Milton "Todd" Ault III - Chairman of Ault and Company, Inc. | Death Threats & Public Markets

I would not wish upon anybody my experience in the public markets. Grand Cardone buys real estate. It's not marked to the market every day. So his risk is, look, I bought this property, look at it again in five years. My risk is people look at it again in five hours. And you could be a hero one minute and a zero the next day. The way it is today is so short term with Robin Hood and Wee Bull and the trading of things. There's so no concern for what they own. I they've threatened my family, my kids, my wife. It is a cesspool on Twitter and stock with say to people you really have to understand what you own or you're a trader. You can be both. When you are building your own business, don't take advice from anyone that hasn't made a payroll. Never. I get people all the time to say, oh, you're background, you know, you've got suit. Okay, well, let me tell you something. If you're looking for people to help you that have never had any problems, keep looking. You can get through pretty much anything as long as you don't lie to anybody. As long as you don't lie to them, people will want to help you. If I were to tell anyone today who is an entrepreneur who wanted to go public and I help a lot of people do that, go public is do not do what I've done. It's not for the faint of heart. I wouldn't suggest it. Welcome to success story. I'm your host, Scott Clary. The success story podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. HubSpot does a ton for entrepreneurs and business owners. That is why I'm so proud to partner with them for over three years now. If you need anything to build your business, help desk software, payment software, email marketing tools, CMS and blogging tools, SEO tools, deal management tracking, pipeline tracking, you don't need more tools to get more out of your business. You just need HubSpot. 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Yeah, I don't think it's possible and the reason why is is because in the beginning it was how do you get anything started towards the like 10% into it? We're started, but we still need capital and then halfway into it were way bigger, but we still need capital and now there's fires that are being created by having a bunch of businesses. And now here we are. I'm 54. I really started the current venture restarted in 2017 give or take and we were zero dollars and 16 were going to be 200 million or so we believe in in 24 and that number is exponential. So the problems are still there and I don't know that I can psychologically take a full day off. I would love to I think, but we're probably past a point where it wouldn't be possible for me to not like review a number or read emails or research something that's happening or think a problem through, you know, there's this warm buffet conversation where he says that sometimes he just thinks, how do you just sit around and think and reality is now is I probably spend half my time thinking because I have to come up with a way of dealing with something and then think through if I deal with it this way, what ramifications there are. I don't I don't know if you could take a day off if you're the actual person in charge of the entire enterprise. Maybe you can I I haven't felt it. That's I mean, so you went from zero 200 million and a fiscal year 2024 presumably projected out in 14 years. That was that was really and that was all allocating capital. Maybe just walk people. No, no, I think it's I think it's six years. It's six. Oh shit. So it was better. Yeah, I think she's even more impressive regardless. So six years. Yeah. So walk people through your story because you started off on Wall Street, right? Yeah. So my story is one of evolution. I I basically at a young age decided I either wanted to fly a plane or work on Wall Street. One of my friends from high school, she said to me, why don't you work on Wall Street? You could afford your own plane. I thought I made logical sense at the time because my research into my flying career was really one of which I would probably end up flying heavy heavy jets, not fighter jets. And so my friend at the time thought a flu for federal express and he said to me, the only difference between him flying and flying a commercial airline is that he's a bus driver in the sky, but the boxes don't talk back. The passengers do. And he really said to me, you will be limited to your your income. And at the time, I think he was a captain. So he was making like 220,000 a year. Now this is 30 some years ago, right? So back then, that was a fortune, right? You know, he was making great money. It was like 20 grand a month being a federal express captain. And I just could never see past that money. So I thought, well, that's still good money. But ultimately, I concluded that I would like Wall Street better. And there was a lot of the deal making aspect of Wall Street that I really liked. And so I've spent, I spent the first sort of 20 years of my life or more working like specifically for a Wall Street firm or my own hedge fund, but I was always registered broker. So I was always in the mix of the first 20 years of Wall Street for sure. And so then the most recent version of what you've done over the past six years, what was the impetus for that? What what got you to the point where you said, listen, I want to build my portfolio up. I want to allocate capital to the point where you've built this this thing that is pushing 200 million. Obviously, you're still heavily involved in the day today. So you're not just allocating capital and acting like maybe a traditional private equity firm would just walk me through sort of like your thesis for what you're building now. Well, we're for sure not a traditional private equity firm. I can tell you that. So I think what happened was there's this driving force initially that I believed that I should run a holding company similar to what Warren Buffett was doing similar to what Loz does similar to big Laurie holdings similar to a few other holding companies. And about six, seven years ago, I just really came to the conclusion that I wasn't really doing that. Still still fatal flaws in my arguments. I'm not going to say that that I had discovered the solution, but I really wanted to make this hybrid permanent capital model where my holding company was publicly traded. And there was a form of permanent capital in the business. You see that now with traditional private equity firms there bringing in some permanent capital. Apollo was really big on insurance money. They're one of one of the bigger insurance operators in terms of the annuity business to settlement business for life insurance. But about seven years ago or so I decided I was not getting any younger and that I needed to make the transition to that sort of permanent capital model. And it hasn't been easy. So what you see is a hybrid of a holding company slash private equity slash venture firm acquiring undervalued assets and investing in ideas. But probably a miscalculation on my part about how Wall Street would reward the hyper growth of a holding company that was in multiple sectors. So I'm still a Wall Street guy at heart. I'm still a capital allocator at heart. But I've had to learn to be more of an operator than I wanted to be because you can't it's really hard to get people to stay with you on your course when the equity of your holding company isn't keeping up. So that's a more of an eclectic argument. But we're really more of a hybrid now where we are migrating to a pure either private equity or private credit but held by a public company. So we're still a holding company but with a hybrid approach. So I'm curious why and it's probably due to just where you came from in your experience. But when you include the public component to it all of a sudden you have a whole other set of problems problems and opportunities that you can take advantage of or could sidetrack you. So is there a particular reason and it couldn't it could just be your experience that you chose not to just build a holding company that was not publicly traded. There was private there was traditional private equity model that didn't have a public component or even venture model or any model really. Well, I would equate something that I would warn everyone about in retrospect. This is the value of hindsight. If you ask me today I would not build a holding company. I would not put any ventures or non proven models in a holding company structure as a public company. I would not do things today the same way I already did them. Right. And that is when you have something that is not a going concern meaning it's not producing its own cash flow and it needs a lot of growth capital. It's I equate running a holding company today where you're a growth company and you need money as you're laying the pavement while you're driving the car. And it is very difficult to navigate the potholes the problems with the pavement uneven. It's very it's very difficult. I will tell you that I probably made it and aily more difficult than it needed to be, but I knew how to access capital to public markets. So I went with what I knew. And because I knew how to access public market capital we've been able to raise hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. But that hasn't translated into the value of the holding company model versus the capital race. The businesses are doing great relative to where we want them to be. They're not all perfect. In fact, when you look at the way we built the holding company, it's really sort of like the equivalent of an 18 to 20 businesses, which looks more like venture where you have four or five that are doing well, one that's an outliner outlier and a bunch that are sort of mediocre, right? And unfortunately, since you