Where it Happens (Greg Isenberg) - How to Become a Super Ball with Anthony Scaramucci

How to Become a Super Ball with Anthony Scaramucci

SPEAKER_00
Good morning. Good morning. What's going on? Dude, so big week.

SPEAKER_01
What's going on?

SPEAKER_00
We both in the last week became a meme. We became names. We became names.

And probably a lot of people that are listening to this or watching this saw something around this, but I wanted to talk about it because I thought it was a pretty interesting case study of the new internet. In this new age we live in, man. Alright, so tell me your meme story.

So I'm going through the airport and by the way, I'm going to preface this by saying this is a true story. So I got a lot of flack for this and everyone was giving me shit saying it wasn't true. I'm going to walk you through it.

So I'm going through the airport. I'm at John Wayne Airport in LA going to go and fly back home. And it was like a week after I dropped that Evergrande thread, the thing the Chinese company where you were giving me.

I was saying I was the Evergrande guy. So I'm walking through the TSA checkpoint and the TSA guy is like talking about Evergrande and I overhear him and my first reaction is like, oh, I'm going to chime in here. I'm going to come in and say, yeah, Evergrande, interesting story, interesting situation, whatever.

And as I'm about to do that, he says, yeah, I read about it on Twitter from this guy, Sahil Bloom. And I was like, damn, super cool life moment. Overheard some guy that had seen about this.

Wait, stop there. Best part about that is the Sahil Bloom. I thought it was hilarious.

It's also how my name is so commonly mispronounced, everybody that's the first thing that, first way they pronounce it. So anyway, he says it, I grab my bag, I walk away, I don't say anything about it. And then I tweet it out.

There's a cool life moment for me. It's like an interesting thing. And so I tweet it out and within 30 seconds, it is becoming an internet meme.

And I've never experienced that, but everyone over the course of the next 24 hours is tweeting out the exact same format, tweet with their own thing, trolling me. And so it was basically like, I'm sitting on a plane and I'm flying back and my internet is just blowing up with people tweeting at me. Most of it was good fun.

Some of it was not and just people openly just being mean about it. But it was kind of a wild situation. How viral did it get? Pretty fun.

I feel like I saw it everywhere, man. It was everywhere. And there were people, it was so viral that there were random people saying it, not citing me as the original source of it.

And then people saying, oh, this is a really hilarious thing and a hilarious way that people are talking. And did you feel bad? No, because I knew it was true. Because people were making fun of me.

Yeah. Part of me was just like, I know it's true, so I don't feel bad and I'm just going to wear it. And if people want to make fun of me for it, it's fine.

But dude, I just leaned into it. I basically said, it's fine. If people want to make me a meme, I'm going to donate money with it.

And so I got a bunch of new followers from it because a lot of people saw my page and the Domicom Sue, the NFL player who we're going to have on in an episode in season one like came and said he would donate money and match me on whatever. So we ended up donating 10 grand to a charity associated with it. Like I said, I would donate a dollar for every new follower I got from becoming a meme.

And it was kind of cool. But basically, I had to just lean into it. Because the internet is just permanent, man.

You can't run and hide from stuff the way you might have used to be able to, where you can just say, I'm just going to delete it, walk away, whatever. And so I leaned into it.

SPEAKER_01
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SPEAKER_00
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SPEAKER_00
Greg, why do you look so tired? I look so tired because I did not sleep last night. Have you never slept well? Or is this a new thing? It's not that I can't fall asleep. I fall asleep right away.

But I wake up a couple hours later and I'm just sitting in my bed and I look at the ceiling and I can't fall back asleep and I don't know what to do.

SPEAKER_01
So I was literally you. And for the longest time, I was this hustle culture bro, sleep when I'm dead, didn't want to sleep, didn't care about my sleep.

SPEAKER_00
And then I honestly, I started reading more of the research and realizing how impactful sleep is to your longevity, to your health, all of these other things. And as part of that, I found AteSleep, which has completely revolutionized the way I sleep. I've heard of AteSleep.

Can you tell me more about it? Think of it as like the future of sleep.

SPEAKER_01
All of these mattress companies have created these mattresses.

SPEAKER_00
They're just stock. They're stock mattresses. AteSleep is technology plus sleep combined.

So the whole product is built around optimizing the temperature that you sleep at.

SPEAKER_01
And so you've read about sleeping cold is the key to sleeping.

SPEAKER_00
And it's not quite true. Everyone has a different optimal sleep temperature and it changes throughout the night, which is the crazy part about it. So you might need really cold to fall asleep and then you might need it to be a little bit warmer to keep you asleep.

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Don't feel like Greg Eisenberg. Be like Sahil Bloom. What is it? There's basically two things you can do, right? You can either lean in or delete.

And we have a friend who, he would totally delete it, right? He was panicked that whole time. He was texting me being like, dude, what are you going to do? This is awful. Your brand is shut.

And I don't know, man. I just think when you have something like that, especially if you can stand behind it, just lean into it. Can you double click into that for a bit? Why didn't you decide to delete it? We were just like, it's true.

Yeah. I mean, dude, it was true. And I didn't think the numbers were that ridiculous, by the way.

The thread had gotten like seven million impressions. I'd gone on TV talking about it. And so I had actually been around talking about it.

So I actually didn't think it was that low probability of an incident to occur either. And so I was just like, I'm just going to stand behind it. It's real.

It is what it is. You want to hear my meme story? Yeah, quick. I'm going to start pouring us drinks while you do that.

Okay. While you do that, I posted a thread how, you know, I'm just like obsessed with NFT. I'm like, I'm going to do NFT's and Web 3.

And I did this thread on YNFTs of the future. And the first day I posted, I'm getting so much love by all these people. I remember this.

Like the top people in like the Web 3 community are like just sharing it and just talking about how it's such a good thread. And I'm feeling really good. I go to sleep at night.

The world is beautiful. I wake up in the morning and I have thousands of replies and retweets and likes on one portion of the thread that is just people memeing it. So I just pulled it up.

There's actually 3,800 quote retweets, which is basically just people dunking you and you wake up and there's 3,800 quote retweets. And I was like, the tweet was most people who make fun of NFTs don't own NFTs. They've never minted.

