The Art of Trading and Galaxy’s Next Chapter | Mike Novogratz

But the great, the great fortunes in life, and you can't pick one, pick any of the great fortunes. They come from riding a trend, and it's often the trend you're stuck in because it's yours. Yep. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. There's not one person in that top 10 list that's there because they weren't riding a trend.

This episode is brought to you by Blockdaemon. You'll hear more about them later in today's episode. Nothing said on Empire is a recommendation to buy or sell any investments or products. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and the views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice, or necessarily the views of Blockworks. Our hosts, guests, and the Blockworks team may hold positions in the companies, funds, or projects discussed. Welcome back to Empire. We got the man, the myth, the legend, Mike Novogratz from Galaxy joining us. Mike, what's happening?

Good to be here.

Yeah, good to have you here. I like the hoodie.

You know, Bitcoin Orange.

Bitcoin Orange, baby.

Business Untitled. It's my podcast that I don't do nearly enough, but I do it with two friends. Nice. We got great merch.

Of all the things you could shill on the podcast, you're shilling your own podcast. You got a stock to pump and you got companies to build.

You know, my, my two, my two partners yell at me all the time because we just don't get around to doing it a lot. And we did it for a—

That's the problem with podcasts.

We did it for a social, a social cause, right? It was to give, like, in lots of ways, advice to underserved communities. And it, it was fun. It's great.

Yeah.

But man, oh man, I give you guys a lot of credit. It's hard to not—

you gotta show up every day. Yeah, it's tough. Uh, quick disclaimer before we jump in: Galaxy, uh, is one of my biggest positions and holdings, so I'm very biased when talking to Mike. And, uh, that is—

I did want—

we had an interesting conversation with, uh, Duncan. I don't know if you see this guy tweeting at you all the time.

I love Duncan.

Yeah, yeah, Duncan and Rittenhouse. So we didn't have—

he's my new favorite.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, well, Nicholas Flamel is like dear and dear to my heart because he's been there from the beginning.

It must be fun as a running a public company, you got these guys who are like bold up on your stock and it's kind of cult following now?

Well, what's so interesting about crypto is that the value proposition of crypto, and I've only come to this in the last year, is community. You think about it's not the technology that makes Bitcoin worth anything. We could fork the technology and call it Novocoin, and it wouldn't be worth that much. My kids might buy it, but it's the brand that comes around Bitcoin and it's the community. So we're trusting ourselves in that community. And so this idea that community could become part of the value prop has now migrated into equity markets, right? Palantir, it's about community. Great company, lots of contracts, trades at an insane multiple. The value, it's memetic.

It's a good stock. Tesla with Elon.

Tesla with Elon. MicroStrategy trading at a premium forever because MicroStrategy became its own coin.

Yeah, totally.

It's its own community. And so I guess every CEO sees that and says, well, I got to build some form of— I always want to build a wonderful business that stands on its own through discounting cash flow loss.

I don't think that's enough anymore though. To thrive in the public markets.

You got to have community.

Yeah. How, I mean, how do you think about that as a public company CEO? Because I see, um, what's the Palantir guy? Uh, Alex Karp. I see Alex, he goes on CNBC, he's got the crazy hair, he puts a Zen in, he's spinning his computer like this with the t-shirt.

Well, and I don't know this factually, I was told by a friend of his that they really do a, a, a real job of cultivating their 500 biggest Twitter followers. They bring them to a conference, they treat them like they're equity analysts, because quite frankly, these guys do as much work on your company as— yeah, the equity analysts at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

And I've heard Robinhood is now starting to do the same thing.

And you understand why there's a real power in it. Like, the big $64,000 question is, how lasting will this be? Is it a permanent addition to valuation metrics, right? Or is this a phase that we've gone through? Like, it started in lots of ways with COVID Uh, people had a lot of time on their hands. The idea of the democratization of finance— you gotta— everyone should be an investor. Robinhood giving you easy access, crypto giving easy access, and the rise of gambling culture in America. Right? Same-day options, right? It's shocking how much same-day option trading happens. Totally. Like, that didn't exist when I was your age. Now we have sports betting. I sit with my kids, my son and his friends. They've got 19 bets per game, it seems.

You can't watch a sports game without some prop bets.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right? And so this whole culture of gambling, which falls into community because community is part of— that didn't exist. For— I'm not going to tell you that I'm a baby boomer because I goddamn it, I'm a baby boomer by about 34 days. I like to think I'm Gen X. Yeah, yeah.

You almost cut it off.

Yeah. 34 fucking days. Excuse the language. It didn't exist back then. Right. And so this is all new. We'll see how long it lasts.

Yeah. I mean, there's also one other element. So we just had Christian on the podcast. We're talking about the decline of religion in just in the States and how maybe religion is coming back, but maybe people are just finding religion in other areas. How about this? It's the decline line of trust.

You can do a graph— the Pew Institute, there's lots of people that will measure trust, trust institutions, trust in religion, trust in each other, trust between parties— and it's broadly a straight line from upper right to lower left, uh, no, upper left to lower right, um, straight line down. And as trust has fallen, we look for we look for community elsewhere, we look for trust elsewhere. So the idea of crypto as a trust machine, that's what first had the appeal. I used to make that speech in 2014, 2015, right? This is where we're going to, instead of in God we trust or in our community we trust, in cryptography and the Bitcoin community we trust. But now you're seeing it everywhere. These are little mini religions. The XRP Army is a real thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

Or the Link Marines.

Oh yeah.

I talked to the guy who founded Chainlink and he was like, I don't even know who the Link Marines are, but I love 'em.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's a cult following.

Yeah.

Maybe going back to this idea of like, is this sustainable? So we just had Dan Morehead on the show.

Love Dan.

Yeah. Who I, who I figure, you know, pretty well. And his—

Know Dan for 40 years.

I actually, to kick off the episode, I pulled up a picture of him at Princeton on the rowing team. It was a good, good old pic of Dan. So were you, you guys were same—

Same class.

Yeah. '86, '87.

Me, Dan, good class. Joe Lubin and one other guy who's named Gavin Andresen. Gavin Andresen.

Yeah. Yeah.

We, we like to call that the big four.

Yeah. Good, good class.

Yeah.

Good class. We like that. So Dan, so Dan was basically making the argument that like, the Fed, so the Fed just started cutting obviously, and he's like that, this is just a bad idea. This is just a bad idea to start cutting this early.

I'm curious to just get, maybe we can start talking markets and macro and then Obviously getting the Galaxy and crypto, you know, listen, rarely does the Fed cut when inflation's still perky, when gold is at an all-time high, when silver is at an all-time high, when crypto is at an all-time high, and the equity market's at an all-time high. And so it's a dangerous cut. And when the president's putting a huge amount of pressure on you to cut, it's a dangerous cut. We are having job growth issues, right? The claims numbers are higher. The unemployment rate is still tight, but it's moving up. You know, nonfarm payrolls was weaker. And so I would say if I was on the Fed, this would have been a, a one and wait cut, right? Just to deal with— because you got to make sure inflation doesn't accelerate.

