Crypto Megan Podcast | Anthony Scaramucci - Bitcoin's Journey to $170K & Why It’s Just the Beginning

You know, you gotta take the millstone of regret in your life and you gotta drop it and you gotta put it down and you gotta go forward without it. Otherwise it weighs down everything that you're doing and it'll make you miserable. You know, you, you, you're gonna live a life of shoulds and coulds as opposed to a life of what is.

Right.

You know, as long as you're out there trying, what's happening to you is some of it's inside of your control. But a lot of it's outside of your control, you know.

My name is Megan Nielsen, a.k.a. Crypto Megan, coming to you here from New York just after NFT NYC. And we've had the pleasure and the honor today of sitting down with none other than Anthony Scaramucci, also known as the Mooch. And he is the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge, a global alternative investment firm, and founder and chairman of SALT, a global thought leadership forum and venture studio. and also a prominent figure in the political and financial sphere. He's actually written a book about From Wall Street to the White House and Back, which includes, you know, valuable insights on his 11-day stint in the White House and things that have happened to him throughout his career that he's bounced back from to become, you know, the incredible firm that is SkyBridge today. And he's been so successful. And so today he's going to tell you a little bit of a backstory about all of that and where, just where he believes Bitcoin will land. This cycle, and so much more. So without further ado, let's get into it.

Welcome to the Crypto Megan Podcast. I'm your host, Megan Nielsen. I'm a high-end crypto and NFT portfolio and Web3 strategy consultant. I'm currently on a world tour as a Web3 keynote speaker at all the biggest Web3 tech and fintech events around the world as an industry leader to educate anyone from beginner to C-level executive, and of course, to advocate for women in Web3. My mission is to inspire new people to get involved in the crypto and NFT space with quality, entertaining information they can trust as pioneers in this cultural and financial revolution, a paradigm shift.

You know, like one of the clients that I was consulting for his portfolios, he asked me who I look up to financially for the, you know, and I told him Cathie Wood and he's like, yeah, oh, well, She's heavily down now. And these are like billionaires, you know, and just kind of like ripping me for like being with her and stuff. So I don't know, I don't know why people are so shortsighted as well. You know, this is a long-term game.

They're shortsighted because they, it's like a match sailing race. They wanna be on the anchor. This is why Davos, Switzerland, the consensus there is always wrong. 'Cause everyone's looking to be in a match sailing race They don't want to look too different from their peer group. Cathie's willing to take risks. She couldn't be Cathie Wood if she didn't take the risks that she took to become Cathie Wood.

Right.

A lot of these people can't do that, you know.

But you think—

I love her, by the way. She's one of my close friends and we talk a lot and I, I think the world of her.

But you think like, you know, having— being that wealthy, you would be better at having a longer-term vision, right?

No, the wealth brings misery. I turned 60 in January. My oldest son said to me, well, Dad, what have you learned in 60 years? There's a paradox to wealth. You have to be very, very careful. It can provide you material goods, it can give you good healthcare, a nice place to live, but it can also insulate you. Okay, let me just give you a couple examples. You're super rich, You're flying around in your own plane. You're not flying Delta. You're super rich. You're on your own yacht. You're not on a cruise ship. And so, but you, you're super rich. You're on a 15-acre estate. You're not in a neighborhood where your kids can run in and out of the houses of their fellow neighbors. And there's a weirdness to it. It creates loneliness and there's a paradox. And then the other thing it does is it's never enough. And so you end up competing with other rich people. So if someone's down, you're happy. If you're up and they're down, you're happy. If they're up and you're down, you're sad. I mean, it's stupid. That's really painful. That's my— but I— but you see, when someone says there's no number, they want more, I say that. I'm not saying— I don't even begrudge that somebody wants more, but it would be like my mentor, Ken Langone. Why would I want more? Well, I'll be able to give more away. You know, there's Langone Medical Center.

So it's the reasoning behind it.

I think so. Yeah. I remember, you know, like, you know, he, he had some great lines and God bless him, he's 88 years young, but like, he's like, Anthony, the money, you know, you're gonna, what are you gonna do? You, how many houses can you own? How many pieces of clothing? How many watches? The separating, when you get to be a certain level of wealth, it's private aircraft, charitable giving, and it's art. After that, I mean, there's no real differentiator. And this is what drives a lot of these people crazy. They're like, well, how is it that I'm not unique or different? And I think you just have to settle into your humanity and you have to settle into the vagaries of what life brings, the good and the bad. Also, let me tell you something. There's a lot of luck in life. You know, you didn't choose your parents. I didn't choose my parents, didn't choose the location of my birth, didn't choose my brain chemistry or my IQ. So there's a lot of luck in life. People have to Recognize, yes, they're working hard. They can create some of their own luck by working. But you know, you born in the United States, you already won the lottery as it relates to the world.

Wow.

So you just take that opportunity and it depends on how you shape your life going forward. What do you do with it?

Hey, I think so. And I think, look, you have to have a grounding bar. You know, you're not different than other people. If you take, not to get overly metaphysical with you, but like think of the math. If you say that there's 14 billion years of universe activity before you arrived here, so let's just call that infinity, 'cause it's just such a big number, right?

Oh, we're getting philosophical.

And then if you live from 0 to 100, after you're dead, that's also infinity. So infinity minus 100 equals what? It equals infinity. So, you know, we're all the same. And so to get too ahead of yourself or too full of yourself, I think is a huge mistake. And I think it costs your relationship. It hurts your children.

Absolutely.

You know, and you know that you interview so many different people, you know, right away when you're interviewing somebody who, you know, is full of it, you know that.

Oh yeah. And it just like, right as you walked into this podcast, I could tell that you were one of those that are few that are really humble and really relaxed.

