As we wrap up the year and celebrate the festive season, we wanted to share some of our favorite moments from one of your favorite Wealthion interviews from 2024: Jack Mallers with Anthony Scaramucci. Enjoy!
All the best for a happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year!
Investment Concerns? Get a free portfolio review with Wealthion’s endorsed financial advisors at https://bit.ly/406YpOb
Original interview aired Dec 13, 2024: https://youtu.be/7POkQI-JLb0
Andrew Brill 0:00
Happy Holidays from all of us here at wealthion to all of you, I’m one of your hosts here at wealthion. Andrew brill, we took a look back at this year, and hope you enjoy these favorite guest moments from one of our best interviews of 2024
Anthony Scaramucci 0:18
why somebody needs to know about Bitcoin. Why somebody needs to at least think about investing in Bitcoin and making Bitcoin part of their investment portfolio and part of their lives. Who’s in the position that I just described? Yeah,
Jack Mallers 0:33
well, I think fundamentally, Bitcoin is designed to be a superior asset for you to hold. We can spend hours on this podcast talking about how and why that is, I think simply put, it’s because it’s the hardest asset you can hold. And hard is in reference to how hard is it to make more of it. How Scarce is this thing? And Bitcoin is the scarcest thing you can own, period. And what do I mean by that? Well, Anthony, if everyone listening to this wants an iPhone, Apple can increase the supply of iPhones and get them one. If everyone in the world wants a McDonald’s cheeseburger, McDonald’s is gonna find a way to get him a cheeseburger. Equivalently, if the price of gold goes up 10x and everyone is in demand for gold, Elon told us he’s going to go to some other planet and get more. So the idea in financial markets is with more demand, you will find more supply. You always will. Now bitcoin is the only thing you can own. Where that’s not true. With more demand, we cannot find more supply no matter who you are, no matter where you are, no matter what you are, we can’t make any more and so it’s for that reason that more demand has to find a higher price, because the more supply that’s being demanded is coming from the market, it’s coming from the existing holders. So if you want more Bitcoin, you got to bid it to a higher price. And it’s the technology and the innovation and Satoshi nakamotos breakthrough that’s built such a scarce thing. But fundamentally, why you would hold it versus other things is because it is harder, because it is scarcer, and because it will outperform and find a higher price. For those fundamental reasons
Anthony Scaramucci 2:21
you and I agree on all that, but you created something called Strike. Tell me what strike is and tell me how strike is used by so many different people. What’s the value of strike and what’s the future of strike? Where? Where are we five years from now with strike? Yeah,
Jack Mallers 2:38
so the reality of strikes founding was baked into this idea that crypto at large was born. And you and I may differ on this where there was now. So just a reminder for everyone, I’ll say it again. I’ve been in this space for 12 years. So end of 2012 early 2013 and so I was around when there were no alt coins. There was just Bitcoin or there were scrappy ideas, but they weren’t to be taken seriously. So I watched the birth of Ethereum and the birth of Litecoin and all of these coins, and when I saw businesses like Coinbase start to pivot and make that their main focus, it doesn’t make it a bad business. In fact, Coinbase is a public company. You can go look at their financials. It’s a good business, but I disagreed with the opportunity and what their focus was, and who was serving the bitcoiner as a customer. And so when I founded the company, I was in my mid 20s, and it was really that I thought Bitcoin was the opportunity that speculative trading and high risk assets like cryptos that I thought weren’t like Bitcoin at all was a distraction, and I thought that there needed to be a financial institution that actually enabled all of bitcoins potential for customers, and that Bitcoin financial services like buying it, selling it, storing it, moving it, getting insurance on it, borrowing against it, using it for cross currency payments. No one was working on these things, and everyone was waiting for the new coin. And so that’s when I founded strike, and we really found our stride after the industry blew up, believe it or not. So when FTX went down, when blockfi went down, we saw a ton of growth in customers that were like, I value Bitcoin. I think it’s the pristine asset. And what I’m looking for is a financial institution I can trust that’s the best in class at Bitcoin, and that focuses on Bitcoin financial services. And so when I founded the business, really, I mean, my whole career, I was like, well, Mount Gox is going to be the Bitcoin company for the world, and I’m just happy to be here. And that didn’t turn out to be true. And then I thought, Well, Brian Armstrong surely is going to figure that out, and he doesn’t seem to be as interested in Bitcoin as I am. And then I thought, Sam begman freed and binance were 10 times smarter than I was, according to the media, and that turned out not to be true either, and where we found ourselves is the most licensed. Regulated, Bitcoin focused company in the world, that our customer is the Bitcoin or our customers, those that are looking for high quality Bitcoin financial services from a compliant, regulated, trusted custodian. And that’s who we are right now. And I think we’re gonna have a lot of upside running that business over the last 10 years if we can continue to do what we’ve done. That’s my thesis,
