In this episode, Tom sits down with AJ Scaramucci — the man who made international headlines by winning a 42-day global auction to acquire the ultra-rare Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card for a record-breaking $16.5 million. AJ breaks down the thinking behind that purchase, why scarcity is the foundation of his investment philosophy, and how he's building Treasure Trove to acquire the world's rarest and most culturally significant assets at scale.
What does a $16.5 million Pokémon card have to do with serious capital allocation?
In this episode of Significance of Wealth, Tom Ruggie sits down with AJ Scaramucci — Founder and Managing Partner of Solari Capital and Co-Chairman of SALT — who recently made international headlines by winning a 42-day global auction for the ultra-rare Pikachu Illustrator card, setting the record for the most expensive trading card ever sold.
AJ unpacks the investment thesis behind that purchase, why collectibles represent one of the most overlooked asset classes available to sophisticated investors today, and how global capital is beginning to flow into rare, culturally significant objects. He also shares the story behind Treasure Trove, his new venture aimed at acquiring the world's rarest assets at institutional scale.
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Martie Salt: Welcome to the Significance of Wealth Podcast, where we explore the evolving landscape of wealth management, private investments, and collecting as both a passion and an investment strategy.
I'm Martie Salt. Today’s guest recently made international headlines — and not by accident. AJ Scaramucci is the Founder and Managing Partner of Solari Capital, a venture capital firm investing across industries including artificial intelligence, aerospace, biotech, and digital infrastructure. He also serves as Co-Chairman and President of SALT, one of the world’s leading global investment and leadership platforms. Earlier this year, AJ stepped into the collectibles spotlight when he won a 42-day auction to acquire the ultrarare Pikachu Illustrator Pokémon card for $16.5 million, setting a record for the most expensive trading card ever sold. The purchase reflects a broader thesis AJ is pursuing through a new venture called Treasure Trove, which aims to identify and acquire rare, culturally significant assets around the world.
In this episode, AJ and Tom discuss the thinking behind that purchase and the bigger idea behind Treasure Trove - why scarce collectibles may represent an overlooked asset class, how global capital is beginning to move into this space, and what it means to build wealth through the world’s rarest objects. Now here’s your host, Tom Ruggie.
Tom: Welcome to this month's edition of The Significance of Wealth Podcast. I am super excited to have with me today, AJ Scaramucci.
AJ the buyer of the most expensive Pokémon card ever purchased, uh, whopping value or purchase price of $16.5 million.
You know, with me being pretty, involved in the collectibles market. I was contacted to do an interview and I did an interview and it got published the next day and AJ followed up with me and, and when I got the, the initial message that the purchaser of the Pokémon card was contacting me. was like, oh man, this guy's probably pissed at me because, uh, yeah, I was trying to fathom how the card could be valued at $16.5 million, and we're gonna talk about that today.
So, with no further ado, AJ thank you so much for, for joining us and, uh, for you to give a little bit of a, a, a background about yourself before we get into Pokémon and, and your other, endeavors that you're involved in, which is pretty plentiful.
AJ Scaramucci: Hi, Tom. Good. Good to see you. Yeah, I, I mean, the quick, my quick story is I worked in Silicon Valley for, for a bit. I had had some roles at, at Tesla and at Google, and I moved down to Los Angeles and had a spectacular experience working as an entrepreneur in residence with Dr. Peter Diamandis. Uh, and we collaborated and built a number of different companies together.
Eventually I, I moved to China. I was investing alongside Dr. Kailey at Novation Ventures, who is the CEO of Google, China as a prominent note in the AI ecosystem out there. I got COVID in China in November of 2019, so had to get, get outta there and enrolled in business school over at Stanford. And, uh, while I was there, started a venture capital firm called Solari Capital.
And at Solar Capital we both invest and incubate companies. We have a, a very multi-stage approach, so we'll invest tickets as small as 2 million up to $150 million into things that we like and we have high conviction.
Tom: Walk me through process and, and to some extent even the mindset that you had with this card. I mean, there were 97 bidders on the card.
AJ Scaramucci: Mm-hmm.
Tom: auctioned through Golden Auctions. I think of time that the auction was open was 42 days. Was your mindset going in, Hey, I'm, I'm gonna get this no matter what, was it something that kind of incubated over time as you got more involved in the bidding process?
AJ Scaramucci: It's a great question. It's very textured and nuanced question. I, I would almost sort of zoom out and maybe give you a, a sense on my philosophy as a collector and maybe some of the origin stories and decisions I've made that ultimately culminated in, in that, in that purchase. But back in, in 2020, so that's six years ago.
