Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged looks beyond the regular headlines heard on mainstream financial media to bring you unscripted interviews and breaking commentary direct from Wall Street right to you on main street.

Frank Curzio: What’s going out there? It’s January 13th. I’m Frank Curzio, host of the Wall Street Unplugged Podcast, where I break down the headlines and tell you what’s really moving these markets. I have an incredible guest today, who may be one of the most connected people in the world, both on a political and the investment front.

Frank Curzio: The former president’s billion-dollar hedge fund manager’s legendary athletes, spoken at his conferences, which he holds several times a year, now runs a $9 billion investment fund where over $1 billion is invested specifically in Cryptos. The name his firm is SkyBridge Capital. The person I’m interviewing right now is Anthony Scaramucci, The Mooch, and a lot of you have heard him.

Frank Curzio: He was Trump’s director of communication for a few days. He worked at Goldman Sachs for over seven years and became the vice president of Goldman’s private wealth division, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, which focuses on alternative investing. SkyBridge, Scaramucci, has become a major force in the crypto world. He’s here to discuss why he believes this industry is still in its infancy, very early stages of growth.

Frank Curzio: He’s also going to share some of his favorite ideas in the space along with price targets. Great, great interview, and let’s jump right in. Anthony Scaramucci, thanks so much for coming back on Wall Street Unplugged.

Anthony Scaramucci: Hey, it’s good to be here. I appreciate it, man.

Frank Curzio: You’ve been pretty busy lately. I saw an interview on CNBC. I think it was early December that you go to Middle East, talk about crypto. Talk a little bit about crypto markets. Let’s start there. I know you’re a believer in crypto. You’re bullish on crypto. You’ve seen the volatility, which I think guys like you and me pretty much expected, especially since the run up it was so great.

Frank Curzio: But what are you seeing out there on the institutional level in terms of raising money, more institutions, more Wall Street? Are they starting to adapt this? Or, is it still a little skeptical, and maybe waiting for a little more regulation to come down?

Anthony Scaramucci: I mean, I don’t know exactly where to begin. Let me step back for a second and remind everybody that crypto is an early adapting technological story. If you understand what’s happening in crypto, then you want to be an investor. If you don’t understand it, you’re either scared. You think it’s the worst things that ever happened to the civilization, or it’s rat poison, or all that other stuff.

Anthony Scaramucci: But if you’ve actually done the homework, which you recognize is happening, there will be some lasting currencies, likely Bitcoin, Ethereum, Algorand, Solana. Those currencies will survive, and they will be stores of value or smart contract platforms where people can engage in activity together.

Anthony Scaramucci: Then you say yourself, “Okay, why do you need that?” The answer is that this is a wonderful delayering mechanism. The best example I can give right now is what’s going on in El Salvador. El Salvador announces that Bitcoin is going to be legal, tender legal currency. The Salvadorian community, this would include expats in the United States, and El Salvador and citizens have saved themselves about 400 million US dollars this year, by bypassing Western Union.

Anthony Scaramucci: A wallet-to-wallet transfer of Bitcoin between an expat living here in the United States and their family member that they’re trying to send money back to in El Salvador, used to have to go through Western Union, it would be a 7% to 10% charge, depending on the amount of it. What we’re discovering is Bitcoin is legal tender, has this wonderful progressive property to it, where it’s actually allowing the under-banked to transact with each other, with little to no fees.

Anthony Scaramucci: When you stop and think about it from that perspective, it’s an unbelievable delayering mechanism. However, it is an early technical adaption story. With early technologies, as they’re adapting, they have this gigantic volatility curve, up and down, up and down. That would be true for Amazon. It would be true for Google, Facebook. Take a look at any of those charts as these new ideas or these new industries were emerging.

Anthony Scaramucci: This is reminiscent of something that Jeff Bezos said a few years back, because Amazon went through this. Amazon started with public. It’ll be 25 years soon, May 15th 1997. At its public offering, if you put $10,000 into Amazon, it’s worth $22 million today. However, you would have subject yourself to at least eight periods of time where you lost 50% of your value, and one period of time where it went down about 85%.

Anthony Scaramucci: When I’m educating people on crypto, I’ll say to them what Jeff Bezos said about his company, somebody asked him on a podcast like this, they said, “Wow, you hung in there. The stock was enormously volatile. Why were you capable of hanging in there?” Jeff’s response was, “Well, I was only tracking users and adaption. As my revenues were going up, and my users were going up, I knew eventually, the stock price and the business would can join, despite all the uncertainty, despite all the market-based irrationality.”

Anthony Scaramucci: I’ll just finish up with this one sentence. Bitcoin is enormously volatile, down 45% from its high. Interestingly enough, we were at 42,000 last January, and people were remarkably bullish and toggled on greed. We’re at 40-ish or 42,000 this January. People are toggled on fear. But yet, if you step back and you take a long distance view of the chart, Bitcoin looks amazing.

Anthony Scaramucci: It should look amazing because the user base is growing exponentially. This time last year, approximately 110 million wallets according to Glassnode, 240 million Bitcoin wallets this year, over 50 million wallets inside the United States. It’s a very, very powerful entity. But because of its early nature, it’s going to shake people to the core, and we’re watching a lot of loose holders of Bitcoin right now sell Bitcoin.

Frank Curzio: Now, it’s a good explanation, and I love the analogy with resellers on Amazon. Now, when you look at Bitcoin, and people… You look at MicroStrategy, Michael Saylor says that to store value, other people like you, even now, is it currency? Is it replacing DFY where you said it’s a method of payment? Even I heard you talk about in terms of if it’s PayPal, Visa, MasterCard. I mean, this alternative that could lower that 3% charge all the time.

