Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin - Billionaire Mike Novogratz on Crypto, AI, and What “Rich” Really Means

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

The Money School: The Complete Financial Education You Were Never Given Nicole's most comprehensive book yet, the financial curriculum that should have been taught in school but never was. From your first paycheck to investing, buying a home, building wealth, and planning your legacy, The Money School is the full course in plain English. Go check it out: https://nicolelapin.com/money-school-book Mike Novogratz has made a fortune, lost a fortune, and made it back. Goldman Sachs partner, hedge fund billionaire, then the loudest bull in crypto. Today, he tells me what he'd do with a thousand dollars right now… What number actually makes you rich… And whether a first-time investor should own any crypto at all… ----------------------- MORE FROM NICOLE LAPIN: 🎥 Youtube: / @moneyrehabshow 📸 Instagram: / moneyrehab 📽️ TikTok: / nicolelapin 🌐 Nicole's website: https://nicolelapin.com OTHER THINGS WE DO: 💰 Private Wealth Collective: https://privatewealthcollective.com 🏦 The Money School: https://themoneyschool.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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provided by Chimes Bank Partners. Qualifying direct deposits required. Terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com slash disclosures for detail. The only way people get rich is either to create something so spectacular that you're going to get a multiple on. And so build a company

or to bet on something with leverage. Mike Novigratz has built a fortune, he has lost a fortune, and he has built it all back again. A Goldman Sachs partner, a hedge fund billionaire, and the loudest crypto bull on the street. Today, he joins Money Rehab to tell us whether or not there's an AI bubble. The AI bubble is a bigger story than railroads.

It's a bigger story than the internet. It's a bigger story than crypto was. It's the biggest story of our lifetime, and therefore it would be the biggest bubble of our lifetime. When he thinks that bubble will pop. I just don't think this AI bubble is finished yet. And I don't know if that means Navidia $10 trillion before it crashes. And so you have this powerful story that's going to keep being fed at least for a few years.

What percentage of your portfolio should be in crypto and whether or not a first-time investor should have any crypto at all. 10% of their net worth is about the right amount, maybe 15. What's the sign that a crash is coming? I think the really, really bad crash would be if... And Nicole Lapton, the only financial expert you don't need a dictionary to understand. It's time for some money rehab. Mike Novogratz, welcome to money rehab. Thank you.

Thanks for having me over to your office. in your studios. What do you think? I was moving some of the accoutrement here, and I saw all of your military stuff. I mean, this is pretty badass. Like, you've flown helicopters in the Army. What's more scary? Landing a helicopter in bad weather or a bad market day? You basically don't want to land a helicopter in bad weather. You don't want to fly in bad weather. Like, it's interesting. I went Kobe Bryant. I have Kobe Bryant on my phone. I met him once and picture of me and him I carried on my phone because he was such a charming and charismatic and so so, so, so, so. to me when I met him, he died pilot error. Most helicopter crashes are pilot air. And it's usually

when the passenger pushes the pilot to fly in shitty weather. And so rule of thumb, the weather sucks. Go to the next day. You can always wait. Yeah. Also, Aspen as well. Don't try to, don't try to push pilots and crappy weather. What about the analogy in the market for that? It's a funny story. I have a plane and I have a pilot who I've known a long time from, I met him in flight school. And he was at this, you know, Gulfstream flight school. And they said, well, what do you do if your client is trying to push real hard? And you know it's not the right thing to do. He was like, oh, that's easy.

I just call his mom. Has he called your mom? He hasn't had to. I have learned to let go, let go let God and let him make the decisions. I wouldn't want to interview for a pilot job with you. I bet you're tough. So how do we look at some of the lessons that you learned doing that and take them over to what you learned in crappy market days.

Because that's not life or death, but I can feel that way. Listen, the hardest part of navigating markets, navigating crises in your own life is take a breath and try to disconnect at fight or flight, that fear response from the rational response. and I think it's kind of naturally do that. It's not always healthy because for me, a lot of that stress shows up in my body. And so every time I've gotten a massage for the last 40 years,

no matter what continent or what type massage, the practitioner says, are you okay? Your body tells me you're not okay, but are you okay? And so I actually can get very calm in my head, but the stress goes into my body. Like that's, I'm not advocating that. You need to figure out through exercise, meditation, how you just don't let that stress get to you.

I think I have a hack that makes me a good risk taker and good in emergency. I literally disconnect. You just dissociate. Dissociate. That's your advice. It's not my advice. That's why I have been successful. I wish, you know, my wife meditates for three hours a day.

Like, I wish I could literally just sometimes I process it out and don't let it get to me. But the body keeps score. The body keeps score. And my body says, ouch. I'm sure, but that's actually antithetical to what you should be doing in the market, right? Buy low, sell high is the opposite of what your emotions are telling you to do. Of course. So how do you counteract that?

Pattern recognition. So I've learned by low, sell high. I learn when everyone else is panicked, have courage. Part of having courage intellectually is to then understand, I'm going to be okay anyway, right? It's like, what are you scared of? You're scared of losing. People won't like you anymore. You're going to feel less worth about yourself.

And so I have had a tremendous amount of luck in that I have a really wonderful family. I grew up in a middle-class suburban neighborhood where my friends were great. I went to school. I had great roommates. And, you know, I was born a cheeky, cute kid. And so my whole life I've been patted on the head and told I'm liked. And so that security of feeling loved allows you to say, I can take more risk.

If you're nervous, if my success equals my love, you get more nervous. And so a lot of it is framing your own story of one of privilege. And people say, wow, you're a self-made man. That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. You're not a self-made man. Your parents have to have sex for you to be there. So no one is self-made. There's two people that make a you.

but you are nurtured by your family, you're nurtured by your teachers, you're driven to your practices by dad's friends. And so by the time you have some success, it's shared success. And if you allow people to share in that success, it takes some of the stress away. It doesn't take all away.

But how do you behave? Because it's really, that fight or flight response is, oh, I'm going to die. And death is a lot of things. It's not physically die. It's like, I'll go bankrupt. or I'll get fired. But your body feels like a bear is chasing you or you're going to die.

And so ideally, meditation, exercise, breathing, all of those things help. They help a lot. I actually, when I kick into dissociating as well, which is not great. But it's just, I think that's one of the reasons. I realized that I was once in a fire. And I was just very helpful getting everybody out and went back, put my daughter here. I said, you stay right here. And cool as a cucumber.