In the midst of the pandemic people are at home and had some more discretionary income, uh, at, at that time from various ventures. And I am on, on eBay mostly, and I'm on Golden Auctions and I'm on heritage and, and I was buying a lot of trading cards at the time, uh, both in the sports category, basketball, football, baseball, you name it.
But, but also more so in Pokémon. And Pokémon was right in the cross here of my childhood nostalgia. I was 7, 8, 9 years old when those Game Boy games came to the United States, circa 1998, 1999, as well as the trading cards. And I thought that just intuitively, I mean, Pokémon's the highest grossing franchise of all time.
These cards are absolutely iconic and they're incredibly scarce, particularly the ones that are, are graded by, say, A PSA or Beckett. Or cg, CGC, where there's a third party authentication service that that steps in almost like a Moody's rating agency. So I started buying some of the PSA 10 ards, the Neogenesis, luas, just different things.
I could get my, my hands up at some, and you know, that portfolio as ridiculous as it sound of Pokémon cards. Is up over 10 times over that six year period. And you know, some of these cards now are five, six, $700,000 and they're no longer cards. They, they feel like pieces of art and they need to have insurance, and they need to be vaulted.
They need to be stored safe. And in 2021 and 2022, I became privy to more layers of the Pokémon collectible universe that were beyond even what I could see in this illustrator card. Popped up and the story of that card is fascinating. It's, it's a card that you can't, you can't buy. You had to, you had to earn or win in an illustrator competition in Japan
Tom: Oh,
AJ Scaramucci: in 1998.
And there's really 39 to 41 of those in circulation and just won in a PSA 10. Right? So you've got this interesting dynamic where this iconic Pikachu card. Was up for sale in 2022. I, I, I hadn't actually heard about it at the time. And Logan Paul came outta the woodwork with a whopping $5.3 million purchase.
And, uh,
Tom: an insane valuation
AJ Scaramucci: insane number.
Tom: Right?
AJ Scaramucci: It was an, it was an insane number at the time, and, and I, you know, I had it, it, it actually, him buying that card drove up the value of all the cards that I had bought a few years earlier. Pretty dramatically actually. And, uh, I'd say. For Pokémon.
Tom: Like a marketing, I mean, it's, it's, it's almost like a, just a marketing push because
AJ Scaramucci: That's right.
Tom: he's a marketer and, and of course, you know, as anybody that's familiar with this story knows, you know, he wore of a gold and diamond necklace around
AJ Scaramucci: Absolutely right.
Tom: and. Yeah.
AJ Scaramucci: right. Yeah. I think, I think Logan, in many ways, he's, he's kind of a pioneer in collecting. I think he, in some ways, I view him as a. An activist investor in the same way, say a Bill Ackman might be, or, or a Dan Loeb might be, where they make an investment and they tell you about it.
They tell the story of why this thing is undervalued. Uh, and they're phenomenal marketers and they drive up prices in, in the collector universe. Uh, not just for them, but for, for everybody else that's participating. And you know, I'd say, you know, the, the Pokémon Universe now, I mean now that we're 30 years into it, it's got multiple generations of fans.
It's done $288 billion of gross sales over that time. And not only is the highest roasting franchise of all time, it's like living in another dimension, almost like another electron orbital. If you added up the total gross revenue of Harry Potter and Marvel and Star Wars combined. It would be less than Pokémon.
And you Pokémon. If you look at trading cards and my, my best guess, there's some fuzziness here, but the order of magnitude, the market cap of trading cards is about 60 billion now, and my best guess scraping PSA, Beckett CG, C data is the market cap of Pokémon is approaching. $15 billion, right? I mean, that, that is a massive gargantuan subset of that superset.
So when you look further, it's like, okay, well, Pokémon and Pikachu are synonyms with each other, right? They're, they're, they're tied together. If I, if I asked you, Tom, Hey, name one swimmer, who would you name?
Tom: I think you probably know Michael Phelps.
AJ Scaramucci: There you go. Can you name a second swimmer for me?
Tom: Uh. funny is who crossed my mind as Greg Legis, but he's actually a diver.
AJ Scaramucci: So, so, but, but, but I'm just, I'm playing with you here because for, for, there's power laws everywhere, right?
And so Pikachu inside the trading card universe, because Pikachu's such an iconic character. There's so many cards, right? And if you look at the top 10 most graded cards submitted to, to PSA, over half of them are Pikachu cards in the Pokémon Universe, the, the number one most graded card is actually a collaboration between the Pokémon company and McDonald's.
It's a Pikachu. At McDonald's, it's been graded 302,000 times.
Tom: Crazy.
AJ Scaramucci: mean, if you, if I, I would encourage your audience if to look up the Van Gogh Pikachu, which was a collaboration between the Pokémon company and the Van Gogh Museum. A number of years ago. They, they had some popups where they were. Giving these cards out, and it was an incentive for people to come to the museum.