'Cause I said there was a lot of pot smoke the whole way.

Is that right?

Yeah.

I heard somebody come around the corner and say, there's a lot of pot in New York. Somebody's smoking up here.

Yeah. And I always get it wrong 'cause I'm like, It smells like skunk. You know, I don't smoke pot. My kids are like, it's not skunk, Dad. It's like marijuana. Duh. Yeah.

As soon as I heard that, I was like, wow, this is gonna be a great interview. Real— no, no joke. Because you don't take yourself too seriously, even though you are where you are in life.

Can't take yourself seriously. What the hell are you gonna do?

I, I mean, I, I love this.

And see, the other problem is like people take themselves too seriously. It's almost like you're never gonna get real with anybody. You're never gonna really get to know people.

Right.

You know?

Yeah, no, absolutely. And so—

But then again, when your last name is like a unit of time from a political duration point of view, like I lasted in the White House 11 days, so I can now do the conversion. Like Kevin McCarthy, the Speaker, he lasted 24.4 Scaramuccis or Liz Truss, the Prime Minister, she lasted 4.1 Scaramuccis. Are you gonna take yourself that seriously?

Oh my God, this is incredible. I mean, it doesn't, I mean, you've withstood all of these hardships in your life yet sitting here talking to you now, Now, you just, it feels like you're so calm, so at peace with who you are and where you're at in life and, and knowing where you're going.

Well, I mean, listen, I mean, I'm 60. I'm not gonna tell you that I've always felt this way, but I think the last couple of years have really taught me a lot of lessons because I've had several comeuppances, right? So just wanna imagine the 31st of July, 2017, I'm being fired from the White House. Obviously did something stupid. I deserve to be fired. I'm not blaming it on anybody, but I'm being fired from the White House. Good morning. 10 days on the job. That makes Anthony Scaramucci the shortest-tenured communications director in the history of the White House. And with 2 resignations and 1 firing in his wake, he's also the most disruptive. I'm now going to get lit up and destroyed by the mainstream media, the late night comedians, cable news pundits. They're gonna roll me in margarita salt after they blow me out the door in Pennsylvania Avenue. That's fine. You know, and then I go back to work on my business and I allow Sam Bankman-Fried to buy 30% of the company.

Ouch.

Okay, so those are 2 big, you know, shit blasts in my life. And yeah, I've had others by the way. So they say these things come in threes. I like to think that the 2008, Financial crisis was the first one. I mean, that almost knocked me out of business as well.

Right.

But the point I'm making is that no different, you know, if you're rich or poor, let's say things broke differently for me. And let's say that, you know, I got Bitcoin wrong. And I'm not saying I've been humbled by life and markets. I think Bitcoin's going up $170,000 to $200,000.

Yeah, I've seen your latest prediction.

I could be wrong. I've been humbled by life and markets. I'm not sitting here Speaking in certitudes, but it doesn't— not gonna change anything. Still the same person, you know? And this is the thing that I think I've learned. Like, I've been on Wall Street a long time. I can't deal with these people that think they're better than other people 'cause they have more money than them. Just, I'm sorry, I'm not— I'm like done with those people.

I mean, that's—

You know, and I've got some really close friends that are multi-billionaires and they are, Amazingly grounded, and they're amazingly chill to talk to and cool. I've got all the time in the world for them. Just these, and you know right away. You know people know there's like a meter in your head: asshole, cool person, asshole, cool person. And it's like a meter. You know right away, right?

You do.

You do.

I tell my daughter, you know women know if a guy is charming or creepy, charming or creepy. You can tell a woman she has intuition, right? You can tell a woman she has a nice dress on if you mean it sincerely. You're not creeping her out. She'll say thank you. And then, you know, there's another character you're like, okay, I gotta run for the hills. Take off my high heels and start running. This guy's nuts. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

And you just know.

Absolutely.

You know.

And in this industry, it's really refreshing. I think we were talking about this earlier when I did my podcast with Tim Draper. He was just such a down-to-earth guy. He walked, we were in Miami. He walked to the set. He was sweaty. He's like, sorry, I just walked over here last 20 minutes. I mean, The most down-to-earth person.

Well, I—

Down-to-earth person I know.

I love him. And I would say that there's a couple of people that helped me get into the industry. Draper would be one of them. Michael Saylor would be another one. Michael Novogratz, Pete Brigger. I don't know if you know Pete.

Mm-hmm.

But when I came outta the White House, I had, well, I'll tell this story briefly. So this happened to me on a Wednesday. The reason I know that I was only in the White House for one Wednesday, so I know it was a Wednesday. So we were sitting in the Roosevelt Room and 2 Fed guys came in to talk to me about the white paper related to digitizing the US dollar.

Wow.

And I remember thinking, what do you guys mean? Like over the blockchain? And they were like, yeah, over the blockchain. And so this is 7 years ago. And I was like, okay, wow, I have totally missed this. I am not conversant in the blockchain. I have really no interest in Bitcoin. I have no idea what Bitcoin does. And I was like, you know, I gotta get up to speed on this. And then lo and behold, by maybe 5 or 6 days later, I got fired. And so I went back—

This is 2017.

2017. So I went back and bought the URL skybridgebitcoin.com. I then went to the Bitcoin conference in 2018. I did a ton of homework on Bitcoin, but frankly, I was still nervous to buy Bitcoin because I was, lifelong institutional investor, lifelong TradFi person. And I was like, okay, I can't really buy this. My clients will flip on me. They'll get super mad at me, but I'm gonna observe Bitcoin. I'm gonna be a Bitcoin observer. I'm not gonna do what other TradFi people are doing, which is slamming or being ridiculously critical of Bitcoin. I'm just gonna be an observer. And then in 2020, when COVID happened, And I think Bitcoin crashed to like $6,000. And I was watching it, you know, build a base. And then I think frankly, the stimulus money did help Bitcoin 'cause—

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that was the beginning of the rush.