Yeah.

What makes all economic projections brutally hard right now is this AI effect. And it's a really interesting dynamic. If you're running a public company, shareholders want to see that you're using AI to bring efficiency. So I talked to one guy who said, we're cutting 5% just 'cause we gotta answer to the, you know, right.

The pressure of people saying to the pressure, like we're, we're doing it.

Like, I'm not sure the AI's helped. And I talk to other people like, oh my God, we're laying off people because AI. I do know one thing, college kids are having a much harder time getting jobs in, in, in fields that they used to.

Entry-level jobs.

Entry-level jobs.

Yeah.

The, I was told this by a guy who would know that the, this year's computer science major graduates from Berkeley. Only half of them got jobs. Every year in the past 10, 95% of them got jobs. So it was a dramatic shift in, uh-oh, we don't need young coders. Um, and so we're gonna have a really interesting time in the next 3 years of trying to predict where macro data goes. Yeah, like, this could be the greatest efficiency boost in all time, and inflation could collapse. Or, or not. Yeah.

Yeah. It's interesting. Okay. So that's one variable is like AI, right? So is it the great job destroyer or is the biggest productivity gain ever? The other one is, um, like central bank independence is an interesting topic. Um, maybe I'd love to have you tease that out a little bit.

Yeah. So the last autocratic leader of a big economy who said I'm smarter than the central banker was Erdoğan from Turkey. Yeah, that went well, right? Turkey was the darling of emerging markets. Erdoğan takes over and oh, they went 32%, 86% back-to-back inflation years. So to put it in perspective, one year of 86% inflation has eroded a huge amount of your purchasing power right now. Luckily it peaked there and it's come back down to like the high teens, I think. But it's still— look at Look at the value of a Turkish lira in gold over the last 10 years and you're like, why in God's name did I own any lira? I have this tattoo on my arm done by a Turkish, is a beautiful peacock done by a Turkish tattoo artist, one of the best guys in Turkey. And he came to New York, he's like, I lost all my savings.

No way.

In this devaluation. And so he moved to New York.

It's a nice tattoo.

Nice tattoo.

Yeah.

It's the last tattoo I'm talking about. And so risking, listen, we're supposed to be running 3 to 4% inflation because we've got $35 trillion of debt that we got to quietly inflate away. But when you go to 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, you lose civil society often, right? People can't eat. It literally becomes societal, really, really poisonous. And that's why the Fed has independence. That's why if you were in Germany, the Bundesbank had this because they had lived it. They had lived Weimar Germany, which— look how that turned out. And so I think we're in really dangerous territory.

Do you have a sense of how this kind of ends? I mean, we're spending more on interest payments than the, than the military.

It doesn't— it does. Let's— uh, Ray Dalio, who's brilliant at this stuff, uh, shout out Ray, uh, he wrote a book about, and about what would call the beautiful deleveraging, he called it. Like, there was a chance that you can run growth a little hot and run inflation just enough hot that you start eroding it away a little bit, and growth takes you out, and, and you can get at it. I think we— he now thinks we're through that, we're past that, um, that we, we've lost our chance for the beautiful deleveraging. Um, we'll see. I mean, Bessant's move is to try to jolt growth so much. But they originally said, okay, we're gonna— we're gonna cut spending, and they increased spending.

Yeah, this— the cutting spending didn't work. No.

And, and, and, you know, Donald Trump never in his life wanted to balance a budget, right? He, he was the king of debt, other people's money, OPM.

Yeah, yeah.

Uh, and so we don't have a fiscally conservative government. We don't have any efficiency gains coming from Doge or some version of Doge. Um, we have an acceleration of rich people getting richer and the cost of living making it brutal for, uh, working class and even middle class people to survive. I mean, think about New York City. The minimum wage in New York is $15. Uh, but I, I'm talking to two friends. One guy's sister worked at Delta. She's been there 15 years. She's goes to LaGuardia every day, works 40-hour weeks, uh, makes about $17 an hour as she works ticket service. Um, that's $35,000 a year. Another, uh, friend who had a client who worked at Yankee Stadium, 25 years Yankee Stadium, hasn't missed a week of work, 40 hours a week, same kind of job, same kind of salary, $35,000 a year. You can't find a one-bedroom in New York even if you go to the, the, the, the bowels of—

Yeah, it's not livable.

Queens.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's $2,500.

Yeah.

That's $30,000 right there. Really? $3,000 is the price. So you're $30,000 just on rent. That's your whole salary. So what about food? $1,500 a month on food. $1,000 a month is the cheapest you could probably do food. Yeah. You know, the real minimum wage in New York, without needing a handout from your dad, uh, from a trust fund or from the government, is closer to $45 an hour. And that's still not a great life. That's just— that's just making it. That's $75,000 a year. And so that's below the median income of New Yorkers. Uh, and so you could have to see why Mondame is going to win this election. It's because half the city are saying, ah, this just doesn't work anymore. And that really crept up on us in a very quick way. Housing prices have over have more than doubled since 2010. That's crazy.

Yeah.

Salaries haven't doubled since 2010. Yeah.

Where do you as an investor and a trader, almost like maybe tying it back. So we're recording this in September of '25. Like how do you think about just the market today? I mean, you've got Nvidia putting $100 billion into OpenAI, market feels frothy, gold ripping.

Yeah.

Crypto ripping.

All the warning signs. I saw Dave Tepper on TV. Dave Tepper is one of the world's best investors, and whenever he talks, you should listen. Him, Stan Druckenmiller, they're very thoughtful. And what's cool about Tepper is he talks like the guy that you'd meet at the gas station. And he is like, ah, this is brutal. Like all the momentum indicators, you got the Fed cutting, markets are going to go higher. We've got this great momentum. But it's a pain in the ass because everything's expensive. So you're long expensive stuff thinking it's going to go higher. Like that encapsulates the market.

Yeah. That's it. That's exactly right. Yeah.

Yeah. What gets me nervous is the interconnectivity between, does it feels like vendor financing, right? NVIDIA to OpenAI to Oracle, CoreWeave, even who's our partner, like it's all tied together. And so I do believe in AI. I do. I see it. We see it. We have a big data center business. When you see and actually take time to think about how much money is going to be spent, we're going to spend $25 billion or more just on what we have contracted. $7 billion from Galaxy, probably $20 billion from the people that are taking the inside of the box, right? CoreWeave tenants. To build one supercomputer, one brain to help in this AI revolution. Now multiply that by 100. It's just, it's CapEx like we've never seen. People don't understand what $30 billion of CapEx is. Like, if we do our whole campus, it'll be over $100 billion of CapEx. The only project in American history that's over $100 billion of CapEx is the interstate highway system.