I remember this. Yeah. They haven't staked their NFTs. They've never earned an NFT playing a game, et cetera, et cetera.

The basic idea was that like there's a ton of people dunking on NFTs.

SPEAKER_01
But they're not in the game. They're not in the game.

SPEAKER_00
They're not in the game. Exactly. I got it.

I actually didn't understand why it got memed. But you did really become a meme. And our friend, same friend, was freaking out that whole time.

I remember that. Yeah. So I was everywhere and I, like you, was like, what do I do? I mean, it goes and it's only natural that it goes into your head. You're like, should I delete this? But I'm kind of like, this is what I believe.

You got to put it yourself out there. Yeah. I agree, man. And it's a good segue too because our guest today, who we're going to have in, has had his fair share of internet trolls and hate.

So he's going to have some interesting perspectives on that as well. Obviously we've got a little ways that we need to dive into before he comes in, but it'll be fun to talk about with him. Yeah. So let's get this drink going and dive right into it. Let's do it.

Hudson Whiskey, four-part harmony special edition, man. Hudson, like Hudson, New York? Hudson, New York. Okay. Yeah. It's a beautiful bottle. I've never seen what we got here.

Have you had this? No, I haven't had it. Keep in mind it's nine in the morning right now, so we're really committed to this whole drinking thing. That's good.

It's sweet. It's sweet, right? It's sweet. It's sweet.

It's good. So what are we talking about today? I want to talk World's Fair, if that works for you. Big World's Fair energy.

I'm into it. I'm into it. So let's talk World's Fair.

I want to set the stage for this a little bit. So the World's Fair I first read about, I'm curious where you first heard about it. I first read about the World's Fair in the book, Devil in the White City.

This is the name of the book. Eric Larson, one of my favorite authors actually is amazing. It's like narrative nonfiction is his archetype.

And Devil in the White City is about, really about the first serial killer in history, effectively. It's a true story based on a true story, but it's based at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. I think it was called the Colombian Exposition then, but it's the World's Fair.

And the whole thing with the World's Fair is like a gathering of the entire world, culturally, industrially, etc. You bring people together and share all the amazing things, progress that's happening. I think it started in like the late 1700s.

I think it was in Bohemia, in Prague, they did the first one. And over the course of history, it's become this big way that basically countries went and flexed on whatever their progress was. And so it was like early days you'd go and flex on some industrial progress.

At the 1893 one in Chicago, the first Ferris wheel was like the massive thing. People showed up and there was this enormous circle there that people didn't understand. You can imagine the first time you see a Ferris wheel, that's bananas.

You go and see that. And you're going to get into a thing that's going around this 200 foot circle. That seems ridiculous.

People would use it, these countries would use it to flex on their progress. And it was people and it was also countries. It was like a romantic aspect to it.

You would go and there was people from different cultures and they would do dances and there was like this amazing, amazing thing. And for a lot of history, it was like the one time per each year, every few years, where the world would actually come together. It was like an intellectual Olympics, like cultural, intellectual Olympics sort of.

Rather than being sports, it was people coming together. Okay. So you know about this guy, because we've talked about this, but there is someone out there today who is pitching the idea of bringing back the world's fair. Basically making a new world's fair, right? Yeah.

Because this isn't the world's fair already. It still happens. There was one in Dubai recently.

SPEAKER_01
Right now.

SPEAKER_00
Right now. So Dubai was supposed to have the 2020 World Expo. I think they were calling it, it was this massive thing.

COVID obviously got in the way of that. Right. So they're doing, I think it's still called 2020 World Expo, but it's Dubai 2021 through 2022. But the whole idea is like six months, six draft begins, people come in, it's this huge economic boom, et cetera.

So we recently got pitched on the idea of the new world's fair, bringing it back, bring back the world's fair, go and do it bigger, better than it's ever been before. And I want to talk about it because I think it's interesting. Okay. So let's talk about it. Okay. So what do you think? I mean, so I've known about the world's fair my whole life because growing up in Montreal, the world's fair, it was called the Expo 67 was a big deal. And I actually, the Montreal Expos, by the way, the baseball team, baseball guys, so I got to say it, Montreal Expos named after Expo whatever it is, 67.

That's how they got their name. So everyone in the city, everyone in the city knows about the expo. But you know, how important the expo is.

Where you can go out on the street and just be like, what is the world's fair? What is an expo? And people will tell you. Is that like the moon landing for Canadians? Like everyone knows where they were when the moon landing happened in the US. Is that like, where were you when 67 expo happened? Pretty much.

So recently I actually went to, I don't know if I told you this, but I went to a hotel in Montreal and it was world's fair themed and you walked in this hotel and everything, like all the walls had like things about the world's fair, all the rooms like were unique and different and they all had like, you were maybe in like the Chinese room or the Japanese room or different, all that sort of thing. And you put on the TV and there's like, you know, you don't get like CNN or CBS, you get like videos, old school videos of the world's fair. And I actually learned about, like I watched this, like I turn on the TV and I watched the making of the world's fair and it was just in Montreal and there's this beautiful moment where I think like in 1963, they were like, we want to do this world's fair.

And they built an island in four years and they did the impossible and it's a story about how they did the impossible and how all of Canada came together to make it happen. Yeah. This is like beautiful story. It's very romantic.

It's very romantic. And I think like the more, that's the common thread of all of expo stories or world's fair stories is that it's the coming, it's the coming together of people and just the showcasing of these different cultures. And there's a lot of nostalgia for that.

So on one hand, I love the idea around like showcasing cultures, promoting other cultures, bringing people together, experiential stuff, like I think there's a huge business opportunity there. Like I'm sure you've seen like Museum of Ice Cream and stuff like that, but on a bigger scale. On the other hand, like isn't the internet that, like isn't the internet where you like go and like showcase stuff? Like if I'm coming up with a new product, I don't like, I don't need to showcase it at like a physical event.

You know what I mean? That's kind of the bearish case for this.

SPEAKER_01
Yeah. I mean, I have a lot of thoughts here.

SPEAKER_00
So basically, look, I think this is either, there's something I really like about it. I love the aspect of nostalgia. I love the aspect of bringing people together.

