Navigating the Future of Family Offices with Anmol Goel

0:00 Hello, everybody. Thanks for joining today. Welcome to another episode of Arthur's Round Table. Super grateful for everybody who's listened in and those of course, in the family office insights community that have shared it with others and pay attention from time to time for topics that interest you. We're excited. Colton, our friend Colton is kindly referred to EMNOL to us and we're really excited to have our conversation today. Sure, you'll find it interesting. It's family office related and so those of you who are in family offices will, I think appreciate what we have to chat with today. So with that, thanks for being here. I'm no. My absolute pleasure. Thank you very much for having me, Alpha. You're very welcome.

0:41 So let's start within the origin story. The beginning is your journey, that sort of thing, if you don't mind. Yeah, absolutely. So urgent story starts off in India, was born in a small town in Delhi called Jackery and moved to the UK when I was about nine years old. You know, family was relatively middle class. And one of the things that I'd sort of seen my my uncle, who was sort of the first entrepreneur in the in the family that the close family anyways and and sort of parents as well work super, super hard to to, you know, build something. But back then, you know, it was the initial stage. So he had moved to the US in 0607 and we had come to the UK in 2010. And so, you know, saw that initial journey of hard work and then back of the mind, you know, one of the things that I was always driven by like is money.

1:30 I wanted to make more money, grow company scale. So I came to the UK and started, you know, working the odd jobs of like accounting, doing just newspaper runs. You know, when I was accounting, it was like notes for accountants coming in and sort of doing the few things back in because I was really good at maths. And then sort of did the runs that, you know, Primark, which is I think the equal of like TJ Maxx in the US. And then everything from like babysitting and blah blah. Until I turned 17 and built my first company, which was a fintech companies. Again, I say fintech to make it sound a bit nicer than it was, but essentially got introduced to cryptocurrency super, super early and I realized I had this knack for understanding mathematical equations, footprints, trends and started to trade it right and realized I was fairly good at it. So I started, you know, extrapolating the data, creating signals, made some money off it, made about thirty, $40,000 off it.

2:31 And then I realized that I was trying to scale it, that hedge funds aren't very keen to listen to a 17 year old giving them advice. So shut that shop up and decided to head to university where I studied mathematics with economics. There I built up my second company, which was quickly bought out at the age of 20. And then there used to be a trading competition which some of the viewers might remember called Amplify. So it was ranked #2 in the world. Through that JP Morgan, you know, came in. So when worked at JP for a bit, but again, I'm that generation where, you know, whilst that was happening, it was at the midst of COVID. So this was 2020, right? Yeah. So my experience, yeah.

3:12 You know, it was very different to to, you know, what you would sort of perceive as a traditional investment banking experience. So I decided I wasn't having as much fun, so I'll switch to wealth management. So I decided to join Marsh McLennan LED a few billion dollar transaction was always the go getter, you know, in the in the team. And that time the second wave of COVID started. So you know, me being me, I said, OK, well, working a night or five isn't hard enough. So what I'm going to do is enroll into a Harvard Business School class and and and get a diploma. So I rolled into a class for it was called innovation in entrepreneurship. During that time ran into something which might people, which many people now know as open AR. So really sort of started getting into it became the 1st 10,000 beta testers and operators and also then for Gemini later and really sort of started to understand the space of AI machine learning algorithms. Sue inside Meyer and venture consulting and venture studio platform where I started to Angel invest and I would bring in other friends and family H and eyes, you know, to invest with me and fast forwarding sort of a year and a half at the age of another time 24, I ended up deploying about 53.8 million. Oh, that was the time where a lot of people, yeah. AI related type businesses.

4:31 In tech enabled, I think you know, in 2022-2023, AI was still up and coming and I think all of them have now branded to AI, but I think at that point it was still tech companies. I think everything is AI now. You know, dot AI was I mean, you know your generationis.com, right? I, I, I'm sure you know, you remember in the late 90s, everythingwas.com and everything that was dot. Comeverythingwas.com Unless you didn't get the name secured enough, then you went to dot net and it was kind of a big fail, right? Exactly, exactly. So my thing was right, a lot of family offices were bringing me in. They were like, OK, he's an exited founder, you know, he's done his studies and he's operationally well in tune and have the background knowledge which led me to starting my own fund.

5:17 So ended up after deploying 53.8 million at the age of 24, thought of my own VC fund. I became the youngest ever fund manager in history of Europe to self fund A8 figure. Well self set up and then had other LP's as well 8 figure VC fund. And if I grew that and continue to work with family offices and got few other guys in, ended up structuring my own multi multi family office. So now we're three families, you know, under a consortium of another thirty families that we work super closely with deploying capital across asset classes. So now we have our own investment banking and advisory, we have our own VC, we sort of have a fund of fund sleeves, we're LP's and four different funds. We have our own venture studio, ended up being partnered into a venture debt fund, so about $150 million fund there and carving out my own private equity sleeve now as well.

