Bitcoin and the Future of Money

00:22AlexThis is Alex at this. And today we’re talking with Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge capital, founder and chairman of Soul, host of the Open Book Podcast, and the Rest is Politics podcast, and author of the book The Little Book of Bitcoin What You Need to Know that Wall Street has already figured out. In this episode, we talk about Bitcoin and the future of money.

00:41AlexI hope you enjoyed this episode and make sure to subscribe to get the latest episodes as soon as they’re released. Now let’s get into it. We’re in 2025 and the price of Bitcoin hit $100,000. Pretty sure in December and in January. What’s causing this big push and this big increase in terms of the price of Bitcoin?

01:03AnthonyAnthony I’m going to give you my theory. And again it’s my theory. And I believe that where we are right now is a direct function of 2022. So hear me out for a second. We were supposed to get a cash bitcoin ETF in February of 2022. That would have been consistent to the administrative law. In November of 2021, we got a Bitcoin futures ETF in order not to be arbitrary and capricious with your administration of the law, you would have to follow suit that something identical or more or less identical, you would give the same approval to.

01:48AnthonyAnd so the Gary Gensler said, no, we’re not going to do that. And so I’m going to act like a czar. I’m going to act Trump like, and I’m going to be arbitrary and capricious and disavow the rules in the United States. And so when he did that, he crashed Bitcoin. Now, the irony of that, Alex, is that he probably saved Bitcoin, and he probably saved the whole industry because he exposed Sam Bankman-Fried, Genesis three arrows.

02:15AnthonyHe exposed all of these fraudsters and charlatans that were in the mix and, they imploded. And so, that created this sort of clean slate to sort of fresh start while that was happening. The bigger players, Blackrock, fidelity, so on and so forth said, oh, okay, he’s just broken the law. We’re going to bring a lawsuit against them.

02:36AnthonyGrayscale was the first to lead the lawsuit. They won the lawsuit. Now he had the opportunity to appeal the lawsuit to a very conservative appellate court. He would have lost that case. So he didn’t appeal the lawsuit. He got forced literally forced in January to, approve the Bitcoin ETF. And so that was a two year delay. You should have gotten that ETF in January 22nd.

03:04AnthonyYou’re getting it in 24 okay. The price pops. It goes back to half of where it was in November of 2021. But you don’t get the price discovery or the price relief to where it should have been in February of 2022 until Trump wins the election, because Trump is signaling and I think this is true about Australia, it’s certainly true here.

03:29AnthonyPersonnel is policy. Trump is signaling he likes Bitcoin. He’s going to staff the SEC, Treasury, Department of Commerce, etc. with Bitcoiners. And so he does that and it causes the price now to pop to where it should have been in February of 2022. So that’s that’s how I see it. And other people see it differently than me.

03:52AnthonyAnd, but I think the price is pretty firm as a result of that. This, this price that we’re looking at right now should have happened two years ago. But but the market’s not super liquid. That’s the you know the news flash everybody has to know. Everyone said oh you know Bitcoin’s got a $2 trillion market cap. It’s it’s super big.

04:09AnthonyIt’s not super liquid. You can move the price of Bitcoin with a couple billion dollars.

04:13AlexAnd so how much of an impact has the Blackrock ETF had in the uptake of Bitcoin institutionally. And from kind of the retail markets.

04:23AnthonyReally, really really good question. I would say that they have helped. I think they have ignited Bitcoin. I think they’ve provided volume. At the same time that they were providing volume, you were getting slippage from great grayscale because of the price differential. And so there was many months where you were netting almost even, you know, stuff was coming out of the Bitcoin markets and stuff was going into the Bitcoin markets.

04:49AnthonyBut now on a net basis, I think they’ve been, by and large, very, very helpful. And it’s just getting started because if you know anything about Wall Street and I know you do, Wall Street is a huge selling machine. And so the engine of Wall Street in the sales in Wall Street are now getting fired up. And even JP Morgan, their CEO Jamie Diamond, says it’s a decentralized pet rock.

05:13AnthonyIt’s a decentralized Ponzi scheme. He says all kinds of bad things about Bitcoin, but he’s gearing up to prepare himself to be allowed to custody Bitcoin for his custom at JPMorgan. So. So this scaling that’s taking place right now is helping the selling effort. And so said differently, Bitcoin is 0.1% of the world’s assets right now. If you were to tell people you need to own a Bitcoin you need to own.

05:46AnthonyPercent, 2%, 1%. And you multiply that by everybody. Couldn’t Bitcoin trade to the price of gold? I believe it could. And so that’s why I’m a bitcoin. You know Saylor who wrote the foreword for my new book, who’s obviously a genius and way smarter than me, yells at me. He says I’m too conservative and I shouldn’t be calling this, a store of value or digital gold.

06:12AnthonyIt’s digital property. It’s a network that’s this exciting, crazy, wondrous network, you know, and so on and so forth.

06:21AlexYou kind of almost just led into my next question because I was asking you about the Michael Saylor effect. Right? Because Michael Saylor, how long ago was it that he started to take the cash reserves in MicroStrategy and purchase some Bitcoin? Right. Because how long ago? I mean, he started that quite a while ago. Yeah. So he’s been kind of almost the poster child for the Bitcoin kind of industry.

06:42AlexRight. Because he’s been so bullish. Right. So what is his perspective on the because and could you also in the same answer talk through like is bitcoin a commodity a currency a property. That’s what you just said. Raiola is a property. It like how do people think about it. Like I I guess the question is kind of what did Michael say to say the part of that discussion great.

