Mike Novogratz: Crypto's Investors Have Moved On

Summary

Prof G Markets — “Mike Novogratz: Crypto’s Investors Have Moved On”

Vox Media Podcast Network | July 17, 2026
Hosts: Scott Galloway & Ed Elson (Prof. G) | Guest: Mike Novogratz (Founder & CEO, Galaxy Digital)

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Episode Overview

The episode features a candid conversation with Mike Novogratz, a veteran investor and key figure in crypto and digital assets. The hosts delve into the cooling crypto market, AI’s explosive impact, and Novogratz’s investment philosophy. The discussion is direct and insightful, examining why energy has shifted from crypto to AI, how business models are evolving, and what makes a top-tier risk-taker tick. The tone is a mix of irreverence, personal anecdote, and hard-nosed market analysis.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Cooling of Crypto: From Mania to Maturity

[09:09 - 19:57]

• Crypto as Narrative & Speculation:

  • Novogratz reflects that: “Crypto was a storytelling business. I mean, I think I was well suited for it because I’m a storyteller by nature. And we told the story of this as important technology...”
  • The industry’s meteoric rise post-Covid was driven by young, leverage-hungry gamblers searching for massive returns, not traditional 12% annual gains: “They didn’t want 12% returns, they wanted 12,000% returns.”
  • Many tokens were “association tokens” built mostly for speculative trading and meme-driven community, some without lasting utility.

• Transition to Real Utility:

  • The market is maturing, focusing on actual infrastructure like tokenized equities and stablecoins, not just speculative tokens.
  • “The infrastructure of crypto is going to survive, be hardened and thrive. Those tokens that we used to trade…many will drift down because they were really association tokens.” (09:09)

2. The Role of Regulation

[13:48 - 15:37]

• Regulatory ambiguity (Jay Clayton, Gary Gensler) in the U.S. led to unclear rules and “Franken tokens," pushing some legitimate innovation offshore and hindering clarity.
• Novogratz notes that overseas businesses (like Bybit and Binance) are thriving: “No one here has heard of Bitget or Bybit. They have 100 million customers each. Robinhood has 15 million.” (09:09)

3. Where Is the Value Now?

[15:37 - 19:57]

• Value in crypto now is about community trust: “Bitcoin is a story...the value comes from trust.”
• Ethereum’s story as “base layer of trust” and programmable money, but lost some momentum as figurehead Vitalik Buterin retreated.
• Notably, stablecoins and cross-border payment use are the biggest real-world crypto innovations so far.

4. Utility in Action: Stablecoins and Tokenized Equities

[18:10 - 18:43]

• Stablecoins are seeing global, cross-border adoption in regions with weaker financial systems.
• Early stage of tokenized equities: “There are 8 billion people on the planet, probably 5 1/2 billion don’t have access to a brokerage account, maybe 6 billion...” (18:44)
• Demand comes from the ability for anyone, anywhere, to buy fractional shares of blue-chip companies.

5. Brand & Integrity in a Fraught Industry

[19:57 - 23:00]

• Galloway: “You’re sort of seen as the clean, well-lit corner of crypto.”
• Novogratz credits his “kitchen cabinet” of long-standing macro friends for keeping him disciplined and honest: “The people you surround yourself with in life are the people that hold you to integrity.” (21:45)
• Discusses other prominent figures—Michael Saylor’s conviction vs. overleveraged position, and the complexities of building real, economic-value products.

6. The Political and Meme Market Overlap

[30:07 - 33:29]

• Trump’s huge crypto windfall ($1.4 billion in a year) and his role in fomenting meme-coin mania. Novogratz is clear: “It doesn’t help at all. This Clarity act, if it doesn’t pass, it’s going to stumble because of the ethics piece. Because even Republicans are saying we need some.” (32:19)

• Democrat vs. Republican philosophies: “If it’s disclosed, buyer beware. That’s a big boy’s Republican idea. Democrats want to protect the consumer.”

• Markets operate on story and energy: as crypto’s story waned, attention and risk capital shifted to new shiny objects, notably AI and tokenized blue-chip equities.

7. The Big Bet — Galaxy’s Pivot to AI Data Centers

[37:34 - 45:27]

• Galaxy Digital’s surprise move building the U.S.’s largest AI data center, initially connected to bitcoin mining and then reoriented for AI, was partly due to location, tax opportunity, and market evolution.

• Novogratz: “I think this Helios is the campus. I’m pretty certain it will be the largest data center in the United States.” (38:04)

  • $16B capex spend on the center, could be $100B+ buildout if fully expanded—“The only hundred-billion-dollar capex build in American history is the interstate highway system.”

• Debate over whether the market has moved from a supply crisis (not enough compute) to a potential demand crisis (limited real-world AI need so far).

• Novogratz: “We’re in like the first out of the first inning...I think the bulk of America isn’t even really using AI yet.” (42:50)

8. The Exponential AI Possibility—Or Dot-Com Redux?

[44:21 - 51:26]

• Imaginative future: superhuman AI employees, hyper-connected infrastructure, “robots” accompanying people to aggregate knowledge.

• But present is more mundane—AI makes some tasks more efficient, but radical change is not inevitable.

  • Novogratz: “That’s not just processing and making someone more efficient. That literally is superhuman...I just think we’re so early in this thing.” (45:27)

• Reference to overbuilding in the dot-com era as a cautionary parallel—“There was a massive period of overinvestment over building knowing that something would happen but not necessarily knowing what it would actually be.” (49:46)

9. Risk Tolerance, Mindset, and Personal Backstory

[55:44 - 64:00]

• Novogratz’s legendary risk appetite came from overcoming fear of failure, a supportive family, and repeated lessons that “having failed a couple times and realized I didn’t die…it was like, hey, let’s go for it, let’s have some fun.”
• He is less attached to money because he values experience, and wasn’t raised to fear reputational loss: “If you reverse engineer your own confidence, you reverse engineer it to a loving mother.” (58:14)
• On the secret to overcoming shame and embarrassment: reconnect with life, get outside yourself, and prioritize service to others: “The more you think of your life in service, it takes a lot of the stress away.” (64:00)
• Marathons, ayahuasca, and family hardship all factor into his resilience.

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the early crypto market:
  “It was really fueled by a gambling mania of young people wanting to get wealthy...They didn’t want 12% returns, they wanted 12,000% returns.” (09:09 – Novogratz)

• On the next phase:
  “We’re now at this crossroads where crypto is actually going to be used… tokenized equities, stablecoins…” (09:09 – Novogratz)

• On the current state:
  “Someone asked me what crypto was like this year. I was like, meh, man. You know, people just aren’t as excited about it because there’s other things to be excited about.” (13:48 – Novogratz)

• On integrity in investing:
  “It would just be embarrassing to not be truthful, right? Like, you got to kind of call a spade a spade in some ways.” (21:45 – Novogratz)

• On Trump and the meme-coin boom:
  “They made $600 million off Trump coin when it went straight down… and so, listen, it doesn’t help at all.” (32:19 – Novogratz)

• On shifting speculation:
  “You could even in non-crypto people...people want to go where the heat is.” (34:12 – Novogratz)

• On the future of AI data centers:
  “Some of it’s luck. Some of it was us being smart...This Helios is the campus. I’m pretty certain it will be the largest data center in the United States.” (38:04 – Novogratz)

