Full transcript: Anthony Scaramucci on London Real
2:56 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Anthony Scaramucci, the investment fund manager, Bitcoin advocate, author and former White House communications director. You are the founder and managing partner of the global investment firm Skybridge Capital with over 30 years of experience working on Wall Street. You’re also the founder and chairman of The Salt Conference, which has hosted President George W. Bush, Sir Richard Branson and Mike Tyson. You are a regular commentator on CNBC and host of the popular podcast Open Book, while also featuring as a judge on the TV show Killer Whales.
3:29 Your latest book, From Wall Street to the White House and Back, The Scaramucci Guide to Unbreakable Resilience, offers words of wisdom from your colorful career. You have recently doubled down on your belief that Bitcoin will hit $170,000 within 18 months of having and argue a spot Ethereum ETF is needed next to continue building out the ecosystem. Anthony, welcome back to London Real. Hey, it’s great to be here, Brian. Thank you.
3:55 I love the set, love your vibe, love your aura. Everything’s good about it. Thank you, man. You know, we met before either one of us really went deep into crypto. And I think you first came here in 19 or early 20 and we were talking about White House stuff. And then I kind of blinked and look back and you were deep in this ecosystem.
4:14 So yeah, I mean, I so before I came back, I went back and looked at that interview. That’s exactly right. We were talking about mistakes and judgment, things that I predict. I also predicted that Trump would lose that election. And of course, he wouldn’t want to lose the election.
4:30 Not saying that I’m prescient or anything like that. It just seemed like it was common sense at the time. But crypto for me, I followed Mike Novogratz and I found out digital and I filed Michael Saylor. And so Saylor got his first taste of first of all, he talks about this, but not that much. Saylor was very negative on Bitcoin. He didn’t understand it. He thought it was garbage. And then he had the Eureka moment. And that’s what happens once you have the Eureka moment. You’re like, oh, my God, I’ve got to own this. And then you wade into crypto and then you understand the technical properties associated with crypto. You realize all of the nonsense about it being a decentralized pet rock and a Ponzi scheme and all this stuff, you realize is none of that’s true. And when you realize that it’s a big awakening for people. And so what I tell people, listen, Jamie Davens isn’t like crypto. Warren Buffett isn’t like crypto. But ask them, have they done the deep dive into Bitcoin or crypto? And they invariably say no. And I would just say that anybody that does that, it’s a one way ticket towards crypto. It’s a one way ticket down the rabbit hole of Bitcoin. I don’t know whether it’s Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, Bill Miller, the old legendary league Mason portfolio manager that outperformed the S&P.
5:47 They all own Bitcoin for a reason. They get it. And they move towards it when you understand it more. Well, you had a conversation, I think, in the hotel lobby with Larry Fink a few years ago. And he saw you and he’s like, you like this Bitcoin thing. And he’s like, I think it’s terrible.
6:01 Garbage. Garbage. Yeah. But he had just invested in the equity of circle, I think. So he kind of liked blockchain. And you said to him, look, do some more research on it. You kind of asked him to go a little deeper and you compliment him for actually doing that. And he’s no spring chicken.
6:16 First of all, I don’t want to take any credit for that. He did that on his own. The only thing where I think we were somewhat additive, Robbie Mitchnick, who is one of his acolytes, works for him at BlackRock, convinced the BlackRock bureaucracy that they should set up a Bitcoin trust, which they then applied for a Bitcoin ETF to convert the trust into an ETF. And the BlackRock bureaucracy went back to Robbie and said, well, you got to prove that you can raise outside money. So he came to my colleague Brett Messing at Skybridge and Brett lit him up with $10 million to get the trust started. So we were the first money into the BlackRock situation.
6:59 And so Brett Messing, Robbie Mitchnick, they made that happen, which rolled it into the ETF. Now, while we were doing that, Mitchnick and his team were educating Larry Fink. And lo and behold, unbelievable fixed income expert, an incredible entrepreneur, great businessman, largest asset manager in the world. I get Bitcoin, I’m moving towards Bitcoin. And to quote Larry, it is a store of value, and there will be a flight to safety to that asset.
