E118: Anthony Scaramucci: Bitcoin was the Greatest Scam in the world (now it's 70% of my net worth)

26:50Yeah. Yeah. That's a great question. This is why your podcast is so good. So, but let's talk about that for a second because Hesse writes about this. Hermann Hesse, the German writer, he writes about this in the book Damien, right? He calls it the Abraxas, right? Or you can see it in the ancient Asian world. We have the white and the black in the disc, right? Or the Greeks would say you have tragedy and comedy in your life, right? You have the good and bad, the white and the dark. And so what Robert Greene is saying, Robert Greene, to me, is one of the brilliant writers. You should get him on your podcast, even though he's not a crypto guy, because he's been on my podcast and he's a brilliant understander of human nature.

27:32And the reason I like the book is that we try to pretend that we don't have a dark side. Again, that's the ego part of us, right? We're getting up in the morning and we're presenting ourselves as this Mother Teresa. We try to do everything right, and we're good, and we're pure, but there's always some nefarious thing that's going on in our personalities. Of course, we want to hide that from people because we don't want people to think poorly of us. And so one of the things that I had to deal with, which I think many people have to deal with, and something Robert writes about in the book is the comparative analysis and the envy that It comes with a comparative analysis.

28:14And it would be dishonest for somebody listening. It would be dishonest of you to tell me that you've never been envious of anybody. If you were honest with me, you'd have to say, yes, I have. I have felt this emotion because the point of Robert's book is that you're living in a 100 ,000-year-old piece of machinery, hasn't had a software upgrade in 100 ,000 years. This phone that I'm sitting with next to the pudgy penguin, this phone went from iPhone one to iPhone 16 on its way to 17 in less than 20 years, but not you, not me. We're living in a 100 ,000 year old piece of machinery and there's atavism in your brain and there's primordial instincts in your brain.

28:58And so the envy comes from your survival mechanism. If you're in a big cave and you got a hot cave woman, I'm coming over to the cave and hit you in the head with a rock. I'm going to take you cavewoman. I'm going to take you cave. That's what I'm going to do. Of course. But now we're in a modern society where there's lots of abundance. So how do you transform that level of thinking? How do you push that excess darkness out of your personality? And what I tell my kids, and I have five of them, is you will be better off in your life if you can celebrate the successes of your friends. And if you can build the habit of celebrating, instead of feeling bad that your friend made the billion dollars and you didn't make the billion dollars and you think less of yourself or you're sore at yourself or feeling envy, you will be better off if you can hit the transformation button in your personality.

29:57It's a transcendental button, if you can become more sublime and you can punch out of the animalistic atavism in your personality that creates envy, and you can hit the love button, or you can reach over to your friend and say, hey, congratulations on this amazing podcast. And God bless you. I hope it continues. You want to be the first call. Something good happens to you. I want to be in your outlook where you're going to call me first to share the news and you're not going to feel jealousy from me or you're not going to feel envy from me. And it's something that you can work out, but you have to build the habit of that.

30:37And that's something that Robert understands better than most people. And I give him a lot of credit for that because it also creates honesty in yourself. Now, have you ever felt envy before? Of course. As many times, probably every day. Okay. Well, as many people, but you can work it out. You can work it out. What I noticed about celebrating other people is it really gets, I'm not sure if it comes with maturity or with success. I feel like the more successful you are, or let's say the more you do well compared to what you wanted to do, the easier it is afterwards to say, ah, congratulations to someone else because you're happy with yourself.

31:14And the more you're happy with yourself, the more you're going to celebrate other people. I think that that is honest and I think that that's true, but you got to try to get there before that. Yeah. You've got to get there before that. Much harder. Okay. I was in a situation in your country, Switzerland. I was in Davos. I was 44 at the time. And I was surrounded by billionaires in their 20s. They had founded social media companies and they were at this place or they were at that place. And they were all geniuses. And I was sitting there feeling bad about myself. I had what I call Davos envy. I wrote about it in my first book.

31:50and then I went back to my room and I thought about it for a moment and I said, you know, I can't compare myself to anybody else because I've had my own life. I've had my own life experience and I've had my own DNA and let's face it, you do have your own destiny and you may think that you're in control of every aspect of your destiny, but you're not. You didn't pick your birth. You didn't pick your sex. You didn't pick your sexuality. I believe that you're born with that. You didn't pick your family members. You didn't pick your parents. You picked your country. Did you pick the location of your birth or the country affiliation?

