Full Transcript
slava (00:01.905)
Hello and welcome to another episode of Smart Humans. I am so excited for today's guest. It's a new friend, somebody who is absolutely impressive, been investing for decades, so he has tons of experience. Anthony Scaramucci from SkyBridge Capital. Welcome to Smart Humans.
anthony (00:17.474)
You just call me old on your pocket. I mean, it's OK. I mean, you hurt my feelings, right? I mean, as soon as we're getting started, my feelings get hurt, and you call me old. You, you, nice young guy like you, just, you know, it's ageism, ageism. Go ahead. How are you, Bob? Congratulations on the podcast.
slava (00:23.505)
You're one of the most seasoned guests we've ever had. So I just wanna make sure people know you've seen it all.
slava (00:32.73)
right in the beginning. So.
slava (00:37.266)
So our listeners always love to know how it all got started. So how did you even get into alts?
anthony (00:45.39)
So actually, you know, we were one of the first people, you know, when I left Goldman Sachs in 1996. Well, let me give you, I'll take you all the way back. I'll give you the thing in 30, 32nd infomercial. I grew up on Long Island. My dad was a crane operator. I went to private public high school and I went to private college. I went to Tufts and Harvard Law School. Got a job at Goldman, spent seven years there and left to start a hedge fund. So it was 1996. I was 32.
My partner and I had a one in 20 product and then we had a registered investment advisor attached to it. It did very well and we sold that business to Newberger Berman in 2001 right after the terrorist attack. So how did I get into alts? I was trading at Goldman in the high net worth area. We had long short strategies on, we had convergence trades on and I went to go see one of my biggest clients in Washington. He's now passed unfortunately.
And he said to me, what the hell's wrong with you? You should have your own firm, go start your own business. And I listened to him. And so I went from a seven figure job at age 32, Slava to a zero figure job. And it was extraordinarily hard. Anybody that tells you otherwise, you know, you know, cause you're an entrepreneur. Uh, and, but it worked out now. I will say this also, uh, I got lucky because it was a robust.
bull market when I left. I left in 1996. 97 was a great year. 98 was a mediocre year, but pretty good towards the end. 99 was an unbelievable tech year. And so those were great years. And it helped me become financially independent.
slava (02:29.001)
And then how did you parlay that into what is today's SkyBridge Capital?
anthony (02:34.126)
So now Newburger bought my business in 2001. They sold their business, the combined businesses, in 2003 to Lehman Brothers. And so I worked at Lehman Brothers for two years. And I went to Dickfold in 2004, December. I said, Dick, I wanna leave and I wanna start my own business. And Dick said to me, I'll tell you what, if you give me a few months, I have XYZ that I want you to do.
I will give you $10 million of Lehman's Balanchy Capital to help me get started. And so I shook hands with them. I left on March 5th. I opened for business on March 7th. And he gave me $10 million. I got $10 million from Merrill Lynch. They sold my first business. I got $25 million from Michael Dell, the computer entrepreneur and the CEO of Dell Technologies. And I put my own money into the business. We started.
The business was about 55 million and then we went out and bought I'm you know into hedge fund managers It was it was a good it was a good start I mean the first one we raised we had 55 billion of our own money, but the first one we raised was 330 million and then we went into the Global financial crisis. So if you had said to me, this is how life works. Okay, you had said to me Okay, here's the thing. You're gonna start this little tiny business called SkyBridge
the place that you left Lehman Brothers, which was a storied investment bank, they're going out of business, but somehow because you are a cockroach and you have a cockroach's mentality, when the bomb goes off, you're going to be calling around and you're going to survive, right? So if you were a fortune teller and you said, the day that I started my business, I was going to be in business three years later, but Lehman Brothers wasn't, I would have never believed that. Okay. So that's how life works. You know, things happen to you when you're
expecting other things. But when the crisis came, this is a big lesson for your listeners, when the crisis came, man up, woman up, you got to get in there and you got to be excited in a crisis. You can't be bummed out in a crisis or feel like a victim. In a crisis, there's always opportunity. And so the opportunity for me was I was able to buy Citibank's alternative investment business.
slava (04:39.509)
in there, then you gotta be excited in the process. You can't be fucked up with your friends in this court, feel like a victim. A court has always offered to the end, so the opportunity for me was I'm taking the public city banks and turning them into investment business, which means that I was on the twilight of 2010 and transferred to the next government. I'm looking for a $4 million shift to a $2 billion dollar shot, and I'm gonna transform to my current government.
anthony (04:55.034)
which we closed on in July of 2010, it transformed SkyBridge. We went from a $400 million shop to a $2 billion shop, and it transformed SkyBridge.