7:30 It’s incredible to watch him talk about it now. Like, yeah, it just seems like the craziest 180 degree where and sailor gets it tickles him because he’s always retweeting when he says it’s an asset that protects you and it’s, you know, an international store of value and like all these things that comes out says and now he is marketing it like a champ. You know, he’s really absolutely. Well, I mean, here’s, here’s what I would say. I missed Uber. I had Travis in my office, he said, I’m gonna create this app, there’s a sharing economy. And I said, Okay, so hold on a second, my daughter is going to have an app on her phone, there’s going to be a no name driver in a no name car, his car or her car, and pick my daughter up and drive her around the city.
8:21 I said, Okay, you know, no, thank you. That’s the stupidest idea that I’ve ever heard. So a $500,000 investment in Uber at that time worth $50 million today. So I miss things a lot, miss things a lot. And so now the question is, and we were talking about this before the show, the question is, are we right on Bitcoin? We are, I believe we are. And I know I believe I have the all the statistical and security analytical capability to understand it. And therefore, I believe we’re right. But I’ve been humbled by life and markets. I got the early piece of the story very wrong. Because when Bitcoin was at 69,000 in November of 2000 and 21, I said it’s going to 100,000. I did not see the political winds being such where they would block it for political purposes, knowing, knowing full well, they were going to lose the court cases at a court of law in the United States, where we have administrative law clauses that prohibit regulators from being arbitrary and capricious. So they knew they were going to lose the court case. And so they, they crushed Bitcoin and they crushed other digital assets. But here’s the thing, Gary, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, and the legendary Max Kaiser is on the wall, hopefully won’t fall off the wall. When I say this, I want to applaud Gary Gensler for one thing.
9:51 Had he not slowed down the locomotion that was taking place in 2021, we may not have uncovered Sam Bankman freed or three arrows or any of the other deleveraging or fraudulent debacles that took place. And so so nobody talks about that. But the truth of the matter is, had he done what was pursuing and consistent with the law, we could still we could potentially still be living in a Sam Bankman freed world today. So thank God we’re not. And that could have meant a much bigger problem further down the line.
10:26 A bigger explosion. Oh, no, no, everyone that commits fraud to that level, they pretend they can skate. And maybe they won’t get caught for a year or two years, or in Bernie Madoff’s case, 30 years. But then it’s just a much bigger problem when it eventually goes. I never heard of that perspective. But you’re right, Mooch. If that had kept going, then they could have swept it under the rug and kept it quiet. And then maybe now it would have blown up massively or in a few years. And it may have blown up after the tests were established, and it could have turned a new an investor in the ETF is an interesting beast.
11:00 I don’t want to own Bitcoin in a wallet. I don’t want to metamask wallet. I don’t know how to open a Coinbase account. I don’t want my own cold storage. Oh, wait a minute.
11:09 I can buy a Bitcoin ETF with a QSIP number. I call my broker and it’s going to go into my account. And then I can turn it up on my app. And I can see where it is every day. And it’s that easy.
11:22 Shoot it in. But imagine if that first experience for those people was the rollover and crisis and debacle of three arrows, FDX, Genesis, you pick the different things that blew up. So Gary has to be, I dislike him. I think he’s been a terrible SEC commissioner. He has to be applauded for that. Talk about this axis of regulatory evil between Warren and Gensler.
11:49 That’s what you called them. I went and took the entire 24-hour class that Gensler taught at Sloan School of Management. I attended Sloan School, but 20 years earlier. And when I watched it and took the whole class, I was struck by how well Gary understood blockchain. He’s very well versed in it and extremely intelligent. And at that time, apolitical about it and said the Ethereum was not a security. He was talking about Algorand. He was talking about the properties of the decentralization, the code. It’s amazing. Well, he’s an acolyte of Elizabeth Warren’s.
12:24 He wants to be the Treasury Secretary. So you have to tow the party line then. Yeah, but he probably would need a sex change operation and a skin pigmentation change to be the Secretary of Treasury in the woke environment that we’re living in now. I don’t see a Goldman Sachs white male becoming the Secretary of the Treasury in a Biden administration. Maybe, but I don’t think so. But I think he’s decided I’m going to go hard left.
