Anthony Pompliano – Building Influence and Capital to Live an Extraordinary Life (EP.430)

23:39And so it led to this explosion of innovation and technology and all that. And you had to be in the right asset class at the right time. And so I know a lot of people who, they're smart, they work hard. But if you go and you ask them, they're like, hey, man, just like I invested in my friends. I just happened to live in San Francisco in 2012, and all my friends were starting companies. And one of them was named Uber, right? And that worked. And so that 2010 to 2022 timeframe, I think was very much about access. It was clear we are in the secular bull trend. It is very clear what a good company in terms of the founder makeup and the early signs, et cetera, looks like versus maybe elsewhere in the country is not necessarily have all the network effects and capital.

24:18And so the audience was used specifically to get access. I don't think that we had any other advantage than we could show up. And if we wanted to do a deal, we got to do it because we had the audience. There was probably some deal flow advantage where people would send us deals knowing we had the audience, but really just to get access. In 2022 is when I realized that, one, I became much less excited about Series A and beyond venture capital as an asset class. A big belief there was QQQ has been compounding it, call it 13, 13.5, maybe 14%, depending on what their starting point over the last decade or so.

24:54The average venture fund, if you give them all the credit for their paper marks, 17 % a year or something, maybe 18%. So if you just average out the numbers, it's about 400 basis point of outperformance looking over the last decade. And what you gave up is about 12 years of liquidity. Probably a pretty fair trade. If you could stomach the liquidity, get 400 basis points of outperformance, great. Now, what we've seen over the last decade or so is so much capital coming to the market. Maybe there's been an incremental increase in the number of good companies created every year, but it's not kept pace with the amount of capital.

25:26And so my thought process is those returns will get compressed down. We'll go from 17. maybe we go down to 15, which doesn't sound like a big change. But now what you're going to ask LPs in that series A or later is, hey, stay illiquid for 12 years for 200 basis points of outperformance. Still some, that's great and we should do that. And others, that's not going to sound as exciting. And so moving forward, I basically said to myself, okay, well, what is the area of venture capital that will always be insulated from market cycles? And I came to the conclusion that the act of creating creates value.

25:58So if you go from zero to one, there's nothing here. Now we have something. You're creating some value. How much value depends on the company, the sector, all that kind of stuff. But that earliest stage, pre-seed and seed, will still have opportunities to invest. And now I think there's beginning to get a separation of the best early stage investors and everybody else. And so you want to continue to play in that area. The other thing that a audience gives you is an advantage, not just in investing, but in building. And so in 2022, I started to think a lot about, well, hold on a second, I have this massive audience.

26:33Right now we are giving capital to entrepreneurs and then we are basically helping them grow their business. but it seems like a raw deal if I give you 100K and I own 0.1 % of your company and then I go and create all this value, I'm happy to help you. That's awesome. That's part of my job. But what if maybe we own more of the company? What if we start some of the businesses? And so over the last three years or so, that's what we've been doing. We've created an investment firm where we've created nine businesses. And the goal really is how do we create businesses in certain sectors where we have a competitive advantage purely through distribution?

27:07And it's not my original idea. I stole this from people who are much smarter than me. And Logan Paul has done this with drinks and CPG. We've seen Mr. Beast do this over and over again in the food sector. We've seen Ryan Serhant do this in real estate. This is a known model at this point. And just the size of these audiences and the scale at which they're able to do this. But none of those people really are business people. Most of them are focused on what I would consider mass market consumer type products. because they have mass market consumer-based businesses and audiences. And so we said, well, what if we have a more sophisticated, higher net worth, more corporate and investing crowd?

27:45What are some of the businesses that you can create there? And so that's really what we've been focused on is we want to continue to invest in the earliest stages, but then also we want to create these businesses and we want to build profitable businesses and continue to do that over and over again. And so far, at least there's early signs of success in doing it. What are some of the examples of those businesses that are a good fit that you can help grow and build with the audience? I'll give you a full life cycle of one of these businesses. So we started a business about two years ago now called Reflexivity Research.