I think the cultural blending, I think it's amazing. And a lot of cool things happen when you bring a lot of people together. Cool businesses, business ideas get formed.

There's intermingling of thoughts. I mean, amazing things can happen at something like this. But it's got big fire festival vibes too.

Like this whole idea feels a little bit like, okay, we're bringing 50 million people together. We're gonna, yeah, it's like events are not easy to do. I mean, I know a lot of people who try to do events.

Our guest today has one of the most successful event businesses in the world. I mean, it's really hard to do. There's a lot of little nuances to doing something like this.

It's not just like, oh yes, slap an idea on a page. We're gonna go create this massive event. 50 million people are gonna come.

We're gonna make $20 billion in the first run. And to give him credit, I mean, this guy is clearly selling a really cool story and vision and ambition. And it is romantic and it brings up nostalgia.

He's raised a bunch of money. There's real people that are coming onto it. So I'm either like in love with the idea and I want to just be a part of it because I think it's gonna be really cool.

Or I think it's just like the dumbest thing I've ever heard in my life. There's no middle ground for me on this and I don't know where I'm landing on it. I think what's smart about what he's doing is he picked a business idea or startup idea that there's a lot of connection culturally.

You know what I mean? He's not. And in those types of businesses, you can raise tons of money because you're pitching, let's say, people like me. I brought this.

This is an astray. It's an astray from the Expo World's Fair in 1967 in Montreal. People like me, I get pitched on it and it's like, yeah, maybe I would invest.

Maybe I want to see a new World's Fair. And I think like there's... From an actual business standpoint, starting and running something like this is insanely complicated. It's not like.

.. A lot of business ideas we talk about here and some of the things we talked about in our first shows, you could go spin up in a weekend like MVP for this. There's no.

.. Doing a 50 million person event, even if it's one tenth of that, five million person event is a ridiculous undertaking and it needs to involve governments, it needs to involve all the municipalities. If you're going to do all these pavilions, there's all the building involved.

There's like a crazy, crazy bunch of coordination that has to happen in order to make this work. That's the part where I just... I guess I can't understand the idea because it's so hard to actually execute something like this at a grand scale and in a good way. I mean like Billy McFarland, right? Right.

Great idea. Fire Festival was a great idea. I mean, you give him credit for it.

He's like fraudster and did a lot of things that are really bad. But the idea of it, if he had executed, it would have been dope. Here's what I would do if I was the new World's Fair guy.

Go for it. So, I wouldn't raise a lot of money and go and build a bunch of events from the get-go. I would think about how can I build it, how can I do community-first, internet-first, validate the demand and then build events.

Because right now what he's going to do is he's going to have to go work with cities, he's going to have to get space, he's going to have to get vendors, he's going to have to coordinate. It's a lot of stuff. If I was him, I would start with Discord, start with Facebook groups, start with no-code solutions, build it out, build the demand and then go to the city of Miami and be like, hey, I have a million people who are interested in this thing and there's a lot of real digital activity.

Let's translate that into the physical. I like this a lot the way you're thinking about it. It reminds me, have I ever talked to you about the mental model, like the map is not the territory? Have I ever talked to you about this? This is this whole idea that you are fundamentally the map, it's supposed to be a representation of the territory that you're looking at.

The more you abstract the territory into a map, the worse it is, the lower fidelity the map is. If you have a massive stretch of land and you're trying to create it into this tiny map, it's going to be a pretty crappy map because you're trying to boil down this massive piece of territory that's very complicated into something very simple. We all create maps, like maps are mental models, you're going around the world, you're trying to create different maps of everything you're looking at.

The challenge is when you're using a map that actually doesn't match the thing that you're going and trying to create and do. I think this is a perfect example of where that can come into play, which is basically to say he has created a map based on what the World's Fair is and it's based on what the past looked like. What World's Fair's looked like in 1893, the Devil in the White City in Chicago, this amazing hundreds of pavilions, etc.

He's using that to play out how you should pursue and build everything. When the reality of what you're hitting on is that maybe the World's Fair of 2025, 2030 looks a whole lot different than what it looked like in the past. Certainly.

Yeah, and the pursuit of building it looks a lot different than what it would have looked like in 1893 or in 1950 or whatever year it was. Maybe it doesn't have to be physical at all to your point. Maybe you end up building a digital World's Fair where people can come together because how many people.

.. The thing that I push back on with all of this is there aren't that many people that are going to be able to or have the means to travel to these things. In a digital world, one of the most exciting trends that's happening is that we're breaking down the barriers to anybody having access to these amazing cultural and intellectual experiences and learning experiences.

If you could build a World's Fair... If his idea can become the genesis of either him or someone else building something really unique that becomes a hybrid physical digital World's Fair-like experience, that's pretty darn cool to me. I think he hit on a really smart insight around people want to connect, countries want to show off their stuff, and I think that there probably is space for something like this, but I think what we're saying, it sounds like what we're saying is maybe the entry point is kind of a bit of a mess.

Maybe he's changed and maybe he's going digital first. I mean, I love the ambition. I love the vibe that he's putting out raising money for it.

Let's talk about things we love about this and things we hate about it. Things we love, what do you got? I love the ambition. I think it's a huge idea, which I think is really cool.

If you're going to go build something, you might as well build something big. I think Steve Shortsman, the Blackstone guy, talks about that where it's just as much effort to start something small as it is to start something big, so you might as well go big. This guy is clearly going pretty big as he thinks about the idea, and I love that.

Can I just edit that for a second? So I totally agree with that sentiment, but your MVP doesn't need to go big. Your minimal viable product doesn't need to go big. Your vision could go big, but the entry point needs to be covert, needs to be tactical, it needs to be super smart, it needs to be intentional.

And you need to test along the way to your point. I just don't know if there's 50 million people that would want to go to a WorldTour today. Is that your kind of bearish hat? No, my bearish hat is that you can't do it.

This is so hard. I just think there's so many nuances to doing an event business. We'll talk to our guest when he comes in and talk about the nuances of running an event business, but there's just a lot that has to get coordinated around it, and when you're talking about it on the scale that he's talking about, you have to involve national governments, municipal governments.