12:49 I’m going to sit at the desk of Elizabeth Warren. I’m going to write out her memos exactly the way she wants them. And maybe that’s my path to this ambition that I have. I mean, it’s disgusting, to be honest. How do you live that way? I just don’t understand it. Welcome to the world of politics. I mean, come on. You’re running for mayor. Yeah, but still. Remember the scene in Animal Farm, the Orwellian movie? Yeah. I recently listened to it again. So what happened? What happened to the pigs at the end of the book? At the very end, they’re actually hanging out with the humans. Of course they are. Right. Well, the pigs are the smartest of the species. Yeah.
13:25 They’re working with the animals and the sort of plurality and this communist structure. And then they become privileged and they stand up and they have pocket squares and pocket vests and so forth. They’re now part of the bourgeois and a result of which they’ve lost the profile of a proletariat. And at Orwell’s point, is that like, this is what happens. This is the human condition. This is the brain on money and the brain on power. That book, I mean, gave me shivers. I highly recommend people go read that or listen to it again. It’s a great book. It’s such a great book. He wrote that right here in London, not far from where I live in Hampstead. And I mean, it’s heavy stuff. They said that that wasn’t a criticism of socialism. It was a criticism of the extreme version of socialism.
14:12 Yeah. Well, he was trying to write a cautionary tale through an allegory. A nonfiction book would not have done its service. So a fiction book about here’s how human beings think. And here’s a dystopia that can happen if you see too much power to aristocracy.
14:31 Four legs bad, four legs good, two legs bad, is what they say the whole time talking about animals and humans. And at the very end, when the pigs become civilized, they say four legs good, two legs better as they become part of the bourgeois. So that’s what’s happening there as well. I got to be careful. I mean, there’s a danger. Okay, so I turned 60 on the ominous day of the 6th of January. So on my 57th birthday, Trump was trying to overthrow the Capitol and retain power after losing an election. Three years later, on my 60th birthday, my children said to me, hey, Dad, what have you learned at 60? And I’ve learned a lot. But there are two things that really stick out. Number one, people can’t handle power. They’re not designed for power.
15:16 The power creates impulses in the brain, they’re indescribable. As I just might imagine something like Vladimir Putin that is absolute, monarchial power over his country. It has to drive him crazy because he’s mortal. So I have this absolute power. I have this control over this ephemeral thing.
15:40 It’s going to slip through my hands. They go crazy. They can’t handle it. Also, the stakes are his life in this case, because there’s not a lot of retired premieres that live. And it’s about image, and it’s about position, and it’s about always being at war, like Orwell would say, so I can stay in power. And this is the problem of people who are focused on this sort of stuff. Okay, they drive themselves and the world crazy. Just to finish up on the Bitcoin thing, you were making these really cryptic cryptic tweets right before the ETF was approved. And you were like, it’s happening. I told you it was gonna happen on a Wednesday. Yeah, you knew exactly what was happening. Because you had because you had invested with BlackRock and you just knew what was going on. It didn’t really do with that. I had a bet. There’s a gentleman by the name of John Reed Stark, who you could bring on if you want your viewers to really hate you and hate him.
16:42 He’ll create a big reaction. He is my high school classmate. And he worked in the internet enforcement area, the SEC for 20 plus years. He’s now a consultant. He’s anti crypto. He hates everything about crypto. There’s nothing you can do to convince him. It doesn’t matter. He hates it hates it hates it. And so we made a bet that the ETF was going to get passed. He’s a former SEC guy. And he had an inside loop and he knew he was losing the bet. So that’s how I knew.
17:12 He didn’t tell me, but I cryptically figured it out. Okay. How big is this decision? Are we gonna look back and found it 10 years from now? Yeah, monumental decision people didn’t Oh, it’s priced in. No, it’s not priced in. You’re now opening the portal to Wall Street. You’re a Wall Streeter. Yeah. You’re a reform Wall Streeter. You run on a great show here and you’re actually also could be an interior designer. But you know that Wall Street sells product.
17:41 These products are sold or not bought. If Wall Street fires up the selling engine for Bitcoin, forget it. Finite supply. UBS on its own. UBS wealth management on its own could double the price of Bitcoin tomorrow. All they got to do is say, hey, we want a half a percent of Bitcoin in our tactical asset allocation portfolios. Let’s go. Price will double tomorrow. Okay, right. There’s that much pent up demand 100%. And there’s no supply, right? Yeah. So we have pent up demand and no supply. Okay, so imagine that. So 170,000 is your call on this. And everyone’s been jacking their calls up. Kathy would is now said her 1.5 million by 2030 is now happening even earlier than this. Well, listen, I don’t want to be Kathy, I think we’re all differentiated. I’m just going off of technically, what has happened since the prior halvings. The prior halvings, you typically move forex. And then you typically have a retracement. And so I think you’re going to move forex, you will probably have a retracement, we just got one, frankly, but it won’t be as big, it’ll be a more muted retracement because of all the money being inducted into the market related to Bitcoin.