28:16And in that business, we basically said, okay, there's tons of research that exists in the traditional world. They all have different shiny traps to them. Some of them are really, really smart on certain subjects. Some of them are really good on distribution. Some of them are really good in terms of a high price point and low volume. Some are high volume, low price point. Go and study all these different businesses. I had helped start a couple of businesses in the crypto space, specifically around research, but it was always more as an investor. And so when I looked at those businesses, I said, hey, each one of these has a niche to it.

28:47But the one niche that no one has gone after yet is providing free research for massive distribution. We're perfectly positioned to pull that off. We don't have to pay to go build all that distribution because we already have it. So why don't we take the right product and put it through that distribution? So that's what we did. We partnered up with a guy, Will Clemente. He was somebody I'd known for a long time. He had all the right values. He worked hard. He was curious and was into a lot of the data and research. And the way that that business basically worked is we put$500 ,000 down on the balance sheet.

29:19And we said, hey, we're going to be partners on this. Let's go build a business. The thesis was right. And that was pretty clear early on. But we actually struggled to figure out what is the right monetization method. Because if you're going to give away the research for free, who's going to pay you? And so what we began to realize was that the different organizations that were getting covered, they would basically turn the research on and they were willing to pay us for it. And so it became the unique element where you say, okay, hold on a second here. We're doing research, but now you've got to do research on your customers.

29:52So again, there's challenges there. There's journalistic things you've got to think through and worry about. There's how do you price it? So long story short, we built it up and about 18 months into the business, business was profitable. But I also, putting my investor hat back on, knew that we were in the start of a Bitcoin and crypto bull market. And so having been around for a while and seen these cycles play out, I knew I'm holding illiquid equity. Well, if I'm holding a liquid equity, that's not that good in a bull market because I can't sell it when we get to the top. And so I said to myself, I said, well, what if instead we thought of the equity of this business, not as equity, but we thought of it as economic value that we could invest somewhere.

30:37We did a lot of work, figured out a lot of different potential opportunities. And we ended up settling on an opportunity where we sold that research business to a publicly traded company in Canada called DeFi Technologies. They were an asset management firm. They had crypto ETPs in Europe. If you have asset management, you need research, you put those together. Not a new original idea. People have been doing that for a long time. But what was unique is that we took 100 % of that deal in stock. And so you can imagine people saying to themselves, you're profitable. This sounds like a bad deal. We had made the analysis that we thought that the business we were selling to was significantly undervalued.

31:14So now you're playing a game where, hey, I'm an operator, but I'm also an investor. And I'm going to try to walk this line of using things from both sides of my brain to be able to make this decision. We sold a business. The stock went from 51 cents worth a couple hundred million dollar market cap at the time to today the stock trades somewhere between$3.30 and$3.50. So what I learned from that whole exercise was we created something from scratch. We solved the problem. We were able to drive revenue. We were able to get to profitability. but then we had an economic asset and it wasn't cash, but then we could almost flip from the operator seat to the investor seat and say, where do we place this economic value so that it will grow even faster than we could do by ourselves?

31:54And so that really, I think, showing that we could start, scale, and sell a business put me onto this path of, well, why don't we start to do this more? Why don't we try to figure this out more? And can we actually work in reverse? Can we go and say, hey, there's certain types of public companies, they all need X, X doesn't exist yet. We should build it. When we get to a certain point of, you know, whether it's revenue, profitability, whatever, we can then go to these five different companies and we can create an opportunity for one of them to go ahead and buy it. But we want to take 100 % stock.

