Anthony Scaramucci's Resilience: Surviving Trump, FTX and Embracing Bitcoin

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[00:01:10] I've known Anthony Scaramucci for about 15 years.

[00:01:14] We had breakfast 15 years ago after his first book came out,

[00:01:17] and I had written a review of it in the Financial Times.

[00:01:21] You know, at different times we even thought about working together,

[00:01:24] and I'm talking like, you know, 10 years ago, 15 years ago.

[00:01:27] But always been a very interesting guy.

[00:01:29] Of course, I know him from the hedge fund world,

[00:01:31] but later on, much later, he got involved in the political world.

[00:01:35] And, I mean, it turns out he was always involved in the political world,

[00:01:37] but he became the communications director of the White House

[00:01:41] under Donald Trump for 11 days.

[00:01:43] And then he got fired, and then he came on my podcast after that

[00:01:48] to talk about, you know, then he was more campaigning for Biden.

[00:01:52] He kind of didn't like Trump.

[00:01:55] So the problem Anthony has is that both sides of the aisle don't like him.

[00:02:02] Everybody who's a Democrat thinks, remembers him as a Trump guy.

[00:02:06] And the Trump people hate him because he trashes Trump.

[00:02:08] So I like it when people can't figure out what they really are.

[00:02:12] But love him or hate him, Anthony Scaramucci has been in the middle

[00:02:16] of all the top news events of the past 10, 15 years,

[00:02:21] from Trump to being involved with FTX.

[00:02:23] FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried tried to buy Anthony's firm, Skybridge,

[00:02:28] and bought a stake in it, and that's part of the whole

[00:02:31] kind of bankruptcy proceedings.

[00:02:33] He just wrote a book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back.

[00:02:38] It's the Scaramucci Guide to Unbreakable Resilience.

[00:02:41] And we start off by talking, why do people either love him or hate him?

[00:02:45] And I point out that this is an interesting thing for books.

[00:02:51] So the worst thing you could have is three-star reviews.

[00:02:54] You want to have a lot of five-star reviews and a lot of one-star reviews.

[00:02:58] So you know that you really had an impact on people one way or the other.

[00:03:01] And that's like how he is as a person.

[00:03:04] I feel like that's how I am a little bit sometimes.

[00:03:07] And, you know, so we had a good conversation.

[00:03:10] He's been a friend for a long time.

[00:03:12] Here's Anthony Scaramucci.

[00:03:14] This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host.

[00:03:23] This is The James Altucher Show.

[00:03:36] Where are you calling in from?

[00:03:38] So I'm on Long Island today.

[00:03:41] How's Skybridge doing?

[00:03:43] Well, I mean, we're doing terrifically this year.

[00:03:46] We, you know, they wrote my obituary after the FTX debacle,

[00:03:50] but we're only up about 200% from then.

[00:03:53] So, you know, I made a very big investment in Bitcoin.

[00:03:56] So that's the reason why we're really empowered up, you know.

[00:03:59] I feel like people have been writing your obituary for the past 17 years.

[00:04:04] I'm not really sure why, though.

[00:04:05] I mean, I have a lot of people that, I mean, I breed haters.

[00:04:09] Well, let's talk about that because I think some people do breed haters

[00:04:14] and others don't.

[00:04:15] Like you don't have to be, let's say you're rich and famous.

[00:04:18] People think, oh, that breeds haters.

[00:04:21] But no, I know a lot of rich and famous people who go about their business

[00:04:26] and nobody seems to like trash them that much.

[00:04:29] You, though, people love to hate you, and they don't get their facts right ever.

[00:04:33] Like probably half the country still thinks you're working for Trump,

[00:04:35] for instance, and nobody knows it.

[00:04:38] If you're a left-leaning person, like ultra-left,

[00:04:41] you could have worked one minute for Trump, 11 days for Trump,

[00:04:45] one second for Trump.

[00:04:47] They hate you.

[00:04:48] You know, my son told a great story.

[00:04:50] Are we live right now? I can keep going.

[00:04:51] Yeah, yeah.

[00:04:52] My son told a great story the other day.

[00:04:54] He was in LA and he was in a restaurant and he was talking

[00:04:59] and somebody said, well, you're Anthony Scaramucci's son.

[00:05:02] And he said, yes, but I'm also Anthony Scaramucci because he's junior.

[00:05:07] And these two women looked at him with revulsion

[00:05:10] and they requested from the maitre d' to have their table moved

[00:05:14] because they were sitting next to him.

[00:05:16] Do you love that?

[00:05:17] It has almost like an atomic bomb effect, but it's fine.

[00:05:22] I mean, I don't know.

[00:05:23] People can do that.

[00:05:24] I totally believe that.

[00:05:25] And of course, it's a cliche now to say the country's gotten more polarized

[00:05:29] than ever.

[00:05:30] I mean, it's been polarized in the past, like 1968,

[00:05:33] like obviously the Civil War.

[00:05:34] But I do see people, I have seen the moving table phenomenon before.

[00:05:38] Even people who are like talking about two different political candidates,

[00:05:41] they can't sit in tables near each other.

[00:05:43] It's crazy, right?

[00:05:44] It is.

[00:05:45] But let's, why do you think people like to hate you?

[00:05:48] Like, do you think it's like one particular thing that you did

[00:05:52] or is it like, you know what it is?

[00:05:54] You're a little bit, you're very New York in an ethnic Italian way.

[00:05:59] Maybe people don't like that.

[00:06:01] I'm just guessing anything.

[00:06:03] I'm not a conformist.

[00:06:04] I think when you talk about people that are rich and famous

[00:06:07] that are conformists, no problem.

[00:06:10] Tom Hanks, no problem.

[00:06:12] He's way more famous than me.

[00:06:13] He's probably richer, but no problem.

[00:06:16] But somebody like me, I don't actually give a shit.

[00:06:18] You allowed a curse on this podcast?

[00:06:19] Yeah, yeah.

[00:06:20] Yeah, I mean, I actually don't give it.

[00:06:21] You're encouraged to curse.

[00:06:22] Yes, I actually don't give a shit, James.

[00:06:25] And so I haven't conformed to any norms on Wall Street.

[00:06:29] I haven't conformed to any norms in politics.

[00:06:32] I'm not, you know, so you were, you know, like another thing has been said

[00:06:36] about my children, like, Dad, you're killing my networking opportunities.

[00:06:39] You were with Trump so the Democrats hate your guts.

[00:06:42] You left Trump so the Republicans hate your guts.

[00:06:45] You're really hurting my networking opportunities.

[00:06:48] And I look at them, I'm like, well, maybe I'm getting closer to the truth.

[00:06:51] My point, James, I don't give a shit.

[00:06:54] I actually took what my grandmother said seriously when she insisted

[00:07:00] and the quote was, what other people think of you is none of your business.

[00:07:05] I actually thought that that was the right approach, so I don't care.

[00:07:09] Have you always felt that way though?

[00:07:10] Like, I think there's been points probably where you really did care

[00:07:13] what people thought.

[00:07:14] As a kid, I didn't, and I think it's impossible to suggest

[00:07:20] that you don't care in general.

[00:07:23] Of course you care.

[00:07:24] When I got fired and I was getting destroyed in the media,

[00:07:27] it did bother me.

[00:07:28] I'm not going to bullshit you, but it didn't cause me to change my way of being.

[00:07:34] I have not conformed myself to the style boxes that I'm supposed to sit in.

[00:07:40] You see what I'm saying?

[00:07:41] Yeah, I mean, people forget I did go to these schools.

[00:07:45] I do have a degree.

[00:07:46] I am a well-read guy.

[00:07:48] If you're trying to two-dimensionalize me as an ethnic Italian from Long Island,

[00:07:53] you may miss a few beats.

[00:07:56] No, I think that's right.

[00:07:57] I think people easily stereotype.

[00:07:59] By the way, just to mention, in your latest book,

[00:08:02] From Wall Street to the White House and Back, there's even a reading list,

[00:08:05] and you quote many different authors.

[00:08:08] It's funny, this story.

[00:08:11] This is not quite an author.

[00:08:12] It's more a movie, but when you tell a story of traveling with Trump

[00:08:16] on day five of the presidency, and you're helping this expert

[00:08:20] explain the Palestinian-Israel situation to him,

[00:08:23] and you use Lawrence of Arabia to kind of get the point across

[00:08:26] that the expert was trying to get across.

[00:08:28] Well, the point I was trying to make is you've got to read your audience.

[00:08:31] Trump does not want to be lectured to.