18:58 Okay, now people are already saying, you know, enjoy this bulldog while it lasts, you got 12 months, 14 months. And then of course, as we get used to it, we’re going to start to sell ourselves that this cycle is different. It’s the super cycle. And I can see people saying this is different, you know, you got causes to go higher, because they’ll, they’ll, it’ll climb the wall of wary of that. And so what do you think is happening next year? I mean, well, you know, so I think Bitcoin will be 100,000 by the end of this year, it’ll probably be 170,000 at the end of two years. And then I think you have to stop and reassess everything to say, Okay, is it fully in the marketplace now? Are institutions buying it or small institutions buying it? Are endowments buying it? I think if all of those things are happening, it could be a higher price than what I’m suggesting. Okay, talking about the Ethereum ETF, since you know what’s going to happen. Is this being approved May 23rd?
19:51 I don’t know. I don’t know. I have to totally be candid because I’m not on the inside scoop on Ethereum, but I don’t think it’s going to get approved. Okay. And I think that Gary will do a flex, an administrative flex, and he’ll be Lucy. I don’t know if your UK viewers and listeners remember Lucy, but she was in Peanuts, just to hold the football for Charlie Brown. And she’d say, Hey, Charlie, come kick the football. And at the last minute when he was going to kick the ball, she pulled the ball away from me. Okay, so proverbial stealing of the punch bowl.
20:24 So I’m mixing metaphors, but you get my point. The Fed, they could do that. You could have unforeseen calamities. A lot of weird things happen with Bitcoin. And I think that the SEC, as it relates to the Ethereum situation, they’re taking so much flack from the Elizabeth Warrens about the approval of the ETF. They just may punt it until the next midterms. Okay. Did they have to approve at the end of the day? I mean, did they get so much pressure from the money?
20:58 Yes. Yeah, but they lost the court case. Right. So remember, we still could have sat on it, right? They could have, but they would have gone to the Supreme Court. It would have been an annihilation. You saw the SEC just got censured today for their overreach, executive administrative overreach for one of these Bitcoin companies. I can’t remember which one, but you have a court telling you that you have to approve the ETF. Remember, Gensler was the winning vote. It went 3-2. He could have voted no, but as he told Elizabeth Warren, he told CNBC, I lost the court case. I’m a guy that respects the rule of law. Okay, there’s something there then. Yeah. With Ethereum, it’s a yield-bearing instrument, which is something that Wall Street and traditional FIs seem to crave, whether it’s a fund or a pension fund or anything.
21:50 Well, it might be a security, so you have to be careful with that one, because they are opining on it now, and they’re taking a position that it is a security. They may lose that case if they ever have to bring it because they lost the Ripple case, and Ripple has certain elements of its non-fungible token that are similar to Ethereum. So again, the courts, the very famous administrative line is arbitrary and capricious. If I pass the Bitcoin ETF, the futures ETF, what am I doing now? And so in other words, they pass the futures. They said no to the Bitcoin ETF.
22:36 The industry came in and said, wait a minute, that’s arbitrary and capricious. It’s actually laws that were passed by Ronald Reagan. You can’t overly politicize the regulatory process. It shouldn’t be about this is a hard left policy decision or a hard right policy decision. It should be about right or wrong. But there’s an Ethereum future, so that means this should happen, right? I do believe it will happen, but I think they’re going to try to slow it down. And when it does happen, will there be a bigger demand from Wall Street because it has a yield curve potentially and it’s yield-bearing than even Bitcoin? I’m not sure if it’ll be more than Bitcoin, but I do think if Bitcoin trades up to $5 billion, Ethereum is coming right behind it to $3 billion.
23:18 I say billion, but I mean trillion. I’m getting old billions. When I was a kid, it used to be a lot of money. Now we’re into trillions. You’ve been a millionaire.