Frank Curzio: But do you think that because you’re an alternative investment manager, and a lot of people who are alternative investment managers see this as something that’s not correlated with the rest of the market? We still don’t know that, so early in its phase. But we are seeing recently where rates are rising, and you have a little bit of sell off, it’s almost as if it’s a risk asset.

Frank Curzio: Do we still have a lot more to learn about this asset? Do you think it’s uncorrelated with the rest of the market or risky assets? How do you play from that point of view from an alternative manager standpoint?

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah. I mean, these are great questions. These are the age-old questions. I think if I told you that I had an asset that over 10 years was the best performing asset in the world, bar none. If I told you that you could put one penny in this asset, 99 cents in cash. In the last 10 years, you would outperform every tactical asset allocation model in the world, stocks, bonds, private equity, venture capital, 1%, in Bitcoin 99 cents in cash. It sounds a little bit too good to be true.

Anthony Scaramucci: When you look at it day-to-day, and you see this oscillating, unfortunately, what we know about investors, despite their supposed rationale or the rationality, what we know about investor is that everybody’s a long-term investor until they have short-term losses. Amid that short-term losses, they flip out, and they run around in a circle and they go crazy. They go and yell at their financial advisor, or yell at themselves or whoever they can blame it on.

Anthony Scaramucci: But ultimately, markets come with the oscillation. They come with the volatility. They come with the risk, and you have to be patient. You have to sit in there. You don’t get a return like the one we’re talking about in Bitcoin or Amazon without taking any risk or not having any volatility. There are risks for sure. But if you ask me like Saylor, I see it as a store of value. I see it as a perfected ledger.

Anthony Scaramucci: If you really study the history of money, and you study how we’ve kept track of each other in our global society, in our global economy, we’re doing it through money. We’re getting the money from a perceived trusted third party. In this case, it’s always been the government. The third party is issuing a coin, or it’s saying this wampum is legal tender, or this seashell or whatever it may be. But what we found that throughout history, what happens is, when the government’s issue the money, they have a tendency to corrupt the money.

Anthony Scaramucci: What do they do? They inflate it. They put nickel into the gold coin to cheapen up the coin, or they print more money, or they electronically create more money, like the Federal Reserve did over the last 20 months. Nakamoto’s premise and the brilliance of Satoshi Nakamoto, what he basically said is, “Listen, all it really is, all money really is a ledger between parties. If I can create this distributed, decentralized mathematical ledger that is incorruptible, well, then you know what, that’s going to be the hardest form of money that’s ever existed.”

Anthony Scaramucci: We stop and think about it. It’s harder than gold, because right now 65% of the available gold in the world has been mined. But that means there’s still another 35% more supply. In Bitcoin’s case, 90% of it has been mined, 10% of it is left, which is going to be mined over the next 100 or so years. This actually becomes the hardest. If you’re quoting sale or thinking about how Michael thinks about it, this becomes the hardest available money in the world.

Anthony Scaramucci: Ultimately, will it become legal tender? Hard to say. If you read Saifedean Ammous’s book, The Bitcoin Standard, or his new book, The Fiat Standard, he believes it will become the global currency, because it’s decentralized. It is protected from the policy whims, policymakers and politicians. But it may not do that. But it doesn’t have to do that.

Anthony Scaramucci: As Saylor says, “It’s better than gold, and if gold has an $11-ish trillion market cap and Bitcoin has a 900 or today because of weakness, $7 or $50 billion market cap, could it get to $11 trillion?” I think the answer is yes. Is that going to happen overnight? No. But if you keep going, you’ve got 240 million wallets right now. You get it to a billion wallets, the billion wallets turns into a billion and a half wallets, all of a sudden, you’ll see that type of price activity.

Anthony Scaramucci: I’ll leave you with this one thought. Imagine we were sitting here 13 years ago. We were talking about, it’s 2009, and we were talking about Facebook. Facebook had 240 million users. I said to you on a podcast 13 years ago, “Well, you know what? Facebook is growing exponentially. Sometime in 2022, 13 years from now, Facebook will have 3 billion users up from 240 million users.”

Anthony Scaramucci: A lot of people say, “Oh, well, that’s not going to happen, or that’s ridiculous.” But that did happen. You can see the trajectory of Facebook stock as a result of that. For me, I try to tell people to hang in there. Understand it’s an early adaption story. Understand it is growing exponentially. There is a need in the world to have something like this. As Satoshi Nakamoto said, “If I have to explain it to you, I don’t have the time to. And so, you’re likely going to miss it anyway.”

Anthony Scaramucci: But Saylor, I think, does a great job of explaining it. I’m certainly trying my best to explain it to people. But I am encouraging people half a percent, one percent, you should hold some of this, and you should tuck it away and not think about it very much.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. No. It’s great advice. I think you get unfairly criticized, too, Anthony, where people say, “Well, he’s all in in this risky asset.” Really, I mean, the numbers that I saw it I think this is in December, whatever it is today and updated, where is it $9 billion in capital and a little over a billion dollars in crypto through four different funds, I think.

Frank Curzio: But it is spread out and I think it does give you an opportunity to add in at times of this when it does come down. But you talked about Bitcoin, you talked about Ethereum, you talk about Algorand, which I’m a big fan of I think every single aspect of Algorand is better than Ethereum, especially no gas fees, it’s faster, it’s safer and so on.

Frank Curzio: Now, outside of those because we know there’s a lot of garbage out there especially on the utility token front. What is some of the trends inside of crypto that have you excited? Because I know DFY which we all know about, you can talk about NFTs right now, which I think some of them are going to be garbage, of course, just like every trend. But having your own content and licensing your own content, owning that content is pretty incredible.