I mean, it's everybody. It's insane. What do you think happens to this business in 15 years? What's your prediction? My prediction would be it gets boiled down to something more manageable and doable.

I think his ambition and his energy is amazing, and I never like to bet against people that have good energy. I would guess he ends up getting something spun up that works. Yeah, that's my vibe with it too.

I think he was able to raise a lot.

SPEAKER_01
It's not a venture bet.

SPEAKER_00
I don't understand it as a venture investment though. I really don't. I just didn't like, what's the valuation of a, I mean, he's pitching it like it's $20 billion revenue.

I don't know. Like, Dubai World Expo is supposed to generate, I saw some projection this morning when I was looking this up, like $20 billion for the Dubai government. It's just, I like, how can that possibly, how can you project anything out? I think my prediction is he zigs and he zags, and he kind of trojan horses his way in, and he makes something happen.

He seems like the type of guy that can do some ziggins, and he's going to make it work, man. And I'm all for that. I love people that do this kind of stuff.

So I feel like we're at a good spot on it. I want to bring in our guest and get his perspectives because he's actually built event businesses and he's actually done the nuances and the details of trying to build something like this out, and he'll have a lot more interesting and informed perspectives than we will on it. So Anthony has a really long career.

He's done a bunch of stuff. He was the founder of Skybridge, which is one of the most successful fund of funds in the world, has done a lot in crypto recently, as you know, very, very cool. Also the founder of Salt, which is one of the biggest conferences in the world, within the financial world in particular, has been very successful.

But as we all know, he's most well known for his 10 day stint as White House head of communications under the Trump administration, was famously forced out of that position, and has been a active critic of our former president since then. So really excited to have him in. He's very opinionated and a lot of fun to be around, as both of us know.

So very excited to welcome him into the room where it happens. Our friend, Anthony Scaramucci, the mooch. Do you mind being called the mooch?

SPEAKER_02
You can call me the mooch. Let's scream it.

SPEAKER_00
You like that? It's 7 AM. These guys are already drinking. We're degenerates, right? That's what we're known for.

So we were talking before you came in about the world's fair, and there's a young man, I don't know if he's even a young man, he's probably 30, going around raising millions of dollars right now to try to bring back and rebuild the world's fair. But you've actually done this shit. You've gone, you built Salt, one of the most successful financial conferences in general in the world, and you built it from the ground up.

Can you just talk about, is this ridiculous? Is it possible? What do you think?

SPEAKER_02
Well, your generation, is your age, I'm assuming, or younger, I would never doubt anybody in your generation. I think you guys have balls, courage, conviction. You're more mature than my generation.

I think we had more fun, by the way. I like being the oldest person in the room because I walk in, I'm like, okay, I definitely had more fun than these guys in college because you're not allowed to talk to people anymore, everything's politically correct, you get in and get canceled by saying something stupid. That didn't happen to us.

We were all reckless and totally fine, and there was no social media, so there was no record of me being an idiot. It just happened to be a fall on idiot. When was that, the 80s? Yeah, that was in the 80s.

Yeah, let's not go too far. It wasn't the 60s bloom. But here's what I would say, a project like that is probably different.

A project like that is probably different from a conference, because now you're talking about global exhibition and you're talking about figuring out a way to get at least a 15 or 20 industrial nations involved, and so you're creating a mini-epcot. So that is a massive undertaking. Having said that, if he can raise some money and he can get the ball rolling, and it'd be smart enough to do what somebody like a Jeff Bezos did, which is delegate, farm out and create a collaboration with a group of people, it's not impossible, and he could probably get it done.

The number one thing I tell people is you can't do everything yourself, but if you've got a team, you've got a really good group of people, and you're willing to collaborate, you can get unbelievable amounts done. In my organizations that I've run, people work with me, they don't work for me. See, the distinction is very important, because if you're working with me, you're now empowered, and my partner, we're collaborating.

If you're working for me and you have that ordinance structure, it can be limiting, and sometimes it could be suffocating. So I don't know the guy, but he could be on to something, he could pull it off.

SPEAKER_00
You want to talk to him?

SPEAKER_02
You want to invest? No, I don't want to invest, but I would definitely talk to him. I like mentoring people.

SPEAKER_00
What advice would you give him? He's just starting out, he's raised a bit of money, he's got great ambitions.

SPEAKER_02
Oh, look, I mean, it's on the world's fair in a lot of places. They did it in Knoxville, they did it in Seattle. Have you ever been to one? The one that I went to in 1964, I just might add, I was in the stroller, we were getting a stretch round by my mom and dad, okay, out here in Queens.

Those people are probably long gone in terms of those planners, but I would go to the most recent ones, and I would identify people that have planned this thing before and get them in the loop. I'm going to go to the Saul conference, I'll take you back to 2009, every major investment bank was leaving Las Vegas because of the TARP money. What was that? The government gave all the banks money to help defend their balance sheets during the crisis, and so they all felt compelled to cancel any high-falutin conferences because they didn't want to be seen spending the government's money in a place like Las Vegas.

I think President Obama didn't do it on purpose, but he was like, hey, now's not the time to go to Las Vegas. All these guys canceled, and here I am as a small-time entrepreneur seeing that opportunity, so I go, wait a minute, we shouldn't be giving up all of our conferences, I'm a smaller company, I didn't receive TARP money, I'm going to put a stake in the ground and fill that vacuum. But I couldn't do it on my own, so I called the mayor of Las Vegas, I called Steve Nguyen, I went to people that had built conferences before, Michael Milken, my first keynote speaker, and so I would tell him, you got to think like that, you got a great idea, but you're not going to be able to do everything, find people that can help you do the things that you need to do.

SPEAKER_00
What do you think? You built something incredible with Sol, you just ran, I know, your most recent one, it was in person, which was a huge thing for New York to bring that back and do something in person, I know people were really excited about it, it was a great event, by the way, I really enjoyed it. Thank you. What's the future of these events that looks like post COVID? Do you think it's going to come back and all be in person, or do you think it's going to be some kind of digital hybrid experience?