07:04AnthonyGreat was obviously these are all great questions, but let me just let me just back I think it’s very important to see to see Bitcoin for what it is. Bitcoin is a kaleidoscope. And so what I mean by that is I’m looking through the lens and I see something that you don’t see it. The lens shifts a little bit.

07:22AnthonyI then see something different than you see. So I’ll talk for myself. I see digital gold. I see a store of value. I see an $18 trillion market cap from 2025 to 2032. So it’s trading at 2 trillion. It’ll go nine times, it’ll take seven years. And that’s what I see. Other people see different things in me.

07:46AnthonyI see that, okay. Michael Saylor sees a global property network, a Michael Saylor sees the operating software, the OS. This is the operating software for the world monetary transactions value, permissionless value is going to go back and forth between the Alex’s and the Anthony’s without the help of the banks. And, that’s what Michael Saylor sees. And so Michael Saylor sees seven, 8% of the overall assets of the world.

08:27AnthonyHe sees a I mean, I mean, I’m just going to say it, okay, he sees $13 million a coin. Okay? I see $1 million a coin. Okay. And he yells at me, you know, like he wrote the foreword for my book. And he’s like, you know, your book is great. I learned so much in your book. But the last chapter, your book was terrible.

08:48AnthonyI said, well, what are you talking to me? So you just told me this is the best idea that you ever had, and you’ve been in the business for 36 years. I said, yeah, this is the best idea. He said, well, do you have 49 other ideas like this because you’re recommending a 2% allocation? So that must imply they have 50 ideas like this.

09:04AnthonyI said, no, I don’t have 50 ideas like, well, what’s your percentage of your net worth in Bitcoin. And so by the way, it did start at seven. It’s now 60. Not my fault. I mean Bitcoin just ate up the rest of my portfolio. I didn’t sell any of it. So it does this to your portfolio. And and so now it’s tremendous a lot of people would sell the bitcoin and diversify.

09:30AnthonyI’m not doing that. And but but but he said well if you’re at 60 I’m at 110 you’re recommending 2% WTF. What’s wrong with you. So I, I ripped up the I ripped up the chapter, I rewrote the thing to reflect this sentiment that if it’s really this good of an idea and I, I believe that it is.

09:55AnthonyIt’s a tremendous idea that we have to we have to own more of it.

10:00AlexWhy do you believe it’s such a good idea? Yeah, it’s. What is Marcus I like, believe it’s such a good idea. And how do you not sell these fluctuations? Right. Because the volatility is quite high compared to like, standard investing. And obviously.

10:16AnthonyOkay. Well I’m going to say two things for you to think about. And then you’ll get the answer from the provocative things I’m about to say okay. So provocative thing number one. If you thought Amazon was an internet bookseller in 1999, then you thought it was too expensive. You didn’t buy Amazon if you thought he was selling a book, because look at these books.

10:38AnthonyThey’re roughly the same size. And so why did he start with books? He could sell something that’s roughly a pound. You can ship it around the US, and then he can reverse engineer and dot plot the warehouses to sell everything. So he started with a book. It was easy to maneuver. It was easy to go back and forth with right.

10:59AnthonySo that’s one of the things that he did. The second thing that he did is he wrote the vomit comet of the oscillations of the wave as his company was getting adopted. So let’s talk about it. It goes public in May of 1997. It drops in value eight times 50%. It drops in value one time, 90%. March of 2000.

11:27AnthonyOkay. And then it drops in value four more times 25 to 30%. You know, the global financial crisis, it touches 50 again. Okay. And so now this asset, a $10,000 investment in this asset known as Amazon, is worth 17 million USD today. There’s 1 or 2 people, Mackenzie Bezos, Jeff Bezos, 1 or 2 other people that held the asset.

11:55AnthonyEveryone else ditch the asset, okay. And did what you said. Well, why would you hold this? Why not trade the volatility or trade the they held the asset. And just think about this for a second because it’s like it’s very important. Let’s go to the internet and you’re old enough. What year were you born? Alex, if you don’t mind me asking.

12:14Alex1978.

12:16AnthonySo you’re born in 78, so you’re old enough. So when you were 20, in 1998, you had a fat box computer somewhere in your house, and you had maybe an AOL desk, and you maybe had a dial up modem, that word and bird to click you into the internet. And it was a very chunky, hard thing, but it was cool.

12:36AnthonyWhat, on eBay to buy a Pez gun? And you went on Amazon and you had email. Maybe you went into a chat room for AOL and, it was okay. But it was a lot of hype and someone like Alex could have came through and said, what the hell is this all about? Why is there so much hype now?

12:53AnthonyWhat if I beamed in? I beamed in from 27 years later, I came in, beamed in, and I said, Alex, how you doing? You’re 20 years old. Let me tell you, this thing called the internet that you’re playing with right now is actually really is going to transform the world because we’re going to build on it. We’re going to bobble global pipes, global Wi-Fi, fast internet technology.

13:19AnthonyWe’re going to put the computer that’s in front of you into your hand. We’re also going to allow you to stream 4K videos. There’ll be 8 or 9 billion people on Earth in 2025, and you’ll stream eight K 4K videos will all do it together. There’ll be trillions of dollars of commerce on the internet, and it will have transformed each of our lives.

