Financial Expert: "Owning 5 Tech Stocks Isn't A Portfolio" | Ep. 447 with Christopher Zook Chairman & Chief Investment Officer of CAZ Investments

Founder's Story

Christopher Zook shares his transformative journey from setting a ten-year goal in 1991 to becoming a leader in private market investments.

Key takeaways

• Zook utilized a Tony Robbins 30-day cassette series to set a specific ten-year goal of founding CAZ Investments.
• Approximately 85% of companies with over $100 million in revenue are private, meaning public market investors miss most of the economy.

Main topics

• Goal setting and intentionality
• Private markets vs. public markets

Notable quotes

Diversification is the only free lunch.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a strategic guide for recognizing value in overl

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) I'm totally diversified. I own five of the Magnificent Seven stocks. Speaker 2 (0:04) 30 years on Wall Street. Lehman, Oppenheimer, Prudential. Now he runs Kaz Investments, the largest GP Stakes investor on the planet, owns pieces of over 30 pro sports teams, and wrote a number one New York Times bestseller with Tony Robbins. This is Christopher Zook. Speaker 3 (0:24) Every company, over $100 million. 85 % of them are private. Only 15 % of them are public. There's a reason why most multi-billionaires are involved in some fashion in sports. Speaker 2 (0:37) Let's talk about the price of success for you. The Speaker 3 (0:40) price for sure has been... Speaker 2 (0:50) You've done some extraordinary things in your life, and I can't wait to dive into your journey of how you got here. Because back in 1991, I read that you watched a Tony Robbins video series, and you wrote down a vision. What did you write down on that vision? Speaker 3 (1:10) Well, thank you for having me, Daniel. I'm glad to be here. It really is a surreal event because the fact that it was late at night, I came home. from a long, long day. He was trying to eat some dinner, watching some TV just to relax a little bit. And I look on TV and I see this very large human being with big hair and big teeth. And that was Tony Robbins. And I liked what I heard. And so I ordered his tape series. And so Lisa, my wife and I, we actually listened to this 30 day series on cassette tapes. For those that actually remember cassette tapes, they really did exist. Cassette tapes. And one of the days during that 30-day process is you do a goal-setting workshop. And during that goal-setting workshop, you set one, three, five, 10-year goals. And I set a 10-year goal to have a firm by the name of Kaz Investments by the time that 10 years was up. And that it would specifically, and to be very intentional about what you asked me in the question, it said to start a firm named Kaz Investments that is one of the leading alternative investment firms. on the planet. That is what I wrote down. That's what I sought to do. And then basically for the next nine years and nine months, I did everything I could to prepare myself to achieve that objective. Speaker 2 (2:26) So knowing that Tony is now your co-author, shareholder, partner, how does that feel? Speaker 3 (2:34) It's fantastic. It really is. I mean, you know, I've said this many, many places other than my faith, my wife. And there's nobody on the planet that's had more of an impact on my life than Tony Robbins. And so, you know, for him to be not only, you know, a partner, not only a co-author, but most importantly, a friend and somebody that I consider to be, you know, a valued part of my ecosystem and what makes me who I am. It's really just a it's a surreal and fantastic feeling to see that happen over, you know, literally now a 34, 35 year period of time. Speaker 2 (3:09) By the way, people always ask me if I'm related and it's not because of how I look. I'm much shorter. However, I have the same last name. So they always say, and I also wrote a book and they think the book I wrote is written by Tony Robbins because we have the same last name. So I always say that he's like my pretend uncle. Before you jumped and went on to your own and became an entrepreneur, you were at some of the big firms like Oppenheimer, Lehman, which fascinating story there, I imagine. What made you want to take the leap? Yeah, Speaker 3 (3:40) I was at Lehman a full decade and a half before the global financial crisis. So it was a very, very, very different situation when I was there from 91 to 94. When I chose to leave Oppenheimer to start the firm, it was really, it was all part of the plan. It was always by design. One of the advantages, and Tony teaches this all the time, of having a definitive deadline to the dream, if you will. That's a dream with a deadline, a goal. That's what it is. It's a dream with a deadline. By having the deadline, every step of the way was to prepare me for that. So it was really not like this, you know, oh, I wonder if now is the right time. It's like, well, I decided this was the right time. So therefore I'm going to go do this. Now, obviously, if it had not been the right time, if I'd not been ready, prepared mentally and, you know, from a business perspective, ready to go, then I could have delayed. But I'm a pretty goal-oriented person. And when I decide that I'm going to do something, I usually going to do it. And I'm going to do it in the timeline in which I say that I'm going to do it. So it was terrifying. I mean, make no mistake, it was petrifying. But as a person of faith, knowing that, you know, this is what I felt called to do. This is what I felt led to do. You know, ultimately, you know, we've approached this as a business. What's the worst case scenario? If you can live with that, the upside will take care of itself. That's the way I've invested for literally 36 years now. In that situation, what was the worst case scenario? If I started the firm, it didn't work. Well, then I'd have to go get another job. And I knew I could do that and it would suck and I would hate to do that. And I would do anything to make sure that didn't happen. But if that's the worst case and I can live with that, then the upside takes care of itself. And fortunately, I've been very blessed and we've built a really fun business. Speaker 2 (5:25) What if I was to say that I think manifesting is BS? What if I say I don't really believe in that? Speaker 3 (5:32) So I don't either. And this is the way I would look at it is manifesting something is in its core, just becoming really what we want to become and saying, okay, this is my intentionality and I'm going to work towards it. But just saying, I'm just going to do this and all of a sudden it's going to happen. I don't believe in that. I believe that somebody can create a plan. and could create very much intentional steps to achieve that plan, is it always going to work out exactly the way it's visioned? Of course not. This is life. Life doesn't work that way. But at the same time, if you don't know where you're going, any road's going to get you there. And as the old saying goes, if you don't have a target to hit, you're not going to hit the target. So I do believe incredibly, it's incredibly important. to say, this is what I'm going to achieve. This is how I believe that I'm going to achieve it. But then also be able to say, it's going to take a lot of work. It's going to take a lot of intentionality. It's going to take a lot of effort. It's going to be bloody and bruising along the way in order to achieve it. But that's big enough and a big enough why that you're going to do it. And to quote Tony again, the bigger the why, the more we try. It's not the what we want to achieve. It's why we want to achieve it and what it's going to be able to do for us, for others, for our family, for our nation, whatever it may be. And if we have that intentionality of this is why this is mission critical, then we'll have the courage to do what we don't feel like doing when it gets hard. And so I don't believe in manifesting something. I absolutely believe in that if we're guided towards something or if we believe strongly in something. then you know what? Go get it and figure out how to achieve it. But it's going to take a lot of work. Speaker 2 (7:18) The big why reminds me of like the big, hairy, audacious goal. I don't know if you've heard rephrased, right? Mine is to impact a billion people, which we started like six and a half years ago. What is your big why? Speaker 3 (7:31) So we actually use the BHAG as part of our business. It's the key driver for our business. Good to great, big, hairy, audacious goal. For those that are not familiar with the book, it's a fantastic book. We have always had a BHAG. For every year of the firm, we've had a BHAG. Sometimes it's a one year, sometimes it's a five year, sometimes it's 20 year. Right now, we're in the middle of what we consider to be the biggest BHAG ever, which is when we did the deal with Tony in May of 2021, we said we need to create a