Yeah, a lot of money went into Bitcoin. And when I saw the activity, I started writing down some notes. I said, okay, Bitcoin gets to 100 million wallets. If I'm comfortable with the regulation, if I can store 9 figures of Bitcoin safely somewhere, I can't put it in cold storage, but I gotta put it, and I ended up putting it at Fidelity, you know, then I'm okay. And I think we were at 80 million wallets. You'd have to take a leap of faith on regulation. But I made the case that I told my clients that the IRS decided it for me with Bitcoin. So you'll recall that the IRS said that Bitcoin was intangible property. And so one of the things that you learn in property law is that in the United States, in places like Great Britain, property is sacrosanct. They can't really take your property from you without giving you some value for it.

Right.

That's been a sort of a right dating back to the Magna Carta in 1215 AD, you know, King John. So I looked at that and said, all right, these regulators, they're not gonna be able to take your Bitcoin away. The court system, the Constitution, all these things are protective features. And obviously, you know, you get these autocratic regulators like a Gensler or an Elizabeth Warren, they think they know more than you do, or they think that their decisions are better than your decisions. Those are sort of people I generally can't stand.

Or just decisions out of self-interest in general.

Yeah, or politically motivated or whatever it might be. And so they lost those cases. But, you know, I would've said, and I made big mistake, I bought Bitcoin, we held it through 2021. Bitcoin got to $69,000 in November of 2021. I then went on television and wrongly made a prediction that Bitcoin would go to $100,000. And I said it would get there—

You mean wrongly by date.

Yeah, but I'll explain this to you 'cause I think this is important for people. To understand, and this is something Gary Gensler weirdly helped the industry, and I'm not a fan of his, but he did something and he lost the court case for it. So when Bitcoin's ETF for the futures got approved, I said, okay, they'll approve the spot ETF in 3 months.

Right.

Why? Well, if you read administrative law, And I went to law school, although I almost failed administrative law 'cause it was like the last semester of my schooling. But there is a clause in administrative law or a statute that says the administrator cannot be arbitrary and capricious in administrating the law. So I can't look at the law and interpret it one way for you and interpret it an opposite way for me, even though we're the same.

Right.

And so I said, all right, well, The Bitcoin spot ETF is almost identical to the futures ETF. If they've approved one, they have to approve the other.

Right, yeah.

He delayed it for literally 2 years, a little bit more than 2 years. And so I got that wrong and it cost me. I mean, I got destroyed.

In that time.

Yes, I got destroyed in 2022. I watched Bitcoin go from $69,000, I guess, to $16,000 or wherever it ended. But I think Gensler did all of us a favor. I don't think he wanted to do us a favor.

Probably not.

And I'm going to explain to you why he did us a favor. He flushed out FTX, he flushed out Celsius, which we were talking about.

Yeah.

Three Arrows, BlockFi, he— everything that would've benefited from a Bitcoin spot ETF approved in the first quarter of 2022 got knocked out of business. Over-leverage and fraud literally got wiped out of the system.

Right.

And if he had approved it earlier, we could still potentially be living in an FTX world right now. And that fraud would've just been mushrooming and growing and becoming more massive. And it could have been more colossal in terms of the damage that it caused in the industry.

Yeah, I agree with that to some extent. I think that bear markets are to wash out the leverage of bad actors, the fraud, But to what extent do you think that Bitcoin was simply just following its market cycles? I mean, things tend to break when bear markets come in general, right? And it was, I remember the tweet like it was yesterday when CZ came out and said, there's something up with FTX that he tipped off that, you know, this is not going. How do you think that would affect, would've affected things if we would've had the ETF already approved at that time?

Well, you see, I think there would've been a floor on the price of Bitcoin. And there would've— look at the buying. Okay? You've had consecutive steady net inflows by and large. I mean, there's been a few days I guess where there hasn't been, but BlackRock has had consecutive net inflows the entire time since it was created. And so I think there would've been a floor. So I don't think even if fraud was exposed at FTX, he could've probably covered his tracks better.

Right. Because of the liquidity in the market.

Correct. He would've had more balance sheet and he would've probably started moving the, The shells more quickly.

Been able to disguise it better.

Correct.

Yeah.

And I think it could have lasted longer, you know? And listen, maybe I'm wrong, but we're here now. And I think as much as I liked Sam and happy to go through all the mistakes I made with Sam, him not being in the industry is better for the industry because he was a huge fraudster.

Right. Yeah. And that's really interesting that you say you liked Sam because I know when Kevin O'Leary came out and he was on one of the podcasts and they asked him, So, you know, if you got to go back in time and know what he's doing, would you still back him? And infamously he said yes. And then the whole crypto industry was all up in arms about it and, oh, how could you say that? So what element of Sam did you like? What did you see in him? How do you put the two together?

So remember, and this is where Kevin and I disagreed, we were actually in a verbal sparring match together a month ago talking about these very issues. So once it became clear that Sam committed a fraud, all I can tell you is my affection for Sam was misplaced. All I can tell you is I liked Sam, emphasis on the past tense of that word.

Right.

I trusted him. I got to know his parents. I went to a charity event, Kevin O'Leary and I. And if you get him on your podcast, he'll tell you, we went to a charity event. We had Senator Cory Booker, Booker there. We had, I'm drawing a blank on the woman's name, but she's in the House of Representatives. She's on the Finance Committee for the House. She was there with us. It was a mini Shark Tank laboratory for African American students at the local public high schools in Miami. We hosted the event at the FTX Arena on a weekend. where the Heat had the day off, or it was like a night— it was like a night game. And we had a host of speakers. We had Yahoo Finance there, and the FTX Foundation was giving out money to these kids to help them get to college. Sam's 84-year-old aunt was running the event.