13:45AnthonyBut it started out as this clunky donkey thing. Okay. And so I gave you two examples one buy and hold. Shut your computer off. Shut your emotions off. Number two, extrapolate where this could be if it is fully adopted and it goes exponential. So those are the reasons for me. And I’m you know here’s the other fucking thing.

14:07AnthonyYou know, I don’t give you a lot of curse on this podcast.

14:10AlexBecause.

14:10AnthonyI don’t give a shit, okay? I don’t give a shit. I’m 61 years old. I was born in 1964. I’ve been on Wall Street 36 years. I’m not a big liver. I don’t have tall poppy syndrome like you Aussies. I don’t give a shit. I’m not looking up other people’s asses and I don’t want them to look up my ass.

14:28AnthonyI’m just living my life and I’m sitting on a ton of Bitcoin. And if it goes to zero and I always do that, I take a look at me, I take my thumb, I go over the the balance sheet and I say, okay, I don’t own it. It’s at zero. Can I afford my lifestyle? And and the answer is yes.

14:47AnthonySo that’s it. Then we’re going to hold it and that’s it. If you want to be with me, great. If you don’t want to be with me, I completely understand. No problem.

14:55AlexIt’s like the story of I forget the person’s name, but they had $5,000 in Apple stock and they sold it in like seven days or something, and now it would be worth like $3 billion or something. And I’m sure those are not the correct numbers, but it’s something similar. It’s really hard to hold it for that long.

15:11AnthonyBut think about what Ballmer did, gates said. I got to sell. I’m going to diversify. He sold. And Ballmer is now worth more than gates. Because, you see, I don’t give a shit. I’m smart. I hold on to it. And by the way, when he ran the company, it sucked. It flatlined. When they gave it to Pindar. I guess his name is and how to pronounce his name.

15:29AnthonyBut it rocketed, and bomber’s the beneficiary of that. And so, you know, listen, there’s a reason why the dead people at Charles Schwab, they do better than the living. You can go look this up on Google. The dead people’s accounts do better than the living, but do you know why they don’t look at their accounts? Alex? You’re dead.

15:49AnthonyPeople don’t look at their accounts. They’re dead. They don’t get upset when the account’s going up and down. And so you can’t sell. And if you just hold and stay the course, you up for everything. You know, Kodak will go bankrupt. GE will take a big stumble. It’s not for everything, but it’s for a lot of things. You know, you’ve got to bet long term on the greatness of American innovation.

16:12AlexSo let’s talk about, this concept of the digital property or however you explained it before. How do you like it started as an idea to be a counter to the fiat system. Right. And from, the research I’ve done so Nakamura he wanted to kind of, the freedom outside of the existing kind of monetary system.

16:39AlexRight. So it started off as kind of a rebellious currency, but now it’s become a store of value. Right? So it started off as an idea. It’s become something else now. So now it seems like it’s more like a commodity that is linked to the price, to the fluctuations of gold. But how you’re explaining it is that it’s becoming something else, right?

17:01AlexPotentially, yes. Where could it go into the future? Right. Because at the moment, I mean Bitcoin I hold it, I have to keep my secret key somewhere unless it’s in on, the centralized exchange. So what is the future of Bitcoin look like. Like is it just like gold or does it evolve into something else?

17:19AnthonyThat’s the that’s the analogy. That’s the example I’m giving you. I just told you what the internet was and I told you what the internet is. Now, you and I couldn’t do a George Jetson phone call me in New York. You in Australia in 1998. Not happening. You don’t have the bandwidth. We don’t have the tech now. We don’t even have the compression technology to pull it off.

17:40AnthonyBut now we do. We look like very seamless to each other. We almost we’re in the same room and and so what I’m saying to you, you’re not seeing it because it’s not in front of you. Let me tell you a very big mistake. A human being makes your brain is a 100,000 year old piece of machinery.

18:00AnthonyHasn’t had a software upgrade in 100,000 years. The phone in front of me, the computer. The phone’s gone from iPhone one to iPhone 16. In 15 years, your brain is 100,000 years old, so your reticular system is designed to think linearly, is part of your survival mechanism. And so here’s the linear thing in front of me. Here’s my survival.

18:25AnthonyI’m going to assume that’s what’s happening today is going to happen tomorrow. That’s a protective device. But that’s not how the world is working. The world is working and moving exponentially. So when a guy like Thomas Malthus says, we’re going to die, and you say, why are we going to die? Thomas Malthus, a famous economic historian in the UK, he said, we’re going to run out of food populations growing exponentially.

18:49AnthonyWe can only grow the food linearly. We’re going to starve. He leaves out irrigation. He leaves out GMO ideas. There’s vertical farming. He leaves out all the great technologies. We have more people dying from obesity and gluttony than we do from starvation. Okay, when I was a kid, they told me, we’ll run out of oil. It says peak oil.

19:11AnthonyThey’re running out of oil. We’ll be out of oil by the year 2010. You know we are okay. But they left out fracking. They left our GPS. They left out the new scenography of the ocean, the new techniques to offshore rig and drill. And, we have more oil and we know what to do with now that we’re creating an environmental problem.

19:34AnthonyBut my point is, you can’t sit in the seat you’re sitting in and look at Bitcoin where it is today. You have to look at Bitcoin and where the world is going. Now, what I do also know about the world is we have a bunch of drunk drivers on earth that are central bankers, and they are drunk driving with our currency.

