Why do most investors consistently underperform? In this exclusive interview, renowned finance expert and bestselling author Barry Ritholtz joins Anthony Scaramucci to discuss his powerful new book, How Not to Invest.
Barry reveals surprising insights into investor psychology, exposes the dangers of emotional investing, and explains why market timing rarely works. Discover why avoiding costly mistakes matters even more than chasing big wins, and learn how the incredible long-term power of compounding can transform your financial future. Plus, Barry shares his candid views on gold, cryptocurrency, tax-smart investing strategies, and more. This conversation is essential viewing for anyone serious about building and preserving wealth!
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Barry Ritholtz 0:00
Controlling your limbic system, the thinking fast system that is your emotionality, your fight or flight, your pleasure centers. If you can’t control your limbic system, you will die poor. That is a hell of a statement that talks about how important taking the emotionality out of your investing processes.
Anthony Scaramucci 0:30
Well, welcome to speak up on the wealthion network. I am your host. Anthony Scaramucci joined with me today is a best selling author. Barry ridholz. He spent his career investigating behavioral finance and data analytics. He is obviously the chairman of ridholtz Wealth Management. He’s got Josh Brown, another famous financial pundit, as one of his partners and Barry wrote an amazing book. It’s hard to believe that it’s 16 years ago. Barry,
Barry Ritholtz 1:00
but I had like clockwork every, every 15 years. The sequel is like 2040,
Anthony Scaramucci 1:07
you’re like the locust. So it was a phenomenal book. I read that book, and the the reason you and I met is I went up to you at an event in 2009 and said, Barry, I read your book. It was an awesome book. I learned a lot in your book, and I learned a lot in this book, by the way, and I want to start where we were in the green room. Mr. Ridholz, this will be a best seller. It’s incredibly well written, but I hate the title, how not to invent. So how did you get that by your publishers?
Barry Ritholtz 1:39
So, you know, I’ve had ballot nation was did did well. And in the ensuing years, I’ve had a number of publishers and friends say, hey, it’s time for another book and and I kind of held them at arm’s length, in part because I was busy. We’re building the firm. We’re five plus, depending on where the market closes today, you know, we’re five plus billion dollars, 75 employees, 3000 families we work with. And that was my focus. And then the pandemic hit, and like I started to have a little more. Hey, I’m not commuting. I got a little more free time, and so I When Morgan Housel came to me and said, Dude, you got to write another book, and the world needs to hear from you. And I’m like,
Anthony Scaramucci 2:32
and Morgan Housel, for those listening in, is another best selling author who’s written a few books now, but the his breakout book was the psychology of money. He’s been on this network with me, and he writes the forward of your book,
Barry Ritholtz 2:45
right? And then, and the psychology of money wasn’t just a best seller, it’s 7 million copies. This is just an insane number for a finance book. And so I kept, you know, I kept on coming up with excuses, and one of the excuses was there’s been 10,000 books written about how to invest over the past, you know, century, none of them have really turned investors into anything more than meh investors in the area I focus on, look, there’s Some great books on behavioral finance from Danny Kahneman and Dick Thaler and Morgan and Jason Zweig. And do we really need another book on behavioral finance? And then they’re all the data analytics books. I’m not gonna do a better job than Jim O’Shaughnessy and what works on Wall Street so, um, so I come back from vacation in this, in this Christmas break, and you know, you have a few days before January 2 rolls around, and I just started looking at some of my old research notes and quarterly calls, and start Going through columns. And Morgan’s publisher was Harriman house. So I reach out to Morgan and Harriman house and say, you know, a lot of the stuff I focus on comes from clients and prospective clients and media questions, and as often as not, I am forced to debunk some financial bullshit or another. And so I said, Hey, how do you feel about the title, debunking financial bullshit? And of course, the British being very proper, oh no, we wouldn’t. We would never go that way. And besides, after Harry frankfurters book literally on bullshit, no book with that in their title is done well. But you know, there’s more like the one,
Anthony Scaramucci 4:40
there’s one book, actually, I was gonna just bring it up to you.