• AI’s “superhuman” potential:
  “[My portfolio founder] created AI Lucy, that...in her first 2 months did 5 times [the contracts] of his 50-person sales team.” (45:27 – Novogratz)

• On family and risk:
  “You don’t have the fear of looking stupid... I was never attached to [money] as much...For me, it’s been a lot of them–from ayahuasca...to service. The more you think of your life in service, it takes a lot of the stress away.” (55:44 – Novogratz, 64:00)

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Highlight Moments & Timestamps

• The psychology of sending a kid to college (emotional, irreverent): [02:55 - 06:48]
• Novogratz gives the blunt state of crypto: “Meh, man.” [13:48]
• Explains utility vs. hype in crypto: “Bitcoin is a story… value comes from trust.” [15:37]
• AI pivot story: From tax avoidance in bitcoin mining to the largest data center bet in the country. [38:04 - 41:11]
• Reveals staggering scale—projected $100B for one data center. [41:19 - 45:27]
• Shares family roots and anecdotes about risk and confidence. [58:14 - 61:07]
• Advice to young people: “The more you think of your life in service, it takes a lot of the stress away.” [64:00]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• State of Crypto Today: [09:09 – 19:57]
• Global vs US Crypto Adoption: [09:09 – 13:17, 18:10]
• Regulation and Meme Speculation: [13:17 – 15:37, 30:07 – 33:29]
• Bitcoin/Ethereum's Staying Power: [15:37 – 17:15]
• Novogratz on Saylor/Integrity: [19:57 – 23:00]
• Shift to AI & Data Centers: [37:34 – 45:27]
• Bubble Parallels, Overinvestment: [49:46 – 51:26]
• Personal Risk Tolerance & Family: [55:44 – 64:00]
• Advice for Losing Fear of Failure: [61:53 – 64:00]

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Takeaways for Non-Listeners

• Crypto has moved from a narrative/speculation-driven market to infrastructure—many coins are declining in relevance, but technology like stablecoins remains vital.
• AI is the new “hot potato,” with infrastructure being overbuilt before true demand is proven—but revolutions often follow such investment.
• Novogratz embodies high risk tolerance, transparency, and grounded perspective, rooted in family, failure recovery, and service.
• For young professionals: embrace failure, focus outward on service, and shed the obsession with others’ judgment.

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If you want the direct, full-blooded take on where markets, crypto, and AI stand, this episode is an essential listen—brutally honest, entertaining, and filled with lived experience from someone who's been at the center of both booms.

Transcript

[Scott Galloway]

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[Mike Novogratz]

I'm pretty confident talking into a mic.

[Scott Galloway]

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[Mike Novogratz]

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[Scott Galloway]

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[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

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[Mike Novogratz]

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[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

I'm Neil Apitel, editor in chief of

[Scott Galloway]

the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today we've got the first of a two part series on the systems that run the world.

[Mike Novogratz]

I'm talking with Bart Butler, the CTO

[Scott Galloway]

of Proton, the company that makes private

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

and secure productivity software. It's impossible to create a backdoor that can only be used by the good guys. No company is going to go to jail for you.

[Scott Galloway]

Often the response is, well, if you

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

change the legal foundation here, we will leave. Yeah, how real is that?

[Scott Galloway]

It's dead serious. With all due respect to Swiss authorities

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

and everybody else, I think it would be suicidal to continue down this path. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast.

[Mike Novogratz]

This series is presented by Comcast Business.

[Scott Galloway]

Today's number $50.1 million. That's how much a T. Rex named Gus sold for at auction this week, setting a new record for fossils.

[Mike Novogratz]

True story.

[Scott Galloway]

I actually bought a gun from Gus. He's my small arms dealer. Has Michael Symbolist forgiven us yet?

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

I'm not going to answer that question. You know why? Because I love the dad jokes. I don't want them to ever end. I I know you, you're into the dirty stuff, but like, just objectively, the dad jokes are very, very strong.

[Scott Galloway]

By the way, did you See my new shades, my new peepers. Look at these.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Wow.

[Scott Galloway]

Yeah. You know where I am, right? You know what's going on here.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

I know where you are, but maybe our audience doesn't. Where are you?

[Scott Galloway]

I don't like to be a Sharon. I don't want to talk about my kids without their permission. I'm in Charlottesville and I'm at orientation, which is fucking ridiculous that I'm even here. I. I woke up yesterday, got to have breakfast with my son. Despite that, that, you know, how uncool he must have felt having breakfast with me. And then he basically told me that it wasn't really necessary, that it dropped him off at his dorm where he was spending a night. But I'm like, no, I'm coming to your dorm with you. I'm up fucking oh, dark hundred hours. And so we go to his dorm hauling comforters and there's all these nervous looking parents with their like, you know, Sherpas and people bringing shit for one night in the dorms. And I'm not exaggerating, we barely walked in. He turns around and hugs me and practically body blocks me out of the room. And I'm taking my revenge. I picked up these bad boys.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Yeah.

[Scott Galloway]

At registration. And I've been wearing them. I wore them out last night. So I came down here thinking, and I said to him, I apologize, but during the middle of the day, I'll have a like two or three hours of podcast. I haven't seen him since 8am yesterday. He hasn't. Like, he texted me late night last night. I called him, I'm like, are we getting together? What's the deal? We having dinner? And he wrote back, is it important? That's what I've gotten back. I'm like, no. And he goes, I'll call you later tonight. Didn't call me. Anyways, so I'm in Charlottesville. What are you doing, Ed?

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

That's amazing. It sounds like you're having an amazing time. Just to clarify, does he have activities that he has to attend to? Is he meeting all his friends? Because in that case I give him a pass because he needs to kind of focus on socializing, being cool, et cetera. Is that what's going on? Or is he just, you know, chilling without you?

[Scott Galloway]

No, he's, he's busy. And what you realize, and you have a long time to, to prepare for this emotional trauma, but you have this, this, these, these mixed emotions of we've clearly done something right. He's at launch. You don't want a kid Clinging to you and worried and calling you and anxious. So we've done something right, but you can't help it. You also, you're just really sad. You want your little boy back. I mean, it is, it's a very emotional time, but he's busy, so I'm trying to continue talking so I don't get emotional. He's busy. But the parents calendar all day. They have schedules for us. We should not be here. Let me summarize everything I've learned from the parents events. Every child is on the verge of a mental breakdown. But don't worry, we have 800, 800 numbers and we have a SWAT team. If your kid even blinks suspiciously, a SWAT team of adolescent psychiatrists are going to drop from the skies and give your kid therapy and call you in accordance with HIPAA laws or whatever. And I'm like, if the kid isn't fucked up, the parents are going to be fucked up by the time they leave this session. That has convinced us that every kid is an emotional tide pool, actually.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Fascinating, this experience for you. It tells you a lot about where college is headed, where young people are headed. It's really interesting. But that's very exciting stuff. I'm very happy for you and I'm very happy for your son. And I'll also say I met your other son for the first time. Talk about well adjusted kids. Had a great time at the England game with you and your son and your buddies. And I had an incredible experience. England is, I mean, it's hard to talk about it because this episode will be out on Friday. So we don't actually know what the result of the semifinals will be. And I'm not going to make any predictions because I don't want to jinx anything. But that was, that was highlights of the year going to the England game. So thank you for bringing me.