There's videos on the internet of absolute pandemonium, stampedes in the museum. Kids, adults, scalpers in some cases, pushing and shoving, trying to get this card. And this, this card, there's, there's a publicly traded company now in Hong Kong that is aggregating. Just that one card. The, the Pikachu uh, van go-kart.
It's got a $90 million market cap. So, so when you try and find Pikachu in the training card universe, and you have to ask like, where is the nested power law? Well, there's a power law in Pokémon as there is in swimming and all these other places. We've established that. Well, where's the power law in the Pikachu card universe?
And it's to this illustrator, because this illustrator is the original artist drawing Pikachu. For nearly the very first time on a card, only 39 to 41 in circulation, only one in a PSA 10, which is why you saw this parabolic price action. And anytime there's a one of one in collecting, that's what happens.
And my, my take, which I don't even think is that hot of a take, is that the Pikachu card, the Illustrator card that we now own, I think is more valuable. then All of the first edition, PSA 10 Charizards combined, which would insinuate over $130 million of value, let alone the media and marketing value that came from purchasing the card.
I mean, the fact that you knew about it and so many people knew about it, and the sports card community too, you know, they reach out to me and they're like, what the hell is going on? How is it possible that a Pokémon card broke the record for the most expensive card? And I counter and I say, well. The revenue of the Pokémon company on an annual basis is bigger than Major League baseball.
It's bigger than the NHL guys, right. And I, and I think a lot of that has to do just with the generations that are interested in these things, right? Pokémon fans, they're below the age of 35 ultimately. So, you know, there's, there's a disconnect in, in, in understanding.
Tom: It also has to do, I think with the, the global attributes because,
AJ Scaramucci: That's true too.
Tom: and you, you mentioned the sports card industry, which, you know, I've been very involved in for years and years, but, but and large don't know the stats, but I would, I would have to think that that's probably 90%, of the big purchases are US purchases.
And, uh, obviously Pokémon is, a global phenomena you still, AJ I wanna get back to process and, perhaps even, you final day or night of, bidding i'd, love to know kinda what was going through your mind. Uh, you know anything about who you were bidding against
AJ Scaramucci: Yes, I did. I did. I mean, we, me and my team, we ran a full blown investigation trying to reverse engineer who else was in the auction. We found a variety of people all over the world, and this is like China, to Brazil, to Dubai, Abu Dhabi, to Saudi, to the UK. To your point about global. As I joked with Ken Golden afterwards, it felt like World War Pikachu that night.
It was bids, bids coming in all over the world, right? And there was, I knew that there were at least six very, very serious
Tom: Yeah.
AJ Scaramucci: institutional bidders that would've we're gonna take this well above $10M I knew that those six, you know, there, there could have been maybe three or four of those six that were gonna take it.
Above $13M which was where the, the record started to break. Right? Because, you know, last year that dual Logoman that you, Kevin O'Leary and his crew bought, sold for about 12.9 million. So I knew that the record was gonna be broken coming into the night, and, you know, the Polymarket and the Kalshi prediction markets didn't know that, right?
The, the kind of weighted average pricing on those two platforms.
Tom: Yeah, you probably could have made some money on the Polymarket that night.
AJ Scaramucci: You know, I probably could have, I, I, I really didn't wanna put myself in that kind of, in that kind of situation, but I was, you, I was an observer and I'm like, okay, you know this. I don't know if people are fully appreciating and understanding what is about to happen.
And, you know, this, this guess, this consensus guess of 10, 11 million, which is kind of where it was floating, was, was, was off. It was, it was off by at least two to $3 million in my view.
Tom: going in, or at least you
AJ Scaramucci: I did.
Tom: in, say, so you
AJ Scaramucci: did.
Tom: to what you paid for this,
AJ Scaramucci: I was, yeah, I was, and I, I, I think that I, I knew the record was gonna get broken for sure. Beyond 13 million. It started to become a little bit more of a, a, a gray area or kind of a blue ocean. It's okay. I know that there's gonna be about six people that are gonna kind of take it into this zone, but I, I don't, I don't really have a nuanced understanding of is there gonna be a significant fall?
I, I figured there'd be a significant fall off after 15 million. And I, I think, I, I could be wrong, Ken Golden would know. After 15 million, there were still three bidders in the mix. Around like 15 and a half. It was two. And then up to that 16 and a half, it really was a, a kind of a one v one type scenario.
And there was a, a Chinese bidder, a a Hong Kong based consortium that was, was in the next to the very end. But yeah, I mean, it was, it's, it's wild. I mean, the, the reality is that there's, there was a high willingness to pay for that card globally. By many bidders, some of which had material institutional backing.