Barry Ritholtz 4:43
How’s frankfurter’s book? Well, so the book? What was the title of the book? How? Not. So the book on bullshit is from Frankfurter. There’s a fake AI book stealing my title that came out a week but. For mine by an author that doesn’t exist. It’s an AI generated 35 page nonsense that eventually the lawyers will send a cease and desist. But that’s not a real book.
Anthony Scaramucci 5:10
No, the only book that’s done well is how not to die. Do you remember that book? How Not to Die? Okay, that’s a good book, okay,
Barry Ritholtz 5:20
but just find out where you’re gonna die and just stay away from that place. Charlie Munger, don’t
Anthony Scaramucci 5:25
want to die. And so that’s one of the books. What? But let’s go to a couple of things in the book that I really well before
Barry Ritholtz 5:32
you do that you you didn’t like you didn’t like the not in the title, how not to invest, right? And when I first said, Okay, here’s what this book is about. It’s all the things not to do. The general reception from people was, oh, no, you don’t want to put that in the title. It’s such a negative. And when No, I kind of, I like that idea. Let’s go with that. When I got the first couple of cover designs. Hated them. All. Had the same experience with bailout nation. John SHERP did the comic for the cover for bailout nation. Said I got your cover and it was perfect. So when I got a bunch of cover proposals, I hated it. I said, here’s what I want to do. I want to do, how not to invest with, not in a different color, and I wanted to trace a stock market line crash. So when you first look at it, and the graphic designer at Hammond House took the idea and really made it sing, having how to invest in white catches your eye, and it’s only when you look at it a second time you go, like, wait a second, is this how to invest or how not to invest? Yeah,
Anthony Scaramucci 6:45
well, I, as I said, before we started, I love the not in black and the how to invest in white. But when I read the book, couple things about your book. It’s unfiltered distillate. It’s a distillation. And the truth of the matter is, as I regal my investment career, which has had its ups and downs, and I and I’m in the how not to phase of my life. So I really enjoyed the book, meaning I looked at this thing and said, Hey, man, I get where you’re going, because this is me. This is I wish I had read this book and been smart enough, however, as well, you got to read the book and be smart enough to exercise the book at a younger age, I’m ready to exercise your book now at my age, because you and I are contemporaries, but neither that’s here or there, but, but you can’t exercise me. Saying, did I read her script? She’s yelling at me, see, because she doesn’t know my relationship with you in the band. Yet, I do have
Barry Ritholtz 7:52
we live about 15 minutes apart from to Locust Valley. You’re really close to the plan dome. But you know, here’s the here’s the thing that you learn when you deal with investors and people across the course of their life. Someone could have handed me this book at age 25 right? And you’re just too young and enthusiastic and you’re too unseasoned. Yes, yes, you’re not ready to accept the
Anthony Scaramucci 8:21
truth. Gotta taste the hot stove. Barry Ritholtz,
Barry Ritholtz 8:25
that’s right, you grew up so quick contemporary story, since we’re contemporaries, go ahead. I grew up on Long Island. I was a Mets fan. And when I was a kid, the Mets had a batter named Dave Kingman. Right? Dave Kingman used to hit these home runs. People think this is hyperbole, but it’s not. These home runs went so far in Shea Stadium, they would leave the stadium and break wind shields in the parking lot. That’s how hard and far this guy like it seems mathematically impossible to hit a 800 yard home run. That’s how big a bat this guy swung. The reason he’s, you know, not a Babe Ruth or, you know, go through your list of of favorite hitters, is that he just struck out so much. And I think most investors or Dave, you
Anthony Scaramucci 9:16
remember that home run he hit at Wrigley Field. That was literally the bomb of bombs, okay?
Barry Ritholtz 9:23
Like it broke a broke a window in an apartment building, like nobody has ever hit the ball as far as this guy crazy.