32:31You didn't pick any of this. And so a result of which you cannot be president. I can't be president either, but I'm born in the country, so I could theoretically be president, but you were not born in the United States. This is something that you didn't pick. By the way, you don't want to be president. That's a shitty job. But the point I'm trying to make is that there's stuff in your life that have predestined you to certain outcomes. And you have to be understanding of that and you have to accept that. You know, if your father is a lawyer and your mother's a teacher and they're computer literate and they send you to a computer laboratory when you're a young kid because they know that you are pre - naturally a computer geek.

33:20So they send you to the 10 ,000 hours of training to be a computer person. And then they help you get the software contract with the mainframe company, IBM, and you have the operating software and that company's focused on hardware and you become Microsoft. A lot of different things have to happen for you to be in that position to take advantage of that. Do you see what I mean? Absolutely. And so you have to have a self-awareness and you have to have a comfort in your own skin about your own levels of success. So even if you're not as successful as you would like to be, you still have to be able to take that leap and share the success of your friends.

34:04Otherwise, it's going to be miserable. It's the same as what you were seeing in the beginning, right? Yeah. Share the success with your friends, share the success with your business partners, give someone young. You have children? No, you're too young. Not yet. Am I too young? That's a good one. Well, I don't know. I feel like I should get going. I had my first kid at 28, but I was a different generation. But what I say to my kids who are your age, I say there's only two things I can give you. The money is not going to help you. If anything, the money will cause some problems and it'll create some anxiety if it's not managed properly.

34:36What are you going to do with that? We'll talk about that in a second. But the only thing I can really give you only thing is two gifts number one celebrate the successes of your friend you'll be very happy number two you have to do something in this life that you love do you like this job being a podcaster i love it it's it's not easy but i love it you love it because you're learning you're meeting new people you you you like the notoriety i can smell that on your personality you do you do you like meeting the people don't bullshit me don't bullshit me don't bullshit me don't bullshit me you go into the room and people see you and they recognize you from the podcast and they say oh and you feel good about it i understand that god bless you you should feel good about it but and you know you know the europeans have a little bit of false modesty about themselves i americans don't give a shit i don't yeah that's the thing we don't talk in switzerland especially you just don't yeah yeah yeah because you like the choice you have the paul poppy syndrome or the schadenfreude you're worried about the schadenfreude right so you have to be careful but you like it and you should like it.

35:38But my message, if you were my son, is you got to pick something that you really love because the time is going to go by very quickly. And in the immortal words of Mel Brooks, relax, none of us are getting out of here alive, okay? So far, nature and age is undefeated. And so a result of which you have to live like you really mean it. You can't be living in fear. What are you fearing? Your life's going to end in death anyway. Go for the thing that you really want to do. Go for the thing in your mind where you're not working. You see? You pick something that you really, really love. So you wake up in the morning.

36:17You said it's hard, but you like the challenge of the hardness. Hard is not bad. Couldn't be without it. Yeah, hard is not bad. The intellectual stimulation is something you're not going to be able to live without. So you'll be doing this for a very long time. But my point is those are the only two gifts. Money is separate. You have to have the right relationship with money. I had a failed relationship with money probably for the first 40 years of my life. And like you said, when you get some measure of success, then you have to make a decision. Should I stay perpetually anxious? And I have friends of mine that are billionaires, billionaires.

36:57They could never spend the money. The interest on the interest is more than they could spend. but they're perpetually anxious and they didn't stop the fever to acquire the money. That's probably why they're a billionaire too. Probably why they're a billionaire. Okay. But you have to be careful because with that, there's a paradox, right? There's a paradox to wealth, my friend. Okay. If you live in the big mansion and you got the 10 acres around the house, you could end up lonely. You got to be careful. You know, I live in a suburban house where the kids can cross the street, knock on the door, the next door neighbor, and pull two kids out and go use the half court basketball in the driveway.

37:37Or they can get their scooters and they could go right around the neighborhood. You got to be very, very careful. You're going to be super rich. You're going to fly the private plane. God bless. But now you're isolated. You're going to have your own yacht. God bless. But now you're isolated. You got to be very, very careful because when you start to isolate yourself, you start to act idiosyncratic and you start to develop weirdness. And you don't want that also when you're so rich, you think everybody's coming for you. You know, like the pudgy penguin is coming for you. The pudgy penguin wants something from you.

38:09See what I mean? Absolutely. And you gotta be careful. Yeah. And so you always have your guard up. Yeah. Like people want my money or they want me to invest in their fund or they want me to buy into their soda factory or whatever the hell they want to do. They always have your guard up. You gotta be careful. There's a paradox of the money. It can make you lonely. Talking about money.