Frank Curzio: Also, I heard you talk about the metaverse, how excited are you at the metaverse concern? I just got back from Consumer Electronics Show, which I go every year, but not for last 10 years. It wasn’t just crypto companies talk about the metaverse. It was healthcare companies. It was the car companies talk about the metaverse. Is this trend coming soon? Or can we prepare it? Does it come through crypto? Talk about some of the things that you’re really excited about, maybe within crypto, those trends.

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, lot there. Let me take the first thing. I’m totally going to get criticized for my crypto exposure and totally expect to be criticized. The irony of that is we put a four and a half to five percent position on depending on the fund. Due to the success of the position, it grew to a… I think at the peak it was 22. It’s now down at 16 or 17. But again, we didn’t add anything.

Anthony Scaramucci: We put in a 4, went to 22. It’s now 16. People, when I was at 22, oh, you have to sell your Bitcoin position. I’m like, “No, I’m not going to sell my Bitcoin position.” First of all, it was 4% of cash. Secondarily, if is what we think is going to happen is going to happen, I’m not going to sell it just for the sake of diversification. I think that’s intellectually dishonest. I think it does a disservice to our clients, particularly after all the research and homework that we’ve done.

Anthony Scaramucci: Step one, if you’re going to be in this space, and it’s early adapting, you’re going to have to embrace yourself to take criticism. This vest should have Kevlar in it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t. You do take bullets from time to time. Secondarily, what you’re saying about the metaverse and going to the Consumer Electronics Show, and the future of where we’re all going to be, I’m a big believer in the metaverse. I see it in my children. I see it in activity in our society.

Anthony Scaramucci: If you counted up the hours that people are playing video games, or they’re involved in Roblox or Fortnite or any of these virtual worlds, why is it that you can have advertising billboards in those virtual worlds? Why is it that designer companies can’t sell you a sleeve or a skin that you can wear in that world or a car that you can drive in that world? Why can’t you have artwork that’s related to that world?

Anthony Scaramucci: I think the answer to that, and obviously, Mark Zuckerberg, a much smarter guy than me, recognizes that, yeah, that’s going to happen. Yeah. We need to be a very, very big part of this. For me, I see the tokenization, the ICO market. You mentioned Algorand. I think there will come a day where there’s an ICO for coins that are directly related to the metaverse. There are a few of them out there right now. But I think Algorand will become the industry leader because of the reasons that you just said.

Anthony Scaramucci: It is a faster transaction speeds per minute. It is a net negative carbon neutral. It doesn’t go down Ethereum and Solana. Go down. Solana recently, just this last week, it gets down for the fourth time in three months. I like Solana. I’m not saying that Solana is not going to be part of the future. I’m not saying Ethereum is, and I will confess that I’m long in a ton of Ethereum.

Anthony Scaramucci: My partner’s long a lot of Solana. I happen to be long a lot of Algorand, personally. We have probably a couple 100 million dollars of Algorand in our funds. But why? Because if you see the world the way we see it, let me take you back 25 years ago, when we were accessing the internet 25 years ago, it was through AltaVista, it was through America Online. It was through something called Lycos or Ask Jeeves, Yahoo.

Anthony Scaramucci: Then a company came in 1998 by the name of Google. They had a better mousetrap. They had a better algorithm. They had better machine learning to their search capabilities. All of a sudden, all of that stuff got replaced by Google. I think that’s going to happen. I think Algorand represents that. What I’m finding is Ethereum built an amazing community. They’ve got all these great NFTs and smart contracts, overlaid on Ethereum.

Anthony Scaramucci: Solana is building an amazing community. But I predict as large scale corporations recognize that they need to tokenize and they need to make liquid things that were traditionally not liquid. The art market as an example, we have a relationship with Axa, Axa XL. The CEO of North America was with me at the decipher event, which was the Algorand event in mid-December.

Anthony Scaramucci: He basically announced that after doing a year’s worth of research on different tokens in different layer one protocols that Axa XL is going to be using Algorand to create the art backed securities market. We have mortgage backed securities, or we’re now going to have art backed securities, and they’re using Algorand. He listed all of the things that you and I know about Algorand, the transaction speeds, the net negative carbon neutrality, the security.

Anthony Scaramucci: The fact that Algorand is really the purest layer one as it relates to solving the trilemma. Of course, now, Algorand through the foundation, you’ve got 2.4 billion Algos that recently got locked for governance purposes, which means that there’s going to be a shortage of Algos coming, as these companies need Algorand to help prosecute things that are going to happen in the metaverse.

Anthony Scaramucci: To me, it’s a little bit of a waiting game. It’s frustrating that it’s not moving faster to people. They want to make money, obviously, very quickly. But I’m okay making money slow. I’m in the get slow rich department personally. I think the fundamentals are there to make a ton of money in the metaverse. But I would prefer to do it through the tokens rather than the VC market.

Anthony Scaramucci: Because I think the VC market has gotten very rich in valuation. I think the tokens, believe it or not, particularly right now, because we’re in interim bear market in a raging bull market. But we’re watching these tokens correct anywhere from 20% to 50%. I’d rather play the tokens right now than anything else.

Frank Curzio: Now, great points on Algorand. We were the first to launch a security token for our business. We’re trading overseas. Now, we’re going to be trading on-

Anthony Scaramucci: Congratulations.

Frank Curzio: tZERO in a couple of weeks. Thank you. But we did on Ethereum. We heard from our clients like, “Hey, you have gas fees, and this is getting expensive as Ethereum went higher.” Now, transitioning over the Algorand, we see every security token being launched going over to Algorand. That transition, I see the same thing on our side, that it’s taking place.