[Scott Galloway]

I've been talking about this a lot. I feel like all the goodwill that was bottled up between nations in and amongst each other is coming out of this World Cup. It was great to have you there. I've taken my sons to the last three World Cups. Now we're going to the final on Sunday and to see all the uk, all the British fans rowing and to see all the Norwegian fans also singing Sweet Caroline. I just thought it was, and I've described it. It's like cousins who love each other doing a sleepover when their parents are out of town and despite the fact their parents are fighting all the time. I've been to World Cups. I was at The World cup in the US and I think it was 94. I've been to Russia, Qatar, and now this one. This one is the best.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Okay, well, we have a big episode to get into here. We're speaking with the one and only Mike Novogratz. So let's get into it. Today we're speaking with one of the most prominent leaders in the crypto space. He founded Galaxy Digital In 2018, one of the industry's leading digital asset investment firms, and has been investing in crypto for more than a decade. Back in 2013, he invested $7 million of his own money in bitcoin when it was trading for roughly $100 a coin. Last year, it peaked at more than $126,000. But recently, crypto has fallen on hard times. Bitcoin is down 27% year to date. Ethereum has fallen 37% and Solana has fallen 38%. At the same time, AI has emerged as the market's new obsession, and few investors have embraced that shift more aggressively than today's guest. So we wanted to talk to someone who's been at the center of both worlds to get his take on where he sees both industries heading from here. This is our conversation with Mike Novogratz, founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital. Mike, great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for joining us. I want to start with crypto, and then we'll talk about AI and then we'll talk a little bit about your investment philosophy. But we have to acknowledge what I would say is the elephant in the room, which is bitcoin is having a rough year, down 50% from its peak, down 47% from a year ago. The industry itself is struggling right now. I'd love to just get your views on why this is happening, what you make of it, and where things go from here.

[Mike Novogratz]

A little context, right? Crypto was a storytelling business. I mean, I think I was well suited for it because I'm a storyteller by nature. And we told the story of this is an important technology. It's going to change the way the world processes information, moves value around rights. Like this was going to be the new plumbing for both the financial markets and the consumer markets. And that was the story. And some very bright and creative entrepreneurs. You know, Arthur Hayes starting created this idea of the leverage perpetual future on crypto tokens. And that really created the crypto markets because it allowed young people especially, but all people to gamble, leveraged on these stories. And it created a tremendous amount of excitement and capital into the system, especially after Covid, when everyone was sitting around at home with nothing to do and really kind of crypto. Chapter two, that grand move that brought Ethereum to 4,000 and all these, these tokens that you never heard of into multi, you know, tens of billions of dollar market cap was really fueled by a gambling mania of young people wanting to get wealthy. They didn't want 12% returns, they wanted 12,000% returns. And a lot of capital got brought into the system. Some of that capital was really well spent, right, building this infrastructure. And we're now at this crossroads where crypto is actually going to be used. And that blockchain infrastructure, tokenized stuff is going to get used all over the world. Some with crypto tokens, but not many, many with traditional assets, perpetual equities, tokenized equities, stablecoins, which are perpetual currency, I mean, which are tokenized currencies. And so it's a really interesting place. At Galaxy, we're pivoting of a lot of our business to helping trade companies build that infrastructure. Right? This thing is the wallet where you'll have your tokenized equities, your currencies, your interest rate. This is the Neobank of the future. And you see businesses outside of the US where financial services aren't as good, like Bybit, Binance, Bitget. No one here has heard of Bitget or bybit. They have 100 million customers each. Robinhood has 15 million. So these are monster businesses that connect to the rest of the world. And why crypto's exciting from a US perspective is the rest of the world wants the great American brands. They want to buy Apple and SpaceX and hopefully Galaxy and Google. I'd like to be in that category. And so the infrastructure of crypto is going to survive, be hardened and thrive. Those tokens that we used to trade, if it was Avalanche or Solana, some will survive, but many will drift down because they were really association tokens. And a lot of that was the fault of first Jay Clayton and then Gary Gensler of not really making the rules clear and prosecuting people. So people made crap tokens like Franken tokens, so they could kind of, you know, skirt the rules and were too scared to have a token that gave you economic value. And then they were like, well, they're going up anyways and so I don't have to give away the economic value and I'm getting paid just for in essence creating a bunch of meme coins. And now you're seeing that, you know, those, those things drift down to Less relevance, not to oblivion, because those communities still care about them. Right. What was unique about crypto is you build community around a story. That community was fiscally incented to bring more people in their community actually to drive the price of your token up. And man, they don't want to give up because they're like religions and so screw with the XRP army and there's hell to pay.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

It's really interesting to hear you say that because I mean, you're describing this dynamic where it was this, as you say, speculative gambling mania that really drove this bull market. But it's interesting to hear that coming from you because that has long been the largest criticism of crypto that some have said that there's something, it's not just speculation, it's not just gambling. There's something more inherent to it. And it's usually been the crypto bears who say kind of what you're saying, which is it's a lot of leveraged gambling.

[Mike Novogratz]

That's what drove the valuations to them. Listen, there is a technology that is being used. I mean, I'm literally doing deals with five or six, hopefully big traditional institutions to help build infrastructure. Right. You're going to see that crypto infrastructure, automatic settlement, being able to transfer value over the Internet, used all over the place. Again, overseas crypto is a lot more important than it is in the us. We have great financial services here. And the other thing that's happened is we've got sports betting and same day options and now betting on Korean stocks. Every young kid that used to buy Solana is buying Hynix or some memory company. And so a lot of the oxygen of that speculative frenzy shifted. And just like in Macro, you saw it, there was a gold and silver bubble. It popped. That was the top. That's what tops look like. Crypto had that same topping pattern. It doesn't mean these things go back to zero. I think Bitcoin probably holds 60,000 and if the clarity act passes, it's probably a 60, 40 that it does. We head a little bit higher. There's too many people that have bought into the bitcoin story as its own store of value for it to go away. But someone asked me what crypto was like this year. I was like, meh, meh, man. You know, people just aren't as excited about it because there's other things to be excited about.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

How much of the value at this point, at the current price point? You mentioned that earlier on in the crypto cycle, a lot of the value was kind of propped up by this speculative gambling mania. A lot of that energy has been sucked out of the room. To what extent is that still a part of the crypto story at current price levels, in your view?

[Mike Novogratz]

Well, listen, if you think about bitcoin, Bitcoin is a story. It's. If you trust me and I trust you, we trust this ecosystem, we're going to store our wealth there. And so it's always the value comes from trust. And there's a core group of people that that trust hasn't been eroded. And so I think, again, bitcoin is the most stable of all the cryptos because it has the biggest community. Ethereum, which was the second biggest, had a technology story, not a store of value story. Right. Bitcoin was digital gold. Ethereum had. We're going to build the base layer of trust. This, this giant database for people to build on top of that story drew people in, but the valuation came because enough people believe it. It becomes money. It becomes money, just like bitcoin became money. And so that they're still fighting that battle. Right. Vitalik, kind of having less of an impact, less presence, hurt that ecosystem because he was such a. A charismatic in his own way and brilliant and decent guy. Right. I mean, he really is. If anyone gets a hero, a hero award for crypto, it's Vitalik, but. And the rest of them just in smaller and smaller ways. Right. What's been hard about this crypto universe is there were lots of fraudsters and, and hypers and scamsters. And so as you separate the wheat from the chaff, we'll see which of these big, big protocols are used to build on. Right. And then there's new ones that come out. Right. I mean, Robinhood, it's pretty interesting to look just how quickly people have jumped on their chain.