Yeah, it's nuts.

Like, These, these are unprecedented amounts of investment.

Yeah.

And that means some group of very informed and very smart people think there's going to be an unprecedented shift in how the world operates.

Yeah. Okay. So let's say you agree with that. Long and strong AI. You guys have a great data center business, well positioned for it. But as someone who maybe is listening to this they hold a bunch of Bitcoin, they hold some gold, they hold Robinhood stock, Coinbase stock, Galaxy stock. Are you— is it like, look, just close your eyes and long and strong?

I think you've got to— listen, the ex-CEO of Citibank once had this sentence that got him just panned. And he's like, you got to keep dancing until the music stops. You got to know when the music stops or stopping. I I think you've got to have a stop loss on your positions. You've got to understand that things have moved a long way, that things can correct. It's probably, you probably should have less at risk today than you did 4 months ago. Yep. Right? Now the problem is what's safe? Is gold safe?

Yeah. That's the question. It's like, well then what are you putting your money into?

Right.

You're just sitting in cash? Like, are you just sitting in gold?

Treasury? You know, some combination of, I mean, I have— I mean, I'm still long. I'm long a lot of Bitcoin. I'm long Ethereum. I'm long Solana. I'm long Hyperliquid. I'm long a lot of crypto. Outside of that, I'm long gold. I'm long a lot of Chinese equities. Like, Chinese equities are a really interesting play.

Speaking of David Tepper, see, David Tepper, who's had an awesome year, he got in early, great Alibaba calls.

Uh, they're still very, very cheap relative to US equity tech names. Uh, China's government is inflating. They're taking deflation really seriously. And so that's a decent diversifier. But it's hard. It is hard. I don't think we're at the point where the dollar goes parabolically down, but it could. You just never know. There's a thing called the Minsky moment in economics where confidence just evaporates. There's a, there's like a line in the sand. You don't know when you cross it. You ever see the movie The Right Stuff?

No, but I should.

You're too young. One of the best fighter pilot astronaut movies of all time, right? Tom Wolfe writer. Uh, Chuck Yeager is the greatest fighter pilot in the history of the US military. He was the guy that broke the sound barrier. And this is about breaking the sound barrier and the Mercury 7 astronauts happening. And, you know, Yeager was too old to be an astronaut and And anyways, he's in this test plane and he's talking about where that sound barrier is. He's like, there's a demon out there. He's smoking a cigarette, chewing. He's, you don't know where he is, damn it. I'm going to find him. Like, that's the Minsky moment. There is a point out there where confidence breaks, where debt is too big, where everything unravels. We don't know where it is, but I know one thing, we're a hell of a lot closer to that Chuck Yeager moment. Than we were. Yeah. And it feels that way. And that's scary.

Yeah, you can feel it.

And so the beginning of the year, I was like, all right, we got Scott Bessant, 10 out of 10 guy.

Yeah, yeah.

I like him. He's got my background. I know him. He's sharp. And we're going to do Doge, which Elon probably was the wrong guy at the wrong time for Doge. Would have rather had Bezos, a little more methodical. But we need to cut government spending. We need to— and I thought we have a shot. And Elon went the way of the dodo bird in terms of Doge and complete failure. And Bessant hasn't delivered. Now it's hard to deliver. You got to get Congress on your side. He hasn't, you know, you got to get the president on your side.

What would delivering have looked like?

Delivering would have been we're going to cut spending. Yeah. We're going to have a very tight plan on where we're going to tighten the belt, right? Uh, even if you're not going to raise taxes, like what you really do when you have a strong economy is you should be raising taxes, taxes and cutting spending, right? Help get debt-to-GDP heading back down. But if you believed in not cutting, raising taxes, you're going to cut taxes, you better be cutting spending. Yeah, we're cutting taxes and raising spending. Yeah, yeah. Right?

Yeah.

And the single biggest problem that's separating the left and the right, the young and the old, trust and untrust, is the inequality gap. And the inequality gap's just going like this again.

Yeah.

Yeah. Every rich guy I know is like, woo, pretty good year.

Yeah.

High five.

Yeah.

Right? Rich guys own assets. Poor guys don't own assets.

Yeah.

And so not good.

Yeah. It's, one, Christian and I were just talking about this idea that like, it feels like everyone has this almost panicked feeling, angst of like, right now, like we need to make money right now. We need to go public right now. We need to get these data center deals done right now. Do you feel that?

You know, I used to feel that more. We, to be fair, we inked our data center, our big data center deal, right? 800 megawatts. We've got contracted rent coming in from CoreWeave, $20 billion plus over 15 years. So I'm more focused on us building this data center on time and on budget and delivering it, and then praying every night that CoreWeave stay solvent. Our Father who art in heaven, please keep CoreWeave solvent. I think CoreWeave's doing an awesome job and I think they're going to be completely fine. And we took that bet. Like we could have done that deal with an Oracle and we would've made a whole lot less money on it. We took the bet with a company that we saw growing at the same kind of time.

Yeah. Higher risk, higher return.

Higher risk, high return. And so I'm thrilled about it. At that, and I love those guys. Um, so I'm less insecure about everything else because that's just such a tremendous amount of money that comes into Galaxy, and I want to share Galaxy, um, that it gives me some comfort to ride the, ride the bucking bronco on the other side.

Is Galaxy a large percentage of your net worth?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's 70, 80% of my net worth. Yeah, okay. and growing, or, you know, as Galaxy grows, the rest of my network doesn't grow as fast as Galaxy. So the beginning of the year was a third and now it's 80%, 90%, right? Yeah.

You're doing something right.

And so I also feel like in the past we had just a crypto company because crypto was so volatile. Bitcoin had higher volatility than it does today. So it had 70 vol back then, wherever my net worth was, felt a lot more transient. It might be there and it might not be there. Mm-hmm. Because it was so much in Galaxy stock and you saw our stock went from 40 all the way to 3 all the way back. Now because we have this solid data center business, which we should almost think of as like cash flows, like a bond.

Yeah.

Yeah. And our book has grown, you know, not just our crypto book, but our non-dollar, you know, our dollar-based book has grown enough that there's a much in my mind, a much higher floor to the share price than there ever was before.

Yeah.

And so even if we go into the end of the cycle in a bear market, I kind of know where value is at Galaxy, and that leaves me still—

you've got this base of fundamental value, basically.

Yeah.

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So listen, traditionally, yes. What's different this time? And it might be. Yeah, that's why we're all nervous.

Yeah.

