Anthony Scaramucci: America’s Economic Narratives Are Breaking | Open Position with Steven Feldman
Summary
Macro Regime Shift: Treasuries are questioned as true safe havens after inflation, with deficits and political risk pushing investors toward alternative stores of value.
Gold: Strong case for gold as a hedge against inflation, institutional distrust, and policy volatility, with evidence of multi-year outperformance versus equities on a gold-adjusted basis.
Bitcoin/Crypto: Long-term bullish view on Bitcoin despite cyclical drawdowns; growing conviction in tokenization via networks like Solana and Ethereum enabling 24/7 asset markets.
AI: AI is a powerful long-term growth force but exhibits bubble-like characteristics; investors should expect volatility while maintaining exposure to innovation.
Market Positioning: Overall equity valuations appear stretched; reduce exposure at the margin, use defensive macro trades, keep ample cash, and maintain a five-year-plus horizon.
60/40 and Bonds: The traditional 60/40 framework has struggled; bonds risk real loss after inflation, making cash optionality more attractive for redeployment on dislocations.
Real Assets Focus: Resource nationalism and decades of underinvestment highlight opportunities in metals, miners, steel, and power infrastructure as a multi-year theme.
Risks and Policy: Populism, institutional erosion, and the social-media “rage machine” elevate macro and policy risks that directly influence portfolio construction.
Transcript
We've set up a situation now that is completely unsustainable without government reform. This is a systemic crisis and this is the reason why gold is doing so well. This is the reason why there's a thought behind Bitcoin. This is why people are searching for something outside of the matrix of what you or I learned about 30 or 40 years ago in business school. Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.comfree. Welcome to the first episode of Open Position. I'm Steve Feldman. I am the co-founder of Wealthon and I've been on the channel from time to time and uh decided this year as I leaned a little bit more into LinkedIn to good result that we would try out a show and the first thing that came to my mind and the producers minds is does YouTube and does podcasting need another financial education show and the answer is probably no. Uh, so we had to try to make this a little bit different. And I'm sure most people here are used to what's on Wealthon and you see a lot of talk about macro, a lot of punditry, a lot of predictions. I'm sure we'll have quite a bit of that on the show, but that's not the point. Uh, the name of the show is open position. It's a bit of a double entandra. you as a trader or someone who's an investor, you could have an open position. But uh as individuals, as business executives, as investors, as citizens, as parts of communities, we all have underlying responsibilities and judgments that go along with those open positions. And uh I often say to myself, certainly as I've gotten older, what's my motivation? What's the point? what am I solving for? And that's something that this show is going to try to get to. If it works, it'll be a good show. If it doesn't work, I'm going to go back to my day job. Uh I am thrilled that the first episode uh is going to be with Anthony Scaramucci. Uh and that's for a number of reasons. First, I've known Anthony for almost years and we started at Goldman together and I absolutely >> 37 37 years ago. 37 years ago and Anthony uh is we haven't always >> a mentor by the way. You helped me out a lot. You probably don't remember all this. You're not going to because you're not going to flatter yourself with all this, but I was a young guy absolutely clueless at Goldman Sachs and you really helped me out a I appreciate that and I remember a little of it. Uh, but what I really remember and what's really fresh in my mind is for those who are the longtime viewers of Wealthfon, we had a previous host and he was good and he was dominant on the show and he decided to leave. It was a mutual decision but it was abrupt and the show was left in a lurch and I called Anthony. He had already built his reputation as a podcaster and we'll talk a little bit more about that. And I said, "Listen, I I need some help and uh I'm not an on-screen guy. What would I do?" And he said to me, "Tell me where to show up." Didn't ask about the money. Didn't ask about the show. He just said, "How could I help a friend?" And for and I know Anthony has a very public persona and you can judge him on that. But I will tell you for someone who knows him privately and what he's done for me and what he's done for other folks that I know that I will remain private is nothing short of extraordinary. If you're in a pinch, this is a man that you uh would like to have on your side. >> Oh god. Hugging it out. Hugging it out. >> Love you. Okay. Sorry. Um, so but I do love you because you're you're a great entrepreneur. You are a humanitarian. You are >> and I'll use the words of dear. You you come across as a very kind person, but you are a kind person. So >> let's get into the show. >> We'll get into we're going to get into Okay. So Anthony and I did a show together >> and you really crushed it on the gold thing. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you very much that. But he's also the the founder of uh GBI. Uh, and we're having a moment. Uh, >> and you a welldeserved moment. >> Thank you. So, Anthony and I did, uh, two year end shows in 2024 and 202023, and they were on his speak up show on Wealthium where we made some predictions. And then he went on to Greener Pastors. And if you don't know this, he has two of the top podcasts. Uh, one, the rest is politics. It's like the number one podcast in politics around the world. Pretty amazing. And I don't begrudge the fact that he went on because it was a a better show and a more lucrative show. But we'd had two prediction shows and I'm really now I'm bragging. Uh we had a lot of predictions and I have to say our batting average except for picking the Super Bowl winner was excellent. Uh and if you bought IBM or uh SoFi or QXO when we said it, you doubled your money. So that was pretty good. Um and then when he moved on, I did a an Outlook show by myself at the end of last year. It was a pretty well-received show thankfully and the premise of the show was that 2026 was going to be a year of reckoning that there were lots of narratives that the economy was working with that the country was working with and that business and investing was working with and I don't think that those are going to last forever and I think 20 26 a lot of that is going to come home to roost. What are those? One, that treasuries are the safe haven asset. That everything gets refinanced, that technology solves all problems, including the climate. And that is and that frankly that technology is always good for you. And I'm not sure that's really true either. And so, uh, with that as a backdrop, we'll start to explore with Anthony some of those, uh, some of that outlook, some of those quote, I don't want to call it predictions, but some of the things that we expect to see happen, and then we'll get to the open position. It'll get a little under the hood with Anthony Scaramucci, which I'm sure people are more interested in. Uh, and we'll see how that goes. Anyway, again, so thank you, Anthony. >> Hey, listen, it's great to be here. >> All right, let's start out. Um, you are an expert at the intersection of business and politics. And so we were in business school, everyone told me that the treasury was the safe haven asset of which all assets are measured against. So if you can make 4% on a treasury, there should be a risk premium in everything. But the treasury itself was a safe haven asset. Now there between debts, a less predictable political uh uh uh uh background and environment. Tell me how you see the Treasury as the safe haven asset. And if it's not, what is that going to lead to in the market? >> Well, I mean, it is in the context of everything, right? It's the tallest of the shortest, if you will. So it it is still considered a safe haven act in that respect. However inflation adjusted Stephen it's not a safe haven asset because it's underperforming inflation. You know if you go to truflation.com and you look at where the US dollar is over the last five and a half years. US dollar is down about 28% in value. Uh you know this as somebody that studied gold and has a large position in gold. And so what we did in the country is we made a decision that we were going to have a very big welfare state and we were going to overpromise the electorate and undertax them. So this is the baby boomer generation. These political leaders have basically failed the country. Overpromise on services, under tax, underd deliver on revenues and you have a structural imbalance is not sustainable. So if we could bring Milton Freriedman back from the dead, he would say all deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. And so you have to pay it somehow. And so we have decided as a society that we will pay it in what looks like a painless way for the politician, but is the most pernitious and most regressive way for the workingclass people. And that's through inflation. And so inflation is the most regressive form of taxation in the world. and it's crippled about a third of the US population. And so I just want to give these stats and I want people to really think about this. If you go to realtor.com, the median price for a house right now in the United States is $462,000. If you reverse engineer the money that you need to live in that house and pay for a 30-year mortgage and not be house rich and cash poor, you need about $160,000. It'll give you a little bit of money, you know, as a cushion. The median income in the United States is 84,000. So that means that you're you're you're you know you're $80,000 away from that target. And if you really study the working poor, they're missing dental appointments. They're missing medicines. They may skip a car payment once in a while. They've got massive credit card debt. And they're angry. Okay. So, we've set up a situation now that is completely unsustainable without government reform. Uh, will the Treasury pay you back 100 cents on the dollar that you lent to the Treasury? Yes, it will because they can print the money that they borrow. So, they're going to pay you back with dollars that are worth less than the ones that you borrowed, but they will be able to pay you back. But this is a systemic crisis. And this is the reason why gold is doing so well. Well, this is the reason why there's a thought behind Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin uh is going through its predictable four-year cycle and is down a lot this last 6 months, but this is why people are searching for something outside of the matrix of what you or I learned about 30 or 40 years ago in business school. If you're looking for a simple, secure way to invest and own physical gold and silver, visit our sister company, Hardass Assets Alliance, at hardassetsalliance.com. That's hardassallalliance.com. >> You know, I think we could stay on this question for the rest of the podcast because there's so much in your answer to unpack. There's the societal piece, there's the economic piece, uh, and there's the investor piece. Let's let's go backwards and let's let's let's layer this. Let's start with the investor piece. So, you're sitting here today and people, you know, you still have an income, you're still an investor, you have a 401k, you have some account at Fidelity. And there was this thing called the 6040 mix, which became the narrative. Remember I started this out saying narratives are going to break. Certainly since the pandemic, the 6040 mix has been a loser for 10 years. The return on the 10-year bond has been basically zero. And if you're a taxable investor, whatever dividend you got, you had to pay whatever interest payment you got, you had to pay that. You had to pay taxes on it. So your $40 trillion of debt, you've got an unpredictable administration. uh you don't know how inflation works, but yet the 60/40 mix is still there. And so can you buy a bond today? Should someone buy a bond today? Or is it just repression? Because it's inflation will inflate away buying power. It's basically dead money only there to deploy if something else cracks. >> Okay. But so you have to do a like all things with investing and most things in life, you have to do a comparative analysis. So if you inflation adjust equity market or you price the equity market in gold on the equity market has underperformed. If you look at the and you probably know the statistic better than me but I would say over the last 5 years uh the 500 best companies in the United States making profits have underperformed a metal called gold. Okay. So that's telling you something structurally is broken. To you know to use your words the narrative is broken. And so so what's broken is that we have lost trust in these institutions. Uh if the president of the United States is decrying the independence of the Fed, that will leak itself into the price appreciation for gold. If the president of the United States is saying unpredictable things about US foreign policy and again whatever you think of America, we've had a fairly consistent bipartisan commitment to the rules-based world order that was structured shortly after the Second World War. And now you have a arbitrary and capricious rhetoric that's coming out where we're talking about the potential invasion of Greenland, a territory that is in the possession of one of our NATO allies. We are talking about crossing the border into Canada. were flagging provinces of Canada on the president's social media where now the prime minister of Canada has to actually go to the defense ministry and say we have to war game a potential invasion from the United States. So, so when you're doing that, people are looking around and on the margin they're going to put less money in the United States. On the margin, they're going to put less money in our treasury markets. And on the margin they're going to look around and say okay the US Stephen because of the decentralized nature of the government and the predictability of the legal system became the most powerful and most prosperous country in the world. That's the irony. There was no Caesar. There was no authoritarian. But it was this collective, this decentralization that allowed your family uh to uh land somewhere in New York, my family, >> right? Land somewhere in New York and then their grandchildren, Steve Felman, Anthony Scaramucci, could go on and live the American dream. Okay? If you're in Europe, there's a sclerosis there. There's an aristocratic sclerosis. I'm from a family of tenant farmers. I can show you that because the Napoleonic code goes all the way back in Naples, the Kingdom of Naples. So, I'm from a family of tenant farmers, went to Tusen Harvard Law School, got educated, and lived a good part of the American dream, as have you. We're busting that now. We're making it incredibly hard for these people. We took an aspirational America for workingclass families and turned it into a desperational one. And so if you don't fix that and you don't push reform, if people don't look into the camera and say, "Hey, this is not working as evidenced by what you're saying in the overall markets and the structure of the society." So the result of which we now have to reform it. If we don't reform it, you know, unfortunately, America will dilute itself and it will become like other nations. uh and your corporate finance professors of 2035 will be talking about our treasuries a lot differently. They won't be Argentinian treasuries, but they won't be what you learned about 40 years ago. >> Well, listen, I I will I see it. Yes. And so there's no political will. So how is this politics? There's no political will to reduce $40 trillion of debt. There's none. You can't >> You don't have to do that though. But you don't have you don't have to reduce, >> right? you you're and and and 3% inflation gets you a trillion dollars of debt reduction each year, right? Because you're inflating your way out of it. >> There's your tax, right? >> And so, but the solution of that, as you mentioned, just creeps back into society. And I think we have this sort of second deviation um where yes, it's if someone could say, "Oh, we can inflate it away." Okay, if that was the answer, that's the answer. and it but it won't inflate away like