32:23So we're actually willing to take a lower price on the sale because we're really just making an investment decision. And so my takeaway from this journey over the last three years or so is if you do what everyone else is doing, you get the same return as everybody else. And so you have to do something that is unique, different, weird, frankly. And so my greatest pain in the world now is describing to people when we talk about what we do, because it doesn't sound normal. But so far, it seems to at least be showing signs of getting some traction. We're going to take a quick break in the action to tell you about SRS Aquium.

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33:43Learn more at srsaquium.com. That's S-R-S-A-C-Q-U-I-O-M.com. And now, back to the show. So when you bring together this ability to build a company, some venture investing, selling to public markets, what's the structure of, let's say, your liability base? Yeah, that's a great question. The way that we're structured today, we have a C corporation. We raised from a great group of investors, many that people would know. It's a combination of a couple of funds, but also a number of very successful corporate executives. There's pros and cons to having it in the corporate structure versus maybe a fund or something like that.

34:26But I do think that one of the things that we have benefited from and are seeing firsthand is this idea of raising once and then never having to raise again. And so I think people are talking a lot about artificial intelligence and that being a thing. By optimizing these businesses for cash flow, in a way you're getting non-diluted fundraising on a quarterly basis. It also allows us to play an offensive game of you have a balance sheet. that balance sheet can be used to start companies. We could acquire companies. We can invest the capital. I started doing this. I was like, oh my God, this is like something no one's ever known.

34:58How am I ever going to learn from anyone? And then very quickly, you're like, wait a minute, Virgin Group, Icon, Coke Industries, Berkshire Hathaway. Actually, there's a ton of these. And I think what people really start to think about is rather than think of it as being an operator and an investor, maybe you just end up being a resource allocator. So you're allocating people, you're allocating money, you're allocating time, but at the end of the day, you're just playing an allocation game. And so it is just a company, which doesn't sound that way when you describe what you do. When you think about the comparisons, I think it's much more of a company than anything else.

35:34How do you think about the allocation of your time between the investing activities and the brand building, the audience building activities? You're asking the hard questions. Whatever we do, we're wrong is the conclusion I've come to. So if I spend all my time on building the audience, the businesses will suffer. The investing will suffer. If I spend all my time on the business and investing, then the audience and content suffers. And like, that's the engine. They give it like a basketball team. The point guard can't play center and the center can't play shooting guard. You need a specific person to do this.

36:09You need someone in this role who has a very high capacity for work because you basically have to do both. You have to do all the content and then you also have to be able to run the businesses and invest. And so my day probably looks like a nightmare to most people. I thankfully, I'm having a blast. This is awesome. I can't believe I get to do all this stuff every single day, but you just fit it in. So it's not uncommon for me to record two or three podcasts in a day. I write every morning. I'm doing all of the tweeting myself. Then I'm meeting with our teams. I'm evaluating new businesses. I'm managing the investment portfolio, trying to hire people, putting out fires throughout the day.

36:46And you look at it and you just say, maybe actually the chaos is why I'm so happy. There's a guy that I met recently who was on SEAL Team 6 for 10 years. And he had been at a job and he basically goes into these companies. He has no responsibility to start. But by the time he leaves, everyone reports to him. Finance, operations, everything reports to him. And then he leaves. He goes to the next one. Starts out. Nobody even really knows he's there probably. And then by the time he leaves, everyone's reporting to him. And he had done this three times fairly quickly. And I said to him, I said, what's up with that?

37:20And he said, dude, I'm a SEAL. He's like, no two days were ever the same. I thrive in the uncertainty and the chaos. I need that. I wasn't a Navy SEAL. I was just a little nobody in the infantry. But I think it's very similar is that the uncertainty is actually where I'm most comfortable. If you said to me, design the worst job in the world, it would be a traditional nine to five where I go and I just do the same thing every day. It would drive me crazy. And so when you begin to learn about yourself and what makes you excited and energized, that gives you the confidence to say, I know most people will say, what you're doing is too much or or focus on one thing.