consolidate the public company, all of those combined up to your consolidated financials. So I would not I would not wish upon anybody my experience in the public markets. If I were to tell anyone today who is an entrepreneur who wanted to go public and I help a lot of people do that, go public is a pure play. Go public is a here's what I'm doing. I'm doing a SaaS model. I'm building software. I'm building a restaurant chain. I'm building a group of mechanic auto repair dealerships. Do not do what I've done, which is this buy everything build a billion dollar conglomerate, which is what I think I'm building. And go through the pressure of what you I've experienced. It's not it's not for the faith of heart. I wouldn't suggest it. No, I have no doubt because venture is already super high risk. I mean, even for a sort of personal experience, I've never played at the level that you're playing at and maybe one day I will and maybe I'll just learn from them. I suspect I suspect you will. I suspect you will play at that label with the social club and what you have going on. I suspect you'll be at a bigger level than I am. But anyways, I appreciate it. Maybe we'll do some stuff together, but regard doesn't matter. We're not this is not a competition, but the point is even venture, private venture that I've put money into. I've lost significant amount. So then I moved to just as an as a as a as an angel as an individual investor with no affiliation with a fund or a firm that I moved into. We talked about this last time on your show. I moved into private equity, which is really just looking at historical PNLs and just seeing that the business has some run rate and some proof that it can actually sustain itself in the market and then there could be some profit there too if you're lucky and fortunate. So this is just I already did risk. So not only are you adding the market making and the regulatory and the market sentiment of a public company now you're combining the risk of is the company even going to work out if you have part of the portfolio venture early stage. Do you have pre-rev? We have some pre-rev companies that we don't do them anymore, but as of right now we don't do any more pre-rev companies, but we've done a lot of pre-rev. What I would say is that when you are a public company, you're on a 90-day shot clock. Michael Dell talks about this 90-day shot clock every quarter. But more importantly, when one person invests for one reason, my discovery is, and I never want to bash investors, but my discovery is investors follow exactly what they think they're following, meaning I had we, you know, we're a Bitcoin miner. We've invested in Bitcoin. We mine a lot of Bitcoin now. That's one of the holding companies just for clarity, right? That's right. That's one of the portfolios. Yeah, it's inside the business called Scent to them. And when we were rallying with Bitcoin, Bitcoin was parabolic from say 5,000 to 70,000. People would trade us, and then later on, when we announced we bought hotels, they're like, wait, I bought a Bitcoin miner. And they clearly didn't read our financials. They didn't read our intentions in 2017. They did not read that we were going to become a holding company. So then I alienated a whole group of investors who were like mad, like you're doing all this other stuff, Todd, why are you doing this? And I said, well, you know, did you read what our plans were? And the answer is no. And when we went from just I'm just going to get a pick of price. This is, I'm going to give a big disclaimer here for financial purposes. This is just a guess as to what things look like. I don't know this to be factual. But let's assume the stock was like 30 cents and it went to $10. And I think that actually happened in some of these pre split issues. People bought into the momentum of what we were doing and not the whole picture. So we went from to 50,000 shareholders back to 10,000 shareholders. And on the way down when Bitcoin went back down to like 15,000 from 69,000 people sold us off so much that we had to reverse the stock. And it wouldn't, didn't matter what news we had. In fact, just a few days ago, we reported a first quarter of profit and sales up, I believe 55% the stock went down. The stock went down. So I don't know what to say to anybody. I'm the most perplex I've been at ever. And we have an AI data center in Michigan that has 30 megawatts live that's going to go. We believe the 300 people are discounting it to zero. So I would say the ramifications of being public, you said it, are it's the investor perception. It's actually what's happening with the market. It's actually what's happening with the company employees that work there. See the price down. And so there's so much different about being public. And I want to make a point here. And that is, I'm going to use a guy named Grant Cardone. Grant Cardone buys real estate. It's not marked to the market every day. There's not a daily quote. So his risk is, look, I bought this property, look at it again in five years. My risk is people look at it again in five hours. And you could be a hero one minute and a zero the next day. Now, I'm not looking for sympathy, but that's not something that I thought would have existed the way it is today. It's so short term with Robin Hood and Weeble and the trading of things. There's so no concern for what they own. And there's also a form to, they, they've threatened my family, my kids, my wife, they've taken pictures of my family. They put my sons picture up with, they put fake pictures up of people. It's just a, it is a cesspool on Twitter and stock, which is a cesspool of made up stuff. People call me all kinds of names that aren't even fundamentally true. They just make stuff up. Now, I'm not saying that to get sympathy, I understand the marketplace now more than I did before. And I would do it differently, but I'm grateful for where I am and the people that are stuck with me. We still believe in the company. We have 700 plus employees. We're very happy with where we are. We're just, the public markets can be really a dangerous place. And I would encourage everyone to think more about a singular play than I would be this sort of global macro play that I was working on. So so many different places to take is it just wild. It's wild. You have to go through this too and the attacks and whatnot. And people see the difference is when things are private, you're dealing with investors that understand the game. And like you said with Grand Cardone, they're not looking at percentages every five hours, right? Or points every five hours. So with you, you're looking at people that maybe put in a little bit too much money, or they're not educated investors, even if they by definition are and they don't understand how the market moves or how this piece of news is on Twitter maybe isn't even true. So you have all these different factors that are impacting. So sort of two questions because there's a question for the person who wants to invest. And then the question for the founder or even yourself that wants to play in public markets. So for the person that wants to invest, what noise should they listen to? I think they should really read the management's descriptions and the 10Ks and 10Qs and really read what's happening and look at what businesses they're in and decide whether they want to be part of that and understand that the riskiest part of the capital stack is being a common shareholder. So if you look at our public company today and I'm not soliciting anyone by our stock, this would be clear. But if you look at our preferred stock, which pays a 13% dividend on the $25 face value, it's never missed a payment and it's trading at a premium to the price we issued it out. We issued it at 2450. It's trading, I believe today at 27. So the 13% coupons on 25, this thing traded down to like 10. So you got the preferred trading at a premium value, money good. And then you have the common trading, what I consider to be a giveaway, but way below book value. And I would just say to people, you really have to understand what you own or you're a trader. You can be both. I don't think you can trade. And I mean, you possibly could understand what you own and decide to trade it. But my instincts are is like what this meme thing that happened after COVID, the we got to kind of got a caught up in that. We're not ignorant to the fact that we did get caught up in that. But what we are not ignorant to is that we told people what we're going to do. We did exactly what we said we were going to do. And then people are mad about it, which we said we're going to raise a lot of capital. But listen, I'm not complaining. It sounds like I'm complaining. I love, I love the company. I love the people that have been supportive. And it is the journey we decided to take. And would I do it differently? Probably would. Yeah, I would. Would you would is there an option for you? I get I think this whole this whole podcast has to be filled with disclaimers that these are not actions that you're taking. But I'm just curious from a strategic perspective, like advice to people that were on the come up that want to do something similar or adjacent to what you're doing. Is there opportunity to divest companies and focus on just one particular category or industry? Is that a smarter play? Is that like a less stressful play? Think about it as a hyper niche down investment thesis. So we have divested our our EV charging business and was our defense. We have a small defense EV charging business called turn on green. We divested that and I think we divinated out 140 million shares and 140 million warrants to shareholders over the last year. And we have told people we probably will divest more stuff. There's more companies that will be divested. But we've mainly got this down to around, you