Frank Curzio: You said that you are in the get rich slow market, or take slowly to get rich. You have a forecast on Bitcoin. Goldman just came out with a forecast not too long ago said 100,000. You said 500,000, which is a 10X from here, but you were… Did not announce a specific timeframe, which I like right. You said, “This is where I see the market have a long, I just hate this three-month, five-month target. You never know what’s going to happen with anything, whatever.” Do you still have that in…?

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, I said, “I want to know own this.” I made a mistake. On CNBC, they asked me my year in target for 2021. I said 100,000. I was basing that on my wallet analysis. What I left out was I had an assumption in there that the cash ETF would have already been in existence. You saw what happened when the futures ETF on October 6th was allowed. Obviously, Bitcoin traded through its all-time high as a result of that.

Anthony Scaramucci: I thought you would have gotten a cash ETF, you didn’t. I also didn’t anticipate the amount of selling pressure that would come out of China after the May debacle. When the Chinese ripped all of the mining rigs out of China and sent them in a diaspora around the world. I thought that was the end of what we would all call China fad. But it turned out at the end of the year, on UOB and other China-based exchanges related to Bitcoin. The federal authorities there said, “Hey, you got to get out of this Bitcoin. If you’re not out of it by December 31st, we’re taking it from you.”

Anthony Scaramucci: That caused another massive dragged down. Bitcoin was trading back up to 40, got hit in early December. Evergrande was selling their Bitcoin position because of their bankruptcy. A lot of that stuff was happening overnight. If you remember that weekend, it rallied back up and then it got hit again as the Chinese once again said that they need to be selling. Then of course, you have this situation in Kazakhstan, which dropped the hash rate because you pulled everybody off the internet in Kazakhstan because of the current protestations that are going on in Kazakhstan.

Anthony Scaramucci: I have a big position in Genesis Digital Assets. They haven’t been able to mine in the last seven or eight days in Kazakhstan. That put pressure on Bitcoin. But again, see through the current morass, the situation in Kazakhstan will settle, resolve itself, the rigs will be back on, the internet will be back on, and see through the morass in China.

Anthony Scaramucci: If China has made this decision, which I think colossal policy mistake, I do understand why they’re making it though. They’re basically trying to curb capital outflows from China. They’ve got some very, very rich people in the country that want to migrate their money into the West. The Chinese government does not want that, because they feel that that would cause a bubble collapse in China. They have these very restrictive capital controls.

Anthony Scaramucci: Of course, Bitcoin is something that you could use to obviate or go around those capital controls. We probably have another couple of months of flushing out Chinese inventory. But then after that, I think we’re going to be in pretty good shape.

Frank Curzio: Now, I love that. I love that. The 500,000 forecast long-term, you still see whatever if it’s 5, 10 years from now but you…

Anthony Scaramucci: I do. But I’ll put a number on it. I think by the end of 2025, which is three to four years from now, let’s call it, you should have a half a million dollars of Bitcoin. Because if you can get to a billion users, and you just look at the short supply of Bitcoin, NYDIG, actually, New York Digital Investment Group does a great research piece on this. At a billion users, it should easily trade between 400,000 and 600,000.

Frank Curzio: Now, it makes sense even with the wallets and the billion. I see it going there. I still think that we’re in the very early innings. Yeah. I definitely agree with you long-term.

Anthony Scaramucci: You didn’t ask me my price target on Algorand.

Frank Curzio: Okay. Go ahead. Let me hear it.

Anthony Scaramucci: I mean, there’s 10 billion coins that are outstanding. I think Algorand could easily trade to where Solana is trading. Solana has a $71 million market cap. I don’t see in the next three to four years, why Algorand couldn’t be trading at $8 to $10. I think that’s where the bang is for the buck. I think that the problem is the way the initial coin offering happened for Algorand, they misfired.

Anthony Scaramucci: I mean, the coins came out at $3.55. They got crushed down into the 30s, I guess even 25 cents. It was a mishandled coin offering. But now they’re rebuilding. They’ve got players like SkyBridge and others now that are strategic partners. I’ve locked up my coins. We’ve got, I don’t know. We bought raise capital for… I don’t know. We’ve probably have about $250 million worth of Algorand at current prices.

Anthony Scaramucci: I’ve agreed to lock my coins up. I’m out there. You mentioned the Middle East. I’m out there marketing. I believe we’ll raise several 100 million dollars this year for Algorand fund. Remember, why would you come into our Algorand fund? Because not just the appreciation in Algorand, you could buy it on Coinbase. But to your point about these coins, you just develop the security coin. We think there’s a loyalty coin that’s going to be coming out of this Algorand base.

Anthony Scaramucci: We think there’s an art based token that’s going to be Algorand based, all of which will be sitting in the catbird seat to absorb from an ICO perspective. I think there’ll be a lot of value added to customers for that reason.

Frank Curzio: Now, it definitely makes sense. We got few minutes. Yeah. I just want to change tunes a little bit and get into political front here. What we’re seeing right now in politics is two sides that completely hate each other. Now, I am pushing 50 years old, and I paid attention for the last 10 years and maybe not so much before that just, again, been doing this for 30 years.

Frank Curzio: But I don’t think it’s ever been this bad, at least from my perspective. You have ties to Donald Trump, and I won’t go into that part there. But you’ve also had the Clinton’s on both sides. I’ve seen you on shows that are liberal and shows that are conservative, which I love, trying to explain both sides.