23:25 I’ve been into quint trillions or stuff like that. And besides these two assets, you have Solana positions. I do. In the past, you’ve talked a lot about algo. How do you feel about the rest of the ecosystem right now? We’ve seen some craziness.
23:37 I like this gaming token Volcan Forged. I like Avalanche. We have a big position in Avalanche. We like that one. It’s got an interesting dynamic. It’s sort of like the Swiss army knife of layer ones. They can batch and they can move quickly. No downtime.
23:52 Much more gaming investments. Much more gaming investments. Ethereum is like it’s won a genre role in art. It’s run somewhat of a genre role in entertainment. It’s got a yield, like you’re saying. So the tokenomics are quite good.
24:09 So people will stake their Ethereum to get paid. It’s a phenomenal product. I mean, Vitalik has to be rewarded for the work that he did to create this product. And you can layer smart contracts on top of the product. So we can tokenize. I can put my house contract on it and I can sell it to you.
24:31 There’s a whole host of things that we could do. Now, the democracies will hate parts of it because you could use it to actually itemize and keep track of the citizens that vote. And democracies don’t want that. They don’t want the people to vote. Less people voting, the better off these guys are, right?
24:52 They have a 14% approval rating in our Congress, the American Congress, but they have a 93%, 94% success rate as incumbents. So you tell me a consumer product company where one out of every five likes the company, but yet they get jammed at the end of every two years with the same product that they dislike. It’s phenomenal. Yeah, it’s shocking. That’s the way it works though.
25:16 So they don’t want the blockchain coming because it’s transparent and it’s truth. So they’ll resist it. Correct. Okay, but it’s coming. Coming one way or another because it’s necessary and it’s a check on monetary policy.
25:29 And it’s actually a decent to incredible store of value. What do you think of some of these yield protocols like Eigenlayer and some of the things they’re going to stack up on Ethereum? I just had a guy in this morning who is doing a liquid restaking company. This looks kind of interesting. It’s the talk of the town right now.
25:45 It’s talking about double digit yields, which again also makes people a little nervous. Is this potentially the future? So I think there is a future. But I also would be nervous because a lot of this stuff is pitched one way. It’s outside of the hands of the people.
26:01 Yeah, and we’ve seen things blow in the past. Ryan, that’s one thing I know. In a bad situation, the correlations go to one. So you can tell me, oh, look at my sharp ratio. And look at this.
26:13 Look at that. There’s an Armageddon. Everything goes to one. Right. Because we’ve seen that happen on Wall Street too.
26:18 Of course. Yeah. And by the way, we both know that the 500-year flood happens on Wall Street every five years. I know. It’s funny because I teach now in crypto and DeFi to these students.
26:29 And I say, when I first got on Wall Street in Bankers Trust in 1993, they were pointing out the different desks. That’s the Latin American desk. And the crisis was there. It was in 1988. And this is the Asian desk.
26:39 The last crisis was there. And I was like, there’s a crisis every four years. Don’t you guys ever learn? And they’re like, no. This is the way the markets work.
26:47 Yeah, because they’re printing money in the interregnum between crises. They also know they’re going to get a government bailout during the crises. You know, you’re mentioning things that are going to go down memory lane with you. In 1995, we had the Mexican peso debacle. The U.S. Congress did not want the American administration to bail them out.
27:11 Rubin got out his whiteboard or his yellow pad, and he figured out a way to do it, and he did it. That’s the way it works. It happens all the time. And we go hard left when there’s bad news. George Bush was like, whoa, what’s going on here?
27:24 Oh, we’re going to lose the banking system? Hard left. Give them the money at a tarp. Save the banking system. Right.
27:30 It’s the same move every time. Yeah. There’s no Joseph Schumpeter. Remember, Cain said in the long run, we’re all dead. Richard Nixon said, we’re all Keynesians now.
27:44 I’m saying Joseph Schumpeter is dead. He was the author of creative destruction. Let the stuff go to zero. You know, we’ll prune it, we’ll evolve and revolve, and we’ll have a much greater success story in the future. That’s not how it works.
28:01 Right. OK. But the dollar’s not going anywhere. It’s going to be around for a long time. No way.
28:06 Really? Yeah, no, no, no. I’m in complete agreement with you. There’s no way the dollar’s going anywhere. Right.