[Scott Galloway]

I buy that bitcoin is a legitimate store of value and consumers on both sides of the trade, they get to decide what is a legitimate store of value. If a baseball card or Pokemon cards are a store of value, there's no reason that bitcoin can't be. So I buy that. What I heard in your earlier comments is you think we're at a bit of a tipping point in terms of the underlying technologies creating utility across different industrial transactions or businesses. I haven't seen that. I feel like we keep getting promised this future where this underlying technology becomes this incredibly efficient plumbing infrastructure for all types of businesses. And I'm not saying it doesn't exist. I just don't. Can you give us some Examples of how an end consumer or an end business is benefiting or is recognizing the benefits of this tipping point of the incorporation of technology into consumers or businesses lives.

[Mike Novogratz]

So the only really big one has been stable coins and with cross border payments. Right. So there's, we have invested a lot of different businesses that in Latin America and in the rest of the world that do cross border payments and make, make that much more efficient. And those are, those are if you just look at stablecoin usage it's mostly out of the United States and so some of its store of value just in dollars instead of bitcoin but a lot of it is in transaction value. And so I think stablecoins is the first we're seeing the very beginning of tokenized equities.

[Scott Galloway]

Explain what that is Mike.

[Mike Novogratz]

You take Galaxy in tokenized form and it's the exact same thing as owning it. So there are 8 billion people on the planet, probably 5 1/2 billion don't have access to a brokerage account, maybe 6 billion. And so if you're the kid in Bahrain and you want to have some savings and you want to buy a fraction of an Apple share, you're going to be able to buy it. Now I said earlier most crypto kids want leverage. And so what's been interesting is the product that has grown faster than tokenized equities is perpetual futures, tokenized perps on real world assets. And so if you think about like this company XYZ my friend Jeff Lo built, it's doing or annualized a trillion dollars in volume, volume for a six month old company. But the SpaceX pre IPO it got all the volume and it literally predicted the price to the dollar of where it was going to open. Right. And so 247 trading non KYC. So anybody in that 6 billion just shows up with an account and starts buying and selling. And that I think shows you the demand globally when you got 6 billion people that are outside of the financial system.

[Scott Galloway]

So this question is more about kind of how you've been able to manage your brand and Galaxy's brand. When I think of crypto I think of some central players sort of adjacent as Trump because I would argue, and we'll get to this question because of his ability to use crypto as an empty vessel for his corruption. Obviously that's a loaded comment. There's FTX that didn't end well. There's Michael Saylor and I think Michael is seen as a legitimate business person. Obviously there's real substance. Anyone who knows Michael's background, knows there's real substance there and also that he votes in a big way with his feet. I mean, his, his actions match his conviction. But at the same time, I think a lot of people look at some of his perma bull on it as with a decent amount of skepticism. And, and then there's Mike Novogratz and Galaxy, and you're sort of perceived as. And granted, I'm known for glazing our guests, but it doesn't mean. I don't mean it, but you're sort of seen as the clean, well lit corner of crypto. You haven't been tarnished with this sort of carnival barker constant pumping. You're somewhat sanguine. You have you, you've called out, you know, fraud or hype where you see it. Just sort of curious as to why. What are the principles and why do you think you've been able to, if you will not get infected with what feels like a little bit Barnum and Bailey slash Adam Newman, like Sam Bankman, fried like skepticism here. What, what, what principles do you try and incorporate into the firm and into your own brand that's been able. Quite frankly, you just seem a little bit above the fray.

[Mike Novogratz]

Well, I mean, part of it is, you know, you have your kitchen cabinet in life, right? And so your, your family's part of that. But my macro kitchen cabinet, right, Guys like Paul Jones and Louis Bacon and Stan Druckenmiller, it would just be embarrassing to not be truthful, right? Like, you got to kind of call a spade a spade in some ways. And because I grew up as a macro trader and in that community, it's my fantasy football league, it's guys I speak to every day, at least one of them every day, they help hold you to integrity. The people you surround yourself with in life are the people that hold you to integrity. I mean, you'd like to think it's all internal, but it's also that external, like, who's your community that you don't want to disappoint. And I think that's important on, like, who you surround yourself with in life. And so listen, I've spent a bunch of time with Michael Saylor. What they got to say about him is he believes everything he says, which sometimes I'm like, michael, that sounds insane. But he literally, no, he might be

[Scott Galloway]

wrong, but I don't think he's a fraud, right?

[Mike Novogratz]

And I think, listen, he did a lot of good things in pulling bitcoin in. And now one of the weights on bitcoin is he's got this, he put too much leverage onto a big pile of coins and he's gotta dig himself out of this over leveraged position when

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

you speak with him, Mike, because that's the real problem and it's a problem that we all knew and could have predicted would have happened. And we had him on the show and we were like what happens if it goes down? What happens to your position? And he said something to the effect of like, well what happens if a meteor strikes tomorrow? Which to me was like just a total false equivalence. Now he's in that position, like does he acknowledge the point that you're making to be fair?

[Mike Novogratz]

And you can call me a wimp. I haven't had a really hard conversation with him. Post this. The last time, you know, I saw him for, you know, at, at length was a year ago summer when it was all working well. And I, I, I did say, Michael, I'm skeptical he believed he was going to buy so much bitcoin there was no way it could go down. I think that's just that just it's a, it's a tautology that doesn't work with me. And you know, I, I, he also had this fascination with tapping into the fixed income markets, right? The fixed income markets are two and a half, three times the size of the equity markets in the world. And so creating a fixed income product, which he did with his, his, you know, perpetual, I mean the crazy part is not that he would do it because it would really tarnish his brand. If you read the contracts on these perps, you know, STRC paying the dividend is optional. I mean it really is equity. He could turn the dividend off legally and just like tough luck and he can turn it back on when he wants to. It's not, it doesn't accumulate. It doesn't. And so, you know, he, he was very thoughtful on how he structured this stuff. It just is not thoughtful enough because once you, once you do that, then the game's over and now he's got a big burden to carry. Unless, listen, what could get bitcoin going higher again? You saw the CPI number today. Kevin Moore breathed a huge sigh of relief. I don't think Kevin hikes rates at this next meeting and he probably doesn't in the fall if inflation stays sanguine. But if you flip to where he's cutting and you get clarity passed and you know, the Chinese are big players in this and I never believed in the four year cycle but everyone else did and the Chinese certainly do and that cycle kind of kicks back off in October of this year and so you could. But you can make a narrative where the buyers come back in and and you get a story again. I don't see a lot of energy in the space. You know, my hedge fund guys just call me every day now. They call me once every two weeks about crypto. They call about other stuff. You know, it's just not as exciting of a space. And so all the crypto businesses are kind of batting down the hatches and we do see what's coming, right? I mean XYZ is doing a trillion dollars volume like that business didn't exist Hyper liquid who created a token where it feels like an equity right? You if as it does better the price goes up and so the future is kind of out there. But we haven't seen it yet.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

