#1335 Anthony Scaramucci | Sovereign Wealth Funds Are Buying Bitcoin

Anthony Scaramucci is the Founder & Managing Partner of SkyBridge. This conversation was recorded at Bitcoin Investor Day in New York. In this conversation, we talk about his thesis on bitcoin and cryptocurrency, macro environment, political landscape, who will be the next president, and future outlook for bitcoin. ======================= Introducing Espresso - the world’s most interactive portable display. They have a portable screen that is incredibly light, comes with a nice stand, and the user interface is very easy. Anyone who listens to this podcast can go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠us.espres.so/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. They have a brand new offer waiting for you. ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. Today's episode is with Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of Skybridge. In this conversation, we talk about his thesis on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. We talk about the macro environment, what he thinks about the political situation, who's going to be the next president, and where exactly we should anticipate Bitcoin to go

• 0:47Anthony Pompliano?

  now that the ETFs have been approved. This conversation is both informative and absolutely hilarious. It was recorded during Bitcoin Investor Day in New York City, and Anthony does not disappoint. I'm really excited for you guys to listen to this one and definitely let us know on Twitter what you thought. Here is my conversation with Anthony Scaramucci.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Espresso, the maker of the world's thinnest portable display. Now, listen up. If you're like me, you feel like you are at a command center when you sit down at your desk. I got a gazillion tabs open and different windows for different activities. There's my web browser, my text messages. I have Slack open and I got a notes app. I normally work on a desktop and it can be very, very productive. But everything falls apart the second I leave my desk. If I'm traveling, if I go to a coffee shop to do some work or just want to work from the kitchen table, my laptop doesn't have enough screen space. I lose my command center and my productivity falls off a cliff. It's a major problem. But this is where Espresso comes in. They have a portable screen that is So beautiful that you think Steve Jobs came back from the dead to created.

• 2:13Anthony Pompliano?

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• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Trust me, I use mine every day. You'll love the espresso screen and I think it'll make you more productive. Go check them out today by clicking on the link in the description.

• 3:04Anthony Pompliano?

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• 3:51Speaker 02

  So, so Pomp and I-

• 3:52Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, you're supposed to sit down. I'm in charge.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Pomp and I are dressed like your local congressman. So just, you know, have to figure out what we're running for after this.

• 4:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Speaking of, I'm doing fantastic. Speaking of, uh, so I polled the audience earlier. They all want to know, are you voting for Trump or Biden? No, I'm kidding, kidding, kidding, kidding. All right. We're gonna get, we're gonna get out of-

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Look at this audience of like Fox News watchers.

• 4:17Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on. So we're gonna get this right out of the way. You were the first investor in the BlackRock, uh, what now became the ETF.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 4:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Can you tell us that story?

• 4:29Speaker 02

  So I'll take you back to, this would be, uh-

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Early 22, I was in Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi Finance Week. And it could have been November 21 late, but it was maybe early 22. I saw Larry, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock in the lobby at the Four Seasons Hotel in Almarion Island in the UAE in Abu Dhabi. And he came over to me and he said, "Aunt," he says, "you like Bitcoin?" And I said, "Yes, I do. I like it a lot." He goes, "I think Bitcoin sucks," is basically what he said. And he said, "However, I just made an investment in Circle, and I do like the blockchain and I do like stable coins and the US dollar on the blockchain." And so that's the direction we're going to go in.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  And then I said to him, which you know, you've heard me say to you and others, "You got to do more homework." Because as you just heard from Dan Tapiero, the more homework you do on this asset, it's a one-way ticket towards the asset. You're not going to do the homework on this, read the white paper, do a deep dive, listen to Cassie Wood, Michael Saylor, Anthony Pompliano, and say, "No, I'm going to pass on the asset." Typically, people that are negative on the asset just haven't done the homework. "Yeah, fine, Bitcoin sucks. Okay, Larry, great to see you. Bye-bye." And we both left. And then about a month or two later, Robbie Michnik, did he speak here yet or no?

• 5:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, this morning.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Robbie came to see my partner and said that they were doing a lot of work with Larry, explaining to him the asset. They were going to open a Bitcoin trust, but the bureaucracy of BlackRock said that they couldn't do it unless they found an outside investor. And so my partner Brett Messing, who I think you know, said, "Okay, we're in. We're in for $10 million. We'll wire the money tomorrow." And that ignited the process at BlackRock. And then they went to the committee and they said, "Okay, after talking to our outside counsel, we'll put in for the ETF." And I don't know if you spoke about this before, but there's a...