Zimbabwe or Argentina. It'll just inflate away so people won't notice. But things are already but things are already unaffordable. Affordability is what brought Mandani to New York. >> And so what happens to society when they start to understand that well um and I can I can I can afford inflation a little better than somebody who's making $60,000 a year. And so what happens politically? Is are we have more and is it just going to continue to be Mani as clean sweep >> both ways? You're going to have a right-wing populism uh and you're going to have a leftwing populism. Now, interestingly enough, they converge on a few things like capping credit card debt at 10%. That's a Mandani and a right-wing populist approach, right? So, what happens is a good third to half of the population rejects the social contract. They say this is no longer working for me. And then you get a populist uprising. And what populist leaders have a tendency to do is they'll start socializing. They'll start putting caps on things. So, so which is absolutely the wrong thing to do. By the way, I understand the intent and the good nature of the intent, but it's bad policy because of the way humans interact with each other and the self-interest of the human being. Better policy would be the Teddy Roosevelt policy. And for those people that really want to understand our history, the father of progressivism was a Republican by the name of Teddy Roosevelt. It's been hijacked by the left. But what was progressivism? Teddy Roosevelt looked at the East New York slums. Uh he had a Dutch journalist by the name of Jacob Ree who was very close to. And Jacob Ree wrote a book called How the Other Half Lives. And when he was the police commissioner here in New York, he went down to these tenementss and he said, "Oh my god, these tenementss are collapsing and killing people. We need structural reform in building codes. We need structural reform in how we take care of the working poor." So Teddy took that to the White House and he got all the robber barons together and he said, "Okay, you're taking too much economic rent from the society. So we're going to enact the Sherman Antirust Act, which came five or six years prior to him. We're going to start busting these trusts and you can have a very beautiful lifestyle, but you got to start sharing it with other people. We have to burgeon and create a middle class so these people don't descend on your m Michigan mansions or wherever they may have been at that time with >> Ohio >> Ohio tiki torches and pitchforks and set the place on fire. >> So let let me by the way I'm a big Teddy Roosevelt fan and I think remember we keep coming back to this word narratives and I'm not thrilled with the Mandani narrative. I'm not I'm not thrilled with the rightwing version of it, but Teddy Roosevelt did something which was more as as important as uh the legislation. He he changed the narrative of what it meant to be rich and what the responsibility of the rich were of which of the rich were in his day. He did a speech. I would highly recommend it. You can Google it. It's called Newism. And he basically explained that nobody in this country gets rich on their own. They get rich using the roads. They get rich using labor. They get rich using the rules and the law and everything else that this country gives to entrepreneurs. And he cowed them first. He made people aware it instead of today's narrative is the worship of the billionaire. Wow, look how great they are. Look at that yacht and look at what they get to do. and they can send their friends into outer space and it's really great. They have huge followings, huge social media followings. They're like celebrities, but no one is in an adult dialogue with them about their responsibility. It immediately goes to immediately goes to tax the rich wealth tax as opposed to this moral persuasion argument. And by the way, I live it and I think you live it too, which is I I think there's virtue in giving back. I don't have enough money to do what Carnegie did and build a thousand libraries. I don't. But if if Elon Musk or if Jeff Bezos decided not to spend $500 million on a yacht and he decided that he was going to just build housing, billions of dollars of housing >> and give back in a way that really changed the conversation. People thought that what was be exalted in America was giving, being part of a community, bolstering the community, not having to have it be legislated to you by Bernie Sanders and Mandani and AOC to actually feel like, wow, you'll be lauded, you'll be the most popular person. You'll feel good. You'll get something deep inside. I don't know how you get there. I think you do it in your personal ver universe. I know I do it in my personal universe. I do wish there was a way that we got away from wealth worship to >> there is a way >> other worship. >> See so so but to me there is a way because it's America right and so what would Buffett say about America? Don't bet against America and America is neurally plastic and America has a tendencies to dip and then have a period of reflection and then a period of redemption and renewal. So let's just talk about America for a second and look at it in three 80year blocks of time which is consistent with Neil How's book the forth turning and so we start America in 1776 80 years later roughly we have a great civil war okay so we're really at a low point in America we then after the civil war we rebuild America becomes a decent formidable global economy and then we go into the great depression 80 years later we have two wars that are catastrophes for the world but also hurt America. We come out of the second war combined 100 million people dead from the two wars and we build a postworld war II society where America is a benevolent powerful democracy as opposed to a hegeimon or a bully. Okay? And that makes a very very big difference from the socialization of the world if the hegeimon is a benevolent democracy as opposed to a bully. It's 80 years out from that. And so what happens is the institutions that we created, they get forgotten by the younger politicians. They get forgotten by the younger people in the room. Why do we have a World Bank? Why do we have a UN? What difference does the EU make? And they start to question everything. And then you get a reflexive systemic rise in nationalism. So we're 80 years out again. And we need reform and we need reflection and we need renewal. And so if you get the right political leadership to explain that to the people, uh the people will look around and say, "Okay, that's actually what we need. We don't need more Bellacosia rhetoric towards the left if we're on the right or more Bellicosia rhetoric to the right if we're on the left, but we actually need a healing solution for America where we can cohabitate culturally in America." Uh America's always had racism, Stephen, discrimination. and it's always had ethnic uh slurs against each other, but we more or less have lived here or cohabitated fairly peacefully and we've all generally pro prospered here. How do we reconnect and how do we make that happen? And so I would say to you the right political leadership would help that. Okay. Uh in the 70s uh the New York the Time magazine had this great 4-week uh essay on American renewal. Uh Jimmy Carter said we were in a malaise. Gold was at $800 an ounce. I don't know what is that inflation adjusted $8,000. I don't know what it is today, but but but we were in a malaise. Reagan came in and offered a renewal. Okay. You had or you know people liked Reagan or Bush or Clinton, there was 20 years of generally good executive management of the United States. Pursuant to that bipartisan commitment, we started running a budget surplus at the end of the Clinton era. We've now had 25 years of horrific incompetent management. Again, whatever you thought of Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg, I submit to you, we had 20 years of reasonably good executive management in the city. And good political management matters because for people like you and me, Stephen, we are minority partners. Okay? You're paying in taxes what I'm paying in taxes. So your majority partner is the president, the mayor, and the governor. They are getting 52% of the economic rent that you're producing. You're a limited partner to them. And so we have to get involved. We have to push the issues. we have to push the reform. Uh and if we don't do that, okay, as part of the give back, then we're making a making a very big mistake. But this is fixable. This whole thing is fixable. >> Okay, so let's we go back to this whole macro question. So the two other pieces of this first. So what are you doing about it? All right. So you you're a very good observer, but you're also a custodian. You're a custodian of a family or a custodian of a business. You frankly you are a custodian of a public persona that influences people and it's nice to talk right there's a lot that's what politicians do and some politicians do more than talk they fight they write you know you read these people in the house of representatives they never part they're great big Twitter followings but they've never introduced legislation barely show up to vote one man but a a man with a good megaphone and a pretty good uh pretty good influence so what what do what do you do personally so I haven't announced this yet, but I'll announce it here on your show. >> Oh, wow. >> Okay. I I signed a book contract. Uh the book is going to be published in September. The title of the book is All the Wrong Moves: How We Got Ourselves into This Political Situation that we're talking about and how we led to the rise of populism. Okay. That's basically the general title of the book. I've spent six months on it. I actually think I sent you a manuscript of it. It's now finished and polished. It will be published right before the midterms. I'm going to go out on a massive marketing campaign to talk about the book because I believe in the book are sociological observation of how we got here. I think it's very very important uh when you're going in the wrong direction to understand how you got into the direction you're going to. And then the last part of the book, generally a third of it is how to get out of the situation that we're in. And I'm g offering solution-based ideas in the book. And I'm going to go out and market that book. And depending on the reception of the book and how popular the book is, the books are hard to sell, by the way. But the ideas could potentially gravitate and become popular. If that becomes popular, then I have another leg to the stool. But I got to get the first leg down. President Scaramucci. >> Well, you the problem with running for president. I don't have a party to run. Let's say I wanted to run for president. Okay. So, my wife believes in castration and I like my body parts, but you know, and Stephen, you know, I had some problems in my marriage which are very well documented by the tabloids. And I always see people say, I'm running for re-election in my marriage. I want to keep my family sacraan. Having said that, even if I wanted to run for president, I have no party to run in. Okay? The left hates me. Okay? because I was once a right-leaning Republican and the right hates me because I left them. Okay? So, I have no party to run in. And one of the things that I write about in the book, we have a very tight duopoly at the top. They have structurally made it impossible for an independent. Even though the independents now have 40 plus% of the registrants, it's it's nearly impossible to get an independent to the president. So, so even even if I get and by the way, they would malign me. I probably don't meet the height requirement to be president. >> Carry you. >> You can carry me on your shoulders. They would probably go after me. But the message in the book is very very clear. If America wants to heal itself, we're now through that 80year cycle. We're in our third 80year cycle. If America wants to heal itself, it's doable. And we're the type of nation that could actually do it. We could pull ourselves out of the current abyss that we're in. Uh, and but here's the other problem, and this is why it would be generally hard to get elected. It's a 20-year fix. It's not a twominute fix. It's not a cable news fix. It's not a podcast fix. It's a 20-year fix. You need 20 years to reform the excesses in the government. You need 20 years to reform the K through 12, very uneven public education system. You need 20 years to fix the infrastructure. You're never paying off the debt. Let's just tell everybody that that's not going to happen. But what you can do is you can grow the economy, okay? And you can structure things like we were doing in the '9s to prevent the debt from getting out of control. We had legislation that George Herbert Walker Bush passed in the early 90s, which effectively became called pay as you go. Dick G Dick Gart who was the uh this the congressional leader for the left at that time signed on to this legislation. Some of the Democrats lost their seats. But the legislation was if you're going to increase social services, no problem. You have to raise taxes. If you're going to cut taxes, absolutely no problem. You got to find things in the discretionary spend and lower them. And it created these guard rails. After 911, George Walker Bush pulled the guard rails and we had an explosion in deficit spending which is continuing. Okay? And and by the way, let's let's include Bush in this. George Washington to George W. Bush 7 trillion. The next three presidents and one of them did two terms, right? Or was in in his second term, $31.5 trillion. I want you to think about that. 17 years from 2008, January 20th, 2009 to today, we've blown through $31 trillion. Of course, there's going to be a problem. Of course, there's going to be a inflation problem. There's going to be a narrative breaking problem. No, of course there's going to be Well, listen, first of all, good luck. Uh it wouldn't be nice to see uh an adult conversation regardless of who wins. something that brings people to discuss blowing up narratives >> that that may be reason enough to enter a race, right? Just so that you could get an adult. >> I'm not going to be your I'm not going to be your campaign manager, but I'm going to throw some ideas for you. First of all, I think what the I've been writing about this a bit on LinkedIn. Number one is I think the middle or the moderate has to be as radical as the left and the right. And the problem is, and I call it radical moderation in the writings, and I think the problem is the people in the middle have other things to do. It sounds strange, but like I can't I don't have the time to be extremely political. >> They're they're the people that the founders actually wanted to be involved. >> Correct. So I call it so the middle the citizen has to be as radical. So I call it radical moderation. The second thing I would tell you, if you're going to run a campaign, use the word marketing. I would say have the book, get a bus, start with the reddest of red counties and the bluest of blue counties. The abs the people where it's 90% one way, 90% the other way. Put your face on the side of the bus and do a listening tour. I think what we need, and I've been writing something myself, I don't write books, but you're better at this. Is almost like a citizens convention. How do you get people to sign on to a 20-year plan? I doubt it'll be because some politician will tell them sign on. But if it's their idea and so you go on this tour, you say, "I want to hear what everybody has to say and I'm not listening because you're red or blue. I'm listening because I'm a good listener." And then we're going to have some sort of lottery to create a citizens convention and we're going to sit down and I'll lead it and I'm going to put down some of the issues. We say, "Listen, $40 trillion dollars of debt. