Elon’s Departure, Bitcoin’s Takeover & How America Wins in the AI Era w/ Anthony Scaramucci, Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #180
2 Jul 2025 · 88 min
This is a podcast episode titled "Elon’s Departure, Bitcoin’s Takeover & How America Wins in the AI Era w/ Anthony Scaramucci, Salim Ismail & Dave Blundin | EP #180" recorded in 2025. The content features a multi-person discussion including Anthony Scaramucci, Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, and Peter Diamandis, focusing on topics such as Elon Musk's political involvement, AI policy, cryptocurrency, US-China competition, and the future of technology and governance. The conversation is informal and covers political and technological insights with a mix of humor and analysis.
So Elon got nailed because he's Elon Musk.
Is the current administration still tech forward even with Elon leaving?
You're asking me the question. I want to be as objective as possible. Somebody minor in the administration could pick your eyeball out with an ice pick, drop it in a dirty martini glass. You're bleeding at the table. They're still talking to you like nothing happened.
That's Washington, China, U.S. tension makes for very little sense.
I'm a believer that we have two different systems, but we have to be compatible. And if anything, I want to get deeper into the economic dependency, the interdependency with China.
It looks like the entire banking and finance industry is about to get transformed.
I have 70% of my money in bitcoin. Could you imagine if I can put my bitcoin at JP Morgan and get yield off it, and there's a structure around it that protects it? Forget it. It's over. Now that's a moonshot.
Ladies and gentlemen, everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with the emperor of exponentials, Salim Ismail, the extraordinary alchemist of AI, Dave Blunden, and our special guest for today, the Mooch, Anthony Scaramucci. So last time we were together, Scaramucci made some extraordinary predictions. If you know Anthony, he's amazing. He's a financier extraordinaire through Skybridge Capital. He's the father of one of my best Strike Force members ever, AJ Scaramucci. He's the creator and host of Salt, the host of the Rest Is Politics Us podcast. Voted the podcaster with the best hair and the spiciest attitude, Anthony. Welcome, buddy.
There's a lot of PRPs combing your.
Hair, for God's sake.
There's a lot of prp. Let's just talk about the hair for a second, diamond, because, you know, I take all your longevity. There's a lot of PRP that's going on up here. Okay. Just want, you know, okay. And there's a lot of old ancestry in that family, so, you know, this whole thing is costing a lot of money. To keep it together, you got to keep it up. You know, by the way, for viewers and listeners, okay, this is Latin American Dictator Brown. I was using Cuban leader black, but it looked like on podcasts. So I've got it. I got the right color now, and I got the right colorist.
You're making Saleem very jealous.
I do save it. I do save heads. Perfect. Like Saleem's. And the rest of us had a good hair, you know, you Know why Peter Diamantis has hair, Dave?
Why?
To hide his horns. Okay. Because you know, you know, come on.
You know, we both a little, we.
Both have a little bit of that mischievous streak in our personalities.
Peter's the Popeye guy. Got, he's got the Popad under there.
Let's, let's jump into this episode here. You know, we haven't even started. For those of you. We haven't started yet. On a previous podcast starring the mooch Anthony, you made a prophetic prediction. And I, I think your prediction was something around the notion that Elon would last about 10 Scaramuccis. We can go back and we can figure out what it was exactly. For those of you who don't. Wait, wait, I'm going to undefined this stuff. For those of you who don't know this, obviously Anthony made a stent in the last Trump White house. He lasted 11 days. Anthony's defined that as a Scaramucci unit. Length, like a plank length in physics.
You can use it in a sentence like Kevin McCarthy lasted 24.5 Scaramucci's as Speaker Prime Minister Liz Truss, 4.1 Scaramucci.
Well, do you know how many Scaramucci's Elon lasted?