28:11 Complete agreement with you. The reserve currency tracks a number of different vital signs on the economic dashboard. One is a robust economy. We have that. Number two is quiescent or quiescent, however you say it, inflation.
28:29 We have that. We’re roughly back to the two-ish percent target. It tracks the largest military footprint. Not only do we have the largest military, we by far have the best technology. OK.
28:41 The Russians can’t keep up with us. From a technological perspective, they can shoot lots of missiles, and they can make artillery shells super fast and perhaps even faster than the West. They just don’t have the sophistication of armament or the sophistication of warcraft making that the US has and, well, obviously, the help of the United Nations. And so that’s a big win for the reserve currency. And then the last thing is our property laws.
29:09 And they date back to your country. You know, we go back to the Magna Carta as well. And our property laws have been very sturdy. You can come to the country. If you buy it with, like, non-AML, you buy it with KYC AML money, it’s not tainted.
29:25 You own it. God bless you. Right. They don’t care if you’re a Dubai citizen, U.S. citizen.
29:29 Doesn’t matter. Turkish citizen. You own it. Right. So you still have capital markets in a legal system that’s second to none.
29:36 And the country still creates the best technology. One hundred percent. Yeah. And so that’s why it will continue to win no matter what they do and how much they print. I believe that.
29:43 Yeah. I think you’re right. What do you tell your clients when they ask, what’s happening, Mooch? What do we have to worry about in the next couple of years? We have to worry about your stomach for volatility.
29:55 Because if you don’t like volatility, you’re going to hate my ass over the next two years because I’m going to ride this thing. Because it’s crypto. It’s crypto. Are you put all your clients in crypto? Are you mainly a crypto guy now?
30:05 No, I’m not mainly a crypto guy, but there’s nothing juicing the portfolio like crypto. So if I have 20 percent of the portfolio in crypto-related assets, it goes up 100 percent. Right? Just do the math, right? That’s a 10 percent return right there.
30:21 Yeah. Okay. And those assets are in the liquid coins, and then you’ve got investments as well, and equities, and you’re across the board on those things. And your outlook for the next few years is to keep investing. My outlook is to keep investing, keep talking to people like you who I enjoy, read a couple great books, take my kids to Disney World, and chillax a little.
30:45 Everything’s going to be fine. Not get too uptight about the situation. How have the last few years been for you? Because it’s been up, it’s been down, and now you seem like you’re in a good place. So the White House experience was horrific.
30:58 When I got fired from the White House, it was very traumatizing, and it knocked me down a peg, and it took me off my footing. But it did have remarkable qualities, positive qualities. It made me more psychologically minded. It made me more empathetic to other people. It made me have to look inward at my success, but be honest with yourself.
31:21 You know, we do this self-talk, and we create these illusions, particularly when we’re not doing well. Look at me. I’m the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz, okay? It’s not my fault. It’s over here, it’s over there.
31:35 But I find we’re at our best when we say, you know what? That’s my fault. I have to own that. Why did I do that? How would I do it better next time?
31:43 How would I rethink that? You see what I mean? Yeah, so that’s the way you analyzed what happened to you in the White House. So I got destroyed. I got lit up on every late-night comedy show.
31:52 I got lit up in the tabloids. I got lit up by journalists and talking heads and pundits. I mean, I got destroyed. How’d that feel? Humiliating.
32:01 Was it harder for your family than you, or were you like? Everyone uses that stupid cliche. Trust me, it was very hard on me. It was harder on my family than me. I really don’t care about it.
32:13 That’s nonsense. Your grandmother told you something that you should take to heart and really try to live by. But no one lives by it. And that is what other people think of you is none of your business. And I live by that to the extent that I can.
32:30 But when you’ve got incoming, it’s unavoidable. And so, no, that was humiliating. That was very tough. I may have mentioned this before, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. I’m in the Santa Monica promenade with my then 25-year-old son.
32:46 It’s seven years ago. He’s 32 now. He’s got his arm around me. He’s like, dad, are you okay? Brian, I was being parented for the first time by my son, who was a 25-year-old kid.
33:01 What do you mean? Am I going to be okay? He said, oh my god, you’re getting ripped up in the press. You’re getting ripped up. Every time I turn on my iPad, there’s a nasty story about you.