know, we have a data center business and Bitcoin mining operation. We have a lender, we have a hotel portfolio, we have a crane business, we have a global defense business. Those five businesses are now doing really well for us. And so we're kind of staying the course right now. We want to give our staff time to catch up with all the changes and financing we've done. Get a bunch of reports under our belt where, you know, we just were profitable for the first quarter. We want to take our time with any changes. We're not raising money on an ATM anymore for 20, for two, it's 2024. We really minimize that. My parent company, Alton Company, which owns Alton Alliance, has invested $44 million. We went out and raised money to invest in the company. We're now the largest shareholder. So we're really taking our time because we're going to focus on the things that are EBITDA casual positive or EBITDA positive. And the ones that are not that are those either pre-rev or the revs are generating, they're moving forward, but they're not properly. Those ones will ultimately be probably become pure plays. I think that we've conveyed to the market that we want things to be able to be sort of on their own. But there's a large, there's a lot of companies in there. And so it's hard to explain that as a public company. You really don't say anything until you've pretty much done it, right? So we've talked about our plans, but yeah, careful. Yeah, we've talked about our plans, but we do focus, we do plan on focusing in a couple key areas. We obviously are big believers and lucky to be in the data center business. We have two facilities in Montana and one huge one in Michigan. The one in Michigan is the Holy Grail of our portfolio. It is 34 and a half acres, 14 acres under roof expandable to a million and a half square feet or more, currently 617,000 square feet, currently 30 megawatts live, mining Bitcoin, converting to AI, we actually have built out 100,000 square feet of the AI data center. So that business is ramping, our crane businesses, EBITDA positive, our lender, our lender just reported a profit for the first quarter. So we're, I'm getting a lot more comfortable. If I were to say anything, you're getting some breathing. If I were to say anything, seven years, six and a half years into it, things are a lot better and a lot easier to manage than they were before. But this goes back to there's not an overnight success. You know, we thought this was going to be more overnight. We laid out a 10 year plan in 2017. I didn't think it was going to take 10 years. And I look okay on camera right now, but I saw some pictures over the weekend and my hair's gray really kind of white actually. So this has been a, and once again, not looking for sympathy, I'm a lucky guy, you know, married to the right woman, four great kids, a bunch of great employees and partners, but it's not been easy for everyone. It's really you have to be prepared whether you're in a holding company with multiple holdings or where you're in a single peer play. It's, it's trench warfare. Is there a, is there a, is there a difference? Because now you've done these acquisitions and you've been doing them for a while now. Is there a difference in what you look for in a company that you would acquire in a publicly traded holding company versus something you would acquire in a, in a, just in a private acquisition? I don't think there's any difference for me other than whether the management, the people that run it are honest with you. It's, it's, it's really tricky for, if you don't ask the right questions, I have this lender that's letting me a lot of money. I think they probably let me, I don't know, 50 million, maybe more. And they, I used to get really irritated with them where they would, they would ask my team, they would ask me the questions. Then they would interview my team and ask them the questions. Then they would come back and ask me new questions. Then they would interview my team again and ask the same questions. And eventually after they asked the same question like six times, I would say, you know, you've asked that question a bunch of times, yeah, we're going to keep asking it and to see if we get the same answer. And if a person knows that they know the model and there's something hidden, they need to tell you what the risk of the deal is. And an honest person selling you the company would say, yeah, here's the EBITDA. Here's the company. Here's our history. But what is it I'm not telling you? What is the real problem that could pop up in the business? What is the contingent liability? And I think it's really hard to find people that want to be honest and not blame others for your problems, right? And I say this in the sense that I'm more concerned about the people that are running it than I necessarily because the business is going to be good or it's going to be bad. And you don't know for sure. But the people running it are either good or bad and that you need to know, you need to know whether they're honest and whether when you acquire them, they're going to stay and be honest with you about what's happening. Or they're going to say, hey, that was on page 47. I told you that, you know, there was a contingent liability. Well, I didn't see it, right? You didn't tell me that you were a week away from losing this contract. So I would say people are the number one issue. And I used to think that was corny, but people are pretty much all that matters. Now, if you got a great product, that's great. But you need great people. You just that really is important. I, there's one lesson I've learned is that people who are not honest will blame you for their problems, even though they already had them. And I loved that. It's really critical that you understand that I, I get upset about things. But at the end of the day, the reason probably we started this conversation off with that I work every day. At the end of the day, I believe everything is my responsibility, even if someone else messes it up. So, uh, that's why probably I have lenders and investors that despite things going wrong, know that I'll tell them the truth and I'll get them paid back. You know, I try to do things that allow me to shoot my way out of a problem. And one thing I don't do is turn my back on someone that's honest with me. If there's an honest mistake, they're going to stay. They're going to work with me. And I'm going to work with them. But you know the deception part. I'm sure you've invested a lot of companies and you know that person that blames you for the problem versus takes responsibility for the problem. And that's a hard thing to do. When you, when you acquire a company, you need to know what management comes with it. The issue is that usually that behavior shows itself far too late. It shows it, it shows it later on, right? It doesn't usually show it when everyone's feeling good and everyone realizes they're about to get a check. Everyone, everyone, everyone wants to play ball when you're, when you're sitting down at the table the first time. But you realize six months later. It's not, by the way, we're talking about acquisition or investing. But this could be a business partner. This could be even if you get a job and you have a city manager and all of a sudden, you realize they're gaslating me. Like, this is, this is just the people you work with make a huge difference. It's no different when you acquire a company. But I've done it with business partners. I have, I have people that have like taken a role with me and maybe they left somewhere else and I tell them how they'll get paid and they get paid exactly that way. And then they're mad later and complained to the whole company that they aren't getting what they used to get at their old job. Well, I didn't make you come more care. And, and, and also when you're then complaining to others at the company, you really end up being, those people end up getting fed or doubted anyway. So eventually, they ultimately don't work here because they, either they change their attitude or their attitude changes where they work, right? Because they're not happy. I just want people to be happy. Like I, quoting Gary Vee, don't you want to be happy? Because the reality is is that that is the only way that things work out. And people, people will make meaning of things. They don't like change. That's another thing too. I tell people all the time to read that book, who moved my cheese because they realized like the people that, you know, you've seen this with Steve Jobs, right? Where he's in a garage and they're all happy and they're all drinking beer together and making a company. But ultimately, you know, my responsibility now, I spend almost all my time thinking and structuring the finances of the company. And it's not the same. I don't have the luxury of hanging out all night and going to have a beer with people when I got four institutions waiting for a proposal from me. And I got covenants. I got a meat and it just doesn't. So the evolution of that is is the human condition. And that's where it's so much easier if a person's unhappy for them to tell you they're unhappy, but it's so much harder for a person to tell you they're unhappy. It's a strangest thing. People tell me all the time I'm intimidating. They're afraid to tell me something. Yet I find that I'm the easiest to talk to and you can say whatever you want to me. But don't blame me for your fucking problems. Like don't blame me for your problems if you accepted the deal. Like you can't blame me for that. And I didn't do anything to you. And that's the biggest problem with managing people is they believe that something's done to them. And the best people accept what they've allowed to have happen. And they come to someone like me who'd say, well, if I did that to you and that was my fault, I