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Administrative law in the United States that basically says that an administrator cannot act in an arbitrary and capricious way in the administration of a law. So when the November announcement that the ETF, the futures ETF was approved, I made a mistake. I went on television and said, okay, well, the cash ETF is going to get approved. Bitcoin's going to $100,000 because I read that law and I assumed that people would take that law seriously. But Mr. Gensler had pressure on him politically and so he did everything he could to delay that process. And then, of course, the court interpreted the law accurately and he lost that case. But I just want to say one last thing about this and

• 7:25Speaker 02

  this is a little contrarian for this group. I think Gary Gensler did us all a favor. And you'll say, well, why is that? Well, he flushed out by accident through that negative political process, a lot of bad actors in the space. So whether it was FTX, Three Arrows, you pick the foil in the space that was either running a fraud or running a over-leveraged operation. He knocked all those guys out of there. Just imagine if he had just followed the administrative process, you would have had the $100,000 Bitcoin. You could still be living in a FTX world where that thing would have blown up and been an even bigger

• 8:07Speaker 02

  problem for the industry had they been in existence post ETF.

• 8:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, you talked to a lot of institutional investors. You were in the eye of the storm with FTX and many of these situations. I saw you going on television. They were grilling you. And what were investors saying then? And what are they saying now? And has that changed?

• 8:30Speaker 02

  Let me just start. I was saying I was six foot eight when I met Donald Trump. And that wasn't so bad because I was 6'2" when I met Sam Bankman-Fried, but look at me now. All right. It was a disaster. And I gotta, I gotta tell you. It was the disaster of my career. So I got fired from the White House. That was a disaster, but that was like a political disaster. You have to be a big boy when you're

• 8:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Was it fun? Was it fun? Like your 11 days?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  The firing was terrible. I'm not gonna lie about that. Flying around in Air Force One was very cool. I got the tour of Air Force One. That was fun. The press conference was fun. Some of Trump's insanity and the fighting inside the White House, not fun. But in general, it was a great experience, Anthony, because it was probably

• 9:21Speaker 02

  one of the most humbling experiences of my life. You know, you just have to imagine, I start at the White House on the 21st, I'm fired on the 31st. That is 11 days, by the way. Don't chip me and say I was there for 10 days. It hurts my feelings.

• 9:34Anthony Pompliano?

  But you also got the, one of the most iconic press conferences with the sunglasses and the finger guns?

• 9:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm a little bit like you. I mean, I got a little carried away probably with that stuff. But, but here's the, here's the thing, okay? If you're having a bad day in this room and it's not a health-related thing, and I pray for Kate Middleton's health today, I don't know if you saw that she, she has early-stage cancer, and I think that's the reason why they're holding this information back. But if it's not a health issue and you're having a bad day, get my cell phone number from Pomp. I'll cheer you up. Because you want to talk about a bad day? Fired from the White House, blown into Pennsylvania Avenue, skinned alive by the media, rolled in margarita salt. I mean, it was brutal. I mean, there were cartoons on the Colbert Show with my face. Of course, I made him sign one for my mom and I gave it to her. But here, here's the thing, okay?