slava (05:07.065)
Incredible and now you're three point seven billion dollar shop
anthony (05:10.538)
Yeah, well, we were a lot more than that until the crypto bear market. I think we were like 5.3 or 5.4 billion. If you'd only done this podcast with me two weeks ago, I could have said I was at like 5.3 million, but that's not. Yeah, but you know, I mean, that's the other thing you got to tell your listeners. Don't measure yourself day to day.
slava (05:24.561)
I think I tried, but you know, you're a busy guy. So I don't know how the bar gets good.
anthony (05:36.626)
Um, an entrepreneur will overestimate what they can do in a year and they will underestimate what they can do in 10 years. So don't measure it day to day. You have to measure it over a course of time and you have to be disciplined. You have to stay in it no matter what. So we're in a bear market right now, bear market for stocks, bear market for crypto, a huge opportunity in that. Got to figure out a way to deploy capital and get invested and find people.
that have cash that we can get them invested as well.
slava (06:08.957)
So SkyBridge likes to invest in what type of investment? So all terms is very broad. So our listeners know about like sports cards and comic books and hedge funds and crypto and real estate and debt and pre-IPO. What exactly is the focus? Or where did it start with SkyBridge and where is it now?
anthony (06:26.414)
Yeah, so Skybridge started with emerging managers. We were taking percentage interests in emerging managers. Skybridge has now developed into a fund of funds where we have investments in places like Steve Cohen's firm, Point 72, Dan Loeb at Third Point, Izzy Englander at Millennium. We have investments in some structured credit firms like Axonic. And then we have some cryptocurrency experts.
exposures through people like Polycoin, I'm sorry, Polychain or Multicoin. And it's a great diversified product. And then I have cryptocurrency products as I made a decision two years ago that this was going to be the future of finance. And I needed to be a very big part of it. So I have a Bitcoin fund and Ethereum fund. We have an Algorand fund. We have our own diversified coin fund.
And basically, I have a fairly large, which you've attended a few of them, I have a fairly large conference business as well. That got born from the last crisis. So in 2009, I thought we were going out of business. All the big firms had canceled their conferences. And I was like, okay, look, man, I'm probably gonna end up as a third party marketer for hedge funds. I said, I gotta start myself a conference business.
And so in 2009, when nobody had a conference, everybody had canceled on their conferences, I went to Las Vegas with my team and we built something called the Sall Conference. And so it's now developed, I mean, it's hard to believe it's 13 years later, but we've done probably 17 or 18 events. We've done the event in North America, the Bahamas. We've done the event in Singapore, Tokyo, Abu Dhabi.
We're going back to Singapore in November. We're going to do the event in New York at the Javits Center in September. And so for me, that event is a massive undertaking, but a great relationship building. We also own a piece of something called Eye Connections, which is another conference that's software related to helping people get together. So this is a fun business. I mean, I'm super excited about the business. I know you told your podcast listeners that I'm 200 years old and I met
anthony (08:39.106)
George Washington, and he was a nice guy by the way, George, but I'm as excited about this business as I was when I was 25.
slava (08:41.737)
Thanks for watching!
slava (08:46.509)
And so you mentioned a number of type of assets. I don't know that I heard any like real estate or collectibles or.
anthony (08:52.386)
A little bit of real estate. We have an Opportunity Zone fund. We built a, we built a boutique hotel, Virgin Hotel in New Orleans, Opportunity Zone, beautiful place. And it's, it's in the port. So these Virgin cruise ships will come into the port. Then you can get off the cruise ship and you can use the hotel or
up on the deck and have dinner, things like that. It's turned out to be great. During the final four weekend, place was booming. And it's in one of those tax free zones pursuant to the 2017 tax code. So a little bit of real estate, not a lot, just one, one really nice piece of.
slava (09:39.293)
How do you think about diversifying across all these types of assets, not within asset across managers, but rather how do you think about, you know, now I want to put X percent into crypto or now I want to put some into a pre IPO or now I want to put some into real estate or how do you think about that or how should our listeners think about that?
anthony (09:59.198)
Well, I think your listeners should think about it differently than the way I think about it. Okay, because my clients, I represent one to 3% of their assets. So let's say you had a dollar under management at Morgan Stanley, and maybe 60% of it was in stocks and 30% of it was in bonds. And now you have 10% of it in other, maybe it's private equity and things like that.
you could have one to 3% of it with SkyBridge. And so a result of which we run fairly concentrated portfolios, right? So I have 20% exposure to crypto. Would I recommend that for an individual? I would not. Would I recommend a one to 5% exposure to digital currencies? I would. So, but if I've got a 20% exposure to cryptocurrency and you have a 3% exposure to me,
You have 60 basis points in cryptocurrencies. You see what I mean? That's a comfortable allocation.