apologize. Let's fix that, right? So managing people is the hardest thing in the whole world. If I say that to anybody, there's anyone who says it's not as foolish. It's so hard to manage people because everyone has their own problems, their personal problems, their family problems, and then their business life. And by the way, it sounds like to me, if you watch this podcast, you're not going to want to start a business. And you shouldn't. You shouldn't. If you're if you're not prepared for what's going to happen to you, you shouldn't start a business. Because I can tell you people today that your friend will sue you later if you make a lot of money. I've been sued so many times. It's ungodly. I got sued by a guy. I think it's still going on five years later. I got sued guy a guy who had a $54,000 bill from me and sued me for $6.8 million because I terminated him. He was a contractor and claimed that I was going to give him a percentage of the company. None of it's true. And and yet here I am, I did not want to be a stipend for lawyers. So I basically defend myself and I do not, I do not settle a case ever unless it's gone a long ways for me to understand their claim. I am not a stipend for lawyers. I just don't sit here and let people sue me. And I'm not afraid. I'm a battle hardened litigator. And I'll litigate. If you're going to try to wrong me or my company, I'll litigate. And a lot of people are afraid of that. They're afraid of lawyers. They're afraid of the IRS. They're afraid of their rights. Of course, we're in a country now where our rights are a little weird. But that's a whole different conversation. It's funny. By the way, I've noticed that because that's a very, I find that a very American thing using, I've never been, I've never been sued by an employee until I've come down to the US or a contractor or anything. And now it just seems like people just use it as a tool. It's like, it's like, it's like any other business tactic in Canada. I don't see it as much. I see it as more of a, if you have been financially wronged in Canada, you get sued. But you let somebody go in the US. And I mean, it sucks letting people go. But this happens when you're building a business, suing and having to let people go and firing people, terminating whatever, it's going to happen if you build anything significant. So yeah, it's tough. But the added tough is when there are sales rep, they don't hit their numbers, you terminate, and then it come after you for nothing, like literally nothing. But they think that for whatever reason, you're going to fold and you're going to settle. And most people do. Most people look at as a cost to doing business, I simply don't. I made it. If you look at our financials, you'll see our legal fees, I just defend everything because I'm not going to be a stipend for lawyers. I made a decision five years ago. And I have, I have three full-time lawyers that work for me, General Counsel, Deputy General Counsel, Associate Counsel, and then two outside law firms, one litigation firm. And I just, I don't sue anybody unless they need to be sued. I do not usually, I am not the, the aggressor generally. I would say 95% or more of the time, I am not the person suing, I'm the person getting sued. And when they sue me, I look at the case very seriously, and I generally will fight it, if I believe, if I, if we did something wrong, we'll try to settle it, if we did, if we thought we did something wrong. But the people that have been with me a long time, especially lenders and investors that know me know that I've paid everyone back. And anyone who stuck with me in any period of time, I don't know, I got to probably put 400,000 disclaimers in this possibility. But if you've invested directly with me, not bought my stock in the open market, but if you've invested directly with me, you put money to work with me, you wrote me a trick for a private placement. I don't think that there's any five-year cycle where you're down. I think there are, there's big drawdowns. I had a lot of people that took the drawdown after 2009, and they participated with me in a private deal that went public open first trade for 3.3 billion, and they got all their money back plus a return on their investment. So I, generally do not leave a dead body behind. If, if I feel like I starting something and I owe you money and you put some money at risk with me and it didn't go right, I try to put you in a deal that helps you make that money. So listen, am I perfect? Not even close. You know, I, when you, when you look at my background, you probably say, wow, you got a lot of stuff in your background. And it's true, but the only way you kind of get that is to do deals and things go wrong and things go right. It's just, it's the nature of it. It's, you don't really see these stories out there. Maybe Scott, you have, but like Mark Zuckerberg starts the Facebook in his, in his dorm. But look at even that resulted in tons of litigation. One of his, what it was parsing, one of his partners, one of his roommates, the, the week of I, all these things, you know, they, it's the nature of business. It's just the nature of it. And as a public company, you get a lot of scrutiny for, um, you know, there's a lot of keyboard warriors and say a lot of stuff that they don't really know what they're talking, but that's the nature of being public. And I don't want to dwell on that. I feel like I've dwelled on, no, I think it's, it's, it's difficult. I think that even if you're private, you're going to get this stuff happen, uh, to you and to your business. So I think actually the takeaway is, uh, first of all, anybody can figure it out and deal with it and survive in spite of it, but it's not going to be easy, but that's okay because anything we're doing is never going to be easy. But I also think it's good to have conversations like this because then it normalizes what's going on in someone's life. So someone who doesn't have a mentor could be from maybe not a big city, USA who's killing it, who's getting their first lawsuit. That's, that's super stressful. And it shouldn't be that stressful. And there's different ways to work through it and maybe don't let lawyers take advantage of you either, but the point is this is part of, this is part of what we're doing here. This is part of business is part of life. And be an ethical, good person and always do things that you know are right and honest. And I think that's how you sleep good at night, even if somebody else is trying to take advantage of you. It sucks, but it's like you have your success story podcast. What I would say to people is it's taken me a long time to learn this, but I inherently figured out how I got here and that was I would endlessly learn you hear these statements about endlessly learning. But like if you, if you were to watch every podcast that you put out, but person did that made a commitment to say, I'm just going to listen and get something I found that I could always get something from every single one of your podcasts, which is that if I listened to what the person did, I could apply some of that lesson to what was happening with me. And you need to constantly be reminded every couple weeks. If you're on the journey of entrepreneurship or starting your own company or buying a company, you need to remind yourself that this is happening in other places and there are creative ways of getting out of it or working around up to the problem. The problems are different, but they're all the same. You just have to listen to enough people. And with with your podcast, since you're not really being spoken to in the sense that you're paying for it, you're able to listen to it. There's a lot of free information that can help you. And that's probably what's changed for me is I spend a lot more time listening and learning than I do doing because I can apply it, right? Like I, I try to, so I'm one of those guys that looks at Edgar as public companies, almost every deal that comes out on Edgar, I try to read what the transaction was. Who did the financing? What was the investment bank involved? How did they raise the money? What was the structure of the deal? What kind of EBITDA that they have or cash flow? Who did that private equity deal? Why did they do that? Well, that's in my world. I need to know that stuff, right? But I promise you, if you're going to start anything, you can watch one of your success podcasts or a few of them and go, okay, I can, this person's something something similar. You've got to absorb that. You know, you've got to, if you, if you can't afford a mentor, you can't have paid for a consultant. You can get a consultant, right? You can, you can watch your podcast and and then eventually you will find that answer and then it'll, you'll dig more and you'll dig more and you'll go down that rabbit hole and you find yourself learning. That's what I tell people all the time. It's just, it's not, it's not overnight. You don't just start Facebook and you're rich. It never, never happens like that. It just doesn't exist. Success story is part of the HubSpot podcast network. In the network, there are other incredible podcasts like the Ops Authority hosted by Natalie Gingrich. Every week on the Ops Authority, Natalie discovers actionable strategies to move your business forward and transformational stories of powerhouse business owners who value operations. You can't ignore backend pieces that have to work together and flow smoothly in order to build a brand, grow a movement or disrupt an industry. If the operation side of your business is a mess, putting out fires will always take priority leaving no room for creative innovation, visibility or networking with powerhouse peers or even wannabe powerhouse peers. You've got to get your house in order and to do that, you have to listen to the Ops