See those? These are Italian singles in my neighborhood, right? These are single singles. Now, let me take one of them. This is made out of cloth. You can Google this. This is 75% cotton. It is 25% linen, some green ink on it, a couple other colors. There's a counterfeit strip there to protect it. And that's it. This is worthless. There's two types of bribes, right? You can bribe somebody and they actually do what you want, and then you can bribe them and they don't do what you want. And I'm not talking about politics. I'm just saying there are two types of bribes.
Theoretically, theoretically throwing that out there. But if you're asking the question about did he hurt the industry? He's helped and hurt the industry. He hurt the industry with the memecoin because he's Trump. He's a skank because that's going to piss everybody off. You're like, so wait a minute, we're socializing their losses. Then you're giving them a million dollars plus a year in bonuses. How are you helping the little guy? Oh, you're not helping the little guy. Let's create the Tea Party movement. Let's create Occupy Wall Street.
Those two movements got together, had a baby, they named a baby MAGA. What would be your advice to Prime Minister Carney and the Canadian government about how Canada should be approaching crypto?
If you want to reach the people actually making decisions in this country, you're already listening to the right show. Fall budgets and economic statements are coming from Ottawa and every province. Advocacy can't afford to wait. Reach out to us at contactquotmedia.com and let's talk about making you a sponsor this fall heading into a big new year. Welcome to the culture lab.
Welcome to the culture lab. I'm Kyler Ralph.
And I'm Gabe D. Ro. This week in the lab, the data is back and results are in. Bitcoin price volatile. Crypto's impact on politics trending up. Under the microscope today, our loaded question, how did crypto become a powerful political force? We speak to Anthony Scaramucci, a crypto investor, podcaster, and briefly the communications director to President Donald Trump about how crypto went from a niche interest of libertarian cipher punks to a genuine voting block and a big-time political spender.
But first, let's get to the trend line. My polling aggregator model has the Liberals at 47, the Conservatives at 31, the NDP at 11, and the block at six. And Kyla, not to start a polling aggregator Twitter feud or something, but my 4731 number has actually a bigger lead for the Liberals than Philip Fornier's 4633 at 38 338 Canada and Eric Gier's 4733.
But Kylo, the paranoia about the Twitter fights maybe is telling a slight too is too telling of the state of affairs in the polling industry. But yes, you know God, that is the thing top of mind for all for everyone in polling is how to join Twitter feuds or how to avoid them. But the real polling news I would say is these provincial elections we have going on. Kylo, what's going on provincially?
Yes. Yes. Yes. That's, you know, tons of excitement. Obviously the red has dropped in BC and early polling. Yikes. I don't know. It's not great for David Eby's BC NDP. Right out of the gate, we have a poll from Angus Reed Institute that has the Conservatives now leading the NDP by eight points, 43 to 35. Maybe a little bit of backlash with 12% for the Greens. Nonetheless, 338 Canada still has the averages tied at 42 to 42. So, we will see. I'm sure we'll get some more polls in the coming days given how exciting it is. I'm sure some pollsters will be heading into the field.
But in Quebec, we are 10 days outish by the time of release, 10-ish days out from election day. The Parti Quebecois is holding their lead at 29 according to 338 Canada, your new nemesis, compared to 22 for the Liberals, 21 for the CAQ, 16 for the Conservatives, and 11 for Quebec Solidaire. We also have some piping hot data from front of the pod Janet Brown that was released earlier today and she finds a tie for the Alberta NDP and PCs in Alberta, which is very exciting and more signs that Danielle Smith is in deep political trouble, I would say, and we'll see how it evolves over the next month as they also head to the polls for the referendum not provincially but right.
Well okay why don't we get on to our loaded question then how did crypto become a powerful political force and by political force we mean a few different things right there's the voting block people with a perhaps financial interest in crypto in their own portfolios and people who actually give a about this. Then of course we mean the money that's being poured into politics via lobbying and especially in the US PACs and then there's the very live legislative debate both here in Canada and in the US and we'll talk about all three of these political forces with our guest coming up soon.