slava (10:57.205)
Yeah, something you said really quickly there was, you know, 10% of your client's money is going into this other this alt stuff, right 60 was equities 30 was bonds and 10% others that what you think should be the mix for everybody out there.
anthony (11:05.174)
Yes.
anthony (11:12.918)
Another really good question. So if I was David Swenson from Yale, I would say no, I would want to have a 35-40% mix. If I'm Anthony Scaramucci that's been in our business for 30 years, I'm probably gonna have a 30 to 40% mix. But if I'm the average investor, I'm saying 10 to 15% because I just think it's conservative. And I think that I'm willing to ride the volatility curve more than somebody else. You know, the
Well, you know, if I, if I own Bitcoin and Bitcoin, I bought my first Bitcoin at 17,000 and Bitcoin traded to 69,000 and now it's at 29,000, but I still own the Bitcoin and it's unlevered. So I'm not forced to sell it. I like the inventory. I'm willing to hold it for five years. You see, see what I mean? But a lot of investors, a lot of investors don't do that. And my, you know, my line Slava is everybody is a long-term investor until they have short-term losses.
slava (12:03.433)
Absolutely.
anthony (12:12.11)
and the minute they have short-term losses, they flip out. So I try to get clients to calm down. I try to get clients in a position where they can ride it out and sometimes if they have too much exposure to something that's very volatile, they get shaken out of it at the worst time. So it's an individual thing more than it is a generic asset allocation.
slava (12:12.443)
I'm gonna go.
slava (12:36.489)
Should individuals, if they have the money, be investing into hedge funds? Would you recommend that, or is that more of an institutional asset class?
anthony (12:45.454)
Should individuals be investing in hedge funds? Yes, I definitely believe that. But here's the thing, the way the SEC works, you have to be quote unquote wealthy. You can't buy into a hedge fund like you can buy into a mutual fund or own an individual stock. So it's my product is actually designed for what I call the mass affluent. I want to be the hedge fund manager for every dentist in America.
So let's say you have a million dollars of net worth in cash, you're going to have 5% exposure in hedge funds, well, that's $50,000. So our minimums are 25 to $50,000. So my pitch to those people is, let me be your outsourced chief investment officer for your alternative stuff. We'll do everything for you, soup to nuts, qualitative, quantitative risk management. We'll make the asset allocations. We'll sell things when they need to be sold. We'll buy things.
that are more opportunistic will do all of that for you. You see what I mean? So, but yes, you should. Mass affluent people, that was my whole pitch at SkyBridge in the beginning. I wanted people that weren't the uber wealthy to have exposure to these great money managers.
slava (13:47.922)
with the whole network. Are there any assets?
slava (14:00.721)
Yeah, I mean, this is why we also get along, because at Vincent, that's exactly what we're trying to do is help democratize all these alts for everybody and get folks into it. Are there...
anthony (14:09.258)
Yeah, well, we grew up similarly, you know, we want people to get that exposure.
slava (14:15.129)
Are there specific assets that you try to avoid, whether it's personally or for your clients?
anthony (14:25.134)
try to avoid no outside of my core competency or like the world of commodities that's outside of my core competency I don't have I don't have a lot of commodity exposure I'm not saying that people you know can't do well in the commodity market obviously the commodity markets are up the last year and a half but they've really been lackluster over 15 years you know so but I but I don't really have an opinion I just don't have a lot of commodity
slava (14:54.785)
And then you mentioned this already, but you bought your first, Skybridge bought its first Bitcoin, you said something like around 17K? And that was, yeah, so that was a year and a half ago, et cetera. What's your point of view on why move into that asset class? Obviously it's volatile and you're navigating it. But what even made you...
anthony (15:02.11)
Yes, October, November 2020.
anthony (15:10.114)
Yeah.
slava (15:21.177)
actually decide because the day before that you didn't have any Bitcoin. And now you're very bullish in that market. So how did that transition?
anthony (15:30.686)
So I want to give you the shortest answer possible. I was very skeptical and negative on Bitcoin in the beginning. Didn't understand it. Didn't care for it. OK, it was a sort of this like the way I was looking at commodity. When I went to the White House prior to going to the White House in my disastrous 11 day stint, I was actually the chief strategy officer at the Ex-Im Bank. And in there.