And then that night I was like, I had all this. And often I drink too much that night. And then the next day my back hurts. And I'm like, oh, where? But in that moment, I deal with distress. And then it just gets stored up. No doubt you're good at crisis. Where do you think that appetite for risk comes from the army, from wrestling? I mean, also you mentioned your siblings. You're one of seven. So six siblings that are also really badass. Like everybody in your family seems pretty risk on. So is it nature, nurture both? I think big families can be complicated, but there's a lot of benefit in having people that like you just because they have to like you. And when you do really well, they tease you and kind of take you down and notch. And when you do really poorly, they support you. And then you support each other. The trick of successful big families is that there's often a sibling or two that are mentoring the other siblings. Often their parents aren't the mentors.

Their parents are like the guiding light and the cheerleader, but they often don't have the skill set to really connect and mentor. It's the early successful kids. And that reads true of most families of multiple successful kids. You said that networking is a big part of your success. Do you have to be an extrovert to be successful? You know, I don't think so because I've seen a lot of introverts that are successful. I don't know what it is to feel like an introvert. I have literally been an extrovert from the time I was three.

And I watch my mother. If my mother is sitting on a park bench and the woman next door, she'll know everything about the woman's life. And then she'll come back to, you know, dinner table. And she'll be like, oh, my God, my friend Jean, and she's telling us all these stories about Jean's kid. I'm like, we don't know Jean or her kid. You know, she is such an extrovert.

And I think I inherited that. And so it does give you an advantage of being able to connect to people to not be scared of people. I think one of the big things that young people need to learn is that their voice matters. I remember at Goldman Sachs, I had these great mentors and people are like, how do you have those mentors? I was like, I just walked in those office and asked them a question. You're not how to do that? I was like, why not?

You know, they all use the same toilet. They're not that different. And if you approach people with admiration and awe and ask, but geez, how did you become so successful? Oh, they'll talk for hours. Now, you have to do your own work. You have to have something to add. But the fear of authority, the fear, I remember going to Princeton and middle class kids, a lot of middle class kids get in there. And next day you see, they're the rich kid. They went to prep school or they're rich kids. And it was so insightful. My first roommate was a very wealthy. Well, not very wealthy, but he was from a dominant New York family and famous. And he took me back to his house. And I realized other than they have. the best sheets in the planet, because in middle class you didn't have those beautiful sheets, right? You just had normal sheets. I was like, yeah, mom made his breakfast, nice friends, like using the same toilet. And at Princeton, there weren't like fancy dorms. Everyone was in the

same dorms. And at that point, all that really mattered was could you flirt with girls, like it was sports girls and a little bit academics? And he had no advantage over the rest of us. And so I was like, yeah, I'm just as worthy of being in the room. And that feeling of my voice matter that I'm just as worthy. I think I inherited from my mom or whatever. I didn't realize until later that it's, that's very difficult for a lot of people. They get nervous to come talk to the boss or, and I try to get people to say, hey, how do you get less nervous? You do some homework. You, but you got to feel comfortable with yourself. And that's like a life journey. There's eight billion people on the planet think they're not enough. It's the one thing

that makes us all human. They're not smart enough. They're not tall enough. Boops are too big. Their boobs are too small. They're too fat. They're too skinny. There's a thousand I'm not enoughs. And therefore, I will be loved. And so like journey in life is to figure out, you know what? You're perfect. You're plenty. And easy to say, hard to do. That's the work of living a great life to realizing that you're enough to be loved. And often that's literally the core work of therapy, of ayahuasca, of whatever journey you want to go to be in yourself, is understanding the impact your parents had on you. And realizing that there was traumas and non-traummas and all that background, understanding they did their best and letting it go, letting all their mistakes go

and loving them anyway. Then you're an adult. Because the people I love in life, they cheer for other people's successes. They don't feel belittled by other people's successes. I've always been enthusiastic about, oh my God, you're killing it, right? Even if I'm not doing well. Your success doesn't make me feel worse. It makes me feel better just because I know you. I get to share a little bit in your glory.

Listen, I want my own glory. I want to do well myself. But that mindset is so powerful because it's infectious. And the scarcity mindset, if you do well, I don't. do well. It's a negative energy. It's not a zero-sum game. Yeah. Mike, are you enough? Do you believe you're enough? Yeah, I worked to try to believe that. We had a gospel brunch this weekend at Rikers Island, which is a cool thing because I have gospel brunches and the guy who now runs prisons for New York, he came to the office and he said, hey, would you do one of those brunches at Rikers? I said,

of course I would. And so we brought 30, 25 visitors plus some great food and great music, gospel singers, this one woman, Victory Boyd, who was just a beautiful soul. We got together with 70, 80 inmates and celebrated. I had a three-hour concert and preaching and eating and just community. And it was so joyful. You saw tears. and laughter and joy. And the message there was, guys, we're all human. We make mistakes. There's redemption.

There's redemption in the gospel, but there's redemption in life. And you deserve to be treated like a human, even if you made mistakes, that you're enough. And for me, it turned out to be a beautiful, brilliant day. And everyone went there was touched. The people that were in Rikers were touched. The guy at Rikers who was running, it said, I think this might have been the best day at Rikers in the last 30 years. years. And so everyone's patting me on the back and giving me, you know, thank you so much for doing

this and thanking it. And that feels awkward even because you're like, I just, I didn't really do that much. I had my idea. It was actually his idea. And I told my staff and it was the music. And like, I was a part of it just because, but it was funny because I had a funny, funny relationship with being thanked. I was like, let me out of this thing. And one of my friends who's a real Christian man, says, guy, just relax. Just where's that resistance coming from? So even in that, moment of kind of glory, for me, there was some resistance. I didn't feel comfortable being thanked. You're not enough. Right? Because if you're in that Dalai Lama space where you are enough, people, where you realize it, you're just like, oh, thank you so much. You don't have reaction.

That was a long-winded way of saying, this is a constant journey to just be in that okay with yourself space. I think there are plenty of times I don't feel like I'm enough still. And And then you're like, well, that's stupid. It's not my dominant way of life. You catch yourself. Yeah, all the time. But it creeps up. So what motivates you now?

It doesn't sound like money motivates you. Maybe when you're- I like money because I like, money allows you to do things in a way of abundance. Like I don't have no idea what the gospel brunch cost me, but that was nothing, you know, food and transportation. And I work mostly because I have all these plans to. build a hotel and to give it away. And so I think what motivates me is I'm 62. I hope to have 30 good years left of way to make a positive impact. And that costs money. It's not just money. George Soros once said that I thought it was so interesting. He said, I got to keep working because I

have, I got to keep giving. Paul Jones is the best at it. We still wake up at three in the morning and are trading. And like, if you're Paul Jones at just turned 70 today, happy birthday Paul or me or Stan Rocka Mueller, like the guys that are, and I don't even put myself in their category, those guys are not an elite level of just commitment and success as investors. That doesn't come without working. They work their tails often. And both of them work to give it away. We have enough houses. Nobody's running out of money. No. And so you're working chaotic. Like there's an adrenaline to doing it. You stay young by being curious. I started that with why I'm in the hotel business. And the market.

markets are like the ultimate curiosity machine. Every day there's new stories. I have spent so much time, even today, try and understand AI, demand for power, data center, data center politics. Those are all interesting narratives, and they tie together with a broader narrative. Is AI going to be good for society or bad society?