SPEAKER_02
Well, I think it's coming back, I think we need each other and I think we need the physicality, we're a social organization, social organism if you will, and I also think that one of our problems is that we're always tied into a screen, and so we're always here, and we're interacting with each other here over Zoom, and so we're losing that physical connection, so I actually think the conferences are going to be bigger and weirdly better because it's like a concentrated dose of human personal contact. So in the case of our conference, we did it at the Javits Center, we ran those air conditioners and those HEPA filters over time, we paid the money to do that, very high ceilings, Scott Gottlieb, a friend of mine who was the former FDA commissioner came in and gave me a safety protocol which we followed, we had a vaccine mandate which I feel very, very strongly about, and a result of which we had little to no breakthrough COVID, and people could wear masks or not wear masks because that was the health guidance, and of course we had big outdoor spaces for networking, so it worked, I think people were happy, you were there, people enjoyed it, so I think we're going back to that, and I think as we start to normalize in this pandemic becomes an endemic situation which is treatable, I had the opportunity to go to the Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation breakfast this morning, Ken Frazier was being honored, the former CEO of Merck, and we had a chance to connect before the breakfast, talking about these antiviral therapies that are coming, it's going to be very promising for us, that's why the future is always bright, there's people like you guys that are going to be running the future, but you don't want to think linearly about our society, you can get very pessimistic, you want to think exponentially about our society, and that's where you get very optimistic about technology and things we can do to solve our problems.

SPEAKER_00
It leads to something really interesting, because one of the things I've been most impressed about you as I've learned more about you and as we've gotten to know each other and become friends is you're someone that's come from a different generation, you've built in multiple generations different businesses, and yet you've been such a massive proponent recently, especially of cryptocurrencies, and of Bitcoin, and of Web 3, and you're supporting it, investing in it with Skybridge, and doing all these other things, how did that happen? Where did you come from on that, what got you so excited about the exponential potential?

SPEAKER_02
So I have kids your ages, they are pains in the ass, I won't tell you that. I'm not a pain in the ass, I don't know who won, I'll judge that after the pot gets over, then I think you're a pain in the ass, but here's what happens, you have to make a generational decision, so I can remember my parents thinking that we were naive, large generation gap, they couldn't learn anything from me, and by the way I couldn't learn anything from them, and I think that is a very big mistake that generations make, you guys are in the future and you guys are doing things that I have not experienced, when you got to college there were computers, when I was in college, we had a mainframe, you had to sign up for it, and I had to go and wait to get on a terminal that was hooked into a digital equipment mainframe, and so if I was typing up a report, I had to send it to the mainframe and then someone would print it out for me the next day, that's how I grew up, I used a frame of reference, but I have life experience, I've been through market cycles, I think people your age could learn from me in terms of that perspective, Bitcoin is at an all time high this morning as we're speaking, but it could crash by 50%, how do you weather those storms, how do you think about it, so I think my generation can offer that perspective, so I want you guys to be open minded to listen to that, but the flip side, I've got to listen to you guys, I've got to listen to what you're working on, whether it's programmable biology, the blockchain, cryptocurrency, things that could be related to the ecology of the planet, we both, all three of us know that the planet is not doing well, if you look at the diagnostics of the planet, the carbon admission, the fires, the pollution in some of the big cities like Beijing is an example, we don't need to be debating whether or not we're hurting the planet anymore, I don't think, I think we've litigated that, we're hurting the planet, we have to figure out how to solve for that, so your generation I think is going to come up with those ideas, those innovations, I've got to be listening to that, and so it's interesting about my son AJ, he went to Stanford Business School, bright kid, running a venture fund, he's a cryptoskeptic, he's not the crypto ball, okay, one of his partners happens to be a crypto ball, but what got me into it is speaking with guys like Anthony Pompiliano, taking the time to understand it, one of my intellectual mentors is a guy named Charlie Munger, who's that, he's 97 years old, he says that Bitcoin is the worst thing that's ever happened in the civil, we've had holocausts, we've had earthquakes, but Bitcoin, we've had out of bombs go off, but Bitcoin is the worst thing that's happened in civilization, and it's surprising to me because when you learn about his life, he was a lawyer with the Harvard Law School, looked up to him, still look up to him, but what did he say, know the other side of the argument better than your own argument, and so I have found that anybody that studies the blockchain, studies Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies, a guy like Ray Dalio, brilliant guy, a Bitcoin skeptic, studies it, he buys Bitcoin, Paul Tudor Jones, a skeptic studies it, buys Bitcoin, and I can name ten or twelve of these people, so once I started to understand it, I said, okay, well, wait a minute, this is a technological delaying mechanism for our society, we can take the middle men, the middle women out of our transactions, and we can start transacting peer to peer, and it has unbelievable long term ramifications, the blockchain is going to allow us to trust each other without knowing each other, we don't have to go through a JPMorgan where you pick a firm, a Wells Fargo, whoever, we can go to each other over the blockchain, I want you to think about the eco-friendliness of that, the efficiencies that that will create, and it will free us up to do other things in the society, so for me, once I got that, once I understood it, and I had this conversation with Michael Seller yesterday, he's been a very good friend of mine, is I'm like, okay, I'm not long enough, okay, how do I get more longness, and then of course I'm dealing with my generation, which are poo-pooing it, and they're all institutionalists, and they don't want to be embarrassed by being wrong, as you guys know, I've been fired from the White House, I got fired from Goldman Sachs, I've been torched in business, I don't mind being wrong, okay, I'm like a human crash dummy, I have no problem being wrong, and what I would encourage your generation to do is take risks, hit the pavement, and be a super ball, you don't want to be bone china, okay, you don't want to be the guy that went to Stanford, as I go, oh my god, I went to Stanford, so therefore I can't fail, I've got to do everything perfectly, and I've got to please my parents, and I have my career arcs, got to be a 45 degree angle, take risks, be willing to fail, because if you're willing to fail, then you can get exposure to Bitcoin, I've got buddies of mine that are like, man, I hear what you're saying, but I can't be embarrassed if I'm wrong, but what do you mean? Well if I put 3% of my portfolio in Bitcoin at $8,000 a coin, and it goes to zero, now I've embarrassed myself, I got huckstered, and it was a con, but I'm not that guy, I'm willing to take that risk, because I see what you guys see in the future, and I think we're all going to be right about it, but even if I'm wrong about it, I have it sized in my portfolio from an allocation perspective where I think it's going to be fine, and I have to deal with now clients of mine that hate Bitcoin, so I created an ETF called Crypt, CRPT, it's got unbelievable correlation to Bitcoin, but it's in Coinbase, MicroStrategy, Marathon Digital, you see what I mean? So now I can go to my buddy, Duddy, he's old farts I had to deal with and say, okay, you don't want to buy the Bitcoin, but how about these companies that are growing at 50% a

SPEAKER_00
year? It's equivocating, it's good, smart.