What could be different this time? By far the biggest difference is the fact that the world's largest investor, the world's largest consumer, the world's largest player in any financial markets, the United States, And we've got a genius act passed and we are going to, with all likelihood by the end of this year, pass a market structure bill, which is going to not just enable, it's going to force all the big giant companies into this market. So, you know, my iPhone, my Apple Pad, there's no stablecoins on it now. It would be shocking if in within the next few years Apple doesn't have stablecoins. Yeah. Right. Or the Samsung phone or all your different apps. And so we're going to see, I think, a much bigger shift than we've seen in the building of new architecture, which is blockchain-based for the plumbing of the financial markets. I talked about that years ago. Blockchains weren't fast enough and we didn't have a regulatory framework. We're now having a regulatory framework and an SEC chair who said, let's build everything on chain. I was like, excuse me, did he say that? And he said it a few times now. So Paul Atkins said, let's go on chain. I mean, today there was an article about a sandbox. Like, they're going to allow DeFi to flourish. And that could change the cycle. It just could. It's such a big story. Look what Hyperliquid did this year out of nowhere to a monstrous, right?

Yeah.

$50 billion company.

Yeah.

Yeah. That deserves to be there because they're doing $1.5 billion, $2 billion of EBITDA a year. Yeah. That's nuts. And never heard of them a year ago.

Yeah.

Right. And so you could see a bigger shift than we're seeing. I think it's going to take a few years, right? You see, like Mike Cagney's company who— Yeah, yeah. You know, tokenized HELOCs, you know, is it— are they trading on the right blockchain?

Are you guys do that? I was thinking of your business when I saw that.

We are. We are spending a lot of time on credit. Like, I— if we're not in tokenized credit in 12 months, someone should kick me in the jaw. Like, we are credit experts. Chris Ferraro, my president, came from a credit background. We have a great credit business now. And so yeah, we are going to be in that part of the space. And it's one of our big initiatives and we're focused on it. Because think about what's going to happen. Stablecoins are going to eat away at bank deposits. So if you're a banking regular, like, oh, we tried to make it, they can only be non-interest bearing. Of course you're going to hack that. You're going to have a money market fund and a stablecoin right next to each other and they're going to, you know, flip back and forth in the same wallet. All right. So if banks aren't going to give credit out because they're going to have less deposits, who's going to give credit? You can have tokenized credit. Yeah. You can tokenize money market funds. We're doing one. BlackRock has one, a big one. We're doing one with State Street. You can tokenize private credit. Apollo's doing their funds. You're going to see Fortress and everyone else tokenize their funds. You could, you could, every part of the stack. You can tokenize. And so all of a sudden, you're going to have your deposits in stablecoin, and your credit in the banking system very well could shift on-chain. Um, that's why the bank— that's why banks fought this for years.

Yeah, yeah. What happens to the banks?

The smart ones are, you know, like, you can't be a custodian if you're State Street or Bank of New York or, and say, we're not going to do crypto custodian. 'Cause all of a sudden when you tokenize equities, you're, so they're all going to get in the space.

They're all doing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they're all working like crazy right now to get in the space. You're going to see some acquisitions. It's why in some ways the easier business to run is the single vertical business. Like if you're a good custodian, there's probably a bid from you from some TradFi bank just to quickly—

Totally.

You know, get going.

Yeah.

But you're going to see every financial institution need wallets. Yeah. That, I don't know how fast this transition happens. If it's a year, if it's 10 years, it's somewhere in between.

Yeah. But it's happening.

But it's happening. Yeah. And it's happening. Why I know it's happening is because we were getting this legislation done.

Yeah. Do you think of yourself more as an operator or a trader?

I am a storyteller. Yeah. I'm a good leader, I think. I can inspire people. I think I have really good instincts on markets. I think those are my 3 superpowers. And I think how we've built Galaxy is Chris Ferraro, my partner, is a methodical builder, also a great investor. And you try to put people around you that like, I, you know, what's an entrepreneur? There, there's a lot that goes into being an entrepreneur. When you do Wall Street entrepreneurism, it's not the same thing because like when you start a hedge fund, you make money in the first year, first month. We've always funded Galaxy by being on the right side of the market. You know, as opposed to, I'm going to lose money for 11 straight years and then start making money. So it's a little different. I, you know, I have more of the investor mindset. I have worked hard to try to figure out how to develop the builder mindset and sub and fill in my blind spots with people who are really good at it. Yeah. But that's the real trick is knowing what you're good at and knowing what other people are good at. Yeah.

Maybe that's a good segue into the Ahud Barak story.

So I was at investor, trader at Goldman Sachs, speculator for at least 6 years, never lost money. And at Goldman, they were kind of smart enough. You had some pure prop guys, but a lot of people like me had a giant prop book, but also ran a business. Run a business, you're kind of having some income coming in that gives you a little more courage in the prop business, right? We go to the casino and I give you $100 every hour, You're more likely to not be as nervous. So I start a hedge fund. I'm 18 months into it. It's doing fine, but I'm just so nervous all the time. I'm miserable.

This is Fortress?

Fortress.

Yeah.

And I remember talking to my wife. I said, I might just shut this damn thing down and do something else in life. I just don't want to live like I'm just stressed all the time. And she was like, you really can't do that since you just hired all these people and fucking stop whining and tough up. I was like, good point. And I have lunch with Ehud Barak, who has just left being the Prime Minister of Israel. And he has two clients. I was his third. First client, Lewis Bacon, Moore Capital, one of the great investors of all time. Other client, Bruce Kovner, right-wing version of hedge fund manager, Caxton, one of the great investors of all time, a little older, like call it a turn older than Lewis, both multi-billionaires. And I'm at this point a $300 million hedge fund, probably worth $20 million myself. So like not in their league. Like one of the things does like look like the other. And I think to flatter me, he says, no, congrats, I figured you out. You know, you're not so smart. I was like, thank you. He's like, but you're lucky. And he said, don't worry about it. Like Louis Bacon and Bruce Cumner, they're lucky too. And that made me smile to be put in their camp. And he said, and then he gave me a quote in French, which of course I don't speak French. And he said, oh, that's right. You don't speak French because you're not so smart. And he translated it. It was from Napoleon. I don't hire smart generals. I hire lucky generals. And he said something about being macro, having studied the three of us, you know, this is the second, third meeting I'd had with him. And he had spent a weekend at Kovner's place and a weekend with Lewis. He said, there's an intuition, there's a pattern recognition, there's an intuition, there's a way you process information and see the world that's non-traditional. And therefore we would call it luck, but there's actually intelligence there. And Napoleon thought the same thing of being a general. People didn't understand it, so they called it luck, but it was a different kind of intelligence. And for whatever reason, the world just opened up and I was like, oh, because I knew I had better results, but why should I be a better guesser of where dollar-yen is going than you? Well, this kind of gave you the permission This gave me the permission to believe in that I had something.

The intuition was real.