Right. And I think people underestimated that.
Tom: I've personally participated in. Probably a hundred auctions. And you know, there, there's, there's times where your anxiety level, because you want something so badly that your anxiety level gets to a point. And, you obviously went into this with a plan and, and a
AJ Scaramucci: That's right.
Tom: And so it's something you wanted but your anxiety level had to be skyrocketing.
AJ Scaramucci: You know, I, I was so crazy prepared for that night. I I was pretty chill the last hour or so. I definitely, you towards the end I was like, wow. I was sort of, I was shocked even, or be, I was beginning to become shocked like, wow, this is, this is not.
This is not just breaking the record, we're gonna be breaking the record by a, a pretty significant margin, like
Tom: that, yeah.
AJ Scaramucci: three, three plus million, right? So, and I, I think you get, you get these parabolic situations in, in, in auctions. I remember watching very closely this auction for a Este source named Apex.
Apex is, it's a beautiful specimen. It's approaching 80% complete. It's one of the iconic dinosaur fossils that has been discovered by humanity since 1902.
Watching this in real time and it kinda just blowing past five, 6 billion and going into the 10 million range and the 20 million range and the 30 million range, and then the $40 million range. And now I was, I was just, I couldn't even understand what was happening. It ended at 44.6 million. Ken Griffin bought it.
He's a huge, huge, huge, collector. he comes up all over the place in this universe. And, similarly I believe that that was a. Us bidder and, and Chinese bidder at the end. Right. I, I kind of actually find in every single area of pursuit, whether it's artificial intelligence or
Tom: I say
AJ Scaramucci: sciences or collectibles, it's always US and China at the end.
It always is. It's hilarious. Yeah.
Tom: I got a question. You, you talk about as a debasement trade.
AJ Scaramucci: yeah. Yeah,
Tom: and, and help our listeners to understand really what you mean there.
AJ Scaramucci: absolutely. Yeah. So I view collecting really a, as a store of value to basement trade. A, a hedge against inflation, real world scarce asset of sorts and humans are, are fascinating. We, we are meaning making machines. Various assemblies of atoms are imbued with meaning and therefore imbued with value.
And if you take out your benjamin Franklin with a hundred on it. The intrinsic value is zero. We all know that, but we've all sort of agreed that it's worth a hundred dollars. And if you real, if you read Neil Ferguson's book, the Ascent of Money, his own definition of money is trust inscribed. Right? So if I flash back to 1971, when we're coming off the gold standard, we were in a period of heightened inflation during the seventies.
Tom: Right.
AJ Scaramucci: from 1971 to 19 80, 81, gold appreciated 24.3 x. Wow. That's effectively a 40 plus percent ROR. The S&P at the time was up a modest two to 3%, so you had a a decade run of 10 x performance, 10 x alpha in this debasement trade, and yo gold increasingly became this safe haven asset. If you added up every single ounce of gold that has ever been mined in the history of humanity, and you multiplied it by the price per ounce, you would get a number between 35 and $37 trillion.
That number is over seven times larger than the market cap of Nvidia. When you say that to a, a person in Silicon Valley, you know, at Anthropic or at OpenAI, it's initially shocking.
And gold is hitting all time highs again recently, right? And I argue that gold is the first collectible because people use it mostly for jewelry. And for a store value and central banks around the world are hoarding this stuff. So you then ask the question, well, what is the second largest collectible that exists?
I argue that it's Bitcoin, and Bitcoin represents digital gold, but it's also just cryptographic. Scarcity is a cybernetic monetary virus that is secured. It's backed by energy, 20 gigawatts of power. And we know that there's just 21 million Bitcoin. So when I buy Bitcoin, I have an understanding of both my numerator and my denominator in a way that I do not when I have a US dollar, because the Federal Reserve keeps clicking the money printer button, right?
So the denominator keeps changing and it changes dramatically day over day, year over year. So Bitcoin has created 1.4 trillion dollars of economic value over a 16 ish year period. Unbelievable.
So you've got gold. As a physical store value, you've got Bitcoin as a digital store. Value and collectibles, in my view, are being slept on as the cultural store value. And how big are collectibles? It's very hard to know, right? They're so opaque and there's not a lot of price discovery. So me and my team, we spent tons of time scraping auction data, trying to understand what's in the hands of museums and foundations and nation states and sovereigns, and just.
Get at at least an order of magnitude sense of how big this thing is. And it turns out it's a hard thing to answer. We, we think that it's about $25 trillion. That's the superset. Okay? So it's, you know, significantly bigger than Bitcoin. Not quite as big as gold, but a lot of that 25 trillion is owned by foundations, museums, and nation states.
