#11 - Clawing Back From $250K Debt at 20

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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What happens from there?

**Aleks Svetski** (0:38)
August the 16th, 2007 happened there.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:41)
The stock market is now down 21%. 43%.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:46)
What in the world is happening on Wall Street? In the blink of an eye, I have never seen a 600-point loss.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:52)
Who knows where this is going to end up? Completely wiped out. The Dow traders are standing there watching in amazement, and I don't blame them.

**Aleks Svetski** (0:58)
There's Apple's under pressure, Yahoo down 8.5%, Cisco 6.5%.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:02)
Every day they're pounding it.

**SPEAKER_4** (1:04)
What started in America last year has now spread to every part of the world.

**Aleks Svetski** (1:08)
And I woke up that morning and everything was in the red, and my account was down about 70, 80%, something ridiculous.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:13)
It was the worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987 And that means life, as most Americans know it, is about to change, in some cases dramatically.

**Aleks Svetski** (1:23)
Within four, five months, I was about a quarter of a million in the hole.

**SPEAKER_1** (1:31)
All right, I just sat down with Aleks Svetski, or Angry Aleks, as he's known in the Bitcoin world. And we talked about a whole bunch of things, ranging from Bitcoin itself, his story, trading stocks, and ending up with a quarter million dollars in debt, as well as how he got out of the hole, built himself back up, made his first million, and what he's doing in the crypto space today. It's a pretty fun conversation. I think you'll enjoy it.
Thanks for coming, man, I appreciate it. You came a long way. I like to think you just came for this podcast.

**Aleks Svetski** (2:08)
I did.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:09)
I know there was also that other little conference, the Bitcoin 2019 conference going on.

**Aleks Svetski** (2:13)
No, no, no, no, no, I just came for this, I swear.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:16)
So this is going to be an interesting one, because so far, the people I've talked to are people that I know super well, like we hang out on the weekends, we blah, blah, blah. I met you five minutes ago, and you came highly recommended.
So I said, okay, let's do it, let's chat.
And the thing that I find interesting is I know that you're pretty heavy in the Bitcoin space.
And so we'll talk about that, but I just want to know a little bit about you first. What's the TLDR on your life story? So give me the one minute version first, and then I know we'll go, obviously, into it. Unless the one minute's good, and then we'll just end the podcast. That can also work.

**Aleks Svetski** (2:52)
Done, shortest podcast in history. The TLDR, went to uni, really academically strong, dropped out, thought I was a genius on the stock market. I got taught a few lessons in the GFC, dug my way out of that door knocking, built a successful business when I was 22, 23, made my first mill, then got taught another lesson from government mismanagement of money.
Lost a lot of money there. Sort of went on this random sabbatical. I said, they're never gonna do business again. I became a hippie.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:17)
Are we talking silent retreats, yoga?

**Aleks Svetski** (3:19)
Yeah, that kind of stuff, exactly. I went and did yoga, I went and did all that stuff. Before it was kind of like, cool, this is, you know.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:27)
Before Jack Dorsey did it?

**Aleks Svetski** (3:29)
Yeah, exactly, so about seven, eight years ago. And then while I was in the States, I spent a bit of time in Venice Beach and up in San Francisco. I ended up going to Singularity University for a couple of days for a little short course thing there. Thought tech's the way to go, went back, muddled around in tech, built a few little software things.