Frank Curzio: As someone that knows both sides of the aisle here, do we see these guys getting along? Because I think guys like you and me, we have our children. I mean, what we want is we love this country. We want the best for those kids and their kids, and their kids, and their kids, and children. But it just seems there’s just the anger and everyone being pissed off all the time. Do you see anyone working together since you know people from both sides of the aisle?

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, I mean, we have a structural problem, if I’m going to be totally candid with you about our lives. How do we have structure problem? We have gerrymandering. We have voter restrictions. Remember, voter restrictions and voter control is as American as apple pie. That’s been going on forever. They didn’t let Black people vote. In fact, they enslave them. They wouldn’t let women vote, was a property holder standard in the beginning.

Anthony Scaramucci: We’ve always had voter restrictions, but the gerrymandering now has gotten crazy. I’ll just submit this to you rhetorically. Are you in a real democracy, if the candidates themselves can choose their voters? Okay. The answer to that is obvious, no. We need some amendments, and we need some structural reform to get the country moving in a healthier space. I’ll just give you three or four ideas.

Anthony Scaramucci: Number one, if you had mandatory voting in the United States like they do in Australia, you would liquidate the two extremes on both sides of the aisle. They would be forced into the center in terms of their arguments. Remember, these are just marketing competitions. Both sides have figured out, “Okay. I can sit on my extreme right or sit on my extreme left, I can gerrymander, and screen out as many of my enemies as possible. I can stay in perpetual power.”

Anthony Scaramucci: Look at some of these people that have been in the congress 30, 40, 50 years. They just sit there. They figured out a way to game the system to allow themselves to do that. I don’t want to be overly cynical. But I’m just saying to you that we need structural reform. We haven’t had a real constitutional amendment since 1965. There was a procedural one in 1993.

Anthony Scaramucci: But the Voting Rights Act in 1965 was our last big amendment. Just reflect on this for a second. We have 27 amendments of the Constitution. Our country is 246 years old, approximately. You should be getting an amendment then every seven to nine years. But we really haven’t had a big amendment in the last 55 years. Just like your iPhone needs an upgrade, your constitution needs an upgrade.

Anthony Scaramucci: A couple things that the Constitution should be upgrading towards is, let’s end the ridiculousness of Citizens United, where the billionaire can pound the airwaves and the individual voter cannot. I see that, that is the Plessy vs Ferguson of our time. It’s separate but equal terms of the standardization. We need a Brown vs Board of Education reform on that Supreme Court decision.

Anthony Scaramucci: You need to end the gerrymandering and get the congressional districts to look like geometric shapes that you and I could recognize from our ninth grade social studies class, or our geometry class, I should say. Let’s just end that. Then the third thing is mandatory voting. Now, Republicans would absolutely hate mandatory voting because they have tired ideas now. It’s a party of white old people that are basically buying catheters and walkers from the Fox News commercial interruptions.

Anthony Scaramucci: They don’t want to reflect what is really going on in the society. They’re trying to narrow down the people that can vote. They’re like, “Okay, listen. I don’t want black or brown people voting because they’re not going to vote for my ideas. Let’s figure out a way to restrict them.” I would argue that the Republicans would be better served if they thought like entrepreneurs.

Anthony Scaramucci: They started to reinvent the way they think about the country. They started to have their ideas look like, or be attractive to the beautiful, colorful mosaic that is the American people. Until they do that, we’re going to be in this struggle. Now, I’ll make a prediction here, too. You can write me back and you can tell me I was dead right or dead wrong.

Anthony Scaramucci: Probably they’re likely going to win the house. They’ve got the gerrymandering in place. They’ve got setbacks by the Democrats. Then they also have this historical situation. It’s very rare that the sitting president’s party wins the congressional midterms. It’s very, very rare. Reagan couldn’t do it. Barack Obama didn’t do it. Bill Clinton didn’t do it. George Walker Bush actually did it.

Anthony Scaramucci: But remember, we were in a war at that period of time. That was one of the anomalies. if Republicans take the house, are they going to end up impeaching Joe Biden? Maybe. I mean, there’s a lot of radicalism in the Republican Party, and they could do… Remember, how you can indict a ham sandwich. You can impeach a ham sandwich, too. They may make a move to do that, which will be further disruptive, more chaotic, more disastrous.

Anthony Scaramucci: I hope that doesn’t happen. But I do think that the American people are now completely and fully fed up. We need a leader, a man or a woman, that can build a coalition of people that, frankly, don’t fit in either of those parties. We’ll have to see if that’ll happen. It’s hard to believe that it won’t happen. Given the confidence I have in the long-term nature of this country, and the entrepreneurial cultural dynamics of the country, I feel like what’s going on in our political system right now will break and it will get renewed.

Anthony Scaramucci: I don’t see how this is… You’re in the media. I’m in the media. You got an amazing podcast. Get a microphone in front of any average American and ask them, “Jeez, are you happy with the way the politicians are handling themselves?” I don’t know. I think Kim Il-Sung has a higher approval rating than the congress in the United States. He’s the North Korean dictator. To me, it has to be fixed. I predict it will be.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. I think I have to vote for Kim Il-Sung now. But in terms of the mandatory thing, and I didn’t want to spend too much time on this, but what happens if say you have DeSantis running, and running against Biden for president, and you don’t like any of them? Do you think mandatory makes sense? Also the freedom to… Anyone over 18, that’s basically showing proof of ID and voting, is it mandating or-?

Anthony Scaramucci: Okay. You go and write somebody in. You go and write somebody in. But you see the mandate is… Look, you don’t like Biden or DeSantis. You pick John Smith, and you’d write in whoever it is that you want. But the point is, if you’re in the country, and we have a participatory democracy, and if you’re above age, it should be an obligation to vote. It should be your civic duty, the same way you have to pay taxes, you have to vote.