So a modest 6.3 trillion, we believe, is owned by private citizens, and these are people like Mohammad Bin Salman and Ken Griffin and Steve Cohen and David Rubenstein and Bill Gates, and the richest people in the world, right? So when you click in to that 6.3 trillion, what you find is that there's ano yet another nested power law where the top 20% most expensive collectible are driving over 80% of the net asset value.
And those top 20% are owned by 10,000 people or so, right? So there's 10,000 people in a population of nearly 8 billion that are benefiting from this debasement trade in the shadows. And if you look at. Um, even art like Basquiats or Picassos or Salvador Mundi, which sold for $450 million to Mohammad bin Salman just a few years ago.
Or you click into rare manuscripts like the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, or dinosaur fossils or Pokémon cards or sports cards or watches or rare cards. And I'm not movie props, like there's so many little nooks and crannies in collectibles and the best of the best assets. The grails have unbelievable alpha.
Unbelievable album. That Pikachu card that we bought, I mean, that card was sold in 2012 for $50,000. That card has been compounding at 51% IRR for the last 14 years. Okay? It's a small little $16 million sliver of a $6.3 trillion superset. Nonetheless, when you click into all of these little subsets, you find that same pattern.
So when I say debasement trade, I think that collectibles are the largest debasement trade I've ever seen since early Gold Circuit, 1971 or early Bitcoin circuit, 2009, 2010, and 2011. And people need to pay attention to this asset class. And it's about to get institutionalized.
Tom: So that's a, that's a great segue. So it, it's for that reason that. You purchased the Pokémon card through Treasure Trove.
AJ Scaramucci: That's right.
Tom: we've talked about this offline and,candidly, I, I was fascinated by of your insight and your thoughts on, on what you're doing there. So let,
talk about what you're doing of treasure trove and, you've done, what you're planning to do going forward.
AJ Scaramucci: Definitely. Yeah. So I mean the, the treasure trove back in 2020 when I was doing my own collecting and a lot of stuff you can't find on eBay and you can't even find on heritage auctions and there's just all kinds of stuff and you gotta, you gotta hunt it down, right? You gotta know where it is, who owns it.
And it could be anywhere. That Pikachu card as an example, that card has been in Japan, it's been in Dubai, it's been in Puerto Rico. It's been in New York, it's now vault in Delaware. That thing has been moving all over the place for many decades, right? And a lot of these buyers are anonymous. You have no idea who they are, and they're anonymous intentionally.
So anytime I bought something just as an individual, it felt like I was on a real life treasure hunt, felt like I had an eye patch on and a parot on my shoulder, and I'm on some crazy grand quest. And we're gonna go find the holy grail. That's what it felt like. So, you know, the treasure trove name is, is derivative of that, of that feeling.
And the treasure trove is kind of a catchall for all the world's real world scarce assets. And, you know, I've been going on these, what I call, you know, treasure hunts. I've been doing it with my brother mostly, mostly. And my younger brother, he's a, he's a up and coming film director. He is got his own production company, Infinity Studios.
He's done music videos for Drake and Daba and Justin Bieber and Machine Gun Kelly. They've been seen nearly billions of times and he's won a lot of film festivals for his first film called Money Talks, which chronicles the journey of a of a hundred dollars bill. Actually, that gets passed from person to person in 1981 New York over the course of the day.
And you see the light and dark side of money, which is kind of interesting in the context of this conversation. But me and my bro, you know, we're kind of, it's, I'm sort of the financier or you know, I'm kind of doing the math and trying to figure out what's what and like where to go next and, and purchasing.
And my brother's really, he's been telling the stories, right? He's been, he's been filming these experiences and in collecting you meet some crazy people. Crazy people and every facet, right? the collector mentality is an obsessive mentality and so it's, people can't just own one sports card.
I remember we met each other, right? Just the other week. And you can't just own 1 1952, you know, Topps rookie card. You gotta own every single one. And they all need to be authenticated by, by PSA, they all need to be signed, right? So that behavior is ubiquitous, right? And, uh, I.
Tom: about you can't, you can't just collect one thing either. I mean, you know, most collectors other collections, youwhether it's artwork or watches or wine or whatever. So, yeah.
AJ Scaramucci: That's right. That's right. So in some ways, you kind of, you'll find somebody, right, and and they'll be like, what? Like you're the guy who owns all the Mickey Mantles, or you're the guy who owns all the Ho Wagners or whatever the, the Michael Jordan fls or whatever, whatever it may be. So, you know, really the Treasure Trove.
I mean,what I'm able to communicate right now is, I'm just out here. I'm out here looking around. I've, made some purchases that the Pikachu happened to just be allowed purchase virtue of, you know, Logan, Paul and King, all these people that were involved in that.