Wow.

Okay. And so I got to spend time with her, get to spend time with his uncle. I spent time with the parents at that event and I was like, all right, this is a good family. These are good people. I mean, the father and mother were tenured professors at Stanford Law School. So I'm like, these gotta be good people.

Interesting.

Now, in hindsight, was Sam a little spectrumy, if that's even a word? Okay, he's possibly a little spectrumy, but that didn't necessarily in my mind make him a bad person. I thought maybe with that came some level of genius.

Genius, yeah. I feel like Buterin's a little spectrum-y if you want to go there.

Well, yeah, there you go. And there are a lot of people that are also very, very successful. So I tell people, I thought he was the Mark Zuckerberg of crypto. I didn't see him as the Bernie Madoff of crypto. And I got it wrong, but I didn't do what Kevin did. If you said to me, would you invest with the guy again? Of course not. I would not invest with the guy again. had sociopathic tendencies.

Right.

And what sociopaths do is they justify their behavior.

They lie to themselves a lot.

Yeah. They're like, you know, I'm gonna take the client's money, I'm gonna move it into my account, and I'm such a genius that I'll be able to put it back in their account before they know. And they, they do all this justificatory behavior and, oh, by the way, I'm way smarter than you and I'm way smarter than the market. I'm gonna get all this stuff right. I'll be the first trillionaire. And then when I do that, I'm going to use the money to save the world. It's just kind of like sociopathic, out of this world, megalomaniac, messiah complex thinking. And it's very faulty. And I didn't see that in him. And I have to own that for the rest of my life. But, but, but here's the different thing. If you didn't ask me this question, but I'm going to ask the question and then answer it.

Okay.

If you said to me, all right, well, Are you gonna go forward and take risks? Are you gonna go forward and consider investments and potentially investments in SkyBridge? Or are you making investments?

Right.

The answer is yes. I'm not gonna let what Sam Bankman-Fried did to me to deter my frontierism, my streak towards risk, my ability or willingness to see new data or new technology to try to take advantage of it.

Absolutely.

What I am gonna do though, and I think it's a big lesson for people and I write about it, in this book is I have to follow the money more carefully because in the, in the Sam's case, there were 4 people that had dibs on that money. And I think when you're running a financial services firm, you have to check to make sure that there's a lot of people overseeing the money. So if you have money at SkyBridge, as an example, we have 2 internal controllers, we have a CFO.

Checks and balances.

Yeah, then it's overseen by our general counsel. Then it's overseen by our operations chief. Still not enough. We have outside accountant, outside administrator, outside bank, all of which have to look at something. And so by the scale of that, if you have 50 people looking at something, there'll always be a person of conscience that raises their hand and says, geez, I'm sorry, this doesn't work for me. But if you think of the Madoff fraud, Bernie Madoff, 30-plus-year fraud, There were 4 people working on it. If you think of the Sam Bankman-Fried fraud, 2 years, 3 years, whatever it was, there was only 4 of them working on it.

Interesting.

And they shielded off the other people that had no clue what they were doing.

Right.

Yeah.

And so I learned, you know, unfortunately I learned that lesson the hard way, but that's a lesson I like talking about 'cause I don't want other people to go through what SkyBridge and I myself ended up going through with Sam.

Yeah, and you had some tough, very tough times because of it, but you've already proven that SkyBridge is coming out more than successful from, you know, that happening.

For now.

For now.

I mean, who the hell knows?

For now, but you kept going.

I like the world with Bitcoin at $72,000 a lot more than it's $17,000.

I think we all do.

I could tell you that, okay?

But I think it's cool.

I'm having dyslexia. I was looking at $17,000. I was dreaming it would someday be $71,000.

And who would've thought it would happen so quickly?

Here it is, right? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. And so I think more people are under the impression that like the more you knew Sam, the more you were in on it. on like whatever was happening. But clearly that's not the case. Like, clearly almost the more you knew him, the more you were drawn into like this picture that he painted. And it felt real because of all of these things, you know?

Well, listen, you know, I sat through 4 and a half hours of testimony under oath. IRS, FBI, SEC, Department of Justice. I turned over my cell phones. I turned over my server from SkyBridge. So they had a look at every piece of information that transferred in and out of my phones. And I wasn't even inside the blast zone close enough to have them call me as a witness.

Right.

And so while that's exonerating, it still doesn't take away the stain or the tar of being that closely associated with them.

No, absolutely. I think these lessons are all very valuable for everyone looking on and following and also other investment firms who have gone through some tough times, including Cathie Wood, who we spoke about earlier. You know, when times are tough and you're a real visionary in this space, like you take risks and you still go for that cutting-edge tech and you're still gonna pick yourself back up and continue on. I mean, that's, it's just amazing. And it's amazing to hear your story.

But I think that's the lesson, right? I mean, so you get fired from the White House, shut up, dust yourself off, go back to work. You're teamed up with Sam Bankman-Fried, and Bitcoin goes down 80%, shut up, dust yourself off and go back to work. I think the problem that happens to a lot of people is they hang on bad decisions and they say, oh my God, if I had gone left as opposed to right, my life would be so much better. Woe is me. I think the real message is everybody makes good and bad decisions.

Oh, absolutely. All the time. And how you continue forward is what matters.