Yeah. But before we dive in as always we have a few data points. The first, and this might come as a surprise to people, I'm not sure, but the first is 25%, which is the percentage of Canadians who report owning some type of cryptocurrency. Obviously, that number is a lot higher among younger folks, among young men in particular. So far from being a niche issue.
And the next one is $300 million the total dollars the crypto industry has spent across the 2024 and 2026 US election cycles. Yeah, just a little change. Our last data point is 2.3 billion, which is the estimated amount that Donald Trump and his family have made from their four major cryptocurrency ventures since he returned to the White House.
And why not a little bonus data point here? Couldn't just do three since you have Anthony Scaramucci on the podcast. It's 11. This is now the broadly accepted unit of measurement for one scaramucci representing the 11 days that today's guest served as director of communications during Trump's first term.
Perfect. Perfect. Yeah, that it couldn't go without being said, especially, you know, on a data centric podcast. The unit of measurement is always very important.
Yes, absolutely. But let's get to our main event. The reason I'm sure everyone tuned in our chat with Anthony Scaramucci, we dig into the crypto voting block of 2026, where the reputational challenges are for the industry, and what political and institutional change is needed for the industry to fully mature.
This week, to help answer our loaded question, how did crypto become a powerful political force? We are joined by Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony is the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital, an alternative asset manager. He's also the host of the podcast The Rest is Politics US and the author of many books, most recently All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions, There it is, led to the rise of Trump, which we will speak about as well. Anthony, welcome to the Culture Lab.
Thank you guys. Thank you for having me on, and I'm ready for your questions. So fire away.
We're really excited to have you. And I'll say at the outset that the culture lab is very much not a finance pod. So if anyone was expecting, you know, our hot takes, our tips, they'll probably be disappointed. But what we are very interested in is the culture of crypto and kind of the political power that is behind it. And I will admit I'm a bit of a crypto skeptic. What I see is a series of events. I see Mt. Gox, I see Sam Bankman-Fried, I see Trumpcoin, and I'm very curious about kind of the resilience of the brand. Like, why are people still so interested and supportive of crypto?
You're leaving out a lot of stuff, too. I mean, let me rephrase that. You're leaving out a lot of debacles. Okay. So, in addition, you mentioned cleverly a few debacles, but we've got a lot more debacles. So, I mean, you know, I'm going to start at the beginning if you don't mind. Okay. I was a crypto skeptic. I was a Bitcoin skeptic.
When I learned about Bitcoin in 2013, I said, 'This is ridiculous.' I was shared with me again in 2014. I said no again. And then when I revisited it in 2017, which is the third cut at the apple, I then started to realize maybe I need to be more open-minded to it and maybe I need to do some work on it. So, I will say to you as a crypto skeptic and to Gabe that I only want people to do homework on it. Okay. So, I came fortified for this call, right? So, I've got a couple of books.
I wrote this book last year. It's called the little book of Bitcoin. All right. And all it is is a discussion about my odyssey into Bitcoin. I didn't like it. I thought it was BS. I thought it was worthless. You know, Jamie Dimon called it a pet rock. So, a decentralized Ponzi scheme. Warren Buffett called it, you know, rat poison. All this sort of stuff. And so, I said, 'Okay, I get all of that, but I bought it. Here's the reason why.' And not to bore you with, you know, seven hours of detail, I bought Bitcoin because it's a spreadsheet.
It's a hardened spreadsheet that's decentralized, that cannot be corrupted, and it cannot be hacked. And maybe someday it could get hacked with crypto being threatened by things like quantum computing, but I think by that time there'll be quantum resistance to meet it. So I bought it because to really understand money, what is money, guys? Money is a spreadsheet.
Okay. So in preparation for the show, I also brought props. Okay, so let me show you these. Okay, see those? These are Italian singles in my neighborhood, right? These are single singles. Let me take one of them. This is made out of cloth. You can Google this. This is 75% cotton. It is 25% linen. Some green ink on it, a couple other colors. There's a counterfeit strip there to protect it. And that's it. Now, this is worthless. If we were in philosophy class and I said I had a piece of fabric in my pocket with some green ink on it, that's worthless.