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it?" Lot, you know, you it's going to be guided. It's going to have been mediated. But when you have citizens orders, when the citizens have talked, when that third estate, yes, third estate is coming and saying, "This is how we feel. We've been unempowered for so long. We've been dominated, dominated by white houses, by congresses, by strong politicians, by the media, by the lobbyists, by the corporations, freed by Citizens United to go in and pervert >> the governing system. >> And so that idea, if we could break that, uh, and if you're the leader to do it, God bless, I will help. >> But I think that is something that can change it. that I'm not arrogant enough to think that I am the leader but you said something about me which I do think I'm a observer and I'm a I'm a prolific reader and I'm a student of history and so I want to at least make an observation and if you read the book it is a different turn on looking at the events I bring up Citizens United I bring up the gerrymandering I bring up the Ross Perau election which actually tightened the duopoly and then once they got smug they're like okay we don't have to deal with the people anymore, >> right? >> Because we have 95% incumbent re-election rates. Uh Chuck Grassley, I think he's 700 years old, I guess. I don't know how old he is. >> I think he's 680. >> Okay. But he's going to live for another 100 years. He'll be the senator from Iowa because we don't have to worry about this anymore. We have 435 congressional districts, Stephen. There's only 22 that are going to be potentially potentially contested in 2026. All the other districts have been decided by the gerrymandering and the squeezing out of adversaries in the district. So, so we have to at least explain to the American people what has happened and why the politicians are so arrogant. The big beautiful spending bill which adds approximately $4.4 trillion of deficit spending over the next 10 years. If you're poor and you make $50,000 or less in the country, you lost $700 of benefits. If you're rich and you make $1 million or more, you got $7,000 of benefits from the BBB. Okay. And the politicians don't care because the lobbyists told them to do it. The big businesses told them to do it. And you mentioned Citizens United. You know, most people don't know what it is. So, let's tell them. Citizens United was a decision that was rendered by Justice Scalia in January of 2010, which gave the right to people that had money to put unlimited amounts of money into political contests or policy ideas through political action committees. He said it was their first amendment right, but it is now become the pie versus Ferguson of the democracy. It's a separate but equal democracy now. And you know what? Pie came out. It took 80 years, Stephen, to have Brown versus Board of Education to repeal PI. And we're in our 16th or 17th year now of Citizens United. We need to reform it immediately. We need to stop this insanity to get the narrative back on the people. Otherwise, you're going to have more radical populace. That's true. >> That are going to pervade the society and make things worse, not better. >> Okay. So, now we're going to get a little closer to more more deeply into why Open Position should be a show. All right. There's a lot of people out there who are politicalminded and you have a lot of interests that are not politics. You have businesses and you have a podcast and you have a family and a wife that you want to make sure that you nurture that relationship. Uh what's the motivation? Why you why why are you the right person to write this book and get on a bus? >> Well, see that's the thing. See, I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I am. >> But why do you want to do it in the first place? Why try? >> I want I want to do it because of I am intellectually curious. I have an unconditional love affair with my country even despite all the warts of the country. You know, if you read Jill Leapor's book about America, these truths, it is there's a lot of bad stuff that has happened in America. There's a lot of bad stuff that happened to Italian-Americans and Jewish Americans in America. Okay. So, but I don't care. I have an unconditional love affair with the country. I am a product of the country. Like what Roosevelt said, I'm the beneficiary of a great public school system, good infrastructure, predictable laws. Uh I've had my fits and stars as an entrepreneur, but I've generally been very successful. I would class my myself as financially independent. And so and I have a love of life and a love of country and I want to at least write down this observation and if people like it and they say okay well then what should we do then I want to be part of it. How much ego is in it? >> Well I think ego is in everything but let me tell you something about ego. When you get your ass kicked and handed to you the way I have in my life. Okay as you know uh we started Goldman Sachs together. 18 months later I got fired. Got my ass kicked. Got rehired into Goldman Sachs. I built three successful businesses, but all of them went through the depths of uh horror, the most recent one, Skybridge, during the global financial crisis in 2008. I then went to go work for the first administration and I got my ass fired after 11 days and I was ripped apart by the media, ripped apart by the late night comedians and I've been generally was destroyed in the year 2017. So if you want to talk about the emasculation of ego, I think I have lived that and I've also told you privately which I'll share on this network that my ego has been my enemy at times. Okay, I wanted to go work in the first administration to serve my ego. Stephen, I was oh blue collar with the Goldman Harvard law school. Let me go work for the administration because I'll be a big wheel in the administration. It was a false narrative. I got my ass handed to me. So, is my ego involved in this? Yeah. Anybody that tells you their ego is not involved in something is a lie. Okay. Is a liar. >> But I think my ego has been humbled. And I think my ego has been tamed by the vagaries of life, the trials and tribulations that have happened to me. So, I'm not sitting here with like two tablets coming down from the mount and saying this is the answer. I'm not doing that. All I'm saying is, hey, been on the planet 62 years. I grew up uh one of the most memorable core memories for me was March of 1972. I was 8 years old. I used to walk back and forth to the main street school, which my house was close to. I came through the side door of my house and my mother and my grandmother were ecstatic. I was like, why are they so happy? Well, it turned out in the unfinished basement of the house that I lived in the the General Electric Corporation through one of the appliance stores delivered a washer and a dryer. And my mother and my grandmother never had one of those and they used to take those, you know, wooden roped, you know, you know, paper and they go up and down to the local laundry mat and they had a washer and dryer. I remember thinking to myself, my god, that's great that I didn't realize that we didn't have a washer and dryer. So I grew up like that and I'm now living where I'm living here. So I think I have a pretty decent bandwidth perspective on the society and so I'm going to opine upon it and people say that's a book. He's an idiot and he should be disgraced. So be it. Or they may say you know there's some kernels of truth in the book of what he's saying and maybe this could lead to a few seeds that get dropped for a potential reform. >> You know I find that there's a ego involved. there's this tension of and you're better at it. You're actually it certainly in the 1% of it. Most people in your position and I will include myself is you look at a a set of vested interests and you stick your neck out and then all of a sudden those vested interests are at risk. I I worry uh that given the political environment if you say something does does it affect your business? It may it may it may >> business has been harmed by my >> So so so here's the issue again getting to the hard the hard stuff which is you may have enough ballast you could look in your bank book or you could even say hey you know it's attention it's not the world's worst thing for me but did everybody in your shop sign on to that you know did I have two I'm an entrepreneur myself two businesses let's call it a hundredish employees in two companies >> right >> um if the companies went out of business I probably would still be okay. I would wouldn't be happy and there would be no income, but uh I'd survive and but yet I've got a number of employees who have got a number of children and they're funding their 529s and trying to get the and do I want to play with their careers? Do I want to play with my family's uh privacy? Yeah, you see the >> And that's and that's I I know and that that's the tension and I was about to say which is >> that's the debt >> you you you are unique and should be lauded for the fact that you're willing to take that risk and I would say collectively if we all took that risk we would all be safe. >> Well, you always say that, >> right? But someone has to stick their neck out first and those people often >> Yeah. >> can take the brunt and they get hurt. But something happened interestingly when 60 people that are min Minneapolis-based CEOs sign on to something. Now there's power. If you go after one law firm and you get the law firm back on their heels in isolation, then they have no power. But if they teamed up with the 50 100 other law firms, >> don't get me started on the law firms. >> But but but but I'm just trying to make a set. I'm I'm trying to make a statement that the the prey is to prey on that self-interest and to prey on that insecurity. But I would say something different. If I really want my family to do well, we got to get the society right. I don't and I know you don't. I don't want to live in a maybe there are billionaires that want this. I don't want this. I don't want to live in a bobwire security compound in my McMansion while my fellow neighbors are suffering. >> I agree. I don't want that. I don't I don't get the I don't get the gated community as a virtue. >> I don't I don't want that. I want I want to be able to walk out of my house. Maybe it's a little bit bigger than yours, but you're happy because you've got one and you got a car. Your kids's going to a good school and you're getting up in the morning thinking your kids's going to do better than you. And so you don't begrudge my house. You don't want to set fire to my house. You want my house. You're like, "Hey moo, someday I'm gonna own your house." Okay? And that's the society that I want to live in. And so the only way to do that is we have to have a systemic awakening and a course correction. And if we're not willing to do that collectively, then it will go the way history goes where you will have a rise and fall of something. Okay? Aurelius said it better than me uh in his writings and meditations. He said, "I want to I I want to cheat history. Rome is in decline. I want to put principles together and I want to make decisions that will cheat history. And under his leadership, he was able to extend the empire for several more hundred years. I understand that things rise and fall in societies. Empires get large, empires descend. I understand that the American century, for us to have another American century, we need a renewal. If we don't want to do that collectively and we're all going to sit there in our silos of self-interest, that's how things decline. And I accept that. I'm not I'm not I'm not here saying that, oh, we're going to change it. I'm not some messianic person or anything like that. I'm just looking at the situation and say we can fix this. And if we want to fix it, it's going to require all of us to take a little bit of risk. But let me tell you something. If you were able to change the conversation and you were able to inject some accountability back into the government, guess what happens? These are marketing competition, Steve. These campaigns are marketing competition. If the public will is on the side of virtue, then the politician is forced to act virtually. >> Yeah. Well, listen. We we need America whe regardless of what 80 years it's been. If it was the from the Mayflower to reconstruction to to yesterday in in in a in an INS uh office, we are in America is a moral argument. Uh just because we stormed Normandy, won World War II, and were a kind sort of kind hegemony for the last bit doesn't mean there's lots of issues that still were building. And they range, right, from racism to fiscal irresponsibility. And there's a lot that we can fix. And what's always so troubling is what we do in our business. The worst thing you can do in a business, remember someone makes a mistake and you say to somebody in your job, they made a mistake. I say to them, listen, after all these years of being a business person, there's very few I haven't faced. That's why I get the corner office. That's why I'm a CEO. I can solve them. But if you don't tell them to me or worse yet, you try to fix them yourself or you cover them up and they start to get bigger and bigger, then maybe I can't and certainly you're fired. That's the country we are in today. We're in a country that has problems. >> And yet we want to take one side wants to try to fix them by hurting the other side, but nobody wants to be in a conversation. No one wants to change that. American exceptionalism. We'll all accept it even though we'll see so many things wrong because it takes bravery and it takes risk in order to have these sort of conversations. >> Let me show you something. This is a rage machine. Didn't start out as it, but this is a rage machine. And so what happens is the algorithms are designed to create rage. >> And if I can get you raging, I can get you on, but I'm going to get a docu in your body. Yeah. >> And so now I got to get you raging. But when when I interact with people and I get people that are HQR79, they hate my guts and they want me to fall into a fire pit. But then when I meet HQR79 in person, they want to take a selfie. Okay? Because what happens is when you're together, you're more civil. You're laughing because you know this is how it works. Okay. Of course. So this is a rage machine. How on God's earth, and Mcronone is right about this. How did we let the Chinese, the Russians, and the North Koreans, and the big tech companies control the rage machine to weaken the tenants of the social fabric in our society? Okay, I don't know how we did it, but we did do it. Okay, and it's not going away. I'm not suggesting that. But are we smart enough to break away from it? Are we smart enough to transform from it? Are we smart enough to say, "Hey, we've had this rage machine going. Citizens United, everything's been going for the last 15, 16 years. We failed after 9/11. Totally misfired. Bin Laden said that we would overreact and that we' take our own civil liberties away and we would bleed out our treasury." >> Okay, it's the top of the seven. >> Mission accomplished. >> Six nothing Bin Laden. So he said that he said it in the dark web. He I'm going to hit them. They're going to overreact. Send their military over here. They're going to be bombing our mud huts. We don't care about this life. We only care about the next one. And we're going to bleed them out. And he did that. Okay. So now we spent $31 trillion on forever wars and we got all these kids came back. Some of them are committing suicide. Some of them have PTSD. And we offshored all the manufacturing. So most of these small towns have been blighted. Okay. Do you want to fix it or not? And so what you said earlier 10 minutes ago, my self-interest is such where let me stay out of it or if I'm a politician, let me sit with the hard right because they're going to write me checks, they're going to keep me elected or let me sit with the hard left and let me stay out of it. Or can we fix it? And so I believe that the US is an early plastic and if we can shed light on the problems and we can get enough smart people together say you know what it is fixable and it is an unbelievable country with the most powerful military most powerful economy and these technologies that we're on boarding you know one of your narratives which may or may not be true Stephen is technology solves the problems but has generally been helpful it been generally deflationary to have technology. It's been generally helpful. It's led to more economic growth and maybe it won't be. But my point is we got to try. >> Well, I I just to put a finer point on that and I I want to dial this back to a little finance in a second. >> Um I'm a believer in technology and I'm far from a lite. I was I was uh I was doing AI in a in a hacker sort of way before Chatg GPT. Uh I don't think our society is very good at dealing with the externalities. So social media is connecting people around the world. Great. Social media as an envy machine, as a uh a rage machine, as a cortisol machine, an anxiety machine, an envy machine, horrible. The internet, you know, at the and it lots of