And you gotta drop it. You know, you gotta take the millstone of regret in your life and you gotta drop it and you gotta put it down and you gotta go forward without it. Otherwise it weighs down everything that you're doing and it'll make you miserable. You know, you, you, you're gonna live a life of shoulds and coulds as opposed to a life of what is.

Right.

And, and then you gotta enjoy the what is, whatever the aspect of it is. You know, as long as you're out there trying, what's happening to you is some of it's inside of your control. But a lot of it's outside of your control, you know?

Right. And as long as you just, you know, keep going and you embrace the technology, you understand that it has volatility and that there's gonna be times where there's, like Warren Buffett said, you know, there's ups and there's downs and, you know, you just kind of have that long-term outlook on the market. So.

So, you know, it's interesting you bring up Buffett because if you follow him and you read what he has written and he won't, 90-plus years old. He's never written a book, but he feels he's written enough annual reports where he's explaining to you what he did and how he did it. There are 3 things I always think about. Number one, never bet against the United States. You have to see through the noise. You have to recognize that the United States is this amazing risk-taking culture, and it's got flaws, like every country has flaws, and there might be some Polarization today, but there's always an undercurrent of opportunity and innovation and entrepreneurship and long-term growth. And so don't bet against the United States. Number 2, the volatility can be your friend.

Right.

You know, as long as you understand what you're doing, if you have high conviction and you're willing to stay in things, okay? That's why I think I said to Anthony Pompliano, you gotta act like you're dead with Bitcoin. You know, like, Like the dead people at Charles Schwab, they do better than the living people.

Yeah.

They don't look at their accounts.

Yeah, they don't look at them. They don't stress about the dip.

So there you go. So, you know, I mean, I had this situation where I had money I put away, I think $1,000 by accident, by the way, I put $1,000 into my son's account when he was born in Microsoft. And it's 32 years later, I think it was worth $70,000 when I found the account. But I'm here to tell you that I would've sold that 10 times before it would've gotten there.

That's a really good point. I think like— Okay.

And so, but I didn't even know it existed.

Yep.

They finally found the account.

It was there.

They called me and they said, hey, you got this money. It's in trust for your son. You know, and I, and I'm telling you, that was a great company. It meandered for about 10 years, you know, during the bomber years, it didn't perform well.

Right.

But it had a great, or it had a great long-term franchise.

Right.

And so the message there was stick with it. If you look at Amazon, Amazon has had 8 periods of time where it's corrected at least 50%. There was one period of time it went down almost 90%.

Yeah.

If you just hung in there, you had this amazing investment. And I think Bitcoin, I'll say this about Bitcoin, it shouldn't trade at a market capitalization of a company. It should trade at a market capitalization of an entire asset class.

Which it is.

And so, so if Bitcoin right now is $1.5 trillion, there are companies that are worth $1.5 trillion.

Oh yeah.

But, you know, gold is probably $16 trillion now because of the recent price rise. And so even if Bitcoin got to half of the price of gold, it's $8 trillion. You're at $1.5 trillion.

Yep.

That's a 5, 5.75 move from here. So that, that asset could easily trade to $350,000. You could invite me back on your podcast and I could say it's undervalued.

Yeah.

In terms of where it is going as an asset class.

And if you have that conviction on where it's going, just all you're missing is the timeframe. And that's people's problem is they wanna know now, they wanna know what the price will be next month. I help consult for portfolios and, you know, coach people who are getting involved in crypto. And it's just, you know, the more you pay attention to it, the more you come in and out, the more you lose. I think Michael Saylor said it, it's like 1% of traders make great money and the rest lose. I mean, it's all about investing for the long term. If you're saying it's gonna be half the market cap of gold, or as Michael Saylor says, will probably overtake gold in value over time, depending on how you look at it, well then there's your answer, right?

But it may be better than gold, right? Because it's, you can't really move gold over the—

It's most definitely better than gold.

Yeah, well, I'm saying it facetiously, right? Could you analyze any different— technical aspect or the technical properties of it. You can move it, it's easier to store, you can transact in it quickly if that's a decision that you're gonna— the world goes in.

Yeah.

And gold is something you can't do any of that with. I'm not betting against gold though, by the way. Gold has a 5,000-year track record. So I'm not gonna be this supercilious, arrogant person that says, gold has been put out to pasture by Bitcoin. I do believe that there will be people buying gold 100 years from now.

Yeah.

And perceiving it as a store of value. All I'm saying is that Bitcoin is going to mature as an asset class and it's going to make that transition. And so when it makes that transition, there'll be Wall Street analysts describing it as an asset class and they'll say, okay, this is, we have gold, physical gold, and we have digital gold. Which is known as Bitcoin.

Right.

And I think people will accept that. They'll be teaching that at business school. They'll be teaching that in an asset allocation class or in an investment class somewhere over the next 10 to 15 years.

Absolutely. And I'm of that camp too. I remember a podcast with Mark Cuban. He, I forget who the guy's name that he was on with, but he's like, if you own gold, you're dumb as fuck. And they had this thing and I'm just like, okay, I think it's smart to be in your camp. You know, it's been an asset class that's been around since, you know, forever, and people are still embracing it that way, and that it doesn't necessarily have to replace gold. It's digital portable property that you can take with you anywhere around the world in any jurisdiction, and it's like true ownership rights for the first time in human history.

I was, I was with one of my Saudi friends who's been a client of mine forever, and he was like, Anthony, I've heard you on TV, you say that Bitcoin is digital gold. And I said, yes, Sheikh, I have said that. He says, well, you know what? It's better than gold. He says, let me tell you something. I have a USB. It's about this big. It's about the size of a quarter. It's got $200 million of Bitcoin on it. Right now, everybody here in Saudi Arabia and leadership, they love me, okay? But someday they may not, okay? And let me tell you, I'm gonna put this USB where the sun doesn't shine. I'm gonna be heading for the Yemeni border Okay, and you can't move $200 million worth of gold like that. And I mean, he put it fairly succinctly and—

It's that simple.