38:00But you say to yourself, if I only do one thing, I won't be happy. And so the challenge in life is like, do what I want to do and be happy. So far, it's working. No guarantee it will continue to work, but definitely a different path. So on top of all of this, you decided to write a book. I need more chaos. Talk to me about the impetus of why you put this book together. My wife wrote a book and I want to sell one more copy than her.

38:29No, I think I never thought I would ever write a book. I'm not somebody who thinks in that manner. For all the content I create, it was something that being married to an author, a writer, a journalist definitely helps. But when my first child was born, my wife really pushed me. She said, hey, you should write a letter to her. And I remember being like, eh, what am I going to say in this? I'm not actually even doing it for the kid. I'm doing it for you at first. And I remember the first time I went back and I read it. and it's pretty bad. It's like, thank you so much for making me a dad. I'm so excited to hang out with you and very fluffy and just, I'm almost going through the motions.

39:08And frankly, I don't even know if I knew what to say. I was like a brand new dad and I was just excited, but I don't know if I'm going to be good at this. And so when we had our second kid, I'd written another letter, I think at maybe the one year birthday or something, and we had the second kid. And that's when I said to myself, if I'm going to take the time to write this, impart whatever little knowledge I have to this person so that one day they're going to read this. And so I started writing. And for whatever reason, the format of writing letters is very easy to me. And I think there's something about, I was writing to a specific person, especially to my kids, was like very clarifying.

39:41And so, I don't know, four or five letters. I was like, hey, you know what? Enjoy this. And I think I started to realize I was getting value out of it for myself. It was forcing me to think about things I had learned. It was forcing me to articulate these things. And somewhere between five and 10, I remember saying to myself, I know the hard path is to make this into a book. I know I should do that. I know that that is the thing that probably my kids would enjoy. It would be good for other people. I really don't want to do that. And my wife pushed me. I said to myself, if I tell myself I'm going to do it, I may procrastinate, but I will do it.

40:15And so I decided to go ahead and write the book. And it's a great forcing function, frankly. I think the biggest thing I took away was how many times in my life did I ever stop to clarify my thoughts? I just really didn't. That was really the impetus for it was I think that I started to realize, although I'm writing this to my kids, I'm getting a ton of value out of it. And maybe it's a selfish act that I'm pursuing. What were some of your favorite letters? Well, the one that is definitely most controversial, which I don't think I was surprised is luck is not real. I don't know when I started to think about this, but I noticed that everyone always says, I got lucky.

40:53Oh, that happened to me. That's bad luck. Oh, that happened to me. That was good luck. And I just remember thinking, what is luck? And so I came to the conclusion, this is fake. Luck is not actually a thing. Probability is something that is repeatable and can be proven and you can measure a mathematical concept. Luck is actually a psychology concept. And so the best way to describe it is if you and I are walking across the street, we get hit by a bus and we both lose our leg, go to the hospital. Somebody shows up and they walk over to your bed and they say, hey, Ted, what happened? I was so unlucky.

41:28I was walking across the street. This bus hit me. I lost my leg. Oh my God, my life's ruined. They walk over to my bed and they say, what happened? You say, oh my God, I was so lucky. I was walking across the street and got hit by this bus. It only took off my leg. I'm still alive. How lucky am I? So same exact situation, same outcome, two completely different perspectives determine what is luck. And then I came across some studies that showed you can actually become more lucky by simply telling yourself you are lucky. And so it was like, okay, this is definitely a psychology thing. And so what I realized was luck is actually poison because it strips people of agency.

42:05So if you constantly rely on luck, if you constantly fall back on good luck, bad luck, what you're saying is that you have no agency. What people normally do is if something doesn't go their way, they don't say, oh, I should have worked harder. Oh, I could have done this. I could have done this. They say, oh, I was unlucky. I'm an unlucky person. If things go their way, they don't want to come off as arrogant. They don't want to say, I worked hard for that. I earned that. They want to say, oh, I got lucky. So you hear very successful people always do that. And so it's this weird thing where actually the extremes, the people who end up not being successful and the people being very successful, they both want to strip themselves of agency in conversation.