How do we make it? And so each one of us have the ability to call experts, to have them come into our office, to get up the speed, to then have a seat at the table, possibly, on what should policy be? And so that alone fills your day with something that is nourishing. That gives you energy, right? As opposed to you're retired and you're like,

who are we going to golf with today? And we're going to read the newspaper and try to understand the thing, but not do the extra work to really understand it, and then not have a seat at the table, not be able to impact people's lives. You know, I think the guys that work well and well past the retirement age are people that just have a different approach. I mean, look at Warren Buffett even.

And he never ate well. He drank Coke every day. But he unbelievably curious mind. Yeah. I don't think anyone's retiring from the guys you mentioned. But you've made a fortune. You've lost a fortune. You've made a fortune.

Is that the order right? It's funny because there's a narrative that the last fortune in my kid was like, Dad. This is such a bullshit narrative because like even when you left Fortress, you know, you were still worth $600 million or some crazy fortune. And even when I left Goldman Sachs, I was still worth $15 million, which was a crazy fortune. And so I have had big fluctuations in my P&L because I've, my personal wealth has often been tied to a stock price. Right. Fortress of stock went from 35 all the way to one. And then they sold at eight. What a ride. I don't. I do. I do. don't tie who I am to that number. So your net worth does not reflect your self-worth, or how often do you check? You know, unfortunately, or maybe nowadays, because I have money outside of Galaxy and I have money in Galaxy and the stock price moves every day, it's like Google Alert. It literally seems to show up almost every freaking week. And I'm like, yeah, they're pretty close.

And so, but it doesn't, it doesn't impact me anymore. The first time you make a million dollars, you're like, wow, a millionaire. I remember I was 31 years old. Nothing really, because I have always spent more money than I had. I have always been in debt. I always had confidence I'd make money. So even in college, I, like, borrowed so much money from rich kids with no way of paying it back. As a matter of fact, I actually was going to work in Washington.

And the best job I could get was out of the Army. It was like $16,000 a year. And I was like, dude, I owe my roommate more than that. And so some wise guy said, he should go to New York and make your impact first and come back to D.C. when you actually learn something. So what's crazy is that there's a different word for rich people with debt. It's leveraging or financing compared to debt. Yeah. It's the same tool. That's just how to use it. But we just had Bill Ackman on the show. And he said that's how everybody gets in trouble when they're over leveraged, over-margined. The only way people get rich is either to create something so spectacular that you're going to get.

a multiple on it. So build a company, and those are the richest people in the world, right? Or to bet on something with leverage. So the first way most Americans get their nest egg is real estate. Why is that? Because they can put 5% down with an FHA loan or 15% down or 20% down, get leverage, non-recourse leverage in most cases, and buy an asset. And that asset for the last 50 years went up. So my parents, who's $70,000 house is now worth a million are millionaires because they were able to get leverage. Well, ideally you want to make more of a percentage than your borrowing, right? You need to get that spread. That's the key part. So in real estate, you need to buy something that appreciates. More than the percentage of your mortgage. Yes. Leverage well used is the wealth engine. Leverage, too much leverage or foolish leverage, or the biggest cause of death in financial markets is an asset liability mismatch. I'm buying a five-year asset, but I'm borrowing in three-month increments. Well, if the rates change, John, or my access to that, borrowing goes away, I'm dead. There are two ways people die in financial markets. Asset liability mismatches.

and excessive leverage. But that's why you used to drive me crazy in crypto. Crypto was this wildly volatile asset. Yet the exchanges would offer 50, 60, 100 times leverage. I was like, taking 50 times leverage on a 60-vall asset is the definition of insanity. You can be stopped out in seconds. And it's almost like buying a lottery ticket. We do a shi-job globally and certainly in the U.S.

of giving people a decent financial education on or an investing education. And I know there's some, you know, when you sign up a brokerage firm, you have to fill out, you know, what your risk tolerance is. And it doesn't get close to trying to give people. They make us take a driver's test to drive a car. I always thought you should have to take a gun test to own a gun. And quite frankly, to learn to be a speculator, there should be some test. before your parents or yourself let you play in the markets. We are in violent agreement about this.

We have this gambling culture that has overtaken America. Listen, I was part of it, so I'm not trying to be a hypocrite. Like crypto was a speculative. It's moving from speculative to useful, but its first 10 years was purely speculative asset. One of the reasons it had a little lull is because people like, Now I can do sports betting or prediction markets or online gambling. And we have way too much of young people's mind shift and capital going into just speculative games where most of them don't have any real skills. Some learn skills, right?

I got a son-in-law who's a really good meme coin trader. And when I sat with him, his charting system was more sophisticated than mine. I was like, show me what you're doing here. There's lots of ways to learn online. There's courses. There's, you know, podcasts. But it's not necessarily the most productive use of a young man's time. And it's, I mean, it's rampant.

And it's seriously, it's zero part of a woman's time. Like, I have two daughters or two sons. My daughters are not in chat groups about, they don't bet on sports. They're not crypto traders. Every one of the guys, their husbands, they're all in telegraphs. chats and with their friends and men bond around gambling, a man bond around investing, partly because men have always felt like they need the money to make the next step in life. And that wasn't part of the training of women, even though a woman wants to live on her own,

she needs money. I'm not saying it's the reality, but the ethos. And so it's really interesting. It talked to 25 to 30-year-old men, ask them how many chat groups they're in off the charts and ask that same question, women, none. Well, not if I have anything to do with it. That's why I left CNBC and I wrote rich and boss and all these books for women to try and democratize that. My group chats are all about investing to you. And I think that opening up that dialogue is super, super important. 100% in all areas.

I want to double click on the age of speculation for crypto. But before we move on, I just want to understand what is your tolerance for leverage. Like how much leverage do you think is appropriate? You know, it's a contextual question. If I, I remember one day, I had this weird instinct that dollar yen was going to fall. This was I was back at Fortress. And volatility was low. So I said, go buy me $500 million of a one day, 40 basis points out of the day money option. So it was like just a lottery ticket. I love gambling a little bit. Like lottery. I paid a lottery every time. It's over a billion dollars. You do? I love it. Stop it. The big one, the big one. You buy. You buy a lottery ticket? I do.