19:55AnthonyThey’re effing up your money. Okay, I don’t know what the Australian dollar buys today, but I can tell you that two U.S 1971 pre taking the US off the gold standard, 2 USD. Is the value of a $100 bill today 53 years from now. Yeah I could actually go look at the numbers. Go look at the purchasing power.

20:23AnthonyWe destroyed the money said differently. My parents house, $16,000, purchased in 1962. If you go on American Zillow. But the Zestimate for my parent’s house is $780,000. But if you price my parents house in ounces of gold and ounces of gold, the conversion should be 1.2 million. So the house actually lost value in ounces of gold. It went up in nominal US dollars, but that should make sense because the technology that built the house, the wear and tear on the house, it should be less than what it was in terms of its purchase price, but it’s up on nominal value.

21:11AnthonyAnd this is the sneaky thing about inflation. It’s a regressive tax, but people weirdly like it, Alex. Because if I have $1 million, I’m a millionaire, even though it has the purchasing power of $20,000 in 1971. You see what I mean? And so so here we are. See the world for where it’s going. Get out of your reticular system and your linear thinking, and recognize that we have drunk drivers.

21:45AnthonyAnd eventually we’re going to have to, as a group of global citizens, take the keys away from the drunk drivers. We’re gonna eventually have to do that. And so and so that’s another big asymmetric upside to owning Bitcoin, not just sitting there. Store value in your keys. At some point people are going to add it to their balance sheets.

22:09AnthonyAt some point they’re going to add it to their corporate and governmental treasuries.

22:15AlexSo MicroStrategy, it started just to purchase it just with its, spare cash reserves because it saw this kind of same issue. Right? Just with inflation and the the degrading of and the degrading of value of the cash in the bank and so on. Right. What is a good strategy for a company to think about if they’ve got a cash reserve, you know, how should they be thinking about this?

22:35AlexIs this something that they should just be holding for long term? I means it’s something that they should hold for the shorter term if they have it. Like, is it because I think, like everyone is looking at Michael Saylor and thinking, that was smart, right. But obviously he’s very, very smart, right? So you probably shouldn’t just go out and spend all your spare cash in your company, purchase some Bitcoin like Michael Saylor did.

22:55AlexRight? I like like he’s done a certain strategy. And there’s a separate one for everyone else. Right.

23:01AnthonyWhere here’s what Michael Saylor would say to you. He was on your podcast. He got his ass kicked okay. He has a software tech company. It’s done. Okay. It’s been around for 30 years. It was a boom in 2000. It busted in March of 2000. He was literally a cover boy for a stock going down 99%. He stayed in the game.

23:24AnthonyHe had enough software applications that he could sell to different corporations. And it was an okay, decent business. Okay. And then lo and behold, he was very negative on Bitcoin, didn’t understand bitcoin. He started studying Bitcoin. And he said to himself, wait a minute, this is the operating system for the global exchange of value. Now you may not believe that.

23:52AnthonyI may not believe that. But he believes that. And so so I didn’t even invent this thing. But all I got to do is own a large piece of it, because these tokens are going to be the country, the world Saturday in almost the Bitcoin standard. It’s going in that direction. And so I had Michael strategy mediocre software company got my ass kicked by Microsoft and Android and Google.

24:22AnthonyBut I’m not going to get my ass kicked here. This is the monetary operating system for the world. And I’m going to use my understanding of mechanical and electrical engineering and my understanding of software application. And I am going to re-engineer my company to be the owner of a very large piece of the operating network that the world is going to operate on in terms of monetary transfer.

24:52AnthonyAnd so that’s the vision, that’s his idea. And so he’s heading for $1 trillion in his mind, because if Microsoft could be the operating system for your computer or my computer, and he could own a piece of the operating system for money, he’s going to be a very, very rich man. And he will have transformed a company that did okay.

25:15AnthonyHe had a very nice living for himself into a multi-billionaire and a possible center billionaire, you know, possible. And that that’s his vision. I am more conservative than him. And he yells at me. I looked at this. I got into it two months after he did. He made his first investment in August of 2020. I made my investments in October.

25:40AnthonyI got roundly ridiculed by all my friends. They told me I was a dummy and they told me I was an imbecile. It went up in 21. Some people thought I was a genius. It went down in 22. It was a confirmation that I am an imbecile. And then it went up in 23. Went up in 24.

25:59AnthonyYou tell me what I am. I don’t think I’m an imbecile. And I don’t think I’m a genius. I think I saw something in the marketplace that’s mispriced, and I’ve got three things going on at the same time that are going to benefit this thing. Number one, I have drunk driving in central in the central banking community.

26:19AnthonyI have extra ordinary over promises from public servants around the world that are extraordinarily over promising their people, a result of which they’re going to tax them. You know, Elon Musk is right about that. Deficit spending is a delayed taxation, okay. It’s just unfunded tax liability. Okay. Well, you’re not taxing me, but I am because I’m ruining your money.

26:45AnthonySo it’s a regressive thing. This is the great irony. This is why we have great populist and nationalist movements globally, because the people at the bottom end of the spectrum are saying, hey, man, this isn’t working for me. I get my money from my time in my labor and you’re stealing it from me through inflation. My house is going up in value, but I don’t own a house.

27:07AnthonySee what I mean?

27:08AlexYeah.

27:09AnthonyMy parents house. $16,000 now worth Zillow’s estimate 78 780. Down in value. Down in value. Measured in gold coins measured in gold ounces. So you got to understand what they’re doing. Once you understand what they’re doing, you say, okay, there’s a big wind behind my sale, and next year could be tumultuous. There’s many disbelievers. All these are generally very cynical.