Authority wherever you get your podcast. You know, but you, you've, I've heard you say this a few times and I'm curious about your opinion on this because the internet has lowered the barrier to entry and this increasing amount of bullshit that people, people talk online and I have a theory on who you should listen to and who you shouldn't listen to and I like people to talk about the worst shit that's happening to them because it just feels real. So when someone tells me, hey, this happened, I got sued and they get really real and raw as opposed to like sugarcoting everything that's happened in their career. That's somebody that I have a little bit more trust with and somebody that just assumed that since they were 20, it's been all up and to the right. So when you pick your sources for learning for education because again, you're very real person, you know, it's no bullshit. You just, you say like it is just good as the kind of person I like. How do you vet what, you know, information to learn from? I start off with one major, one major thing that I think is a criteria for anyone you listen to and that is, I would never really take advice from anyone that hasn't had to make a payroll and what I mean by that is. So I at one point in my life when I was 28 or 29 years old, that three Harvard MBAs that were older me, that worked for me. And I thought the answer was I'll hire people smarter me and it is the answer, by the way, but careful who you hire the smarter than you, right? The answer, the answer is if I got an MBA from Harvard and I went to work for General Electric and I ultimately moved up to being a general manager of a division with a thousand people. I may have had to cut expenses. I may have to have it work in the organization that is GE, but I didn't have to start it from scratch and I didn't have to make a payroll, right? They had the money. When you've had to make a payroll, it changes everything about who you are. When you're responsible for other people getting paid, it completely changes the narrative and I would never, I see all these people mastermind groups all the time and I think to myself, did they have to make a payroll? Like did they just become a consultant? Like really understand who you're getting advice from is what's went wrong for them? Because if it's not went wrong for you, I could care less. I just don't pay attention to it. Now, some of the operational advice for best practice and ways of streamlining your business and looking at cutting costs once you're established, there's nothing wrong with consultants that can share ideas with you. But when you are building your own business, don't take advice from anyone that hasn't made a payroll. Never. I wouldn't do it. Ever. That's just my opinion. I want to say something too that's important because people gloss over something about Grant Cardone and even though Grant and I aren't really friends anymore, I will tell you something about him that if you really dig in because I know you've interviewed him before, he was sued after doing a reg A and allowing nonaccredit investors to put money into his fund. And he was sued for something super petty. I read his perspectives. They were accurate. It was all nonsense and he spent millions of dollars defending it and he ultimately won. And it was trivial. The person put in 5 or 10 grand and the media made a big deal out of it. All these people on YouTube were experts were saying Grant Cardone FBI is going down. He's this. He's that. And who knows whether that was ever going to happen or not. I can't speak to the other parts of his business. But it's so much. It's so easy for people to bash grant and not report what actually happened that they make it up like he's under investigation and his real estate's a fraud. It's not true. You didn't have any information to say that. I read some of these financial guys. I undercover the financial facts and they report it like it's a fact on Grant. And you see Grant, he's had to be battle hard and people tried to take him down. And yet I don't see anyone reporting right now that Grant was vindicated and that that lawsuit was nonsense. You know, and I'm not saying that nothing had ever happened to Grant in the future. I don't know Grant's business. But that's an example of a guy who is delivered checks monthly to people opened up the door for them to be in real estate that they could otherwise not be in and that people who are haters bash him and say stuff that's not true. They ultimately don't report the facts. The fact is is that Grant beat that case and he spent money and I've listened to his interview saying I spent the money to prove a point. I wasn't going to settle with this guy for 10 grant. Grant has that sitting in his pocket. He could have gave the money back to him. But he didn't. And that's what I'm saying the same thing I do. I'm not going to settle for something that I have Grant messed up. He would have gave the money back. I promise you if Grant made a mistake, he would have wired the guy the money back. And I've seen Grant do that. I knew a guy who was an investor with Grant. And he started questioning Grant all the time about his investments in Grant. Why are the money back to him? So I don't want your money. So we live in the world now even with Grant not being public. He's like public because he gets bash publicly. Now you could argue the hey, if you're going to raise money from the public, you're going to get public criticism. But what reality is in this country, you can say whatever you want about someone and the facts don't have to be real. But in my world with the SEC and grants world, if your facts aren't real ultimately that audit isn't really they're going to catch you, right? Yeah. Um, so you also have that even as a private company. If you're a public figure, you're going to have haters that just they'll be your biggest promoters. But they're also do crazy stuff. And over in the pandemic time, I when I saw what people were doing to Grant, I, I felt bad. I know the guy. I'm not saying we agree on everything. But he's, you know, and he's exactly who he says he is. Um, it was an example of him being, you know, attacked pretty viciously by people that aren't really in the game. They're not really in the game. They're not really making payrolls. They're not really, they're one guy on a podcast. They're really not, they're not making a payroll. I don't think the loudest people are the people that have their own businesses that are making payroll. I don't believe that at all. You get, you get death threats. You get death threats on social. Oh my God. If you come to our office, you better be armed. I'm not kidding. You see, we, oh, yeah, we, we, there are, we have can still carries all throughout this office. We have armed guards here. I've gotten so many death threats. Are you kidding me? At any given time, I'm carrying. That's why I moved to Vegas. You come to my house. You're going to get shot. You go, you come on my property and you're, and you're basically not welcome there. And you propose a thread. You're going to get shot. There's no question. We, that we, we take it very seriously here. We have security. We protect our employees the best we can. We have, we have, doors that are magnetic and all this other stuff because yeah, you get, we get death threats all the time. I get them all the time. People want to kill me all the time. And I, and no one's gotten to me yet. Why? Why is it like what? At first of all, is anything serious that it ever happened? No, no, not really. I will tell you that the, the issue is that this, this actually makes me really troubled. I'll tell you why it makes me troubled. I don't mind that people threaten me. I'm, they're mad about something. The stock went down. I get that. But I didn't ask them to buy it. There's nobody out there that can, can show me any, anything I've ever done where I said, please buy my stock. Doesn't exist. I've never, I report the facts that I see them. I report what I think is accurate. Have we made mistakes? We've always, there's no question we've made mistakes in our judgment of our investments and what we thought was going to happen when we give forward indications. We tell people what we think would happen. They don't always happen perfectly forecasting is an imperfect science. But I get messages on my Instagram where people say I put my life savings in this. I put my kids life savings in and I say to them, why? When, when did we ever say that you should put your life savings in one of our low price stocks on the New York Stock Exchange? We've never said that to them. We, I would never condone that to anybody. But yet they want to have someone to blame. And in fact, I can tell you why I know they're not paying attention because they say I'm the CEO. I'm not even the CEO of all the lines. There's another CEO. I'm the executive chairman. I haven't been the CEO for three years. I, I, I allocate capital, right? And yeah, I'm a public figure. But listen, it's part of the game. You know, the employees here at the corporate office have accepted the fact that we, you know, we live in Nevada and we protect ourselves and we don't think anything is ever going to happen. But we take it seriously. But it's my understanding that a lot of people get death threats. A lot of public CEOs get, you know, good death threats, especially when their stocks are not performing ours. Unfortunately, it's not performed like we liked it. And case in point, that's why I bought so much of it back. You know, I, and I telegraphed that. I told Cheryl, Hey, if you're going to bombard our stock to zero, we're going to end up buying it back. And we, we at Alton company have bought a lot of all the lines by investing in the company. We could already told people publicly we can, we intend to take our investment for 44 million to 