Mike Nogras. Is this a joke? I have been really lucky my whole life. Every time it's, you still over $100 million. Because it's true. I buy lottery tickets. Why? Just because I just like the spirit of lottery.

The scratchers? Or you pick numbers? No, no. This is when the mega goes over, you know, when it gets up to $6 billion, $800 million. Do you do quick pick? What? Quick pick? I don't.

I don't. Just when the mega gets big. Powerball or the mega. At the big numbers, I go buy 100 tickets. Are you doing the numbers that? I used to pick my own numbers, but then when I started, I need to buy 100 tickets and I just have the auto pick. This is crazy. It's not in that.

It's fun. So I made by that is sports betting is fun. If I go to the sport, you probably want to put a bet on it, race horses. But you have to have a budget. You have to realize it's entertainment value. It's not a long time plan. It's not economic wealth creation. Yeah, it's not a plan.

Unless you dedicate your life to it, you're not going to beat the odds. The house wins. Go to Atlantic City. I'll go, I'll have a bunch of Jack Daniels. I will hit the craps table or the blackjack table and have fun with a budget and I love it. But I don't do it very often. But when my friends says, I think I got a system, you're like, just hang up with the thing. You don't have a system.

The house has a system. The house has an edge. That's why they're big hotels in Atlantic City. Jane Street is the house in same-day options, right? Like they are. That's why they make sense. Jane Street and those groups. And so you've been very careful in gambling.

So in options, you know, your defined loss, you can get huge leverage. In general, most options over time, the house wins, right? So Jane Street and Jump have made fortunes because all these young kids are doing same-day options and they take the other side. And because volatility plays out. And so there's a lot of lottery ticket to it. I got lucky in the timing or my instinct was right. And so I would rather have people spend money on premium so, you know, exactly what you

could lose than sell options. Nobody who's non-professional should ever sell options. It's like literally the definition of insanity. And even for pros, you really better know what the downside is. It's like shorting stocks. Shorting stocks can be so dangerous because as they go up, your basis infinitely grows. I mean, your position infinitely grows. And so you short something at two that goes to 10, and you're like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's my whole let note worth. And I know, like, in one hand, we think finance should be democratized. That doesn't mean everyone should be a player, just like we should all have access to health care, but I shouldn't be able to do neurosurgery on you. And being a great investor takes a lot of training. It takes a lot of skill. It takes a lot of experience.

There's a conflict between the term democratization of finance, where I do believe everyone should have access to great product. Never should access to the same. The rich guys shouldn't have a separate lane. well, I get invested in the good stuff and you don't. I made a fortune in SpaceX because I had access to SpaceX in 2014 and you didn't. I'm positive if you had access and someone said, if I had said, hey, put a little money in SpaceX. These are the three reasons why. Elon Musk has already fucking done it with Tesla.

Space, he's got a monopoly in. And space is going to be a big deal just from all these different reasons. You'd probably say, I'll put a little money in there. You didn't have the option. So, like, that's the democratization of politics. that we need, not meaning everyone should be their own speculator. So an accredited investor is BS, the self-attestation. Yeah, the self-actestation doesn't really make sense.

There should be something more stringent. What should that look like? I haven't figured that out per se, and I don't want the nanny state label. I just think, even here, like, we were, like, thinking about our wealth management business, and I was like, maybe one of the goals of the whole firm should be we want our clients to get wealthier. Right. That's not the goal if you're, I'm not going to pick on finance, but any of the big exchanges, right? They set up these amazing platforms to get people access and, you know, when you're giving all this leverage, almost by definition, you know you're going to burn through clients. So for regular investors, do not over leverage crypto. Right. Well, you could take some leverage,

right? Right. Like, again, I take leverage all the time. But. And so what would that look like? That would look like, hey, I think Bitcoin's at 83,000 right now. And I think there's a real shot we get up to 100,000 by year end. But if it goes below 80 or 79, I think this could be a false sense of enthusiasm. We can go back down. So now I'm going to take buy it at 83 and I'm going to have a stop loss at 79. right so I know I go lose four whatever that would be on 80 is probably 6%.

So I'm going to risk 6%. So it doesn't matter my notion. I mean, so how much money am I willing to lose? So I'm willing to lose $600. I'll buy $100 million. I look at the amount I'm willing to lose. And so you get more leverage if your entry point is closer to your stop loss. Of course, there's more risk there, but you get more leverage.

For the same bet, so much of importance in markets if you're trading as opposed to investing is your entry point, right? If you bought Bitcoin at 60, you feel much better here at 82, 83, than if you bought it at 84. Emotionally, and so patience to get in right is really important. If you're a long-term investor and you're not close enough to market that you think should be a market, market timer that you've got to be in because you just in two weeks had the whole year's move, 60 to 80. And so if you're awaiting, you missed it. And so you've got to determine to start. Am I trading or am I investing? And there are different time horizons and there are different volatility horizons you're willing to take. For a regular investor, how much should they

invest in crypto? 10% of their net worth is about the right amount, maybe 15. I would say one, one to 10%. We just had Brian Armstrong on the show, and he said one to 10%, but start with one. So you would say more than that? Well, listen, I think Bitcoin is becoming a core holding of anyone's portfolio. We have a government that has proven itself completely ineffective at reining in the amount of debt we have as a country. We had a good chance, right? We had a doge that was going to cut government inefficiency and try to, we're doing.

the spending, and we had Scott Besson, who is a very smart guy who said, I'm going to go for 3% budget deficit, 3% growth, right, $3.3 oil. And guess what? Scott got 7% budget deficit, right? 450 oil. Like, we're off. They lost, and Doge was a complete failure. And debt, Instead of going from 39 trillion to 39 trillion to 38.5 is 40, 41 on its way to 50. As long as that debt is heading higher and heading higher in an accelerating rate, the story for Bitcoin is just too real. And we will monetize our way out of this, at one way or the other, which will create inflation. It's creating pain for the bottom shape of the K-shaped recovery. New York is so much more expensive than it used to. All of America,

is six years ago, before Biden got elected the first, his only, only time, right? So six years ago, and buy a medium-sized Diet Coke for 99 cents, and today it's $2.30 at McDonald's. I got this from Ken Griffin, who drinks Diet Coke every day on his way to work. That's a lot of inflation, right? That's, you know, 120% in six years. You know, you look at eggs, you look at gas, you look at rents in New York. I mean, quite frankly, you can't live in New York anymore for under 80 grand. So that the minimum wage, if you believed in the minimum wage, should be 50 bucks an hour. Not 60.