6:06 So investing in acquiring cash flowing businesses and doing a lot of roll ups. So acquired a tech development company, a sales and marketing company, as well as a tax advisory company. And then we'll soon acquire a legal and insurance company as well, a partner with the family to bring in a hedge fund, which I'm leading the overseas arm for, as well as now expanding into hotels and infrastructure as well. Few of my cousins, you know, who are involved in steel and tire, I'm helping, you know, bringing those business out from India into GCC and European countries. So you know that that sort of 53,000,000 + 10,000,000 plus a few, you know 80 million in the last sort of 2 1/2 years has now bubbled to about 1.1 billion and planning on taking to about 10 billion by 20302031. Nice.

6:53 Is that? I mean, it's a lot to have done in a short period of time. Congratulations. Of the three families, are they your family? Are they other families that you met along the way? Are they folks that you brought over from India? You don't have to be precise and who they are. I'm just wondering what the profile of the these folks are. Yeah. So 1 is my family and then there's one family in Mumbai and there's a family in California and the connecting sort of route or, or the way we connected was one, we all had similar ethos and background. All of us are from the diaspora. And then second thing was we were all operating in complementary asset classes. The family in Mumbai looks at, you know, public market, right?

7:35 They, they didn't do as much private or venture or, or that kind of stuff. So you know, that was a complimentary thing where they said, look, we will back you and you know, you helped expand us. And same with the family in California. Their background was taxation and real estate. Again, we didn't have too much knowledge in that side on the large scale commercial or you know, multi family units and flipping them and you know, being tax savvy with those kind of stuff. So it sort of ended up working out quite nicely. And then underneath that, we're building out this consortium because I realized, and you know, I think you would kind of agree with it, that the AUM side of asset management is slightly broken. And what I mean by that is, you know, let's say you're a billion dollar family office, right?

8:16 That's your AUM. You go to an asset manager today, he'll charge you 1.5%, right? So in opportunity you're pretty much paying him 15,000,000 a year. So if I come to you and say, hey, also I have this amazing opportunity, let's put 100 million into this, right? We're putting in 100, let's you put in 100. It's in your asset managers best interest to not let you invest, right, because he's losing that 1.5 million in fees every single year. So we said, you know, screw that, we don't want that. We're going to work on deal by deal basis. So we'll say OK Arthur, we'll put in 100 million each. We'll have a 2% fee on top of if we have originated the deal, right? And then we'll have a, you know, we'll underwrite it by a third party or whatever and we'll OK, let's say in 24 months we're expecting a 40% return, right?

9:00 Anything above the 40 right we will get an additional 50% kickback. So you know it's in our incentive to make sure it over performs and there's no AUM feed. So AUA model asset under advisory. And with that, you know, a lot of families have been super interested and more so than that, what's been super, super insightful is bringing in the next generations, right? As you, I'm sure you know, multiple people came to, you know, your podcast and have said there's a massive disparity of Gen. ones and Gen. 2, right? And what they want to invest in. How do you get started in that? And you know, the wrong way to go about it is just to throw it into an asset manager because then the next generation doesn't learn, right? You carve out and sleeve and let them work with another next generation and then build something on top where you are actually overseeing everything.

9:46 That's a good way to unify because you know, it could be that the grandparents or the parents might have been in agriculture or real estate or steel or wherever and the kid just wants to invest and web 3 and AI. So that's again a massive unifying point. And, and those 3031 families now we have in the consortium, you know, those things are working super, super strongly as well. And we plan to grow that to 100 families by 20302031. So it's really interesting to see how the AUM businesses evolved. And I can only comment on what I see in the US. So it's, you know, it's idiosyncratic to my experiences here. But aside from the seemingly obvious problem of the next generation going, wait a minute, you have a half a billion dollars with Merrill Lynch and they're charging you 150 basis points to be in public markets and 30% of it's in ETFs.

10:39 I don't get it right. And furthermore, what you said is really true. I mean, there's the incentive for your advisor who's getting paid on the AUM to even entertain taking some of that off their balance sheet, not their balance sheet, but their AUM to, to deploy it in something that interests the next generation, for example, or even the matriarch or patriarch that's interested in deploying capital into new asset classes. They have 0 incentive to do that. In fact, they'll make every argument in the world and I'm not trying to be disparaging. It's just natural humanity, they, they naturally want to keep it that way. And of course the argument is, wait a minute, what do you want to do?

11:22 Stay rich or get richer, right? And so they want the argument to be the preponderance of the argument to be on this stay rich side, right? And there's that mean there's, there's, there's a trend now in the US, you've probably seen it that the assets under management business is a nice recurring revenue. And so there's a lot of acquisitions and consolidations going on because of the regulatory environment there. It's, it's not such an easy thing to take your AOMAUM from as a, an investor or family office from Goldman Sachs and move it to Merrill Lynch or whatever, right? It's, it's a pain in the neck.

12:03 And so the stickiness of that business is appeal to a lot of the private equity firms and people who are lending money to those firms to aggregate more registered investment advisors, for example. Are you seeing that also in Europe? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, it's very, very sticky business to have because you know how difficult it is to liquidate it and then rebank it and then put it out into the market. Yeah, exactly. Which is something everyone hates, right. So and and look, you know, by no means, you know, I would say again, I will you use names. I won't use any names, but you know, I, I wouldn't say to not do that. I think by all means, you know, 67% of your portfolio, if you haven't made the wealth or don't know how to manage your property should be with an expert.