We'll be right back after the break. And if you're enjoying the show so far, send it to a friend and please follow us on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes from Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk bonds for a minute. Capturing value in fixed income is not, not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky. And let's be real, lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day. But not Vanguard. Vanguard's bond lineup is built around institutional quality. And institutional quality isn't just a tagline. It's a commitment to delivering the kind of investment solutions that your clients deserve. That means access to more than 80 bond funds actively managed by a global team of over 200 sector specialists, analysts and traders. While some firms like to spotlight a single star portfolio manager, Vanguard takes a different approach. They believe the strongest active strategies come from collaboration with ideas shared across the entire investment team. That means your clients benefit from the collective expertise of hundreds of investment professionals, not just one person's perspective. So if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for [e-mail] audio. That's vanguard.com audio. All investing is subject to risk. Vanguard Marketing Corporation. Distributor. Support for the show comes from anthropic. If you want to produce a show that releases episodes as often as we do, you need to stay organized and have a workflow you can rely on. And believe me, there will always be ways to improve and streamline your progress processes. If that sounds appealing, it might be time to check out Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and things with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Cowork brings Claude Code's agentic power to your desktop. No terminal required. So anyone can use and have Claude do real work. Point it to a folder on your computer or add connectors like Google Drive and Gmail. Describe what you need and it handles the rest, like organizing files, building spreadsheets, or drafting reports from scattered notes. Ready to have an AI that can tackle real work? Try Claud Cowork today. Claude AI Markets that's Claude AI Markets. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude AI Markets.

[Scott Galloway]

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[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

We're back with Prof. G Markets. I think that Saylor has really become the face of the industry and when he goes out and he's says he's selling and then does sell, I mean that's a, that's a real problem for the industry. But then on the other side, I would say that Trump's involvement, I mean the fact that we just learned that he, he earned $1.4 billion from crypto last year. He out earned every crypto company in America. He may he earned more on crypto than Coinbase earned last year. It's just unbelievable. How much do you blame it on

[Mike Novogratz]

him it's so interesting. It's a double edged sword. Like Gensler and the Democrats were terrible on crypto. And as a Democrat I was like, this is almost not American like what they were doing. And Trump ran on I'm going to take care of crypto. And he did. So that initial surge was, okay, we've got an SEC and a CFTC that are going to be very crypto positive. And in quite frankly, to be fair to the head of the sec, he said, I remember talking to him right before the inauguration, he said, until they're rules, I'm not going to enforce the rule. Like I'm not going to enforce non rules. And so in essence he said go for it until the Clarity act passes. And people did. And so companies like quite frankly, Hyper Liquid and xyz, right. Non KYC companies are growing and thriving. Not thinking they're going to have the same thing that CZ or Arthur Hayes did. Right. The long arm, the US law getting them even if they're not US companies. I think what Trump also, and listen, Paul Atkins telling me this, he said, listen, I'm all about disclosure. If it's disclosed, buyer beware. That's a big boy's Republican idea. Democrats want to protect the consumer. Buyer beware. All of these Trump coins will fee the meme coin. If you read the freaking tiny fine print, it says, oh I, it's not, it's not. He made all his money from selling the coins. Every transaction they got a marketing fee. And so it's all in the fricking fine print. And it's like, oh my goodness.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

The question is who reads the fine print? Yeah.

[Mike Novogratz]

So like they made $600 million off Trump coin when it went straight down. And then there's also people that sold the coins. And, and so I listen, it, it doesn't help at all. Like this Clarity act, if it, if it doesn't pass, it's going to stumble because of the ethics piece. Because even Republicans are saying we need some. That's like it's, it's hard for Republicans. They're running on this thing that looks more and more corrupt. And people are like, and I go down to D.C. at least once a month now. I'm like, guys, look past it. It's what's good for the country, what's good for the industry. Give clear rules. That's good for any industry. And there were plenty of legal ways to go after a president who's doing bad things. Right? From emoluments clause to just you're not allowed to insider trade. Like we have a Department of justice who has decided not to pursue cases against what normal Department of Justices would pursue. And so I argue that why should crypto have a special set of rules? Right. You can look with the same thing with the rare earths, the Kazakhstan deal. I mean there are plenty of deals that don't feel up and up, but the bulk was crypto of the wealth. And so that's become a real political hot potato.

[Scott Galloway]

So what you said before, that kind of crypto is a story. If you have an asset that doesn't produce underlying cash flows, doesn't have hard assets, then it is sort of, it feels like an empty vessel that is filled with a story or a narrative. And that describes a lot of stocks right now. And the word we use is meme. Right? Do you think that the energy, and I like the way you described it, there's just more energy elsewhere. Do you think the story Shifting to SpaceX and AI, do you think a lot of that mentality or that got stalled or the kind of person that was buying crypto is now quite frankly more interested in trading, you know, zero day options on SpaceX right now we see it 100%.

[Mike Novogratz]

That's that it's so interesting because you could even in non crypto people. So 100% within crypto people. When I talked to the those two big Chinese firms I was telling you about, they were like, they're dying to get into the tokenized equity game because their customers want it. Like people want to go where the heat is. But even in bigger macro, right? Because Trump came out at the beginning and started down, you know, bashing the dollar, really. Right. I don't want to be part of the international community, you know, like they wanted a weak dollar. Now Bessens changed that a little bit. But the early story was screw Canada, screw we're going to take out Greenland. And this idea of where should you, if you inherit $10 million, Ed, like what's the safe place to be? Was it in the dollar? Was it? And so everyone went gold and silver. Then gold and silver had a huge move in its bubble. It was bitcoin and then gold and silver and then Korean stocks. And so moving the hot potato of where to stay ahead of your neighbor. Because remember, wealth is all about am I richer than you? Right. It's not an absolute number, it's a relative number. And so I think being a wealth manager has gotten so much more complicated because you have these hypervol places which are exaggerated by all the leverage. I Mean, right now in the US Equity market, we have never, ever had as much leverage in global markets. This is. We're one of one here. We're above 29, we're above 07, we're above 99. And so it's a very dangerous place to be.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

We had Tom Lee on the show, and he said, I mean, we had him on when bitcoin was suffering recently. He said he sees bitcoin going over $100,000 by the end of the year. Do you agree with that? And do you have any predictions for Bitcoin price?

[Mike Novogratz]

His lips to God's ears. Listen, can I make a. Can I make a. A case for it?

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Sure.