Anthony Scaramucci 5:20
what you would say to other countries in that situation. So question one, are other countries going to do? What El Salvador has done, is that your prediction. And then number two, what would be the messaging to these other countries? What would you say? I
Jack Mallers 5:36
think whether so, I’ll take the second question. First, whether you’re a country or a family or a corporation or an individual, especially in lesser served emerging markets, what you’re looking for is growth and stability. You know these people as a reminder to everyone listening, you can’t buy Apple stock. You cannot invest in Miami beachfront property. You don’t have access to index funds from the smartest financial minds in the world, with the biggest capital basis of all time, you have, maybe the naira, and that’s it, your local community shillings. And so the fact that you have an asset that on average over the last 10 years is 63% annualized return. So it’s the fastest growing thing that any of us could have owned. I mean, it’s accessible to everybody. So it is a life raft, in that sense. And whether you’re a country and you are in debt, listen, we talk about these metrics like debt to GDP, how much have you borrowed versus how much growth are you producing to pay that back? We’re all looking for growth, and you can buy growth off the shelf. All 8 billion of us. Is a way to think about it as a government if you’re interested in growth, if you’re interested in productivity, you could say, I’ll take a burger, small fry, a Coke Zero and 63% year over year growth over the last decade. That’s not a bad deal. That’s not a bad lunch order. And so for the individual in the family, it’s very similar in the same you know, for El Salvador as well, these people don’t have access to Google engineers. They don’t have access to mines like Michael Saylor. They don’t have access to consumer innovating mines like Jack Dorsey. But being a part of Bitcoin, they did. They were benefiting from the work of MIT professors, from Michael Saylor, from Google engineers, from Jack Dorsey, from the world’s work on an open, distributed network. So you’re joining a global team of the smartest minds and the most powerful computing network in the world, and you get access to the best performing asset that’s even outperforming guys like Ken Griffin. And that was the message, is that join this team. Network effects and economies of scale are going to take you. You actually need to humble yourself. This goes message to myself in the mirror, humble yourself. You’re not the main character. You’re not going to advance this any more than the greater good. And so just be a part of it. Be a part of it. Realize it’s bigger than you. And that’s when you start to gain that benefit. Is when you realize I was wrong about this thing. This thing is bigger than me, and all I need to do is subscribe to it and align myself with the fact that it’s a system with equal rules and equal rights. And you know, it was better to buy it when I heard about it, but the second best time is now, and that’s a lot of the conversation with them. And for the my speculation on countries, I’ll keep this one short. I actually knew fairly quickly that we were not going to see other Latin American countries. El Salvador was unique in this way. Anthony, they didn’t have their own currency. So for those that don’t know, they lost their own currency in a civil war, so decimated the whole place, and really put it back many, many decades and violence and gangs and a lot of civil unrest, whereas people like to compare Argentina Malay, yeah, but they get to print money. If money is our time and energy in an abstracted form, it’s very difficult to forgive the ability to print that, to print time and energy. And so I couldn’t really figure out, I mean, maybe there are economies and markets in countries like Panama, but it was not going to happen from another country that could print their own currency. And I almost took that next leap and thought, well, who with a central bank and with the money printer is going to adopt this? And I did, genuinely, I swear to you, I thought the United States. And I thought the United States because the world reserve currency status, we have so much debt. And what do you want to back your debt with? And really, the way I think about it, your future promises you want to instill confidence in your future, and the promises that you’re making about your future, about your economy, about your stability, about your ability to harness technology, about your ability to localize and grow talent in the country, and that, to me, was Bitcoin, and so it doesn’t surprise me that it was part of this election and that we’re still hearing positive rhetoric from this new administration. So that’s more my prediction is that if we are going to see a more advanced adopter the. It isn’t El Salvador that didn’t even have their own currency. I do think it’s going to be the US, believe it or not, before it’s someone like Argentina.
Andrew Brill 10:08
Thanks again for watching these favorite moments of 2024 and we hope we can continue to provide you with information that will help you invest wisely and be financially resilient. Wishing all of you a healthy, happy, safe and prosperous 2025.