27:42AnthonyI mean, Oz’s my experience in Australia. They hate fees. The cheap. They hate fees. They won’t pay hedge fund fees super cheap. They don’t like people that are super successful or braggadocious. They say that’s tall poppies. They want to.

27:56AlexGo poppy syndrome.

27:57AnthonyThey want to cut them down. Okay. And what is this bullshit known as Bitcoin? It’s got to be ridiculous. You know my buddy Cliff, as I said. So it’s a computer that’s turned on 24 over seven. And it’s just a bunch of financial blather. How could that be worth anything. So he doesn’t understand the process and the promise of that network.

28:19AnthonyHe hasn’t studied Robert Metcalf and Metcalf’s law, and I would submit to him because I would say with great humility, I’ve been humbled by markets. I’ve been humbled by life. But I would submit to you that if the marketplace is saying that this asset is worth $2 trillion, it went from zero when they turned on the network to 2 trillion.

28:43AnthonyThere could be some smart people in the mix that may know what they’re doing. You know, the you know, there’s a wizard, there’s a madness to crowds, Alex, but there’s also a wisdom in crowds. You know, the two hour to tulip bulb. Okay, well, the tulip meeting lasted two and a half years. We’re 16 years into this, and it’s,

29:02AnthonyAnd there’s no counterparty risk. So if there’s no counterpoise, how is it a tool, a bulb? It’s a burgeoning adopting network, and a result of which, because of the scarcity of the tokens, it should get priced in satoshis eventually, and it’ll be worth 18 to $20 trillion. Or if saylor’s right, it’ll be worth 300 trillion, I don’t know, I have it at 18 to 20.

29:27AlexSo there’s still central banks obviously at some point in the future, how does I mean potentially? This is too big of a question, but I’ll still ask it. And then we can skip it if we want to. But I mean, how do the government start to respond to this threat, I guess to their internal kind of governance, operating systems, internal, because right now it’s a secondary currency.

29:53AnthonyOkay. So an old school, 90 year old fossil aka an American politician, because these people won’t leave the stage. An old school 90 year old fossil, George Washington’s great grandfather, still in American government, is going to see it as a threat and is going to want to see if they can do something to it. It’s too late. You can’t strangle it in the crib.

30:17AnthonyIt’s out of the crib now. It’s moving. It’s teenager. You can’t strangle it in the crib. But the new politician, a visionary leader, would say, wow, there’s a big opportunity here. Because if I can get some bitcoin on my balance sheet and I can begin the process of reform in terms of the spending, the over promising, if I can figure out a way to correct the excesses that we’ve created in this system due to baby boomer narcissism.

30:50AnthonyBitcoin could be a tool for this discipline. It could be a tool for this correction. And I could blame my need to have some level of fiscal conservatism on things like Bitcoin. Bitcoin is making us, bite the bullet a little bit. Because if I can’t create bitcoin and I can’t, do the manipulations that we do with our money, you know, the government, the United States printed $5 trillion in 29 months, printed it.

31:28AnthonyOkay. We had a $31 trillion budget, 29 budget deficit 29 months ago. Bam, bam, bam. We have a $36 trillion deficit. So you tell me there’s no cost to that. See, the modern monetary theorists are right in the following respect. If you have the debt denominated in a fiat currency that you yourself can create, there’s a lot of laxity, a lot of space there.

31:58AnthonyHowever, with the modern monetary theories leave out your lower and middle income people struggle and get suffocated by this because you’re confiscating their purchasing power by creating more dough. More dough in the system, same level of goods. The price of the goods are higher. You’re paying me a flat rate and it’s tied to my labor, not to my assets.

32:27AnthonyI’m screwed. I can’t get ahead. 8% inflation in the US. You pay me $1,000. I only have $920 of purchasing power. So yes, my wages are 20 bucks. But you took 10% of it from me. I’m really only have $18 worth of spending power. And by the way, while you’re doing that, the rich are getting richer on assets.

32:52AnthonyIf you if you want to choke out like, I don’t know if you have, like, an EKG in your house, but if you want to choke out factor in the real estate inflation in Australia factored in factor in not just the price of the goods and services, factor in the price in the stock market and the real estate and really measure the inflation, really go out there and say, whoa, there is a reason why a 30 year old kid right now, I’ll talk about the US, was a 30 year old kid sitting on a mountain of school debt.

33:31AnthonyHe doesn’t have the wherewithal, the money, or the job opportunity to buy a house right now. Baby boomers suck the life out of these kids. They generationally transferred well from the younger generation to their generation because they’re the weak. We had the greatest generation that fought the war, and they handed the baton to the weakest generation who took all of the spoils of everything for themselves.

33:58AnthonyAnd now they’re heading into their late mid to late 70s. They don’t want to leave the stage. I don’t want to give the kids an opportunity to have a job or to run for Congress. They want to sit on their faces. Okay, you got these jackasses in Washington wheeling themselves around in wheelchairs. We had this one woman, this poor woman, Dianne Feinstein.

34:17AnthonyShe was, like, half dead voting the other woman, they discovered she’s in an assisted living home, can’t even get to the Congress, but she won’t leave the job to make room for a younger person. So, so, so I think the system will break, and I think there will be a renewal. And I think there will be a reset.

34:38AnthonyAnd when there is Bitcoin, I have a big role in that.