12:52 And for a lot of these second, third generations, right? The reason the wealth is so quickly dissipated is because it's mismanaged and then given to guys who have no idea, you know, the origins of the wealth, how it was derived and how to manage and whatever. So for certain cases, I think there is that business where you and that does well. But I think even if you carve out like a 20%, you know, for yourself or 30% for yourself to really engage into this next stage of innovation and then especially to to align it with the next generation and what they're thinking, right? I think that could be massive. Yeah, One of the things that we found pretty consistent even though there's been a fair amount of evolution in the large bank platforms doing multi family office is that their natural inclination to keep some money with some of the big banks that have multifamily offices because you get access to their balance sheet, right.

13:50 And so if you need to do a collateralized loan, you know, you can't do that with somebody that doesn't have a balance sheet. So there's an added advantage to them to have AUM and pay those fees perhaps. And that seems to be a pretty consistent, at least in my experience, you know, reason to stay part of keep part of your assets with one of those companies that have a balance sheet. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. What's going on with the, you know, I, I, I don't want to be snarky about it, but I get amused when people say, Oh my God, AI is going to replace half the jobs, right? And of course, I might have a different point of view than some that would lose their jobs as a result. And so I have compassion for that. On the other hand, it just creates so many more opportunities.

14:42 What are you seeing in your world recently? For example, you've seen open claw, right? That just took off. And the the level of automating things that can be counted is ridiculous, right? It just just eliminates so much not just manpower but errors, right? I think look, in every situation like this, it presents an opportunity to retrain yourself and to become more effective and useful, right? I've seen multiple of those guys who, you know, a big example is printing press, right? So distant cousin of mines around a printing press company. Now that's almost, you know, that industry is dying out massively, right?

15:22 But they've figured a way to be super, super ingenuity about it. Cut costs using AI and then, you know, work with some marquee operators and then again use that to sell into very niche products. So I think definitely AI will take the jobs, but these are very repetitive menial tasks which humans shouldn't have to worry about. I think the big difference is AI can't replace thinking, right? What you're thinking perception strategy, AI can't do that. AI is really good at synthesizing information which you feed into it as a system. So if you're worried that you know, currently your job is looking at a spreadsheet and then, you know, clicking down buttons and then if X = Y whatever, yes, of course it replace you.

16:08 But I think you should take that opportunity to teach yourself those commands and go to the next business and say, hey, I can now do 10 projects instead of 2. So rather than my job as an operational analyst, I'm an operational project manager. Let me oversee this with the insights of exactly understanding how to derive and in, you know, if something goes wrong, how to do it right. And as someone who studied mathematics at university, there's a concept called the concept of first principles, which basically means you have to derive something, you know, when, when you sort of do a cosine formula or a sine formula, you know, equals to 1, whatever you have to as first principle, show how you got there.

16:49 We all know what it's equal, right? We, we, we know what the answer is, but show that proof. So I think you having that technical knowledge now as a, as a analyst and then building upon that to make yourself more useful would be much more valuable than it used to be before. And the salaries, you know that paid 3040 grand for it will now pay 100 grand for it because all of a sudden you can be doing work of five people, right? So the five people that will be paying 250K for, they would much rather pay you 100K. So you all of a sudden just doubled your money. So I think it will definitely replace menial labor to make life easier. But I don't think humans are are are you know, if you know, they, they, they, they sort of operate correctly or anything will happen to them. I think AI as a technology will net benefit given it doesn't get politically reinstated.

17:42 I mean, it's again, you know, if we go back to the Internet example, I'm sure 25 years ago the same malarkey was going on, that the Internet will replace the humans. I mean, we're still here, all right? I mean, back then we were 6 billion and now we're 8 billion. So if anything, there's just more of us and more people working. And also another thing is this also brings opportunity to techify things which are very old school, right? When you go into agricultural systems, when you go into, you know, cleaning garbage, which is still very hands on, very manual labor, it's to again, build out the efficiency because a lot of those won't be replaced. I mean, maybe some humanoid robots are built 20 years down to time and then they can help out with that.

18:22 But again, there is that opportunity to be that first mover if you understand exceptionally what the power of AI is and leverage that. And you know, that's what we sort of try to do early doors and pretty much everyone is doing that now. But if you can be the first mover and brand yourself well, I think you'll be you'll be well set with AI. Yeah. I think the human element and all this will become exponentially more valuable. I like to use the example in our real estate business where we've been able to automate a lot of the stuff that otherwise would have had to an analyst would have done or someone's processing numbers. But nothing can replace our ability that, you know, over the last 15 years, we had relationships with lenders that are also that helped us catalyze relationships with real valuable people who know how to identify properties in local markets that AI is never going to be. I mean, I'd be able to look at the data, but they'll they'll never hear about that property that we know because the syndicator is somebody that we had a relationship that we lent money to, you know, 10 years ago. And so that sort of interface is just non existent. But it was really interesting what happened during COVID, too, is that a lot of people who had spent a lot of time networking and getting to know people, building relationships were able to leverage that.