So it was 11.8. But I'm a, I'm the official scorer of Scaramucci's and I put out on X. We round up. We're generous here. Okay, Big balls, big balls. He lasted 14 Scaramucci's so you got to give the kid credit, you know, but Elon, Elon, by the way, as you know, and I said this last time, I'm a huge fan of the guy as I'm an investor in xi, I'm an investor in SpaceX and only wish I had more money in those two things. And I, and my heart goes out to him because you know, Trump is seductive and he got, he got seduced by Trump and I get why. But then, you know, the disillusionment process happens when you realize what Trump really is. And so there you go, you know, 12 Scaramucci's later, Trump's on the Epstein files and away we go.
So before we move off the unit, because that's going to last hundreds of years. You know, the massive bridge here in Cambridge is measured in smoots and they repaint it every year. The number of smoots and, and a couple of years to, to measure the length.
How many. Do you remember how many smooths it is, Dave?
Oh, that's good, that's good. I should know it was like 300 every day.
And an ear.
And an ear. Yeah, yeah.
David, the ice cream place still over there? Tuscanini's. Is that still.
Oh my God. I used to play pick up basketball with Toscanini. Yeah, it's still there. I think there are two of them actually now.
I think that's the best ice cream in Cambridge, by the way.
That's go good home turf stuff. Actually. Our good buddy Brian Mox used to work there and he would dump this big bag of lard into the mixing machine. We're like, that's why the ice cream is so good.
All right, well, that's why. You know, my favorite flavor from Tuscany's was Vienna fingers. Just to show my junk food aholism, something that Peter wouldn't let me eat today in my Sugar is a poison. I think I look good for 91 though.
Sugar is a poison.
Okay. Okay, so wait, back, back to the unit. So it's exactly 11 days is one Scaramucci. Is that what we're defining?
Some people say I was there for 10 days. That does hurt my feelings. I really feel I got fired on the 11th day. And since you're a math expert, Dave, if you start on the 21st and you work a full day on the 31st and you leave at 2:30, I think you get a full 11 days there. And I don't even when the President Tommy and puts out on truth social that I'm a major loser. He says I lasted 11 days. Let's. I sort of feel like the president deserves some official scoring as well.
It's defined. It's defined for all time. Let's move on. All right, so listen, I have a question for you. I mean one of the, one of the things that made the beginning of the Trump administration potentially super exciting was the fact that Elon was there and we had a very pro technology veneer, if you would or pro technology thrust of using AI in the government, using knowledge and information to make decisions. And the overall question I want to have a conversation with you about and my moonshot mates here is, is the current administration still tech forward even with Elon leaving? We're going to talk about things like gov AI and all that's coming there. But what's your opinion in general there, Anthony?
So I always try to be objective. I don't like Trump and I can explain why and I think I've done that in prior.
But listen, I don't want to go into politics. This is not a political show.
I'm not doing that. I'M just trying to point out like I'm going to say a lot of objective things, but I also want to be with self honesty that that's my personal feeling. I think they will be tech forward. I think they do have a lot of very smart guys working in the administration that are tech forward. I think David Sacks has done a great job. I'm not going to pronounce his name well, but he's a great guy. Shuri Ram Krishnan. Am I saying it right?
Yep.
Okay. I think he is a phenomenal guy. He's doing a great job. I think that there's a guy that was at Stanford that AJ my son knows that I believe is involved in the personnel area that's helping to staff people that are tech forward. I think he's doing a great job. And to give the President credit, the President knows that this has to be a broad scale initiative. And let me give him credit, even for Trump, one where he was recognizing the AI race. If we had a space race in the 60s, we're having sort of an AI race, perhaps with China and a few other competitive economic adversaries. But no, but I mean, Joe Biden didn't do this. Joe Biden was not on this. You have to be honest about this stuff. So, so Trump is on it. I like Elon closer to the situation than not in the situation. But I also understand Washington. I have a PhD. I have an 11 day PhD in Washington. Scumbaggery. So I can tell you exactly what they did to him. I can tell you how it got handled. I can tell you who leaked what on the poor son of a bitch and how he got blown out of his seat. Okay. And I can also tell you that the hot and cold streak of Donald Trump where he, he gets hot on you and then he drops you like a hot potato. Right? And so that's what happened. So, so, so. But you're asking me the question. I want to be as objective as possible. Trump is better on AI. He's better on crypto. He's better generally on D reg. He's not great on batteries. Again, if we're just being open and.