There was a group of people at the XM Bank talking about
anthony (16:04.226)
digitizing the US dollar and I was like, oh my God, they're going to digitize the US dollar and use the blockchain. This Bitcoin has to be something. Okay. So that was 2017. That's five years ago. So when I got fired from the White House, I went back to SkyBridge. The first thing I did was buy the URL skybridgebitcoin.com. I said, this is going to be something. We've got to do the homework. And then I started doing the homework on it. And I was like, okay, this actually could work, but it has to scale. And so I made a checklist.
and I said it has to get to 100 million wallets because then from, if you understand MedCast law, which I know you do because you're a technologist, it will have reached escape velocity. Number two, I gotta be able to store it properly because if you remember there was a exchange called Mt. Gox which went out of business, there was a hack and people lost their coins there and I was like, oh my God, I'm gonna put a lot of money in this thing, I've gotta make sure that I scale it properly.
and make it safe. And then the third thing is I had to get comfortable with the regulation, and I am comfortable with the regulation. I can explain that if you have an interest. And so once I got all three of those checked off, which was around October, November of 2020, I started buying our first coins and it made a $270 million investment in Bitcoin, which has proven to be successful. Yes, it was more successful at 69,000.
Everyone's running around now with their hair on fire, but we bought the stuff at 18,000. Could it trade back to 18? I don't know. Could it trade back to 12? I think it's unlikely because there's so much demand for it. And remember it's fixed. There's only 21 million coins. And I think probably one or two million of those coins have been lost. And you know, there's a little under two million coins left to be mined. So you have a lot of demand for something that's finite. You usually get a price increase, but maybe.
slava (17:36.903)
I think it's unlikely because there's so much demand for it, and remember it's fixed, there's only 21 million coins. And I think probably one or two million of those coins have been lost because there's a lot of 2 million coins left in the mine. So you have a lot of demand for something that's finite, and you usually get a price increase. Maybe I'll be careful. I don't know. Here's the thing. I have been troubled by the last few days.
anthony (17:57.41)
Maybe I'll be wrong. I don't know. Here's the thing. I have been humbled by life and I've been humbled by markets. So if you invite me on in a year and I'm wrong, I'll look you straight in the face and say, geez, I got that wrong. Here are the reasons why I got that wrong. But these are why I think it's going directionally where we think. And it's a big macro bet for us. And, but it's also, I want to push my clients to go into the future. So if you're podcast listeners,
can only remember one thing from this conversation. I want them to remember that the blockchain is a delineering mechanism for the society. Ultimately, if we get this right, the payment rails that you and I have been using, the economy's been using, really got started after the Federal Reserve was created. They're roughly 80 to 90 years old. You know, 1933 is really when the system got set up.
most of these companies are using call ball and mainframe computers from the nineteen seventies you know that and i know that this technology would allow you and i to do a permissionless transfer of value between the two of us we wouldn't have to know or like or trust each other we could do this permissionless transfer of value between the two of us without a third party so that's a major delaying mechanism so
slava (19:01.495)
but allow you and I to do a permissionless transfer of value between the two of us, we wouldn't have to know or like or trust each other, but we could do this permissionless transfer of value between the two of us without a third party. So that's a major deal in everything. So if you were a restaurant and I was a connoisseur, I could pay with my smart wallet and avoid American Express. If you were living in El Salvador, you were my dad and I was an expat
anthony (19:18.762)
If you were a restaurant and I was a connoisseur, I could pay you with my smart wallet and avoid American Express. If you were living in El Salvador, you were my dad and I was an expat and I wanted to send you money, I could do a wallet to wallet transfer and I could avoid the 10% surcharge from MoneyGram or Western Union. The president of El Salvador said something the other day, I don't know if he's right, but he said that he believes his country will save $400 million a year in...
slava (19:31.535)
I could do a wild wall transfer and I could avoid a 10% surcharge from MoneyGram or Western Union. The president of El Salvador said something the other day, I don't know if he's right, but he believes his country will save $400 million a year in MoneyGram and Western Union fees.
anthony (19:47.834)
money gram and Western Union fees for expats that are sending money back to their family members in El Salvador if they do a wallet to wallet transfer vis-a-vis Bitcoin. So to me, this is a massive delaying mechanism and things like this are transformational. This is bigger than Web 1. And as this starts to unfold, and it's going to start to unfold fairly quickly as we get into 5G and 6G.
slava (19:52.713)
for expats who are sending money back to their family members in El Salvador if they do a wallet to wallet transfer piece of the big one. So to me, this is a massive delayering mechanism and things like this are transformational. This is bigger than Web 1 and as this starts to unfold, and it's going to start to unfold fairly quickly as we get into 5G and 6G, it's going to be a massive transformation for the
anthony (20:17.227)
It's going to be a massive transformation for the better for the economy, and I want to be a part of it.