You know it's worthless. I know it's worthless. However, if I hand this to a maitre d', he's happy. If I give it to the valet, very happy. I can give this to my pizza guy. Even though we've inflated this and made this less valuable, I can still probably get at least one, two, three pizzas for it. So, what is money? Money is a technology that we use to transact with each other.
It's symbolically valuable, but it's empirically worthless. The spreadsheet that is your bank, because that's all your bank is. It's a secure spreadsheet. Your money's in one account, Gabe's in another account, mine's in a third account. If I buy your house, the digital dollars that are in my account go down and the digital dollars in your account go up. That's it. And then you give me the house, right? So, we have to understand that once you get all that and you understand that the money is all it is is a medium that we're using so we don't have to barter with each other. And then you'll realize that these guys technologically created a hardened system that can't be replaced that has all the attributes of what human beings have thought about around money. And it takes a while to get it, but man, once you get it, you're like, 'Wow, I got to own some of that.' And so Michael Saylor hated Bitcoin. Now he's the biggest holder of Bitcoin. Stanley Druckenmiller, great hedge fund manager, didn't like it. Did the homework, bought Bitcoin. Ray Dalio, same thing. Paul Tudor Jones, Mike Novogratz.
And so I get it and I understand your skepticism because I was right there where you were and you have justifiable skepticism. So only thing I ask people is to please do homework. And this is a breezy book. Remember, I have to write these books so my 90-year-old mother can understand them. She's pistol smart. She never went to college. So this is a very easy digestible readable book and it also starts with I was a crypto and Bitcoin skeptic.
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I'm glad that you started at the beginning because I think I mean for any currency, right, you need buy in. People need to accept what the value is and go from there. And I have this sort of image of the early crypto community as a bunch of kind of I don't know hackers and nerds and libertarians on Reddit who were talking about this kind of stuff. But now we've got, as you mentioned, all of this kind of industry insider backing. They have Larry Fink and BlackRock backing Bitcoin. We have Wall Street building crypto products and then the president launching his own kind of memecoin. Who is the crypto community in 2026? Like, do I need to update my understanding of kind of the crypto culture? Is there only one crypto culture anymore?
Such a good question. Okay, so I'm going to try to answer that and not overly do it. Let me see if I can say this. I think you did a good job of identifying the early culture.
But I think what's happened is to your point, it got beat down with Mt. Gox, got beat down with Sam, went down, Three Arrows blew up, all that stuff. And it's had lots of up and downs if you look at the I mean, Bitcoin's up 40% in the last two months, but you know, it was down 50% prior to that, you know, so it's very volatile asset, but it's a resistant asset. Sort of sticky biased upward asset. And so what's happened is the culture's transformed. There's a group of people that are what I would call traditional finance people that have now decided that they want to own some Bitcoin. And so a guy like Larry Fink hated Bitcoin. Hated it. He was talking to me in the Four Seasons Hotel in Al Maryah Island in Abu Dhabi, telling me in November of 2021, five short years ago, hated Bitcoin. And then by January of 2024, he launched the largest Bitcoin ETF in US history. So the culture now is everything you just said, but lots of traditional finance people who are doing the homework have now decided, you know, there's room in my portfolio to own some of this stuff.
Should I basically so if we again kind of map back to the beginning, there's kind of an irony to this that Bitcoin was sort of created at least in part as a response to the financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street movement. Yet you know much of Wall Street is asking the government for industry regulation and oversight. Is there kind of a tension an inherent tension between these two communities?
I think so. But I also think that there's a promise to the blockchain to really understand the blockchain and blockchain technology. I can transfer value to you, me to you, peer-to-peer without a third party permission. Like usually, let's say I'm going to go buy your house. You're going to give me the wiring instructions for your bank, right? And I'm going to wire the money to your bank using your wiring instructions. You're going to get a notification from your bank and it's going to say the money's there. Then you're going to give me the deed. But over the blockchain, I can send it directly to you without that third party. Does that make sense?