SPEAKER_02
Say you have to be flexible, be flexible, nearly plastic.

SPEAKER_00
You hit on something, I mean the Superball thing, I've never heard it referenced that way, and I think it's amazing, you're someone who, you've learned how to take a punch really, really well, and pivot, gather yourself, and throw the next one. But like, there's something amazing in that, and it's probably one of the biggest signals of someone that's going to be successful is the ability to take a punch, gather yourself, pivot, and still fight back after that. What taught you that? Like what in your life?

SPEAKER_02
You know, I think I remember, I grew up in a blue collar family, okay? My father didn't give me a lot of advice because he was wearing a green uniform when he went to work, he was loaded with grease when he came home, and he got up at 4.30 in the morning, I can remember my mother putting his lunch pail in the refrigerator at 9.30 at night, he came home at 3.

30, I mean God forbid you weren't at that dinner table at 5.15, you got your ass kicked by him. But if you were in sports, then it was okay, but if you weren't in sports, you had to be sitting at the table with him, and he was a hard guy, he was a very honest guy, and he couldn't give me a lot of advice, but he said to me something that I'll share with you and you should think about it.

I got my job at Goldman, okay, so I graduated from Harvard Law School, my parents think it's Hartford Law School, I mean they have no idea, they don't want to take me to Hartford, can they? I'm like, mom, it's Hartford Law School, why the hell would they call it Hartford Law School if it's not in Hartford? I guess it's not called Hartford Law School, right? It's like an everybody loves Raymond's sitcom, right? So I'm coming out of school, I got my job at Goldman, I'm buying myself some suits, and my father says to me, I want you to never complain about your job. And I said, what do you mean? Just remember something about your job, you're indoors, you're out of direct sunlight, and there's no heavy lifting. Okay, I just want you to think about it every second, my dad spent 42 years on a crane, hot and cold weather, working the crane, crane broke down, you got to get out of the cabin, fix the crane, he did that for 42 years.

So here I am, blessed with this opportunity to wear a suit, you guys dressed like shit by the way, we're talking about that on our fashion podcast. I can't believe the way you're dressed.

SPEAKER_01
You're watching a fashion podcast?

SPEAKER_02
I can't believe the way your generation dresses, it's like unbelievable to me, but that's fine. These are the billionaires of today's podcast, I'm the popper, but it's fine. But I just want you to think about that, so my expectations were here.

Okay, so when you get hit, and you watch your father get up in the morning at 3.30, okay, this is no big deal, okay, he's got fired big fucking deal. Let me dust off and get back to work.

Oh, I'm getting fired from Goldman? Okay, fine, let me go find another job. Turns out I found a job at Goldman, right? So this is another funny part of my life. They gave me an $11,000 severance check.

I fired me on February 1st, 1991, I'm looking for a job, I get a job offer back at Goldman, the personnel director, she's a lovely person, she's like, we're going to mark you down as into the departmental transfer. You'll never have to tell anybody that you got fired. Can we get the $11,000 check back? I'm like, no way, I need the money.

I'm paying off school debt. I said, you can tell the whole planet I got fired, I don't give a shit. You see what I'm saying? Why would you give a shit, right? So now I'm back at Goldman working, and I realize that I got to start my own business because I don't fit into their culture.

I don't have the right personality. That's another big lesson for your listeners is don't conform. You don't want to be a conformist, okay? Because your life will suck, every day will be dread, and every day will be work.

And so you got to figure out who you are, and be who you are, and be comfortable in your own skin. So I realized that I couldn't be there. And so I wrote down in my book, if I can pay off my school debt the day after I'm leaving Goldman Sachs to create my own business.

So I paid my debt off in May of 1996, at the age of 32. I left Goldman Sachs on December 1st at the end of their fiscal year. So low expectations, accept failure, be willing to pivot.

You got to have a sense, you know, when you're getting your ass fired from the White House and they're lighting you up on Saturday Night Live, and you run into Lorne Michaels at the Met Yankee game, you know, you tell him, hey, a little more hairspray, please. The tie wasn't tight enough. Right? What are you going to do?

SPEAKER_00
You got to roll with it. Exactly what we were talking about at the beginning of the show. You got to lean into it.

Stuff happens in your life. You get embarrassed.

SPEAKER_02
Even Colbert asked me, he said, do you think you're going to last a long time in the White House? I said, longer than a carton of milk in the refrigerator, I don't think I was going to get blown out like that.

SPEAKER_00
Do you think our generation is softer?

SPEAKER_02
No, I think your generation is self-conscious. I don't, not softer. No, you got very tough.

Remember, I've been on troop support missions to Iraq and Afghanistan. You got some killers in your generation. I don't, I don't think they're softer.

There's a layer of your generation that might be a little entitled where they have high expectations, but there's self-consciousness that you have to do away with. So in other words, I'm going to start this company. I'm going to go to the cocktail party.

I got to be able to brag about the success of the company. And I've got everything figured out. I got to tell everybody that.

That I think is a weakness. That's not a strength. The strength is telling people authentically what's going on in your life because the minute you can turn to that and you can express your vulnerability, people start trusting you.

They say, well, how are you doing? You say, well, this is how I'm doing. We just had a setback here. I tried to launch the website.

It blew up. And all of a sudden someone will look at you and say, this is a real guy. Because everybody's dealing with that.

Everybody's got problems. And when you're trying to cross over your situation or paint a perfect picture, to me, that's a sign of insecurity. So I know, I think you've got very tough people in your generation.