You go to, you go to Allo or Nike and you talk to, I do this all the time, I talk to the workers and ask them what they're making. What do they pay this job? It's always 16, 17, 50 an hour. That doesn't pay their rent, right? And so we have a real problem in America. And the only way we're going to get rid of this debt is inflation, which just is a tax against the middle class and the working class. So help me understand the correlation of crypto as digital gold. That's how it was sold, right?

But in 2022, stocks fell 19 percent, crypto fell 65 percent. So is it correlated, uncorrelated? How should you look at it as a new investor? I think you should look at it as a 14-year-old asset versus a 3,000-year-old asset. And these both are assets about narrative. And they will get more or less volume, energy around their narrative at different times with the same similar story. Who's buying gold at Central Banks? It's big old institutions.

And they were the biggest buyers of gold. And then for a while, we got the taxi cab drivers in, right? Silver went crazy. And then you had a bubble. It popped. And then it came way down. And now it's been reconciledating for the next time that story goes away. What I'm here to say is until we get fiscal responsibility,

financial market prudence in the West, that narrative is just going to keep just coming back and coming back. So Bitcoin looked dead in the water most of this year. People ask me, what about crypto? I would use the word, meh, nah. And all of a sudden, Scott Besson says, I'm going to buy treasuries. I'm going to put my finger in the dike

and try to buy treasuries back that we've issued to adjust the curve. The entire world was like, oh shit, we're screwed. there's a bubble in the government bond market, and he just admitted it. And Bitcoin goes 60 to 80. It was that. That brought the narrative back in play. And now it's back in play. It's not going away. And so we're going to have, I'm not saying we're going to go straight up. But we saw the ETF market re-energize. We saw institutions. We had sovereign wealth funding here last week,

say, I got to get money, money into it. Like the Bitcoin narrative is starting to come back. And remember, markets are always about energy. Where's the energy? What are people talking about? Why Korean memory stocks were the greatest thing is because, hey, they're cheap companies, and everyone started talking about them. And so it's like a hive of bees that go to where the energy is. And there was zero energy in crypto until six weeks ago.

Best it makes one comment, one comment, it triggered all the light bulbs on. You've said that the age of speculation for crypto is over. You said that earlier this year. The only use case up until recently had been stable coins and speculation. We speculated on these tokens that were going to help change the future. Some will. A lot won't. And so you basically had speculative communities that could pump themselves up on a narrative.

And once that narrative got ran out of gas, the prices went way down. now you're going to need, because there's so many other ways to speculate, there's so much other energy, AI is a bigger story than crypto. Sorry, crypto guys, it just is. You're going to need things that actually work. And so something like hyperliquid, which is up 230% this year, when basically all the crypto is down three to five percent. One's up to 30. Everything else is down three to five because it works. You actually get paid to use it. As they make money, they buy their token back. So it feels more like an equity. But mostly, All the offshore people first were trading crypto on there, and now they're trading equities on there.

So you've converted a lot of crypto power users to equity speculative power users, right, to commodity speculative power users, all on XYZ. That runs on top of hyperliquid. If you build something that people use, you're going to see money flow back into it. And that prices might even go further than they should. The old versions of crypto, like I don't think the Celestia token, which was the first modular blockchain, and everyone loved Celestia. It was the hardest thing to get in. That thing ain't coming back. You know, some of the core infrastructure piece as well,

because the story of tokenization being built on top of Ethereum or Solana is a real story. And that's bringing a narrative back. But we really need to see tokenization being built on top of those things for that story to continue. So you also said that the era of expecting outsized returns is ending. So where do you get the outsized returns? Well, there's been outsized returns. Well, there's been outsized returns in AI venture, right? And there'll be some. I mean, again, like, you know, Hyperliqu was a great one this time. But even that, like on the year's up 100 and, what I say, 200 percent. But that's not 8x. Like, crypto guys used to get into things. They wanted a 10x their money. And that's over.

I think that's over for any scalable thing. There might be one off here or there, you know. And listen, you just did it in Anthropic. You did it in etched. We put an investment into this amazing chip company that's building a much faster chip than the video has. And, you know, 18 months ago, it was a $300 million company, and today it's a $30 billion company. And so you're seeing it some of them in the privates, mostly around AI and AI infrastructure. I don't see it happening in tokens. With all of the craziness happening in Washington that you alluded, we had Ray Dahlia on the show. He's been talking about a crash for a long, long time. First, you agree with him that that's going to happen.

And second, if it does, is Crypto the winner. He does an amazing job of framing the big epical. Epical, is that the word? Apocalyptic. No, no, not apical. It feels apocalyptic. It does feel. No, but the big moves throughout history that repeat themselves.

Oh, like. Listen, we have politics that are going to push ourselves to a wealth tax. Wealth taxes are bad for markets because people need to sell. Like, even the California wealth tax, just to put in perspective. If a 5% wealth tax went through and you're worth $5 billion, you might only have $400 million of liquidity. Well, $5 billion times 5% is $250. So you basically are either giving all your liquidity away and having no cushion or your selling much assets. But a wealth tax by definition forces selling.

And so once you start that process and fear of wealth tax, there's more selling pressure. I think that's what Ray's argument would be. Yeah, apocalyptic, like E-P-O-C-H, right? Like different eras. And epic, as opposed to, I guess. Ray will be right in time. What is interesting now is the markets want to challenge him. Hold Ray, who I agree with in big picture, with this other idea that bubbles happen over stories that fundamentally change everything about our lives.

the internet changed everything about our lives right in 1999 at the peak of the internet bubble we didn't date over the internet we didn't watch movies on the internet we did nothing on the internet we talked about it but it hadn't had any impact on our lives we didn't get the iPhone till by having 2006 or seven or five we were ready in that same zone yet we peaked and we didn't go back to the same high in the nasdaq for 16 years the railroad bubble is the same way the AI bubble the AI bubble bubble is a bigger story than railroads. It's a bigger story than the internet. It's a bigger story than crypto was. It's the biggest story of our lifetime. And therefore, it will be the biggest bubble of our lifetime. And because of this idea of an infinite learning machine, which creates in some ways an infinite ROI, there's almost no price you're willing to not risk to be part of that. And there's enough new information weekly that feeds that narrative. I mean, I downloaded Muse. And I was so mad that I'm running this company because as a CEO of a public company,

you really can't let Muse have to do it on a non-work phone and not just on a tiny bit of my life. You can't let it into your life because there's all kinds of security protocols. And what do you think security companies are going to be a big winner? Oh, huge winner. I mean, just nonstop winner. But all you think about using users, this is the first commercial app that's going to turn people positive on the AI story. And this is day one. I mean, I was using it all weekend.