38:33we're here to talk about a new form of money. How did you get so fascinated by the world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?

38:44Well, you know, I was a skeptic. If you followed my career, and I wrote this in my book, I just wrote a book, Michael Saylor wrote the foreword called The Little Book of Bitcoin. And the book is about Bitcoin, yes, but it's also about my odyssey into Bitcoin. and it's about other people's odysseys, whether it's a Stan Druckenmiller or a Ray Dalio or Paul Tudor Jones or Michael Saylor. Many of these people start out as skeptics of Bitcoin. They don't really understand it. And then if they do the homework on it, I submit to your viewers and listeners, if you do the homework on Bitcoin, you generally go towards it.

39:21Say if there's a hundred people and they're super smart people, very intellectually curious, and said, okay, I'm going to spend the next six weeks learning about Bitcoin, meeting people like yourself, reading everything, the white paper, going to talk to core developers of Bitcoin. When they're done, they will generally be a Bitcoin proponent. They will generally go towards Bitcoin. I would say of 100 people, 95 will do that. Maybe there'll always be five people that'll be the skeptic and hate it no matter what. But to do the homework is to go towards Bitcoin. And so for me, I was a skeptic. I read in the book, I actually met Hal Finney.

39:59I think you know who he is. Peter Diamandis introduced me to him back in 2012. And he was explaining Bitcoin to me. I did not understand it. Of course, everyone wishes at that time that you did. And by the way, even if I understood it and liked it, I probably wouldn't even know how to buy it at that time. But I didn't understand it. When I got to the White House in 2017, there were two Federal Reserve officials. They had published a white paper on the digitization of the US dollar. You can go back mid-summer 2017. And they were in the White House talking about this. And I said, well, what do you mean like a digital dollar?

40:39I said, well, we would digitized the dollar over the blockchain. I said, the blockchain like Bitcoin? Yes, like Bitcoin. And I was like, oh my God, I am so out of it. I'm a 53-year-old man. I think Bitcoin is bullshit. I don't understand it. There are two Fed people talking about digitizing the US dollar on the blockchain. I better get up to speed on this. I owe myself, I owe my family to get up to speed on this. Boom. A couple of days later, I got fired from the White House. I went back to Skybridge. I bought the URL skybridgebitcoin.com and I started doing the homework. But even then, even then I was nervous to buy Bitcoin.

41:24I was an institutional investor, had lots of clients, had the wire houses as clients. Bitcoin was speculative. Bitcoin was volatile. You know, I think it peaked back in 2017 at like 20 ,000 and then it crashed after that. And so now I was looking at these prices. I was like, wow, this is things like an 80, 100 vol security asset, token, whatever you want to call it, commodity. Because it's too dangerous. I don't want to buy it. So I wrote down three things. I said, if Bitcoin reaches these three things in my mind, we're going to buy Bitcoin. Number one, will it scale? Will it get to 100 million wallets?

42:08Number two, can I get comfortable with US regulation of Bitcoin? Can I get comfortable with the future regulatory environment for Bitcoin? And then the third thing is, where can I store my Bitcoin? Because as an older person who's a little bit technophobic, I didn't want to have a cold storage wallet with my own catchphrase. And if I'm going to buy nine figures of Bitcoin for my institutional investors, where can I put the Bitcoin? And so one, heading towards 100 million wallets, maybe 80, 85 million wallets getting towards the end of 2020. Number two, the IRS deemed Bitcoin tangible property.

42:53So I didn't learn a lot in law school, but I did learn one thing, that property in the United States is sacrosanct. You can come with a Democratic president, a Republican president. We have 900 years of legal precedent dating back to the Magna Carta of common law precedent on the integrity of property and the sanctity of property in the United States. And so if Bitcoin is deemed intangible property by the IRS, it can be very hard to take it from you, okay, without representing fair values. It'd be very hard to make it illegal in the United States. And so even though the regulatory environment wasn't fully articulated, I said, well, that is a precursor for a favorable long-term regulatory environment.

43:43And then the third thing, of course, is Fidelity was offering storage. Nydig was offering storage. Coinbase Pro was offering successful bells and whistles. Places like Bitwise are now like that. And so once I got comfortable, me and my team, we made a$100 million purchase of Bitcoin in the 16, 17, 18, 20 ,000 zone. This was like, sort of say October to December of 2020. But then we made more purchases. We made purchases at 69 ,000 in November. And so we scaled into it and clients called me an idiot for being an investor in Bitcoin. By the end of 2021, they called me a genius. And then of course, Bitcoin crashed.