[Mike Novogratz]

We would need clarity act. We would need the Fed cutting rates, and we would need some buyer base to get reignited. I'm not seeing those three things. I don't think we cut rates this year. I think we'll be good enough not to hike them. Clarity, I think, is a 60, 40, maybe even a 2/3 at this point. I. My gut feeling is somehow they find it to get away across the finish line, and that will help. I don't see where the, the new enthusiasm comes from, but the one thing I would say is every time crypto feels dead, like something happens and you're like, whoa. And so I don't want to. I don't want to count it out, but I don't see it. And in the past, like, the easiest crypto bull market of all time was Covid, because you're like, oh, that's my narrative. And I feel like I'm an insider because I'm one of the storytellers. And I figured out what's the story I can tell to get people excited. And it was the money printer goes burr. Right? Like we were going to throw tons and tons of money at the COVID problem. And you had kids that now had more time to sit around and do nothing but gamble.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Yeah, that's exactly right. So if you had to predict a price point by the end of the

[Mike Novogratz]

year, I think 60 is going to hold, and I think 80. 80 is going to be a top. And if we can get through 80, then 100 is going to be a top. But I would say we're 60, 80 for the. The rest of the year unless we get a real nice setup.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Shifting to AI for a moment. Everyone knows Galaxy Digital as a crypto company. They know you as a crypto investor, which is why I think a lot of people might have been surprised to read a headline in the Wall Street Journal last week or maybe a couple weeks ago it said, quote, galaxy Digital stock surges on AI data center business. This is a very interesting story. Galaxy Digital is now in the AI business. How did that happen? How did you get into this?

[Mike Novogratz]

You know, the crypto community sometimes has a little rainbow that follows it around. The biggest users of energy free AI were bitcoin miners. And we got into bitcoin mining partly out of another Trump thing when he came up with the 2020 opportunity zones, or maybe it was 2016, when was the opportunity zone thing came in. But in 2021 that was a monster year in profits and crypto. And I was like, I don't want to pay all this capital gains tax. Let's put it into an opportunity zone. One of the best assets for an opportunity zone within our space was bitcoin mining. And so having never been a bitcoin miner because I didn't like the business, I'm like, well, but for this tax advantage will go into bitcoin mining. And you know, I said something before, you don't have all the cleanest players in crypto. And after a couple mistakes of hosting our machines at other people's data centers, we decided we wanted to buy our own data center. And now it's 2022 and there's this company that owns a giant data center in Texas that is close to bankruptcy. And we help them avoid bankruptcy by buying their big data center and lending them some money. And so we got our hands on what looked like one of the best bitcoin mining data centers in the country. And we put our machines there and it was a decent bitcoin mining data center. When AI kicked in and people started talking about this giant bull market in power, I was like, dude, we own a lot of power. And so some of it's luck. Some of it was us being smart and saying because everyone would buy it or partner with it and say, no, no, this is more valuable than we think. And now we've developed it. I think this Helios is the campus. I'm pretty certain it will be the largest data center in the United States that's not being built behind the meter. That's part of the grid. We're already 1.6 gigawatts approved. There's another gigawatt that is in the queue that we'll know about in first quarter. But even at 1.6 gigawatts that is a massive data center. It is for us, it's about a $16 billion capex spend. Then the people that put the chips inside it probably another 60. So just from what we're already contracted, it's going to be a $75 billion capex bill. If you build the whole thing out, it'll be over 100. The only hundred billion dollar capex build in American history is the interstate highway system. And so for me it's interesting to become a landlord because our business is we have the power. We go get a lease from somebody who says I'll rent it from you, you take that lease, we go to the bankers and say we need to borrow the money to build it and build it. You got to build on time and, and on, on budget and then you collect rent and pray your tenant doesn't go bust.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Exactly. Which is increasingly the question for the AI data center levels for some of these companies. Right, Yeah.

[Mike Novogratz]

I look back and I couldn't find an example of a top three market cap company in the world ever going bankrupt in a 15 year period. Right. Nokia got close, you know. Yeah.

[Scott Galloway]

But there I just want to double tap on that because Amazon lost 92% of its value, so did Cisco. They didn't go bankrupt, they lost 92. And what I, I want to describe a dynamic and just get your thoughts. It seems to me that in the last 90 days there's been this dramatic shift potentially from a supply crisis in AI to a demand crisis. And that is a lot of the front end guys who were supposed to be creating this, all this demand on the front end, including Meta, the largest scale platform in the world, Xai have all of a sudden decided, okay, we overestimated our ability to create demand on the front of these LLMs. But we have this incredible infrastructure we've developed and then we have Mike Novogratz who presumably or fortunately built a bunch of data center capacity for crypto, it feels like. And tell me where I got this wrong. We've moved, we've flipped from a supply crisis where there's not enough compute to potentially not only meeting the supply because everyone's flipping from demand generation to supply generation for essentially, as far as I can tell, the only people creating demand right now are anthropic and OpenAI. Are you worried that the pendulum's swinging the other way to a demand crisis?

[Mike Novogratz]

It's going to be a very quick moving pendulum back and forth. And I tell you what. So first of all, most of the power that you've talked about, like of our 1.6 gigawatts, 200 megawatts is now up and running and producing, you know, AI stuff and so it's just getting started, this power being brought online. But most companies aren't really using AI yet because they're scared to. They don't know how to. We don't have robots yet. Like when you look at the exponential usage of compute when it starts really happening, like it's hard to think of this, but we're in like the first out of the first inning. And even in my company I've been screaming we got to use more. A we just did a 40 minute call with you know, Anthropic and their internal team to, because they have a team to help people learn how to use it better, I think. And we should be more cutting edge. I think the bulk of America isn't even really using AI yet. And the real use, I mean the real use cases are going to take so much more power. And so. But I don't think it's a linear line because I think you're right. You're not going to have five of them. You're not going to have, you know, these. You're going to have some guys win and other guys get knocked out. I just think it's early to debate even to think Anthropic is going to be the winner. It's early to know. Like every time I've counted Elon Musk out in my life, I've been smacked in the jaw.

[Scott Galloway]

Tell me about it, brother. But you've just zeroed in or you've identified what I think is the fulcrum or the epicenter, the plates crashing into each other around what is the central question or debate and that is are we just scratching the surface? We didn't even imagine all the different uses for broadband, right? We thought, oh, at some point if the chip keeps doubling in power and having in cost every 18 months, we're, we're not going to need anymore. And we have invented ways to use broadband a lot faster than even the exponential increase in it. And I absolutely conceptually understand, at the same time I think there's a countervailing argument that actually it's not, it's not that we're on the precipice of an explosion and ways to use it. A lot of companies are using it, they're just not getting the return they'd initially anticipated and that we might. In fact, I think there's a decent thesis that a lot of CFOs are going to say playtime is over. I need you to either justify the return on investment in our token consumption or to reduce it.

[Mike Novogratz]