• 10:26Speaker 02

  If that happens to you, you got two choices. You can hurl up in a ball and cry and live in a period of self-pity and woe, or you can dust yourself off and get back in the game, own your mistakes, and enjoy the process. And I went on Colbert, I mean, my, I had this crisis PR person, they told me, hide for five years, you know, go to like Afghanistan and live in a cave, and then return to the United States after five years. And I'm like, not doing that. I'm going on the Colbert Show. Okay, so I went on the Colbert Show, and he was brutalizing me, and I was responding. And then he's like, hey, did you think you were gonna last a long time? I'm like, hey, I thought I was gonna last longer than a carton of milk in the refrigerator. I think I was gonna get blown out before the milk soiled.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  But then look at what happened. Okay, he fired 85 people after me. John Kelly, who actually fired me because Trump didn't have the guts to fire me, is a personal friend. He's on the Trump Support Network. That's the group therapy session that we all have to do that work for Trump, you know, so that's General Milley, General Mattis, McMaster, Esper, Nikki Haley, Bill Barr. I mean, we're all in like a Trump Support Network, you know, it's like, you know, it's like dealing with a traumatic father and you have to like all sit down and say, what the hell happened? And then you look around and you're saying, okay, there's people out here that are actually gonna vote for this nut. And you're saying, okay, how is that even possible?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  If there are 40 of the 44 people that worked right inside the rim and saw the full-on craziness and the insanity, the Putin-loving, the dictator-loving, the need to be in the access of autocracy with like Kim Il-jung and Erdogan and Orban and all this stuff. So I don't know, you gotta, maybe it's something about you that you are hearing this information and you're like still gonna make that decision. I mean, I know you're looking at the other guy thinking it's like Weekend at Joe Biden's, I got that. But I would take, I would take an elderly guy that's a little forgetful over one flew over the cuckoo's nest, where the guy needs a lobotomy, right?

• 12:39Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, let's pull it back.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  You know you wanted to go there. Go.

• 12:45Anthony Pompliano?

  If, uh, if you guys ever want a free entertainment, just call Anthony. All right.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  Two Italians on stage, there's no oxygen in the room. Some of you are gonna need like CPR when this is over.

• 12:55Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, ready?

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Keep going.

• 12:56Anthony Pompliano?

  So, uh, you guys go from, you and I did a podcast episode. I came to your office, you were very kind. You gave me an entire history lesson on currencies. I walked out of there and I said, this guy is insane. He knows everything about currencies, but he's not into Bitcoin. And then a few months later, you were like, all right, we're doing it. Uh, and you've pretty much gone from zero to 100 in confidence, but also you all have started to allocate capital, you're talking to investors, you know, you've really kind of pushed into the space. And so maybe describe a little bit, like, one, what you guys are doing, but also, two, uh, what conversations with investors look like today?

• 13:30Speaker 02

  So a couple of seconds on the origin of Skybridge into Bitcoin. This actually goes back to the White House, actually. So this was a seminal day for me. It was a Wednesday, Ant, because I know it was a Wednesday. I was only there for one Wednesday, so I know it was a Wednesday. And I was in the Roosevelt Room with these two Fed officials. And they were talking about the digitization of the US dollar. And I had the Winklevoss twins at our conference in 2014, and they were champions of Bitcoin. And I didn't really understand it, and I'm sort of an institutionalist and a trade-fi guy. And so I sort of blew it off. But when I was in the room with the two Fed guys that wrote the White Paper, you can go back to July of 2017, you could read the paper.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  They were suggesting that at some point, we would have a US digital currency, and that at some point, this would be great cost efficiency. So now I'm fired, and I say to myself, I gotta get up to speed on Bitcoin and the blockchain. I'm missing this. When you had came to see me, we had done a ton of work. That was your podcast. That's why I knew so much about currency and the checkboxes of currency. And I had a personal note. I had three things in my notebook. I would buy Bitcoin if we got close to 100 million wallets. I would buy Bitcoin if I was comfortable with the regulatory situation.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  And I was very comfortable, because the IRS treated Bitcoin as property. And so just for everybody's education in the room, the property rights in the United States are sacrosanct, and they transcend parties, they go back to the Magna Carta, British common law. And once they say it's property, it's very hard to take it from you. They have to give you something for it, and so on and so forth. So number two, I was actually comfortable with. I knew eventually Gensler and Elizabeth Warren, these sort of autocratic-thinking people, would lose in the American court system. And then the third thing was, could I store nine figures of Bitcoin somewhere? Because we needed to make a nine-figure investment. So about...

