For years, I've been connecting with interesting people and documenting insights that might help my clients and myself. What was once private is now (mostly) public.

People often ask: "How do you know all these people?" and "How do you connect these (re: random) ideas?" The answer is simple: consistent relationship cultivation and thoughtful note taking. My north star is trusting my instincts, my maps are the constellations in these reflections.

This approach to multidisciplinary networking has helped dozens of clients, colleagues, and friends strengthen their networks and unlock new opportunities. Feel free to steal these ideas directly - that's what they're for! I can't promise you'll learn FROM me, but I guarantee you can learn something WITH me. Let's go. Count it off: 1-2-3-4!

Introducing... Tony Greer!

Do you know Tony Greer? He's a Long Island kid who went from quoting precious metals on trading desks at Sumitomo Bank and UBS to becoming one of the most thoughtful voices on macro markets and financial strategy. He's built TG Macro into a real media/publishing business - complete with a weekly newsletter that thousands of serious market participants read, a Slack community of professional investors, and the Macro Dirt podcast co-hosted with Jared Dillian that's now run for 72 consecutive weeks.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Tony has spent over three decades in financial markets - from Goldman Sachs during the dot-com bubble to trading floors, to launching independent ventures, to building a sustainable media business around macro insights. He's the kind of person who understands both the mechanics of how markets actually work AND the psychology of how people navigate pressure, risk, and opportunity.

I wanted to connect with Tony because he embodies something I value deeply: the rare ability to be intensely competitive while remaining fundamentally collaborative - someone who understands that real success comes through relationships, not transactions.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Cultish Creative AND Epsilon Theory YouTube channels (and in The Intentional Investor Playlist). Listen and you'll hear the unfiltered story of how Tony built a three-decade career in markets - from surviving catastrophic trading losses at 27, to launching his own newsletter on election day 2016 with 60 subscribers, to building the thriving media business he runs today.

THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Tony Greer to share with you (and drop into my Personal Archive).

Read on and you'll find a quote with a lesson and a reflection you can Take to work with you, Bring home with you, and Leave behind with your legacy.

WORK: You Can't Be Both The Risk Taker And The Price Maker

Key Concept: One of Tony's most valuable lessons came from losing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a precious metals trade at 27 years old - a moment that could have ended his career but instead taught him something profound about how to operate in competitive environments. The insight isn't about avoiding loss, but understanding what role you're actually playing in any given moment, and owning that reality. When you're providing liquidity to others, you need flexibility and small positions. When you're taking directional risk, you can't also be the person everyone relies on for pricing. Trying to be both simultaneously is how you blow up. This translates perfectly to any leadership role, any business partnership, any complex relationship - you have to be clear about which role you're filling, because the mechanics of each are fundamentally different.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Roles and responsibilities are such a strange life issue. Mostly because it moves, with time and age and experience, but also because it explains and frames how we see the past and imagine the future. Kids grow up to become parents. Parents age into grandparenting. And there are a million examples from school and work, too.

Tony’s experience happened on a trading desk. The story about how you had to know what role you were in to not betray what others were holding you responsible for, maps over other parts of his life. It maps over other parts of all of our lives.

The idea is we grow and change, but in each present space, when we’re occupying it, we want to have some sense of the role we are performing and the responsibilities that come along with it. We will screw up. Others will let us know, or we’ll find ourselves in trouble, but that’s just part of the process. The key is to realize how valuable those lessons are, to carry them forward into our next chapters.

Work question for you: In your own work right now, are you trying to be both the risk-taker and the price-maker? Where are you asking yourself to play two incompatible roles simultaneously?

LIFE: Real Allies Show Up When Half The World Doesn't Want To Know Your Name

Key Concept: Tony had survived a catastrophic gold trade in Zurich in his late 20s - the kind of loss that could have ended his career. But he made it through. Then he came home, joined Goldman Sachs in March, and literally weeks later on Easter weekend, got caught massively short on silver. Two devastating losses at two different institutions, separated by just months. What got him through both - what actually saved him - wasn't his own resilience (though he had that), it was the people who immediately surrounded him. His partner on the desk. The senior traders who came over to help manage the position. The managers who said "here's what we're gonna do." The lesson here is brutally honest: you find out who your actual network is when you're underwater. Not when things are good and you're fun to be around, but when you're in real trouble and you have nothing to offer. This is when you learn who your real allies are. And if you don't have people like that, you need to spend less time networking and more time building actual relationships with people you'd help in a crisis - because that's how you become someone people help in a crisis too.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: It’s an extension of learning your role and responsibilities by banging into the boundaries. Living life isn’t a pretty process. It’s probably an advantage people with trading backgrounds gain. By constantly pricing boundaries, they appreciate how quickly boundaries change, and how to assess who the other players making the market around those boundaries are. Outside of fiction authors, there aren’t a lot of trades (re: jobs/professions) where we see this truth so bluntly.