slava (20:23.047)
So you mentioned a couple times that crypto and Bitcoin was worth a little bit more a couple weeks ago And we are getting too wonky in the details But there was a stable coin called UST that got the pegged and really had an issue So the Luna folks the people behind it had to spend like three billion in Bitcoin to try to support it And it really didn't work out It's my opinion and that's you know One of the main reasons that we went down from like let's call it a 40k Bitcoin to about a 29 30k Bitcoin Do you see? this
period in time as a huge opportunity where people should be buying? Is it more like who knows how this is gonna shake out in the next 18 months where it might go flat for a while? Or is this a concerning period? What do you think of this period in time right now? And I don't mean this week, I mean kind of.
anthony (21:07.722)
And again, it's a big opportunity, but let's go over a couple of things that you said. So there was this Luna Terra situation where the idea was they were going to have a stable coin. And so for your viewers and listeners, they probably know what it is, but let's just talk about what it is. It's something on the blockchain that's going to trade at $1. Okay so it's stable. Okay, now why would that be? So this way people who were using the blockchain...
If they wanted to send somebody something that was denominated in US currency, they could send a stable coin. It's represents one dollar. It should stay fixed at a dollar. Moreover, if you want to trade these things and you want to get out of them and into something stable, you don't have to come completely off the blockchain. You can stay on the blockchain and use this as sort of a reservoir. There are stable coins like tether. There's a USDC by circle. But this particular stable coin was
backed by Bitcoin. And so that was a problem. Our research department wrote about it. We said we didn't like it because you can't have something that's quote unquote stable backed by something that is quote unquote unstable. So a Bitcoin has an 80% or 0.8 volatility, 80 vol. You can't have that be the thing. But Doh Kwan was suggesting that Bitcoin was going to be a three, four or $500,000 and it was ultimately going to be stable. He,
he would be right in 2040 when Bitcoin's got two billion wallets and it's totally saturated. It's the Amazon of 2040. Remember, Amazon was unstable in 2009, but it's become very stable in 2022. But he missed that. Okay. So what ended up happening was to his credit and his detriment, he was very transparent about what he had. And so he was under asset
slava (22:34.333)
He would be right in 2040 when Bitcoin's got 2 billion.
anthony (23:03.646)
in terms of his mix match between assets and liabilities. And so somebody, a big kahuna could look at it and say, okay, he's got $18 billion of market value, but he's only got 12 or $13 billion of Bitcoin backing this 18 billion. That was, let me short this thing and see if I can crack it. And somebody did that to him. And then, so he, he massively had to sell his Bitcoin. He dumped four, possibly $5 billion where the Bitcoin
over a one week period to try to stabilize it. And so Bitcoin got knocked from 42,000. I think it traded as low as 25,000. And now it's, like you said, 2930. Why is that a big opportunity? We just want you to think about the magnitude of that. An 18 billion dollar enterprise disintegrated due to faulty engineering and faulty programming, it dumped, I don't know, seven or eight times the volume, the trading volume into the market.
And the market more or less absorbed it. So I want you to just think about that for a second. The market, um, you know, uh, if you told me that the, there were lots of bears and Bitcoin to quote Warren Buffett was rat poison and blah, it would have traded to 10,000 or 5,000. But there's a tremendous amount of demand for Bitcoin. So I take the fact that this happened and Bitcoin still trading at around 30,000 is remarkably bullish.
And so for me, I'm going to hang tough. I think people learned a lot from this, but this is also what happened in web one. E-Toys went out of business, pets.com went out of business. By the way, pets.com was a great idea. They just were under-capitalized and they got, they mis-executed. Pets.com became Chewy. Not the same people, but it was a different group of people, but now Chewy's doing very well. There was something.
slava (24:49.177)
Of course.
slava (24:54.665)
I mean, also most people don't recall, but Amazon as part of that 01 crash, went down 92 and a half percent.
anthony (25:03.486)
Yeah, exactly. And, you know, think about that. So Amazon crashed, went down 92%. If you were smart enough to buy it, you made a fortune in Amazon. Even if you bought it, when it went down 50% in 2009, you're 64 to 1 on Amazon. So these technologies that are adapting and scaling, excuse me, the way Bitcoin is, your goal is to stay in them.
you know, I would almost like to buy the coins for you, put them in a lock box and tell you, we'll come visit them in five years. Remember the best performing accounts at Charles Schwab Slava are the dead people. That's the best performing account. Why is that? Because they don't do anything. Okay. You have to stay long-term in your products and you have to stay long-term in your ideas.
slava (25:45.583)
I'm sorry.
slava (25:57.801)
That's a great line. The best performing accounts are the dead people. I need to.