75 million and continue to invest in the company. And we will. But like you asked about death threats. Listen, do I think about it all the time? No, but we're conscious of them. We pay attention to them. We have an extensive group and outside agency that reads every single post. Believe it or not, this has gotten so ridiculous that we read every single post ever posted anywhere dark web, regular web. And then they review them and they do a threat analysis. We've, we've went, we've had sheriffs go to people's homes and we know who they are. We've contacted them directly. So it's, you live in a universe nowadays where it's not hard to find people anymore. If you're going to go online and say something, we're getting, you know, I never knew there were so many of these kind of groups out there that could find who were saying it. So if you're a sleuth and you know how to say it without anyone catching you, be my guest. But we have an outside agency that reviews all of them and I, and we spend the money for it. And people, and people don't realize that because I'm a public figure in an officer of the company, the company has to cover my security. So the more you make problems, the more expensive it is to just be in business. It's crazy. It's not like I'm covering it. I don't have, I can't pay for 24 hour security at the office. We have to, we have to pay for it. You know, what's the, what's the, what's the exit plan for you? I mean, we started this even talking about the fact you never take a day off. So, Sky, I want to say something to you. There's more to this story than you just hear it either too, by the way, in this. We are a single source supplier to IAI and the Israeli military. So seven years ago, we invested in a company called EnterTech and we make missile guidance systems and other things that are top secret for the Israeli military, for the Iron Dome and for Arrow III and Arrow IV missiles. And so I get grief on that too. I'm a bad guy because I make military equipment for Israel. Anything's possible, you know what I'm saying in terms of what people want to blame you for. But I don't hide from it. I'm a defender is Israeli's right, the Israeli government's right to defend themselves. And if people don't like that, then don't buy my stock. And frankly, they don't like it. They can fuck off. That's the way I feel about it. I agree. Every country, every person, every, every, every country has the right to defend themselves. And I'm not saying Palestine doesn't have the right to have its own thing. And I know that they've had lots of offers. I am not in that political mess. It's way over my pay grade. But you're not going to tell us, as a public company, you know, who we can do business with, especially if they're defending themselves. And it's a tough call. I know there's people that don't like that and frankly, I don't care. You know, you so right now, you look at all the different. I want to see where what your exit plan is because it's always curious to me, like when you build something public, there is no exit plan. All the entrepreneurs that I speak to, they have the exit plan or they had the exit. And they sold, when they exit it, made some money, got a nice check. They could retire to a degree, even know everybody who built something meaningful, never wants to retire, which is a whole other conversation. I think it's a personality thing. There's slightly delusional and crazy and the personality thing that lets them be successful. But I do want to know where you want to take this. I'm super curious, especially because it's a lot. I mean, I don't think anybody, I don't think many people that I know have the experience of defending a public rate of company dealing with death threats, understanding. All the different things that are just sort of weighing on you on a day to day. So, want to know where that, where you plan to take it. But when you look, go, no, you can comment on that. But I was also going to say, just from all the different companies that you have a hand in, and there's a whole bunch now, what's actually very exciting for you in terms of, because you have real estate, you have defense, weapons, technology, you have Bitcoin, data centers, AI. What are some other exciting verticals maybe in the future? I know you said you have your sort of five core, but that would be exciting for you as somebody who can go and acquire. We have a more auditorium on new acquisitions. I know you do. We do. I would say to you in terms of categories, the categories we're in now we're going to stay in. So we have AI, data center business, data center business for hosting for Bitcoin. We actually have our own Bitcoin miners, Crane company. I'll probably push the lender to do more public deals where we lend to other public companies. That's where we really make a lot of money. That's sort of our bread and butter long term. But if you looked at a growth curve, we just recently reported a quarter, the AI data center business is just so, so big and growing. And there's no way for the other companies to keep up with what's happening with AI. The fourth industrial revolution, which we're part of now because of our data center business is just it's screening on fire. It's I cannot stress to people how much we're giving the company away. Now while there's a lot of money that needs to be invested in our AI data centers, most of that will come from the debt markets. We don't really need a lot of equity anymore. We raise the money for that. Now could we use a little equity? We always could use a little equity. But we we really have said publicly that we plan on issuing the minimal equity possible. We'll tap the debt market. We'll tap the preferred market. But in terms of issuing common stock, we're going to try to keep that to a minimum and focus all of our energy on the cash generation that's coming from AI data centers, from cranes, from defense, from hotels, and from our lender. And we we told the public that we thought by the end of 27, we were doing we're at above a 500 million dollar a year run rate. And that could just be from the data center business. The data center business that the first for power and AI compute and sort of this fourth, this fourth industrial revolution with Novitya and what's happening with AMD and and all the different AI companies out there and demand for compute is so off the Richter scale. And we we as a country are not paying attention to the fact that we need power. People say it out loud. And they say we want to be green and all this is but you cannot do what you're doing without power. And we have power. We have 20 megawatts in Montana. We believe that'll grow the over 250 around 250. And we have 30 megawatts live live. We're not actually a lot of companies talk about what they're going to have. We have it live. We're already mining millions and millions of dollars with a Bitcoin a year there. I think we did more than 50 million last year. I don't think know the exact number. And so if you just looked at us and said, are you going to what's your exit plan? I want to run a holding company the rest of my life. I'm 54 years old. I'm finally losing weight. I look like I'm a little thinner here actually. That's called those epic, right? So when someone said Todd, when you were when you were fatter than you are, you put the Ick and exempt, oh, ozempics. So I'm trying to lose a little weight here. And that's a miracle drug in itself, right? But I anticipate running a public holding company. That could change. But right now we're on the plan of just building out the AI data centers. The guy who runs our crane business came from Berkshire Hathaway subsidiaries. This very talented guy. The person who runs our our defense business we're very comfortable with. We are our hotels are managed by someone second to none in the hotel management business. And we're very comfortable with the guy who runs our AI data centers. Jaluni who came from the data center business. So we really refined who's running these things. And so we're really comfortable with it. We probably will spin off. We've talked about spinning off some of the other assets to share holders so that they're not part of our consolidated portfolio. Kind of staying in the sort of the major big four big five that we have. But the AI business, the data center business will ultimately dominate our revenue. There's not there. It's just like a venture portfolio. You ultimately look at all the things you have. And just five things do okay. Five things lose money. Five things make a lot of money. And then one or two outliers go crazy. The data center businesses could be an outlier for us. You never know. And my suspicion is is that'll drive our AI data center business will drive pretty much all of our long term profitability that like really matters in terms of scale. And ultimately those businesses are being bought up by people like digital reality, digital bridge. You know, the big players in that space are soaking up all that power. So if we got a big enough check, we'd probably take it. But that's the ways off. Tell me something because you're building out your brand. You have a conference risk on 360. Obviously you're jumping on podcasts too. Is this not at the level that you're playing at? Does it not cause more stress for you to be putting yourself out there all the time? It's just like more eyeballs looking at what you're doing. You're already getting death threats or you don't give a shit. Yeah, I don't care. Uh, I don't care about the death threats. I don't care about that part. I care about. So, so the risk on 360 conference what we what we've done differently with this conference than most of them is like if you went to some of grants 10x conferences, there was so much pay to get access. It was so expensive. We wanted to lower the cost of that and really