I'm very impressed with your generation. I have high hopes for your generation that frankly are going to solve a lot of the problems that my generation caused. We were neilists, smoking pot, they're going to Woodstock.

SPEAKER_00
People are still smoking pot.

SPEAKER_02
Of course they are. But I'm saying they're going to Woodstock. They're then they're driving around in BMWs with yellow ties in the 80s, they're peeing on each other in the politics.

It's not enough for me to be 100% right. I have to beat your brains in on cable television. And that's hurting the country.

We have to figure out a way to focus not on left or right, but what's right or wrong. That's why I like reading your stuff because you're looking at it from a heuristic perspective. You're looking at it from a clinical perspective.

What's going to make somebody successful? What's going to make a kid motivated to read and write? Let's focus on things like that. Let's not focus on the politics and the unions and all this stuff. How do we get a kid and give him a platform of equal opportunity? I'm all about unequal outcomes.

I want you guys to both shoot yourselves into space in your own rockets, like Bezos. God bless. If you can create public good and make that level of public profit and you want to shoot yourself into space in a rocket, go for it.

Bring Captain Kirk with you. But we have to have equal opportunity. We have to have a platform of equal opportunity.

So if I'm born in Harlem or if I'm born in an inner city and maybe my parents haven't figured it out, is there something in our society that can help me figure it out? I grew up with a modest amount of money in a middle class environment, but there were strong people and they were hitting me to go study and they wanted us to go to college. They didn't know what fucking college it was, but they wanted us to go. We have to do that for our young people.

You guys are going to figure that out. I have high hopes. This tech, these technologies are going to allow for brilliant educators to enter everybody's classroom if our politics and our policies and how we deal with unions and all this other stuff allow that to happen.

And that would be transformative. It would be very good.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think that's what, I mean, if I were to have a takeaway from it, I think that's what I find so exciting about Web 3 and about cryptocurrencies is that it's not the rich kid that grew up and went to Goldman and has been an MDA Goldman for the last 20 years that's getting rich off this. It's anybody. I mean, there's a massive generational transfer of wealth that's happening right now and the incumbents don't like it.

Insiders don't love the fact that anybody can get onto these on rails and operate in the system, but it's such a cool thing.

SPEAKER_02
Some of the incumbents, you know, I would say all of them. I love it. I'm a product of a blue collar family.

But you're a little different. I want the society to be flatter. I want good things.

You know, I was with...

SPEAKER_00
You didn't grow up in a country club culture though, going and playing golf on the weekends.

SPEAKER_02
You've made yourself into what you are. That's one of my best stories. Now, we make ourselves into what we are.

You never do it on your own trust. Sure. You need mentors and professors and you need parents and you need siblings. When somebody tells me they're self-made, I did it all on my own.

I'm like, okay, it's not possible. Not in our society, right? But I'll tell you guys a funny story. I'm at the Charles Hotel in Boston.

The Goldman Sachs has set up an interview room and I walk in there and this is the 80s. I'm in 100% polyester. I got a polyester black suit.

I'm like a young funeral director. I'm setting the scene. I got a polyester shirt.

I'm literally glowing. I mean, this shit can come out of the dryer. You don't even have to bring it to the dry cleaner.

I got a black Guido tie and I'm wearing these Capizio dance shoes. We used to call them cockroach killers because they had points on them. You could kill cockroaches in the corners.

I got them laced up. My hair is blown back, but like Tony Monero from Saturday Night Live and I'm in the interview and there's two guys sitting there like you guys are and they're asking me questions about the Ted spread and the Euro swap and the Petro dollar and I'm hitting every question and one guy gets up and he says, can I see you for a sec? I said, yeah. I gotta tell you, you're a smart kid.

You were the worst dressed person that we've ever met at the Harvard Law School. What are you doing in this outfit? And I looked at him like, I thought I looked great. I had no idea.

And he says, this is my best clothing. I said, okay, listen to me. I can't bring you to Goldman Sachs dressed like this.

You gotta go to Brooks Brothers or J-Press. Go buy yourself some natural fiber clothing. I was literally fully flammable from my first Goldman Sachs interview.

And why am I telling you this? Because it's a rite of passage. You don't go from my neighborhood with my family members, never hitting a golf ball, never swinging a tennis racket, never seeing the inside of a country club, never seeing the inside of an office building and it's easy. You go and you have tremors of embarrassment and self-consciousness and doubt as you're trying to find your way and try to make that transition.

So anyway, that's why I think you guys are dressed like shit.

SPEAKER_00
We're not flammable. You're natural fiber. Maybe our hair products flammable.

SPEAKER_02
It's probably a sign of intelligence though that I'm dressed like this all cramped in my suit, 10 pounds heavier than I need to be and you guys are dressed comfortably and casually. It's probably a sign of intelligence.

SPEAKER_00
I'm going to have to put on a suit later. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02
If I go on to do it. You're going to go on to tell me?

SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I got to do something.

SPEAKER_02
I got to look nice. That's another big thing for me. If you're going to be on TV, generations watch television, young and old and old people like seeing people in suits.

They get turned off by the other stuff.

SPEAKER_00
I like looking nice. My profile picture on Twitter is still being a suit.

SPEAKER_02
Don't conform. Just be you. Be you.

What's going on with the hair though? Honestly, I know you like looking nice but what is this whole thing with the floof and like spraying that?

SPEAKER_00
It's Palo Alto energy. Big Palo Alto energy.

SPEAKER_02
You put shit in your head and you look like it.

SPEAKER_00
I woke up like this. You just woke up like that. Believe it or not, that's $600 right there.

Is it? Yeah.

SPEAKER_02
$600 to do that.

SPEAKER_00
I come from modest means. I'm impressed. I'm impressed.

I know we're up against the end of the time.

SPEAKER_02
Low expectations, high performance. That'll get you along with low expectations. The world doesn't owe you anything.

You got to make it happen.

SPEAKER_00
What I'm hearing you say is also the mentality, your mindset is so, so important. Your mindset is the difference between… 100%. Of course.

I also think, my biggest takeaway from some of the stuff you're saying too is you can't do it on your own.

SPEAKER_02
You said it as it relates to the world's bear. If you need help, what did Ben Franklin say? If you want to make a friend, ask a stranger for a favor. That's how you make a friend.