Honest or energy policy in general, solar.
Or energy policy in general. If we're just being honest and. Okay, he's taking too hard of a. Sometimes Trump gets in his mind, the culture war. So the culture war to him is drill, baby, drill. Don't tell me I need to be in an electric car. Right. So his base likes the meat eating aspects of drill, baby, drill. There's a group in they were in the UK last week. I think they made an anti Semitic remark. It's like a rock band. And now they're banning them from getting their visa to come into the United States. I disagree with it. I think it's a bad policy to initialize. But that's the culture war stuff. So when Trump has got the culture war going, he can tip himself to make a bad policy decision in areas where he's generally making good policy decisions.
Every week I study the 10 major tech meta trends that will transform industries over the decade ahead. I cover trends ranging from humanoid robots, AGI, quantum computing, transport, energy, longevity, and more. No fluff, only the important stuff that matters that impacts our lives and our careers. If you want me to share these with you, I write a newsletter twice a week, sending it out as a short 2 minute read via email. And if you want to discover the Most important metatrends 10 years before anyone else, these reports are for you. Readers include founders and CEOs from the world's most disruptive companies and entrepreneurs building the world's most disruptive companies. It's not for you if you don't want to be informed of what's coming, why it matters, and how you can benefit from it. To subscribe for free, go to dmanness.com metatrends that's dmadness.com metatrends to gain access to trends 10 plus years before anyone else. Let me hit you on a tweet from David Sachs, who I think is brilliant and I feel extraordinarily positive that he's in that position and I hope he remains there. So yesterday David Sachs tweets out what is the most realistic way for the US to lower debt and increase GDP growth? What's the best driver for growth? Productivity. What's expected to drive productivity? Most AI yet over 1000 bills have been introduced into state legislators. To hobble AI, we need preemption in OBBB in one big beautiful bill. So thoughts on this and I welcome.
We have to apply historical context, so let's thoughts on this. There were people that were running stagecoaches that did not want the railroads. There were people that had a horse and buggy. They did not want the horseless carriage. There were people that did not want the commercialization of the airline industry. And on and on and on it goes. The most contemporary example I can give you is there was not one mayor, not one regulator in any urban area that wanted Uber. Not one. They fought it tooth and nail. They fought bitcoin, the American Banking Association Liquidated aspects of the genius act, the whole nonsense that you can't get yield on, the stablecoin is an example of that. And so what ends up happening in a society, the society, like in Governor's Travels, the Lilliputians want to tie down the society, they want to tie down the innovation. And so it's incumbent upon smart leaders to step over those people and to go directly to the American public. Now, smart leader fdr, we need the bomb. Can't tell anybody about it. We're going to put two and a half billion dollars, which is like almost $100 billion of today's dollars, into the Manhattan Project. We're building the bomb. And so. So, but what's happening now is we have too much money in the political system. And just hear me out for a second. January 2010. Justice Scalia, citizens United States. You can light up the political system, spend as much money as you want. It's your First Amendment right that's very, very bad for the country. It's created a separate but equal democracy. Moreover, I can show you legislative agenda at the state and local level. Legislative agenda in the US Congress, all skewed now to big money and special interests. I've got a lot of money and I don't want the AI screwing up my staffing company. Let me go to my state senator. Hello, State senator. AI could make all these people redundant. Pass a bill to slow down the AI. Here's the money, right? Yep. You know he's got, you know I'm Italian, right? So I always got money on me, right. So let's take the money out. Let's show the money. These are Italian singles. See those? Everybody see them?
What the hell is that?
You never know. You could get invited to Rails one night. Dave, they don't take credit cards. Array. Okay, how long. This is rooting the systems. Everybody see that?
Depreciating as we watch how it is depreciating.
How long before those pieces of green paper are no longer part of our economy?
That's very.
I want to take it. I want to take a bet on that one. Dave and Saleem, you know how long before.