[00:08:34] So he's probably the most insecure person I've ever met in my life,

[00:08:39] and so this requires him to always be right.

[00:08:42] It requires him never to be in a room where he thinks he doesn't know something.

[00:08:47] Like you can't sit there and tell him the difference between a Shia

[00:08:51] and a Sunni.

[00:08:52] That would really piss him off because he wants you to think that he knows

[00:08:56] what the difference is, you know?

[00:08:58] And so the relevant point in the story was the national security expert

[00:09:03] was trying to tell him about the Sykes-Picot Treaty,

[00:09:07] which was the treaty that the British and the French negotiated

[00:09:11] with the Ottoman Empire upon their departure from the Middle East

[00:09:15] as they were pulling out of there after the Second World War,

[00:09:18] and it was a very racist treaty, I might add,

[00:09:21] and they created these imaginary countries like Syria and Iraq,

[00:09:26] and they divided them in a way so that there would always be

[00:09:29] a border dispute in the region.

[00:09:31] And so the expert was trying to explain to Trump what David Frumkin wrote

[00:09:35] in his book The Peace to End All Peace,

[00:09:38] and he was lecturing Trump and he was being somewhat pedantic.

[00:09:42] Trump obviously didn't know what the F he was talking about,

[00:09:45] and he shut him down, and he got very rude with him.

[00:09:50] And so I waited about an hour.

[00:09:52] It was a long flight to L.A. We were doing a fundraiser.

[00:09:55] I waited about an hour, and then I said to Trump casually,

[00:10:00] oh, do you remember the movie Lawrence of Arabia?

[00:10:03] I said, ah, with Peter O'Toole.

[00:10:05] I said, yeah.

[00:10:06] I said, do you remember what the movie was about?

[00:10:09] Eh, not really, but I loved the movie.

[00:10:11] It was great.

[00:10:12] And then I explained to him what the movie was about,

[00:10:14] which was ultimately the clash of the different tribes

[00:10:18] as a result of them arguing over the border disputes.

[00:10:22] And it was a way to get into Trump's brain what was going on.

[00:10:26] I also, you know, when the trade issues came up,

[00:10:31] he was always questioning, well, why did the U.S. do this

[00:10:34] or why did the U.S. do that?

[00:10:36] And I had to explain to him, listen, we set the trade

[00:10:40] to be uneven in the beginning.

[00:10:41] We had 2.5% of the world's population, 65% of the world's output.

[00:10:46] The United States was trying to create rising living standards

[00:10:50] around the world to foment peace and prosperity.

[00:10:54] Now maybe we needed to make an adjustment on that,

[00:10:57] and I think to be fair to Trump on that one issue,

[00:11:01] the Chinese did take advantage of that trade policy

[00:11:04] that we put in place.

[00:11:05] But you can't get to him without telling him a story.

[00:11:10] He's not the type of person that is intellectually secure

[00:11:15] where you could actually tell him something that he doesn't know

[00:11:18] and he'll ask you questions about it in a way that would indicate

[00:11:21] that he had intellectual security.

[00:11:23] Now, you know, and look, you write about this in your book,

[00:11:29] and I'll do an intro later describing the book more fully,

[00:11:32] but you've been on a fascinating journey basically since,

[00:11:36] I mean, your whole life, but since 2016, I mean,

[00:11:40] you were essentially the communications director

[00:11:43] for like five minutes, 11 days specifically.

[00:11:46] And you've been running your hedge fund, but also the whole FTX thing

[00:11:52] where on the downside, you were buddies with Sam Bankman,

[00:11:59] whatever his name, Freedman.

[00:12:01] Sam Bankman, Freed, yep.

[00:12:03] Freed, and you're a huge supporter of Bitcoin.

[00:12:06] So the downside was FTX.

[00:12:08] The upside is you've really called it on Bitcoin,

[00:12:12] and so I want to ask you about that.

[00:12:13] But just the 11 days in the White House,

[00:12:16] why did he fire you after 11 days?

[00:12:18] Like what happened?

[00:12:19] Well, you know.

[00:12:20] Or John Kelly, like the whole thing.

[00:12:22] Yeah, well, listen to me.

[00:12:23] If you got General Kelly on, he would tell you,

[00:12:25] I didn't get fired because of what I said about Steve Bannon,

[00:12:28] which was probably one of the funniest things that's ever been said

[00:12:31] from the White House actually.

[00:12:33] In fact, Trump liked that.

[00:12:35] You know, Trump has a potty mouth.

[00:12:36] He thought it was funny.

[00:12:37] I got fired because I was fighting with Trump.

[00:12:41] I got fired because there were a couple of issues that came up,

[00:12:44] and he called me a deep stater.

[00:12:47] And he said, oh, I thought you were working for me,

[00:12:49] but you're really a deep stater.

[00:12:51] I was like, well, first of all, this deep state nonsense

[00:12:54] is a bunch of nonsense.

[00:12:55] And then secondarily, I'm obviously not a deep stater.

[00:12:58] I'm a kid from Long Island that never worked in the government.

[00:13:02] But I did swear an oath to the Constitution,

[00:13:04] and I do respect the institution of the office

[00:13:09] that you're there to serve the American people.

[00:13:11] I wasn't necessarily there to serve Trump.

[00:13:13] He may have been my boss, but if there was something he wanted to do,

[00:13:17] like divulge national security secrets

[00:13:20] or let loose confidential information that the country has held

[00:13:25] for purposes of keeping our agents safe around the world,

[00:13:29] I was not going to be for that.

[00:13:32] And so even if he was for that,

[00:13:34] and so there was a couple of things like that happened.

[00:13:36] Next thing you know, I was fired.

[00:13:38] And that's fine.

[00:13:40] I mean, I'm a big boy.

[00:13:41] I never blamed my firing on anybody other than myself.

[00:13:45] If you read the book or you've listened to any of my interviews,

[00:13:48] why did you get fired?

[00:13:49] Well, I did things that the president didn't like.

[00:13:52] He fired me.

[00:13:53] It was my fault to be fired.

[00:13:55] I hold myself accountable.

[00:13:57] But I never let it define me.

[00:13:59] I think that's an important part of the story.

[00:14:02] You talk about people writing your obituary.

[00:14:05] I mean, a lot of people say, oh, he's disgraced himself by working for Trump

[00:14:09] and then he got fired by Trump, so he's done.

[00:14:11] It's over when you say it's over, James.

[00:14:14] You know that.

[00:14:15] I've read your stuff.

[00:14:16] I follow you.

[00:14:17] I listen to your podcast.

[00:14:18] It's over when you say it's over.

[00:14:20] It's not over when somebody else says it's over.

[00:14:23] And I think that's an important thing.

[00:14:25] You were also very kind.

[00:14:26] You probably don't even remember this, but 14 years ago my first book I wrote

[00:14:30] about was called Goodbye, Gordon Gekko.

[00:14:32] You wrote a very nice book.

[00:14:33] Of course I remember, yeah.

[00:14:35] I wrote in the Financial Times.

[00:14:37] I really enjoyed the book.

[00:14:39] You wrote a very nice review, but that was an honest story about growing up

[00:14:45] clueless and not knowing how to dress, not knowing how to, you know.

[00:14:51] My first time inside of a commercial office building was my callback

[00:14:55] interview to Goldman Sachs.

[00:14:57] I had never been inside of a country club's locker room.

[00:15:01] I don't know how to play golf.

[00:15:02] I don't know how to hit a tennis ball.

[00:15:04] My dad was a laborer.

[00:15:06] He grew into a crane operator, but I didn't have any of the, you know,

[00:15:13] customary secret handshakes or whatever the BS is.

[00:15:17] I didn't know anything about any of this stuff, you know.

[00:15:20] And so I've been in – I'm not even an outer borough person, right?

[00:15:24] You know, like Trump is an insecure guy.

[00:15:26] He's an outer borough person.

[00:15:28] I'm not even from the outer boroughs.

[00:15:30] I'm from Nassau County.

[00:15:31] I mean that's even like – it's another quantum electron orbit away

[00:15:35] from the action.

[00:15:36] You follow what I'm saying?

[00:15:37] So I'm quintessentially an outsider.

[00:15:40] The difference between a guy like me or Donald Trump is I don't mind

[00:15:43] being an outsider, you know.

[00:15:45] Trump couldn't get into Deepdale, which is a very famous country club

[00:15:48] out here, so he built 18 golf courses, you know.

[00:15:51] I got to show you guys.

[00:15:53] I didn't get into Deepdale.

[00:15:54] I mean they probably wanted me to landscape the fucking place, you know.