anthony (26:00.994)
But that's a true story. Go take a look. The Schwab people always bring it up. You know, there was a great movie with Brendan Fraser and Christopher Walken like 20 years ago. And it was like, Christopher Walken was this neurotic scientist, and he was convinced that the Cuban Missile Crisis was going to lead to a nuclear war. And he had built this bomb shelter. And so he descended into the bomb shelter with his family in 1962.
slava (26:04.461)
I need to remember that one.
slava (26:08.844)
Um...
anthony (26:30.906)
only to pop their heads up in 1992. And so the little boy that they had was now 31 years old and they raised him in the bomb shelter, him and Sissy Spacek. And they sent the little boy out to the LA area to find out what the hell was going on up there, right? And of course they were on top of like a porno video store or something like that, right? You know, the whole area had been decimated. He gets up there and his father gave him the address to the bank.
and he says go to the bank I've left some stuff in the safe deposit box go check on it for me and so he goes to the bank the bank is still there he meets with the banker he gives the social security numbers he's got the key for the deposit box banker opens deposit box he's got the stock certificates and he says oh my god sir you're worth a hundred and seventy million dollars you own IBM Walt Disney and he's naming all these companies that his father bought the shares of in nineteen sixty two
They did nothing but leave them in the safe deposit box for 30 years. Okay? It's a big lesson in life. It's why Buffett says, I'm buying high quality stuff and I'm going to hold it. You know? And I think that's something people need to do. Don't get juked out of things.
slava (27:42.569)
Nice. So all the listeners wish they had, you know, an opportunity to just pick your brain and hear what you have to say about the market. So here we are, I'm gonna ask you that, which is not specific to any asset, whether it's crypto or hedge funds or anything, but just your point of view, giving your experience. No ageism here, just you have a lot of experience. And what do you think of...
anthony (28:02.414)
I mean, who's kidding who's fine.
slava (28:04.505)
What do you think of the current market? I mean, you've seen it all the ups and downs, the bear markets, the crashes, the.
anthony (28:08.586)
Yeah, you're going to slog. Your current market is likely to slog for a while. OK, you don't have the Fed inducting liquidity. You know, after the crisis in March of 2020, the Fed just jammed the markets with lots of liquidity, forced a lot of that into the marketplace. So you don't you don't have that going on right now. And you have.
a war going on just affecting commodity prices and energy prices. You also put probably too much money into the system. So now that money is chasing less goods because the supply chain was disrupted by COVID and that's where you get in your, your inflation. But I think, you know, Dr. Bernanke, the former Fed chair, uh, said something recently, which I think he's going to be right. The supply chain will correct itself. The war will eventually end. All wars end.
Okay, now hopefully we don't have a nuclear situation, but all wars do end. And when the war ends and the, and the supply chain gets corrected, the inflation is going to come down. And the minute that the market sees the inflation numbers come down, you're going to see a huge rally in the market. So, so to me, you know, this is short-termism, but short-termism defined by 18 to 24 months. People are very impatient today. They have these things like this. They look at them all day. They have two minute attention spans.
So they want instant gratification. If you're looking for instant gratification in a market like this, you're going to be very disappointed. But if you have a three to five year view and you can hang in there with high quality assets, you're going to win. Um, but that means you can't look at stuff day to day, you know, Bitcoin's at 30,000 right now. A lot of people are upset. They want to sell their Bitcoin. When Bitcoin gets to 70,000 people will be like, Oh my God, I gotta buy more Bitcoin. This is the cycle of psychological euphoria and
despair that takes place. It's just a weird thing about the stock market. It's not like women's apparel. Women's apparel goes on sale at stacks. People flood into the store. When the stock market goes on sale, people are running from it. And so you have to train your brain to absorb the fear, absorb the pain and run towards it. And it took me a long time to do that. This is my eighth fair market.
anthony (30:27.478)
My first two bear markets, I was on oxygen. My third bear market, I thought we were going out of business, was scared, SHIT, don't wanna curse on your podcast. But now I'm looking at this as my eighth bear market because I am old and I'm like, okay, this is an unbelievable opportunity. Everybody calm down, have a little bit of patience and foresight and wisdom and you'll get to the other side of this feeling very happy. But you gotta get the other side. Something like Vincent.
you know, we got to get that out there to people because smaller investors should have the access of the smartest money managers in the world. It shouldn't just be for the rich people. So let's get the Vincent idea out there to as many people as possible. Let's get them some exposure to some of these high quality products that you have in your weaponry, in your arsenal.
slava (31:16.018)
And just to be specific for the audience, so are you saying that the people who are listening they should not be running to deploy capital, but they should be thinking about if they have a little extra cash now would be a good time.
anthony (31:25.25)
Right now they should be running, right now they should be running to deploy capital. Yes, because we're in a bear market. But I would tell people something different. I have always deployed capital regularly. So I would tell people, you know, I grew up in a blue collar family, had no money. My first check that I got, I paid myself first. Okay. I don't know what it was. Maybe it was 500 bucks. I put it in a mutual fund. The next month, I put $500 in a mutual fund.