But you're, you're, you're asking the question. Is the dollar going away or is the piece of paper going away?
The paper is going away.
That's another conversation. Whether the dollar.
Okay, but let's, let's go back to David.
Same way the typewriter went away. There'll always be dollars like there are typewriters. But the tight. The dollar is going away. It's going to be on your phone. You're going to, you're going to, you're going to trade with people on the phone.
All right, Shalim and Dave, comments.
Well, let's talk about backtracking in general here because that's the political thing. I think what we all voted for was, hey, balance the budget. Doge is real. We're going to bankrupt the entire country if we don't do something, which we will. That's what people wanted, right? And we don't want to see a big bloated bill. We want to see a big beautiful bill. So we wanted Elon to be in there changing everything. We didn't want him to get booted out. And you know, backtracking is sort of the political way, right? You promise the world and then you get elected and then you, you go back to bureaucracy as usual. Is that what's happening here or what?
Well, well, you see, but it's too academic, Dave. So let me tell you what's happening, okay? They call it a swamp. It is not a swamp. It is a gold plated hot tub, okay? And what they do is they sit in a hot tub, they pass cubanos, they pass Krug to each other and then they have like a 01. You know, like your computer goes 01.
Sure.
Look at you. Look at my hand. They look at you, they say, saleem bought or can't be bought, okay? Can't be bought. Okay, fuck Saleem. Let's get opposition research on him. Let's say he's got bladder problems related to his ketamine. Let's say he's this, let's say he's that, okay? Fuck Celine. He's not coming into the hot tub and letting us play in the hot tub. If you can be bought here, the Cabanos, here's the crew. Come into the hot tub and let's take the money from the taxpayer and put it in our pockets. We're going to insider trade. We're going to, we're going to blotate these bills. A lot of blotation in the bills because it's going to go to our constituents who are going to feed our kids and our grandkids and we're all going to get rich. Saleem, you don't want to do that. You're a scumbag. You're a bad guy. Let's go set fire to Saleem's factory or his electronic vehicles. You know, that's what they do. So that's the game. Don't be academic about It. You have to understand what they're doing.
So you prediction then. If, if that's the game, is David Sacks going to be there at the end of the administration or not? He's clearly not in that camp, right?
No, no, no. David. Well, see, David's different. See, David's different, okay? Because David is a duck, okay? And so if, you know, Elon's not.
A duck in the hot tub. He's like a rubber duck.
Elon is an eagle. David's a duck, okay? So the duck is in the tub there. Look at me. He's moving and he's just gliding across. No one sees how hard he's working. And he's under the radar. And he's done a couple of really smart things. Let's talk about three of them, quickly. Number one, the executive order on the sovereign wealth. Or you want to call it the Bitcoin treasury, whatever you want to call it the Reserve. Beautiful job on that. Let's not make it partisan. Let's convince these people it's like oil. There's no partisan debate on oil. Beautiful job on that. Number two, I can't get everything. I can't get everything I want. The American Banking association has brought the lube, they brought the Vaseline and the microwave oven to the table and they're going to jam me. And so I can't get everything. So what I gotta do is I gotta go for 80% of it, okay? That's David Sachs. And then David Sachs. I don't need any credit. Look at me. I don't need any credit. He has hardly any face time with the President publicly.
Really?