[00:15:57] I didn't get into Deepdale.

[00:15:58] I laughed.

[00:15:59] I said, okay, no big deal.

[00:16:00] I'll go to another golf course.

[00:16:01] You follow what I'm saying?

[00:16:03] You either know who you are and you're comfortable in your own skin

[00:16:07] or you drive yourself crazy.

[00:16:09] You got to make that decision, you know.

[00:16:50] And keep your flower beds fresh with the 40-volt cordless string trimmer.

[00:16:54] Then clear debris with the 40-volt jet fan leaf blower.

[00:16:59] Click into Memorial Day savings happening now at your cordless power source,

[00:17:03] The Home Depot.

[00:17:04] How doers get more done.

[00:17:08] Earning your degree online doesn't mean you have to go about it alone.

[00:17:11] At Capella University, we're here to support you when you're ready.

[00:17:15] From enrollment counselors who get to know you and your goals

[00:17:18] to academic coaches who can help you form a plan to stay on track.

[00:17:22] We care about your success and are dedicated to helping you pursue your goals.

[00:17:27] Going back to school is a big step,

[00:17:29] but having support at every step of your academic journey

[00:17:32] can make a big difference.

[00:17:34] Imagine your future differently at capella.edu.

[00:17:40] I think it's hard.

[00:17:41] I think what most people do, and I would say probably what I do,

[00:17:44] is I do care what people think,

[00:17:47] and I try very hard not to care what people think.

[00:17:50] I don't know if we were live, you mentioned, quote-unquote,

[00:17:53] my friend Jerry Seinfeld just turned 70.

[00:17:56] I cared what people thought after his article came out,

[00:17:59] and I was upset.

[00:18:00] A lot of people were so angry at me,

[00:18:02] and it took a while to build resilience.

[00:18:06] And I've had other situations similar in the past

[00:18:09] where I have to individually build resilience for each situation.

[00:18:14] But a lot of times I probably care too much.

[00:18:16] This is the reason why I admire you.

[00:18:18] I think that that piece that you wrote about New York

[00:18:24] was a seminal piece.

[00:18:25] Whether you agreed with that piece

[00:18:27] or you didn't agree with the piece,

[00:18:29] it was basically a wake-up call to your fellow New Yorkers

[00:18:34] about what is happening and what could happen

[00:18:38] if we don't get our stuff together.

[00:18:40] And by the way, I'm talking to you on a great day for New York

[00:18:45] because the fact that the NYPD went in and cleaned up

[00:18:50] the acts of insanity and stupidity

[00:18:54] that were going on at Columbia University,

[00:18:57] I think is a great sign that perhaps maybe the pendulum

[00:19:00] is going to swing back into the middle.

[00:19:02] New Yorkers don't like buying their cosmetics

[00:19:07] or their toothpaste and toothbrushes behind plastic.

[00:19:11] They don't like it, okay?

[00:19:13] There are 6,000 known criminals

[00:19:16] that are in professional criminal rings

[00:19:18] that are stealing from these stores.

[00:19:20] It's not racist to lock that person up

[00:19:24] to improve the quality of life of 7.5 million people.

[00:19:28] It's just not racist.

[00:19:29] It's not a black or white issue.

[00:19:31] It's a right or wrong issue.

[00:19:33] And I think what's happening now is people are like,

[00:19:37] okay, stop and frisk was racist,

[00:19:39] so we're going to make things, quote unquote, non-racist.

[00:19:43] But they destroyed the quality of life inside the city.

[00:19:48] And so I'm hoping that a lot of these things

[00:19:50] that are happening now move the city back to neutral.

[00:19:54] And you were a part of that,

[00:19:55] and I think you deserve credit for that.

[00:19:57] And I admire it.

[00:19:59] I don't—and I also got Jerry's point.

[00:20:02] I read Jerry's rebuttal to what you're saying.

[00:20:06] But Jerry's missing some things in his argument as well,

[00:20:09] which is, hey, man, do not make the mistake

[00:20:13] of not acknowledging the problems.

[00:20:17] Here are the problems.

[00:20:18] We have solutions that can fix these problems.

[00:20:21] If we don't fix these problems, James is going to be right.

[00:20:27] You've got a half a million people

[00:20:29] that have left, mostly the rich,

[00:20:31] because they have the wherewithal and the mobility to leave.

[00:20:35] And you're going to leave us in a worse state

[00:20:37] if we don't fix these problems.

[00:20:39] You fix these problems,

[00:20:40] this is the greatest city in the world,

[00:20:42] everybody will come back and everyone will be here.

[00:20:44] I mean, that's the thing.

[00:20:45] Like, look, we're from New York, and I love New York.

[00:20:51] I didn't want it to have problems,

[00:20:53] but I thought, like you said,

[00:20:54] I thought people were ignoring what was happening.

[00:20:56] When you have—and everybody was saying afterwards,

[00:20:58] oh, let kind of the rich move to Florida.

[00:21:01] They forget that New York City needs

[00:21:03] $100 billion a year to open the doors.

[00:21:06] They get that money from the hedge fund managers

[00:21:10] who pay for expensive commercial real estate

[00:21:12] and pay expensive taxes.

[00:21:14] That's where they get their money.

[00:21:15] You can't just raise taxes on everybody else.

[00:21:17] There's not enough money there.

[00:21:19] Exactly.

[00:21:20] You know what?

[00:21:21] I'm not just saying that because I'm on your podcast.

[00:21:23] I'm a huge fan of yours.

[00:21:24] I think you have—you're very good

[00:21:28] at understanding human emotion,

[00:21:30] assessing human intelligence,

[00:21:32] and also there are things you talk about systematically

[00:21:38] that if you deploy those things,

[00:21:40] they make you more confident,

[00:21:41] and they make you more happy.

[00:21:43] And if you don't deploy those things,

[00:21:44] they make you more miserable because your design—

[00:21:47] Woody Allen ultimately is right.

[00:21:48] You're designed for misery.

[00:21:50] Okay, why are you designed for misery?

[00:21:51] You have a 100,000-year-old piece of machinery

[00:21:55] that you're living inside of.

[00:21:56] It hasn't had a software upgrade in 100,000 years.

[00:21:59] And it's designed to be protective.

[00:22:01] It's designed to make you worry.

[00:22:03] It's designed to make you run from the woolly mammoth.

[00:22:06] It's designed to make you be envious.

[00:22:08] Of course, you're envious.

[00:22:09] You see someone else has a bigger cave than you.

[00:22:11] They've got a better-looking cavewoman.

[00:22:13] You go over there and hit them with a rock.

[00:22:15] You take the cavewoman, you take the cave.

[00:22:17] That's how we're designed.

[00:22:19] But in a modern society, we don't have to be like that.

[00:22:23] And we can do things that are more transformative,

[00:22:26] and we can do things that are more sentient

[00:22:29] if we're able to observe ourselves.

[00:22:31] You're very good at that, and I've learned a lot from you.

[00:22:34] Well, I appreciate you saying that.

[00:22:36] I mean, look, again, I've been following your story as well

[00:22:39] these past few years, and it's been amazing, the ups and downs.

[00:22:42] Let's talk about Bitcoin for a second

[00:22:44] because everybody takes single situations,

[00:22:48] like let's say FTX, a company that seems—

[00:22:51] Everybody in the world thought it was one of the best companies

[00:22:54] in the world, and then suddenly afterwards,

[00:22:57] everyone said, oh, I knew that was a fraud.

[00:22:59] But literally, it's this company in the Bahamas

[00:23:02] that everyone—when it collapsed,

[00:23:05] everyone thought, oh, Bitcoin's dead.

[00:23:08] It's just a company in the Bahamas that had a fraud

[00:23:11] but had nothing to do with the story of Bitcoin.

[00:23:13] So how did you get into Bitcoin?

[00:23:15] And then everybody wrote your obituary when FTX failed

[00:23:20] and you were involved in it.

[00:23:21] How did you survive that?

[00:23:24] Well, I mean, let's step back for a second

[00:23:26] because there's a lot there.

[00:23:28] So let me just step back for one second and just say this.

[00:23:31] You're right.

[00:23:33] When it happens, everybody says that they knew.

[00:23:36] When Bernie Madoff blew up in 2008,

[00:23:39] I can't tell you, James, the number of people that said to me,

[00:23:42] well, I knew he was a fraud.

[00:23:44] I'm like, I didn't know he was a fraud.

[00:23:45] I didn't have any money with him.

[00:23:48] Let me just—sorry to interrupt, but I met Bernie Madoff

[00:23:52] a few months before the collapse.