And every single month for 31 years, I have been paying myself first. Okay. And so I don't know, my check will come on the 15th and the end of the month, I will put money in crypto, put money in my fund, I'll put money in my 401k, pay yourself first and do it regularly. And you'll buy more volume at lower prices when there's bear markets, you know,
slava (32:22.737)
Meaning invest in yourself for the future.
anthony (32:24.542)
In other words, I can buy two Bitcoin today for $60,000. Bitcoin goes to 60. I can only buy one Bitcoin. You see what I'm saying? Pay yourself.
slava (32:33.577)
Absolutely. So I just want to transition here for a second. But you obviously are not afraid, and I use that word on purpose, of failure, because you've had to navigate the tightrope quite regularly. And
anthony (32:47.878)
I've been blown out of the White House. I mean, trust me, if you're having a bad day, Slob, you should tell your clients this and your listeners. Call me. Unless you're having a health day, bad health day, can't be having a worse day than me on July 31st, 2017, when I got my ass shot up and fired at the White House, blown into Pennsylvania Avenue, rolled in broken glass, salted with margarita salt by every late night comedian. I mean, come on, it was brutal. So yeah.
slava (32:54.952)
Haha.
slava (33:14.973)
So.
anthony (33:15.786)
I've had my ability to rebound from things like that. And yeah, I don't give a shit. I'm first curse. I'm ready to deal with failure. But I'm also ready to live my life without any fear or trepidation. Because I got five kids, I want to show them that they got to have set on them. You know, let's go. Remember what you know, remember what Mel Brooks said, okay, relax, none of us are getting out of here alive. Okay, so this no dress rehearsal. Let's rock and roll.
slava (33:36.521)
So I want to jump in there for a second.
anthony (33:45.294)
find out what you really wanna do and go for it.
slava (33:48.201)
So you have a book, Hopping Over the Rabbit Hole, right? And in that book, there's a chapter, I love the title, it's Fear, Failure, and Focus. And there's a sentence in there, which I think those words are amazing put together. There's a sentence in there, which is, if you're afraid of failure, don't become an entrepreneur. It's a very short sentence, right? But there's a lot of underneath that. How has that like chapter, how has that sentence, how has that mantra helped you navigate life?
anthony (33:57.174)
Yeah.
anthony (34:16.726)
sit. That's the whole thing. If you feel, I mean, like, let me tell you something. And I wrote this in one of my books. I was with a guy and his wife. They just started my first entrepreneurial venture and we were sitting at dinner and he was a Goldman guy and he's nice guy and he, you know, he was perfect for Goldman. And I was at Goldman with him. He said, oh, look at him. He's failed at a couple of different things. I've never failed at anything. And I remember thinking, yeah.
Doesn't that suck for you that you never feel that? I mean, I want to throw the ball. I want to take the risks. Okay. And I, if you're fearing failure, then you can't do that. Right. If you're, you need to be at the cocktail party at the certain country club. Let me show you my finger. My finger's up in the air. I've got the martini glass and I'm sipping it. And I'm telling people how perfect my life is. Don't be an entrepreneur. If you need to have everything in your life go up in a 45 degree angle,
and there's no wave of volatility to it, don't be an entrepreneur. But if you want to dent the society, if you want to move things, if you want to contribute something that is perhaps a game shifter, okay, then you, you know, you gotta, you gotta get in there. That's why like when people shit on Elon Musk, curse word number two, if they, if they do that, I look at them, I'm like, what are they nuts? This guy's a genius. This guy's the best. This guy could be the best entrepreneur of all time, not just our time.
Okay, and so I admire the guy and I get his vibe, I get his energy. And I also admire that he's so honest about certain things. Like he was this close to going out of business in Tesla and SpaceX. Don't you love that? But he didn't. And he's the richest guy in the world now as a result of that. Mazel Tov, I hope he makes a trillion dollars and I want to be there cheering him. And that's another thing. I cheer people's successes. I want you to.