44:32At the end of 2022, I was an idiot. I went from genius to idiot. And then if the people stayed, even though I was an idiot, they stayed. They did very well in 23 and 24. But a lot of people left. And some of the journalists wrote nasty stories about me. They wrote my financial obituary, which is part of this. But if you want to be an entrepreneur and you want to be bold and you want to adapt your business to the future, you have to be willing to take those hits as a human being

45:05I read somewhere you have more than 50 % of your net worth in Bitcoin a little over 70 right now but that's a byproduct of buying it and sitting in it let's say you have a 15 % position in Bitcoin when you are looking at your overall portfolio you have a 15 % position in Bitcoin it goes 6 to 1 your other stuff is not moving like that And so it starts to eat your portfolio from a pizza slice perspective. Do you see what I mean? Absolutely. And, you know, Saylor said something to me. You know, he said, you know, I like your book, but I don't like the last chapter. I said, what's wrong with the last chapter?

45:41He says, well, you get done telling me this is the greatest idea ever. Best idea that you have had in 36 years of being on Wall Street, Bitcoin. I said, yes, I did say that. Then why the hell are you recommending a 2 % position at the end of the book? I wrote something about that. Yeah. And I said, well, Michael, I'm trying to be conservative. Let me tell you something. Do you have 49 other good ideas like this? I said, no, sorry, I don't. He said, well, you got to rewrite the chap. That's what I did. I rewrote it. What did you rewrite? What's your recommendation now to people you used to tell?

46:14Yeah, well, I basically said this is what I have. People like Saylor have 100 % or 99.8 or whatever the number is. I have 70. If I'm right about Bitcoin, it's going to go up. You know, if Bitcoin goes from 80 ,000 to 400 ,000, you know, it's going to be 90 plus percent of my net worth because I'm not selling. So the other stuff will not grow up as fast as this. If you believe that this is digital gold and it's going to go from 1.8 trillion to$20 trillion and it may take 10 years to do that, then you're going to sit in the asset. And so what I would say to you is that

46:54you either see it and you're very comfortable with it when it goes from 108 to 78. Very comfortable. Or you don't see it and you're going to be a short-term renter of Bitcoin. You're going to buy into Bitcoin. You're going to sell Bitcoin. You're going to buy into Bitcoin. Or you can think like a landlord and you can treat it like it's property. It's digital property in your portfolio it's like if you and i bought this building i mean could i just tell this guy's in a very shitty building here somewhere in the middle of new york i mean it looks nice in here but outside kaputs but i'm just saying the building's probably expensive you bought the building and you held the building that's what you got to do with bitcoin you mad at me because i shit on the i don't know no you're just checking about maybe they might be my time i might be a okay sorry

47:48I've recorded from much worse building than that in Singapore like old Chinese buildings where I brought like some really really big people and they're like what is that and I'm like oh yeah this is the I brought Raoul actually there the first time and he was like man I thought I got lost I was like yeah this is the first test I was just with him I love him yeah I spent a lot of time he's amazing he's an amazing person and he's just yeah he's all He also took a lot of shit. Actually, we talked for two hours and a half last time on the podcast, and I asked him about, you know, you talked about when people call you an idiot.

48:21He's been called an idiot a lot, usually online, and we talked a lot about dealing with Fed and all that stuff. I think, like, everybody who is taking risks and doing it publicly, like, will go through that at some point, especially in volatile industries like that. You just went to the Abundance 360 event together. I brought Lynn Alden, who I know you know, to the Abundance 360. talk about the macro currency dynamic. And Raul was talking about the macro cryptocurrency dynamic. And we had dinner together and we worked together at Goldman many, many years ago. And I credit him as sort of an elder statesman who has seen a lot of different market cycles.

49:06and I credit him for seeing the wave of digital financial technology, fintech digital innovation. And he got there ahead of me, frankly, and I credit him as being one of my Sherpas. Amazing at explaining things very simply and calming down everyone when things are volatile. I mean, amazing. An amazing guest also on the podcast. I'm a very big fan of his. I think we all are. there's a bunch of questions i have on the book bitcoin book the little book of bitcoin yeah you wrote if i've learned anything in my decades in finance it's this don't let the press manage your money why well the press is trying to get eyeballs they're not trying to get intrinsic they're not trying to identify intrinsic value so if things are going down you know there's a great study, if you bought the breaking news, catastrophic CNBC news stories, if you bought them, you tripled the return of the market, meaning you got to buy on those really, really bad days.