Anthony Scaramucci 9:31
You and I live the same era of New York, and so we know Dave Kingman, and we know Duffy Dyer. We know all these sad sack Mets that never could run a
Barry Ritholtz 9:41
champion. Well, you know, you did have to Dwight Gooden, you did have a bunch of people, Darryl Strawberry, who are
Anthony Scaramucci 9:49
already out of college. I was already out of college when that happened. You know that that right, that nine year old excitement of the 1973 World Series, it was well behind this,
Barry Ritholtz 9:57
but, right? But let’s 86 was a. It was a long time ago. Let’s go to
Anthony Scaramucci 10:02
this book handsome, because there’s a couple things in this book that I really want to hammer to people, and that is emotional investing, emotional investing. And you’ve been an emotional investor. I have been an emotional investor. Most people listening to this program have been emotional investors. So let’s go to the how not? How do you not be an emotional investor? By Barry Ritholtz, go
Barry Ritholtz 10:31
so three simple steps. First, have a plan, figure out why you’re investing towards what ends. You know, we could have a whole nother conversation about purposeless capital. Bill Huang, Archer, ghost, more more. More is not a good strategy. When you have a goal, then you can, then you could deploy the appropriate amount of risk to obtain that goal through a financial plan. You have a core portfolio that’s broadly indexed. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Vanguard, total market, the s, p, whatever the it is, it’s your core. And then feel free to add, you know, I like to say you can the tree is your broad index. Add some ornaments and garland and popcorn strings. And that’s your Hey, I have a little bit of momentum. I have a little bit of crypto. Here’s some India, here’s some emerging market value, whatever you want to flavor that stew with, to mix metaphors, knock yourself out, but at least guarantee yourself you’ll get market returns over the long haul for much of your portfolio, because the the academic literature makes it really clear, in any given year, let fewer than half of active managers beat their benchmark. Five years, that number is 83% fail to beat the benchmark. 10 years, it’s over 90% and 20 years, it’s virtually nobody. And the people who you know the point 3% who do are the Peter Lynch’s, Warren Buffett’s will Dan Hoffs. You know their names because they’re the Michael Jordan’s LeBron James Steph Curry. To switch sports metaphors of their field, no one would want to go out and play one on one against Michael Jordan, LeBron, James, and yet we’re willing to play one on one against these rock stars. It’s called home field advantage for a reason, and the average investor just is way too cocky and way too sure of themselves versus they would never do that if it was basketball or football or what have you
Anthony Scaramucci 12:45
well said. I mean, I think the, I mean, there’s so much in the book. I mean, I’m I’m buying a stack of these books, handing them out to my summer interns. I’m buying the book, giving out to my children, because they need to read the book, and then every 10 years, I’m going to recommend to them that they read the book again, because as they get wiser and they get their asses kicked more Barry, they’ll be more willing to listen to what’s in the book. But there’s one thing you wrote in the book, and I’m going to quote and thank you. Is Charlie Ellis still alive? By the way? Yes,
Barry Ritholtz 13:16
yes, Charlie. I just had him on the podcast two months ago, his new book is, is rethinking investing. It’s like 96 pages like and he’s just such a charming, delightful guy, and he
Anthony Scaramucci 13:30
wrote a great book about Goldman years ago, Charlie. Charlie is a real leading by
Barry Ritholtz 13:35
the way, chairman of the Yale endowment board of directors of Vanguard ran Greenwich Associates, a legend in the industry. Legend in
Anthony Scaramucci 13:43
the industry. I learned so much from him. One of the best things I learned from him, and I’m about to get into it with you, is market timing. Don’t be a market timer, because if you’re out of the market 10 days, you end up with a ridiculously low, even lower than the bond market, like return. You have to, have to stay in it and ride the volatility curve, except the bumps and scrapes of being an owner. But you say something which is so clear and so simple, and it’s so Charlie Ellis like, and I’m going to quote from your book, The truth is counter intuitive, avoiding errors is more important than scoring points. It could have been more it could it be more crystal clear,
Barry Ritholtz 14:27