positives, but it facilitated all of this. And now there's AI and we haven't gone there. And it could be utopian in some ways. I doubt it. Same way so can driverless cars. Could be utopian, but you have 1.5 million drivers who will not have a job in the United States. They're going to be a little upset. And so we we didn't deal very well with NAFTA, with the people who were uh disengaged from financial success. There wasn't some Marshall plan to retrain the people who were quote victims of NAFTA. And similarly there will not be there doesn't seem to be any urgency to do the same thing for AI which may be NAFTA on steroids. >> Yeah, we totally agree. >> And you sit there and you say wow a lot of the anger that happens today is really NAFTA 30 years later the gutting of the middle class. >> But nothing is more dangerous society when you start to eat white collar jobs. that there's a I forget the guy the uh the uh writer Longshore uh Long Shoreman who wrote about the danger when when the upper middle class because they have resources they're angry it's all those suburban women if they're going to start to have a lower standard of living because their husbands lose their job or they lose their jobs then that is going to be something that society has never really faced in America and so that's very dangerous all right listen I want to pivot because I don't want to take the rest of your day >> let me can I just say this >> it'll be a small pivot 30 seconds. Okay, >> I got it so wrong in 1999. Smug, self-centered 35year-old hedge fund manager. What the hell are these guys doing protesting at the WTO in Seattle? Do you remember those? >> Yeah, sure. >> Antifa, man. It was Antifa. >> Got it wrong. Right. Right. Go ahead. I'm sorry. >> All right. So, we just spent at least 30 minutes talking about the state of the world, the state of America. Wealthy on is still a financial education channel and so there's sort of two two things I would say and one we'll get to crypto in a second because I know you're very involved in that. All right. So you're sitting here today and the MAG 7 seems pretty expensive, highly reliant on AI. They've driving the entire market. The S&P is seven companies and you know and Elon Musk is is going to be the fourth biggest country by the time you know he's done merging all these things together. um you're in the markets and you're investing and you're giving people advice and people talk to you. So, how are you telling people to position themselves today? And what are you doing? >> I think the market's expensive. I think that the uh the 40 multiple on the market is nearing the $2,000 bubble multiple. Uh you know, guys like Buffett have pulled out of the market. So, if you look at our portfolio, we've reduced some market exposure. We have some macro trades on that I think are defensive related to things like inflation and interest rates and the potential collapse of the.com bubble. I'm not willing to bet that that's going to happen today or tomorrow because you know how things go. They go further than you think further than are rational. I am a big believer long-term in Bitcoin. I do think that we will use things like Salana and possibly Ethereum to tokenize assets and to have 24-hour markets like Brian Armstrong was talking about yesterday. So, I do own positions in those. Um, but I'm not sitting here going to be pulled completely out of the market any more than I'm completely into the market. I'm in a sort of a halfway zone. I just remind people that our generation that got burnt by technology in March of 2000, 26 years ago, some people got burnt so badly, Stephen, they never return to tech stocks and they made a mistake because the technology stocks, that sector of the economy was probably one of the best in the history of the world. Okay? And they could have gotten definitely B. So, is there an AI bubble? I'm sure that there is. I'm sure it will burst. But I will own things. I do own some SpaceX. I do own some XI. I do own some Nvidia. And maybe they'll correct 50%. I'm not saying they won't, but I have to be a equity holder. And the best equity holders in my lifetime, based on my observation, are private equity thinkers. Warren Buffett owns the stock, but he owns it for a five or 10 year period of time. He's not >> He's buying the company that But the the way he executes it is through the stock. >> Exactly. Exactly. And so he's looking at the company saying, "I now have an ownership stake in this company. It would be the same way you beautifully built Gold Bullion International over 15 years and now you deserve the harvest that you're reap reaping from the building of that." You didn't say, "Oh, you know, gold, you you started the company in 2010. Gold's down this week. Let me sell the company." Okay, gold's down this week. I got to build the company. I got to innovate and think around that. Okay, so that's what I'm suggesting to people. Now, the good news for me is I have an interval fund, so there's a longer term lockup on it. I had people that wanted to kill me in 2027. I'm sorry, 2023. Maybe they will kill me in 2020. Want to kill me? Sure. 27, right? And then they praised me in 2024. Okay? You know, who the hell knows? But I believe the trajectory is right for growth. And I do believe that we we will get the trajectory right. There'll be an upside bias in these markets, but there should be based on valuation some type of near-term correction. >> So, but as an aside, is that fund open? Can wealthy investors look at it? All right. Well, we we'll send something out on that. I assume it's accredited or >> Yeah. No, it's an accredited credited fund. Actually, you know what? It's not anymore. The SEC actually changes rules, I think. So, so yeah, we we could we could take people's money, but I would tell people do not invest in that fund unless you have a fiveyear horizon. And I always tell people that everybody's a long-term investor until they have short-term losses. The minute they have short-term losses, you strike a match of their hair and they run around in a circle. Okay? So, you got to think particularly right now in a very long-term way if you want to do really well. >> Well, that's the other thing that Buffett says that time is the ARB, right? If you can hold for a long period of time and you can compound uh tax efficiently, >> definitely the >> then you should do well in the equity market. I I would I want to layer just something quickly on that because this is actually is the way it's interesting how many DMs or private uh messages I get say oh I saw you on wealthy how you position what are you investing in my I am a firm believer in innovation I think in innovation whether it was RCA you know back in the 20s and hey we did the radio or >> right or it's or it's Nvidia um innovation has driven all of the equities returns and the S&P is a magical thing because it drops out the woolw Perths and the Sears and it adds the best companies and if they don't work it drops it out and it's and in the index in the ETF it's all tax efficient. You don't even pay any taxes as they buy and sell things within the fund and so you do have to stay invested in innovation and because that's the thing that drives the market and so >> and and and but >> and you have to do it over very long periods of time. >> Yes. And I'm going to use a Buffett apherism uh to compound what you're saying. He gave a presentation at the some valley commerce. I was 36 years old. It was the year 2000. He showed the Dow in 19 >> The Dow. Yeah. >> He showed the Dow. 30 stocks in the Dow >> and then he showed the Dow in the year 2000. There was one stock in the Dow was GE, but apparently it got taken out of the the index for a few years and then put back in. And Buffett's point was this Dow here's the trajectory of it, but none of the companies >> Yes. >> are there. This is your point about the S&P. See what I I I have to understand the fluidity of markets. Whatever we're expecting to last doesn't sometimes things last longer than usual. But what does last is what you said is innovation. >> Yeah. And the one thing and and and since we are we do have a wealthon audience, Wealthon has sort of is now majoring in real assets. You know, we we feel like one of the narratives that changed was globalism to mercantalism. and and so now you're going to have this uh resource nationalism. And so the metals, the miners, the steel makers, the electricity makers, all of those things that have to be now created for China, for Russia, for the United States are been completely underinvested in for that for literally for the same 80 years. And you know, but and the key is is picking the winners. And so there's a lot of in that space there's a lot of uh promoters and so if you can help investors curate it I think we can help people make better returns and that's something we're trying to do but I think as a general rule you know for me positioning I'm always long I always want to be long innovation and my ARB is time just don't look and uh don't look uh try to pick a theme and for us theme is real assets metals and mining uh because it's been underinvested it's still less than 1% of holdings. Uh I am fully I have to say I'm I'm pretty much fully out of bonds and have been for almost a decade. That's I'd just rather have it be in cash. I'm not out of cash. The cash is there to get a small return and then the option value of being deployed if something cracks and I probably have too much cash and I've missed out but I'm still I still like to think I can maybe outsmart a market if it cracks. >> I'm going to say something on the wealthy on there. I don't think you could ever have too much cash. I mean that to me um I'm not I'm not and I think for people listening you don't have to be the richest person in the room. Who you who are you trying to prove that to what you need is you need to understand your needs as a family what your personal philosophy is and get to a safety zone and stay in that zone. >> All right. Well, >> safety zone plus growth. >> I I I agree to me. Remember I started out in the introduction and say what am I solving for? And I get it that I'm not the age of every wealthy on viewer, but certainly at the top of the list, the tippiest top of my list is sleeping through the night. Uh, one of the most val, you know, I don't think from the moment I gradu started out in a law firm through my Goldman career and then being an entrepreneur, even worse, that sleeping through a night without a care in the world has is just not it's not on my dance card. And so as an investor, having some cash, building some cushion, having some resilience is really the number one thing you can really solve for. >> You know what would make me sleep less through the night? If I wasn't articulating what I saw as a systemic problem for the country right now, there are other people, Stephen, that would say, "Oh, let me stay out of this. No one will shoot an arrow at me." >> The ostrich strategy. >> Yeah. Let me let me stay out of it. But I'm the very opposite. I'm like, "Okay, I would not be comfortable with myself and I would not be able to sleep through the night." And and by the way, uh I have family members that fought in the Second World War. Uh my uncle was on Normandy Beach, the one I'm named after, my uncle Anthony. And the notion that uh I'm in a supposedly free country where I have a First Amendment right to exercise my right to free speech and that is now deemed courageous in the country. I mean, my uncle was on Normandy Beach getting shot at by the Nazis. Okay. So I should be able to have enough courage in my personality to talk about the problems that the country has without overly worrying about the retribution. And if the retribution comes say that's part of life there's nothing I can >> so is that what's so is that what keeping you up? Is that so you said is that currently keeping you up and when you wake up at 3:00 in the morning and you can't fall back asleep what's on your mind? I think that the things that I worry about are not my personal financial condition because uh I think from my life's perspective, I'm doing so much better than I ever anticipated. I wake up with lots of gratitude about that. But I am worried about the country. I am worried about that to the point where if I have a voice in that, and I'm not saying even my voice matters, but to try to have a voice in that, I would be upset with myself if I didn't. That's the point. I would be sleeping less well at night if I didn't have a big mouth. I think that's the answer. >> Yeah. You know, people, this is a hard time, but >> I understand this is a hard time for people with a good conscience. And if you have a value system and and you want to do the right thing and you have a platform like you do and maybe I'll have one over time and wealthy on and you don't use it or you're just using it to make more money that you do not need, >> right? >> Or it is is really a hard time. I I I do struggle consciouswise of what is the responsibility of somebody who has a corner office, has some resources and can string three sentences together. Uh what are they supposed to do? And I'm pretty sure it won't be buying a yacht. But uh all right, so listen, this has been great. I want to have one closing question for you. We have a lot of subscri hundreds of thousands subscribers on wealthy. You you you better. >> Okay, I'll come back. G give them it doesn't it doesn't have to be a finance thing, but give them a pro tip. What what would you like people to take away if you could you've written a lot of books and many of those books are self-help in style. Many of them introspective. It's got to be something that you would tell somebody if you were mentoring. You're mentoring the wealthy on audience today. You got one shot. >> There's Okay, so it's it's actually three things. Okay, I can't get it to one, but I I really thought about this long and hard. Number one, you got to start the day with some level of gratitude. Just the fact that you have access to the wealthy on network means there's probably enough technology around you where you've got to, you know, hopefully heat, you got the air conditioning and the you got to start with the basics and be gratified by your life. The second thing, and this is the most important thing, and it's the only thing I can really give to my children. You have to celebrate the successes of your friends. If you do that, you'll have an abundance of friends in your life. You've got to be the first cough people. If you're taking GBI public, I want to be one of the first call so I can shoot you with the champagne. You got to be that person because there's no reason. You have to strain out the attistic urges of envy and jealousy in your life. If you do that, you're going to be a happy person. You're going to have a lot of friends. Last point, number three, you got to do something you love. Okay? I have two kids in the arts. Are they gonna make a lot of money? I don't know. But one's a great singer and one is a film director. I didn't say, "No, no, no. You gotta go to Wall Street." I said, "No, no, no. You got to do what you want." Because in the immortal words of Mel Brooks, relax. None of us are getting out of here alive. Maybe him. He's 99. Maybe he'll make it to 199. But you get my point. So that's it. Do something you love. Celebrate the success of your friend. Don't be an envious, you know what. And get up in the morning and say, "Hey, I'm up. I got a cup of coffee. This is fantastic. >> Well, it's very good advice. I I was going to add a fourth one for now, which is not only should you do what you love, you should elevate love. We're in an angry country and anger kills the host. >> After me on the rage machine, I don't even respond. Oh, oh, that's nice. I'm a Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that. Oh, maybe you're not allowed to sub on YouTube. I I That's nice. >> Well, listen. I I I won't do this for many many guests, but this at least for this one. >> You're the you're >> Thank you for being our first guest. >> Congratulations on the show. I expect to be back. Okay. Calling my agent, telling him to fight me back. And this is the first show. It's the only place in my life where I'm as tall as Stephen Feldman on the stage. Okay. I'm very happy about that. >> Goodbye. All right. Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.com/free. With markets hitting all-time highs, now is a great time to stress test your strategy and be prepared for what comes next. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you again next time.