And that's what people are looking at. And that's why the transaction times I can tell you I don't sell my Bitcoin. I've held my Bitcoin for 5 years. But if you sell your Bitcoin, it settles like that, right? And then the money gets wired to your bank like that. If you sell your stocks, forget about it. Takes forever.
Yeah. The crypto industry has been spending big on politics for the past few years. Just earlier today it was reported that a crypto PAC plans to spend $30 million to take down Sherrod Brown which a little bit of Canadian trivia to you. If you do the exchange rate from the US dollars to Canadian that would actually be above the entire Canadian spending cap for like the Liberal Party of Canada. But anyway, fun fact. But after all of this money that has been spent, what do politicians still not get about crypto? And what does the crypto industry still not get about politics?
Well, there's two types of bribes, right? You can bribe somebody and they actually do what you want and then you can bribe them and they don't do what you want. And I'm not talking about politics. I'm just saying there are two types of bribes.
Theoretically, theoretically, just throwing that out there. Okay. But I think what happened in the United States, what I think is a travesty, and I do write about it in all the wrong moves, is that we let unlimited amounts of money into the political system. So to your point about comparing Canadian to American politics, I think it's a real travesty. So we have people inside of our government that can easily be susceptible to putting fertilizer in our children's cereal and we can be easily susceptible to chlorinating our chicken. I don't think the Canadians are allowing for stuff like that. And so when you put big money into the system, big money gets what it wants. And if you look at the legislative agenda over the last 16 years since Citizens United, it is skewed to be big business, tax cuts for the rich, big food, big pharma, big everything. And I think that really sucks for the average person. So, I would like to see that changed, but if you're in Rome, do as the Romans do. So, the Bitcoin people were torched by the Biden administration and they were torched by the SEC chair, Gary Gensler, who was the worst SEC chair since the SEC chart started. And so, they said, 'Okay, if you're going to be that anti-crypto, we're going to use the rules and we're going to spend endless sums of money to try to knock you anti-crypto fiends out of business.' And so, they did. But they elected Donald Trump when they did that because Donald Trump said, 'I want that money. I'm pro crypto.' But then you got to remember you're dealing with Donald Trump. So to your point, you started the conversation. He threw up a memecoin. He made $700 million for himself. He rugpulled everybody. $3.8 billion was lost by everybody else. Trump made 700 million for himself. And that's the reason why you didn't get the Clarity Act passed.
People can say whatever the hell they want to you on Culture Labs, but let me tell you something. When the president rugpulled his supporters with that memecoin, you set up his adversaries to say no to whatever the president wanted. And so he wanted the Clarity Act passed. And so they said no.
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That's a perfect segue for Gabe, which who I think wants to talk to you about Trump.
Yeah, I was going to open my part of the interview with a question exactly on that the Trump memecoin and the family's investments, World Liberty Financial, and the potential for corruption there. I mean, you kind of got to this, but how big of a problem is that kind of behavior for shaping the legislative environment or even frankly shaping how individual investors view crypto as an asset class?
Well, a little bit of a demographic thing, too, Gabe, how old are you, Gabe, if you don't mind me asking? How old are you?
I'm in my late 30s. I'm 39.
Okay. All right. So, 39. You're below 40. You're open to crypto. You know what I mean? Kyla, I don't know how old she is. I'm not going to ask her because I don't want to get slapped. Even though she could probably...
I'm much younger than Gabe.
She's 36. All right. But, you know, if you're below 40, you could be open to it. If you're above 60, you hate it. And so if you're above 60 and you hate it and you're above 60 and you hate crypto and you hate Trump, then guess what's going to happen? They're going to do everything they can to block it, right? But I submit to you guys, this is better technology than what we have. This is very reminiscent to me of Uber. So Uber was ride sharing technology, way more efficient, way more user-friendly, way easier to use. Everybody wanted it. The taxi cab commission didn't want it. I can tell you there's a big commotion about that in New York. I don't know in the states that you live in or the provinces you live in if it was that much of a commotion, but London, they almost had like a revolution, but who wanted it? The people wanted it. And so I submit to you that if the technology is better than what's existing, it'll eventually get adopted. But if you're asking the question about did he hurt the industry, he's helped and hurt the industry. He hurt the industry with the memecoin because he's Trump. He's a skank, but he helped the industry because he put Paul Atkins and others in place that generally understand the technology and want the US to maintain its mantle of financial services leadership. But like with Trump, with everything, there's two sides to the coin.