right? So, so that traces back to a paper that Ellis wrote. I want to say in 1976 75 you and I were probably in high school or junior high school when that paper came out. Thing was the Journal of portfolio management or something like that, and he likens, and he, by the way, turns this into a book 20 years later, but he likens investing to tennis. I play a little tennis. I’m not that good, but this resonated with me, because tennis. Like investing are two games in one the professionals the point. Oh, 1% of people who play tennis professionally, they win by scoring points. They hit the ball with power, with accuracy. They score aces on serves. They hit the ball where the opponent isn’t they put enough top spin on the ball that it stays away from the opposing players. Sweet Spot. They kiss the line like everything they do is they score points. That’s the winners game. That’s how the professionals play it. The other 99.9% of tennis players in the world, which includes you and me, we don’t win by scoring points, we lose by making unforced errors, and we try and operate outside of our abilities, outside of our skill set. So we double fault on a serve. We hit the ball long, we hit it wide, we hit it into the fence, into the net. We hit the ball with two little top spin. So which means the mechanics of your stroke isn’t great, so the ball just comes right back up to the sweet spot of the other player, and he could put it wherever he wants, and that’s where you’re not. And so it turns out that if you just as a tennis player, make fewer unforced errors, don’t try and kill it on your serve, because you’re not that good. Just put the ball in play. The ball comes back to you, just return it. Keep it within the field of play. Let the other guy think he’s going to score an ace and hit the back wall. And it turns out that’s very hard to do, because you really want to play like, I’m not Roger Federer, you’re not Rafael Nadal. None of us are these amazing players. Serena Williams would kick all of our asses, you know, 606060, we’re not them and but we want to be, and if we only make fewer mistakes playing against other amateurs, that’s actually how you win, and the parallel to investing is identical. You are not will Dan Hoff, you’re not going to be a great stock picker. You’re not Warren Buffett. You don’t have this endless amount of capital from GEICO that allows you to wait out value stocks to return to their full value. None of us are Boas Weinstein, who’s buying closed end funds at like this deep discount and then agitating as an activist to force the manager to Hey, If this is 20% below nav, go buy arbitrage. We’re gonna get a better return. Go buy your own stock and close this, close this gap. We’re not those people. We are simply punters trying to work our way through this. And if we just stay within our ability, if we just make fewer mistakes, you end up 90% better than you’re better than 90% of everybody else who’s hitting the ball out, who’s hitting the net, who’s thinking they could stock pick, who’s thinking they can market time and the data, there’s no ambiguity here. The data is clear as a group, as a species, we are not good at that.
Anthony Scaramucci 18:15
So, so, so you know, letting you go, because it’s just such crystal clear simplicity and brilliance, before I take questions from the outside audience, holding periods. Let’s go over the holding periods.
Barry Ritholtz 18:32
So I mentioned purposeless capital, if you have purposeful capital, where you’re managing money towards a goal, that’ll define your holding period. So some one of the people my office just had a baby, we set up a 529, hey, guess what? In 17 years that kid’s going to college, that’s your holding period. So you’re putting money away towards that, and there’s just no reason to play with it. Make regular contributions. It grows tax free, you have a 17 year holding period if you’re thinking that I’m saving for retirement. All right, so depending on your age, if you’re in your 20s, 30s, 40s, you have as much as a half a century to go. The miracle of compounding is is so amazing. And humans, you know, we grow up in an arithmetic world. We’ve evolved where we don’t need to understand compounding. But in the book, I tell a story. Two guys go off to World War One. They each have a small fortune. They have $1,000 which 1917 that’s just an unbelievable amount of money. One of them buys the market broad the equivalent of a broad index. The other one buries it in Mason jaws in the backyard. And so whenever you hear people say, you know, the dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power over the past century, technically true, but the dollar was never supposed to be a store of value. It’s a medium exchange. Much the families of both of those guys, the one who buried it in the mason jar. Well, how much purchasing power does $1,000 have a century later? Much, much less. But to show you how we don’t understand exponential math. We don’t Intuit compounding. When I ask people, What do you think $1,000 invested in equities is worth? A century later? Oh, $1,000 it’s got to be 800,000 a million, 1,000,007 like you had 3 million. Someone even said, Oh, it’s got to be $5 million when I show them the table of compounding at just a very simple 8% and with dividends, you actually get closer to 10% 10% over a century is $32 million from $1,000 people don’t understand that as wealthy as Warren Buffett is most people Don’t understand that 50% of his wealth has come in the past seven years. It’s just shows you the effect to combat he