Well, the cost of tokens is going to have to go way down here. Let me tell you a story, quick one. I invested, not through Galaxy Penns investment in this young kid who was building an insurance company, a health insurance company based in Texas. A brilliant kid. He was scientist of the year in the UK when he was like 16. Not, not young scientist, scientist of the year. And you know, he had a great thesis and he was going to use AI, but the thesis was more can I incentivize people to get tested early on? And then if I do that, I'm going to give them no copay and no premiums because I can drive medical cost, medical expense down 30%. And he's doing that. So then he says I'm going to use AI. First it was all the back office. There's huge amounts of paperwork pushing at Aetna and US Healthcare. Aetna, US Healthcare legally they can have a 15% charge, 85% goes to the providers, 15% to them, and they do 2 to 3% margins. And he said, well I can AI all the paperwork. Then he said, let me create an AI salesforce. And I was like, what? And right there, hundreds of hospitals and psychiatrists and healthcare systems that you're trying to sell this to. And he created AI Lucy, that scan, the scan the phone book. And I figured out who my targets were, figured out who to talk to at that target, sent them an email, started the conversation, start to finish. He got the, the docusign and his sales force of 50 people did 90 clients. 90 in the two in the two month sales period, did 90 contracts. So basically two each. Lucy in her first two months did five times that by herself. And he was like, oh my God. And so it's the first example I've seen as someone who's actually created a real superhuman employee. That's soup to nut sales in a pretty complicated business. And I listen, this boy, he's a boy genius. I think I'm going to make more money on this company than I have on any venture. Bet I hope. And so I'm a cheerleader. But more importantly I was like, you know, that's not just processing and making someone more efficient. That literally is superhuman. I just think we're so early in this thing. But it's a good. Here's another example, like Roman was telling me that they record all the conversations and at the end of the night they run it through and figure out what's the, what's the collective brain thinking. And you say, well you get these little robots that follow people around. So if I'm having a conversation with you, the only way the recording is going to be if the robot follows me around. And so now it's recording us talking by the water cooler. That robot has so many, you know, touch points to be able to follow you around and record like that's like, that's the usage where they say it goes infinite, right. That every last device is connected to this grid of AI. It's a future. That's a weird one, but that's the bet. And if it's just people using it to make their email more efficient. Scott, you're 100% right, but you've got to have that imagination that like there are no driverless cars in New York right now. I mean I never, I mean I'm sure there are a couple, but you never see them. Like if in five years the whole fleet's driverless and if you got in the new Tesla, you know, Tesla self drive, I mean I hadn't done it in years because I was just, you know, take your hands off the wheel and it would stop. Now you just can go like this. I don't know. And I, what I do know is Scott's right in that you're going to have this lurch left, lurch right, lurch left, lurch right. This is not going to be linear and we're at parabolic, right? Like markets went parabolic. And so I think it's very. The equity markets I think are very dangerous right now.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Yeah, I guess the trouble is to your point, these futures are totally possible. They're totally on the table. The amount of capital that is going into them, that is being invested would make you think that they're inevitable. And that's the problem is they're not necessarily inevitable. And similar to what we saw with the dot com boom, there was a massive period of overinvestment over building knowing that something would happen but not necessarily knowing what it would actually be. It does seem quite similar to what we're seeing right now.

[Mike Novogratz]

Even the stats I gave you for us to build out, our full data center is over a hundred billion dollars and that'll be the biggest capex. I mean Galaxy was a small company. Like we were in a data center company. We're not, you know, we're you know, ten plus billion dollar market cap now. But, but there's a lot that has to go right for us to actually by 2031 say, dude, I spent a hundred billion dollars.

[Scott Galloway]

See, I think you could spend it. Dude, it worked. Is the hard part, I think in this environment you could probably spend it well.

[Mike Novogratz]

But there's so many. I mean, what you're saying now in Texas is they're like, okay, stop. Because so many people applied for permits and whatnot. If you looked at and why the politics are changing on data centers, if you looked at every thing that was applied to be built, the whole country would look like one giant data center. I mean, the whole state. And so now all the politicians are like, whoa, whoa, that's not right. And so they're doing some smart things to say, hey, you got to put the money up first. And lots of people are falling away. But I think of what you read about and hear about and are proposed, 10% will get built. That's still a huge number.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

We'll be right back. And for even more markets content, sign up for our [e-mail].

[Mike Novogratz]

Remember Snapchat, the app best known for being the place to send disappearing photos and videos to your friends? Well, Snapchat was back in the news recently, but this time it was not about disappearing photos and videos. It was about smart glasses that you put and keep on your face. Snapchat was trying to get in on the game with a pair of black horn rimmed looking spectacles. Think the pair that the old man in up wears, but like three times thicker and with a price tag of 2,195. Photos of Snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing his specs. That's what they're called by the way. Specs were all over the Internet and not in a good way. People were laughing and they laughed all the way over the stock market where Snap took a hit. But as you're gonna hear on Today explained from Vox, Snap's playing the long game with smart glasses and the rest of big tech is too. Smart glasses are officially here, so we're gonna officially talk about them on the show and worry about our privacy.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

1, 2, 3.

[Mike Novogratz]

I'm stand up comedian John Marco Cerese.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

And I'm actor penis model Russell Daniels.

[Mike Novogratz]

The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are because let's face

[Scott Galloway]

it, things are not getting better.

[Mike Novogratz]

Every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guests, lives the world, but in a fun way. Bottom line is you're gonna walk away

[Scott Galloway]

feeling better about your life.

[Mike Novogratz]

We've had so many cool guests. Caleb Huron, Busy Phillips, Stavros Halkias, Laverne Cox, Hasan Piker, Alana Glaser.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

I promise you're gonna have a good time now.

[Mike Novogratz]

On the Vox Media podcast network.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

This is the downside.

[Mike Novogratz]

What is happening?

[Scott Galloway]

What am I seeing?

[Mike Novogratz]

This is not real. I'm like, what is that Unexplainable? The show about everything we don't know

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

is coming to Netflix. Come on.

[Mike Novogratz]

You're not serious, right? It's real.

[Scott Galloway]

Oh, my gosh, I'm freaking out.

[Mike Novogratz]

We'll still be getting into all the

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

huge questions that can take over your life. Are there different ways that humans might be dead?

[Scott Galloway]

Do we live inside of an enormous black hole?

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Why do we cry?

[Mike Novogratz]

What if I eat it? But now we're going to be able

[Scott Galloway]

to show you all sorts of things

[Mike Novogratz]

we never could before.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

You really have no choice but to just let your mind go wild.

[Mike Novogratz]

Unexplainable is going to have new video episodes every Monday on Netflix, with new

[Scott Galloway]

audio episodes still dropping every Monday and Wednesday. What came first, the chicken or the egg? Everybody asked if the chicken or the egg came first or second, the egg or the chicken. Nobody knows what was there in the beginning. What came first?

[Mike Novogratz]

Unexplainable, a podcast from Vox now on Netflix.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

We're back with Prof. G Markets. Mike, when I ask people what the secret was to your success, and just for people who don't know, I mean, it goes. There's a long track record here. You before, I mean now you've made this incredible AI bet that is paying off. You had the crypto bet that paid off. You started Galaxy Digital. You worked at Goldman for a long time. You made partner by 1998. Before that, you were the captain of the Princeton wrestling team. Princeton alum, myself. Go Tigers. Helicopter pilot in the New Jersey National Guard. Like, you've had a pretty incredible track record.

[Scott Galloway]

He's launching a cologne called Testosterone. Jesus Christ.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

So my question.

[Scott Galloway]

Fucking A. Yeah.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

It's a good resume. So when I ask people like, what is the secret to Novo, I always hear the same thing. Everyone tells me Novo has a risk tolerance unlike anyone I've ever seen consistently. Where does that come from?