19:46 Even though you couldn't be in person, you were able to get on Zoom and talk to people who you had a relationship that said, OK, I'll listen. What's going on, right? And so I think that sort of personal interaction will become exponentially more valuable. We'll see. But it seems to be the case. Yeah. And I think that's been, you know, a lot of people sort of asked me, especially those who have been following me for the last two to three years, you know, what's been the secret to the rise, You know, that you've been able to scale so fast. And I was like, I've always been people first, right? In the world of where we're supposedly getting more and more connected, actually, I feel like we're getting more disconnected. So when someone is, you know, all the way across the ocean, I'm willing to make the trip, right?

20:30 My team didn't order. Tell me last year. I did 113 flights last year. So I was pretty much on a plane every three days, right? But then that showed it to the people that this guy's committed, you know, he's in every single conference. He's speaking everywhere. He's going to see those startups, he's going to work, you know, on those investments that he's made. He's, you know, being part and being active with the, the, the governments and the, and the bigger players on the team as well. And if someone is on a equal balance or scale as compared to me, they will go, you know what I'll trust and more to do it right because he's got that personability edge, right? Being likable. The world of in the world of AI is huge because AI doesn't have a personality yet, right? So again, taking advantage of the moment whilst at lost and building or a building upon it is super, super key. Yeah, it's really interesting.

21:17 I watched part of the episode of Lex Friedman. It viewing the founder of Open Claw. Besides being a fascinating conversation, one of the things that he said is he wanted to give it a personality, so he purposely let it reprogram itself in the context of the conversations he has with his friends in his WhatsApp group, right? And so it actually can readjust. And of course, it's the same guy, that and the same technology that had a social media platform for the two AIS to talk to each other. And what's really fascinating to me, I'd love to hear your, is that when Open AI came out with HTTP, we went from this to exponentially utilizing this technology. I mean, it happened so fast and I think it'll continue to happen that way, but I'm not prognosticating. It just seems that way.

22:12 Yeah, no, I think definitely. And now the next thing is, you know, agentic agents, right? So what GPT does, GPT is almost like, imagine you're in a library, right? This is a huge library all across you. GPT will pretty much say you will come and ask a question to the librarian. Imagine the librarian as the interface. GPT will be able to pick information from the left side and to the right side and give it to you exactly in the way because it has that input. If it doesn't have that input, it'll go round and round and round and nothing will happen. Now the difference is in agents is agents don't just do that. They're, they're much more responsive and adaptive. So if the agent knows that you like blue books in the right column and you like white books in the left column and you like it to be organized by A-Z, you just go, hey, organize it in a any format which is suited to me. And you know, once you put in the command of blue, it will automatically now know, OK, well, I can put in white because I know his track history.

23:14 He prefers this usually color combination. I will now sort this out in alphabetical order. If someone then asked me repeated information, I have the input of how to to take care of like so it's it's sort of doing multiple sort of steps with that, you know, sort of logical reasoning. So that's sort of the next step. And then you know, sort of skipping a few things along. I think the next big thing that will come out the agentic AI is what they called SGI. All right, which is the little bit scary, little bit sci-fi part of it and a little bit exciting. And that's when there's that's what they call super intelligence. The the last one, the AI has a conscience, which is the key differentiator between US and AI right now. Right now, AI can't think for itself, right?

23:56 If you go back to librarian example, it's, you know, if, if you put in a prompt right now today and tell AI, give me 10 new ways of making money, right? It will again pick from different books that the librarian has in. The librarian will tell you, but it doesn't have that ability to think for itself. With SGI, since it has conscience, it has that way of innovation, right? You know, because innovation is made by making mistakes, right? By learning from that mistake and having that capacity to think outside of the box, which AI isn't able to do. It's perpetually meant to be inside a box. So I think that would be super, super interesting. I think we are away. We're still far away until quantum computing and the derivation of the memory is there. But then we then run into a challenge of energy, right? The cost of compute is already so high. So the cost of computing something on a quantum level with that sort of brain frame power, it's just going to be stupidly high.

24:50 Like right now, you know, when you put in a prompt into charge EPT, it's the equivalent of powering a bulb for a minute, right? So to be able to afford that, I think that there's, there's some levels of satiation that humans will reach more on the hardware side before we do on the AI side, before everyone goes, hey, we need to put a stop or we need to figure something out, right? And you know, then that's heating everything up and the water systems and you know, the wider life that's being affected around it. So I think again with AI, there's those sort of opportunities that if you're able to solve, you know, those innate problems which are coming in with AI, again, the the likes of Open AI, Claude, Amazon, Microsoft and all these bigger players, they will pay you billions, not 1,000,000 billions. So yeah.

25:35 Yes, super interesting. It's fascinating to see. Also it's not really crypto but I was speaking to some folks and they were let's just say crypto lol right? There's a community that has, you know, all Bitcoin, all the time, crypto all the time solution to all the problems that I'm I'm purposely being a little dramatic. And they were talking about how tokenization of funds is just another basis of evidence that crypto is the reason why they're long on crypto. And my thinking was, I'm wondering what you think about it is the reason why Blackstone and State Street want to tokenize their funds has nothing to do with the real tokenization part of, you know, selling the tokens, like often is the case with crypto.