I do this. It made me a reservation. You know, it's really good. And that's their first shot at it. And we haven't seen Amazon's version and Google's version. And so I just don't think this AI bubble is finished yet. And I don't know if that means Navidia, $10 trillion before. before it crashes. And so you have this powerful story that's going to keep being fed at least for a few

years. And then you have this interest rate going up. The stock market is literally incomprehensible. Every single person I know that had studied the stock market their entire life, if you had told them race from people were there today, they would have S&Ps way down. They'd have NASP way down, not 2% from the old time on it in the S&P. And so there's this tension between the reality, Ray's reality, which is coming, and the hope and bubble-licious idea that this AI is going to go. And listen, the crazy part is how you square that circle is our only real hope that Ray is wrong, our only real hope that the U.S. doesn't go bankrupt, is AI works, that AI can deliver for 5% growth with 2% inflation.

Because the productivity, after you get this inflation bubble now is partly coming from the war and partly coming from this Cappex boom. But after you build it out and AI starts really working, it is a deflationary. You know, it increases productivity, therefore it lowers prices

and creates this age of abundance. Like for America to get out of the $41 trillion in deficit debt, we need AI to work. So we're going to have a bubble. We're in a bubble and we're going to have a bigger bubble. But where, I guess, in the cycle are we? Goldman has come out and said we're more like 1999, 1997 compared to the dot-com bubble. You know, it's like pornography.

You don't know how to define it, but you know it when you see it. You don't really know when these things crash until they start crashing. If you look at silver six months ago and you go back and look at the chart of silver, it goes wildly parabolic and then a big crash and it bounces and it fails. And they can say, well, that was the silver bubble, at least for the chapter. And we haven't had that yet. What does that mean? That means a 20, 25% precipitous fast fall in the NASDAQ and then a bounce because people

that miss buying the Vitiate at 210 can now get a, that didn't buy it at 160 the first time get a chance to buy it at 160. So it's gone from 210 to 160. Now you've got to buy Navidate. Right. And they buy it, it goes back up a little and then rolls again. When it rolls again, you know, it's over. When do you think that's going to happen? We just haven't had it yet. We haven't had that below off moment. Look at the chart of the S&P. Put it on your podcast. And that doesn't look like what market tops look like. Market types look like the silver top or the micro strategy top when it got to 600, where it just goes to like infinity and beyond and then collapses and goes and then slowly comes back down. So we haven't had the blow off top in equities. We just haven't in tech. And you've got companies that are all still making a fortune.

Like meta looks cheap. You know, it's going to go about another hundred bucks. These companies, the mag seven, mag, whatever you want to call it, you can put new ones that didn't take some out. I think it's gone from fangs to mangoes. But that's the tension because otherwise you're like, oh my God, look at rates, look at rates, look at rates. And at one point they hit all done. where gold and crypto shake out of that cycle, it's really hard to predict because normally when

there's risk sell off, people sell what they have. They just need to get back to home. If the dollar is selling off, normally the dollar rallies, right? Home is still the U.S. no matter as shitty as our foreign relationships can be, as bad as our deficit. Right now, gun to everyone's head, safety is a treasury bill. If that changes, so you got to watch the dollar. If the market goes down and the dollar sells off, then crypto is going to go much, much higher. If the normal reaction is, just put me in treasury bills, right? It's a different story. And so why do people lose faith in the U.S.? We have a president who has broadly gone out and verbally assaulted most of our neighbors and our bondhold, you know, people that have bought our

bonds. And so they don't like us as much. We are not like nearly as much overseas as we used to be. And so, and you can see it in the foreign holdings of treasuries are all going down, right? China's selling treasuries, Russia's selling, sold their treasuries, right? People don't want to own as many treasuries as they used to. But we still have the strongest military, though that's being questioned, right? We're losing this war in Iran, or at least it's been much harder than we thought it would be. And there's no end in sight. And so there's an argument that the dollar could lose a lot of strength, but it hasn't.

And so you've got to watch that very carefully. So that's the bellwether. What's the sign that a crash is coming? Well, I think the really, really bad crash would be if stocks down, dollar down, right? That would be like people just went out of the U.S. Until that, and that's really the, does the bond market unhinged? And we're watching it in slow motion. And so Ray might be right in the next few months even.

You've got to watch the bond market. I'm telling you, I've never seen a stock market that trades with as much resilience to interest rates as this one. And I really do believe that's because this AI story is bigger than anything we've ever been part of. So if we're still maybe in the 1997 analogy compared to the dot-com bubble and there's still a room to grow, if I have $1,000 right now, where should I put it to capture some of that? Galaxy stock, I like. Listen, we are... But you're not biased. I'm not biased.

But if AI works, we're going to work, right? The data center is the foundation of the AI boom, and we have a very, I think, undervalued proposition. But listen, you've got to still, unfortunately, you've got to be long the Mag 7. You've got to be long meta. You've got to be long. The hyperscalers that are going to play this

that have the Korean memory stocks look cheap. They're three times earnings. What's hard is, I have no idea what the world's going to look like in three years. But I think for the next three years, you know, if these guys can make their market cap back in three years. It feels like you've got good downside protection. And so you can just buy the cost because it pretty much is just their big three stocks. But I-NX-SK, Samsung, like it's still an AI bet. I like Bitcoin because I think we tested the downside a lot at 60 and there was no more

sellers. And so does it mean to go straight up from today? No. But I feel like there's a much better chance we end the year at 100 than we end the year at 50. So of that $1,000, how much am I putting in to what, to crypto? Like, what percentage? Obviously, you want some safe. What age you are? What you have in real estate. I actually love real estate right now, high-end real estate. So like New York City apartments, beach properties, I just think there's a lot of wealth and those things. In any kind of debasement, real estate does really well. Right. So hard assets. So I don't know. I'm probably 15% in crypto. And that's probably two-thirds Bitcoin and one-third, you know, some other cryptos. I mean, my own property of Ethereum,

I have Salon, I have hyperliquiter, my three kind of core longs outside of Bitcoin. It's probably 40% equities. It's probably some fixed income. I think it, you know, we're five and a half percent, you know, three years, you're putting some there. That's probably as much as we're going to high rates at one point. But also you want that as your dry powder. Yeah, I think if you can't manage a thousand bucks, you can't manage a million. Yeah. And so if you're just starting out, you know, where do you put that money?

And also, what is your definition of, we talked about enough, but what about enough money? What is your definition of being rich? Some say 25 times expenses. I think rich, it's a really interesting question because it's, you know, like when you're the young Wall Street, I think, if I can only make this and then I can live off the interest, I'm good, that's from I'm going to quit. And you get there, you're like, oh, my wildlife's, more expensive or I have higher aspirations.