42:46And so this idea of luck is not real. The funny thing is it's a very real conversation because it then says back to you, you have agency. What you want in life is just on the other side of your actions. And so if you don't want to be fat, don't eat bad food. If you want to have a lot of money, do the things that create a lot of money. So definitely controversial, but probably my favorite one because it required a lot of exploration to come to the conclusion. There are a bunch of them that touch on investing. One about bad news, certainly a case of venture investing. Love to hear your thoughts.

43:16I learned this at Facebook. Bad news does not get better with time. At Facebook, one of the things that I knew going in was that I was not good at interviewing, identifying and hiring talent. And so I said, I want to get better at this. And at Facebook, the interview process, You go and you talk to three product managers, and each one has a specific thing that they are trying to evaluate. So are you a culture fit? Can you do the job? And I forget what the third one is. So when I was at Facebook, I think over a 12-month period, I did something like 120 interviews. My favorite track to be focused on was, can you do the job?

43:52And so they taught me the way to conduct the interview is basically give a hypothetical situation or game through a scenario. And so the scenario I would always propose to people is, hey, you're responsible for a product. You go home on Friday afternoon. Everything is working great. You come in on Monday morning and 50 % of the traffic to your feature has dropped. What do you do? And I asked this question to probably 100 people, but only once ever did somebody say to me immediately, the first thing I would do is I would alert the team we had a problem. Everyone else would jump to, I would call and look at this dashboard.

44:29I would do this. They would get into the war game. But this one person who was very senior, it was so clear they understood how to work in a team. They understood this idea of bad news doesn't get better with time. And so it is something where bad news people don't want to share naturally. But if you have a mentality of, I want to solve problems, well, people can only solve the problem if you share the news. You tell people there's a problem. So you have these two chapters next to each other. Rich people sell too early and buy great assets and hold them forever. How do you hold that cognitive dissonance in your head?

45:02It's a great paradox of investing is there's many ways up the mountain. And so Jim Simons, very rich man, so is Warren Buffett. Could not have different investing styles. If you think about for the individual, both are true in your portfolio. So there are times where you bought something, you started something, and there's a natural life cycle to it. It created a lot of value, but at some point it gets overvalued. or market dynamics change or competition changes or whatever. What a lot of people I think will say are their regrets in investing is not actually the opportunities they missed. It's that they give back returns that they had.

45:41So I bought something at$100. It went to$1 ,000. I'm a genius. There's a 10 bagger. Oh my God, it's back to$200. Now I'm only going to make$100 on this investment. How stupid am I? Well, maybe it was going to go to$1 ,000. Maybe it was going to go to$1 ,200. It was going to go to$800. But if you had sold at 600 and taken your 6X, done okay. And so it's very hard to do. It's painful watching it continue to go up after you sold it. But I do think that there is this idea of all the rich people I know at some point sold too early and they were okay with that. They were satisfied. At the same time, all the rich people I know have at least one asset that they bought at some point in their career and they just said, I'm never selling this.

46:21Real estate people, it's usually like commercial real estate. Now Bitcoin investors. I'm going to take the Bitcoin, I'm going to give it to my grandkids. Warren Buffett, buy things and hold them forever. So this is a timeless investing principle. But what makes it so difficult is as an investor, you know both of these things are true. When you bought that thing at$100, which bucket does it go in? You may actually at the same time, in the same portfolio, be pursuing two different strategies. And your job or your challenge is to figure out what's in my bucket of no matter what happens, what changes I'm holding forever, and what's in my bucket of when it hits a certain price target or something happens, this is my off-ramp to this investment.