The intuition was real that I should just trust my intuition. And real quickly I decided how I made money. And it didn't have to be the same way you made money or he made money. And it was taking information, lots of different sources, know what the sources are and try to keep making them better sources. You process them through some algorithm. And I knew what went in my algorithm, not linearly, but what went in it. And it was at the crossroads between that information, working on your precognitive intuition, and your analysis where I came up with an I think. I think dollar-yen is going higher. I think Bitcoin is going to go nowhere. I think— and because you recognize you're just guessing, right? This is the I think business. You know you're going to feel anxiety. And so how do you manage that anxiety? You manage it through some series of risk management rules and lifestyle management rules. What's really unique about a guy like Stan Druckenmiller is if you studied him, he's maybe the best there is at this.

Druckenmiller's the best.

Yeah. I mean, Druckenmiller, Lewis, Tepper, I mean, you're splitting hairs. They're all so good. Stan's in his desk every morning at the same time. Used to be 6:00 AM. Now I think he gets himself 6:30. Because he's retired, uh, going through the same charts in his same rhythm, right? That's his process. That's his discipline. The greatest macro traders in the world that ever existed are the most disciplined. The second ingredient they have— because I'm always like, those guys, like, I'm not as good as those guys. I'm close sometimes. I see the world as close, but my track record isn't as good as So what's the missing link?

The discipline.

Discipline and competitiveness.

Oh, interesting.

They're so competitive. It's crazy. I'm in the same fantasy football league. You would, you would think Sam's like, give me a story. His life depends on it. Yeah. Like he loves competition.

Yeah.

Yeah. Louis Bacon, I told this story before, I went out to play croquet at his house and I thought croquet was like a yard game. Oh, he's got a full professional croquet court with professional clubs and he had hired like the best croquet player in the world to give lessons. Of course.

Just so he could beat you.

He smoked me.

Yeah.

Everything they do, they're competitive in. I mean, I'm pretty competitive.

You're competitive. You wrestle.

I think I'm pretty competitive. I'll wrestle anyone.

Not like these guys. Yeah.

But it was just a different level of— And listen, I'm not thinking that one's better or the worst. I have a lot of different varied interests, but rebuilding that discipline muscle is something I work on. It's something every trader needs to work on. Work on.

How do you think about seizing, um, in like a market that moves so much on narratives, less on fundamentals these days, more on narratives, there's seizing the narrative in trading and see like the trade might be Palantir, right? Or the trade might be MicroStrategy. Um, there's like, how do you think about seizing the narrative in trading versus seizing the narrative in business? Because the trade, you click a button, you put on the trade, whereas, uh, you know, business, you can kind of— there's like a stablecoin narrative. Do you chase it? Do you—

no, it's dur— it's, it's duration. Right? When I say duration, I might be in a momentum trade, which is a narrative trade for years, but I know I can change my duration in a day. I could be long Bitcoin for 4 years, but if I wanted to, I could get out tomorrow. And so, if you know you have a quick exit, it's a trade, an investment trade, whatever you want to call it. In business, you have to have a lot more confidence that the narrative is real. I'm going to spend $500 million building or $50 million or $5 million, whatever you're going to spend investing in something for a future that you are predicting. And so you really have to have a lot more conviction. It's not the entrance. The entry to the trade, it's the exit, right? You're going to build an asset management business. Even if you wanted to exit it, you got to call a bank. You know, like you got to find, they're not that many people that are going to buy your asset management business. You just can't pick up the phone and hit, yeah, sell.

Yeah.

And so I think a lot, they're much harder bets. And then what determines success is partly did you pick the right narrative? But 80%, did you execute? Right? A lot of people went off to start exchanges.

Yeah.

CZ out-executed everybody times 3. Yeah.

Yeah.

The richest man in the world because he knew how to execute. I remember asking when I first met him, I said, like, what are you great at? He said, I don't come up with any idea, but I figure out what the good idea is and I copy it and I do it better.

Like he's doing right now with Hyperliquid.

We'll see. It'll be, it'll be an interesting battle.

Yeah. Yeah.

I, you know, I full disclosure, I went and bought some of his, his token today because I'm like, he's a kingmaker. Yeah. It's hard to fight it, you know, bet against.

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With disclosure, I own a lot of Hyperliquid.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, one of your guys was very early into the Hyperliquid ecosystem and don't— speaking of fantasy, don't, don't dox anyone here, but like, I think you guys were pretty early into Hyperliquid, or at least you discovered it or we—

I, I actually have an email that, which I wish I had read, that could have got me in at the very ground floor from a good friend who's, who, who, who is big into it. Um, we got in plenty early and it had done well. Um, listen, Jeff and Sophia are sharp as hell.

Yeah.

And they're stone cold serious. I, I've only met 'em a few times on Zooms, never in person, but I've certainly spent time with them. And, you know, they have 12 employees and they've built an amazing, uh, my instinct, and this is not fact, this is instinct, is they're in it for the long haul and they want to build something spectacular. They both went to Harvard, they're both 40-ish, they had great, you know, pedigrees. Uh, this is not a quick get me rich scheme. They are rich. Yeah, you know, uh, and I think they've got big, big plans.

Yeah. And so, so you're not following Arthur Hayes and selling your hype off?

No. Listen, when something falls 20% in a day, you wish you sold a little and bought it back. And yeah, because I'm a trader. Yeah. Yeah.

Trader. Yeah.

And I actually, I thought about calling, not that they tell me. My, again, my instinct is they're not going to panic sell out of their own hype just because it freed up. These guys are building a business for the long haul. Yeah. Right.

I think, I think so.

You think about my, my, my partner Chris Ferraro has owned Galaxy stock. It's all been vested for a long period of time. He could have sold all the stock because it vested. Yeah. And he'd be a lot less rich. He kept his stock even though it was vested.

Right.

Because he thought it was going higher.

Yeah.

And he was building a company. I have sold very little of my Galaxy stock and I own over half the company. 'Cause I thought I was going higher. Now at one point it's prudent to take a little bit off the table to diversify.

Sure.

Your, your, your significant other can, yeah.

Mental health helps.

Mental health and all that stuff. But the great, mental sanity, the great fortunes in life, and you can't pick one, pick any of the great fortunes. Yeah. They come from riding a trend and it's often the trend you're stuck in 'cause it's yours.

Yep.

Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. There's not one person in that top 10 list that's there because they weren't riding a trend.

Yeah. Let's talk Galaxy. Um, so you guys have, you have two, you have two businesses as I see it today. You kind of have the, uh, the crypto business and the data center business. How do you think about owning both of these?

I'm happy.

Yeah.

Um, I feel kind of like maybe I am lucky.

'Cause I, you guys got pretty lucky with the data center business. Oh, listen, we, and now you've got an amazing, we stumbled into it. Yeah.

And that was the lucky part. But the way Chris and me, more Chris, have prosecuted turning it from maybe to now we're gonna build one of the country's largest data centers is, you know, I'm, I'm proud of what, what my team did there. Yeah. And I'm proud that I was like, we're not selling. Now, like once we realized we had gold, it's easy to sell the gold early. We didn't sell. Yeah. We, we, we are going to do our best to maximize value for our shareholders of that asset. That's 70 of our 650 people and it's probably 20% of my brain. 10% of my brain is probably half of Chris's brain right now. It's not as hard of a business to think about.