And so it's a moving target. But it's when you can comfortably know that you and your family can operate the way they want to. But I mean by operate that can live the way they want to. They can take off. They can have vacations. They can keep up with their neighbors. That they can have a comfortable life. And you define, like, listen, people need three things in life to feel good.

They need financial market security. So that's different for everybody. They need purpose. What do I wake up? What do I care about? What do I do? And they need community. And so there are people that feel so rich on so much less money than a lot of us have because they've got great community.

They've got purpose. And they have enough money that their kids can go to school, their medical's paid for, their housing's paid for, and they got plenty to take one or two vacations a year. And quite frankly, they have very rich lives. What's happening in the U.S. is that threshold of those three things is being questioned. I'm going to lose my job to AI. That's my purpose. I don't have enough money to pay for my health care because it's just getting more and more expensive. I don't have enough money to pay for food, right? I mean, 30% of New York goes to bed food insecure. That's an insane, insane number. Right? We have 25% of the city to live under the poverty line.

that's an insane number. But I think that's what rich is, when you can cross those three things. Because other than that, it's like, okay, you know, there's ultra rich, they're super rich, there's do you want a yacht? You don't live much better if you want to think about real rich. Like my friends that are worth $100 million, which is a gigantic amount of money, their lives don't really make, other than they give less away, the guy that's worth 500 million or a billion or a $3 billion.

You've got a house, a beach house, a bunch of kids, and then some charity stuff. Right? It's not like you can't eat that much cereal or that much sushi. You can only watch one TV at a time. Yeah. So where do you think the biggest difference comes in? I think once you hit $100,000. It's income.

But again, $100,000 in New York and you're poor. You can't, again, I'm just do the math. Our average one bedroom is 3,500. That's not Manhattan. That's the city. So at 3,500 times 12, you're 40,000 after-tax dollars just for your rent, to live by yourself in an okay one-bedroom. That's not a beautiful one-bedroom.

Food, internet, insurance, at $80,000 you're just making it. So what's the most significant zero to add? I think in a city like New York, it's. 500,000 income, you feel like, and some stability around that, right? But if we're in Alabama, your 100 is probably a pretty good, 125 is a pretty good number. A lot of it is where you are. A lot of it's your confidence around the stability of that income. I'm not talking about wealth, right? Like wealth is your, I can fall back enough to work. Like that's a bigger number because you should just look at that and say times 5.0.5. So I have $10 million.

I can feel pretty comfortable with getting a half a million a year to live off. And living off the interest? Yeah. Like the four or five percent rule. So quite frankly, you need $10 million of wealth to feel okay in New York City. Is that the definition of FU money that? No, that's starting on FU money. That's to feel okay in New York City.

That gives you $500,000 a year to live. Again, now you've had a wife and two kids, so you don't have a one-bedroom apartment. You have a three-bedroom or four-bedroom apartment, and your rents $25,000. a month. So quickly, it's like, that's $2.50 a year just in rent. 25,000 a month does not get you a beautiful four-bedroom in New York. It just doesn't. And so New York has gotten so expensive that that level just keeps going up. What about people who just want to get in the game, first-time investors who want to make their first $100K? What should they do? The hard part is grinding really hard to go from a $16 an hour job

after an 18 hour in a job is admirable, but it's not gonna change the game, right? And so in some ways, you have to redefine what you're trying to do. How do I get the confidence to think I deserve to be in that room, right? We don't have a person that works at this firm that doesn't make good money, including by receptionist,

our assistants, our being assistant takes a little wit because you're gonna put up with, nervous, aggressive people at times. It takes being organized. It takes being pleasant. It takes, but it doesn't take prior skills, right? You know, we've hired some more citizens out of college that have, and they get their jobs because they present that they want to be in this world, that they deserve to be in this world.

And so they might be starting at $100,000 plus or sometimes more versus, is working, you know, selling at Allo for $40,000. And so some of it is how do you put yourself in a position where you feel worthy? How do you invest in yourself and your self-confidence? We started with this where I feel I deserve to be in that seat. Investing in that is more important in some ways of trying to save a teeny bit or to try to get from 16 to 18. Like there's a quantum leap you need to be. Yeah, I mean, I've had this debate many, many times when Kevin O'Leary came.

on the show and yelled at me for saying people can buy their latte because I don't think that you can budget your way into wealth. He didn't. You didn't. No one's budgeted their way into wealth. They've grown their way into wealth. And they've lucked their way into some because a lot of real wealth comes in nonlinear jumps. What I mean by that is you got lucky to be at a company that you got stock in when the stock

was at three. We gave a ton of options and weighed $3 a share. And then our stock went to 40. And every one of those employees that were here at that time had some version of wealth, right? From loyal people that had good jobs, but never the high flying jobs, that all of a sudden had $4 million of stock or $6 million of stock. And that's wealth. You've got to be smart about it.

And so being at a young company is one way to get wealthier, that's a bit of helping them build it and being lucky that you get options. But you've got to find a way to own equity in something. That's one way to get wealth. The other is to develop a skill set that the market will pay for. And that comes from internal investing in confidence. It just does. And, you know, that's going to be harder to navigate as AI is filling different parts of the universe.

But that's always going to be, can we hire an invest in confidence. So what can you do in your life to build confidence? And the third way is once in a blue moon, you get an early look. You know, if you were around me and I was out drinking and I would have said, you got to put some money in Ethereum. And I got guys that come up on the street to me and thank me because they listened to me and they put some money in Ethereum and they've made. Do you told random dudes at a bar to buy Ethereum? I told, I'm a hyper, hyper extrovert. If you sat next to me on a plane, if you were my ski instructor, I'd probably would give you half, you know, like, yes.

They got, what do you do up Wall Street? What should you buy? Oh, you should buy some of this, buy some of this. But what happens mostly, so I tell you to buy Ethereum at 1, and you put $1,000 into it. That was a lot of money for you. You have $1,000 is your good bet. It goes to $8. Your girlfriend's like, too, dude, you know.

We get actually engaged. You can buy my ring now. Or it goes to 30. That's a down payment on the house. It goes to 80. It's a change in my life. I didn't sell mine because I was already rich. It was a small amount of money.

And then it grew to a huge amount of money because of theory went all the way to $4,000. You put $1,000 in at $1,000 and what's it worth at $4,000? A whole lot, right? Millions. But what if it goes to zero? It'll think a lot of shit coins did. So you'd be right. So that's all about network.