Right. So it kind of went into orbit a little bit, but I'm, I'm just,
Tom: dropping price. I mean,
AJ Scaramucci: yes, that's right. That's it.
Tom: attention.
AJ Scaramucci: Tip that tip. So, you know, I, I've been, I've been going from different place to place and you know, I've looked at manuscripts. I think manuscripts are incredibly interesting as an asset class in collectibles. I think there's a lot of undervalued pieces, uh, in that area.
And even the Americana manuscripts, things like the Bill of Rights or the Emancipation Proclamation, or Declaration of Independence. A 13th amendment. I mean, these are iconic documents and they chronicle the story of our American history. Right? And we happen to be in the 250th anniversary of the country this July.
I've been poking around the dinosaur world as well. And that world is probably the most idiosyncratic, unique, weird, fantastical portion of, of collecting that I, that I've clicked into. My best guess is, you know, dinosaurs, there could be five to $7 billion of market cap out there just in dinosaur fossils, mostly Stegosaurs, triceratops and T-Rex of course, and manuscripts is also just all over the place.
I'm trying to make good bets and I think there's a lot of things that are undervalued, particularly in the context of this debasement trade.
I mean, it's, it's, you know, there's, there's the micro and the macro, right? So we can have very nuanced discussions on any individual collectible for sure. But the macro, you zoom way out. It's just so obvious, so obvious this stuff is, is underpriced. So that's my 2 cents.
Tom: Is Treasure trove going to be an investment vehicle for outside investors or is it more of a personal, holding company you that ultimately become, um. You know, part of a, a larger investment or
AJ Scaramucci: Yeah.
Tom: what's the game plan, or at least what are you willing to share
AJ Scaramucci: Yes, yes. So I really wanted to make sure that my core assumptions and hypotheses were right. So initially it was just myself, personally, and then my funds capital. more recently, I've begun to scale, the strategy and approach. I'm now bringing on investors into, to the Treasure Trove to really deploy like meaningful capital.
I mean, we're, we're looking to deploy many hundreds of millions of dollars into this category. And, we've got huge of different treasures. We almost have, we've almost built like an internal treasure map, and we've got, we've got treasures. We know about, we know where they are, we know who owns them, we know where they last transacted.
We've got, you know, all kinds of nuanced data, uh, that represents the compounding sub-asset classes and so on and so forth. So, that's exactly right. we are, beginning to scale beyond our own capital. so that's more or less, as much as I can say in a public format.
Tom: Fair enough. Now you're not looking just for one of a kind items. I mean, the, the Pokémon card, at least in a 10, is a one of a kind. But for example, the Declaration of Independence,
you know, there's multiple
variations and multiple, um, so but you, but you're looking for, kind of generational
AJ Scaramucci: that's right.
Tom: collectibles.
AJ Scaramucci: that's exactly right. We're looking for things that. Can really stand of time, right? Someone wants to a Berkshire Hathaway style approach to collecting, like what is, what is going to compound? Over many, many, many decades. Like where can we and, and think, like the decoration independence.
Yes, there's the dunlaps and there's the broad sides, and there's a number of other different variations that that, that exist, some of which are dated July 4th, some of which are a little bit later, of which are dated 1823. If you buy one of these copper plated versions that John Quincy Adams issued, there's tons of different declarations out there, but ultimately the common thread in really good collectibles.
Comes down to pretty simple demand supply asymmetry, right? There has to be true scarcity. There has to be true mimetic and that mimetic value is often tied to stories, narratives, but also flows, flows of capital and flows of attention, right? And if you look at. Even a place like, like Pokémon As, as the subset.
I know we spent a lot of time there. there's billions of dollars of capital flow there's billions of hours of time and attention flow of human beings playing Pokémon games and playing the card games. And, I encourage people to look up things like collect collect topia or, or Comic Con.
I mean, there's, there are trade shows out there that you can go to. That have tens of thousands of people at them buying and selling. Cars two days. I mean, I, I've been to, to many of them. And, when I went to my first one, I was like, whoa, there's, there's so many, there's way more people me than I even appreciated.
Right. It's, it's one thing to see the numbers on the screen and oh, you know, these. know, this particular baseball game or, or this sporting event is, is generating this amount of views and that it's another thing to actually physically go to the Super Bowl and see 80,000 people, you know, yelling and screaming and so on and so forth.
Or going to Comic-Con and seeing people that are dressed up like, oh, we Wine Kenobi, or Yoda, whatever it may be, or Captain America or Ironman or you know, just a million characters that exist. There's a real intense fandom. And you know what I would offer people too is. a world where AI is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, you and I, Tom, are living through the singularity right now, we've passed the Turing test years ago.