[00:23:54] I was running my own fund of funds and he offered me a job.

[00:23:58] But I was already running a fund of funds

[00:24:00] and he wouldn't invest because he was just nervous

[00:24:03] about quote-unquote investing money outside the firm.

[00:24:06] So he just didn't have any money there.

[00:24:08] But as I was leaving the Lipstick building,

[00:24:11] which is the building he was in,

[00:24:13] every hedge fund manager I knew called me and said,

[00:24:16] can you put in a word for us?

[00:24:17] We want to invest in Madoff, but he doesn't let anybody invest.

[00:24:21] And afterwards, 100% of those people told me,

[00:24:23] no, there's no way I could have called you.

[00:24:25] I knew Madoff was a fraud the whole time.

[00:24:27] And I'm like, no, I have it on my phone right here.

[00:24:29] You called me that moment.

[00:24:30] Well, I had people that said to me,

[00:24:34] I knew Sam was a fraud.

[00:24:36] And I looked at the person and I said,

[00:24:38] didn't you have an account at FTX?

[00:24:43] Yeah, I did.

[00:24:45] And they said, is your account frozen?

[00:24:47] Yes, it is.

[00:24:49] Okay, well, how did you know then it was a fraud?

[00:24:51] If you had an account at FTX,

[00:24:54] why would you have an account with somebody that's a fraud?

[00:24:57] So in other words, let's stop lying to each other

[00:25:00] and tell the truth about things.

[00:25:02] I think that's where, you know,

[00:25:05] and I write this in the book and I tell this to my children.

[00:25:07] If you have integrity, James,

[00:25:09] you will always have opportunity.

[00:25:11] Also, if you're nice to people,

[00:25:13] you can get fired from the White House.

[00:25:16] You can make a mistake and allow Sam Bankman-Fried

[00:25:19] to invest in your business,

[00:25:21] and you will still survive that.

[00:25:23] You will have friends that come to your aid.

[00:25:26] That's an important insight that people should pay attention to.

[00:25:29] Because it's the cliche.

[00:25:31] Be nice to the people on the way up

[00:25:33] because they're the same people you meet on the way down, right?

[00:25:35] Think about somebody like Eliot Spitzer as an example.

[00:25:38] He was mean and cruel and arrogant towards people.

[00:25:42] When he blew up, he blew out.

[00:25:45] Okay?

[00:25:47] You can have mistakes in your life

[00:25:49] and you can do things that are misguided,

[00:25:51] but you can also benefit from your goodwill that you've created.

[00:25:57] You see what I mean?

[00:25:58] Yeah.

[00:25:59] This is very important.

[00:26:00] But on Sam, I don't revise history there.

[00:26:02] I liked him.

[00:26:04] He was a nice guy.

[00:26:06] I asked Mike Novogratz.

[00:26:08] He called me unsolicited through a third party.

[00:26:13] The third party called me and said,

[00:26:15] hey, there's a guy by the name of Sam Bankman-Fried.

[00:26:17] He'd like to talk to you.

[00:26:19] I said, okay, no problem.

[00:26:21] He said, yeah, it's got to be 9 p.m. on blah, blah day.

[00:26:25] I said, why 9 p.m.?

[00:26:26] Well, he's in Hong Kong.

[00:26:27] I said, okay, no problem.

[00:26:29] He had just signed a deal to name the arena in Miami after the company.

[00:26:35] I said, okay, this is an up-and-coming cryptocurrency exchange.

[00:26:38] I had already been long Bitcoin and investor.

[00:26:41] We'll get to the Bitcoin story in a second.

[00:26:43] But when I got on the phone with Sam,

[00:26:46] he was this staccato talking, somewhat awkward young man

[00:26:51] that seemed absolutely brilliant.

[00:26:54] He explained to me what he was doing.

[00:26:55] He wanted to sponsor the SALT conference.

[00:26:58] He wanted to come to New York,

[00:27:00] and he wanted to meet people in that sort of crossover

[00:27:03] between traditional finance and DeFi.

[00:27:07] I said, okay.

[00:27:08] I accepted his money.

[00:27:10] By the way, he paid me very quickly.

[00:27:12] You're a student of Wall Street.

[00:27:14] Fast pay makes fast friends.

[00:27:16] So I said, okay, this guy seems like he's legit.

[00:27:20] He came to the conference.

[00:27:21] He had a great time.

[00:27:23] He then asked me if he could sponsor more conferences.

[00:27:26] We struck up a deal with him.

[00:27:29] Then he invited me, and this was a seminal moment for me

[00:27:33] and may not reflect well on me or whatever.

[00:27:36] I'll just tell you the truth.

[00:27:37] He invited me to a charity outing at the FTX Arena

[00:27:42] that his 84-year-old aunt was coordinating.

[00:27:46] She was incredibly nice.

[00:27:48] They had given $10 million of scholarship money

[00:27:52] to some of the poor public high schools in the Miami area.

[00:27:57] We were going to do a mock shark tank for these students.

[00:28:03] We had Senator Cory Booker there, Maxine Waters.

[00:28:07] Waters, I guess her name is.

[00:28:09] We had Kevin O'Leary and I.

[00:28:12] We're going to do the mock judging for them.

[00:28:15] The parents were there.

[00:28:17] Sam was there.

[00:28:19] I thought this was like a great Jewish family where the kid

[00:28:23] had grown up in suburbia but on the campus

[00:28:28] of Stanford University.

[00:28:30] I bought hook, line, and sinker into Sam Bankman Freed.

[00:28:35] Now, if you want to think worse of me for that,

[00:28:38] there's nothing I can do about it because it happened.

[00:28:40] But I did learn something from it, James,

[00:28:42] and that is a crime like the Madoff crime

[00:28:45] or the Sam Bankman Freed crime,

[00:28:48] it gets created by a small group of people.

[00:28:51] See, that crime can't happen at Skybridge because I've got

[00:28:54] 50 different checks and balances going on.

[00:28:59] I've got an outside administrator,

[00:29:01] an outside accountant, all blue chip,

[00:29:03] Pershing as the custodian of the assets,

[00:29:07] three people in control, one in compliance,

[00:29:10] one on the legal team.

[00:29:12] So when you have 50 or 60 people looking at something,

[00:29:15] there will always be a person of conscience

[00:29:17] that raises their hand and says,

[00:29:19] hey, I'm sorry, this doesn't work for me.

[00:29:21] A financial crime gets caused or created

[00:29:25] by a closed net of people.

[00:29:27] And he had four people working on this with him

[00:29:30] and they all pled guilty.

[00:29:32] And I missed it.

[00:29:34] They did such a brilliant job of covering over what they did

[00:29:40] in terms of what they showed you from a due diligence perspective

[00:29:44] and what they were actually doing.

[00:29:46] And if you followed the case, it wasn't just me.

[00:29:50] It was 25 of the largest venture capitals in the world,

[00:29:53] sovereign wealth funds, leading investors.

[00:29:57] It's sort of amazing because take Madoff as an example.

[00:30:02] He really didn't have institutional investors

[00:30:04] because he knew he wouldn't be able to get past due diligence.

[00:30:07] But you and these other VCs and so on,

[00:30:10] you're a professional due diligence person.

[00:30:13] Skybridge is a fund of funds.

[00:30:15] You invest in other people and other funds.

[00:30:17] And what do you think?

[00:30:20] So what I'm saying is I'm giving credit to him

[00:30:22] for fooling so many people this way.

[00:30:27] How do you think he did that?

[00:30:30] They created a software and it was pointed out during the case.

[00:30:34] One of the things about crypto, James, it's perpetual.

[00:30:39] Meaning that the market's open 24-7.

[00:30:43] So when I get a statement from my brokerage people

[00:30:46] at the end of a month, like we just ended the month yesterday,

[00:30:50] whatever the prices were at 4 o'clock,

[00:30:52] they mail me a statement or they send me one electronically

[00:30:55] and they show me what I own.

[00:30:58] And it's priced as of the end of the day, 4 p.m.

[00:31:02] What Sam and the crypto world does is

[00:31:06] when you get that statement, it's priced at midnight

[00:31:10] on the last day of the month.

[00:31:12] But what Sam was doing is there were 10 seconds

[00:31:16] where your money looked like it was in your account.

[00:31:19] They printed you the statement.

[00:31:21] And then for the other 365, sorry, the other 24 hours, if you will,

[00:31:28] or 23 hours and 59 minutes, it was in his account.

[00:31:33] So at midnight, they made it look like it was back in your account.