50:12Every time they're out there saying that the world's coming to an end, you got to step into the breach and buy. The 2022 situation with Bitcoin was a little bit more unique because there was some fraud going on in the system and there was excess leverage in the system. And so when the fraud was exposed and the leverage was punctured, the bubble really came down fast. If you said to me in November, when Bitcoin was 69 ,000, if you said to me, yeah, you know, we're at 69 ,000, how low could we go? I was, oh, you know, could correct 40%. You know, you go from 70 ,000 to call it 42 ,000. You know, that's a 40 % healthy, early stage technology volatility curve.

51:02But you corrected from 69 ,000. You know, there was a flash print at 12 ,000. I don't know if people remember this in January. It flashed down to 12 ,000. And so this was extraordinary pain. And this is a big lesson in an asset like this. No leverage. Don't hold it with leverage. because the leverage, to quote Warren Buffett, is like a spear coming out of the steering wheel. You're in a very fast sports car and you're driving on an icy road, a mountainous road in Switzerland, and it's icy. And you're in the sports car. When you need to brake, this is when the leverage is going to hurt you the most.

51:43And so I didn't own any of this stuff with leverage, but the press the press can be mean and the press is looking for an eyeball they're looking for the attention so they'll find a story that's a car crash or they'll find a story that's controversial and they'll spend their day on that because this is what we like our brains are set up for the brains don't like the good news you know the brains like the bad news we stop you know there's an expression in the press if it bleeds if it bleeds it leads the top stories are the ones where there's blood on the newspaper, you know? Yeah. But you got to be a big boy.

52:19You know, what are you going to do? You're going to make a bet and you're going to get the bet wrong temporarily. But if you've done your homework and you're right about it long term, or do you have the strength, have the strength to stay in the position? And so thankfully we have, we've had that strength. And to buy the blood when it's in the street. Exactly. The blood is on the newspaper page. You should be buying. Yeah. That's a Rothschild expression. Bernie, what happens when you combine belief and technology? Can you explain? Yeah. So I think that what happens to us is we manifest things.

52:56We believe certain things. And I think the generators of Bitcoin, the Satoshi team, maybe it was one person. Maybe it was one person. Maybe it was a computer programming team. But I think they probably looked at e-cash and other type, digi-cash and other types of potential technological currencies. And they said, OK, these all failed for different reasons. What iteration of this could we create that would make it not fail, that would allow it to scale? And I think the anonymity is a feature, not a bug of Bitcoin. I think the fact that we don't know who Satoshi is and that the wallet hasn't moved is a very good sign for the progenitor of Bitcoin.

53:48And so there's a belief there. What was the belief? The belief was that we could take the keys away from the central bankers that are drunk drivers. Okay, we have had drunk driving with our currency for the last 50 plus years. So take the keys away from the drunk drivers that are inflating the currency, monetizing debt, executing wars around the world by printing money effectively. The belief was could we create something hard? Could we create something unhackable, immutable that we could use between ourselves where we would not have to trust a central authority that we ourselves. through the network would be the central authority.

54:38So therefore, there's nobody to trust because there's so many people involved with the trust. And that's a belief. And so to take that belief and turn it into a technology, okay, I think that's the intersection of the funnest parts of being in business or the funnest parts of life, that creation. There's an amazing book. I mean, the book that I read two books that made me go in Bitcoin and crypto in late 18, early 19. And one is called the Bitcoin Standard, obviously. Safed Niamhos, yep. And it's absolutely talking about that, right? The other one was Antonopoulos, the Internet of Money. Yeah, the internet.

55:21But the Bitcoin Standard is called the Bitcoin Standard. 80 % doesn't talk about Bitcoin. It's just about evolution of money and talks exactly about what you're talking about here. Well, where I praise him, and I'll say this about Mr. Alamos, okay, Safadeyan, who I've had on my podcast. If I have a crisis of faith - You go back to the book? I go back to the book. Absolutely. If I'm worried the volatility is affecting my mood, you can pretend that it's not going to affect you, but it does affect you. When it moves, boom. Like, okay, maybe I got this wrong. Maybe this thing's trading to zero. Let me go reread the Bitcoin standard.

56:00But then when you're done reading it, like, okay, let me see how I can buy more of this shit. You know what I mean? That's what happens, you know? So I praise him. He gets very high praise. I think he's a genius. Absolutely. And I think he's a visionary and I think he has balls. Yeah. So I respect him. And he doesn't care about what people think. Absolutely. I love that about him. He doesn't care about what other people think. And okay. And, and, uh, Lehman, I'd agree all the time on the politics, but I love the fact that he has a point of view. That's what makes the world great is we can have opposing points of view, uh, but we can still respect each other intellectually.