Anthony Scaramucci: Because what’s happening is, they’re taking advantage of that. They’re hoping less and less people vote. They can control and isolate the people that do vote. They can put them in their little jigsaw puzzles, in the society, and they can preserve their power. If you want the society to improve, liquidate that. The way, you liquidate that is no gerrymandering. Everybody’s got to vote, and let’s get them to the voting booth.

Anthony Scaramucci: Okay. You watch how quickly the society, which I now, look, not likely to happen unless you can get a transformative leader that can get in there and break up this duopoly that we are faced with right now. Trust me, because I know how Washington works. I got an 11-day PhD in Washington scum beggary. I can tell you that somebody that tried to make that type of change, these two sides would come after that person in the most vicious, most brutal way.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. Now I hear it.

Anthony Scaramucci: They would do everything they could to discredit a person like that, because they want this system. They want to maintain this system because it’s benefiting them. Not benefiting the country, but it’s benefiting them and they want it.

Frank Curzio: Now, great stuff. I love talking about this where just reasonable people talking politics where you seem you can’t really have that these days. But one last thing on politics, I know you’re a fan of Eric Adams. He is a crypto guy in New York City. I’m a fan as well. Friends have very close ties with him. You have close ties where I think he was keynote at the SALT Conference. I think that was in September…

Anthony Scaramucci: He was. Yeah. We help him set up his wallet. He accepted his first two or is in the process of accepting his first two paychecks in crypto. He can take it in Bitcoin. He wants New York City to be a Bitcoin capital. He’s going to have to compete with Mayor Francis, Francis Suarez in Miami for that to happen. But New York is back.

Anthony Scaramucci: He’s working. I mean, saw what he did with the snow removal last week. He’s riding around on a city bank bicycle in different neighborhoods, checking on things. He’s a hands-on leader. Listen, I mean, all you have to do is the exact opposite of what Bill de Blasio did. You’re going to be an amazing mayor.

Anthony Scaramucci: I mean, you couldn’t have had a bigger dope, or a bigger imbecile. I don’t know anybody. I don’t know a Republican, Democrat, black or white, brown… I don’t have anybody who likes the guy. I mean, maybe there’s some radical communists that’s, “Oh, that was great that he tried to destroy the city, and he tried to cause a population evacuation from the city, and he let the crime fester in the city.” I mean, I don’t know. Who the hell wants that?

Anthony Scaramucci: I’m interested. Thing is the disastrous. You want to talk about empirical data left leaning policies running a city are an effing disaster. Okay. We need to stop that. Eric is a progressive, but he’s intersecting his progressivism with a really good efficient city administration. I predict the city will roar back as a result of that.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. I hope you’re right. I hope you’re right. If anyone wants to invest in your funds, SkyBridge Capital, crypto regardless your stuff of the funds as well, how can they do that?

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, you go… There you go. Thank you for putting that up there. You go to skybridge.com. You can click on any of those investment solutions. We’ve got different things going on, our digital assets, our fund to funds. Then now to learn more you send us information. We have to vet you, of course, you have to be an accredited investor to be with us at SkyBridge. For right now, we do have an ETF, which is a first trust SkyBridge ETF.

Anthony Scaramucci: I’m not sure if it’s there. The First Trust, there it is, the digital innovation portfolio unit investment trust that IUT, that is something that you can invest in and not be accredited. That gives you a sleeve of exposure for crypto. But to me, we’ve got great products, 17 years old this coming March. We started the firm in March of 2005. I’m very happy with the direction we’re going in, and I would encourage people, if you are long-term investors, think like long-term investors, don’t allow yourself to be shaken out by the vagaries or the whims of the market, or whatever the Fed is saying your term.

Anthony Scaramucci: Sit tight. Look at the fundamentals of something. The case of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Algorand, the wallets are moving. If you and I did this podcast in November, there were 16 and a half million Algorand wallets. Today, there are 19 million Algorand wallets, just think of that growth. Okay. It’s not reflected in the price yet of the coin. But it soon will be.

Anthony Scaramucci: My recommendation, people, is stay the course. Sit tight, be patient. Don’t look at your screen all day. Focus on fundamentals.

Frank Curzio: I want you to go without talking about this, which is your SALT Conference, which is… I mean, here we go let it run here. But some of your guests on here, I just didn’t almost… I mean, I don’t even want to start naming because it’s almost every major hedge fund manager, past presidents, past politics. I mean, this conference is very amazing. Talk a little bit about SALT if people aren’t familiar with it.

Anthony Scaramucci: Well, I appreciate you bringing up. I think it’s one of the leading thought leadership conferences now in the investment world. It is a collection of… There’s Mayor Eric, there you showing him. President Biden came in 2017. There’s President Clinton. We have a very eclectic mix of policymakers, public servants, former Federal Reserve Chairman, British Prime Ministers, Defense Secretary, CIA people, but then we also have hedge fund managers, sports team owners.

Anthony Scaramucci: Will Smith has come. Ron Howard came. Unfortunately, we saw the tragic death of Kobe two years ago, but he was there in 2017, did an amazing job. What we try to do is we try to bring a conclave of brilliant thinkers together to just discuss what is going on. For me, I’m always trying to renew this thing with younger and younger people. We had a lot of crypto people, NFT people, programmer, or biology.

Anthony Scaramucci: I want this conference to always be about the future, not a bunch of legacy toadies like me, okay, saying the same thing over and over again. Okay. My attitude is, the younger you are and the smarter you are, I want to give you a chance to sit on that stage and talk about what you’re doing.