At this point, we're moving into embodied intelligence. You're gonna see robotics, you're gonna see all kinds of sci-fi like things over the next number of years, the next number of decades. And I think if things go well, which I hope they do, I generally am, am, am an optimist. A lot of our time is gonna be reallocated.
I'm hopeful that humans will spend less time focused on basic needs like food and water and shelter, and all those layers, those lower layers, those foundational layers of Maslow's hierarchy, and they'll begin to self-actualize. And when humans self-actualize, they are post scarcity, what do they do?
They pick up hobbies, they play instruments. Like you, they buy 1952 tops cards or they to conventions or they, they start to get more creative. They start to have fun. And thesis that a lot of value is going to accrue a lot of investment value is going to accrue into all of those areas, areas of self-actualization, particularly areas where there are scarce assets, right.
And collecting. ways represents the culmination that thesis.
The AI narrative, the inflation narrative, the debasement narrative, which are all real, fueling the collectible narrative. They're entangled with one another.
I just encourage people to really just zoom out as far as you can and see what's actually happening.
Tom: Difficult to do.. Uh, you know, you, you talk about AI and you talk about two years, five years, 10 years, I mean, that's compounding so fast that it almost feels like that's day to day. Things
things are just changing.
AJ Scaramucci: Yeah.
Tom: any idea how involved private equity is starting to get into. This space because I sense from various auctions and, and the escalation of value, and of course all the money that, that these firms such as Solari Capital, for example, has, I, I, I think that, that intuitively, without having actual knowledge about this, intuitively, I'm thinking that that's pushing some of this up.
What,
what's your, what's your
AJ Scaramucci: Yeah. I think you're right. I think the institutional capital. it is there. it's still small in, in the grand scheme of things and collecting mean. A lot of collecting is at least collecting objects, right? You're talking about sports teams. I mean, private equity's in there heavily.
Private equity deployed $10 billion into sports teams over the last 12 months. It's a kind of a different animal. about movie props or trading cards or, know, things like this. There's, there's some dabbling. There's dabbling happening, and there, there are some private equity firms or even, even some hedge funds that are in the space.
I, I, I would say that it's still, still early in, that
Tom: Still it's infancy, huh? Yeah. Okay.
with treasure trove do you anticipate an eclectic portfolio of a number of, collectibles, or do you feel like there's going to be a focus of more specific collectibles.
AJ Scaramucci: Yes. Yes, indeed. I, we, we are, I think the, you know what's interesting about gold is in gold there is an atomic unit, right? There is an ounce of gold, right? And we've all sort of agreed that an ounce of gold is worth 5,000 plus dollars an ounce, and there's 6.7 billion ounces, and that's. That's it. That, that, that's the measurement system that gold.
Tom: I
AJ Scaramucci: atomic unit of Bitcoin
a singular Bitcoin or it's a satoshi. There's 21 million. That is the, the language and abstractions that we've used. And I, and I think in collecting what's unique or divergent from those two is those two are homogeneous right? Like one piece of gold. If I have a piece of gold and you have a piece of gold, they're the same thing.
I got a Bitcoin and you got a Bitcoin, they're at the same thing. have a Declaration of Independence and you have a T-Rex. they're not the same thing, but, in some ways they are. Right? That's, that's a core part of my, of my argument. So, you know, the treasure trove believes that there should be an atomic unit for collectibles, right?
Like there has to be some kind of abstraction that wraps collectibles, such that people can exposure, particularly at scale.
Tom: And so how does Trove differ from what you're doing with Solari Capital?
AJ Scaramucci: Definitely. Yeah. So Solari Capital, uh, you know, it's really, it's a, it's a venture fund. I mean, we're investing in Prese Seed Series A companies at the early stage we'll. We'll invest in, in growth rounds that are more pre IPO. We, we focus on private markets investing technology bent, like I that's Mayan and my other partner's
Uh, so there, I mean, we're, we're placing bets all the time. you know, large and small. Every once in a while though, we'll come across something that's really, really interesting. So, a few years ago that happened to be what's happening in mental health. And in, in mental health, there's a huge phase shift happening away from SSRIs, away from antidepressants into a new wave of psychedelic therapeutics.
Things like ketamine, mdm, a psilocybin, like transcranial magnetic stimulation that actually have curative properties, right? So instead of Zoloft where you get numbed out. Really, there's 42 million Americans now on antidepressants. They, and they, they don't really work. They're just kinda like a numbing agent, essentially.
a new paradigm that, that is curative. So I, you know, there's so many people that I'm close to that have, you know, PTSD or treatment resistant depression or whatever it may be. So I was, I was thinking about it and I was like, okay, well we're gonna have to build a really big provider network to.
care of people in this new paradigm. The old paradigm is not going to work the pill mill of shipping pills to your house continuously from CVS or your local pharmacy that you just take and numb out for decades. That's not gonna work. We need vertically integrated clinics, provider networks that are integrated with insurance, psychiatrists, and therapists that can actually administer and deliver that's truly healing for patients.