Anthony Scaramucci: America’s Economic Narratives Are Breaking | Open Position with Steven Feldman
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We've set up a situation now that is completely unsustainable without government reform. This is a systemic crisis and this is the reason why gold is doing so well. This is the reason why there's a thought behind Bitcoin. This is why people are searching for something outside of the matrix of what you or I learned about 30 or 40 years ago in business school. Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.comfree. Welcome to the first episode of Open Position. I'm Steve Feldman. I am the co-founder of Wealthon and I've been on the channel from time to time and uh decided this year as I leaned a little bit more into LinkedIn to good result that we would try out a show and the first thing that came to my mind and the producers minds is does YouTube and does podcasting need another financial education show and the answer is probably no. Uh, so we had to try to make this a little bit different. And I'm sure most people here are used to what's on Wealthon and you see a lot of talk about macro, a lot of punditry, a lot of predictions. I'm sure we'll have quite a bit of that on the show, but that's not the point. Uh, the name of the show is open position. It's a bit of a double entandra. you as a trader or someone who's an investor, you could have an open position. But uh as individuals, as business executives, as investors, as citizens, as parts of communities, we all have underlying responsibilities and judgments that go along with those open positions. And uh I often say to myself, certainly as I've gotten older, what's my motivation? What's the point? what am I solving for? And that's something that this show is going to try to get to. If it works, it'll be a good show. If it doesn't work, I'm going to go back to my day job. Uh I am thrilled that the first episode uh is going to be with Anthony Scaramucci. Uh and that's for a number of reasons. First, I've known Anthony for almost years and we started at Goldman together and I absolutely >> 37 37 years ago. 37 years ago and Anthony uh is we haven't always >> a mentor by the way. You helped me out a lot. You probably don't remember all this. You're not going to because you're not going to flatter yourself with all this, but I was a young guy absolutely clueless at Goldman Sachs and you really helped me out a I appreciate that and I remember a little of it. Uh, but what I really remember and what's really fresh in my mind is for those who are the longtime viewers of Wealthfon, we had a previous host and he was good and he was dominant on the show and he decided to leave. It was a mutual decision but it was abrupt and the show was left in a lurch and I called Anthony. He had already built his reputation as a podcaster and we'll talk a little bit more about that. And I said, "Listen, I I need some help and uh I'm not an on-screen guy. What would I do?" And he said to me, "Tell me where to show up." Didn't ask about the money. Didn't ask about the show. He just said, "How could I help a friend?" And for and I know Anthony has a very public persona and you can judge him on that. But I will tell you for someone who knows him privately and what he's done for me and what he's done for other folks that I know that I will remain private is nothing short of extraordinary. If you're in a pinch, this is a man that you uh would like to have on your side. >> Oh god. Hugging it out. Hugging it out. >> Love you. Okay. Sorry. Um, so but I do love you because you're you're a great entrepreneur. You are a humanitarian. You are >> and I'll use the words of dear. You you come across as a very kind person, but you are a kind person. So >> let's get into the show. >> We'll get into we're going to get into Okay. So Anthony and I did a show together >> and you really crushed it on the gold thing. Congratulations. >> Thank you. Thank you very much that. But he's also the the founder of uh GBI. Uh, and we're having a moment. Uh, >> and you a welldeserved moment. >> Thank you. So, Anthony and I did, uh, two year end shows in 2024 and 202023, and they were on his speak up show on Wealthium where we made some predictions. And then he went on to Greener Pastors. And if you don't know this, he has two of the top podcasts. Uh, one, the rest is politics. It's like the number one podcast in politics around the world. Pretty amazing. And I don't begrudge the fact that he went on because it was a a better show and a more lucrative show. But we'd had two prediction shows and I'm really now I'm bragging. Uh we had a lot of predictions and I have to say our batting average except for picking the Super Bowl winner was excellent. Uh and if you bought IBM or uh SoFi or QXO when we said it, you doubled your money. So that was pretty good. Um and then when he moved on, I did a an Outlook show by myself at the end of last year. It was a pretty well-received show thankfully and the premise of the show was that 2026 was going to be a year of reckoning that there were lots of narratives that the economy was working with that the country was working with and that business and investing was working with and I don't think that those are going to last forever and I think 20 26 a lot of that is going to come home to roost. What are those? One, that treasuries are the safe haven asset. That everything gets refinanced, that technology solves all problems, including the climate. And that is and that frankly that technology is always good for you. And I'm not sure that's really true either. And so, uh, with that as a backdrop, we'll start to explore with Anthony some of those, uh, some of that outlook, some of those quote, I don't want to call it predictions, but some of the things that we expect to see happen, and then we'll get to the open position. It'll get a little under the hood with Anthony Scaramucci, which I'm sure people are more interested in. Uh, and we'll see how that goes. Anyway, again, so thank you, Anthony. >> Hey, listen, it's great to be here. >> All right, let's start out. Um, you are an expert at the intersection of business and politics. And so we were in business school, everyone told me that the treasury was the safe haven asset of which all assets are measured against. So if you can make 4% on a treasury, there should be a risk premium in everything. But the treasury itself was a safe haven asset. Now there between debts, a less predictable political uh uh uh uh background and environment. Tell me how you see the Treasury as the safe haven asset. And if it's not, what is that going to lead to in the market? >> Well, I mean, it is in the context of everything, right? It's the tallest of the shortest, if you will. So it it is still considered a safe haven act in that respect. However inflation adjusted Stephen it's not a safe haven asset because it's underperforming inflation. You know if you go to truflation.com and you look at where the US dollar is over the last five and a half years. US dollar is down about 28% in value. Uh you know this as somebody that studied gold and has a large position in gold. And so what we did in the country is we made a decision that we were going to have a very big welfare state and we were going to overpromise the electorate and undertax them. So this is the baby boomer generation. These political leaders have basically failed the country. Overpromise on services, under tax, underd deliver on revenues and you have a structural imbalance is not sustainable. So if we could bring Milton Freriedman back from the dead, he would say all deficit spending is unfunded tax liability. And so you have to pay it somehow. And so we have decided as a society that we will pay it in what looks like a painless way for the politician, but is the most pernitious and most regressive way for the workingclass people. And that's through inflation. And so inflation is the most regressive form of taxation in the world. and it's crippled about a third of the US population. And so I just want to give these stats and I want people to really think about this. If you go to realtor.com, the median price for a house right now in the United States is $462,000. If you reverse engineer the money that you need to live in that house and pay for a 30-year mortgage and not be house rich and cash poor, you need about $160,000. It'll give you a little bit of money, you know, as a cushion. The median income in the United States is 84,000. So that means that you're you're you're you know you're $80,000 away from that target. And if you really study the working poor, they're missing dental appointments. They're missing medicines. They may skip a car payment once in a while. They've got massive credit card debt. And they're angry. Okay. So, we've set up a situation now that is completely unsustainable without government reform. Uh, will the Treasury pay you back 100 cents on the dollar that you lent to the Treasury? Yes, it will because they can print the money that they borrow. So, they're going to pay you back with dollars that are worth less than the ones that you borrowed, but they will be able to pay you back. But this is a systemic crisis. And this is the reason why gold is doing so well. Well, this is the reason why there's a thought behind Bitcoin. Although Bitcoin uh is going through its predictable four-year cycle and is down a lot this last 6 months, but this is why people are searching for something outside of the matrix of what you or I learned about 30 or 40 years ago in business school. If you're looking for a simple, secure way to invest and own physical gold and silver, visit our sister company, Hardass Assets Alliance, at hardassetsalliance.com. That's hardassallalliance.com. >> You know, I think we could stay on this question for the rest of the podcast because there's so much in your answer to unpack. There's the societal piece, there's the economic piece, uh, and there's the investor piece. Let's let's go backwards and let's let's let's layer this. Let's start with the investor piece. So, you're sitting here today and people, you know, you still have an income, you're still an investor, you have a 401k, you have some account at Fidelity. And there was this thing called the 6040 mix, which became the narrative. Remember I started this out saying narratives are going to break. Certainly since the pandemic, the 6040 mix has been a loser for 10 years. The return on the 10-year bond has been basically zero. And if you're a taxable investor, whatever dividend you got, you had to pay whatever interest payment you got, you had to pay that. You had to pay taxes on it. So your $40 trillion of debt, you've got an unpredictable administration. uh you don't know how inflation works, but yet the 60/40 mix is still there. And so can you buy a bond today? Should someone buy a bond today? Or is it just repression? Because it's inflation will inflate away buying power. It's basically dead money only there to deploy if something else cracks. >> Okay. But so you have to do a like all things with investing and most things in life, you have to do a comparative analysis. So if you inflation adjust equity market or you price the equity market in gold on the equity market has underperformed. If you look at the and you probably know the statistic better than me but I would say over the last 5 years uh the 500 best companies in the United States making profits have underperformed a metal called gold. Okay. So that's telling you something structurally is broken. To you know to use your words the narrative is broken. And so so what's broken is that we have lost trust in these institutions. Uh if the president of the United States is decrying the independence of the Fed, that will leak itself into the price appreciation for gold. If the president of the United States is saying unpredictable things about US foreign policy and again whatever you think of America, we've had a fairly consistent bipartisan commitment to the rules-based world order that was structured shortly after the Second World War. And now you have a arbitrary and capricious rhetoric that's coming out where we're talking about the potential invasion of Greenland, a territory that is in the possession of one of our NATO allies. We are talking about crossing the border into Canada. were flagging provinces of Canada on the president's social media where now the prime minister of Canada has to actually go to the defense ministry and say we have to war game a potential invasion from the United States. So, so when you're doing that, people are looking around and on the margin they're going to put less money in the United States. On the margin, they're going to put less money in our treasury markets. And on the margin they're going to look around and say okay the US Stephen because of the decentralized nature of the government and the predictability of the legal system became the most powerful and most prosperous country in the world. That's the irony. There was no Caesar. There was no authoritarian. But it was this collective, this decentralization that allowed your family uh to uh land somewhere in New York, my family, >> right? Land somewhere in New York and then their grandchildren, Steve Felman, Anthony Scaramucci, could go on and live the American dream. Okay? If you're in Europe, there's a sclerosis there. There's an aristocratic sclerosis. I'm from a family of tenant farmers. I can show you that because the Napoleonic code goes all the way back in Naples, the Kingdom of Naples. So, I'm from a family of tenant farmers, went to Tusen Harvard Law School, got educated, and lived a good part of the American dream, as have you. We're busting that now. We're making it incredibly hard for these people. We took an aspirational America for workingclass families and turned it into a desperational one. And so if you don't fix that and you don't push reform, if people don't look into the camera and say, "Hey, this is not working as evidenced by what you're saying in the overall markets and the structure of the society." So the result of which we now have to reform it. If we don't reform it, you know, unfortunately, America will dilute itself and it will become like other nations. uh and your corporate finance professors of 2035 will be talking about our treasuries a lot differently. They won't be Argentinian treasuries, but they won't be what you learned about 40 years ago. >> Well, listen, I I will I see it. Yes. And so there's no political will. So how is this politics? There's no political will to reduce $40 trillion of debt. There's none. You can't >> You don't have to do that though. But you don't have you don't have to reduce, >> right? you you're and and and 3% inflation gets you a trillion dollars of debt reduction each year, right? Because you're inflating your way out of it. >> There's your tax, right? >> And so, but the solution of that, as you mentioned, just creeps back into society. And I think we have this sort of second deviation um where yes, it's if someone could say, "Oh, we can inflate it away." Okay, if that was the answer, that's the answer. and it but it won't inflate away like Zimbabwe or Argentina. It'll just inflate away so people won't notice. But things are already but things are already unaffordable. Affordability is what brought Mandani to New York. >> And so what happens to society when they start to understand that well um and I can I can I can afford inflation a little better than somebody who's making $60,000 a year. And so what happens politically? Is are we have more and is it just going to continue to be Mani as clean sweep >> both ways? You're going to have a right-wing populism uh and you're going to have a leftwing populism. Now, interestingly enough, they converge on a few things like capping credit card debt at 10%. That's a Mandani and a right-wing populist approach, right? So, what happens is a good third to half of the population rejects the social contract. They say this is no longer working for me. And then you get a populist uprising. And what populist leaders have a tendency to do is they'll start socializing. They'll start putting caps on things. So, so which is absolutely the wrong