33:09 You’re Tony Soprano on the Potomac. You’re a Jersey Shore cast member. There’s all these racist tropes thrown in there to ignite everybody. And I said, hey, AJ, not only am I going to be okay, watch what I do with this. Really?
33:22 You felt like that? Oh, 100% because I knew I had to. I didn’t have a choice. My crisis PR person said, you should slink away. Re-emerge in three years and pretend it didn’t happen.
33:35 I’m not doing that. Who learns from that? You see, there’s something about you that I admire. I don’t say this flattering. I just say it factually.
33:46 You’re doing this because yes, you enjoy it, but you’re doing this because it helps people. In your mind, you’re like, okay, I’m doing this. I want to expose interesting people to my delegation, my followers, and I want to help them with their lives. You’re doing this because you’re aspirational. And there’s a teaching element to your personality.
34:08 And that’s why you attract people because people want to be there with you and they want to share that with you. And so you saw this as your moment in a way to teach a little bit? No question. You know what’s better than success? You know what’s better than success?
34:24 Shared success. If I’m making money and you’re my bud and you’re not making money, it’s good. Not great. It’s so much better when we’re both making money. Yeah.
34:36 You know, if I’m in the neighborhood and I buy the big car, you don’t have the big car, there could be sore feelings or vice versa. You could have the big car. I could not have the big car. And that’s natural primordial instincts that we have. Let’s not pretend we don’t have them.
34:53 Yeah. That’s why I like Robert Greene so much of 48 Laws of Power. He writes about this in the book and you read it. Yeah, he’s right. Tame our demons, promote our angels, and be at our best when we’re in service helping other people.
35:08 So I was 40 years old, making ridiculous amounts in the city of London here and then I would go home at night and drink myself to death and I had no friends and family. That’s what happens when I try to make money for me. Now, when I’m like serving or even when we’re investing in these ventures with a group of people and I love it. I’m making money for other people. It’s like it’s a whole different feeling.
35:32 But nobody taught me that in school. The MTV was like, you got to be the best. You got to be the baller. You got to be the one that does this. But you’re teaching it.
35:40 Yeah. And this has got to be very gratifying for you because I listen to your shows and there’s a tautology. There’s a pedagogical nature or a battalion from Long Island. I can’t pronounce it but you’re a teacher and you’re trying to explain to people. There’s inner city people in London.
36:04 There’s people on the fringe of the society and they watch you and they say, hey, I can be somebody. And that I like. It’s a beautiful thing. I want to meet people on the streets. But it’s crazy.
36:16 It’s worth all the nonsense. And they get it all goes to zero when you meet one of those people. I agree. I mean, I had people when I got fired, I had people lighting me up. And you are a super respected guy on Wall Street and you were before and then you did this communications thing and now you get tainted with this.
36:33 And again, building that reputation is hard to do. It bothered me. Right? It should have bothered you because that actually had nothing to do with your Wall Street experience. But pretend otherwise at your peril.
36:43 You’re better off admitting your foibles. You’re better off admitting your jealousies. You’re better off admitting your, oh wow, I really am bothered by that. So how do I make myself better? How do I improve myself not to feel that way?
37:00 Okay. So you worked on yourself on the back of that. 100%. And I would also say that,
37:08 I mean, don’t go by me. You could ask my wife, but I feel like I’m more psychologically minded. I think I’m more patient.
37:16 I don’t know if Winston Churchill said this or not. I don’t know. But I believe that I read this in Roy Jenkins’ biography of Churchill 20 years ago. So forgive me. I haven’t gone back to Chad G.B.T.
37:29 Maybe he didn’t say it. But I’m paraphrasing. There was a line in the book where Churchill says the best among us choose not to judge human weakness or human frailty so harshly. Think about how beautiful that is. Yeah.
37:49 Okay. So we’re here in the street in London, the streets of New York. We’re tribal. We’re fighting it out with this sect or that sect or this political view or that political view where somebody had a moment of indiscretion or bad judgment. We’re chortling with laughter and delight about their downfall or their comeuppance.
38:08 How about taking a chill and saying the best among us choose not to judge human frailty so harshly. Imagine the uplift of that. Imagine the way the society would interact with each other if we had that a little bit of compassion for each other. And you gained that through this experience. I did.