[Mike Novogratz]

The irony is it start off with fear of failure. Like, I was like, you know, I was supposed to do well. Born a cute little kid. My mom told me I was going to be the senator one day, and. And so I had felt all this pressure to succeed, and actually it stopped a lot of early success. I think my wrestling career would have might have been better if I wasn't so nervous all the time. And then having failed a couple times and realized I didn't die, there was kind of the Opposite of fear of failure. It was like, hey, let's go for it, let's have some fun. And I do have a high risk tolerance partly. You know, I grew up in a great family and I was really happy when I was poor or middle class or I went to the Army. I made $18,000. Those are my, some of my most fun years. And so while I spend a ton of money and I have fun with it, I was never attached to it as much. And so listen, there's still a I don't want to fail gene in me, but it's not the fear of it. And I don't have the fear of looking stupid. And maybe that's coming from confidence of having been raised by a loving mother or whatever, but I don't have the fear of looking stupid. And I've looked stupid a few times. You know, I mean, I've got a luna tattoo and Luna went to zero. You know, I like certainly have looked less than, less than you'd like to. That doesn't scare me so much. I'm like, hey guys, I got on this thing, we actually made money on it. And you know, the world turned. And, and so I do think it comes from some confidence that you get as a young kid that you know, because otherwise you're, you're going to sit there and it's always, what do people think about me? If you, if you get away from what people think about you and say, hey, all right. And I used to say it on tv. I said, listen to my employees. I said, you guys are taking a lot of risk joining this company because crypto might not work and you're going to have taken your great years of your life. I said, all I'm risking, I already have money. I'm risking reputation, I'm going to look like a complete idiot. I'm willing to do that. But my mind was less risk than the 28 year old who's at that core of their career saying, I'm going to spend the next six years in this weird industry and I'm happy for lots of people. It paid off. I think the journey itself was good enough for most people in this industry to feel like it wasn't a waste. But I don't think you have the same people in this industry in the next five years. Right? They'll take those skills and do other things.

[Scott Galloway]

Just, I just want to pause on that. You know, Goldman Sachs, army multibillion dollar firm, Princeton. And what you said, that really struck me is that if you reverse engineer your own Confidence, you reverse engineer it to a loving mother. I want you to end here, but I just want you to talk a little bit about your parents.

[Mike Novogratz]

Yeah, listen, I have a middle class family. My dad just passed and we were at his funeral and we were like, when we were writing his obituary, some of the siblings were saying, well, he did this. He was an all American. And. And the obituary really became who he was, not what he did. And so I had a really strong, quiet dad who I don't think, you know, I was comparing him to Trump. I don't think my dad has broken one of the seven deadly sins in 50 years. And, you know, he was a very kind of moral center. And I had a mom who was really aspirational and a cheerleader, and there were seven of us. She worked as a waitress at one point, you know, to kind of keep selling antiques. She was a hustler. She came from Queensland. That she's still alive and is still going strong. And, you know, we just had that kind of idyllic 1970s American, you know, military family. You know, my mom always told us we can be the world. I mean, she. I think she thought we should be the Kennedys. I mean, she named my sister Jackie, my brother Rob, Bobby. I was Michael, John, John. We had similar names, but it was that era. And, you know, she's a big. She's still a big cheerleader to all of us and all the grandkids. And, you know, my, My dad's funeral, the. The telling point was there was the casket's going down the island. There are 23 grandkids walking behind it. And that legacy of big family, you don't have that as much in America anymore, but it, it does allow you to take more risk because you know that there's some people you're going to screw up and they're going to like, you know, have your back, and when you do well, they're going to take the shit out of you. Right. Like, you know, brothers and sisters and big families don't allow you to be special.

[Scott Galloway]

So just one, one anecdote that is related. I was doing a podcast with your sister Jacqueline, and I was talking about something and my. My usual cynical, depressed manner, she just kind of stopped and she said to me, she looked at me and, and not a. In a sincere way. She looked at me and she said, I get the sense you could really use a hug. And it was so arresting. Like, I just wasn't expecting that. And I feel like I can handle anything. And I'm like, yeah, and she got up, and when I got up and she hugged me. So anyways, a weird way of saying, like, your.

[Mike Novogratz]

Your.

[Scott Galloway]

Your mom clearly did something right.

[Mike Novogratz]

We are a family of huggers and drinkers.

[Scott Galloway]

First time a podcast guest has said to me, you need a hug, and was right, by the way.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

I'd like to go back and see what went wrong in that interview to get to that point.

[Scott Galloway]

Anyways, bring it.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

Bring us home then. Yeah. Just one final question here. You said part of your success was you were able to shed a fear of failure and a fear of embarrassment, which I think from all accounts I've heard about you is true. A lot of young people listen to this show, and I'm sure a lot of young people would like to know how to get rid of that fear. What would be your advice?

[Mike Novogratz]

I had screwed up at Goldman Sachs, and I was no longer there, and I was trying to figure out. I felt so embarrassed with myself. And I did this. Six marathons in a row across the Sahara. And about halfway through, in grueling pain, but in this gorgeous, you know, sun and mountains of sand, listening to the same nine songs because that's all you could get on an MP3 player. I was like, what are you complaining about? You're fucking alive. And that physical piece to it kind of brought me back into my body and into, like, you know, stop being a whiny bitch. Like, go for it again.

[Scott Galloway]

And.

[Mike Novogratz]

And so I. For me, it's been a. A lot of them. I mean, from ayahuasca, trying that journey to understanding. Because one thing about ayahuasca, when you're on it and you're like a puddle on the.

[Scott Galloway]

On the.

[Mike Novogratz]

On the floor and you're crawling around and you're throwing up, you're like. You realize how idiotic it is to think you're more special than the next guy. You're just like, in God's name. And so that. All of those things. And I don't think I've reached some, you know, Buddhist state by any stretch. I think I'm as far from it as. As most. But that journey helps you kind of de. Stress the. The. The. Oh, God. What are. What are people thinking about me? Right. The other thing is service. The more you think of your life in service. I want to. I. I work really hard to make money because I want to do shit with it. Building a hotel in New Orleans. I'm building up our park somewhere in the Hamptons. I'm giving money to these different charities. I'm trying to change politics, like, the moment you start thinking about others, you stop thinking about yourself. And it's the greatest hack for public speaking. People go out for a wedding toast and they're all nervous. Like, what are you guys nervous for? This is your best buddy. How about think about him and just talk about how they're in love with each other and you're happy to be here. And like, wedding toast should have no nerves to them. But most people get nervous. I say you're nervous because what do you think about you? And so if you can flip the switch and think of your life in service, it takes a lot of the stress away.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

That's great advice. Mike Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Galaxy Digital. He was formerly a partner and president of Fortress Investment Group. Prior to Fortress, Mike spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs, where he was elected partner in 1998. He also served on the New York Federal Reserve's Investment Advisory Committee on financial markets from 2012 to 2015. Today, Mike serves as the chairman of the BALE project. This is gonna be a long one. And has made criminal justice reform a focus of his family's foundation. He also sits on the board of overseers at NYU Lang Medical center and is board member of Princeton Varsity Club and Jazz foundation of America. Mike received an A.B. in Economics from Princeton University and served as a helicopter pilot in the US Army. That's a great place to end on the resume, Mike. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much, guys.

[Mike Novogratz]

Thanks. Here's the guys that are follically challenged.

[Scott Galloway]

There you go.

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Jorge Carty. Our research team is dan Shalon, Kristen O' Donoghue and Mia Silverio. Jake McPherson is our social producer. Drew Burrows is our technical director, and Catherine Dillon is our executive producer. Thank you for listening to Profg Markets from Profg Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow and join us for a fresh take on markets on Monday.

[Scott Galloway]

And kind reunion

[Prof. G (Co-host or Interviewer)]

as the world.