Frank Curzio: Now, it’s great stuff. Your next conference is going to be… And I want to bring that up, is a crypto…

Anthony Scaramucci: We have a crypto conference. We have a crypto conference coming in the Bahamas. There you go. There’s crypto Bahamas. That’s the 26th to the 29th. It’s going to be in the Baha Mar Hotel, right there on Paradise Island. We’re super excited about that.

Frank Curzio: It’s great stuff. Okay. Last thing here, by the way, I’m going to Bahamas this week. Hopefully, everything will be okay because of requiring tests three days before, tests on the way back. Hopefully, by April, it gets a little easier to get there. But I’ll let you know about that.

Anthony Scaramucci: Sure. You’ll be fine.

Frank Curzio: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. I want to leave it with this story because it was a funny story that I heard you tell once before and it was about you boring Air Force One, with the President and you being a little sick, and he’s a germ freak. Could you tell us why, because I thought it’s fantastic?

Anthony Scaramucci: Yeah. This true story, Trump is a little bit of a germaphobe. I had a sore throat. He was pressing the service button. The butler came into the Air Force One cabin, the office that the President sat in and he says, “Hey, there’s something wrong with Anthony. Go get Ronny Jackson.” Ronny is now a House of Representatives member, but he was the President’s doctor.

Anthony Scaramucci: He came in, took a look at me. He said, “Okay. Come in the back,” took me into the hospital bay. He told me to pull my pants down. I was like, “Pull my pants down?” Then he said, “Yeah. I think you have a strep throat. I’m going to give you a shot of penicillin.” There I was on Air Force One with my ass up in the air as I was getting a penicillin, and a cortisone shot from the President’s doctor. Anyway, that was pretty funny stuff.

Frank Curzio: No. It’s great stuff. Well, Anthony, listen, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate how busy you are. For anything on our end, please just let me know. I really appreciate with this podcast.

Anthony Scaramucci: My pleasure, Frank. Great to be. I hope you invite me back. It’s always a pleasure.

Frank Curzio: Definitely will. Thank you.

Anthony Scaramucci: Thank you.

Frank Curzio: I’m a big fan of Scaramucci. He does a good job. He doesn’t run away from certain things, whether it’s conservative channels, or you just left this craziness. I like the fact when I interview him, he’s like, “You can ask me anything you want, politics, whatever. I’m like that when I get interviewed. Look, this is me. You like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t.”

Frank Curzio: I like that. I don’t agree with his politics, but big deal. I mean, that’s become such a factor what everybody where you hate each other because of political shit. Everything else you have so much in common. You won’t believe in this industry. He’s a huge force in crypto over a billion and assets in the industry. That perspective, Novogratz talked about yesterday, has about three and a half billion dollars in there.

Frank Curzio: If you come in. They’re of one of the leaders. Just someone who has their finger on the pulse, his SALT Conferences are absolutely amazing. The access he has is huge. He has a big soundboard, which massive social media presence. He has a certain political presence, global presence, where we talked about how he just flew to Middle East to raise capital for his funds, as, there’s a lot of people in Middle East to even when I raised money, there’s companies that reached out to me from the Middle East.

Frank Curzio: We didn’t take any venture capital institutional money because they all wanted the special deals and wanted probably to control a company, which I wasn’t going to let them do. We were in a position of weakness or generating money. We’re doing well, growing. Why don’t companies… Do they just see that number and want to take it, and they don’t understand the consequences?

Frank Curzio: I see a lot of people where their business is no longer at the company that they started. They really don’t have too much control. They’ve given so much away because they see a number of 5 million, 10 million. Oh my God, look at the name it’s going to come in. Well, that comes in with a lot of asterisks. It’s we want this. We want that. We’re on board seats, want everything. You have to be very, very careful, very, very careful.

Frank Curzio: But I like Anthony a lot. I feel our paths are going to cross within the crypto world. Since we share similar views, since we have our security token, Curzio Equity Owners, which going to be trading a couple of weeks on tZERO. We pushed it just to January and, you know what, to do just make it a really big deal for all of us and not just announce it between holidays, which is scheduled.

Frank Curzio: It’s going to come out pretty much a couple of weeks. Let everybody know about that. But last time, Anthony was on, the second time he’s on the podcast, he loves coming on. He’s a hard person to get on. He doesn’t go on all podcasts. He does do some media. I’m very honored that he came on. The last time he was on, we had one of most listened to podcasts, most viewed podcasts, and sure you’re going to have similar results if not better, because we’ve added lots and lots of new people to our list.

Frank Curzio: But he’s just one of the contacts that we have in the crypto industry. I don’t call myself a pioneer, other people say that. I just saw something that made a lot of sense. But the fact that we were one of the first to do that with security tokens, the access it has given us is incredible within this industry, because we did it the right way. We did it for shareholder friendly. No bullshit when I diluting the hell out anybody, hey, we’re looking to build this into a billion dollar organization.

Frank Curzio: We got in people the ground floor, and we do this because of security token which less regulation, less cost to us. And now we have… We’re trading on a foreign exchange where our investors could trade the security one year later, which holds me accountable. If I’m a private company six, seven years and I fuck up on year two or three, what are you going to? Nothing.

Frank Curzio: Can’t get out of investments because there’s a liquidity period, most people anyway. Now liquidity period could come with an IPO which probably not going to come if I messed up, I’m not doing well within the business, or getting taken over which get the average time a private company is that liquidity period is 7 to 10 years. It’s a long time. That’s one year.