thing to do. By the way, I understand the intent and the good nature of the intent, but it's bad policy because of the way humans interact with each other and the self-interest of the human being. Better policy would be the Teddy Roosevelt policy. And for those people that really want to understand our history, the father of progressivism was a Republican by the name of Teddy Roosevelt. It's been hijacked by the left. But what was progressivism? Teddy Roosevelt looked at the East New York slums. Uh he had a Dutch journalist by the name of Jacob Ree who was very close to. And Jacob Ree wrote a book called How the Other Half Lives. And when he was the police commissioner here in New York, he went down to these tenementss and he said, "Oh my god, these tenementss are collapsing and killing people. We need structural reform in building codes. We need structural reform in how we take care of the working poor." So Teddy took that to the White House and he got all the robber barons together and he said, "Okay, you're taking too much economic rent from the society. So we're going to enact the Sherman Antirust Act, which came five or six years prior to him. We're going to start busting these trusts and you can have a very beautiful lifestyle, but you got to start sharing it with other people. We have to burgeon and create a middle class so these people don't descend on your m Michigan mansions or wherever they may have been at that time with >> Ohio >> Ohio tiki torches and pitchforks and set the place on fire. >> So let let me by the way I'm a big Teddy Roosevelt fan and I think remember we keep coming back to this word narratives and I'm not thrilled with the Mandani narrative. I'm not I'm not thrilled with the rightwing version of it, but Teddy Roosevelt did something which was more as as important as uh the legislation. He he changed the narrative of what it meant to be rich and what the responsibility of the rich were of which of the rich were in his day. He did a speech. I would highly recommend it. You can Google it. It's called Newism. And he basically explained that nobody in this country gets rich on their own. They get rich using the roads. They get rich using labor. They get rich using the rules and the law and everything else that this country gives to entrepreneurs. And he cowed them first. He made people aware it instead of today's narrative is the worship of the billionaire. Wow, look how great they are. Look at that yacht and look at what they get to do. and they can send their friends into outer space and it's really great. They have huge followings, huge social media followings. They're like celebrities, but no one is in an adult dialogue with them about their responsibility. It immediately goes to immediately goes to tax the rich wealth tax as opposed to this moral persuasion argument. And by the way, I live it and I think you live it too, which is I I think there's virtue in giving back. I don't have enough money to do what Carnegie did and build a thousand libraries. I don't. But if if Elon Musk or if Jeff Bezos decided not to spend $500 million on a yacht and he decided that he was going to just build housing, billions of dollars of housing >> and give back in a way that really changed the conversation. People thought that what was be exalted in America was giving, being part of a community, bolstering the community, not having to have it be legislated to you by Bernie Sanders and Mandani and AOC to actually feel like, wow, you'll be lauded, you'll be the most popular person. You'll feel good. You'll get something deep inside. I don't know how you get there. I think you do it in your personal ver universe. I know I do it in my personal universe. I do wish there was a way that we got away from wealth worship to >> there is a way >> other worship. >> See so so but to me there is a way because it's America right and so what would Buffett say about America? Don't bet against America and America is neurally plastic and America has a tendencies to dip and then have a period of reflection and then a period of redemption and renewal. So let's just talk about America for a second and look at it in three 80year blocks of time which is consistent with Neil How's book the forth turning and so we start America in 1776 80 years later roughly we have a great civil war okay so we're really at a low point in America we then after the civil war we rebuild America becomes a decent formidable global economy and then we go into the great depression 80 years later we have two wars that are catastrophes for the world but also hurt America. We come out of the second war combined 100 million people dead from the two wars and we build a postworld war II society where America is a benevolent powerful democracy as opposed to a hegeimon or a bully. Okay? And that makes a very very big difference from the socialization of the world if the hegeimon is a benevolent democracy as opposed to a bully. It's 80 years out from that. And so what happens is the institutions that we created, they get forgotten by the younger politicians. They get forgotten by the younger people in the room. Why do we have a World Bank? Why do we have a UN? What difference does the EU make? And they start to question everything. And then you get a reflexive systemic rise in nationalism. So we're 80 years out again. And we need reform and we need reflection and we need renewal. And so if you get the right political leadership to explain that to the people, uh the people will look around and say, "Okay, that's actually what we need. We don't need more Bellacosia rhetoric towards the left if we're on the right or more Bellicosia rhetoric to the right if we're on the left, but we actually need a healing solution for America where we can cohabitate culturally in America." Uh America's always had racism, Stephen, discrimination. and it's always had ethnic uh slurs against each other, but we more or less have lived here or cohabitated fairly peacefully and we've all generally pro prospered here. How do we reconnect and how do we make that happen? And so I would say to you the right political leadership would help that. Okay. Uh in the 70s uh the New York the Time magazine had this great 4-week uh essay on American renewal. Uh Jimmy Carter said we were in a malaise. Gold was at $800 an ounce. I don't know what is that inflation adjusted $8,000. I don't know what it is today, but but but we were in a malaise. Reagan came in and offered a renewal. Okay. You had or you know people liked Reagan or Bush or Clinton, there was 20 years of generally good executive management of the United States. Pursuant to that bipartisan commitment, we started running a budget surplus at the end of the Clinton era. We've now had 25 years of horrific incompetent management. Again, whatever you thought of Giuliani or Mike Bloomberg, I submit to you, we had 20 years of reasonably good executive management in the city. And good political management matters because for people like you and me, Stephen, we are minority partners. Okay? You're paying in taxes what I'm paying in taxes. So your majority partner is the president, the mayor, and the governor. They are getting 52% of the economic rent that you're producing. You're a limited partner to them. And so we have to get involved. We have to push the issues. we have to push the reform. Uh and if we don't do that, okay, as part of the give back, then we're making a making a very big mistake. But this is fixable. This whole thing is fixable. >> Okay, so let's we go back to this whole macro question. So the two other pieces of this first. So what are you doing about it? All right. So you you're a very good observer, but you're also a custodian. You're a custodian of a family or a custodian of a business. You frankly you are a custodian of a public persona that influences people and it's nice to talk right there's a lot that's what politicians do and some politicians do more than talk they fight they write you know you read these people in the house of representatives they never part they're great big Twitter followings but they've never introduced legislation barely show up to vote one man but a a man with a good megaphone and a pretty good uh pretty good influence so what what do what do you do personally so I haven't announced this yet, but I'll announce it here on your show. >> Oh, wow. >> Okay. I I signed a book contract. Uh the book is going to be published in September. The title of the book is All the Wrong Moves: How We Got Ourselves into This Political Situation that we're talking about and how we led to the rise of populism. Okay. That's basically the general title of the book. I've spent six months on it. I actually think I sent you a manuscript of it. It's now finished and polished. It will be published right before the midterms. I'm going to go out on a massive marketing campaign to talk about the book because I believe in the book are sociological observation of how we got here. I think it's very very important uh when you're going in the wrong direction to understand how you got into the direction you're going to. And then the last part of the book, generally a third of it is how to get out of the situation that we're in. And I'm g offering solution-based ideas in the book. And I'm going to go out and market that book. And depending on the reception of the book and how popular the book is, the books are hard to sell, by the way. But the ideas could potentially gravitate and become popular. If that becomes popular, then I have another leg to the stool. But I got to get the first leg down. President Scaramucci. >> Well, you the problem with running for president. I don't have a party to run. Let's say I wanted to run for president. Okay. So, my wife believes in castration and I like my body parts, but you know, and Stephen, you know, I had some problems in my marriage which are very well documented by the tabloids. And I always see people say, I'm running for re-election in my marriage. I want to keep my family sacraan. Having said that, even if I wanted to run for president, I have no party to run in. Okay? The left hates me. Okay? because I was once a right-leaning Republican and the right hates me because I left them. Okay? So, I have no party to run in. And one of the things that I write about in the book, we have a very tight duopoly at the top. They have structurally made it impossible for an independent. Even though the independents now have 40 plus% of the registrants, it's it's nearly impossible to get an independent to the president. So, so even even if I get and by the way, they would malign me. I probably don't meet the height requirement to be president. >> Carry you. >> You can carry me on your shoulders. They would probably go after me. But the message in the book is very very clear. If America wants to heal itself, we're now through that 80year cycle. We're in our third 80year cycle. If America wants to heal itself, it's doable. And we're the type of nation that could actually do it. We could pull ourselves out of the current abyss that we're in. Uh, and but here's the other problem, and this is why it would be generally hard to get elected. It's a 20-year fix. It's not a twominute fix. It's not a cable news fix. It's not a podcast fix. It's a 20-year fix. You need 20 years to reform the excesses in the government. You need 20 years to reform the K through 12, very uneven public education system. You need 20 years to fix the infrastructure. You're never paying off the debt. Let's just tell everybody that that's not going to happen. But what you can do is you can grow the economy, okay? And you can structure things like we were doing in the '9s to prevent the debt from getting out of control. We had legislation that George Herbert Walker Bush passed in the early 90s, which effectively became called pay as you go. Dick G Dick Gart who was the uh this the congressional leader for the left at that time signed on to this legislation. Some of the Democrats lost their seats. But the legislation was if you're going to increase social services, no problem. You have to raise taxes. If you're going to cut taxes, absolutely no problem. You got to find things in the discretionary spend and lower them. And it created these guard rails. After 911, George Walker Bush pulled the guard rails and we had an explosion in deficit spending which is continuing. Okay? And and by the way, let's let's include Bush in this. George Washington to George W. Bush 7 trillion. The next three presidents and one of them did two terms, right? Or was in in his second term, $31.5 trillion. I want you to think about that. 17 years from 2008, January 20th, 2009 to today, we've blown through $31 trillion. Of course, there's going to be a problem. Of course, there's going to be a inflation problem. There's going to be a narrative breaking problem. No, of course there's going to be Well, listen, first of all, good luck. Uh it wouldn't be nice to see uh an adult conversation regardless of who wins. something that brings people to discuss blowing up narratives >> that that may be reason enough to enter a race, right? Just so that you could get an adult. >> I'm not going to be your I'm not going to be your campaign manager, but I'm going to throw some ideas for you. First of all, I think what the I've been writing about this a bit on LinkedIn. Number one is I think the middle or the moderate has to be as radical as the left and the right. And the problem is, and I call it radical moderation in the writings, and I think the problem is the people in the middle have other things to do. It sounds strange, but like I can't I don't have the time to be extremely political. >> They're they're the people that the founders actually wanted to be involved. >> Correct. So I call it so the middle the citizen has to be as radical. So I call it radical moderation. The second thing I would tell you, if you're going to run a campaign, use the word marketing. I would say have the book, get a bus, start with the reddest of red counties and the bluest of blue counties. The abs the people where it's 90% one way, 90% the other way. Put your face on the side of the bus and do a listening tour. I think what we need, and I've been writing something myself, I don't write books, but you're better at this. Is almost like a citizens convention. How do you get people to sign on to a 20-year plan? I doubt it'll be because some politician will tell them sign on. But if it's their idea and so you go on this tour, you say, "I want to hear what everybody has to say and I'm not listening because you're red or blue. I'm listening because I'm a good listener." And then we're going to have some sort of lottery to create a citizens convention and we're going to sit down and I'll lead it and I'm going to put down some of the issues. We say, "Listen, $40 trillion dollars of debt. What are we going to do? How are we going to do it?" Lot, you know, you it's going to be guided. It's going to have been mediated. But when you have citizens orders, when the citizens have talked, when that third estate, yes, third estate is coming and saying, "This is how we feel. We've been unempowered for so long. We've been dominated, dominated by white houses, by congresses, by strong politicians, by the media, by the lobbyists, by the corporations, freed by Citizens United to go in and pervert >> the governing system. >> And so that idea, if we could break that, uh, and if you're the leader to do it, God bless, I will help. >> But I think that is something that can change it. that I'm not arrogant enough to think that I am the leader but you said something about me which I do think I'm a observer and I'm a I'm a prolific reader and I'm a student of history and so I want to at least make an observation and if you read the book it is a different turn on looking at the events I bring up Citizens United I bring up the gerrymandering I bring up the Ross Perau election which actually tightened the duopoly and then once they got smug they're like okay we don't have to deal with the people anymore, >> right? >> Because we have 95% incumbent re-election rates. Uh Chuck Grassley, I think he's 700 years old, I guess. I don't know how old he is. >> I think