And plaintively, but I mean, that's one of the big reasons why this is gonna be with us for our lifetimes.

Yeah, and I know that you've referred to it on some interviews as a digital store of value. And then others like Tim Draper that we've discussed believe that the world will eventually evolve into the Bitcoin standard where he's accepting it for his Draper School as, you know, monetary value and as a medium of exchange. Where do you think Bitcoin will end up long-term?

So I'm not smart enough. I hope Tim is right. I hope Saifedean Ammous, The Bitcoin Standard writer, is right, but I'm not smart enough. And all I'm saying is it just has to trade to half of the market capitalization of gold. The third thing I was gonna mention about Buffett as I was going through my 3 things is the margin of safety. Okay, so Buffett doesn't like Bitcoin, but I make the case that when these guys say they don't like Bitcoin, it's because they really just haven't done the homework on it. I was a Bitcoin skeptic. Michael Saylor, believe it or not, was a Bitcoin skeptic. I find when you do the homework, it's a one-way ticket towards Bitcoin. And so when I hear people talking about it, And they say negative things about them. I'm like, all right, this person, man or woman, hasn't read the white paper.

Hasn't done their homework.

Hasn't read the research. Hasn't gone down the rabbit hole. Hasn't talked to people in countries outside of the United States. So you remember traditional finance people are dollar-centric people. And so while the dollar's lost 22% of its value in the last 4 years, it has been the world's reserve currency for their entire lifetimes. dating back to the Second World War. And so if you're a dollar-centric person, you may be a little blindsided to that.

Right.

If you're living in Africa or you're living in Latin America where they punish the money way worse than we do here in the West, we do our requisite share of punishing the money, but they do way worse job down there. And so, you know, then you say, okay, maybe Draper's gonna be right. But I'm saying, I don't know. I would love to have him be right, but if it's just half of the market capitalization of gold over the next 10 years, a $70,000 asset goes to $350,000 to $400,000. And I think there's a margin of safety in it, meaning you don't have to be where Tim is to get this right as an investment thesis.

I think that's a really great summary.

Yeah.

If you get to where Tim is, then of course we'll be on Tim's yacht somewhere. Hopefully he'll invite us. You know what I mean?

He kind of gave that example as like—

But we don't have to get there, you know?

I love where you stand on this because it's, albeit, a more conservative bet, if you even can call it that. I mean, who knows where it'll actually end up, but I think that's a good 10-year bet, right? Like, where can we be in the next decade and how can we get there? So I like that approach. I think Tim said that because he invested in the 30,000 Bitcoin that he got off the Silk Road way back when, and he was thinking, well, and his investment immediately went down by 50%.

Of course.

So he felt like the stupidest guy in the room, he said, and he's like, well, I invested this in this asset, either thinking it would go to zero or would become everything, and that's it. So it's an interesting mentality. People who are in it for the long term are clearly gonna win, and that's what it is.

Yeah, well, listen, and I applaud him, and he was great to me back in 2018 and '19. He spent a lot of time with me helping me get up to speed with the asset. And so I see him as a Bitcoin evangelist.

Yeah, and you've done a phenomenal job at SkyBridge. Walk us through then where we are now in the market. I saw something about Plan B on your Twitter, so I'm assuming that you've had a look at some of his models as well. He says that, I think, I believe it was the 6 months up to the Bitcoin halving was typically the best time to buy, and then the 18 months up to 18 months later is the best time to sell. So where do you think we're at now? The ETFs have just launched, and you have some phenomenal stats on that, by the way. It's been one of the best, it is the best performing asset in human history.

The best performing asset in human history, the best launch of an ETF in human history. But I, and I, you know, the real question is, and I love Plan B and I've interviewed him, he's been on my podcast.

Yes.

We're friends. But I think the real question is, is it, is his stock-to-flow model or other technical models being skewed by the ETF? And so I think the answer to that is yes, because I'm a Wall Streeter. And so what do we know about Wall Street? Wall Street sells product.

Right.

Okay. Product is sold on Wall Street, not bought. And so when Fidelity, BlackRock, ARK Asset Management, they enter the ETF space, they've got people picking up the phone, calling consultants, calling asset managers, calling garden variety wirehouse financial— analysts and saying, or financial associates and saying, hey, please, Mr. Financial Advisor, buy 1% allocation to Bitcoin. Do it through our ETF. It's low cost. We'll store it for you. It's got a CUSIP number. It can go right on your client statement, et cetera, et cetera. And so what Wall Street does is it gins up this huge selling machine. And you're seeing that right now in a very small way.

Right.

Because wirehouses haven't come into it. Registered investment advisors haven't come into it. Large-scale institutions have not really started buying it. Now, granted, there are sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East that have started buying it, but by and large, there's an untapped pool of several trillion dollars of assets that could enter the space. And if that happens, then me saying that there's a 50% market capitalization of gold will be very low. But I just want people to recognize where we are right now. These prices, if you overlay the macro environment, these prices are light. And again, look at Nvidia, look at Amazon.

Right.

Look at Facebook. When they start scaling and they scale exponentially, And they take full advantage of Metcalfe's Law, full advantage of the networking effects, they move quickly. I think Nvidia's up 6 times in the last 18 months.

That's insane. It's wild. It's wild. And we're certainly at an inflection point in the industry. So now first quarter, can you give us some stats on the inflows, your thoughts on how the halving is going to affect the price of Bitcoin?