• 15:39Speaker 02

  Two or three months after you came in, I think we got to about 80 million wallets. Michael Saylor had made the investment in August. We started buying our first coins in October, November, and we were getting a lot of flack from our clients. Then 21 happened, and I got some calls from people, actually, there's one Sovereign Wealth Fund, said, "Well, I want to thank you for bringing me into the future." And then 22 happened, and I got calls from those very same people saying, "You are an imbecile." And of course, the wirehouses, man, the wirehouses go crazy on a fund. They

• 16:20Speaker 02

  always sell these funds out at the bottom. And then you know, I guess the good news is, when you get a really shitty article written about you in Bloomberg by Kathy Burton, which was basically almost like a financial obituary of Skybridge, that I knew it was the bottom. And so, we went up a lot from there. I don't have a lot to say publicly how much, but just think about this. Bitcoin is probably up 150% from there, and we had probably 1/3 of our assets in the digital space. And so, clients are happy right now. But clients are not super happy, if you want me to be totally candid, because they are used to traditional finance. Dan said something that Mac wrote today, "Other traditional

• 17:04Speaker 02

  finance seems a little more boring," but they don't like the volatility ride. Now, I think Kathy or Dan will likely be right, or yourself. I think we trade probably to the market capitalization of gold. And the hardest thing to do for everybody in this room is exactly what Dan Tapiaro said, "Nothing." Because if you do nothing, and you're smart enough to do nothing, you're going to be very well rewarded. And I'll just leave you with this one last thought. The dead people at Charles Schwab, they do way better than the living people. Does everybody know that? Just go look through the math. Person dies, the clap, no one's looking at the account. Dead people don't look at their accounts.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Does everybody know that? Not even with a Ouija board or anything like that. So, they don't do anything. And a result of which they do better than the living people. So act like you're dead with your Bitcoin and don't sell your Bitcoin. Don't do anything with it. And hopefully we can continue to coach our, our clients into listening to that mantra.

• 18:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What about the ETFs? What, what changes in the market are you seeing there? And is that helping the conversation with clients?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yes, I think the ETFs are helping conversations with the clients. I think the demand is there, but I've been on Wall Street for 36 years. And so I think BlackRock, Fidelity, others, Kathy, the 11 ETFs that are out there, I've done generally a really good job, but it's just getting started. Like if you really understand Wall Street, Wall Street is a selling machine. It's a 12 cylinder engine of selling and products are not bought on Wall Street. Products are sold. And so I just want you to imagine this scenario where a total return portfolio at

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Fidelity or BlackRock, the investment committee says a half a percent into Bitcoin, 1% into Bitcoin. I want you to imagine a situation where consultants are telling their pension funds, well, you gotta have some money in Bitcoin because if you don't have any money in Bitcoin, you're sort of short it or you're underexposed to it. You're going to underperform the other groups of pension fund managers that have Bitcoin. And so, you know, and that's like what happens when a, a stock gets added to the S and P 500 or it gets added to the Dow 30. And so to understand those mechanisms is to understand the monumental exponential

• 19:43Speaker 02

  growth in value of that asset. And then if we get to the wirehouses and the registered investment advisors, and you know, like if a place like Edward Jones says, you know what? It's okay. We can recommend Bitcoin. Then you're getting to like full valuation.

• 20:01Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna leave this open-ended, so you share what you want. But what's up with the wirehouses? They don't like Bitcoin, or they like Bitcoin?

• 20:08Speaker 02

  No, I think the wirehouses have access to the Fed window. And I think that the wirehouses got access to the Fed window in 2008. So they act like commercial banks for that purpose. The access to the Fed window over the last 15 years has been one of the most extraordinary money-making mechanisms in the world. It'd be literally like me giving you the answers to the final exam your senior year in college the night before the exam. They borrowed at zero, and they lent to the US government at a two-handle, and they just minted money, and the Fed allowed them to do that

• 20:49Speaker 02

  to restore the capital in their businesses that got wiped out in 2008. So the Fed is being driven by people like the Elizabeth Warrens, and they're being driven by the naysayers on Bitcoin. And they quote-unquote "need to get up to speed." And so therefore, until there's a greener light, I mean, there's not even a yellow light. There's a red light. It could even be a blinking red light with caution tape related to Bitcoin. And so this is the main reason why a lot of these wirehouses are staying away. But good news is, some of the wirehouses, including JP Morgan, you can reverse inquiry into these places and say,

• 21:32Speaker 02

  "Could you buy me some of Kathy's ETF or BlackRock's ETF?" And they'll put it in your account.