34:41AlexWhat about the other I mean there’s so many other, what to call it. I say for example the Ethereum’s and Solana is and all the other. It seems like there’s so many other cryptocurrencies out there, but the Bitcoin is the gold standard. Let’s call it. Should we be investing in other areas too. Or is it just Bitcoin right now.

35:02AlexAnd we’ll see how everything else kind of lands. Because it feels like that’s the conversation is like invest in Bitcoin is like the safest of the cryptos let’s call it. It’s still kind of volatile. Everything else is more speculative. But. But that could be operating system.

35:17AnthonyYeah. Saylor’s a Bitcoin Maximos I’m not a bitcoin maximalist. I, I believe. I believe that Bitcoin will be. What I said a store of value. It’s not going to be used. It’s you could transfer back and forth to each other. But it’s sort of a store value toggle from that to a stablecoin. You’ll toggle to that from something else.

35:44AnthonyBut I believe something like Solana or Ethereum where you can layer on contracts, I believe you can tokenize things. You know, when you buy a stock in the United States and you buy it on the open market, you go call somebody, I’m going to buy Microsoft. It goes through seven different entities still to this day before it reaches your account.

36:11AnthonyOkay. We started when I was in the industry 36 years ago. T plus five. Then we went to T plus three. Now we’re at T plus one. But we have the technology over the blockchain to go to T plus a few seconds. We do have that technology, but the old world doesn’t want to give up okay. And the regulators don’t want to relent.

36:35AnthonyBut the new world is coming is the younger guys don’t care. Okay. When I was a kid, I had to call my mother every Wednesday, okay. If, you know, tight leash Italian American family. I’m in Europe. I’m, I got my Eurail pass in my backpack. It’s 1985. I got to call your mother on Wednesday. Well, I would go to the post office in the local square, and I would buy a phone card.

37:03AnthonyYou could buy a phone card for 15 U.S. dollars. It’s like $100 today. And you could have a five minute phone conversation with your mom. $3 a minute. You’d hook into the AT&T operator, she’d dial your mother’s phone for you. Your mother would answer the phone five minutes, they’d beep, beep, beep. And then the thing would shut off and you’d leave.

37:26AnthonyYou’d leave the central square where the post offices and the phone booths are. I committed to my mother today. You can go to any. Cafe in Rome, and I can hook into the internet. And I can FaceTime my mother for free. And that’s the financial services industry in a nutshell. Now, $35 for a wire, seven days for a wire, 42 different IDs.

37:53AnthonyWhat are you doing? Sending money to Alex in Australia. Fill out this paperwork. We’re going to d bank. You. You’re from crypto land. You’re not allowed to have a bank account to. Hey, go fuck off. We’re going to do this in a decentralized way, and we’re going to do to the financial services industry what the internet did to the phone industry.

38:16AnthonyNow, by the way, as visa has figured out American Express, others, they’ll still be roles for them, like the route, the phones and the phone industry didn’t go away. They just shifted their business model. And that’s what these fintech companies will do. And so you’re going to need Solana. You’re going to need a Etherium. You’re going to need Sui and Aptos and Avalanche and Solana’s, little brother Algorand.

38:42AnthonyYou’re going to need all of these people, okay? And there’s not going to be one vehicle, but maybe there’ll be smart contracts for stocks on Solana, and there’ll be smart contracts for bonds on Ethereum, or they’ll be gaming tokens inter game, Web3 gaming. You and I will play each other for money and trade Polkadot tokens.

39:06AlexYeah. That’s where avalanche is going with gaming as well.

39:09AnthonyThe future is going to extrapolate exponentially. It’s not going to extrapolate the way we predict. It’s just not going to do that. If you told me that we have.

39:26AnthonySwitched over from chemotherapy to immunotherapy. And we’re treating people who would have died 50 years ago by strengthening their immune systems and they can live out their lives. I have a friend that has cystic fibrosis. I know you know what that disease is, but it’s a the these sort of fibroids get created in your lungs. It’s a genetic disorder.

39:51AnthonyAnd you pick it up by getting two recessive genes from your parents. And it’s a genetic like a sickle cell anemia. It’s in the lungs. And this was a life expectancy of seven. And it’s now a life expectancy of 85, because they have figured out that there’s a missing genetic component to the production design, and they can drug deliver it, and they can recode your gene to produce the right material for your breathing.

40:24AnthonyNow, I don’t know the people 200 years ago think we were going to be able to figure that out. You know, people living in 1825, they were like, yeah, my son’s not breathing and he’s going to die in seven years. Oh no. No problem. 200 years from now, that very same person will live the 85. You got gotta you got to get out of the comfort zone of linear thinking, and you got to think about the way the world is moving and is, is this worth having a position in?

40:58AnthonyIf some of the things I’m talking about are right, if you’re going to go to a costless transaction like we’re now on a costless phone line, you paid a monthly fee for your Wi-Fi. I paid a monthly fee for mine. I can do this with you all month. I could leave it on. No problem. Okay, the incremental cost is zero.

41:18AnthonyAre we going to do that to the world of financial services? Is the software going to eat these companies or change these companies? I think it is. And I own shit. If it doesn’t, then I got it wrong.

41:30AlexAnd so you basically own it and it’s for the long term. And so you buy something and you predict, where it’s going to go in the future hopefully. And how long is your kind of how far out are you looking. You know. So if you’re purchasing I’m.

41:43Anthony60, I’m 61 years old. When I turn 80, if I can make it to 80, who the hell knows? Okay. But if I make it to 8019 years from now, I will figure out what to do with this shit for my kids. If they don’t want it, will sell it. You know, if they don’t want my comic book collection, put it up for auction.