So it's just under $15 billion. which is a staggering amount of money. Just to put it into context, the gold ETF, it took 12 months to get to $10 billion. So that meant there were a tremendous amount of fence-sitters on Bitcoin, tremendous amount of pent-up demand. And so you do have this flood of capital coming out of the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. And so we can be Monday morning quarterbacks and say, geez, maybe if they price that a little lower, they would've seen less movement. But I think you're finding, and I don't know this analysis empirically, but I think you are finding a lot of that money has drifted out of the Grayscale Trust and gone into these 11 lower-cost ETFs.

Right.

And so the real question is, where is demand right now on a scale of 1 to 10? And I would say that demand on a scale of 1 to 10 is about a 1.5.

1.5, that's where we're at. That's so crazy. We're still at the beginning.

Yeah, because it's retail investors.

Is retail even here fully, you know?

Well, judging by Google searches and judging by the atmosphere in places like Twitter or Instagram, I would say no. It is starting to tick up. But judging by price movement, um, there, you know, there's a lot of retail people that are buying the Bitcoin ETF. There's a lot of retail people that are getting more focused on it, but I think it's a blend of retailers and a blend of institutions, but it's a small percentage.

Very small.

It's not the big-time consultants. You know, when a big pension fund or big pension consultant comes out with a tactical asset allocation model that has 1% exposure to Bitcoin or 2% exposure to Bitcoin, then you'll really see—

You start doing those numbers and then it's just like—

You'll just see this monolithic demand. But remember this, if you're a consultant and you want to differentiate yourself from your peer group, you're going to recommend Bitcoin.

Absolutely.

Because you're going to want your client to get invested, right? You want to get your client off zero.

Right.

You're not going to say put 20% of your money in it, but you're going to say, you know, we want to have a 1% or 2% exposure. And now you put pressure on all these other portfolios, right?

Right.

'Cause remember these guys, like I said, it's like a match sailing race. They all get in an index, they hover around the index. So if my index has Bitcoin in it and yours doesn't, and I'm doing better than you because mine has Bitcoin in it, what do you think's gonna happen?

Yeah, people are gonna gravitate toward the winners. They're gonna gravitate. You know, get an outsized return.

100%.

Absolutely. So there's like, what, 900 Bitcoin being mined Right now as before the halving. So per day after the halving, what's that going to look like?

Well, so on or about April 20th, we're going to go from 900 Bitcoin a day to 450. A lot of people get confused about this, so I want to make the distinction. It doesn't mean the supply of Bitcoin gets cut in half. It means the amount of Bitcoin that's being produced by the network on a daily basis gets cut in half. So there's still a few percentage points left of Bitcoin that has yet to be mined. And that halving cycle will take place through now through 2140.

Right, well into the future.

Right, so you got 120 years or 30 more halvings, if you will, before you get to the end of the Bitcoin game.

How many Scaramouche's is that?

I don't know, we could figure it out though.

It's a lot.

Many thousands of Scaramucci. But the point I'm making is that this is a process that will mathematically make the incremental Bitcoin more scarce.

Right.

So let's say I'm Robbie Mitchnick at BlackRock and I've got $500 million of create, meaning people are calling me and saying, create $500 million worth of Bitcoin. of Bitcoin. I now have to go into the marketplace. I gotta call Coinbase or crypto.com or whatever trading it for me and say, hey, I need to source today a half a billion dollars of Bitcoin. Well, let's say Bitcoin's trading at $100,000. Just use easy math. That was $90 million.

Okay.

And then all of a sudden the $90 million is going to $400— I'm sorry, the $90 million is going to $45 million.

Right.

So you could have $400 or $500 $400 or $500 billion worth of demand, but have only $45 million being produced by the network. So you have to find the Bitcoin from someplace.

Right.

And if it's supply constrained, what happens in markets? Well, bid up.

Price goes up.

Yep. You know what?

Yep.

You don't wanna sell your Bitcoin at 70? Larry Fink's on the line, he wants to buy your Bitcoin. You don't wanna sell it at 70? What about 80?

Yep.

What about 90? What about $100? Oh, you're a seller at $100? Larry, you wanna buy some at $100? Well, I actually have to because I have $500 million of cash right now that I'm obligated to convert into Bitcoin.

Right. No, and that's what's gonna—

So to not see this, to not to see the asymmetrical nature of this trade, it's either you're not paying attention, you were told by Jamie Dimon that Bitcoin's a pet rock, And so therefore you're not doing the homework on it.

Right.

Or you think it's— there was an author, he wrote his book about Sam Bankman-Fried, Number Go Up, which is, oh, it's just a greater fool multi-level marketing scheme.

Right. We've heard that one a lot.

Right. Number Go Up. Okay. But then you don't really understand the network and then you don't understand what Professor Metcalfe said about the value of a network, right? Testifying 35 years ago to the Congress, he said, hey, one fax machine's not worth anything, but if I got hundreds of thousands of fax machines linked together, it's an information superhighway. The network itself becomes very valuable. And now look at Bitcoin.

I look at it.

You know, Bitcoin's got, you tell me the number of wallets, but let's call it 300 million wallets. You know, it's very, very small percentage of the overall people of the world, right? And it's tracking to like 1998 of where the web was in terms of adoption.

Only much faster, right?

Much faster, right? But I'm just saying, I just want you to imagine the world. Like I said the other day, you can't— I can't predict the future for you. I can't tell you if you're going to have it on your phone, you're going to be buying a Starbucks with Bitcoin. Can't predict the future. But I can observe the past. I can take you back To 1998, where if we were having this podcast, uh, probably couldn't have the podcast, by the way, because there weren't smartphones and couldn't deliver the information.

Right.