[00:31:36] So if you logged on to your app, you saw your money in your account,

[00:31:41] but it wasn't in your account.

[00:31:43] He also did something called paper Bitcoin.

[00:31:46] And not to bore your listeners, but what is paper Bitcoin?

[00:31:50] So let's say James wants to buy Bitcoin.

[00:31:52] He calls me, I'm the broker.

[00:31:55] I'm now making a book on Bitcoin.

[00:31:57] Meaning I don't buy Bitcoin for you, James.

[00:32:00] I electronically pretend that it's in your account,

[00:32:03] but I now took the money that you gave me, $2 billion worth of it,

[00:32:07] I might add, and I put it in my own account.

[00:32:10] And so now I am short the price movement of Bitcoin.

[00:32:16] You think you own Bitcoin.

[00:32:18] No Bitcoin has ever been bought.

[00:32:21] That's paper Bitcoin.

[00:32:22] He did $2 billion worth of paper Bitcoin.

[00:32:28] Can you imagine that?

[00:32:30] So basically then as prices dropped in 2022, 2021,

[00:32:35] he basically couldn't return the money because he had none.

[00:32:40] Couldn't return the money and he couldn't catch up.

[00:32:43] He couldn't catch up.

[00:32:45] And so he also had an adversary in this man, Chen Pao,

[00:32:52] CZ, who was the CEO of Binance, who shoved it on him.

[00:32:58] He owned a lot of his FTT tokens and he put those tokens up for sale

[00:33:03] and shoved that on Sam at the low point in the market.

[00:33:07] And so there's a combination of things that happened.

[00:33:10] But listen, you know, very bad story.

[00:33:14] What are the learning lessons?

[00:33:15] I just explained one of them.

[00:33:17] That's how a financial crime gets committed.

[00:33:20] Learning lesson number two, very important lesson.

[00:33:23] Something goes wrong.

[00:33:25] Tell the truth.

[00:33:27] Okay, I went right on the air.

[00:33:29] Just imagine the hero to goat move.

[00:33:33] September 7th, I sold a piece of my company to Sam.

[00:33:36] I was riding high thinking I was going to be working with

[00:33:39] the Mark Zuckerberg of crypto.

[00:33:43] By November the 8th, I was back on television.

[00:33:46] I had gone from hero to zero, and I was not working with

[00:33:51] the Mark Zuckerberg of crypto, but I was working with

[00:33:53] the Bernie Madoff of crypto.

[00:33:56] And I had to explain that on national television.

[00:33:59] And then how much were you involved in?

[00:34:01] I faced the music, James.

[00:34:02] I faced the music.

[00:34:03] I went and made the interview.

[00:34:07] Yeah, I mean, and you were kind of brutal about it all the way down.

[00:34:13] How much were you involved in kind of the court case and sort

[00:34:17] of the unraveling of what happened?

[00:34:21] You know, I was not a witness.

[00:34:26] I was called by the Department of Justice to testify behind

[00:34:32] closed doors for four and a half hours on what I learned.

[00:34:37] I also turned over my phones.

[00:34:40] So my WhatsApp, my signal, my text messages, my email traffic,

[00:34:45] I gave all of that to the Department of Justice.

[00:34:49] And I sat with them for four and a half hours and explained

[00:34:53] to them everything that I saw.

[00:34:55] And by the way, it wasn't just the Department of Justice.

[00:34:57] The IRS was there.

[00:34:59] The SEC was there.

[00:35:01] I mean, you want to talk about a non-fun time in life?

[00:35:04] Sitting by yourself with a lawyer under oath with the SEC,

[00:35:09] the IRS, the FBI.

[00:35:12] It's like a dream come true.

[00:35:13] And the Department of Justice.

[00:35:15] And that's what Sam put me and my family through.

[00:35:18] But as I said to those guys, here's what happened.

[00:35:22] And here's the whole story.

[00:35:24] And, you know, what's interesting is they offered me something

[00:35:28] called a proffer.

[00:35:30] And I don't know if you know what that is, but a proffer is,

[00:35:32] so they called me in as a voluntary witness.

[00:35:35] And so if they ever decided to quote unquote prosecute me,

[00:35:39] a proffer means they could exclude the testimony

[00:35:42] that I was giving them.

[00:35:44] And I looked at them and said, I don't need a proffer.

[00:35:46] If you want to come after me for whatever happened, go ahead.

[00:35:50] I didn't do anything wrong.

[00:35:52] Did I make a mistake in judgment?

[00:35:54] Yes, I did.

[00:35:55] But I told my attorney, we're not negotiating a proffer

[00:35:58] with the Department of Justice.

[00:36:00] I don't need a proffer.

[00:36:01] Do you think that's something they offer to see if you're

[00:36:03] willing to take it?

[00:36:05] Maybe.

[00:36:06] I don't know.

[00:36:07] That's a good point.

[00:36:08] I didn't think of that.

[00:36:09] Maybe, maybe.

[00:36:10] But my attitude was I have nothing to hide.

[00:36:12] Here is everything.

[00:36:13] Here's what happened.

[00:36:14] I've been on Wall Street for 36 years.

[00:36:16] I don't even have a personal trading account.

[00:36:18] I've never done a personal trade.

[00:36:20] So I'm not going to – all my money is in my fund.

[00:36:23] Here's everything that I have.

[00:36:25] I've been a registered investment advisor.

[00:36:27] I'm a broker-dealer.

[00:36:30] I have a broker-dealer license, a Series 24, 7, and 63.

[00:36:34] Good luck to you.

[00:36:35] Never had a violation.

[00:36:37] I'm not going to spoil that at age 60.

[00:36:39] I mean, come on.

[00:36:40] This is what happened.

[00:36:41] I made a mistake in judgment.

[00:36:44] And what happened?

[00:36:45] I invested my fund in my firm.

[00:36:48] I'm sorry.

[00:36:49] What happened to his investment in Skybridge?

[00:36:51] How did that play out?

[00:36:53] Well, I mean, the bankruptcy estate still owns the investment.

[00:36:58] I would imagine at some point when they get around to it, they'll contact us and we'll

[00:37:02] negotiate with them.

[00:37:03] We're the only buyer for that asset because Sam was trying to buy the whole business, James.

[00:37:11] So it was set up as a minority stake with a three-year option to buy the rest of the business.

[00:37:18] And so there's no minority rights there.

[00:37:21] There's no protective economic rights or preferences.

[00:37:25] It's really not valuable to anybody.

[00:37:27] I can run the business till the day I die exactly the way I'm running it without any

[00:37:32] interference from the bankruptcy estate or from Sam or whoever the legacy is of Sam.

[00:37:37] So we'll just let it run its course.

[00:37:40] And at the end of the day, we'll buy it back.

[00:37:44] But as I pointed out to people, he hurt us and he damaged us.

[00:37:48] He hurt the business.

[00:37:50] So we're not interested in buying it back at a premium.

[00:37:53] I can assure you of that.

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[00:38:58] And so how did you first get in?

[00:39:01] I feel like everybody has a Bitcoin origin story.

[00:39:04] Was there anybody who was knowledgeable who told you about Bitcoin and a light went off

[00:39:09] in your head and you're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

[00:39:12] Well, I think I have to start with the misses.

[00:39:15] Okay, so 2012 I was introduced to Bitcoin.

[00:39:18] I was like, this is a bunch of malarkey.

[00:39:21] I put out a tweet that said, I don't understand Bitcoin and who cares?

[00:39:25] And caveat emptor.

[00:39:27] I think that's on the internet somewhere.

[00:39:29] And then 2014, the Winklevoss brothers, the twins came to my conference.

[00:39:34] They explained Bitcoin to me and they were very passionate about Bitcoin.

[00:39:39] And I was like, all right, you guys are very smart guys.

[00:39:42] This will probably work, but I'm an institutional investor.

[00:39:44] I can't get anywhere near it.

[00:39:46] That was 2014.

[00:39:48] And then something seminal did happen in 2017.

[00:39:52] I was in the White House and this happened on a Wednesday, James.

[00:39:56] The reason I know that I was only there for one Wednesday, so I do know that it

[00:40:00] happened on a Wednesday.

[00:40:01] And two guys from the Federal Reserve came in to talk about the white paper that

[00:40:07] they had written about the digitization of the US dollar.

[00:40:12] And I asked the question in the meeting, I said, is this like the blockchain?

[00:40:16] Oh yes, this would be over the blockchain.

[00:40:19] And then I said, so like Bitcoin?

[00:40:22] And they said, yes, well, slightly different.

[00:40:25] We have our own blockchain, but it would be technically similar to Bitcoin.