56:29He's very harsh against shitcoins or non-Bitcoin related cryptocurrencies. What about you? Well, I'm a Wall Streeter. So I know we have to tokenize over the blockchain. I know that the bond market and the stock market, those securities that are represented right now by QCIP numbers, which if I'm going to trade my stock from my account into your account, it's going to pass through seven pudgy penguins. Seven different entities is going to have to catch that before it dumps into your account. So if you're telling me that there's technology available where I can put a contract on a layer one protocol and I can deliver that into your account, bypassing all of these third parties, unleashing a tremendous amount of cost savings, and that cost savings can go to you and me and could get dumped back into the global marketplace, the global economy to lead to more economic efficiency, more technological development than I want that.

57:33So I'm not a Bitcoin, I am a Bitcoin maximalist when it comes to understanding the nature of Bitcoin and its store of value. But I own other coins because I do believe in the utility of these layer ones. And I do believe what Larry Fink is saying, the CEO of BlackRock, that we are going to tokenize the stock in bond market. We're not going to do that on Bitcoin. Could we do that on Avalanche? Yes. Could we do that on Ethereum? Possibly. Unlikely, because it's still pretty expensive. Could we do it on Solana? Yes. You see what I mean? So I own some of those other coins, if you want to call them coins, protocols.

58:15I see this like the cloud. So you're a young man, so you don't remember the advent of the cloud. Okay. But the cloud scared the shit out of everybody. Okay. So what do you mean? I'm going to take my top secret data from my company and I'm going to hand it over to your company and I'm going to put it into the cloud. Nobody wanted to do it. Yeah. I know that because I built my first data company in 2015 and we built it directly on the cloud. And it was a nightmare to get a lot of industries moving to that. We knew within five years, 2020, most people, the companies will have to go there because it's so much better.

58:52It was impossible to explain them. Most people were like, no, no, there's no way we're going to do that on our own servers, on premise. They call that. Listen, there were generators in this town that we're in right now on the island of Manhattan. The first electricity was born from the home generator. and the gasoline or the oil that was getting sent into the generator to make the electricity for the house. And then people said, okay, well, hold on a second. We can carry a power plant and use alternating current, and we could pulse it through the lines, and we could have one central authority make the electricity for everybody.

59:31Or it was a game changer. And it's the same thing with the cloud. People were nervous in the beginning, and then they yielded to the cloud, and they realized how much cost savings to work. It's the same thing with the paycheck. industry, right? In the U.S., you can go to a paycheck provider and you don't have to have that whole accounting staff on call. And it's cheaper for you and it's actually better, it's more efficient. This is the same thing. There will be protocols. These are operating softwares. This is like the cloud. You can't see it right now. There's still a resistance to it. There's still a regulatory resistance, frankly, in the U.S.

1:00:08to it, which obviously is coming to an end. And so I want to own some of this stuff. So I think when somebody tells me that Ethereum is a store of value, then I'm with Safadan Amos. I say, no, it's not a store of value. Solana is a store of value. No. Solana could be very valuable the same way Microsoft or Apple or NVIDIA can be very valuable, but it's not a store of value. It's not gold. It's not digital property to quote seller. See the difference? Although, especially in the last, whatever, one, two decades, stocks like Apple and a bunch of others have been used as store of value. They have been because of too much money in the system and you have to find, but yeah.

1:00:55And I accept that. I accept that, but it's not from an academic and from an ideological perspective. It's not pure. If you said to me, gold is a store of value, I'd say, okay, well, we have 5 ,000 years. And if Lynn Alden was on the podcast, she would say gold was your first proof of work. You had to go mine that shit, man. You had to go dig it out of the ground. And it's very rare. And it's an attractive piece of metal. And so it's your first proof of work. And so we put that away and we consider that a store of value. I don't see Microsoft or Apple like that, but I see the point that you're making that it was a repository.

1:01:36It was an opportunity cost repository, given where rates were and given where the dollar was and so on and so forth. I do accept that. You tweeted, we believe in a United States strategic Bitcoin reserve, not because it will help Bitcoin, but because it will help the United States. Well, listen, I think Bitcoin, it will help Bitcoin in the sense that if the U.S. starts buying it, the price of Bitcoin will go up. It'll force more adoption. So I don't necessarily think that's why we should do it. We should do it because it will help the United States. We should do it because Saylor is correct that if it is a piece of the operating layer of the future of transactions, if it is a piece of something that people can rely on that can't get corrupted by central banks, if it's something that can't be monetized that were inflated away, the value that's inside the network, then the network should be held in reserve.