Frank Curzio: You can say, “Hey, I like this idea.” If you don’t like it, now you can trade that token. Now, a US based company going to be trading on a US-based platform, and CZ are the largest in the world in terms of volatility. It’s really exciting times. They’re really is. That’s the last component here. But having these types of contacts, like Scaramucci and others, interviewing guys, the CEO of BlockFi, and just really… It’s an honor because these people are brilliant.

Frank Curzio: They’re the pioneers. They’re the innovators. Even guys like Scaramucci and myself, we see these people and say, “Holy shit. This is where the innovation is going to come from. It’s pretty amazing.” I think some of the biggest hedge fund managers that destroyed crypto have come around and said, “Hey, you know what? I get it now.” I understand it.

Frank Curzio: This is an industry. Well, you’re going to see the ups and downs and you saw Bitcoin get hit, and most of you in crypto holdings got hit, that’s the industry. You want to be careful. You want to start with small positions. Don’t take full positions right off the bat. This is one of the only areas where you could see 5X or more returns. That’s very difficult to see in the market these days, when you have the Snowflakes coming out of $80 billion valuations, to Robinhood’s coming out 40. It’s 15 right now.

Frank Curzio: It’s very difficult with the valuations that these companies come out, especially with SPACs, which are… I mean, how many of those are trading underwater, below that $10 price. But there’s not a lot of areas that you could generate massive, massive returns and be first to the party. This provides that opportunity even for us, because your research.

Frank Curzio: Maybe it doesn’t work, maybe I fail, whatever. People who know me know that I’m going to do everything I can to make this thing work. This isn’t a short-term thing for me. This is my life. I’ve been in this for 30 years and fall on top… My late dad who’s been in for 30 years. My plan is to build this thing into a massive coming, if I do, people investing in our token now, they’re going to see life-changing gains.

Frank Curzio: That’s what you want in investments. People don’t mind taking all risks. Even if the risk is 100% of your loss, you want only use capital that you could afford to lose. But if you’re invested five grand and say, “I don’t want to lose.” Make sure that five grand could turn into 50 grand, could turn into 100 grand, because that’s worth it from a risk-reward basis. Depending on what that reward is.

Frank Curzio: The higher the reward, the more the reward, the more risk you have to take. You can’t risk something and say, “Hey, I’m going to put $1,000 in it. But I can’t lose it.” If you can’t lose it, don’t go into crypto. Don’t go into crypto. Because the shot that you could lose it on some of these things. However, there’s also, if you look at our portfolio, even after this pullback, you’re going to see 20X, 10X winners across… Lots of them.

Frank Curzio: This isn’t like, “Hey, we got lucky with one. We got lucky with none.” Some of them are actual stocks that even cryptos we have to go to different exchanges, whether it’s Coinbase, whether it’s Kraken or Gemini or wherever you go and to trade these things. These are actual stocks that we got in early through our access. Having that access is incredible. It’s building. Our network is building in this industry.

Frank Curzio: You guys know I believe in this, and I like to see pullbacks because we have a lot of small positions in our newsletter. We’re going to be adding to a lot of stuff this week when Crypto Intelligence comes out, which we delayed for a week, because I was away for a week. I want to talk to a couple crypto companies who attended the Consumer Electronics Show.

Frank Curzio: But getting back to Anthony, he’s a big force in his industry and over a billion dollars in it. He has amazing, amazing context. I think I just have a feeling that we’re going to be doing business together going forward. I really appreciate him coming on. It means a lot. I know it’s not an easy name to get into media just for anyone. But he liked it last time. He’s on again. He said, “Hey, invite me any time,” which is really, really cool. That’s a great, great context. Let me know what you thought.

Frank Curzio: Frank@curzioresearch.com. I do this podcast for you, guys. This is a free podcast. Let me know. I mean, if you liked the interview. If you want to criticize, yes, I’m going to hit, get the political comments back and forth. But when you put aside the political stuff, when you put aside the shitty part, because you always going to have difference of opinion, and we have social media that’s forcing us to hate each other. That’s what they want. That’s why we post more. They’re forcing us to hate each other.

Frank Curzio: But if you take away that bullshit, there’s a lot everyone has to offer, every person has to offer and Scaramucci and his firm what they have to offer and what they could do for us and what we could do for them, I’m just happy that he’s in this industry. Again, I think our paths are going to cross in the future. I just have a feeling. No guarantees, but I just have a feeling they will. I think we share similar outlooks and I like the way it does business.

Frank Curzio: Again, question, comments, frank@curzioresearch.com. Early next week, be on a lookout for my free report. It’s absolutely free. Going to outline the biggest trends at CES, along with seven stocks on my watchlist that had the biggest influence, at least from my point of view. That report is going to be available early next week. I’m just about finished writing it. It’s going to go through production and everything. I would say Monday or Tuesday next week, it’ll be on our website. I’ll let you guys know.

Frank Curzio: But it’s absolutely free. Definitely take a look. You’ll see seven cool stock ideas that may make their way into our portfolio. But it’s a really, really good detailed report that you’re not going to see anyplace else, at least in that detail of videos and pictures and everything that we shot. A lot of the stuff that’s going to be in there is not stuff that currently on our website, which you can go there and view our whole CES coverage and all the videos which are really cool.

Frank Curzio: This is going to be different, this report. You’re going to see stuff in there that’s not in some of the stuff in the website that we have. Really, really cool stuff that come up next week. Questions, comments, feel free to email me, again, frank@curzioresearch.com. I really appreciate all the support. I’ll see you guys next week. Take care.

Announcer: Wall Street Unplugged is produced by Curzio Research, one of the most respected financial media companies in the industry. The information presented on Wall Street Unplugged is the opinion of its hosts and guests. You should not base your investment decisions solely on this broadcast. Remember, it’s your money and your responsibility.