26:25 It's to get rid of the, you know, 1000 analysts that are counting the numbers to make sure that the funds are doing what they're, that the reporting is clear. And so tokenizing it puts it on a smart contract on the blockchain and eliminates a bunch of errors and a bunch of people just analyzing stuff that arguably humans should have better things to do. What's your take on that? I think it's it's a little bit more than I where so I was recently at Davos, right. So while Economic Forum just happened in Davos last month, one of the things that Larry Fink said, which is pretty interesting was he wants people could not own anything. He wants everyone, you know, to just rent. You know, that's where the happiness is. To be free is the concept or the narrative that they asset light, asset light.

27:18 But you know, literally being human, like, right, you don't own anything. You know, there are ways like you can travel, the world has become digitalized. You can go all across. But I think that's where the issue is because fractionalizing these funds will give people part ownership, but no control. What they really fear is control, right? Because when he truly owns something, right? I mean, this going back to those oil mine examples, right? Back when oil was discovered. And then you need to drill and they would always be that pesky house because the owner owned it. They would be like, Hey, we'll pay you 100 grand. He'd like, no, it's my house, I'm keeping it, right? And then they would have to pay him 203 hundred 400. And in some cases, you know, the, the owner by no means would move. And you know, those sort of instances, I think the, the, the, the bigger reason the big players want you to sort of do that is because ultimately they want a higher AUM of people not, or having some, some ownership, but no control of it, right? And, and, and when I say own, right, so your ownership is so insignificant, right?

28:17 Because when you look at these Vanguards and Black Rock and Blackstone, these guys each own between 9:00 to 12 trillion in AUM, right? When you own an ETF, even if you think you're you know you're a big player with 100 in the ETFI mean you put 100K again, you know, you divide 100K by 10 trillion. All of a sudden you realize, well, that actually makes 0.00000001%. So, you know, if let's say me and you own a car, right? And all of a sudden I say, OK, well Arthur, I'll give you 0.000001% ownership of my car, you will slap me. Like, what are you talking about, dude? Right. So that's what they're sort of trying to do. And I wouldn't go for that.

29:01 That's my approach. I think if someone wants to live that Vagabond or Berber lifestyle, which he used to be, where, you know, the world is their oyster and they just want to travel and they want to have no ownership to nothing, great. But I don't think that's the best way to move forward. I think, you know, the blockchain as a concept does definitely have it's upsides, but I don't think this is the right scenario for I think where the upside of blockchain comes in is transparency, right? And speed of transactions. So when you do a, a transaction through blockchain, you can see which wallet, what code, what time, who owns the wallet and if the wallet was ever sold, transacted to past money moves, next money moves in. It's very clear which, you know, in the current banking system especially, you know, the stuff that we have in BVI or, you know, Switzerland or, or, or you know, Bermuda or whatever, it's very easy to to, you know, hide that. So that's one good thing.

29:55 Yeah. And then second is speed of transaction and the, the minimality of the charges you'll get for it. If I want to spend, if I want to send let's say one Bitcoin to India, I can pretty much send it with, you know, few cents cost. Whereas if I'm remitting money, you know, there's a, you know, .9% or in some cases one 1.2% cost. It's when it starts to be larger transactions. I'm paying like thousand $2000 per transaction. So that's and, and and you know, it'll take two days. In some cases it'll take five days. In some cases it needs to be checked. So it might take a week. So I think those two right off the bat are much bigger and better opportunity. But when it comes to some own age and it replacing the currency and blah, blah, I, I personally don't see it yet. Not to say I can't be wrong, definitely can be in the future, but for me right now I don't see that. It was was the being that you were there, you know, the visceral experience of it going from Kloss to Fink. Was Fink also adopting Kloss's narrative since he did say nothing?

31:03 Because that's what Kloss was talking about at the beginning, right? Yeah, I mean, look, I'm sure they're connected. I think I remember watching this interview of Chamat Pala, Pala puppeteer probably buttering this sign him again. He said there's about. Yeah, exactly. So there's about 150 people who rule the world, right? It's not the US government, it's not the UK government, Chinese and whatever. It's about 150 people that have absolute control, right? And it's likes of these guys who have ownership of complete ownership, so they can dictate, right? They can do enough to shut governments down, right? So when Trump initially came in and and, you know, he was trying to get rid of what he kept calling the deep state, this is what he was sort of trying to do, right?

31:49 So I think there's definitely a lot of similar sort of ideologies that they use their publicity and their press and the control they have over media to push that forward. But I think if you open your eyes and think logically, it's super clear to see what they're trying to do and and you know how you can beat that system, especially for my generation. So yeah. Yeah. So let's talk about beat the System. You know, I think there's a fair amount of control from these. Let's just say there's 150 people. But what's really interesting is that you can, and it's not even in the fringes. It's like you can operate and make a lot of money and do business and at some point if you get too big, then they get their knickers in A twist.