he's 680. >> Okay. But he's going to live for another 100 years. He'll be the senator from Iowa because we don't have to worry about this anymore. We have 435 congressional districts, Stephen. There's only 22 that are going to be potentially potentially contested in 2026. All the other districts have been decided by the gerrymandering and the squeezing out of adversaries in the district. So, so we have to at least explain to the American people what has happened and why the politicians are so arrogant. The big beautiful spending bill which adds approximately $4.4 trillion of deficit spending over the next 10 years. If you're poor and you make $50,000 or less in the country, you lost $700 of benefits. If you're rich and you make $1 million or more, you got $7,000 of benefits from the BBB. Okay. And the politicians don't care because the lobbyists told them to do it. The big businesses told them to do it. And you mentioned Citizens United. You know, most people don't know what it is. So, let's tell them. Citizens United was a decision that was rendered by Justice Scalia in January of 2010, which gave the right to people that had money to put unlimited amounts of money into political contests or policy ideas through political action committees. He said it was their first amendment right, but it is now become the pie versus Ferguson of the democracy. It's a separate but equal democracy now. And you know what? Pie came out. It took 80 years, Stephen, to have Brown versus Board of Education to repeal PI. And we're in our 16th or 17th year now of Citizens United. We need to reform it immediately. We need to stop this insanity to get the narrative back on the people. Otherwise, you're going to have more radical populace. That's true. >> That are going to pervade the society and make things worse, not better. >> Okay. So, now we're going to get a little closer to more more deeply into why Open Position should be a show. All right. There's a lot of people out there who are politicalminded and you have a lot of interests that are not politics. You have businesses and you have a podcast and you have a family and a wife that you want to make sure that you nurture that relationship. Uh what's the motivation? Why you why why are you the right person to write this book and get on a bus? >> Well, see that's the thing. See, I'm not arrogant enough to believe that I am. >> But why do you want to do it in the first place? Why try? >> I want I want to do it because of I am intellectually curious. I have an unconditional love affair with my country even despite all the warts of the country. You know, if you read Jill Leapor's book about America, these truths, it is there's a lot of bad stuff that has happened in America. There's a lot of bad stuff that happened to Italian-Americans and Jewish Americans in America. Okay. So, but I don't care. I have an unconditional love affair with the country. I am a product of the country. Like what Roosevelt said, I'm the beneficiary of a great public school system, good infrastructure, predictable laws. Uh I've had my fits and stars as an entrepreneur, but I've generally been very successful. I would class my myself as financially independent. And so and I have a love of life and a love of country and I want to at least write down this observation and if people like it and they say okay well then what should we do then I want to be part of it. How much ego is in it? >> Well I think ego is in everything but let me tell you something about ego. When you get your ass kicked and handed to you the way I have in my life. Okay as you know uh we started Goldman Sachs together. 18 months later I got fired. Got my ass kicked. Got rehired into Goldman Sachs. I built three successful businesses, but all of them went through the depths of uh horror, the most recent one, Skybridge, during the global financial crisis in 2008. I then went to go work for the first administration and I got my ass fired after 11 days and I was ripped apart by the media, ripped apart by the late night comedians and I've been generally was destroyed in the year 2017. So if you want to talk about the emasculation of ego, I think I have lived that and I've also told you privately which I'll share on this network that my ego has been my enemy at times. Okay, I wanted to go work in the first administration to serve my ego. Stephen, I was oh blue collar with the Goldman Harvard law school. Let me go work for the administration because I'll be a big wheel in the administration. It was a false narrative. I got my ass handed to me. So, is my ego involved in this? Yeah. Anybody that tells you their ego is not involved in something is a lie. Okay. Is a liar. >> But I think my ego has been humbled. And I think my ego has been tamed by the vagaries of life, the trials and tribulations that have happened to me. So, I'm not sitting here with like two tablets coming down from the mount and saying this is the answer. I'm not doing that. All I'm saying is, hey, been on the planet 62 years. I grew up uh one of the most memorable core memories for me was March of 1972. I was 8 years old. I used to walk back and forth to the main street school, which my house was close to. I came through the side door of my house and my mother and my grandmother were ecstatic. I was like, why are they so happy? Well, it turned out in the unfinished basement of the house that I lived in the the General Electric Corporation through one of the appliance stores delivered a washer and a dryer. And my mother and my grandmother never had one of those and they used to take those, you know, wooden roped, you know, you know, paper and they go up and down to the local laundry mat and they had a washer and dryer. I remember thinking to myself, my god, that's great that I didn't realize that we didn't have a washer and dryer. So I grew up like that and I'm now living where I'm living here. So I think I have a pretty decent bandwidth perspective on the society and so I'm going to opine upon it and people say that's a book. He's an idiot and he should be disgraced. So be it. Or they may say you know there's some kernels of truth in the book of what he's saying and maybe this could lead to a few seeds that get dropped for a potential reform. >> You know I find that there's a ego involved. there's this tension of and you're better at it. You're actually it certainly in the 1% of it. Most people in your position and I will include myself is you look at a a set of vested interests and you stick your neck out and then all of a sudden those vested interests are at risk. I I worry uh that given the political environment if you say something does does it affect your business? It may it may it may >> business has been harmed by my >> So so so here's the issue again getting to the hard the hard stuff which is you may have enough ballast you could look in your bank book or you could even say hey you know it's attention it's not the world's worst thing for me but did everybody in your shop sign on to that you know did I have two I'm an entrepreneur myself two businesses let's call it a hundredish employees in two companies >> right >> um if the companies went out of business I probably would still be okay. I would wouldn't be happy and there would be no income, but uh I'd survive and but yet I've got a number of employees who have got a number of children and they're funding their 529s and trying to get the and do I want to play with their careers? Do I want to play with my family's uh privacy? Yeah, you see the >> And that's and that's I I know and that that's the tension and I was about to say which is >> that's the debt >> you you you are unique and should be lauded for the fact that you're willing to take that risk and I would say collectively if we all took that risk we would all be safe. >> Well, you always say that, >> right? But someone has to stick their neck out first and those people often >> Yeah. >> can take the brunt and they get hurt. But something happened interestingly when 60 people that are min Minneapolis-based CEOs sign on to something. Now there's power. If you go after one law firm and you get the law firm back on their heels in isolation, then they have no power. But if they teamed up with the 50 100 other law firms, >> don't get me started on the law firms. >> But but but but I'm just trying to make a set. I'm I'm trying to make a statement that the the prey is to prey on that self-interest and to prey on that insecurity. But I would say something different. If I really want my family to do well, we got to get the society right. I don't and I know you don't. I don't want to live in a maybe there are billionaires that want this. I don't want this. I don't want to live in a bobwire security compound in my McMansion while my fellow neighbors are suffering. >> I agree. I don't want that. I don't I don't get the I don't get the gated community as a virtue. >> I don't I don't want that. I want I want to be able to walk out of my house. Maybe it's a little bit bigger than yours, but you're happy because you've got one and you got a car. Your kids's going to a good school and you're getting up in the morning thinking your kids's going to do better than you. And so you don't begrudge my house. You don't want to set fire to my house. You want my house. You're like, "Hey moo, someday I'm gonna own your house." Okay? And that's the society that I want to live in. And so the only way to do that is we have to have a systemic awakening and a course correction. And if we're not willing to do that collectively, then it will go the way history goes where you will have a rise and fall of something. Okay? Aurelius said it better than me uh in his writings and meditations. He said, "I want to I I want to cheat history. Rome is in decline. I want to put principles together and I want to make decisions that will cheat history. And under his leadership, he was able to extend the empire for several more hundred years. I understand that things rise and fall in societies. Empires get large, empires descend. I understand that the American century, for us to have another American century, we need a renewal. If we don't want to do that collectively and we're all going to sit there in our silos of self-interest, that's how things decline. And I accept that. I'm not I'm not I'm not here saying that, oh, we're going to change it. I'm not some messianic person or anything like that. I'm just looking at the situation and say we can fix this. And if we want to fix it, it's going to require all of us to take a little bit of risk. But let me tell you something. If you were able to change the conversation and you were able to inject some accountability back into the government, guess what happens? These are marketing competition, Steve. These campaigns are marketing competition. If the public will is on the side of virtue, then the politician is forced to act virtually. >> Yeah. Well, listen. We we need America whe regardless of what 80 years it's been. If it was the from the Mayflower to reconstruction to to yesterday in in in a in an INS uh office, we are in America is a moral argument. Uh just because we stormed Normandy, won World War II, and were a kind sort of kind hegemony for the last bit doesn't mean there's lots of issues that still were building. And they range, right, from racism to fiscal irresponsibility. And there's a lot that we can fix. And what's always so troubling is what we do in our business. The worst thing you can do in a business, remember someone makes a mistake and you say to somebody in your job, they made a mistake. I say to them, listen, after all these years of being a business person, there's very few I haven't faced. That's why I get the corner office. That's why I'm a CEO. I can solve them. But if you don't tell them to me or worse yet, you try to fix them yourself or you cover them up and they start to get bigger and bigger, then maybe I can't and certainly you're fired. That's the country we are in today. We're in a country that has problems. >> And yet we want to take one side wants to try to fix them by hurting the other side, but nobody wants to be in a conversation. No one wants to change that. American exceptionalism. We'll all accept it even though we'll see so many things wrong because it takes bravery and it takes risk in order to have these sort of conversations. >> Let me show you something. This is a rage machine. Didn't start out as it, but this is a rage machine. And so what happens is the algorithms are designed to create rage. >> And if I can get you raging, I can get you on, but I'm going to get a docu in your body. Yeah. >> And so now I got to get you raging. But when when I interact with people and I get people that are HQR79, they hate my guts and they want me to fall into a fire pit. But then when I meet HQR79 in person, they want to take a selfie. Okay? Because what happens is when you're together, you're more civil. You're laughing because you know this is how it works. Okay. Of course. So this is a rage machine. How on God's earth, and Mcronone is right about this. How did we let the Chinese, the Russians, and the North Koreans, and the big tech companies control the rage machine to weaken the tenants of the social fabric in our society? Okay, I don't know how we did it, but we did do it. Okay, and it's not going away. I'm not suggesting that. But are we smart enough to break away from it? Are we smart enough to transform from it? Are we smart enough to say, "Hey, we've had this rage machine going. Citizens United, everything's been going for the last 15, 16 years. We failed after 9/11. Totally misfired. Bin Laden said that we would overreact and that we' take our own civil liberties away and we would bleed out our treasury." >> Okay, it's the top of the seven. >> Mission accomplished. >> Six nothing Bin Laden. So he said that he said it in the dark web. He I'm going to hit them. They're going to overreact. Send their military over here. They're going to be bombing our mud huts. We don't care about this life. We only care about the next one. And we're going to bleed them out. And he did that. Okay. So now we spent $31 trillion on forever wars and we got all these kids came back. Some of them are committing suicide. Some of them have PTSD. And we offshored all the manufacturing. So most of these small towns have been blighted. Okay. Do you want to fix it or not? And so what you said earlier 10 minutes ago, my self-interest is such where let me stay out of it or if I'm a politician, let me sit with the hard right because they're going to write me checks, they're going to keep me elected or let me sit with the hard left and let me stay out of it. Or can we fix it? And so I believe that the US is an early plastic and if we can shed light on the problems and we can get enough smart people together say you know what it is fixable and it is an unbelievable country with the most powerful military most powerful economy and these technologies that we're on boarding you know one of your narratives which may or may not be true Stephen is technology solves the problems but has generally been helpful it been generally deflationary to have technology. It's been generally helpful. It's led to more economic growth and maybe it won't be. But my point is we got to try. >> Well, I I just to put a finer point on that and I I want to dial this back to a little finance in a second. >> Um I'm a believer in technology and I'm far from a lite. I was I was uh I was doing AI in a in a hacker sort of way before Chatg GPT. Uh I don't think our society is very good at dealing with the externalities. So social media is connecting people around the world. Great. Social media as an envy machine, as a uh a rage machine, as a cortisol machine, an anxiety machine, an envy machine, horrible. The internet, you know, at the and it lots of positives, but it facilitated all of this. And now there's AI and we haven't gone there. And it could be utopian in some ways. I doubt it. Same way so can driverless cars. Could be utopian, but you have 1.5 million drivers who will not have a job in the United States. They're going to be a little upset. And so we we didn't deal very well with NAFTA, with the people who were