You've already had an amazing career, God bless you. And I want you to have an even more amazing career going forward. And I want to be able to celebrate that with you. And you want to hang out with people like that. You don't want to hang out with people that are naysayers and jealous and all this sort of nonsense. Who the hell wants that? I want to be with my buddies, cheering on their success. And, and we're all built differently. We all have different lives. We all come from different families. Don't compare yourself to anybody. Just do your best at who you are and what your dreams are.
anthony (36:43.018)
That makes sense. That's right. That's how I'm women.
slava (36:44.101)
It makes a ton of sense. Makes a ton of sense. We're coming close to the end here of the podcast. And do you have any other advice that you would share with the listeners about investing? That's an open-ended question.
anthony (36:58.198)
Yeah, so I don't want to make it like too generic, but boring is better. Boring is better. And so you don't want to put all your money in crypto. You don't want to put all your money in the one idea. I mean, unless you're an entrepreneur like Elon or you, and then that's got to be the focus, I get it. But if you just have extra cash that you're now disposing into the markets, boring is better because.
you just have to win slowly. You have to get singles and doubles. You have to understand compound interest where the dollar goes to a dollar 10. Now the next 10%, you're gonna make 11 cents as opposed to 10. And then the next 10, you're gonna make 12.1 cents. And you have to just understand like, you know, when I teach, I tell kids, do you want $10,000 a day for 30 days? Or do you want this magic penny that I'm gonna hand you right now?
that doubles every day for 30 days, what do you want? The 10,000 a day or the magic penny? Okay, and of course the answer is the magic penny because the penny's doubling. It looks like shit in the beginning, curse word number three, but then by the end it's worth $5.4 million. And if you're in July and you pick up the extra day, it's 10.8 million, right? So you have 300,000 or 5.4 million. You wanna be in things that are compounding. Wanna be in world class things.
that are compounding. You don't need to be the lights out guy, you know, hitting your golf balls with your buddies telling them, Oh, I got into Uber when it was worth five cents. You don't need that. Just put the money in the markets, high quality things, close your eyes and stay focused. Okay. And that's, that's made me, that's made me a lot of, made me a lot of money and it's also given me a lot of personal freedom, right? I'm not talking about freedom to fly around in a private jet. I'm talking about, Hey,
slava (38:42.533)
I love it. So not everybody can find.
anthony (38:53.186)
Taking some risk, if it doesn't work out, no big deal. You see what I'm saying?
slava (38:57.033)
Absolutely. So not everybody can find that magic penny to provide the return. So my last question for you as we ask all of our guests, and I'm going to pin you down here is what is one actual investment, not a generic thought or an asset class? What is one investment that you would recommend today that three years from now when we have you back on the show, we could talk about how it did and you would recommend for folks to get into?
anthony (39:10.254)
Yeah.
anthony (39:21.398)
Well, I think you know the answer. There's only one thing I would tell people right now. You got to own some Bitcoin. You're going to buy Bitcoin before the ETF gets approved, the cash ETF. The floodgate is about to open. Fidelity just made a decision that they're going to allow Bitcoin into their 401k products. We just signed up for that product, by the way, at SkyBridge. Buy Bitcoin. Now, percentage wise, buy one, two or three percent of your holdings in Bitcoin.
So if you have $100,000, put two, $3,000 into Bitcoin. Don't be greedy, don't be nuts. Put some money into Bitcoin because if I'm right and it goes 10 to one, it's gonna have a massive impact on your portfolio. And let's say I'm wrong and it goes to zero, you won't have permanent impairment of capital. Okay, but it's a transformational idea and it's a transformational piece of property on a...
technology that I think the blockchain is going to transform the world.
slava (40:24.585)
I love it. Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. We've covered a lot, everything from me here and for the first time, that the best performing accounts are from the people that are dead. We covered about...
anthony (40:34.398)
Yeah, I'm going to send you the backup on that because it's funny. You know, it's not, I mean, it's a little bit gruesome, but I mean, but you know, what happens is the executor gets in there with like the kids and then they rip the account up and then of course it underperforms. But as long as the person's dead and you know, the stocks are being left alone, they do well.
slava (40:37.957)
I love it.
slava (40:48.649)
It's
slava (40:53.341)
We talked about fear, failure, exactly focus, boring is better. We talked about Elon Musk. We talked about buy BTC and hold for five years.
anthony (40:56.295)
It's East Basic, Christopher Walken.
anthony (41:03.55)
Only three, only three S-H-I-T's too. I mean, it's pretty good for me. I usually, yeah, I'm like a prolific cursor as I'm known for that. And I tried to like hesitate with you because, you know, I know you have such a classy audience.
slava (41:07.593)
and no F-bomb, so that's impressive.
slava (41:17.957)
Absolutely. So thank you so much. We look forward to having you back on the show.
anthony (41:22.222)
Great to be here as well.