Okay, well, no, no, no. I'm not saying he's not interfacing with the President, but they're not infinite pictures. Elon hurt himself when he jumped on Air Force One every weekend with the President. Elon hurt himself when he's standing in the Cabinet Room with the President. Elon hurt himself when he's in the Oval Office with the President. Because these people suck, okay? And they're envious, jealous people. And you know why Washington sucks? Because the stakes are so small. Let's take out the money again. See the money. Okay? The Washingtonian people are not on the green team. You guys are on the green team. I'm on the green team. If you hated my ass. But there was $500 million on the table, we could split it, but we got to fake liking each other. We're gonna do that, but not in Washington. There's blue teams, red teams, purple teams, and if you're too close to the President. I'm envious. The stakes are small. I'm gonna try to pick your eyeball out with an ice pick. Now, Trump said something to me and Peter, he said this to me on a Wednesday when I was in the White House. You know how I know? I was only there for one Wednesday, so I know it was a fucking Wednesday. And what he said to me on that Wednesday is he said, you know, this is a tough place, man. I thought I was a killer. I thought I was a billionaire real estate guy from New York. But these people are nuts down here. I mean, the secretaries will pick your eyeball out. You know, Trump said to me that somebody minor in the administration could pick your eyeball out with an ice pick, drop it in a dirty martini glass like it's an olive oil. You're bleeding at the table. They're still talking to you like nothing happened. That's Washington. Does everybody understand that? So Elon got nailed because he's Elon Musk, David Sachs, he's moving like a duck. So he'll last in the administration as long as he wants to.
So I think the duck analogy, though, I really feel like Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk are about to become the most powerful people on the planet because of AI. There's never been anything like this before. David Sacks is a duck with AI inside. I don't know how that makes your analogy.
No, but he's a brilliant duck. I'm just making a point about a duck, is that he's moving quietly through the water. He looks like he's effortless, but he's working away. And he's really smart. He's good on policy. He's good on commerciality. He understands the significance and the importance of AI being the tip of the spear for the future of American productivity. He's not pissing people off.
Celine, what are your thoughts on all this, buddy?
So much you mentioned earlier that a wealthy guy goes to the state senator and tries to get a bill to. How do you, at the federal level, if you're David Sacks, counteract that and get AI navigated properly the way it should be?
Yeah, well, he's smarter at it than me. But the way you would do that is cautiously. The way you would do that is you get a little bit of help from your friends like Elon Musk and Zuckerberg that understand the issue. And the way you do that is you catch the president and you explain to the president that he's going to get a lot of accolades and he's going to get a lot of attention as a visionary if he helps you push that agenda. And Trump is very smart that way. Again, he's got great political instincts. And so I think David is doing all those things and more. And so back to the first question. Is this administration tech forward, tech positive? It is, because you have people like David in the room that actually understand the stakes being so large and they're willing to take the nicks and gnats to get the thing done. And so I applaud the guy. I think the guy is. I don't know him. I mean, I think you guys probably know him personally. I mean, I've met him a few times. I will say this to David Sacks if he listens to your podcast. He did bring up the Scaramucci as a unit of time on All In. I was very happy about that.
Okay.
Of course I, I retweeted that, you know, I think it's very, it's very important that we have, you know, you have like E equals MC standard, standard measurement of like time and relativity. I think you have to have a.
Science unit, true time, buddy, for all.
You have to have a unit of time named after you.
So we're recording this on June 30th, July 4th, coming up. There's supposed to be the release of AI.gov and so this idea that the government, which has been sublinear the most inefficient part of humanity at any point, maybe we're the most efficient of the most inefficient part of governments, but could be using this for every agency, for the fda, for the faa, for the dot, for the DOE to move things rapidly through and to optimize things. Do you think that's going to happen?
An extent of that thing is going to happen. So there's a great book behind you called Bold. You also wrote a book called Abundance. And in those books, if it was going to happen the way you wrote about them, it would be revolutionary and transformative. It would unleash a wild amount of productivity and it would probably solve things like our imbalances, our credit imbalances, debt, etc. But it can't happen like that because we live in a world with lots of different people and we live in what Churchill said, the worst form of government until you consider all the other forms of government. And so it's not going to happen like that. Can you get 30% of it this year, 50 or 60% of it in years coming? Yes, you can. The big problem right now for that movement is the complacency. And you say, well, what do you mean by the complacency? We're not facing a kinetic or ideological threat. We're not in the Cold War. It is not World War II. Now, you may think we are, and I may think we are, and I may read a presidential daily brief that says that we are, but I'm talking about the hoi polloi of the American people. Remember the American people. On the evening of the election, the most searchable term on Google was, did Joe Biden drop out? That was the most searchable term. People are like, well, wait, wait, wait, who's the. That's my little sister running against Donald Trump. Who's that person? And what. Joe Biden dropped out. Okay, what are you talking about? Okay, that's the American people. So you have to understand where the American people are. One of the biggest mistakes you can make in politics is that you hang out with really smart people like the three of you, and you get the confirmed biases of the people you're hanging out with. Yeah, you got to go to the man or woman on the street and you got to talk to them. You got to get, hey, excuse me, here's the microphone. Are we facing an ideological or existential threat? They say, no, and that slows down everything. When Sputnik went off In October of 1957, the man. October 4th. Shit.