42:03AnthonyI don’t give a shit. I’m not going to be.

42:05AlexAnd probably at that point, yeah, I probably at that point, the comic book collection, it can be sold on, on the blockchain in some way. It’s a real asset.

42:13AnthonyThat’s something you don’t know. You don’t know. I mean, my my, my, my my point is, you told me 20 years ago, 2005, I had a flip phone. I could send text from it. It had a rinky dink camera. Okay. And then BlackBerry said, you know, we’re going to let you do emails. We’ll put some apps on this thing.

42:41AnthonyWe’re going to it’s going to basically be a Palm Pilot with cell service. And then Steve Jobs said, yeah, that’s bullshit. We’re going to turn it into a computer and we’re going to eat everything we need, everything we eat your printer, your fax machine, we’re going to eat your iPod. We’re going to eat your music collection. We’re going to win your Blockbuster Video wherever the hell it was in Australia, all your VHS.

43:03AnthonyWe’re going to eat everything, and we’re going to shrink it into this little fucking thing here. And by the way, we’re going to make you addicted to it so you can spend 5 to 8 hours a day and you’re going to get screen time notifications that you got to screw loose because you got one third of your life sleeping and 130 life staring at that.

43:21AnthonyOkay. And, but you’re going to need money. And you got a group of people that have been drunk driving with your money. Now, us 54 years of drunk driving. August of 1971, and you’re drunk driving with the money. We don’t have any discipline with the money. Bitcoin forces that discipline. Bitcoin is clarity.

43:47AlexFor people who are not in the crypto space. It’s like the fiat system for all of, the downsides at least has, some safety features, kind of is locked into it. Right. So that if you get hacked, if something happens, then visa or the bank will kind of like insure it and so on. Right now in the crypto space, it’s all, essentially the private keys, right?

44:12AlexAnd if you lose the private keys, then. Yeah, then you lose your bitcoin or it’s on a centralized exchange. And if the centralized exchange gets hacked then all you bitcoin goes as well. All right. So right how would you say the.

44:25AnthonyExchanges have insurance.

44:27AlexYeah. But some of these.

44:28AnthonyExchanges have backups. But yeah you’re you’re making a.

44:30AlexVery gets other better ones to go for the just based on your research and. Yeah. So what would you say to people because obviously there’s like that part of it too, where, yes, it’s got like a fair bit of upside, but there’s a lot of stories of hacking and exchanges going down and kind of different things like that.

44:45AlexSo yeah. What would you say to people about that? You know, like, like how how would you advise your grandma, for example, or your mama, what? Oh, whoever, who wanted to purchase some the safest way of doing it. What’s the safest way of buying bitcoin. Yeah.

44:59AnthonySo I would say to you that we built we built the car and we could run around with the car to fast cars faster than the horse in the carriage. It’s a horseless carriage, but we haven’t figured out the highway. We don’t know where the road is. We certainly don’t have a traffic lights up. Okay. And we haven’t come up with the levels of rules for when to make a left turn and what signal to use and when to make a right turn.

45:25AnthonyAnd by the way, what side of the road are we driving on? Some of us drive on the right side, some of us drive on the left side. We don’t have the rules. So everything you’re saying is healthy skepticism. And I think what you’re saying is in fact true. Okay. And then you have to ask yourself, okay, so will the industry.

45:45AnthonyWill the society solve for this? Will there be some regulation and will there be in our country? There’s a security protection corporation. It’s called civic Security Insurance Protection Corporation. I have my Microsoft stock at Goldman Sachs. If Goldman Sachs goes down, they’ll get my Cusip number out of Goldman Sachs and they’ll return it to me. Okay. If I have, it’s up to $250,000 now, but it’s actually way more than that.

46:18AnthonyBut it’s up to $250,000. But they never let these banks fail. But if my money’s in the bank and the banks going sour, either the government stepping in or the FDIC and so the question is, will there be a system where that happens for Bitcoin? This is where I think the opportunity is for Visa and American Express.

46:36AnthonyYou can use your Bitcoin or you can use your cryptocurrency with us. You’ll pay us a tiny fee. You won’t pay us the 3.5% that you’ve been paying. We pay us a fee and if somebody rips you off, we’ll be in there with our insurance to protect you. So I do think that that’s coming. That’s the traffic light and that’s the double line in the road.

47:00AnthonyAnd that’s the street signs. They’re not there yet. And that’s why I when I say this, it when we’re so early, it’s ridiculous. You’re six you’re 6% saturated. You’re you’re web one 1999. And you own that. You own the operating system. You own the Http colon slash slash, you own that and you own a piece of it.

47:23AlexYeah. And I think on that and I think on that point as well, I guess, the biggest upsides I made now, because as soon as it becomes a safer and more protected, like investment category, then there’s less risk. And then there’s an upside kind of thing. Right? So if if you want maximum upside, the sooner that you get in the better.

47:44AlexObviously there’s kind of higher risk. But that’s why there’s higher upside right. So that’s kind of how to think about it. Okay. Well look, I think I will keep talking about this for a while, but this has been really good. What the summary is, is that it’s the future and, it’s the future of the monetary system or potentially the future of the monetary system.

48:04AlexSo have a small percentage in that and just forget about it. That’s the best investment strategy. Yeah. Well Bitcoin is just have some forget about it and have a look in ten years time kind of thing. Right. Because if you look at it per hour per day, which is how I look at it, right. You can easily be, you know, shut out or scared out of it.