[00:40:29] And then the light bulb went off in my head.

[00:40:32] I said, okay, I am really missing this.

[00:40:35] I can't be that stu-nod, which is like stupid in Italian slang.

[00:40:40] I got to get up to speed on Bitcoin.

[00:40:42] And so I got fired a couple of days later.

[00:40:45] I went and bought the URL skybridgebitcoin.com.

[00:40:49] And then I did what I always recommend to people, do your homework.

[00:40:53] I don't know anybody that's done homework on Bitcoin, James, that's gone down

[00:40:58] the rabbit hole of Bitcoin and comes up with, I'm not buying any Bitcoin.

[00:41:02] I haven't found anybody yet.

[00:41:04] I usually find that the Bitcoin critics are like I was back in 2012.

[00:41:10] They don't understand it.

[00:41:12] And it's very superficial.

[00:41:15] And so anyway, make a long story short.

[00:41:18] I built a list of things that I would need to have happen for me to invest in Bitcoin.

[00:41:22] Those things started happening.

[00:41:25] And then-

[00:41:26] What was on that list?

[00:41:27] So the three main things was, number one, we had to get to 100 million wallets.

[00:41:31] At the time of my first investment, it was at 80 million and going up.

[00:41:35] Number two, I had to get comfortable with the regulation.

[00:41:39] And this is back in 2020.

[00:41:41] You say, well, how did I get comfortable?

[00:41:43] Well, the IRS deemed Bitcoin intangible property.

[00:41:46] And the minute they did that, I knew that Bitcoin was going to be okay in the United

[00:41:50] States because property rights in this country are sacrosanct.

[00:41:54] They date back to the Magna Carta.

[00:41:57] It's traced through British common law, our property rights.

[00:42:01] And this is still a capitalist society.

[00:42:04] And we protect people's property rights contractually.

[00:42:08] And when the IRS said it was intangible property, good luck to the likes of Gary

[00:42:13] Gensler and the czarina Elizabeth Warren.

[00:42:17] They may not like me owning Bitcoin, but it's too bad.

[00:42:20] The IRS already deemed a property and therefore the court system is going to protect my

[00:42:24] property.

[00:42:25] And then the third thing, which I think was very important, is if I'm going to buy nine

[00:42:29] figures worth of Bitcoin, which I need to have a meaningful impact on my clients, I have

[00:42:35] to have a place where I can store it.

[00:42:38] And there were really good service and storage options, including Fidelity Digital Assets,

[00:42:43] Coinbase Prime, or even New York Digital Investment Group.

[00:42:49] Those are three great places to store your Bitcoin.

[00:42:52] I do have some at Galaxy, by the way, as well.

[00:42:55] So for me, that was the decision.

[00:42:58] And what do you think is the next...

[00:43:00] I mean, we've had kind of these...

[00:43:02] Some important catalysts, some not as important.

[00:43:04] I don't think the having is that important, but the Bitcoin ETFs are very important catalysts

[00:43:09] because now finally both Main Street and the institutions can feel comfortable buying Bitcoin.

[00:43:16] What ultimate effect do you think this is going to have on Bitcoin?

[00:43:20] Well, here's the thing.

[00:43:22] We're in an instant gratification world and everybody wants to be instantly gratified

[00:43:27] and Bitcoin should shoot to 300,000 tonight and everyone should get rich immediately and

[00:43:32] so on and so forth.

[00:43:33] It doesn't work like that in the real world.

[00:43:35] So there are buyers and sellers and there are speculators and skeptics alongside of long-term investors.

[00:43:43] And so what ends up happening in a situation like this, most people don't understand the asset.

[00:43:48] There's a lot of people out there that are trading that asset as opposed to really understanding it.

[00:43:54] And so there's a huge volatility in an asset like Bitcoin because it's so early.

[00:43:59] And by the way, you can compare it to early assets like Amazon or Apple computer back in the day.

[00:44:05] Until the businesses get matured and scale, they can oscillate and trade with a lot of volatility.

[00:44:12] And so the problem right now is Bitcoin is an 80 vol asset.

[00:44:16] So it went up, it started the year I guess at 40 something.

[00:44:20] It went to 73,000.

[00:44:22] I think it's trading at like 58 or 59,000 right now, somewhere in there, 57,000.

[00:44:28] And it's moving around a lot.

[00:44:30] Could it go back to 30,000?

[00:44:31] I think it's possible.

[00:44:32] I don't see it ever going to zero at this point.

[00:44:35] But what is happening while people are short-terming and trying to time Bitcoin is the network itself is growing.

[00:44:43] And it's growing exponentially.

[00:44:45] And so as that network grows, the network effect, Metcalfe's law, will make that asset, that piece of digital property, way more valuable over time.

[00:44:57] And so, I bought my first Bitcoin at 17,000 in 2020.

[00:45:03] It shot to 69,000.

[00:45:05] I was a genius.

[00:45:07] It then went from 69,000 to 17,000.

[00:45:10] I was a doofus.

[00:45:12] It's now gone from 17,000 to 73,000, now at 57,000.

[00:45:17] I guess I'm a dummy now because it went from 73 to 57.

[00:45:22] Yeah, why didn't you sell at the top?

[00:45:23] Yeah, exactly.

[00:45:24] So, depending on the time frame, I'm either a dummy or a genius.

[00:45:29] The truth of the matter is we're never as smart or as dumb as we look.

[00:45:33] But if I am right about this asset, it will trade to a market capitalization similar to gold, if I am right about the asset.

[00:45:42] I mean, you look at gold, it's very interesting because the first gold ETF was introduced, I think in 2004.

[00:45:48] And then it had seven straight up years from there because now suddenly people could buy it.

[00:45:53] And now you have sovereign wealth funds, funds like SkyBridge, funds like other hedge funds, mutual funds can finally buy it.

[00:46:01] This seems like a huge thing.

[00:46:02] Plus, you see more countries like Switzerland has a referendum on the ballot now to include Bitcoin in their reserves.

[00:46:09] And this is just talking about Bitcoin, not even other crypto assets and uses.

[00:46:14] So, one thing I always tell people is that it's not going to be this price.

[00:46:19] It's either going to be zero or millions.

[00:46:22] Like it's not going to kind of, it's on its way to where it's going to be.

[00:46:26] I agree with that.

[00:46:29] And again, I could be wrong.

[00:46:31] Let me tell you something.

[00:46:32] As evidenced by my book, I've been humbled by life.

[00:46:34] I've been humbled by markets.

[00:46:36] So, what I'm about to say may or may not be right.

[00:46:39] I honestly have to hold myself humbly in that position.

[00:46:45] But I think it's going to be hard for it to be zero only because of the expansion of the network effect and that the asset is being supported by very large institutions that have ETFs.

[00:47:01] And you know this as well as anybody, Wall Street is a selling machine.

[00:47:06] And so, if Wall Street has a product known as a Bitcoin ETF, they are out there selling that product to a very large group of individuals and institutional investors.

[00:47:16] So, it may go to zero.

[00:47:18] I would say that's a very low probability.

[00:47:21] You know, could it get to a million dollars?

[00:47:24] You'd have to see Bitcoin be recognized as a digital piece of property akin to gold and then it could.

[00:47:32] One of the valuable use cases which I've seen is actually in the human rights community.

[00:47:40] How are you going to fund an activist supporting the Uyghurs in China through currency?

[00:47:46] How are you going to send the money?

[00:47:48] You have to do it through crypto, it's the only way.

[00:47:50] I've been to conferences where activists are there and they're being trained on how to use crypto to raise crypto for the revolutions in their countries.

[00:48:00] Including, you know, 100 million has been sent to Ukraine through crypto.

[00:48:04] So, the U.S. is one of the biggest customers of crypto.

[00:48:09] Yes, and I would point out that there's a very large professionalized gambling that's taking place in Europe on these soccer teams.

[00:48:18] There's no way that could happen without the crypto markets moving this stuff relatively costless among the participants.

[00:48:26] So, those are minor things that are happening.

[00:48:29] One major thing would be if you developed a wallet where we could have a wallet-to-wallet connectivity with each other.

[00:48:36] You and I could go into a department store or a restaurant and we could cross money to the restaurateur or cross money to the department store without paying the American Express fee.

[00:48:50] I think that we're three to five years away from that.

[00:48:53] You think even that long?

[00:48:56] Well, I'm being conservative.

[00:48:58] I mean, it could happen more quickly.

[00:49:00] You know, look, the U.S. regulator, again, for whatever reason, rightly or wrongly, does not like the asset class.