The data center business is not as hard.

No.

Oh, I see. I would think that it's a much harder business than a crypto business.

No, we have the power that people wanted.

Yeah.

We had to pick the right—

You sell the power.

Yeah, we're selling power.

Yeah, yeah.

And we had to pick the right tenant. We think CoreWeave was a great pick. Yeah. We had to pick the right general contractor. We got a group called Clayco. We love them. We had to get it financed. I couldn't have done that. That's where Chris Ferrara's expertise of being in that world, right? We borrowed $1.4 billion from Deutsche Bank. We're in the market to borrow more money. Like the financing piece is— there's an art to it, but it's, it's not.

Yeah. How do you— just one thing on that. How do you borrow $1.4 billion? You go sit down and Chris is like, hey, smile on your face. Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, are you putting together a pitch deck?

And oh yeah, it's, it's, it's— this was a tortuous long-term process because it was the first time, right?

Yeah.

The second piece will be easier because people don't know where credit— they know who you are. One of the reasons a lot of the crypto mining companies haven't been so successful in the transition to AI is they don't have the capital markets or the capital themselves. Like, we have to have a big enough balance sheet guaranteeing, you know, completion, like the parental, the parental guarantee on the money we borrowed. Uh, Deutsche Bank wouldn't lend us $1.4 billion even on a contract if we didn't have Yeah, $2.5 billion. Yeah, you know, uh, and so, but where that goes, what, what the decisions each week that have to be made are limited. Now let's talk about crypto. We're talking about this idea that stablecoins are going to replace deposits and crypto credit's going to come out. Well, where are those tokens could even trade. Right now they're on an ATS. Are they going to trade at Binance, at Coinbase, at the NASDAQ? You saw, like, a— there's regulatory uncertainty on where their liquidity is going to be, when people are going to care. Like, there are so many more variables to predict and to bet on, and then you've got to execute.

Yeah.

And there are a lot more competitors trying to execute. Right?

Yeah.

You think, oh great, I got a ton of money in Hyperliquid. They've got a moat of— oh, the same week CZ and Justin Sun launched competitors.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And there's still regulatory uncertainty around the KYC piece of it. It's a huge question, right? Remember Arthur Hayes and CZ went to jail. For the KYC piece. Yeah, not for security commodity, right? There are two pieces to crypto: security commodity. Are you licensed? Are you selling an unlicensed security? And the KYC users.

Yeah, yeah.

I am a huge advocate to our government, uh, that we should allow permissionless systems, but the systems that integrate with the permissionless systems should have to do some version of KYC. So what Uniswap company, not Uniswap protocol, does is they use a bunch of various— I'll call them, uh, uh, Chainalysis-like, right, you know, radar guns. Yeah, figure out the good users and the bad users and OFAC lists and all the stuff. If we get that to become the standard If the standard for using and participating in DeFi technologies is because blockchains make things transparent, it's the government's job to catch the bad actors, and the government can hold users responsible to catch bad actors, but it's still permissionless.

Yeah.

Then DeFi's gonna eat the world.

Yeah. Yeah.

It just will. That feels like it's happening. We're advocating it. I was literally on an hour call with a senator 3 days ago educating one. But if you're not a crypto degen, that's nuanced shit.

Yeah. Yeah.

And, and I'm probably not good enough at the details to be the guy that helps that next level down. Right. I'm a big picture storyteller. There are guys that need to know the details. Then you're talking to the person at the NSA and they're throwing fucking 3-letter words at you. You don't understand what they are. Like, and what's scary, the possibility that it happens, I think is higher than it's ever been. But getting all this stuff right is going to be tricky.

Yeah. Could your data center business ever be bigger than the crypto business?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, we have 800 megawatts, which makes us a huge business. I told you it's 20, somewhere between $20, $20 and $25 billion of rent coming in 15 years. Yeah. We are—

you have 800 megawatts. You want to build more though, right?

We are in line at ERCOT.

Yeah.

With a 2.7 gigawatt ask. Yeah. My own hunch is they won't do that all at once, but they'll—

so that'd bring it to 3.5. Yeah, 3.5.

Yeah, the largest data center in the world, just about.

Yeah.

Uh, but let's assume you get another gigawatt. That's, that's nuts. There you go. That's bigger than data center that exists in Europe right now.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so you're— we're talking such crazy numbers. That's another— I don't know what value— if the first data center business is going to discount cash flow out to $6 or $7, $8 billion, not like it's— I mean, again, it's— you do the math, it's about $12 billion of, uh, if it's of free cash flow that goes over 15 years. So like there's such large numbers that each marginal piece adds a ton to our business. And so, yeah, I think right now it's worth a whole lot. It might be worth half our business and it could grow a lot. The jury's out. Like we need to get the second piece, then we go from a trade to a business. And then if you get the third piece and another geographic area, now you really start having felt like you have the muscle power. You know who uses it, when they need it, how to finance it, right? They're not that many muscles, but we've learned them. And so we need a little time and a little luck and it'll be a monster business. Yeah.

How do you think about capital allocation between the crypto business and the data center business?

You know, what did Mae West say? She had a great line about too much is, you know, I blew my joke.

I get where you're going.

I get where you're getting at. It's complicated. Like right now, the data center business was such high ROI and so important to us. There was a lot of capital allocation there. We have made a lot of money in crypto. We've always financed ourselves. This has been another great year. The data center starts cash flowing in the first quarter. A year from June, so what are 18 months from now, it really is cash flowing, you know, $500, $600 million a year. And so it, it surviving for 18 months, that's a self-funding business as fast as you want to grow. Will we split the businesses? If we find the market doesn't give us credit to be together in 18 months when the things are cash flowing, we split the businesses because they don't have a lot of synergies between the two of them. Right now we share capital, right? Yeah. The same capital that's guaranteeing this thing I'm using to run my crypto business. And so, what do you think the likelihood is that you split it? 50/50. Yeah. I just don't, We're not a public company long enough to get, have had enough chance to tell our story, to get people to trust us and believe us, to see if they'll give you value. People don't love some of the part. That word is a discount. And the only way you can actually talk about our company is some of the parts. We got a data center business. We got a crypto. Yeah.

You need like a simple story. Circle, stablecoins, stock. Goes up?

My and Chris's mantra: build a great company and the stock price will follow. Now, we'd rather have our stock price higher than lower. We have a great IR guy, Jonathan Lugowski. Uh, we— I'm on podcasts, I'm on TV. Uh, you know, we are trying to tell our story effectively, and so we want our stock price to go higher because it gives you a lot of flexibility to do other cool shit with. But the best we can do is build a world-class company. Yeah. And I'd rather have a world-class company that trades cheap than a shitty company that trades expensive.