1:02:41The same way gold is held in reserve, and frankly, the same way oil is held in reserve. And by the way, there are probably 27 or so things that are held in the U.S. reserve. It would include medical equipment. It would include lithium. It would include rare earth minerals, metals, rare earth metals that the United States thinks that we need for technological preservation of our economy in the event of a nightmare or some type of warfare or something like that. So Bitcoin, if you believe what I believe about Bitcoin, that it is digital property, it is a store of value akin to gold, it is the future of value storage, then the United States should hold it.

1:03:23And if the United States holds it and buys into it now, and I'm right or seller's right that it could trade to a million dollars or in seller's case,$13 million, the United States would be very well benefited by having this asset on its balance sheet. And I applaud David Sachs, frankly, for understanding this, but I also applaud his gradualism. Because if he said Donald Trump is going to sign an executive order, we're going to buy 500 ,000 Bitcoin. We are in such a polarized society, we may end up having the next person say, okay, I'm signing an executive order. We're going to sell 500 ,000 Bitcoin.

1:04:01We don't want that. So I think what Sachs has done is very prudent. He's trying to get a bipartisan commitment. We don't debate in this country gold. In other words, there's not a Democrat that says sell the gold and a Republican says buy the gold, we accept that gold should be in our reserve. Gold should be reserved by the United States. We don't debate. It's apolitical to store and reserve oil. We got to get Bitcoin to that. And I think it's going to take a little bit of time. So I applaud the way they've handled this and it will be good for the United States. You wrote another book called From Wall Street to the White House and Back.

1:04:41it's not about Wall Street it's not about the White House it's about life what's the single most important thing to you in life? I mean with all sincerity what we're doing right now the relationship relating to others helping others appreciating life together, sharing we are social I am certainly social And so for me, I want to be with my family. I want to be with my colleagues, my friends, people that I work alongside of. And I want to relate to them. And I want to be able to, you know, feel them, the pathos, right? I want to be able to have that experience. And so if you want to say from a faithful perspective, you know, you have to ground your life in gratitude.

1:05:41dude. If you don't do that, you'll be unhappy, you know, because you'll have the wrong expectations. I expect nothing. I'm here today. I've watched friends of mine die. I lost a friend two years ago at age 58 to brain cancer. I lost one of the closest people in my life. 17, it's hard to believe it would be 16 years ago on June 7th, 2009, uh, to stomach cancer, 44 year old man to stomach cancer. And did he have any control over that? Did he wake up one morning and say, okay, I don't want stomach cancer. Let me wish it away. No. His clock started in November of 1964 and it ended in June of 2009.

1:06:24No control of himself. And you are in good shape. I try to keep myself in shape, although I'd probably eat too much pasta, but you're not in control. Maybe you could have the fish oil tablet and you'll live a day longer, or maybe you won't. You'll get hit by a bus. Who the hell knows? So you're not in control. So don't have high expectations for this experiment. You have to have low expectations. And so if you get a great cup of coffee, you have gratitude. If you have a coconut water that you're enjoying, you're blessed with this and you have gratitude. If you do that in your life, you'll generally be happy.

1:07:06You won't be perfectly happy because how could you be? You know that people around you that you love are going to die. You will meet your own demise. And so you have to have that in your life as well. There's no nirvana. There's no perfect. You could be the richest and you still have a sell-by date. You could be the poorest and you still have a sell-by date. This is the great equalizer. And so the best thing you can do is live in the moment that we have right now and in that relationship, in that relatability, have some level of success. What's the worst advice you've ever been given? Person-centered advice is the worst advice.

1:07:50So if I came to you and I said, give me some advice, And you turned to me and said, well, I did A and A didn't work out for me. So now my recommendation to you is never do A, only do B. You see what I mean? You go to somebody for advice and they're talking to you about their life in a very egocentric way. And then they're giving you advice related to their life. That's not good advice. Good advice. Why are you laughing? No, no. Because I'm thinking about so many people who would do that. Starting a business is a good one, right? Oh, no. It's risky, et cetera. That's why I'm just thinking. If you have a fire in your brain to want to start the business.