47:04To pull this full circle, I used to think that the hardest part of investing was buying the right assets. And I'm now fully convinced that the hardest part of investing is selling correctly. And I'll ask every investor I meet, how do you think about selling? And to this day, the only good answers I've ever heard are people who throw their hands up and say, I sell knowing I'm wrong. So maybe I sell half and I hold half. Or I talked to a very well-known early stage investor and he said, once a company goes public, I break it up into three tranches. First day it's liquid, I sell day one. The next third I sell over the next 18 months.

47:40And the last third I hold forever. And he goes, and if it's a good company, that last third makes me wish that I held the first two. If it's a bad company, I'm glad I sold the first two. And the last third, that's my tax for not knowing. And I thought that was a very good, take the decision-making out of your hands, figure out your system that makes you comfortable, and then just go and make sure you're always disciplined with it. What's interesting is when you're building and investing, this doesn't just exist in the investment portfolio. It also exists in the building portfolio. So I always laugh that Google, they just got a little bit more money offered to them early.

48:12They would have sold. But man, was it a blessing in disguise that they ended up not selling. And so I do think that there is something about as long as you are able to take some money off the table and then think structurally like most assets over a long period of time should go up, especially the public markets and liquid assets. Maybe that's what you should do. Maybe just take your principal plus a single turn on the capital or something and then let it go. So what's been the impact of the book? The single most rewarding part is how many dads have reached out to me and said, I wrote my kid a letter.

48:47A couple have even sent me the letters and you read it. And there was a type of thing where I show my wife and I'm like, this guy wrote a four page letter to his kids because he read the book that I wrote. I think that's been the coolest part. And then the other part that has been rewarding to a degree, but if I ever write a second one, I will be more cognizant of is every person that works for us weaponizes the book against me. I got 65 different life lessons that they selectively choose when to remind me. I put them in the book. There's one that says, take work off your boss's desk. So I have somebody who came to me and they said, I don't want to do my work.

49:23I'll take work off your desk. And I said, why don't you do your work first and then you can come over here. So that type of stuff is always fun. But I do think that just knowing that people are reading it and internalizing it is pretty rewarding as well. I want to ask you a couple of closing questions, but I have one to ask you before that, which is you mentioned your wife's an author. You write a lot. Your brother writes this great sports blog. What is it in the DNA or the water or both that's perpetuated all this writing in your family? Maybe we're just competitive. I don't know. I do think that there's an element of healthy competition in the most loving way of if I figure something out, I want to tell them.

50:03If they figure something out, they'll tell me, but also to an element of of my brother. He's growing pretty fast on Instagram right now. He won't say it, but I know he's just like, when I pass you, you never kind of hear the end of this. I'm like, maybe we should post a little bit more on Instagram this week, right? I can't let this guy catch me. Go back to sports teams. The best teams, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Steve Crow, they're all competing, but it's for a common cause. I think that there's an element of that makes everyone better. In terms of writing in particular, I think that there is something very clarifying.

50:34You can't be a clear writer if you're not a clear thinker. And so writing is the most selfish thing I do. I think that it's somewhat therapeutic, frankly, but also it really forces me to take all these disparate data points and information, et cetera, and clearly articulate it in a single 750 ,000 words each morning. When you think of that, everything I do throughout the rest of the day is informed off of that. I can pull ridiculously minute data points and details off the top of my head because I sat down and I wrote them. I did the research, I figured it out, had to craft this whole thing, and then I read it after I wrote it.

51:12If you think about my brother, my wife, et cetera, I think that there's an element of that as well. They're learning and the writing is the output. And so when you're around people that like to learn, I think you guys all gravitate towards each other. And so there's no one thing. I wish there was a magic water. We'd probably be handing it out to people, but I just think it becomes cultural. and then also there's the competitive aspect. That's probably the more fun part. All right, Pump, got a couple of last questions for you. What's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family? Reading.