So I said, Hey, you know, I didn't see anything or anything or anyone building something in that space. So when we can't find an investment, we have a thesis, we'll just start a company. So we started Radial Health got wonderful partners in, in that business I've known for many years, and including Elliot Cohen who built PillPack, which he sold to Amazon for a billion dollars in 2018.
And John Capa Cilantro, who was with him the whole way through, who's the CEO of the business? had a board meeting actually just earlier today. And we're, we're growing really quickly and we're treating a lot of patients, and that business has blossomed from an idea or a thesis into a real company.
Right? So, Trove is, is like that as well. Treasure a company. It's a new company that's in, its in its infancy and, and scaling, right now.
Tom: Cool. I'm gonna close out with a question really kind of revolving what you were just talking about. So, you know, our podcast is called Significance of Wealth. And, you have a lot of things going on between buying Pokémon cards and chasing other things such as dinosaur fossils and manuscripts and whatnot. But, you're working on, and to some extent what you were just talking about, but MDMA therapy for, PTSD. taking all that into account and taking every, really everything that you're doing into account, give me an idea of how you personally define. makes something significant?
AJ Scaramucci: It's a deep question. Well, I mean, when you go to the, when you go to the Solari website, you'll see a simple tagline that says reality is programmable. It's kind of a provocative statement, right? the presupposition of that statement is that every single bit and Adam is in fact programmed. And that you, Tom, or me, aj, or humanity as a whole, we are creators.
We are actively programming our reality, right? So whether it's or treatment resistant depression, which in my view for a lot of people is, is a struggle. It's a struggle of entropy, of the mind. You know, the terrible things that happen to people. There's victims of rape and veterans of war, you as a human, you have plasticity.
You can rewrite those meanings. You can program your mind neurolinguistic programming or exogenous resources. You, you can do it right, and the chair that I'm sitting in is. Programmed by whoever built it. Those atoms are rearranged into this chair. This building is, is programmed. Mickey Mouse is programmed, and Pikachu is programmed.
We are creators at our core. So what really fuels me and where I'm, I'm fascinated and interested in is what's the frontier of programmability, both in programmable intelligence and programmable biology and programmable matter. Uh, but also just in this case, you know, in collectibles too. 'cause I mean, what is collectibles?
I mean, collectibles like the Pikachu card the Mickey mantle tops that, that you own. It is programmed that those atoms are imbued with meaning they mean something to you as they mean something to many. And that meaning translates into value, right? So there's layers of extraction that we've created.
We are constantly programming our surrounding reality, and that's what really fascinates me.
Tom: So I, gave you a deep question and we got a deep response. It's
AJ Scaramucci: That's, that's right.
That's right. We're getting metaphysical here at the end, Tom. Yeah.
Tom: Yes, yes. So, uh, you know, to, to close out AJ any further comments, number one, and number two, any place that if somebody's listening to this, that they'd want to go check out Treasure Trove or Solari Capital, you know, websites, information, anything you'd want like to put out there.
AJ Scaramucci: Definitely, and you can check out Solari Capital at solaricap.com. You can out Treasure Trove at treasuretrove.com. Grateful we got that domain. That was easier, uh, said than done. but yeah, you can follow us on, on social media, particularly with the treasure trove. The whole, the whole purpose there is you're gonna be following these treasure hunts, right?
So we, we want people to be. Along the ride this this, ride is an Yeah. Yeah. That's right. This ride is an exciting and fun ride. Right. So that, that's, that's what we want. That's what we're hoping. That's the kind of brand that we're hoping to build.
Tom: AJ, phenomenal conversation. thank you so much and, love what you're doing. Love, you know, love, uh, kind of the vision that you have, not just in the collectible, but just the, the real broad vision that you have. I, I think is, is just spectacular and, uh, love hearing about it.
Thank you for taking the time to join us today.
AJ Scaramucci: Thank you for the invite.
Martie Salt: That brings us to the end of today's episode. Thank you for tuning in. Be sure to subscribe to Significance of Wealth on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and anywhere else. You get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. You can also follow Tom Rouge and Destiny Family Office on LinkedIn and Destiny family office.com for more insights on wealth management, private market opportunities, and collectibles.
Until next time.
The expressed views, thoughts and opinions belong solely to the host and or guests, and are not investment recommendations or opinions issued by Destiny, wealth Partners or its affiliates. Investment advisory services are offered through Destiny Wealth Partners, LLC, and SEC, registered Investment Advisor.
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