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Sometimes I see FalconX, sometimes I see Anchorage, but we, we originally looked at DApps to say, I'm not positive of the longevity of these things. And I've kind of changed my mind on some of that, but I know one thing, I want to be the asset manager. And so Steve Kurz, who runs our asset management business, Jason Yanowitz, they have done an amazing job of getting in front of the dApp users, the dApp builders, and saying, hey, we'll help. We will bring value added in staking and buying and selling and doing all the execution, storage, custody for your dApp, taking that off the table and getting paid a fee for it. And these are long-term contracts. And so we've done that for 8 different people maybe.

Yeah.

And we've got more coming. It's a substantial amount of assets and, you know, and then we did it of course for Ford. And the great news about that is when you add it all together, we had an asset management business that, you know, wasn't making, it was, was doing fine. It was growing. But because we have a heavy cost structure, was in the negative EBITDA and now it's in the big positive EBITDA. And that just gives the business so much air and oxygen. You have optionality. If those crypto prices double, your assets double, right? And so that's been wonderful. It's also been a great way for us to connect with these new entrepreneurs, some that we've known, many that we've known in the past. To say, hey, some of these DAS, like BNMR, it's a $10 billion enterprise all of a sudden.

Like, and Tom Lee can manage X percentage of that.

And Tom Lee has mojo.

Oh yeah.

Uh, you know, SBIT, I met with the, uh, CEO of SBIT. I realized I'd known him for a long time. He came from BlackRock. Uh, and we'll do shit with these guys. Yeah. Um, and so That piece has been very exciting and I think it's, Galaxy took a long time to build and I think our number one asset we built was brand and that brand was, you can trust us. We broadly know what's going on in the space and we understand how institutions work. And this year brand has made us a ton of money. What brand brings you is these opportunistic ideas, gives you fuel to then build the, the longer-term business that scales. Yeah, yeah.

You guys tokenize your equity?

We did.

Yeah, yeah. Uh, so that's cool. What do you think about— so one idea, so, um, okay, Vlad, when, when Bullish IPO'd, Vlad from Robinhood tweeted and said, shout out to Tom Farley, they've allocated, I think it was 20% of their, um, retail, their, their allocation to retail. Via Robinhood. And then you guys did this via, I think it was Superstate.

Yeah. So let me, let's, I'll give you some inside baseball.

Yeah. Yeah.

You asked earlier on about how do you create community?

Yeah. Yeah.

We went public and shame on me, you know, like we picked great, you know, Goldman Sachs and Jefferies and they did a great job and I didn't even ask the question. How much went to retail?

Yeah.

I'd gone public at Fortress. I'd gone public at Goldman Sachs. Yeah. Banks know what they're doing.

This is the third IPO, right?

Third IPO. And after Bullish went public at the same market cap, Bullish traded a lot better than Galaxy. I called the Goldman bankers and I said, what the hell's like, what is the goddamn difference? Like, is Jeremy that much better a storyteller than me? We're both bald. I'd like to think I could win in a wrestling match. They have a simpler story, but is it that much of a better story? And their stock just took off like gangbusters.

Yes. Not bullish. Circle.

Circle. I'm sorry. And then one of the guys who was on the deal, not one of the leads, I went out for coffee with. He said, I got to give Jeremy credit. He fought like hell to get a higher retail.

Oh, interesting.

And so I, of course, called Tom Farley.

Yeah. And said, dude, give the retail.

I mean, it's, and it was such a wake up call.

Oh, interesting. I didn't—

It was such a wake up call for both, for all of us.

Yeah.

Like crypto has been about the little guy and what's traditionally happened. Big banks give allocations to their hedge fund clients who pay 'em a huge amount of, and their real money who pay 'em a huge amount of commission. And these things trade up and some sell right out of it into retail.

Yeah.

And so it's like, wait a minute, it's exactly the opposite reason we got into crypto. We all got into crypto because it was supposed to be the little man's revolution, right? Give retail. And what was so cool about crypto is it started with the little guy. It started with, there was no institutions and I was like the first institutional, you know, guy and everyone laughed at me. And so I give bullish a lot of credit. It's, Brendan and Tom Farley and Jeremy credit for saying, hey, like we got into this thing for the little guy.

Yeah.

And I think that's helped them get liquidity. I wish I had that foresight before we went public at Galaxy. I would've said 30% retail.

But now you can still do it by tokenizing the stock, right?

So we tokenized our stock.

That's the, I thought it was genius to do this 'cause that's the other allocation. Yeah.

And so listen, so far, I think there's $1.5 million, $2 million that have been tokenized. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's the only $1.5 million, $2 million that have been legally tokenized under the kind of SEC. What will happen most likely is at one point somebody will move those tokens and start trading them on a decentralized exchange. We can't push them there, but like if it happens and at one point you're out of the, the superstate sandbox and you're onto decentralized exchanges. And, and at one point the SEC is going to say to the NASDAQ or to Coinbase, you can trade these things. Uh, you know, right now you've got to be an ATS to trade them, but at some point I would assume a significant amount of our liquidity happens on-chain. Yeah. Like one of the reasons we're tokenizing stocks is a much broader distribution. When you talk about the democratization of finance, that's what we meant by the democratization of finance. Not that everyone should be a portfolio manager, that everyone should have access to the same investment opportunities that rich people do.

Yeah. What do you, what other advice would you have? So there's all these crypto IPOs that are coming, probably, I don't know, a dozen or so in the next 12 months. Um, what other advice would you have for these execs as they, as they think about IPOing? I mean, you, you were, you went through the gauntlet, right?

Just like, I, I think the hardest thing about being a public company is knowing that every 3 months you got to stand up in front of the world and say, this is what we've done. And so you should not go public unless you know that you've got a 5-quarter story baked into the cake. Of good things that are happening. It would've been far harder for us to go public without the data center business. Now in the last 6 months, our crypto business has done great things. And so you'll see our earnings call probably, I don't know, mid-October, and we'll tell you a great story about crypto. We wouldn't talk as much about data center business because we had a great crypto quarter. But the, what gave me a lot of courage to go public was I knew I had this, this business that everyone cared about, that, that's easy to talk about and it's going to show progress in a linear fashion. And so I see a lot of these crypto companies going public without great businesses, and you're going to see the moment the, the tide goes out, those things are going to fall hard.

Yeah.

Um, right. So you, again, when I said early on, I'd rather have a good business that trades cheap than a, than a bad business that's expensive.

Do you think these folks should be rushing to get, to get public?

No, I— listen, I shouldn't say no, uh, because I'd probably be like, why being public helps is it gives you so much more visibility, bringing in customers, bringing capital. You might be able to raise capital and then use that currency to merge into something. Um, there are a ton of crypto companies that are subscale to be public. Let's say they're $60 to $80 million revenue companies that have been around for a while that make a small amount of EBITDA. They're not big enough to be public, but they've got bad pref rounds they raised, and so they're kind of orphaned. And so listen, if one of them could get public, it unorphans them and and it turns that pref into common and it's probably smart strategically, but it's hard to run a company that subscale public.