Yeah.
Holy shit, we got to get our shit together, okay? And then Eisenhower said, holy shit, we got to get our shit together. And then they bring in the German scientists and then they hand the ball to Kennedy and we get our asses on the moon, the moonshot. Right. But that's because the people feel the threat. Okay, so you have to get.
Because the media made them feel.
Yes, of course. Right.
It all comes down to sort of the dystopian news that our media spreads and what are they going to be teaching you about tomorrow?
But this is why you need. In this country at this moment, you need a transcendental. You need a transformative leader. See, Lincoln understood that the slavery issue was an original stain in the Constitution. And so therefore he had to make sacrifices to re knit and refashion the country, to align the idealism of that document with the reality of what was going on on the ground. We are now at another moment like that in our history where we have to clean things up. The establishment very, very selfishly has taken advantage of the treasure of the American people. And so they need reform. They need constitutional reform. I submit to you Guys, rhetorically, that there are 27amendments to that constitution. The document's 235 years old. There's 27amendments. Do the math. You're picking up an amendment every eight or nine years, and yet we have not had a significant amendment since 1993. That was a procedural one. And the big amendment was 59 years ago, the 65 Voting Rights Act. But that's a living document, guys. That document is supposed to be refitted for every generation. But these sons of bitches won't move on the document. You got to reform, end gerrymandering. You have to end Citizens United. You have to put a budget process back in place where we're not running this stuff on continuing resolutions or big beautiful spending bills.
Yes, I would vote for you.
And we're not doing that. But we have to do that because we have to re engineer, renew the promise that America is for the rest of the people.
I always think of the Constitution of software. You have to update software occasionally to keep 100%. The founders knew that and they knew that. They framed it. This is my issue with the originalist. But quick question. Back to the tech forward question. If the administration is so tech forward, why the reticence on solar?
On solar.
Culture war. Culture war.
Straight off. Culture.
Culture war. Drill, baby, drill. Amen. We're meat eaters. We watch Fox news.
You like F150s, by the way.
I don't want an electric stove. Give me the propane. Let's fire up the shrimp on the barbecue. So it's a culture war issue. You see, if you said it the way an Elon Musk could say it, he was like, guys, our future is in the sun. It's not in what died before us. That's in the ground. Our future is what's right in front of us every day and night. And we can channel that now. We have the capability, we have the resources, and we have the efficiency of software. We can move the UPS truck around the neighborhood more efficiently. We can move the plane in the sky more efficiently. We have. We have so many different things at our disposal now to make this energy renewable and to clean up. You see, I think you're going to be sitting here someday. People that are related to us 100 years from now, say, these assholes, 1850-2150, they're going to call that the dirty period of civilization. So these assholes were burning fossil fuel and they were ruining the earth, these idiots. It was like they had an open garbage pit with the atmosphere. What the hell were These people doing okay. And the same way that we hate slavery, they're gonna take down statues of us. They're gonna say, these assholes try to destroy the Earth. And the good news is we move to carbon free, we move to solar, we move to the future. And so what Musk is trying to say, and he said it beautifully on Twitter the other day, this is where we gotta go. This is where the future's. By the way, the Chinese are there. Guys, everyone.