But I'm just saying, we're doing this interview in 1998. We were on fat box computers. We had dial-up modems under our desk, and they would whir and burr to get the dial tone. And then it would take 35 seconds for our landing pages to arrive. On the internet, and maybe mine was AOL.

I remember that dial-up provider.

Yours was Prodigy or whatever. And we had an email account and we could buy a PEZ gun from eBay or a book from Amazon. But imagine coming in 25 years later and saying, well, you know what? This thing that we're calling Web1, there's going to be pipes that are so wide that we're going to have trillions of dollars of transactions happen over the internet. Moreover, we're gonna have billions of people watching 4K video, playing video games like Fortnite or Call of Duty.

Right.

They're gonna, they're gonna stream Netflix. They're gonna do all of this on this wide bandwidth. They're gonna have, you know, billions of people interacting with each other on social media over this thing that we're calling the internet.

Unimaginable at that time.

I don't think it's imaginable. And people would've scoffed at you.

Same place we're at now. And it's once in a generation opportunity that you will miss if you don't do the homework, as you say.

Same place we're at now.

Your price prediction for this year, $170,000 Bitcoin.

Yeah, so I want to be clear. So I've gotten this wrong and I've ended up in the public dunking square. I've been dunked in the water for getting it wrong because I said $100,000. By first quarter of 2022. Got it wrong. I believe we get to $100,000 this year, but I believe we get to $170,000 in the cycle. So you mentioned Plan B, best time to buy is before the halving, and then people can liquidate after the halving into an up sort of slope. Typically after a halving, you go 4x.

Right.

The price from where it was at the halving. And so Let's say it halves in 2 weeks, we're at $70,000. You know, people will say, all right, 18 months from now it should be $280,000. So I just use the number that it was on the day of the ETF.

Okay.

And I said, okay, here's the day of the ETF, let's multiply that by 4, count the halving in, that's $170,000. And if this asset goes from 70 To $170,000. It started the year at 40 plus, I guess. 40, you'd have to do the math. I think it was 44 or something like that. I'm not sure, but—

I think it was just under that.

Yeah. All right. But you know, if you go from 40 to $100,000, that's a big move.

Yeah, it's massive.

Okay. And if you go from $100,000 to $170,000, still a big move.

It's insane. It's, uh, it was just $6,000 in 2020, right?

Yeah. Like people have an opportunity to say, well, that's another thing. People get scared and say, wow, Why would I buy that? It's, it was $6,000 in 2020. It's now $70,000. It has to be too expensive.

Right.

Don't look at the price. Look at the slope and scale of the network. Look at the exponential growth in the network and you'll see why people are paying that.

That's absolutely what we discussed actually on a Spaces the other day. You have to join the next time about exponential growth. It was with Cathie Wood and Bill Tai and some, some really great people. And they were talking about like, this is the inflection point of the industry. And you so clearly are one of those leaders in this market. movement and thought leaders so involved in the financial sphere as well as, you know, now the crypto sphere and previously this political sphere. As we wrap this up, I want to talk about your book because it was, it's been really special getting to know you and you've given some descriptions on what it's been like to get dragged by the media. You even showed us a visual of it.

Mm-hmm.

About what happened when FTX happened and, you know, various other challenges in your career, including your 11-day stint in the White House. Um, so your book, Wall Street, From Wall Street to the White House and Back. I mean, you give some really valuable advice in this book. What would you say are some of the key takeaways or things that people can really get excited about?

So, you know, I don't wanna do the book too much of a, a disservice or anything like that, but I like simplifying things. I'd get it down to 3 things. Okay. Number one, you gotta build some really good habits for yourself. So, I mean, that's mindset habits in terms of your gratitude, how you think about life. And everybody's got problems. I have my share of problems. I'm certain that most people do. And I'm attracted to people that are willing to share their problems because I would like to help them solve their problems. And I go into a lot of my problems in that book. But number one, you have the right mindset and then you have to build the habits of success all off of that. No matter what's going on, whatever the vagaries or the, Volatility of your life or your personal or professional life. Second thing, which I think is really important, is you got to be accountable. So many people don't want to be accountable anymore. I got fired. Well, that was my boss's fault. This happened. Well, that was my spouse's fault. If you own your stuff, you are gonna put yourself in a position of leadership where people can rely on you because so many people. Or like the Scarecrow now in The Wizard of Oz, right? They're trying to point blame at other people.

Right.

So you wanna be accountable. And then the third thing, and this is the most central, you gotta keep going.

Well, just like you. I mean, you've proven that.

Yeah, you gotta keep going, man.

You gotta keep going.

You keep going and you reach incredible amounts of success and you can bounce back from anything, right?

Don't stop, you know?

Yeah.

And as long as it's not a health issue, which God forbid, unfortunately all of us eventually are gonna have a health issue. But as long as it's not a health issue, you can survive it. I think those are the messages from the book.

Absolutely. Well, I cannot wait to read this in full. I've already started reading this. Everybody go get your copy of From Wall Street to the White House and Back so you can learn about that 11-day stint in the White House, what Anthony's takeaways were from that. And I can't recommend this enough. I can't recommend you enough.

You can read the book in 0.2 Scaramuccis. Okay.

0.2 Scaramuccis. There we go. We measure in timeframes like that. And you'll know what we mean if you read the book. I'd have to say you're one of my favorite guests so far, just the way that you've been. And you're just so laid back and so willing to, to talk about those, you know, experiences in your life. I can't wait to catch up with you, hopefully in Dubai. Now it took in 2049.

2049. We'll invite you. We'll invite you guys to our— we're having a little cocktail party.

Oh, absolutely. So we're going to celebrate this around the world. Anthony, thank you so much for being here. It's been a real pleasure. We'll catch up again soon. Thank you.