SPEAKER_00
The beauty is… I wrote about this once. I wrote about this once.

SPEAKER_02
Of course. You got to ask people for… Because let me tell you something. Human beings have a nature, good human beings where they want to reciprocate.

Reciprocation is a sixth continent universal language. If I do you a favor, you are inclined to want to do me one. I ask you to do me a favor.

Now you feel good about yourself. Now you've got an OZ for me. It's not linear.

I'm not making it a quid pro quo. You want to do nonlinear favors and you want to be a karma bank for people. You want people to know they can call you if they're in a pinch and you're going to be there for them.

And you do that, you're going to have a very happy life. You wrote about this recently and I tell my kids, I can only give you two gifts. You want to hear my two gifts? The only thing you can inherit from me are two things.

Forget about the money because the money is not going to make you happy. Make you comfortable. Two things.

One, celebrate the successes of your friends and I've seen you write about that. I can't emphasize that. I'm like, you want to be the first call for your friends when something good is happening to them.

They're flying themselves into space. Hey, Mooch, I'm flying myself into space. That's awesome.

Okay, let's go drink champagne together. Right? And then the second thing is find what you really love to do and do that. Don't do anything else.

You know what it is. I don't know what it is. I know what it was for me.

I like selling at a paper route is 11 years old. I love people. I like meeting people.

I like connecting people. That's how the SAW conference came about. I like building businesses that are on teams.

I was a, you know, play a lot of team sports as a kid. That's me. That's manifestation of my professional life as a result of the things that I love.

And that's what you have to do with your life. Okay. And you got to relax like Mel Brooks says, relax. None of us are getting out of your life.

We look very relaxed, don't we? You look very relaxed. We're not getting out of this thing alive. So you better enjoy yourself.

SPEAKER_00
Drink whiskey. Yeah. Well, for what it's worth, you have definitely embodied those principles in my interactions with you. I'm super excited that we were able to get you in here and honestly really excited for

SPEAKER_02
what your next act is as well. And you took my fashion haircut shots pretty well. Okay. It's a sign that you guys have some personal resilience.

SPEAKER_00
Okay. Well, I appreciate you coming in. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_02
Thank you.

SPEAKER_00
In the room where it happens. Anthony Scaramucci. Thank you.

Thank you guys. All right.

SPEAKER_01
Well, that's a lot of pleasure. Thank you so much. I wish you guys a great trip.

SPEAKER_00
This was great. You're the man. Hello. Have a discussion, man. Mind blown.

Yeah. I love him, honestly. I know he's gotten a bad rep for some of the stuff Trump administration and his experience there.

But man, he's a great guy. He dropped knowledge. Tons of interesting insights.

What were your big takeaways? What was the one big thing you took away from that conversation? A few. I can't give you one. Well, hit me with your first one.

I mean, top of mind is how important it is when you fall down to get back up and how important that mindset is. And he talked a lot about that. I think it's just, it's okay to, you know, we talked about that actually in the beginning with that, you know, some of our memes, right? Like falling that, you know, if you're going to, if you're going to walk, you're going to fall.

He hit me different with that Superball thing.

SPEAKER_01
That was good.

SPEAKER_00
Yeah. I never heard that. You need to be a Superball and you need to be able to bounce off things.

I love that. Yeah, you know, for me, the one big takeaway I had was that you just can't do it alone. He referenced it in the context of, of the World's Fair actually, like bringing it back to our earlier conversation.

If you're going to go and do something really ambitious, you cannot do it alone. And I think that's such a powerful framework for thinking about starting something because the reality with anything, when you're going and doing something big, you just need to have people you can count on. You need to reach out to people, collaborate with different people, et cetera.

And so my call to action, like when we think about this community and what we're building, we have all these people that are coming together, all ambitious, all want to learn, all want to go do things. We should collaborate with each other. We should be in the community talking to each other, interacting.

We'll be there to do that alongside you guys. It's an amazing, powerful thing when we can bring each other up, raise each other up, and work together to get shit done. Yeah. And I think the beauty about the internet, like he was talking about the 80s, right? You had to be physically in a place, right? And now it's just like, you don't go on your iPhone, hop into the Discord, hop on Twitter, meet people, do good things, and good things will happen to you. And it just compounds.

He talked about the karma thing and just continuing to help people raise other people up and the benefit that that creates for you. And we're creating a platform for that. What I hope we do with this community is continue to build a place where you can do that, where you can help each other out, where you can look out for one another, where you can support one another, connect someone with someone else.

It might not be you that knows the specific thing, but if they have an idea and you know someone that might know something about it, help each other out, connect them. We're happy to do it, reach out to us. But there's something really special here.

I'm really glad he said those things. I'm really glad we had the conversation around it. I thought it was a blast.

I'm going to do some good things today. That is super fun. Well, cheers, man.

Cheers and cheers to you. Cheers to you guys. Right. Why do you look so tired? I look so tired because I did not sleep last night. Have you never slept well or is this a new thing? It's not that I can't fall asleep.

I fall asleep like right away, but I wake up a couple hours later and I'm just sitting in my bed and I look at the ceiling and I can't fall back asleep and I don't know what to do.

SPEAKER_01
So I was literally you. And for the longest time, I was this hustle culture bro, sleep when I'm dead, didn't want to sleep, didn't care about my sleep.

SPEAKER_01
All of these mattress companies have created these mattresses.

SPEAKER_00
They're just stock. They're stock mattresses. AteSleep is technology plus sleep combined.

So the whole product is built around optimizing the temperature that you sleep at.

SPEAKER_01
And so you read about sleeping cold is the key to sleeping.

SPEAKER_01
Forcigmatic is the secret sauce behind the where it happens podcast.

SPEAKER_00
You know how much I've been talking about that hot cocoa, the one that's jam packed with the reishi mushrooms. It absolutely has been transforming my mornings. I have it at night.

It really chills me out, takes out all my stress and allows me to have a good night's rest. After those long days of tequila on the set, I'm sure that's helpful. I mean, it does help.

The Sweet Vanilla Plant-Based Protein is the one that I've been going to.

SPEAKER_00
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