48:26AnthonySo I would tell you, you had 1% or 2% in it and I’m right or sellers. Right. It could be a game changer for you because it could go 20 to 1. If I’m wrong and you have 1 to 2% in it, $0.98 and everything else, I don’t think it impairs your life. It’s not a permanent capital loss for you or your family.

48:50AlexThis is the final question and just a quick one. So is there anything happening in the US with the 401 K and Bitcoin? Because right now you have to invest it in the stock market, which is just a complete like I don’t want to say scam, but like it’s it’s not providing the promise that it’s supposed to be because of the stock market kind of volatility.

49:12AlexCan you invest kind of 401 K is into the Bitcoin.

49:16AnthonyBut you can buy Bitcoin at fidelity. You. We are one of the first companies in the United States that have our 41K sitting at fidelity. And you can actually buy Bitcoin but it’s in a centralized area. Fidelity will custody it for you in your four and one K because they’re they’re an accredited regulated 401 K custodian. Now they have layers of protection on it.

49:39AnthonyThey’ve got backup systems. They’ve got Lloyd’s of London insuring the Bitcoin. But they will only allow you 5%. But we have $1 million in your retirement fund. And you want to own Bitcoin. They’ll let you own $50,000 worth of bitcoin. Now that’s the starting number. So in other words I got $1 million. Let me buy 5% of it.

50:05AnthonyBitcoin goes up 10 to 1. They don’t force me to sell it. But your starting number is 5%. And so yeah you can use you can use Bitcoin. You can’t take it out of that account though you know because like you were saying with your own keys and custody it because in a 401 K it’s got to be in a 401 K custodial account in the U.S.

50:31AlexIt’s the same thing here with superannuation. Now it’s because that might be just the easiest way for people to get started, right? Is that like if they’ve got some funds in the superannuation or in the 401 K’s, you can’t spend it anyway. Perfect thing to buy a bitcoin.

50:45AnthonyI’ve been in Newcastle, Australia giving keynote addresses to the superannuation conferences and those very good people are not buying bitcoin. I’m just telling you they don’t understand that.

50:59AlexThen but could you buy it like as a person who took control of your own superannuation or you took control.

51:06AnthonyOf I don’t, I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know the rules in Australia, but in the United States.

51:09AlexNo, but in the US.

51:11AnthonyYes you can.

51:12AlexSo that’s a good way in. Right. So that’s probably what I guess everyone should take a percentage of the 401 k’s with the superannuation and just put a little bit in a couple of percent, even a 3%. And this is not financial advice. I’m not a financial advisor, you know, like it’s all those disclaimers. But, it’s just a really interesting way to think about the different ways that you can get exposure to it.

51:33AlexRight. And it doesn’t have to be just from the paycheck. It could be from, it could be from your 41 K or from your superannuation. It could be from other areas as well.

51:41AnthonyGood stuff.

51:42AlexAnthony, thank you so much for coming on this podcast today.

51:46AnthonyIt’s great. Great, great to be with you. Thank you for including me.

51:49AlexIf people want to find out some more about you. So how do they connect?

51:52AnthonySo I’m at Scaramucci on Instagram and Twitter, I’m at Scaramucci on LinkedIn. And I also have, two podcasts. One is a UK based podcast called The Rest is Politics U.S.. I do that with Gary Lineker, the famous footballer. He’s the owner of the company, but I do it with Katty Kay, the British journalist. I have a, my own podcast, which is about books.

52:14AnthonyBasically, it’s called Open Book. I interview authors and, you know, and I’m a Bitcoin or I’ve just written a couple of books on it and, you know, I don’t know. We’ll see if I’m right. Hopefully you’ll invite me back, you know, and if I’m wrong, you can invite me back and you can dunk me in the water, you know, but I, I don’t know, I so far we’ve been right.

52:34AlexYes. I’ve, that is the case. And I put all of the links in the show notes. And, you know, just a quick last point is I think I interviewed, glycol Tim Draper three years ago, and he predicted he predicted at the time that Bitcoin would hit. I think he said about $300,000, right. Or $250,000. And everyone laughed at him.

52:51AlexAnd he’s becoming, correct. Right. And, so I think, you are right. It’s just how soon it happens. Right? Because I think this is the one thing that everyone is not actually just getting is the time, because sometimes it takes a bit longer. But right, everyone says seem to be correct so far in the Bitcoin space.

53:09AlexIt’s just a little bit kind of after the time that they said it was, you know.

53:14AnthonySo we’ll we’ll see. You know I mean look it could go to 10,000 again and people will say you got it wrong.

53:21AlexIf it goes yeah, that’s I’m going to buy a lot of them, I’m going to buy it as many as I can. If it hits 10,000 that’s the that’s the stuff.

53:27AnthonyWe’ll see what happens. I don’t think that will happen though. There’s also it’s got a regulatory promise now in the US to directionally go in the right direction.

53:35AlexYeah. Fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

53:38AnthonyTo be on with you. Thank you sir.

53:39AlexYou know I enjoyed it.

53:40AnthonyThank you. Have a great night or great morning I think you’re in the morning there.

53:43AlexSo in the morning it’s very early morning. Thank you so much. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please give us a five star rating on iTunes. For more episodes, please visit Growth manifesto.com/podcast. And if you need help driving growth for your company, please get in touch with us at .