38:30 I definitely did because I got destroyed. Ryan, if you’re having, you have my cell phone. Listen to me. If you’re having a bad day, call me. I’m going to cheer you up because I had a worst day.
38:41 Unless you’re telling me it’s a health issue. But I got fired on the 31st of January. My wife filed for divorce. I mean, she hates Trump like almost as much as Melania hates him. I use the Melania standard of hatred.
38:54 You know what I mean? Certain people hate him as much as Melania. My wife is like right below. And we were filed for divorce. Fire from the White House.
39:05 Destroyed by late night comedians. Destroyed in the media by cable news pundits. Lit up in all the newspapers. Then we have this woman, Cindy Adam. She’s like 500 years old.
39:15 She writes a gossip column in New York Post. Pretty sure she’s on the take from Trump because she’s like loves Trump. Anybody that says one sentence against him, she goes after with like a machete. It’s not a ballpoint pen she writes with. She writes with a machete that can cut through the Amazon.
39:32 And you know, my thing is it was so bad. It was so bad that one of my kids was trying to parent me through it. Dad, are you going to be okay? And I chose, yeah, I’m going to be okay. Watch what I do with this.
39:50 So- And you always kept your head up through it. Kept my head up. I was able to laugh about it. I owned it. I do not blame Donald Trump for my firing.
40:01 I got fired because I did and said some things that were regrettable and stupid while I was his comms director. And therefore I deserve to be fired. I’m accountable for the firing. I’m not going to blame anybody else. It still doesn’t mean it didn’t suck.
40:17 It sucked. But that was the lesson. Yeah. And the other lesson was don’t put your ego into these things. Make the decisions, ego less.
40:26 Make the decisions without pride. And I didn’t. I wanted to take a round peg and force it in a square hole. Okay. And that was a big mistake.
40:37 And now a few years later, in 22, you now have the perfect chance to try to exercise some of this newfound compassion. When- I have fun. I try to. And you had a perfect chance when someone that you brought into your inner circle, Sam Bankman Fried, who again, you leverage your reputation to introduce them to all your friends in the Middle East, then really ruined that for you. And I’m just curious.
41:02 He really ruined that for you. And I was in Dubai the last couple months. And there’s a guy named Dr. Marwan El-Zarouni who runs the Dubai Blockchain Center. He got me my golden pizza.
41:12 And he remembers a meeting he was in with you in Abu Dhabi. And he said, you were so upset that you would let those people down. And they could all genuinely feel that you were just, you know, heartbroken that you had let them down through your association with Sam Bankman Fried. Then Marwan said to me, he said, Brian, he’s like, I wanted to give him a hug. That’s what he said.
41:37 I don’t know if he gave you a hug. He might have. I think he did, actually. I think he did. And he said something to me that I’m sure I can share this.
41:45 I think it was Chatham House Rules. But he told me, don’t be so hard on yourself. I trusted Sam. So now you’ve got to think about this now, right? I’m getting hurt by Sam.
41:58 He’s hurting my reputation. He’s destroyed my portfolio. I mean, the portfolio came back, thank God. But he’s hurt me. He’s hurt my reputation.
42:06 I took him to see NBC. I took him to see the leader of the country, who’s a friend of mine. And the meeting went quite well. So now you’ve got to do two things. You have to be compassionate to Sam.
42:19 You have to be. You have to be. I’m not saying it as a Christian. I’m saying it as a person, okay? You have to not overly judge and you have to be less harsh on human frailty, even though the guys hurt you.
42:37 Are you able to do that? Not perfectly. But reasonably, well, go look at my interviews. You interviewed me after the fact. I thought I was compassionate towards him and the autism and the mistakes that he made.
42:49 The flip side is you can’t play the victim. You can’t say, oh, well, what was me? It’s not my fault. No, I brought Sam. I thought I trusted Sam.
43:01 I liked Sam Bryan. I liked him. It’s always nice to me. I liked his family. And you could do that.
43:10 And now you’ve let people down. Marwan, NBC, whoever I brought them to. And you have to hope that they feel that way about you. Right. Right.
43:21 You have to hope, okay, I’m trying to be that way towards others. Will they be that way towards me? And let me tell you the gift of the UAE.
43:32 This doesn’t reflect well on me, but I’ll share it, okay? I…