Anthony Scaramucci 21:07
after age 60, which is good for you and me, bro,
Barry Ritholtz 21:11
right? That’s right, it’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s really astonishing, because, look, we, we evolved to adapt to challenging conditions and changing conditions on the Savannah. We were not built for selecting this muni bond or that equity fund. It’s not an organic, intuitive thing. And so simply making fewer decisions and making less errors, and when you make a decision, you’re thoughtful and rational. To use Danny Kahneman phrase, you’re not thinking fast, you’re thinking slow. And thinking fast is where the emotionality comes from. I love the quote from Bill Bernstein. I started a chapter with so Bill Bernstein, literally, neurologist, brain surgeon. Like, Oh, that guy is a brain surgeon. Literally starts managing money for doctors and then pivots and becomes a wealth manager. He said, controlling your limbic system, the thinking fast system that is your emotionality, your fight or flight, your pleasure centers, if you can’t control your limbic system, you will die poor. That is a hell of a statement that talks about how important taking the emotionality out of your investing process is not none better a hard to find someone better situated to communicate that than Bill Burns,
Anthony Scaramucci 22:40
well, I think, I think you’ve done an amazing job, and I think I think you’re at the right point in your life, Barry, to write a book like this, because the book you wrote in 2008 the great analysis of the collapse, how it happened. But this book is really a legacy book for you, and God bless you, for this is a book where people say, Hey, young kid, you know, this is the Peter Lynch book of our time. You remember one up on Wall Street?
Barry Ritholtz 23:09
Oh, sure. How to beat the street. One up on Wall Street usually, you know, this
Anthony Scaramucci 23:13
is the Peter Lynch book of a new generation. So let’s take some questions from the audience, quick before right mooch
Barry Ritholtz 23:19
before we go to questions, I just have to share one thing with you. So writing bailout nation was very cathartic. I had to get it off my chest. But what made that book a little bit of a slog is it was never done. Because every time I think I’m ready to submit the manuscripts, some other company would blow up. God damn and I gotta rewrite that chapter. Uh, countrywide. I gotta, oh, Washington Mutual, like it started with Bear Stearns, is what kicked that book off. And then every month, some a Lehman and AIG blow up, and here’s Goldman and here’s, um, here’s Morgan Stanley with the mitsubi. Like each chapter had to be rewritten four times. This book was really a joy to write. I hope it comes across how much fun it was putting together, because nobody was blowing up. I part of the reason I wrote the book is, you know, Michael batnick in my office like all right, he’s telling that story again. I can hear bat Nick’s eyes rolling. You know what, Mike, I’m going to put it down on paper, and let’s see what people think. All
Anthony Scaramucci 24:24
right, good for you. Let’s, let’s, let’s go to the questions. I got a few questions. You know, we always pick three questions from our audience that we distill Barry, what do you think about gold’s meteoric rise to three plus 1000? This is Angela from New York,
Barry Ritholtz 24:37
sure. So if you’re a trend follower, if that’s your particular flavor, gold has been a wildly successful trade over the past. Let’s call it five or six years. The challenge with gold over the past century is it’s more of a trade and less than of an than an investment. I started on a trade. Writing desk. So when I see gold, and by the way, I have a vivid recollection of when the GLD ETF was first rolled out, and I’m on CNBC leading up to the financial crisis, and like, yeah, you could buy some gold here. And I remember the anchors actually snorted at me. They actually laughed at me. So gold is a trade. The challenge with gold is it’s not a productive asset. There’s no dividend, there’s no yield, there’s no coupon. So when you’re buying gold, or many commodities, you’re buying it in response to economic conditions, some crowd psychology, but it’s not the sort of thing that’s going to compound over decades and centuries. Gold goes through these long periods where it crushes everything, and it goes through these long periods where it underperforms. So hey, anybody who’s a momentum trader, anybody who is a futures trader, my buddy, Mike COVID, I wrote the forward to his book. I know it’s got to be like 1010, years ago. Trend following talks about when gold is hot, every trend follower, every MTA guy, is all over it, and when it cools off, you can’t touch it with a 10 foot pole. So if you’re a trader, if you’re a speculator, I talk in the book about having a cowboy account and take 5% of your money do whatever the hell my I’m a junkie. I started on a trading desk. I’m always looking for that dopamine high, and I do the