If you're somebody young, you want to invest in a network of people that are winning. So I talk about this in the underserved communities. I have this one friend who we've taken on our under our wings because he became our friend and mentored. And his friend started coming out of a house that they all wanted some business advice. And you realize in his neighborhood, in New York City, right, in Flatbush, there was no one who had access to knowledge, financial knowledge, and deals. And so then he got access and he's doing very well. And so much is access. Can you find the person in your community that?

that's doing better. Can you find, can you get to the community next door to yours or a gentle, tangential that feels like they're doing well? Like, what are they investing? And you learn from other people. You can learn on the internet. You can learn from who you follow. But you need to be connected somehow to people that are winning. And like Stan Druckumler, 34 years. of 30% returns. So when you see them on CNBC, listen, right? What I learned, which was really interesting in the first Bitcoin frenzy, call it 2015, 16, 17, a lot of wrestlers.

I was a wrestler, would call me up, and I was, I didn't have a company at the time, so I felt much freer giving people advice. And they'd get into something. And, you know, back then you had to get in and you had to get out. And I would then, if I thought about it, I would text him, hey, just so you know, I'm exiting. You know, you made nice money. And I'd see him later. I was like, hey, did you make any money?

And they're like, oh. I was like, why did you just say I told you to sell? And they're like, ah, my buddy Jimmy thought it was going higher. And I'm thinking to myself, I'm in the center of the universe. I was your smart guy that got you into the thing. And now you're listening to Jimmy. Like, shame on you. Like, develop a network who to trust and who not to trust.

Well, I love that you're doing this because we're a. able to reach so many more people with your brain juice. Can we do a game of bullish or bearish? Let's do it. To help them because you can also join the group chats. It sounds like of your son, my group chat too. Maybe yours is more crypto. Mine is more long-term investing. All right. So I'll say a word and you say bullish or bearish. Ready? The S&P 500. Bullish. Bullish. To what level do you think? Sorry. I know we have to do a fast round. $8,000 in the year. Gold. Long-term bullish. 10,000. The dollar. Probably bearish, short-term bullish, long-term bearish.

T-bills. Going to be fine. I mean, you're going to buy a T-bill. The U.S. government will never default on the T-bill, so you're going to get whatever you pay for. 30-year treasury. Scary. For all our sakes, I pray, it turns around and we're bullish. I think 5.86% should be the worst it gets, but that's pretty bad. But if it can't sustain some kind of bid, like, then we're really nervous. Then Ray is probably right.

And that might overwhelm the call. Yeah. Commercial real estate. Very situational. Barish broadly, but bullish in certain neighborhoods. Residential real estate. Bullish. But again, you want to be in the right neighborhoods, but broadly bullish.

Prediction markets. Barish. Barish because the regulation is. going to come and kick them right between the legs. And it's going to be unfair that they don't have to have any regulation. All these other markets do, that will catch up with them. But I do think they're here to stay. For its betting. I think unfortunately, the genie's out of the bottle. I don't think you can get it back in the bottle. Be careful. Like, it's very addictive. And the companies make 96% of their money on the parlay. That means you lose almost every time you do a parlay. AI broadly.

Wildly bullish. We're going to have a political backlash. It's coming. But, But it's not going to stop it. Crypto broadly. Crypto adoption is going to come slowly and then quickly. What I mean by that is these rails are all being put in place, the banks. What does that even mean? It means when are we going to literally realize that all assets are tokenized? Five years, three years.

I don't know. It's going to happen slowly. And then all of a sudden, you're like, this thing is going to be your neobank. And you're not going to have Apple stock and Bitcoin and your treasury bills all. and tokenized for. And I mentioned we had Brian Armstrong on the day that a clarity act failed by one vote in the Senate. Do you think it's going to get safer? People are worried about that and the next.

I think we had a generational change, generational chance with clarity to get it passed. And it was a real unfortunate that it didn't. There's some small hope in the lame duck that they can put something together. And once we start the next term, the, with the Dems in charge of everything, just the anger that people have about what is perceived to be abuse and the meme coins and the stable coins with the administration is probably going to chill out anyone's like, hey, let's do another version of clarity act. And so the good news is the CFDC and the SEC are putting out rules. And sometimes when rules are there for a few years, they just become like the de facto law. That's what we're all hoping for.

The other good news is most Democrats turned out to be pro-crypto. It was a small vocal wing. I can see Elizabeth Warren and her gang that hijacked the party. They realized that it was dumb. The Clarity Act would have passed if it wasn't for the president's participation in crypto. And I would tell the Democrats, guys, look beyond it. It's a 50-year bill. You're worried about the politics of the next six months.

And so I was mad at them. But I was also mad at the Republicans. I was to have a little courage until the president. He already made the money. And yes, we need ethics around it because the American public doesn't think it's a great idea that the administration. The president made all this money in crypto. Like it doesn't poll well.

And so both sides were scared. Politics killed the Clarity Act, not one individual person. All right. Last one. Stable coins. You can see more and more usage. Like that's as bullish as you can be on stable coins. Okay.

Last, last one, yellow pants. You know, I was in Italy and I was like, Italian men just are cooler than most men. And I saw a guy with these yellow pants and I said, what you should get the pants? I walked down. I bought a pair of pants trying to steal a little bit of his mystique. Killing it. We end our episodes by asking for a final tip that listeners can take straight to the bank for a new person who's never bought a investment in their lives. What's a move that you would tell them to make? Go home, buy some flowers, give it to your girlfriend or your wife.

and the return on that $140 or $80 or $30, whatever flowers cost in her neighborhood is going to be better than any return you do by putting it in stock. So your significant other is the best asset or liability? No, I was saying the change of her appreciation of you from free flower to post flower is probably worth the cost of flowers. Fair. But also is the most important investment you can make your significant other, your spouse? Listen, I think your spouse is a hugely important investment. And the biggest impact on how your children turn out is probably 67% the mom and 33% the dad. And so you want nice kids, you better have a nice wife. You want kids that work hard. You better have a wife that works hard, right? If you want your kids that are nice to the cab driver, you better be nice to the cab driver yourself.

So, yeah, you better invest in someone who has a shared vision, both a moral vision and a lifestyle vision that you do. Or it's just a headache. How did you know your wife was the one? You don't. Really, you don't. It's just like in anything else in investing. You take a risk. There's intuition, a little pattern recognition.

You're often defined by your family pattern, right? People in your family get married young. you get married young. You know, if you're Jewish, you marry Jewish somebody. Like, so there's a lot of hidden forces that are pushing you one way or the other. And then you take your best guess. And so there's risk. That's why half the marriages end in divorce, because there's a lot of risk involved.

I guess my advice is don't overthink it, feel it, think a little bit of it, make sure you guys have a shared vision of how you want to live your life, and then try hard to make sure it works. We have