32:43 But the meantime, for example, beat the system. I think what you mean is you could still operate, especially in your country, in my country and and Dubai, you know, in the in that area, UAE, you can still operate, make a lot of money without them interfering. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, a lot of people who are now sitting at that and you know, for those listening, we don't know if it's exactly 150 or 100 or whatever. It's just a figurative number. A lot of them work their way up there, right. You know, a few of those people, you know, you're, I mean, obviously some were born into it and, and control that heritage.

33:23 But I think you can find the right way. I think you do. Obviously, we'll have to align with them and you'll have to make sure you don't ruffle too many feathers as you're coming up. Unless you are absolutely sure you can get the masses behind you, right? The only way to go about that is either through pure democratic will where you have the masses behind you. So it doesn't matter how much you have in the bank and because the masses will lead you to, to victory or it's, you know, create an immense amount of wealth and slowly, slowly, slowly start to control assets all across key strategic assets, which eventually they will have to be like, OK, well, you know, either we bring you to the table or, you know, we, we offer to buy you out, In which case again, your buyout I'm sure would be big enough, right?

34:08 If it's this 910 figure buyout and you're comfortable either way, and then your next few generations will be. So I think it goes back to what do you want? You know, ultimately there's a lot of people who earn $1,000,000 a year and they're very happy with it. Nothing against that. You know, when I hit my first million, I, you know, I was like, this is nowhere near where I want to be at the end of the day. And I wanted to do a lot more and I still do. But maybe that's because I'm a bachelor. I don't have wife and kids. I don't have that, you know, responsibility behind it. Maybe a day will come where I'll be like, actually I'm, I'm satisfied, right? Because after a certain point you're like the, the, the amount of zeros is not going to make a difference. So if it's not a bigger act of change which is driving you a bigger act of purpose, I don't think it needs to be that different way. Yeah, it's I happen to know a fair amount of people that have made more money than they'd ever need. And some of them along the way were stopping and experiencing life and some of them weren't.

35:12 And some of them that finally made enough money where they felt comfortable. Then they decided, OK, is there all there is? And then decided that they were going to do something more. Now do I say spiritual, but more rewarding right then just because it's, you know, at some point, you know, money's money, right? Money just buys freedom, right? So you can do whatever you want. The the thing that's interesting that Trump I think did have an impact and it was there were signs of it initially. Is he disclosed to the general public? And most of the general public didn't either have the time or interest or would not necessarily believe that there's a revolving door with USAID, for example, where the taxpayer money was going in. Hence the politicians had to control the tax for the money and it was going out.

36:07 And then it went back into the, the politicians to pay for their, their, their campaign. So they get rehired. I mean, this is not conspiracy. This is all validated information. And most people didn't want to either believe that or they didn't have, you know, they're busy taking Johnny to soccer and making sure they get up and go to their job every day and make sure there's food on the table, right? So I was for a time wondering why people weren't paying attention to this. And then I sort of relent and say, you know, they have the lives. They're just, you know, they're doing what they have to do and they're just not paying attention to this stuff either because they don't have the time, it's too disturbing, or they're just not interested.

36:50 Yeah. You know, it my my comment about Trump isn't I actually like a lot of things that he's doing. So I'm not endeavoring to make political statements. But you know, when he revealed the the waste that was happening and the revolving door of the money people go up, that makes sense, right? So I don't think we're ever going to stop that entirety. But we slowed it down a lot, which is, I think. Yeah, yeah. No, I completely agree. Right. And another thing that you sort of talked about like people and, you know, the perception of why they not carry, it's like there's all these wars going on, right? And you would see, you know, when the Russia Ukraine war started, everyone was up in arms for about a week. And then now we just move on, right, Because it's.

37:33 Every day we don't even hear about it right? Yeah, and I think, I think we as humans, we value our convenience and disruption to the convenience of actually much more of a bigger matter of issue than these actual larger problems, Right. I'm sure you know, when you wake up and you realize, oh, the corner store has no milk, right? And you have like no eggs for this week. And that puts you in more of a annoyance mood than you realize. OK, well, there's another war that's kicked off or, you know, your tire gets punctured and then you're like going to have to go out my way to sort that out. For most people, that is much more of an inconvenience and a problem to to think and look after them. These bigger geopolitical issues, because I think it's the the inconvenience issue with what you convenience in the world, right and change will come.

38:17 You know, when the, the and, and, and, you know, this was one thing that I realized, you know, when, when I was sort of going from corporate to, you know, sort of building my own company and then exiting and then, you know, doing my own thing was the, the, the you, you will change when the pain of being the same is greater than the pain of changing. Exactly when, when, when, when that mediocrity has bubbled over so much, you can no longer be the same. That's when you will decide to change, right. But too many of us in the middle class in these Western countries, like yourself, like myself, they're too comfortable where they are at the point where it's like a situation could be better, but it could also be worse.