1:08:29Yeah. I have a son that is in the film business. He has a fire in his brain to be in the film business. He's a creative human being. Should I not endow him with the gift to be in the film business? Or should I talk to him snorkelly and tell him he's got to be an investment banker, which is some boring motherfucking shit? Should I tell him to do that? Or should I tell him to be in the film business? What should I tell him to do? Right? So you have to give the advice in relationship to the person and the arc of that person's life. And so the worst advice I've gotten, I go to people and they tell me, well, this happened in my life.

1:09:06And therefore, this was good. You should do that. And this was bad. You should do this. Hey, I didn't come to that. I came for an observation. I came for the sentiment. I came for, hey, this is what I'm thinking about doing. These are my goals. how can you help me achieve these goals you mentioned death multiple times in the last hour how do you want to be remembered well i'm not i'm not going to be remembered so i don't have to worry about that i mean you know so so that's my point you know i mentioned death because in the book wall street in the white house and back it's modeled after meditations right there's 25 lessons in the book you can open that book and you can start it anywhere in the book you don't have to start on lesson one.

1:09:51It's just I have 25 observations from my 60 years on the planet. I'm 61 now, but when I published the book, I was 60. Here are 25 observations that I've had in my life that I'll share with you. And some of them you may agree with, some of them you may disagree, but these are my observations. And the number one thing is get comfortable with death. I've mentioned it a number of times on this podcast because you have to get comfortable with death because we are mendacious. We lie to ourselves. Okay. There's a survival mechanism. We can't wake up in the morning and say, holy shit, I'm going to die.

1:10:29We have to have the self-belief that we're going to live forever to manifest ourselves. But that creates a mendacity about your life, right? Homer explained this better than me. Homer had the figure of Cassandra. Do you remember who Cassandra was? Have you read the Iliad? No. Cassandra is the daughter of the king of Troy. And she's Priam's daughter. And she's blessed by the goddesses of having great clairvoyance, but she's also cursed by those goddesses to have nobody believe her. And so she can see the future. She runs to her father and she says, the Greeks are coming. They're pissed that we took Helen, Helen of Troy.

1:11:12They're pissed. As though they're launching a thousand ships, they're going to come and they're going to destroy our great city. And Priam laughed at her and said, well, that's not going to happen. Relax. And Homer was trying to say in this metaphorical story that we lie to ourselves. We can't accept the truth. Aaron Sorkin took this concept. He put it into the Jack Nicholson figure and a few good men. You remember the very dramatic scene in The Jury? He says, you can't handle the truth. And so what Aurelius would say to you, the general, is that the minute that you can accept death in momento more, in this moment I can die, you relax.

1:11:48You relax into life and you accept the bounty that today brings to you. And so it's a very, very important concept for people. You can believe when the person gets sick next to you, that's them. It's never going to be you, but someday it will be because nature is undefeated. You see what I mean? And again, it's not to be morbid. If anything, that's to be liberating. That should create liberation. It shouldn't create morbidity. It should create, holy shit, I'm going to do what Steve Jobs said to do in his 2005 commencement address at Stanford. I'm going for it in this life, man. I'm going for it because it's temporal.

1:12:31Stay hungry, stay foolish. You stay hungry, you stay foolish, you stay optimistic. and when your kids want to go for ice cream at 11 o 'clock p.m., don't be that asshole that says you can't do it, it's too late. Get in the fucking car, take him for the ice cream. Getting the fucking car, take him for the ice cream. Thank you so much, Anthony, for doing that. Hey, really good to be. That was awesome. The accent works for you, by the way. I'll just let you know that, okay? The accent? Yeah, yeah, it works. It's because it's Swiss. It's Swiss, yeah. It's a bit less subtle and it's like a little, you know, It's like a little, you know, you lure the people in with the accent, and it comes across very smart.

1:13:11Yeah, it's good. That's my sales trick. Yeah. That's my network trick. I don't know. Is New York accent working for me? I don't know. I feel like it's a little overbearing. No, I think it's very good. It's okay? To be honest, for me, I enjoyed the most this podcast with American people because they're really the best guests. They're the best at talking. They're the best at exposing themselves. as you said before, they just think they're amazing and they say it out loud and it's just so much more entertaining and better for me but also for the people who are watching. So I enjoy it a lot. Well, I don't think I'm amazing, but I do think I think and I'm ready to fuck to live my life.

1:13:44I have a podcast with this woman, Caddy Kay. I have a Lamborghini. I'm not afraid to admit that to people. She was upset because she's a Brit. I let her drive the fucking car. She broke the license plate off the car. But down deep, we all want to have the Lamborghini. So just relax, go get the Lamborghini. You know, that's my message, right?