So here in Canada, we've had some Bitcoin discourse, crypto discourse. While running for the leadership of the Conservative party, Pierre Poilievre was a big booster of cryptos. He later used as an attack against him in the Canadian election last year in the sense that like Mark Carney was painted as this kind of serious economic manager, the institutionalist and Poilievre was with his support of crypto seen as kind of unserious financially. With the crypto market that we have today, how can politicians be taken seriously as economic managers if crypto is a big part of their platform?
Okay, you're talking to a pro crypto person. So again, if I have a trade date and I have a settlement date of one when I started the entry trade date plus five if I tokenize it, a stock or bond I have a trade of minutes and I can run the thing perpetually using the technology 24/7 which will reduce the cost. I don't. Let me ask something. Do you like spending, you guys are so young, but when you guys were just about to be born, I was spending $3 a minute to make a long-distance phone call from London. Now I spend no dollars a minute. So, let me ask him. Would you like to spend $3 a minute or no dollars a minute? What would you like to do?
Anthony, I'd prefer to spend no dollars a minute for...
Okay. So, the technology is such that you're going to be able to spend less. I just explained to Kyler that you have to go through a third party to create the transaction. There are wiring fees. There are third party associated fees. There are brokerage fees. There are admin fees. If I'm buying our house, there are lawyer fees. We spend $4 trillion a year verifying each other's transactions, including the three and a half% that we all seem willing to pay to the credit card company so that I can buy the meal in the restaurant using my credit card. But if I told you I had a dollar bill on my phone that I could over the blockchain send it to the restaurant and I could bypass the three and a half% fee, would I be willing to do that? Would I want to save three and let's say I spend $100,000 a year on my credit cards. Would I like to save $3,500 or would I like to give it to the credit card company? What would I like to do? So, again, I'm telling you that we have technology now that can bypass third parties in the payment and processing area. This is called innovative fintech. I would like to use it. I would like the government to stop the nonsense and politicizing it and to understand what it is and to allow us to do that. So just like we advanced in Uber, just like we advanced in long-distance phone telephoning each other, I'd like to make that advancement in financial services. That's all.
So it sounds in part like you're making kind of an affordability case for crypto. Affordability is top of mind, top of the issue salience ladder right now pretty much everywhere. Do you think crypto hasn't done enough to make that affordability case to the public?
Well, I again it's being generally blocked by old fogies, okay, who are lobbying on behalf of the banking industry, okay, and they would like to keep the status quo. Do you think the banks want to lose their 18% interest on the credit cards or the three and a half% transaction fee? They don't. So, they go to Washington. You guys mentioned the money that the crypto guys are spending, but you don't think the banks are spending money? They are just been in look at Elizabeth Warren is like a ventriloquist and Elizabeth Warren is like the talking dummy for the bank. She just literally spouts, you know, talking points of the US Banking Association, you know. So yeah, you know, that's what's going on. There's a lobbying battle. There's a money war in Washington between those two powers. One is David and one is Goliath. But right now, Goliath is beating David's ass in. But I submit to you this is better technology and this is technology that will eventually get adopted because it is better.
All right. So you and Mark Carney go way back to Goldman Sachs days. I mean he's a...
He's I don't want to call him an old fogy on the podcast. Everyone's gonna lose all my subscribers, but he's the son of a is younger than me, but it makes him an old fog. Here, here, here. You know, because when I'm not only a name dropper, I actually bring receipts. Okay, this is me and Mark at a party in January together and he's there he is looking for there he is looking for Alastair Campbell, right? So, I just want to let you know like me, your prime minister has a sense of humor and we do go way back.