38:59 And I'll just take it for the time being. Like, they'll grunt and learn. They'll, you know, put out their social media stickers and flags or whatever. But it's not bad enough that we need to get the pitchforks out. But because we've seen that happen, right? It's happening in Iran right now. Things bubble over and the pain of being the same was too much, right? So now the change is coming. So I think that's where, you know, the problem for a lot of the people is. Yeah, and it's the fear. You know, generally it'd be I'm not making this up. And there's some statistic and I don't know exactly what it is, but the preponderance of the population is not comfortable with change. I'd rather things stay the same. And I think one of the things that accidentally and then on purpose I taught my children is to that life is a series of adjustments. So if you can build the scale set of how to adjust without freaking out and being afraid of it, then that will serve you well.

39:59 And it has right. So, but most people don't want to change. It's just like when you're in a big corporation and some event happens where the. People who control the company decide to merge into another company. You have to hire change agents because the people who are toiling away day-to-day doing the stuff that needs to get done are freaking out. They're going, wait a minute. That's not that's not what you said we were going to do. And they just, it's a hard, hard thing for people to change general. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I completely agree. So what's on the, you know, helped us understand how things have evolved and the variety of asset class you're getting involved in, what's what's on the horizon for you?

40:41 I think moving forward, and I think it's the continuation of moving towards the hard world assets, which I sort of talked about earlier on, I think AI will continue to grow and it's going to be a much bigger market. I do think the market's slightly overheated. So I think there might be a slight correction before it goes back up. But I think we've realized now AI is here to stay. We're not going to replace it, but where that we are having issues is the power of compute energy and the infrastructure which is needed to sustain the continuous growth of AI and more and more people, right? I mean, like, for example, my grandmother who's, you know, you can't be any further away from tech as her, right? She recently mentioned Chaji PT and I was like, dude, how do you like, you know, you're like 80 years old.

41:25 What the hell Like and the fact that even those kind of people know about it, right, how far AI and charge GPD has gotten. But for those people to start using. And obviously right now, I think she's still trying to grasp the understanding of what the hell is your GPT is. And you know, she tries to get a command. I think the other day she was like, hey, you know, warm up my food or something. Yeah, right. To go explain to her that GPD can't do that. But soon it will right? Soon it will be connected to your Alexa. Your Alexa would be connected to your microwave and once you give it command, you know your food is in the like array will automatically turn on and it'll stop at the given time because it can assess its internal temperature and blah, blah. So for it to reach that level, the development that is required from an infrastructure, energy and compute perspective is massively lacking.

42:13 So that is an area we're actively trying to pursue and build on, you know, investing into deep tech companies as well as to investing into infrastructure which is required to build that out. Second thing and a big thing on our horizon as you sort of mentioned is like consolidation, right? We in this current time is going through the largest bulk transfer has ever taken place, right between 2018 to 2000, between 20182032, more than 17 trillion in the US alone is expected to change hands. I think globally the number is like 35 trillion or something like that, right? And 3540 trillion. So here is a massive opportunity where these boomers generation or just the one after they've worked 2530 years, in some cases even more 40 years into these businesses and their kids have no idea right on on what the hell dad did or granddad did.

43:06 And they're just inheriting money and they have no interest in taking over these cash flowing companies. And these are solid cash flowing companies. There's a huge, you know, amounts of company between sort of a level of three 4 million all the way up to 20 million in revenue. Anything bigger than nights getting sweep up completely, you know, anything would like a solid 2530% EBITDA margin. And you know, these traditional cash flowing companies, whether they're in hospitality, cement or construction, health care, whatever might be, there's a lot of these businesses and they have no idea what to do. A lot of them will just close, pull money out and we'll figure things out. But before they do that, if we're able to come in, get it on super cheap, right?

43:46 And the good thing is you can acquire a lot of companies in US on SBA because the, the, the, the is market is a capitalistic market allows you to do that. And these companies have filings for the last 20 years, right? So the company with a strong crack record. So I think again, it's a very strong opportunity to come in and techify those companies, keep the management on for the next 12 years as they hand hold you to understand the principles of how the business was run over the last two decades and take over that. I think that's going to be a massive opportunity for wealth creation. So that's the second one. And then the third one is obviously just hedging our bets on these right disruptive companies which are coming into AI, right? We saw Amazon was a big changer.

44:27 You know, in in India, there were a lot of companies like Blink it and Swiggy, which were on the delivery side as well. So just picking out few two winners into these pots and coming in early enough, right and being very hands on with these founders who know what they're doing. So it's like these three things we are we're sort of really trying to double down over the next five years and it would be our target. And alongside that, obviously building relationships up with the other families who want to invest in tech, who want to invest in this next generation, this immersive technology that is coming in and partnering up with them and sort of telling them, look, we're not in competition with each other. If we leverage your insights and you leverage ours and we work together as a collective, I much rather, you know, get 50% of a pie, which is 100 billion versus getting 100% of a pie, which is a billion, right?

45:15 So that's that's sort of the approach. Yeah, So super helpful. The second thing that you mentioned with the operating companies that are below a certain level where the institutional buyers will come in and buy them is interesting. We have a friend that I've known a long time, Brett Hickey, Star Mountain here in New York City. And he's a lower middle market a basically lending money to these companies and then helping them acquire other similar companies so they can aggregate to the size where they then can be acquired by big private equity, right? And so they have a growth trajectory for these cash flowing companies where the principal may be exiting in five or years or soon. And so they help them grow to the size where they can get exited.