Yeah. Yeah. How much of your time do you spend selling the stock? Meeting with either one-on-one or publicly?

If you asked my senior team, including Jonathan Goldowski, they'd say about 90% too little. Yeah. Yeah.

More. You should do more.

Listen, being a CEO is a challenging job because partly, like, you're supposed to be out selling your stock and telling your story. It's supposed to be you're out meeting your clients and converting them into bigger clients. Partly you're helping set the mission. You know, we're still a new company, you know, young company, and we're doing a little all of that. I divide and conquer with Chris Ferraro. Like, he approaches the thing like a partner. Um, and so that helps because he does a lot of like getting ready for earnings and all that stuff. If I had to do it myself, I think I'd have less hair.

That's Chris.

That's Chris. Good format. Chris and Tony and Aaron Brown. Yeah, you give them all—

make it look nice.

But, uh, well, actually, like putting it together, making it logical, making sure the auditors don't hate us, uh, you know, making sure that we Yeah. That we do all the things necessary to be a great public company. I have a team that does that and it's just, my brain doesn't, you know, work well in that, that environment.

Yeah. So I always text friends who know you or know in, in your circle before these podcasts for, for the guests. And as we think about wrapping this up, I got, I got more questions about your personal life than pretty much any guest that's come on. People said, Uh, so I, I, I'm in the same circle as like your, your kids in New York actually. And a lot of, so a lot of people were like, ask him how he has such good, these are the, uh, these were the questions I got. I got, ask him how he has such good relationships with his kids. Um, uh, ask him about living a risk-on life. Um, and ask him about, uh, his siblings and how what parenting thoughts he has to rate. Why did your civil— your whole family basically seems very successful. Um, so I don't know if you are open to talking about anything.

I'd love to talk about it. So listen, I think I, I am lucky. I have a great family. Uh, I'm one of 7. I have sweet parents. Uh, my mom was very aspirational. She, oh, you guys can do anything in the world. She wasn't pushy. She was just aspirational. And my dad was a stoic. Tough. He was an All-American football player in the military. Didn't say as much. Big smile. Very tough.

By the way, I was looking at your sibling names. Robert, Jackie.

Oh, yeah. The Kennedys. We're the Kennedys. My mom wanted us— my mom got married when she was 19 and engaged at 18. She was gorgeous and she looked a lot—

I see the inspiration.

She looked a lot like Jackie. I was reading these.

I was like, is this Right.

Yeah. And, you know, the Kennedys, 1960. Think about it. That, that was everything.

Yeah. Yeah.

And so, but we were raised to be like, if the Kennedys can do it, you can too.

Yeah.

And we were middle-class neighborhood in Virginia. The one thing about having a big family is when you do poorly, they're there to pick you up. And when you do well, they're there to kind of take shots at you for fun in a nice way. So you don't think your shit doesn't stink. There's a lot of studies on families with more than one successful sibling, and it always is the same answer. One parent is aspirational. Neither parent really have the tools to mentor everybody, but one or two siblings succeed early, and that role model and mentorship brings everyone else along.

So who was that for you guys?

My sister Jacqueline has been successful. I was successful. We've kind of shared that role. My brother Bob surprised everyone. He'd became this, you know, media star with his wife building, you know, a TV empire and houses. And so I think also you see someone succeed, you're like, well, we grew up at the same dinner table. If he can succeed, I can succeed.

Yeah. Yeah. And that, you know, he's not that special. Yeah.

No one's that special.

Yeah.

And that's the reality of it. And so that, that part's been fun, you know, to raising kids. I have gotten lucky. I have really—

how many kids?

I have 4 kids. 4 2 30-year-old girls, uh, shout out, uh, they'll be, one will be 31 soon, but they're Irish twins, uh, a 27-year-old son and a 22-year-old son. And I had this theory called light touch parenting. It sounds a little creepy these days with all this Epstein stuff. Uh, it was every New York City kid's gonna feel pressure. So let's not put any pressure on our kids. Let's just be good role models. If you want your kid to be kind, be kind to people. If you want your kid to talk nothing about money, then talk nothing about money. If you're talking money all the time, your kid's going to talk about money all the time. If you want your kid to work hard, but work hard. I can't tell my kid to work hard and lounge around and do nothing all day.

Right.

So both my wife and I, and quite frankly, my siblings had this very loose way of raising my kids. They had no rules.

No rules.

No rules.

Yeah. And the rule was, how do you make sure they're not spoiled kids then if they grow up very wealthy, no rules?

Is it because you embodied, they, because they see you being nice to the person, you know, like we didn't, if you don't act like an asshole, your kids wouldn't act like assholes. Yeah. Yeah. And I never asked for report cards. I never went to parent-teacher conferences. I, and I told the schools, I'm paying you $70,000 a year. If my kids having a problem, call me. And my one daughter had dyslexia and we had a, intervene and get her into a different school. And then she's in some ways been the biggest success because you're looking at terrible scores and whatnot, and she just outworked everybody and she has done great. Now she's a social worker in New York and married and couldn't be happier. And so it's not like you're not neglecting your kids. You actually are talking to them all the time. How's your day? But you're far better off to ask your kid how their day was than how did you do on that math test? You ask a 5-year-old how they did on a math test, there's only 2 answers. I did really good, Dad. Pat me on the head. Yeah. Right? There's no upside in it.

Yeah.

How's your day? Hey. Oh, I had a hard math test. Oh, that's okay. Right? If your kid brings it up, of course, talk to them. And my kids have great friends. I'm so social. One of the gifts of life is my kids' friends. So they become your friends. And I believe in multigenerational partying. I remember going to a 50th birthday party at the Rainbow Room costume, black-tie costume. They had a great band and the party was, eh, eh. And 2 weeks earlier I had had my summer party, which was a 40 out of 10. It was just so awesome. And I'm like, They had the great band. We had the great band. They had the costumes. We had costumes. They had the Rainbow Room. It's the best room in New York City. What was the difference? Youth. Yeah. You can't go to a good party with just 50-year-olds.

Yeah.

You gotta make some 20s, some 30s. So you gotta have the whole gamut.

Yeah.

And it's that youth that brings energy. And so becoming, again, you're not supposed to be your kids' friends, but as they grow older, you're supposed to be friends with their friends. Yep. And then you become their friends. Yeah. You're supposed to be their parent. And then there's this transition as they get into their 20s. And so that's the fun part of life we're in right now. Yeah. So shout out to my kids' friends.

Yeah, there you go. Mike, anything we didn't cover that you want to cover?

I'm good.

You're good. Congrats, man. Hell of a run. Cool to see you build Galaxy over all the years. And yeah, congrats on everything.

Thanks a ton.