[00:49:10] And so, it's taking longer for its full adoption as a result of that.

[00:49:17] And that's really Elizabeth Warren was given a lot of latitude over financial services from Joe Biden as part of an agreement with her when she left the 2020 campaign and endorsed him.

[00:49:29] You know, I think it's going to be very interesting also when people start quote-unquote tokenizing real assets.

[00:49:36] So, let's say a college student graduates with $100,000 in student loans.

[00:49:42] Imagine if they quote-unquote IPO 10% of their future income streams by tokenizing it, making income coin or whatever that they kind of sell off.

[00:49:53] And now people who buy that coin, James coin, can basically benefit as a former student's income growth changes over time.

[00:50:01] It gets 10% of all the income flows.

[00:50:04] They can pay down their student loans.

[00:50:06] They have an opportunity to create additional wealth for themselves and not rely on the government system to pay their loans or pay their loans back or whatever.

[00:50:16] So, I think tokenizing is going to be very interesting.

[00:50:20] Well, I mean, if you follow, you know, listen, great story, right?

[00:50:24] Larry Fink is negative on Bitcoin, tells people he's negative on it.

[00:50:29] And then lo and behold, he's orange-pilled by a group of Bitcoiners.

[00:50:33] And he now has the most successful ETF in U.S. history.

[00:50:40] And, you know, he would tell you that what you just said is 100% true.

[00:50:45] We're going to tokenize everything.

[00:50:48] You know what I mean?

[00:50:49] I think that's what's going to happen.

[00:50:51] So, politically now, I feel like here we are again, Biden, Trump.

[00:50:57] You obviously have been involved as far as I know in every election since 2008 or 2012.

[00:51:04] I remember talking with you about Mitt Romney.

[00:51:08] I didn't know you in 2008 for Obama, but I know you donated to his campaign you mentioned in the book.

[00:51:16] And then, of course, 2016, 2020.

[00:51:20] What's happening now?

[00:51:22] It's going to be Trump versus Biden again.

[00:51:24] So, I – and again, this is probably why people hate me.

[00:51:27] I mean, I'm not glued necessarily to one party.

[00:51:32] I'm glued to what I think makes sense.

[00:51:35] You know, Barack Obama and I went to law school together.

[00:51:38] I didn't know him super well in law school.

[00:51:40] My friends knew him.

[00:51:42] I said, okay, I'm going to give him some money for his campaign.

[00:51:47] This is 2007, so how many years ago is that?

[00:51:51] 18, I guess, or – yeah, right?

[00:51:54] Yeah, 17 years ago, I guess.

[00:51:56] And I just looked around and said, okay, I'm never going to know anybody that's actually the president.

[00:52:01] I mean, that's what I was thinking at the time.

[00:52:03] And I said, okay, so Barack Obama is somebody I know.

[00:52:06] I'm going to give him some money.

[00:52:08] He won.

[00:52:09] I wasn't in love with his policies.

[00:52:11] I'm a lifelong Republican, and so I went back to my Republican stripes and supported Mitt Romney.

[00:52:18] But I've been involved – this is the irony of everything.

[00:52:21] I've been involved in politics since 1993.

[00:52:26] How did I get involved in politics?

[00:52:27] I had no money, James, and I was working as a high net worth broker, financial advisor at Goldman.

[00:52:38] And I wasn't a member of a country club.

[00:52:40] I didn't know the hand signals that you needed to do in the world of the wealthy.

[00:52:45] And so I said, well, how am I going to meet these people?

[00:52:48] And the way to meet these people was politics.

[00:52:55] I could go to these political fundraisers.

[00:52:57] I would meet the people and potentially I could do business with them.

[00:53:00] So I wrote the first check.

[00:53:03] This is the great irony of life.

[00:53:05] I wrote the first check, $250, young Republicans for Rudy Giuliani.

[00:53:11] He had lost in 1989.

[00:53:15] He was now running again in 1993, and I was young Republicans for Rudy.

[00:53:21] Do you love that?

[00:53:22] That's funny.

[00:53:23] Okay, and now I'm going to these fundraisers with him.

[00:53:27] He wins, which is like the greatest thing that could have ever happened to me at age 30.

[00:53:33] I've now got the parking placard and I can park my car on two wheels anywhere in the city.

[00:53:40] And I'm working for the mayor.

[00:53:42] And lo and behold, I'm starting to meet clients.

[00:53:45] And then Rudy introduced me to Pataki.

[00:53:47] So I'm now young Republicans for Pataki.

[00:53:50] And then you may or may not remember this, Rudy switches.

[00:53:54] He endorses Chris and Andrew's father, Mario Cuomo, in 94.

[00:53:59] You know what?

[00:54:00] I did not remember that.

[00:54:01] I'm surprised I didn't remember that.

[00:54:02] I remember it because me and George Pataki, what the hell is he doing?

[00:54:06] He was always meshugan.

[00:54:07] He was always a little nuts, you know?

[00:54:09] And so he went with—him and Pataki didn't talk for like a year after that.

[00:54:15] It was a very hard time to thaw that out, okay?

[00:54:20] Alphonse DiMato had to get involved with that, the whole thing.

[00:54:22] But anyway, so now I've worked for the mayor and the governor.

[00:54:26] And so that's not big enough for me because I'm a little stu-not.

[00:54:29] I've got to go work on a presidential campaign.

[00:54:31] So I worked for George W. Bush.

[00:54:34] So I've been around the hoop of politics for 30 years.

[00:54:40] And my mistake, among many, and if I was going to write a book of mistakes,

[00:54:46] it would be longer than War and Peace, and you wouldn't have enough time

[00:54:49] in your life to read all the mistakes that I've made.

[00:54:52] But if I want to talk about a mistake is I got full of myself, James.

[00:54:58] I let my ego get to me.

[00:55:00] So when Trump offered me the job, even though my wife hates Trump

[00:55:05] almost as much as Melania hates him, and that's like the highest standard of hatred,

[00:55:09] I took the job.

[00:55:12] And I was trying to put a round peg in a square hole to fit my ego, James.

[00:55:17] Okay? Yeah, I wanted my narrative.

[00:55:19] Oh, blue-collar kid, Tufts and Harvard, Goldman, two successful businesses.

[00:55:25] I'm now going to go work in the White House for the American president.

[00:55:28] Well, the American president's batshit crazy.

[00:55:30] No, that's okay because that doesn't fit my narrative.

[00:55:34] It doesn't fit and soothe my ego.

[00:55:37] You see what I mean?

[00:55:38] And so the book is about that cautionary tale.

[00:55:40] Don't put your ego and don't put your pride into your decision-making.

[00:55:46] When you do that, it can really blow you up.

[00:55:49] It can really hurt you badly, and that's what happened.

[00:55:52] But I want to defend you against yourself a little bit here.

[00:55:55] You don't believe in taxing unrealized gains, for instance, on investments.

[00:56:01] Okay?

[00:56:02] Biden is potentially proposing that to Congress, which is the most insane kind of law.

[00:56:06] It would crash the entire economy.

[00:56:08] So you don't believe in BS like that.

[00:56:12] You do believe in a lot of the economics of the Republican Party,

[00:56:17] and you believed in Trump.

[00:56:20] Okay, you hadn't yet worked that closely with him.

[00:56:23] You took a job supporting your beliefs and principles,

[00:56:26] and like you said, you were working for the American people.

[00:56:28] You're not going to work for someone who's going to try to do a 44 percent capital gains tax

[00:56:32] and 25 percent taxing unrealized gains.

[00:56:35] Do they just make this stuff up because they think it will get voters?

[00:56:39] Nobody actually believes in that policy, do they?

[00:56:41] Yeah, well, I do think that actually.

[00:56:43] Mark Cuban actually tweeted that.

[00:56:45] It's been on the docket for a while.

[00:56:49] And, you know, it's not a new thing that they've come up with.

[00:56:53] And they do write about this stuff because they think it's going to help them with the left

[00:57:00] or something like that.

[00:57:02] They know that that can't get passed, and thank God it can't get passed

[00:57:05] because whether you're a Republican or a Democrat, there is right or wrong.

[00:57:10] I mean, society now is flailing because we have left-leaning policies

[00:57:16] and we have right-leaning policies.

[00:57:18] We don't have right or wrong policies anymore.

[00:57:21] So if you're the SEC and you've got to kowtow to Elizabeth Warren,

[00:57:25] let's do stupid stuff at the SEC and lose case after case in the court system.

[00:57:31] Let's sue Coinbase, who's trying desperately to get everything right

[00:57:36] and to follow the rules.