dumbest out of the money puts in calls on broad market indices, dumbest way to speculate, but it scratches my itch, and lead I write in the book that allows me to that allows my big, dumb lizard brain to leave my real money unmolested. If you’re a trader, if you’re a trend follower, gold is fantastic. One of the things I talk about extensively in the book, is how not to get fooled by people who are facile in number, the famous Joan Robinson quote, we start study economics not to understand the economy, but so as to not be fooled by other economists. You know, you really have to be careful with when people cherry pick starting dates of charts, I could show you a chart that shows gold kicking equities ass. If you go back to the right point, right point, right to before late, oh, seven. I could show you other charts where equities kick gold’s ass. It goes back and forth. You have to understand how easy it is. Anytime you see a chart, always look at the starting point. Hey, why are they picking that date? It’s one thing to say. Here’s one year, five, year 10, year 50 year, big, round numbers. But when someone says, look at this 12 and a half year chart, hey, why so? So if you’re a trader, if you’re a speculator, gold is a fantastic asset to trade, but if you’re putting money away from 100 years, or even for 2030, years, I want to bet on human innovation. I want to bet on the genius of people solving problems, figuring out how to provide goods and services to the economy, to the to people who are consumers, because history tells us that is a spectacular way to earn a good return.
Anthony Scaramucci 28:33
Well, well said. And you do, you do go over a lot of that in the book, let’s go to the next question. What recent evolution in finance excites or concerns you most?
Barry Ritholtz 28:47
So, so some of the things so after you know, 90 chapters, admittedly short, but a lot of things. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Beware of this, careful of that. The last 10 chapters of the book are like, all right, I can’t just tell you how not to do everything. Here are 10 things to do. One of the things I talk about is tax alpha, and it really applies to everybody. Now, the deduction against ordinary income is $3,000 a year of losses and blah, blah, blah. But if you are somebody who is sitting on a substantial amount of gains, and if you’ve been investing any length of time, the odds are that that’s the case. If you have a concentrated position and fill in the blank, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, united, health, Bitcoin, if it doesn’t matter, you will probably generate more net net returns by managing your taxes better than you will by market timing or whatever you’re doing with those holdings. So about six years ago, we started working with ocean. Want to see for their direct indexing product. I had never been a fan of direct indexing most of my career. It was clunky. The interfaces were terrible. You got these giant like, 1000 page quarterly statements. It was terrible. They figured it out. And so now canvas and O’Shaughnessy was purchased by Franklin Templeton. We were the first client. We’re currently the biggest client. I want to say, you know, somewhere around a quarter of our assets, about one and a half billion dollars, are in Canvas. Obviously, those numbers fluctuate based on on wherever we’re closing but, but that sort of thing has been really interesting. Currently than the next technology we’re working with. Eric golden, former bond manager fidelity, he set up canopy, which is the same basic concept, but for fixed income, how do we generate the max after tax returns for people who want income stream, want munis, and then there’s a handful of other tax related things. MEB Faber has an ETF, T, A X, Wes Gray. The guys over at alpha architect, ETF architect, bunch of geniuses, former military guys. Everything they do is has a military precision to it. They’ve come up with these really interesting ways that carefully track the IRS guidelines and the 40 Act guidelines as to, here’s how to to manage these big capital gains. You know, if you’re up 50 bips or down 50 bips against your benchmark, who nobody really pays attention. Like, like, clients aren’t going to notice that. But figure out, hey, we We saved you $300,000 this year in taxes. And here’s the thing, and here’s what we worked out with the tax team and your accountant, they’re like, wait, what you save me? How much money I don’t have to pay the IRS? People are like, that is real cash in their pocket. They’re not writing a check. And I think, you know the Dave nodding loves to say, the investing is a problem that’s been solved. We know how to invest it’s we just don’t do most of us just don’t do it because emotions and all these other things. I think organizational alpha, tax alpha and behavioral alpha is there’s so much more heads headroom there than I’m going to beat the S, p5, 100 by 50 basis points. Fantastic. Let’s go to the next
Anthony Scaramucci 32:45
one. Barry, what’s your take on crypto? Mrs. Michael from Florida.