Inevitably, we screw up. We make a choice, and whether it’s a good choice or a bad choice, we find ourselves in a predicament where somebody is mad at us. Oh, do I relate to this. Oh, have I pissed people off and felt the crushing weight of guilt, shame, and - candidly, confusion about what to do next.

There’s one common factor that always shows up, though. Tony got it in his stories. You find out who is playing long games. You find out who wants to keep playing with you and reaches out a hand to help pull you out. Those become your people in those moments.

So yes, go find the boundaries and recognize how much they change. But when you find a bond that extends over a boundary, hold onto that too. Your best relationships are the result of working through challenges together.

Life Question For You: When you think about a genuine crisis in your own life, who would you actually call? And more importantly - if something went sideways tomorrow, would those same people call you?

LEGACY: Build Something That Lets You Do What You Get To Do, Not What You Have To Do

Key Concept: Tony spent years building TG Macro in the gaps - writing newsletters while working other jobs, fighting the loneliness of entrepreneurship in the early years, learning the painful difference between being a talented market person and a successful business person. He went through the "pickup basketball phase" - bouncing between three different shops in three years, each time getting his deal cut as soon as he exceeded expectations. The turning point came when he stopped trying to build a lifestyle business around what he loved and started building an actual business around what people needed. When he brought in a general manager. When he created multiple tiers of products. When he built a (small, but effective) team. That's when he moved from "I have to do this because I need the money" to "I get to do this and it's sustainable." The legacy lesson here: the businesses and relationships that last are the ones where you create enough structure and team that you're not dependent on your own continuous effort. You build systems. You build people. You build leverage. Then you get freedom.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: Striking out on our own with a creative pursuit is a dream I hear people pining for all of the time. There aren’t a lot of do-ers. There are people everybody recognizes on the other side, and you have people who wish they could be them, but there are way more people wishing they could be something than there are doing something about it.

You have to hear Tony’s whole story to appreciate the build to where TG Macro is now. And it’s far from finished, I am sure, but this moment really matters. When you start to connect the dots from his growing up friends, to his college group chat, to his professional lessons and peers, to how he’s not just navigating markets but the marketing of himself, you start to see how much other people matter.

I listen to the way he talks about his subscribers and the one-on-one time a certain tier of them get from him and it all makes sense. Everybody who wants to be doing this should focus on that part. The do-ers, who have a creative pursuit they do full-time, without having to work for any one larger entity, all have figured out how to price the scarcity of their own time and attention, and that can only come from testing the market for your attention in a million and one ways, with a growing sense of the roles and responsibilities around how it was priced and why in each circumstance.

Only after you’ve figured out the boundaries around your time, and then the bonds you’ve made to lift you higher with what you offer, are you ready to be in the spot Tony’s in today. Remarkable. I’m rooting for him.

Legacy question for you: In whatever you're building right now - whether that's a career, a business, a body of work, a network - are you building something that requires you to show up, or are you building something that sustains itself through others?

BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…

• Follow Tony Greer on Twitter/X (@TGMacro) or DM him there, and find him on LinkedIn too

• Visit TG Macro to see samples of his newsletter and learn about his products

• Subscribe to TG Macro on Substack

• Check out the full Intentional Investor conversation on Epsilon Theory YouTube

• Take a moment to reflect on all these ideas!

You have a Personal Network and a Personal Archive just waiting for you to build them up stronger. Look at your work, look at your life, and look at your legacy - and then, start small in each category. Today it's one person and one reflection. Tomorrow? Who knows what connections you'll create.

Don't forget to click reply/click here and tell me who you're adding to your network and why! Plus, if you already have your own Personal Archive too, let me know, I'm creating a database.

Want more? Find my Personal Archive on CultishCreative.com, watch me build a better Personal Network on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel, and listen to Just Press Record on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and follow me on social media (LinkedIn and X) - now distributed by Epsilon Theory.

You can also check out my work as Managing Director at Sunpointe, as a host on top investment YouTube channel Excess Returns, and as Senior Editor at Perscient.