[00:57:37] Let's sue them.

[00:57:38] And they look like horses' asses when they do that.

[00:57:41] Flip side is, you know, you've got the Republicans.

[00:57:45] You know, I'm a Catholic, but I'm a pro-choice person.

[00:57:50] If I choose life because I'm a Catholic, that's my choice.

[00:57:54] Can't impose that on other people.

[00:57:56] That's a First Amendment religious situation right there.

[00:57:59] And so this notion that we're going to have a handmaid's tale for women in the society

[00:58:07] and that Trump is in Time magazine saying that, yeah, well,

[00:58:10] we'll police and monitor women during their pregnancies.

[00:58:15] What the hell is he talking about?

[00:58:17] So we've got nuts on both sides.

[00:58:20] And so I'm not about left or right.

[00:58:23] James, this is probably why I get in so much trouble.

[00:58:25] I'm about right or wrong.

[00:58:26] You know the difference between right and wrong.

[00:58:29] It's not that hard.

[00:58:30] It's not that complicated.

[00:58:32] I mean, I agree, and sometimes my listeners criticize me.

[00:58:35] I've never voted in my life because I don't want to be on a team.

[00:58:40] And I feel I'll be too – just the process of voting, I feel, will influence me too much.

[00:58:44] I'd rather be able to express my opinion that's my own personal opinion and not be –

[00:58:49] you know, actions can often precede thoughts and feelings.

[00:58:54] And so I don't want to make the action of voting and then suddenly now I'm a Democrat

[00:58:59] or I'm a Republican or whatever.

[00:59:01] I want to have my own opinions on things instead of belonging to a team.

[00:59:05] And I think, look, you've confronted this.

[00:59:07] You've joined teams and then they don't work out.

[00:59:10] Like sometimes some of these guys, they might have your beliefs or seem like they do,

[00:59:15] but then there's something different when you work for them or donate to them

[00:59:19] or they get elected and you donate it and now they're no longer who they were.

[00:59:23] I mean, that's what really goes on, isn't it?

[00:59:26] I mean, I know people are going to be mad at me for saying this, but Trump was a moderate.

[00:59:30] He was pro-choice before he was pro-white.

[00:59:32] He was a Democrat in New York.

[00:59:34] He was a Democrat. You know that.

[00:59:36] He went to Elton John's wedding.

[00:59:38] He didn't care about transgenderism.

[00:59:40] He didn't act like a homophobe.

[00:59:43] I mean, we can pretend that – I don't know.

[00:59:49] I mean, we could pretend that there's –

[00:59:52] I mean, people yell at me and say, oh, you knew Trump was an asshole.

[00:59:55] You lived in New York. Of course you knew he was an asshole.

[00:59:58] Yeah, he was an asshole, but he was our asshole.

[01:00:00] I thought he was going to do an okay job actually.

[01:00:03] I thought at age 70 we had the opportunity to get a guy that wasn't really beholden to the lobbyists

[01:00:10] and we had a guy that maybe he would be a post-partisan president.

[01:00:14] Maybe he would be transformative and help us.

[01:00:16] I didn't think he was going to turn into a nut – the full-on nut job that he became.

[01:00:21] So I got that wrong.

[01:00:23] So now this year, this election, it's like you can't vote for anybody.

[01:00:27] Who are you going to –

[01:00:29] Well, I'm voting for Biden.

[01:00:30] I mean, look, there are choices on the table.

[01:00:33] There's dementia and there's demented.

[01:00:35] I'm going with dementia.

[01:00:37] If there's movies, we're going to go to the movies.

[01:00:39] There's Weekend at Bernie's where the guy is half dead and he's forgetful and he's elderly.

[01:00:45] Or there's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest where the guy's full-on crazy and needs a lobotomy.

[01:00:52] I'm going with the least harmful of those two.

[01:00:55] Mr. Trump has said that he wants to effectively revoke the democracy.

[01:01:00] He wants to expand executive powers.

[01:01:02] He wants to come after his adversaries using the Department of Justice.

[01:01:07] He has said that he wants to shut down or take away FCC licenses for people that disagree with him in the media.

[01:01:14] He wants to change the standards associated with the freedom of the press.

[01:01:19] He's saying all this.

[01:01:20] I'm not saying it.

[01:01:21] He's saying it.

[01:01:22] When he's asked if you want to be a dictator, he told the Sean Hannity he wants to be a dictator for a day.

[01:01:28] He told the Time Magazine guy that people like dictators.

[01:01:32] Okay, your family and my family have been benefiting from the flat, decentralized structure of the United States

[01:01:41] and the knowledge, the wisdom that our founders had to make it so we could be protected from an autocracy.

[01:01:51] This guy is a nut job.

[01:01:53] We have no institutional memory of fascism in this country because FDR put down the first America First movement.

[01:02:02] They go on field trips in Germany.

[01:02:06] This is what the Nazis did.

[01:02:08] They go on field trips in France.

[01:02:10] They say, okay, here's where the blitz happened in London.

[01:02:13] Okay, so Europe has all of this hereditary and institutionalized memory of fascists and the plague of fascism.

[01:02:22] The United States, we don't.

[01:02:24] So weirdly, we think, okay, well, maybe that's a panacea.

[01:02:28] Maybe that's a cure-all for our ills.

[01:02:31] Okay, I'm not saying all of us, but there's a large enough group of us that think that.

[01:02:36] And Trump represents that.

[01:02:37] We can't have that.

[01:02:39] I'll go with Weekend at Bernie's over that.

[01:02:42] Well, your book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back, there's also a lot of stuff that's really important that you don't see in a lot of books written by Wall Street or political guys,

[01:02:52] which is how to find purpose in life, how to find meaning in life, and how connected that is to happiness.

[01:03:00] It's a very philosophical book based on all of these experiences.

[01:03:04] There's one piece of advice you give that's very important, and I really encourage young people to read this.

[01:03:11] Do a little, and it's going to sound almost like a cliche when I say it, but do a little each day.

[01:03:16] If you write, for instance, five pages a day, then in two months, you're going to have a pretty big novel.

[01:03:22] You're going to have a Game of Thrones-sized novel.

[01:03:24] So that's all.

[01:03:26] I don't want to say that's all it takes is for success, but like you say in the book, if you don't do anything, there's nothing for you to be happy or sad about.

[01:03:35] There's just going to be nothing.

[01:03:38] I really encourage that this philosophical aspect, okay, we can talk all day about Bitcoin and failures and successes and politics,

[01:03:47] but individually, we need these nuts and bolts first.

[01:03:52] We need to lay this foundation for success.

[01:03:55] We didn't talk much about it, so that's what a lot of the book is about from your own experience.

[01:04:00] I really appreciate you writing that in this book.

[01:04:02] Well, it's very sweet of you to say.

[01:04:04] Again, I tried to make it real, and I tried to talk about it openly.

[01:04:08] It's one of the things I admire about you.

[01:04:10] You have a lot of self-awareness in your writing.

[01:04:13] You have a lot of human observation.

[01:04:18] With human beings, there comes levels of fallibility.

[01:04:22] Whether it's you, James Althusser, Robert Greene writing about the real stuff, if you will, the rights and wrongs.

[01:04:40] People try to pretend that they have no jealousy or envy.

[01:04:42] They do.

[01:04:43] People try to pretend that they're right or they don't have mean streaks in the personality.

[01:04:48] Well, guess what?

[01:04:49] They do because everybody does.

[01:04:50] I'm trying to just make it as real as possible so that if a young person picks up this book and reads it,

[01:04:57] they're like they have space there to make mistakes, and they have space there to figure things out without being overly judged.

[01:05:06] Yeah, all very important stuff.

[01:05:09] So much more important than the things we tend to argue about all day long on social media.

[01:05:14] This is like the real stuff.

[01:05:16] But Anthony Scaramucci, once again, it's been great.

[01:05:20] I mean, it's 14 years since we first met.

[01:05:22] It's been great having you on the podcast.

[01:05:24] You're the man.

[01:05:25] I remember having breakfast with you at the Core Club.

[01:05:27] Let's do that again.

[01:05:28] Yeah, we should definitely do that again.

[01:05:30] I appreciate you inviting me on.

[01:05:31] You got a very popular podcast, and it's an honor to be on with you.

[01:05:35] Thank you.

[01:05:36] From Wall Street to the White House and back by Anthony Scaramucci.

[01:05:40] Good luck on the book.

[01:05:41] Congratulations, and look, let's talk again soon.

[01:05:44] All right. Thanks, brother.

[01:05:45] That was great.

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