51:43I really enjoy sitting and reading physical books. Although I read all week, Twitter and emails and news and all that kind of stuff, the time spent per insight gleaned from a book is still off the charts compared to the noise of the internet. And so it's very enjoyable. What's your biggest pet peeve? It's probably the intersection of laziness from a worth ethic standpoint, a lack of ambition, and a disregard for quality. One of the things that I think I've learned over time is if you think about a professional sports team, the product they put on the field tells you everything you need to know about the ownership and the management team.

52:29If you look, usually the teams that are not good are not good for a long time. And they tend to be the owners that are less involved or less enthusiastic. They usually are the owners who've owned the teams for a long time. And so I think about the same thing in professional life of what is the product that an individual is putting on the field? Is it something that they're actually proud of? And one of the aspects maybe that I'm most proud of over the last three years or so is when I was thinking about, okay, we have to name the company. There's a lot of names. You could name it after yourself.

53:03You could name it after some random thing. You could name it after a place or there's all these heuristics people use. And I remember saying to myself, I just want to think of one word that summarizes everything that I want this company to stand for. And so we named it professional capital management. That is the bar. What time should you come to work? When would a professional come? What should you wear? What would a professional wear? How should you conduct yourself in the meeting? What would a professional do? It just became this very clarifying framework. And everyone doesn't have the same idea of what a professional is, but it really focused people on there is a standard of excellence.

53:44There is this professionalism. There is this desire to do something different. Which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life? On my professional life, Mark Yusko and Jason Williams. I met Jason in 2015 or beginning of 2016. Jason was probably the first person I'd ever met that had been very successful from a business perspective, but he was still incredibly down to earth to the point where you could go and get a beer with him for four hours and feel like you were talking to your best friend from high school. And I think that he probably took a bigger bet on me than he was realizing.

54:22There was definitely times where I was probably a pain in the ass, but I think he was probably just mature enough to realize sometimes you got to let young guys run and like, let's see what happens. And so that was really effective. And then I think the second one is Mark Yusko. And Mark taught me that you get old if you don't hang out with young people. And so he constantly was looking for who are the young people, who are the people I can hang out with, how do I continue to learn, how do I stay interested in this stuff. The guy takes more notes in meetings than I've ever seen. I used to joke, dude, your hand's going to fall off, but just he wants to learn.

54:56All right, Pomp, last one. What life lesson of all these you've written about in your book, perhaps, have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life? I learned at 20 years old that we all die. It's very morbid, but there was a specific incident in Iraq. There was somebody who died. It was a very horrific situation. And I remember leaving that day. You're a mess of emotions. You're mad. You're sad. You're confused. You, frankly, are frustrated. Probably feel guilty to a degree as well. There's just this whole thing. And I remember I got back to the base and when something like that happens, it's just chaos.

55:34Yes. And so I remember thinking to myself, what is the lesson I can take away from this? And I came to the conclusion, it's that we all die. Today was his day, could have been mine, it's not, but one day it will be. And so what can I do tomorrow, the day after, et cetera, to squeeze as much out of life as possible? The greatest blessing of my life outside of probably being born to the family I was born and the environment I was born is I learned that at 20. There's a lot of people that don't learn that until literally they're on their deathbed. And so at 20 years old, I think there was this inflection point in my life where I said to myself, there's a different life that I want to lead.

56:12Not that I was on some bad path or something, but just I want to get as much out of this as possible and really enjoy it. And so I probably became more optimistic. I became more enthusiastic. I became more excited. I don't know how else people can learn that other than maybe you can read about it, but you probably got to experience something. And it was incredibly valuable. Well, Pom, you start every day with a tweet or an X tweet. Today's going to be a great day. Let's get after it relentlessly. And I just want to thank you for sharing just a little ounce of that relentlessness with us. Thanks so much for doing this.

56:45Thanks for listening to the show. To learn more, hop on our website at capitalallocators.com where you can join our mailing list, access past shows, learn about our gatherings, and sign up for premium content, including podcast transcripts, my investment portfolio, and a lot more. Have a good one, and see you next time.