Barry Ritholtz 32:48
So I think I have a sort of different perspective, and I think people are like, it’s always fun, and you and I know each other a long time to kind of be out there on the ledge and then watch the rest of the crowd slowly come towards you. So I look at Bitcoin as a big, Magnificent Seven type tech stock. And if you look at the market cap, and I’m not looking at where it closed, but let’s call it 1.71 point 8 trillion, something like that. It’s bigger than Facebook. It’s smaller than Google, if you think of Bitcoin, if you think of Bitcoin like a giant tech company, and like, I love the concept of smart contracts, I wrote a post about this a couple of years ago. Hey, there is going to be, uh, an application. I’m a, you know, I’m a big music guy. I go to a lot of shows. If Taylor Swift is tired of all the scalpers making more money on her shows than she makes, she could put her tickets for sale on a blockchain where her own, her own fans, who get a special number get access to this. They buy a ticket inexpensively for 50 bucks, if they choose to resell it, if they choose to scalp it, well, you could sell it for $1,000 but because it’s on the blockchain, and she’s Taylor Swift, she’s gonna say, Hey, I get 60% of this. You get 40% of it. And she gets to sell tickets to her hardcore fan base at a reasonable price. And then the scalpers who are coming in, they’re cut out. And if someone decides to flip the ticket for a profit, hey, it goes to the artist who should get the money, not a rentier, not a middleman that doesn’t add anything to the process. So I think there, you know, some people have criticized crypto as a solution in search of a problem. It’s a technology. We will figure out ways to deploy it the. Uptake has been slow because there’s a lot of entrenched interest. Just like search was a problem, Google figured that out, just like Cloud was a problem, cloud was a problem. Amazon figured that out, Office productivity software was a problem. Microsoft figured that out interface and ease of use was a problem. Apple figured that out. So I look at Bitcoin as you know, it’s a bet that there’s going to be some application that justifies this enormous Hey, somewhere between, somewhere between Facebook and Google, is this company now it’s not exactly a consumer facing company yet. It’s really a B to B solution in terms of at least that use case, the smart contracts. But there are going to be some other ideas. And you know, to some degree, to some degree, there’s been a lot of speculation. But isn’t that true about Nvidia? Isn’t that true about Apple and Amazon? Hasn’t there always been speculation in a new technology, in a fast sure Juniper Networks blew up, and global crossing was a disaster, and pets.com hit the shitter, but pets.com led to chewy and some of these other companies eventually, they were a little early. Bitcoin seems to have been early, but it’s still an evolving thing. And you know, hey, it’s not Google. It’s sort of Facebook. Without all the acquisitions, Facebook would be nothing without. Think of the Instagram and WhatsApp, and go down, go down the list of Facebook. The reason they changed the name to meta is is Facebook is now your parents social media. That’s not where you know the young people are, and they haven’t been there for a decade. But think of it those ways, and I don’t think of it as an asset class. I think of them as a Bitcoin is a giant tech company, and I’m really intrigued to see how the world adapts to it and how they make their way into our life. The iPhone had like, a two year head start, and so the iPhone is ubiquitous. It’s everywhere I, you know, stop and think about I board a plane with my app. I take a Uber with my app. I check my portfolio with my phone. Like everything you do in your life is on your phone. If bitcoin is gonna have staying power, it will eventually be that b to b n, hey, none of us buying Nvidia products. We get to use Nvidia in in the next layer. You know, if you use perplexity or chat GPT, Nvidia is somewhere in the background. But I don’t, I don’t buy Nvidia chips. I suspect bitcoin is going to be in the same place. All right? I’m
Anthony Scaramucci 38:01
going to leave it there. I’m going to give you the last word. The title of the book is how not to invest, but it’s really a book about how to invest. And you’re an amazing guy. We’ve been friends for a very long time, and we have the same shared life experience. You and me, baby. Okay, it’s you, me and Billy. Joel, my man, stuck on
Barry Ritholtz 38:20
Long Island. Thank you so much