create an environment of like I know we're going to try to get you there. We want to create an environment where people can know each other and that there's at least a level of trust of how they met you and that the cost is minimal to be there. Um, and I've had I believe uh, two of them so far two or three. And we've had like Alice Rodriguez. We've had Damon John. We've had tons of people Tucker Carlson, RFK Jr. A ton of entrepreneurs guys that have started businesses, girls that have started businesses. And we know that those people are networking in a big way. I find out this later on that a lot of businesses being created there. And one of the things I got out of Grand Cardone was all the people I met there. But the cost was so parabolic. Then it was like, you know, 50 grand pay to play, right? And I'm like, yeah. It just the average person can't afford that. And it's not that I don't want the average person there or that I want people to have a reasonable opportunity to go meet people and network. Right? And then you've got to you got to fed out, you know, feather out who's real? Who's not? Um, yeah. But I ultimately think because the companies will ultimately turn cash flow positive, even positive. And we expect to produce a lot of cash long term that I like investing. I've created this thing. You know, I'm so excited about the social club, what you have. And I encourage I encourage people that are I encourage people that have had an exit or understand financial markets, private equity, public equity, private credit, public credit to learn about the social club because I think that these are really valuable things to put together. You don't all have to be a Tiger 21. If you don't know what I'm referring to, either Tiger 21 or the social club that Scott runs, then then you probably need to do a little research. You'll eventually it'll eventually rise up to to where, you know, as an entrepreneur where you want to be. Um, and there's criteria to get in. I'm not suggesting everyone can be in. But I've created something not the same, but similar in the sense that I created this thing called the deal lions.com. And the deal alliance allows people that are credited to just see the deals I'm doing. And they can join me or not join me. It's the problem I have in with this is that when I started my career, 34 years ago, when I worked at Dean Witter, I did so many IPOs that I was giving them out to brokers as a syndicate manager. And I have never really had an opportunity to tell everyone, here's the private deal or public deal I'm doing. If you want to have access to it, you got to be accredited. Here's the deal memo. Here's my thesis. Make your selection. Very similar to Kalanis Jason, who's doing the syndicate. Yeah. Jason, Kalanis and he I'm part of his slack channel. And he does all of his deals through there to a camera, what is called, but right. And so, but minor more like structured equity, structured finance yet, some sort of elaborate transaction that I'm doing. I do a lot of structured finance deals where I want like, you know, 100 people in them, they all put in 50 grand or something, you know. So I do this public stuff because I believe that ultimately I can help people. And that's why that's why I did your podcast. That's why I hope you did mine. Yeah. And it's because I like to network with people and get to know what they're doing. I'm probably more selective on the deals I do now than ever before. But I do believe that we can ultimately help everyone. There's someone out there to help every person, no matter how small or no matter how big they are. Well, over over over 150 million dollar, 200 million dollar company, I'm probably not the guy for you. But maybe you never know. But you know what, you get somebody start, so you democratize access to deals, to education, to your years of experience, because you've been in the trenches, which is what people actually need. They don't need somebody who built a whole audience on social media and the teachings have to do something that's ever done themselves. Big red flag and that happens a lot. So when someone like you puts themselves out there, democratizes that access and sort of helps them get started from a lens of experience, then some people are going to go on to build incredible things, whether or not they become full-time investors, they find a way to do a deal that gives them the capital required to maybe take their business at the next level or not take another job because now they have a nice nest state to sit on for a little bit, whatever it is. More financial acumen and more financial education and access to deals and you normally wouldn't have access to. This is what, this is all good. It's all good stuff. So I think that it's just good that you're doing it. That's my tip. I will tell you that that's what I think attracted me to you and that is warts and all, you know, you don't want to be doing business with someone in my opinion that's just a social media popular person that's not ever done it before. Now sometimes the people that done it before don't really present well in social media, right? So there's a, there's a mix of me doing this myself to try to explain to people. I get people all the time to say, oh, you're background. You know, you got sued. Okay, well, let me tell you something. If you're looking for people to help you that have never had any problems, keep looking, buddy. You know, in 2009, when I was dead broke after the housing crisis, I borrowed 200 bucks from my mom. I mean, I couldn't pay my bills. Couldn't, I couldn't put food on the table fast forward seven years from 2009. I brought a company public that I owned half of for more than 3.3 billion. That was the first trade. It would public and five open to 33. You have to have access to people and my whole life is based on this risk on philosophy that relationships are the most important thing. They're the most vital. You have to invest in yourself. You have to stay your own course. You have to know your competition. You have to own your own mistakes and you have to never give up. But if you start with relationships that are honest, you can get through pretty much anything as long as you don't lie to anybody. As long as you don't lie to them, people will want to help you. And I want to help people the best I can. I need to avoid people lying to me. And so I love the conference because you meet a lot of people. I met this guy the other day in Bermuda, an 18-year-old kid doing something called microgreens. I thought, okay, is that really a business? Maybe it is. And then I found out that he's doing microgreens so you can feed your reptiles. I said to him, hey, the pet space is huge for this. And I said to him, I said to him, hey, if you create a GoFundMe account, or what's that thing where you can sell microgreens to get paid? You can sell like your idea. You know that web kickstarter, kickstarter, kickstarter. I said, he said I only need $10,000. I said, I'll do the first 10% but you got to ask for 50,000. I'll do the first 10% right now. So sometimes I like to help people that just have a really cool idea and we'll see where it goes. You know, I'm a true believer and I'm not a religious guy but I'm a true believer that there's something bigger than us and the more you give away, you're going to get it back 10 fold. I'm a real believer in that. And so the conference, we don't make money really much at it. I don't know that we actually make a profit at the conference really when you think about it but we make a lot of relationships that turn into things. And so I mean, I don't think you charge for people on your podcast but you probably get a lot of relationships from it, right? And you're giving a you're giving away a lot of you're giving away a lot of your time to educate people on something that I think is invaluable. There's nothing more important than learning whether someone's ever made a payroll or not and how they made it through it and how they got help because you will be engaged. But because a person, an entrepreneur, anyone who's starting a business is fooling himself if they don't think they're going to need help. How do you gauge success? How do you gauge your success? My wife. I gauge all my relate my my success on the relationship I have with my wife and my four kids. So everything else is just your business. So now you're probably saying, well, you had to have some financial success to keep a family. That's true. But she stayed with me when I didn't have a dollar, never complained, not even for one second. So you'll you'll you'll you'll feel like I said about the art and relationships. The hardest part about being an entrepreneur is being married to the right human being whether you're male or female, you have to you have to have the right counter party with you with the right mindset. My first wife basically said to me one time, and I wasn't paying attention to this. She she you know, I worked and ran a hedge fund. And she said, it would be nice if you came on with five o'clock and left your work behind. And I said, oh, that's never going to happen. And sure enough, a couple months later, she divorced me. So I wasn't thinking that when I answered the questions, never going to happen, that was going to lead to the force. And that's probably not the only reason she left me. But the second time, which is really better, the second time I said to her, you have to accept 50,000 or 500,000. I never know what I'm going to make. And I work all the time. And this is what I'm committed to. And she signed up for it. And it's been a rocky roller coaster fun ride. But you said expectations, which is that's the secret. You said expectations early on. I think that's some people screw up. All right. What did we not go into? Because I went into a lot today. I just have a couple one one