46:03 And it's the same type of company that you're talking to where no one's paying attention to that lower middle market because it's not worth the big institutional private equity or investors to look at. Yeah. But if you consolidate it, it is, right. So we've done a couple of those, one in retail, one in construction. We're looking to do 1 now in sort of the sales marketing side and we'll do another one in tech. If you put it, you know, individually these companies agree, it might not be because of the 10510, fifteen, $20 million company, but you put 6-7 of these companies together, all of a sudden your portfolio is 100 million. You add some tech, you know, get some additional value, maybe 100 and 2000 and 30 million. All of a sudden the KKR or whoever, they'll come in and sweep that up, right? So, and so you know who the end buyer is, You know, they buy these kind of stuff, but they, for them, the individual deals are just too small, all right, for them to waste their money. So why don't you just get it ready for them and sell it to them?

46:56 That's right. And there's multiple players, you know, who understood the game have started doing this. So again, I think this opportunity will stay for the next three to four years. So anyone listening, if you want to jump onto it, you have to do it now because in 3-4 years they'll be gone. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, there's a life cycle for some of these opportunities. It's, you know, I always laughed when I'll pick on the hedge fund managers when you ask them a question, when does this strategy not work? And if they said it always works, that I would head for the door because it doesn't always work, right? Because things change and things evolve. What's your what's your take on Bitcoin and crypto and all that business, you know, with the Mac? Yeah, I think, you know, like I sort of mentioned blockchain itself as a technology.

47:43 The, you know, the two facets that I really like about it is the, the transparency and the the calculative side, which you know, keeps the transaction fast and cost effective. Bitcoin itself as a unit of, you know, money I don't think is going to be it. I don't think we're ever going to be seeing large usage of Bitcoin, you know, for transaction. Big reason being governments like control. We already sort of touched upon that. And no government, especially large government like, you know, the United States or China or Russia or India will ever say, yeah, we will make sure you have no control, right. So I just don't see that happening. And it's same with the rest of the coins, all coins or whatever you sort of want to call in, most of them are, you know, gearing behind a project or some sort of fad. So I don't see the applicability on that side. But when you look at the technology behind the coinage and what in the back end technology was made there to develop, I think there's some very strong principal principles and fundamentals where if and when rightly used, you can do well.

48:46 I think where there could be an opportunity. And again, this is a odd thing to do and this is obviously what I did when I was 17 was to trade it. If you can read charge momentum good with the news, you have a little bit of insider knowledge, which is not going to get you landed in jail. You can you can definitely scalp the market and make some good money. And I have seen people launching this this crypto hedge funds, right, which is sort of a quant, you know, hedge fund where they don't hold anything for more than a day period. So I think because the market is so volatile, again, I think in the next 5 years, we will know which way Bitcoin will, you know, either will be setting up because again, it's a cornerstone for this technology or I think it'll be in the bend.

49:28 So again, I think you have the next five years to, to really sort of make money trading that or using it's behind the scene technology for purposes of implementation outside of Bitcoin. I mean there's a lot of guys you know who just don't even know why how Bitcoin was created the Ledger. And you know, when you start reading the white paper, the technologies behind it, they just buy, you know, a dog coin because I'm influencer saying it and you know, they that they believe that that gives them perpetual rights. It's not the case. And I think more and more of those buyers are ruining the name of, of, of the concept and the technology itself. But then for someone who's looking at it from my perspective, it's, it just means opportunity, right?

50:08 I, I, I'm off the Buffettian view that, you know, you have to be very bearish when the market is super bullish, when there's blood on the street, be careful. And then, you know, vice versa, when everyone is being bearish, careful, whatever that's, that's your chance to scalp and make money. So that's the way I operate. Yeah, the value investing, it's interesting to see the treasury plays with Bitcoin that are taking place. It's I mean, if you look back in history, there are people who consistently made money were the picks and shovels all of finance, right? Finance just printed money because all they did is, is figure out how to be a good exchange. And of course, do it largely non-us because what we were talking about earlier, the transferring of money domestically is easy. But if you're in other parts in the world, it becomes complicated, right?

51:00 And expensive and time consuming. And so that's, I think a lot of reason why the crypto stuff caught on in other parts of the world. Yeah, we still have friction and lots of intermediaries and hands in the pot, but it can happen pretty reliably here. So look Emerald, thanks for sharing all this with us. I really appreciate it. Yeah, no, it's been my absolute pleasure. Thank you for the very engaging questions. I think we definitely ruffled some feathers by, you know, going a little bit right and then, you know, a little bit political, but that's fine. Much rather get some, you know, spice in the mix. But it was an absolute pleasure of being here and thank you for having me. You're very welcome.

51:42 And let's do it again in a couple months and we'll sort of update everybody if that's OK with you. Awesome, sounds good. Great. Thanks very much and thanks everybody for joining us today. We'll see you next time. Thank you.