• 21:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So as we continue to watch this all play out, you got a lot of friends in the Middle East. They like you over there, a lot. What are they saying? Are they gonna just go rip a market order and buy a bunch of Bitcoin? Or what?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  So I think people sort of know this. I think that there are sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East that are already long, and they're not gonna make a public announcement about it because they frankly don't want to move the price as a result of their buying. And so if someone's... Looking at this and saying we're gonna make a three, four percent allocation. They got a trillion dollars of assets. They're just not gonna raise their hand while they're in the middle of buying this stuff and say that they own it. But, you know, we just got back from Abu Dhabi. We did a salt conference there at the St. Regis Hotel. And I'm confident in saying that there are family offices, there are institutions, there are sovereign wealth funds

• 22:39Speaker 02

  throughout the area that are long Bitcoin, will get longer Bitcoin. And you don't have to be a genius on this. Just Google Bitcoin miners and some Middle Eastern countries. You'll find that there's several of them that are already in relationships with miners related to some blowing off of power at refineries or a nuclear power plant where they have excess energy. They're attaching mining facilities to those places. And these are very forward-thinking, very smart people. So I think they're already in the game.

• 23:15Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of the interest for them in Bitcoin is price appreciation versus like sanctions hedge versus we're trying to get off of, you know, oil dependency?

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Good question.

• 23:27Anthony Pompliano?

  There's a whole bunch of different reasons why, but like, what is really driving them?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  So I actually think what is driving it is an inflation hedge digital gold theory where once you do the work, you get comfortable with the immutability of the asset and you get comfortable with the scarcity of the asset. And then you experience the network effect and you're like, okay, I get why this is gonna be something that is worth a lot of money and that we're going to use. I think we're still trying to figure out things like the Lightning Network and Layer 2s on Bitcoin that will move it more efficiently, more quickly. I think some of it is related to the sanctions, but very small amounts of it.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Because if you look at the dollar data, and there was something that just came out recently, and I can, I'll put it up on Twitter tonight, about where the dollar is in terms of its supremacy around the world, and basically analysis of where dollars are around the world. It really hasn't changed since the Russian war. So there's a lot of thought that the Ukrainian war and the imposition of those sanctions was going to shrink the dollar's market share. That has not happened. There's a coalition of BRIC nations trying to come together to find ways to trade commodities off of the dollar.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  It's very small and highly publicized relative to its scale. And so I think you coexist. I think you have a, I think the dollar remains the global supreme fiat currency. And I think you get an asset like Bitcoin up to 14 to 20 trillion dollars. I don't think it happens overnight, but can it happen over the next five to eight years? Yes, and just this one point, I think people in this room understand this, but trade-fight people do not. This next halving is going to be massively monumental. Because the havings after this are smaller, Anthony, and maybe the dollar will, you know,

• 25:34Speaker 02

  the price of Bitcoin will go up, but this is a monumental halving. You're going from 900 coins a day to 450 at a time where the institutional demand is really picking up and the Wall Street selling engine is really picking up. And eventually, the grayscale sales will wane. I mean, obviously, they can go to zero, and then that's it, will be no more. And so that combination, I think, bodes very well for Bitcoin over the next 12 to 18 months.

• 26:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you think that they'll keep dropping their fee? Or do you think they'll just leave it at one and a half and that will accelerate?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  Grayscale?

• 26:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 02

  You know, I don't know. I really tried to put myself in Michael or Barry's shoes. When they first did it, just confessed how I got it wrong. I thought 150 was acceptable. I looked at that and said, okay, they dropped fees by 25 basis points. They have a lot of low basis people in there that don't want to trigger a tax situation. But I got it wrong. I also think we didn't fully anticipate or fully understand the volume of GBTC that bankruptcy trustees own in pockets everywhere. It's not just FTX. There's other things that have gone on. I don't think we fully assess that volume. And, you know, I don't want to be a Monday

• 26:53Speaker 02

  morning quarterback on these guys. I think they're brilliant guys, but one would have to wonder if they went to 80 basis points or something like that, which is 4X BlackRock, as opposed to 8X BlackRock, you know, we would be in better shape.