last question to close it out just to tie it and bring it home. But what would be one thing that we didn't go into that I didn't ask you? Maybe that I wouldn't know to ask you from all the stuff you posted online. That would be a lesson or insight or learning that you've experienced in your life. So I did learn to schedule my worry. And what I mean by that is this is just something that could be helpful and that is I have things that happen to me every single day that are a problem every day. They're just a problem. My wife says I wake up to problems as a fireman that people if they experience that once in their life would not recover from it. And I have it weekly and daily. I have a strategy of scheduling my worry. It's about 15 to 30 minutes a day. I only allow myself to worry that time frame. The rest is all taking action to solve those problems. So if you can schedule your worry, don't drag it out. Don't tell a thousand people and I'll emphasize that by if you don't have a business coach or a life coach, I've been seeing the same shrink for 24 years. I never miss. I've been seeing her every Saturday now by Zoom because I live in Vegas. I've been seeing her one hour a week for 24 years since my first divorce. And if you're not talking to someone and you're not if you're not laying your issues with someone you pay to coach you, you're making mistake. I mean an actual licensed therapist, someone that can help you with whatever issues you think you have. And they have to be really able to help you. Meaning they're not giving you the answers. They're helping you find the answers. And I would I would encourage everyone to read two books and read them completely. The roadless travel, the original by M. Scott Peck. And it tells you in the first page what the problem is. And I remind myself of that all the time. And I would read Napoleon Hill's think and grow rich even though it's written in a way, which is kind of the old English language, it's important to understand why you're doing something, what you're giving in return, right? If you understand the difficulties of being a human being and you understand the difficulties of being in business from Napoleon Hill, you're halfway there. But you really got to understand it. You can't just say you read it. You got to live it. I would say that's good advice coming from somebody who apparently reads what 60 to 70 books a year. If that's not a doubt, that's the minimum. I was thinking about this last night. I was flying home and I was reading a new book called The Fund about Radalio, the amount of consuming data that I can see. And well, right now I'm on this mission to watch every podcast you have, which by the way, holy shit. That's going to take me a while. Yeah. I would you got a couple of trips in you. Yeah, a couple of lights in. Exactly. Um, be out of mission to consume data, but you've got to take care of yourself first, right? So you've got to figure out what makes you happy, right? Really, really what makes you happy. Because if you think somehow there's an ending, I was thinking about this the other day. Like, I'm a fairly rich guy now. Like I'm not super rich, but I've got access to a lot of stuff. There's no ending. It doesn't like end. Like you know, like it's just a new set of problems. Now they're good problems to have, but they're just first world problems. No one cares about my first world problems. Nobody. You have to care about them, right? And so in your world, whoever world you're talking to, they have their own problems. Right now, their own first world problems, right? You got to be able to talk to someone about them. You've got to and not someone that's going to tell you what you want to hear. Like, you know, someone who, um, well, we're all psychologically damaged to some extent, right? And so do we actually tell ourselves the truth? It's probably ourselves that we like to the most, right? I think having a good therapist, someone you can trust is a good start. And a lot of guys won't do this. They won't have a therapist or someone they can talk to. And I'm not talking about paying a guy a hundred grand for five sessions. I'm talking about a therapist, someone you can talk to about your issues and find the right person. It's hard to do. You've got to find the right person. Because if you're going to be, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, if you're going to make a payroll, it's going to be a lonely space for you to be in. But I think that's super important. And I think that the, the classic issue with entrepreneurs is they think they're smarter than everyone else. Oh, yeah, they do. And then either. Yeah. Yeah. If you're, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you're going to get your teeth kicked in. Sorry, it's not easy. There's occasionally the guy that gets lucky who this, everything goes swimmingly in his dad mom lend him two million dollars. And, you know, but he hadn't, he didn't really have to make a payroll. Please, you have to make a payroll. Make a payroll. Make a few of them. You'll figure it out very quickly. Where should people go to connect with you? What's the website, socials, all that? For a conference for, for anything really, your podcast. Go to riskon360.com. I have a website totalt.com, t-o-d-d-a-u-l-t. I have the deal lines.com. On social media, I'm totalt the third, so one, two, three. I'm verified on Instagram. I think there's like two million followers there. It's not hard to find me. There's a couple of bogus accounts. But go to the ones that are verified. I'm everywhere. You know, I try to post everywhere always. I'm a pretty transparent guy. But it's really easy to get ahold of me. Or you can type, you can, you can, I think you can, you can text ROI to 31798, ROI to 31798. I think you'd even text totalt to 31798. I've got so many, so much access. You can text TDA, the deal lines, TDA to 26786. I'm pretty much available everywhere. It's all over my social media. You can't miss it. Okay, so people, people will find you somewhere and put some links in the show notes too. Okay, last question, which I think is, you know, you've gone through so many seasons in your life. You grew up, you grew up in, in a HUD housing. So you grew up poor. You grew up very, very poor. So you look back, what would be one lesson? I know you've given tons of insight, but just pick something though, humor me. One lesson you would tell your 20 year old self. You don't know what you're talking about. I grew up in HUD housing until I was 13. My mom married a guy who adopted me. I took his name. People confused something about me. Here's an antidote. The company's not named after me. I was adopted by my dad and my grandfather, who was my adopted grandfather, gave me $1,400, which I paid him back to start the company. And when I was 18 years old, I wrote in my yearbook that I would start this company when I was in high school. And my 20 year old self would, this is by design, I will tell you, you asked probably the perfect question. I would not think I knew all the answers. I would tell my 20 year old self to go and get a mentor or someone I could learn from, go work for someone that I could understand and read and study. In the beginning, the first probably eight or nine years of my life, what I became a business person, I did almost no reading and studying. I didn't really understand. It was till I failed the first time that I really understood that I didn't know what I was doing. And you don't really know what you're doing until you've had to make a payroll, produce financials, and have credible financials, meaning financials. There's a guy named Tillman Fatita that I had the privilege of helping bring his company public when I was a very young guy. Believe it or not, Landry Sifu was public for a short time. He hated being public. He went private later. But one thing he used to say that I thought resonated was you must know your numbers. Don't be arrogant enough to be the boss and tell people I don't know the answer. You need to know the answer very quickly. And the arrogance of being 20 was my downfall. The arrogance of thinking I knew better was my downfall, right? The overconfidence in my expectations on how quickly I'd grow and what I could sell, right? So I would probably tell myself that I need to learn a lot more. The idea of going to get your education in college, really today, unless you're going to be a scientist or a doctor, is about you starting something and completing it. I have a son that went to UCLA. He came out a much more educated guy than I thought he would. Really brilliant kid, right? Who learned in college? Go learn something 20 year old Todd. Learn it. Don't act like you know it. Don't fake it to you make it. Learn it. And just admit you don't know. That's what I would tell myself. And that's what I would tell all these entrepreneurs. I see them out there buying cars and lambos and they're doing social media stuff and they're getting endorsement deals. This is all going to go away. Hey, you guys are all fools. You think you're all going to have these social media deals that happen forever or you're going to be Kim Kardashian. You're not going to be. You got to be yourself, right? You can learn from other people, but be yourself. And that's a hard thing to do. Like I'm 54 years old. I've only recently accepted that I am who I am, right? In the last probably 10% of my life so far, last five years, I've ultimately accepted that that while I wanted to be like Warren Buffett, I was not, right? He was he's always sort of been my he Kirk Kirk accordion and Carl, I kind of been my sort of like financial mentors that I've really Kirk accordions probably the most I align myself with. I would tell yourself to learn and that you don't know what you're talking about yet. You don't know it 20. I promise you. You don't know.