uh disengaged from financial success. There wasn't some Marshall plan to retrain the people who were quote victims of NAFTA. And similarly there will not be there doesn't seem to be any urgency to do the same thing for AI which may be NAFTA on steroids. >> Yeah, we totally agree. >> And you sit there and you say wow a lot of the anger that happens today is really NAFTA 30 years later the gutting of the middle class. >> But nothing is more dangerous society when you start to eat white collar jobs. that there's a I forget the guy the uh the uh writer Longshore uh Long Shoreman who wrote about the danger when when the upper middle class because they have resources they're angry it's all those suburban women if they're going to start to have a lower standard of living because their husbands lose their job or they lose their jobs then that is going to be something that society has never really faced in America and so that's very dangerous all right listen I want to pivot because I don't want to take the rest of your day >> let me can I just say this >> it'll be a small pivot 30 seconds. Okay, >> I got it so wrong in 1999. Smug, self-centered 35year-old hedge fund manager. What the hell are these guys doing protesting at the WTO in Seattle? Do you remember those? >> Yeah, sure. >> Antifa, man. It was Antifa. >> Got it wrong. Right. Right. Go ahead. I'm sorry. >> All right. So, we just spent at least 30 minutes talking about the state of the world, the state of America. Wealthy on is still a financial education channel and so there's sort of two two things I would say and one we'll get to crypto in a second because I know you're very involved in that. All right. So you're sitting here today and the MAG 7 seems pretty expensive, highly reliant on AI. They've driving the entire market. The S&P is seven companies and you know and Elon Musk is is going to be the fourth biggest country by the time you know he's done merging all these things together. um you're in the markets and you're investing and you're giving people advice and people talk to you. So, how are you telling people to position themselves today? And what are you doing? >> I think the market's expensive. I think that the uh the 40 multiple on the market is nearing the $2,000 bubble multiple. Uh you know, guys like Buffett have pulled out of the market. So, if you look at our portfolio, we've reduced some market exposure. We have some macro trades on that I think are defensive related to things like inflation and interest rates and the potential collapse of the.com bubble. I'm not willing to bet that that's going to happen today or tomorrow because you know how things go. They go further than you think further than are rational. I am a big believer long-term in Bitcoin. I do think that we will use things like Salana and possibly Ethereum to tokenize assets and to have 24-hour markets like Brian Armstrong was talking about yesterday. So, I do own positions in those. Um, but I'm not sitting here going to be pulled completely out of the market any more than I'm completely into the market. I'm in a sort of a halfway zone. I just remind people that our generation that got burnt by technology in March of 2000, 26 years ago, some people got burnt so badly, Stephen, they never return to tech stocks and they made a mistake because the technology stocks, that sector of the economy was probably one of the best in the history of the world. Okay? And they could have gotten definitely B. So, is there an AI bubble? I'm sure that there is. I'm sure it will burst. But I will own things. I do own some SpaceX. I do own some XI. I do own some Nvidia. And maybe they'll correct 50%. I'm not saying they won't, but I have to be a equity holder. And the best equity holders in my lifetime, based on my observation, are private equity thinkers. Warren Buffett owns the stock, but he owns it for a five or 10 year period of time. He's not >> He's buying the company that But the the way he executes it is through the stock. >> Exactly. Exactly. And so he's looking at the company saying, "I now have an ownership stake in this company. It would be the same way you beautifully built Gold Bullion International over 15 years and now you deserve the harvest that you're reap reaping from the building of that." You didn't say, "Oh, you know, gold, you you started the company in 2010. Gold's down this week. Let me sell the company." Okay, gold's down this week. I got to build the company. I got to innovate and think around that. Okay, so that's what I'm suggesting to people. Now, the good news for me is I have an interval fund, so there's a longer term lockup on it. I had people that wanted to kill me in 2027. I'm sorry, 2023. Maybe they will kill me in 2020. Want to kill me? Sure. 27, right? And then they praised me in 2024. Okay? You know, who the hell knows? But I believe the trajectory is right for growth. And I do believe that we we will get the trajectory right. There'll be an upside bias in these markets, but there should be based on valuation some type of near-term correction. >> So, but as an aside, is that fund open? Can wealthy investors look at it? All right. Well, we we'll send something out on that. I assume it's accredited or >> Yeah. No, it's an accredited credited fund. Actually, you know what? It's not anymore. The SEC actually changes rules, I think. So, so yeah, we we could we could take people's money, but I would tell people do not invest in that fund unless you have a fiveyear horizon. And I always tell people that everybody's a long-term investor until they have short-term losses. The minute they have short-term losses, you strike a match of their hair and they run around in a circle. Okay? So, you got to think particularly right now in a very long-term way if you want to do really well. >> Well, that's the other thing that Buffett says that time is the ARB, right? If you can hold for a long period of time and you can compound uh tax efficiently, >> definitely the >> then you should do well in the equity market. I I would I want to layer just something quickly on that because this is actually is the way it's interesting how many DMs or private uh messages I get say oh I saw you on wealthy how you position what are you investing in my I am a firm believer in innovation I think in innovation whether it was RCA you know back in the 20s and hey we did the radio or >> right or it's or it's Nvidia um innovation has driven all of the equities returns and the S&P is a magical thing because it drops out the woolw Perths and the Sears and it adds the best companies and if they don't work it drops it out and it's and in the index in the ETF it's all tax efficient. You don't even pay any taxes as they buy and sell things within the fund and so you do have to stay invested in innovation and because that's the thing that drives the market and so >> and and and but >> and you have to do it over very long periods of time. >> Yes. And I'm going to use a Buffett apherism uh to compound what you're saying. He gave a presentation at the some valley commerce. I was 36 years old. It was the year 2000. He showed the Dow in 19 >> The Dow. Yeah. >> He showed the Dow. 30 stocks in the Dow >> and then he showed the Dow in the year 2000. There was one stock in the Dow was GE, but apparently it got taken out of the the index for a few years and then put back in. And Buffett's point was this Dow here's the trajectory of it, but none of the companies >> Yes. >> are there. This is your point about the S&P. See what I I I have to understand the fluidity of markets. Whatever we're expecting to last doesn't sometimes things last longer than usual. But what does last is what you said is innovation. >> Yeah. And the one thing and and and since we are we do have a wealthon audience, Wealthon has sort of is now majoring in real assets. You know, we we feel like one of the narratives that changed was globalism to mercantalism. and and so now you're going to have this uh resource nationalism. And so the metals, the miners, the steel makers, the electricity makers, all of those things that have to be now created for China, for Russia, for the United States are been completely underinvested in for that for literally for the same 80 years. And you know, but and the key is is picking the winners. And so there's a lot of in that space there's a lot of uh promoters and so if you can help investors curate it I think we can help people make better returns and that's something we're trying to do but I think as a general rule you know for me positioning I'm always long I always want to be long innovation and my ARB is time just don't look and uh don't look uh try to pick a theme and for us theme is real assets metals and mining uh because it's been underinvested it's still less than 1% of holdings. Uh I am fully I have to say I'm I'm pretty much fully out of bonds and have been for almost a decade. That's I'd just rather have it be in cash. I'm not out of cash. The cash is there to get a small return and then the option value of being deployed if something cracks and I probably have too much cash and I've missed out but I'm still I still like to think I can maybe outsmart a market if it cracks. >> I'm going to say something on the wealthy on there. I don't think you could ever have too much cash. I mean that to me um I'm not I'm not and I think for people listening you don't have to be the richest person in the room. Who you who are you trying to prove that to what you need is you need to understand your needs as a family what your personal philosophy is and get to a safety zone and stay in that zone. >> All right. Well, >> safety zone plus growth. >> I I I agree to me. Remember I started out in the introduction and say what am I solving for? And I get it that I'm not the age of every wealthy on viewer, but certainly at the top of the list, the tippiest top of my list is sleeping through the night. Uh, one of the most val, you know, I don't think from the moment I gradu started out in a law firm through my Goldman career and then being an entrepreneur, even worse, that sleeping through a night without a care in the world has is just not it's not on my dance card. And so as an investor, having some cash, building some cushion, having some resilience is really the number one thing you can really solve for. >> You know what would make me sleep less through the night? If I wasn't articulating what I saw as a systemic problem for the country right now, there are other people, Stephen, that would say, "Oh, let me stay out of this. No one will shoot an arrow at me." >> The ostrich strategy. >> Yeah. Let me let me stay out of it. But I'm the very opposite. I'm like, "Okay, I would not be comfortable with myself and I would not be able to sleep through the night." And and by the way, uh I have family members that fought in the Second World War. Uh my uncle was on Normandy Beach, the one I'm named after, my uncle Anthony. And the notion that uh I'm in a supposedly free country where I have a First Amendment right to exercise my right to free speech and that is now deemed courageous in the country. I mean, my uncle was on Normandy Beach getting shot at by the Nazis. Okay. So I should be able to have enough courage in my personality to talk about the problems that the country has without overly worrying about the retribution. And if the retribution comes say that's part of life there's nothing I can >> so is that what's so is that what keeping you up? Is that so you said is that currently keeping you up and when you wake up at 3:00 in the morning and you can't fall back asleep what's on your mind? I think that the things that I worry about are not my personal financial condition because uh I think from my life's perspective, I'm doing so much better than I ever anticipated. I wake up with lots of gratitude about that. But I am worried about the country. I am worried about that to the point where if I have a voice in that, and I'm not saying even my voice matters, but to try to have a voice in that, I would be upset with myself if I didn't. That's the point. I would be sleeping less well at night if I didn't have a big mouth. I think that's the answer. >> Yeah. You know, people, this is a hard time, but >> I understand this is a hard time for people with a good conscience. And if you have a value system and and you want to do the right thing and you have a platform like you do and maybe I'll have one over time and wealthy on and you don't use it or you're just using it to make more money that you do not need, >> right? >> Or it is is really a hard time. I I I do struggle consciouswise of what is the responsibility of somebody who has a corner office, has some resources and can string three sentences together. Uh what are they supposed to do? And I'm pretty sure it won't be buying a yacht. But uh all right, so listen, this has been great. I want to have one closing question for you. We have a lot of subscri hundreds of thousands subscribers on wealthy. You you you better. >> Okay, I'll come back. G give them it doesn't it doesn't have to be a finance thing, but give them a pro tip. What what would you like people to take away if you could you've written a lot of books and many of those books are self-help in style. Many of them introspective. It's got to be something that you would tell somebody if you were mentoring. You're mentoring the wealthy on audience today. You got one shot. >> There's Okay, so it's it's actually three things. Okay, I can't get it to one, but I I really thought about this long and hard. Number one, you got to start the day with some level of gratitude. Just the fact that you have access to the wealthy on network means there's probably enough technology around you where you've got to, you know, hopefully heat, you got the air conditioning and the you got to start with the basics and be gratified by your life. The second thing, and this is the most important thing, and it's the only thing I can really give to my children. You have to celebrate the successes of your friends. If you do that, you'll have an abundance of friends in your life. You've got to be the first cough people. If you're taking GBI public, I want to be one of the first call so I can shoot you with the champagne. You got to be that person because there's no reason. You have to strain out the attistic urges of envy and jealousy in your life. If you do that, you're going to be a happy person. You're going to have a lot of friends. Last point, number three, you got to do something you love. Okay? I have two kids in the arts. Are they gonna make a lot of money? I don't know. But one's a great singer and one is a film director. I didn't say, "No, no, no. You gotta go to Wall Street." I said, "No, no, no. You got to do what you want." Because in the immortal words of Mel Brooks, relax. None of us are getting out of here alive. Maybe him. He's 99. Maybe he'll make it to 199. But you get my point. So that's it. Do something you love. Celebrate the success of your friend. Don't be an envious, you know what. And get up in the morning and say, "Hey, I'm up. I got a cup of coffee. This is fantastic. >> Well, it's very good advice. I I was going to add a fourth one for now, which is not only should you do what you love, you should elevate love. We're in an angry country and anger kills the host. >> After me on the rage machine, I don't even respond. Oh, oh, that's nice. I'm a Oh, I didn't know that. Oh, that. Oh, maybe you're not allowed to sub on YouTube. I I That's nice. >> Well, listen. I I I won't do this for many many guests, but this at least for this one. >> You're the you're >> Thank you for being our first guest. >> Congratulations on the show. I expect to be back. Okay. Calling my agent, telling him to fight me back. And this is the first show. It's the only place in my life where I'm as tall as Stephen Feldman on the stage. Okay. I'm very happy about that. >> Goodbye. All right. Don't forget to sign up for a free portfolio review with one of our endorsed investment partners at wealthon.com/free. With markets hitting all-time highs, now is a great time to stress test your strategy and be prepared for what comes next. Thank you all for watching. We'll see you again next time.