• 27:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you worry at all that you're so right on the Bitcoin and digital asset side? You said about a third of the firm's assets today are there. If price continues, you become more than 50%, maybe even close to 60, 70, 80%.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  I'm going to get fired by a lot of people if that happens because they get nervous. And so, but you know, remember, I have my money in this. Like I tell my clients, my money is right in there. We eat our own cooking. It's in our coin fund. It's in our hedge fund, fund of funds, which has got a third of the assets, probably 40% now because of appreciation in this space. And, you know, I know Buffett doesn't supposedly like Bitcoin, but I honestly don't think he's done the homework. But you have to think about what Buffett would say in a situation like this. You don't trade Michael Jordan for four scrubs and call it diversification. You just don't do that. If you're right on something and it's transitioning

• 28:06Speaker 02

  from a small scale, technical, technology story, software story into digital gold, why would you want to sell that right now? And plus, you know, this is my 36th year on Wall Street, nine bear markets. This is about to scale exponentially. And so, you know, Nvidia, I think, went up 6X in the last 18 months. I mean, something like that. It's not impossible that this could happen and certainly it'll happen with some volatility, but I don't want to, I don't want to leave that on the table for my investors. So we have a high conviction on the asset. We actually think it's going to be a non-correlated asset.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  If some of these doom and gloomers are right, related to inflation or government debt spiral. And so it could start to decouple from other assets as well. And so weirdly, I think we're providing a hedge for people.

• 29:01Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the other two thirds invested in? And part of that is, are they similarly correlated things that everything could go up together or no?

• 29:08Speaker 02

  So, you know, we're, we're in the fund of funds base on most of our assets. So we have a, you know, we own a hotel with Richard Branson in New Orleans. That's in a real estate fund. It's sort of a opportunities own fund. We have several hundred million dollars in coins, in a coin fund. We started a, we call it serve Skybridge Unicorn Recovery Fund. It's closed, so I am allowed to talk about it. We've made investments in things like Astor Labs, which is when public, we own some liquid death in that portfolio. We love this product and the company. And, and then the core business is in the fund to fund space. And so that's all fully disclosed on the net because it's a registered fund. And so we own things like

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Point 72 or Millennium or Elliott and Associates. So if you're buying our fund, it's a collection of some great hedge funds in the digital space like Brevin Howard, MultiCoin, but you're picking up Steve Cohen, you're picking up Elliott. And I, we have a $50,000 minimum on that fund because when we started it, I, you know, I grew up in a blue collar neighborhood. I didn't like the fact that people that I grew up with couldn't get access to hedge funds. And so we have a $50,000 minimum. And so you can get into some of these great funds that have $15 million minimums and you can get some exposure into these great digital funds in that portfolio. And, you know, it's done very well in the last two

• 30:37Speaker 02

  years, but it did really badly in 2022. And I define the last two years as frankly, the last 15 months. I mean, obviously just see what Bitcoin did and you get a sense for how we're doing.

• 30:49Anthony Pompliano?

  My last question is internal, maybe sentiment. What did people think about all the crypto stuff when you first started, you know, three or four years ago? And then what is kind of the internal team thinking now?

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Well, there's somebody here in Skybridge that absolutely hated the space, hated it. I'm just looking over at the guy. I mean, just hated it and was mumbling complaints in 2022. You're, you know, you're like Thelma and Louise. You're driving the business right over the mountain. And see, there's some people, my vintage, that actually know who Thelma and Louise are. And, you know, I was taking a lot of flack, honestly, and I was getting hammered by people as out of touch and you're just wildly overly convicted in this thing. But here's, here's the thing, and I know we got to go, so I'm going to finish on this. The biggest

• 31:41Speaker 02

  mistake I made in politics is I put my ego into my decision making. So I just want you to think about this. My wife hates Donald Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. I mean, that's like my standard, okay? Like, certain people hate him as much as Melania. That's like General Milley. My wife hates him like almost as much. And so my wife did not want me to work for him. But I put my ego and my pride into that decision making. And so there's young people here, here too, but there's young people here. Don't do that. Don't put your ego and your pride into your decision making because you make disastrous decisions. So the real question is, when Bitcoin got to 17,000 and we were getting

• 32:24Speaker 02

  buried in the FTX debacle, was my pride and my ego into that decision, Anthony? Was, was I, I'm just going to hold on because of my pride and ego? And the answer to that is no. We held on because we believed in the fundamental nature of that asset, and we kept buying more because we believed in it. And so I'll leave you with that thought. Take your pride and ego and your emotion out of your investing. Do the homework. And if you think you're right, stay right and act like you're dead when it's related to Bitcoin. Thank you very much. Anthony Scaramucci, everyone.