As you know, earlier this year, I was on stage at the Abundance Summit with some incredible individuals. Cathie Wood, Mo Gadot, Vinod Khosla, Brett Adcock, and many other amazing tech CEOs. I'm always asked, hey, Peter, where can I see the summit? Well, I'm finally releasing all the talks. You can access my conversation with Cathie Wood and Mogadot for free@dmanandis.com summit. That's the talk with Cathie Wood and Mo Gadot for free@diamandis.com summit. Enjoy. I'll ask my team to put the links in the show notes below. On June 5, Elon tweets out, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle? He puts that out as a poll and he gets an 80% positive response. Then on June 6, he says, the people have spoken. A new political party is needed in America to represent 80% in the middle. And exactly 80% of people agree. This is fate. Again, Elon's tweet or his post again, I wish X would come up with a verb instead or keep tweeting. I remember I texted you right away, Anthony, because I was like, oh, my God. This is the, you know, this is the injection point where hopefully a third party can come into existence. You know, they name it the American. The American Party. Do you think this has a hope?
Well, you got to tell me who's going to find. If you tell me, we're showing up at the table with $50 billion and so we can get to people and say we're going to have a $50 billion endowment to start a new party. And then we have to have a convention and we have to put the platforms and planks together of what that party's actually going to represent. But you gotta have $50 billion. Let me tell you what these guys did. And they did it right after the Ross Perot election. They got the shit scared out of them. Ross got 19.9% of the vote 33 years ago. They went to each other and said, shit, this sucks. Can't have a third party, guys. So I hate you, you hate me. Let's get in bed together in the hot tub and let's conjoin. And let's strengthen our duopoly so we'll make it impossible through voter registration, signatures, petitions, lawsuits. I'm going to let you gerrymander your district. You're going to let me gerrymander my district. We're going to strain out all the people. And so we're going to make it as impossible as we can to start a third party. Ask Bobby Kennedy. Ask Donald Trump in the year 2000 when he tried to become a Reform Party candidate for president. He looked at it and said, okay, there's no way they've locked this thing down. We have a duopoly. So you would need a duopoly busting strategy. $50 billion, 5, $0 billion. The right people operationally, the right tech people, the right people on software, and you could do this, but then you still have to appeal to one of the other two parties because they have the machinery, they have the architecture. And Trump did this. Trump took over the Republican Party, he decapitated the party. Hostile takeover. His third party is maga, and he inserted it on top of the Republican Party. He took operating software, to use Saleem's analogy, and he overlaid it on the old tech, okay? And he created a new party. Now, that party, unfortunately, is too populist. And that party's policy decisions are driven by the culture war. And they're driven by one other important thing, and that's Donald Trump. Donald Trump was asked during the Iraq. I'm sorry, the Iran bombing. Donald Trump was asked during the Iran bombing, what are the policies and principles of maga? And Trump said, whatever I want them to be, okay? And that's a personality cult. That's not a party. That means that party's going to be up for play in 2028, because there's no other person on his team that can say that and get away from that. So if I was Elon Musk's political strategist, I would say, Mr. Musk, what is the platform? Who are we getting the $50 billion from? We got to have a convention. So it's a principle based party, which means we're going to have a little bit of a love and tug in the party and some consensus building. Then we elicit what the platform is to the American people, and we go out and we explain to the American people the rigged system of the duopoly. And we got to get to them on Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat and all these other places, and X and X. And guess what happens? Because you guys are entrepreneurs. We're all zero to one people.
Yep.
You can go zero to one, and you will liquidate those two parties and you'll force them back into the middle. And so we should get things right. And that party should be. This isn't left or right, but this is right or wrong for America isn't Andrew Yang. We need solar policy. We need good space policy. We need good crypto policy. We're not gonna make it partisan. And, oh, by the way, that guy's trying to lobby me to stop something from happening. We gotta figure out a way to stop that from happening. See that.
Isn't Andrew Yang trying to do some of this with the Forward party, Okay?
I love Andrew Yang. He should be part of that party that Elon Musk is putting together. Andrew is correct about a lot of the things that he's saying, but he doesn't have the financial muscle to pull that off.
You know those bills you had pretty much added up to what you were talking about.
No, no, no, no. These bills, man, we've lost. In 30 years, we've lost 50% of the purchasing power. Look at this shit. Yeah.
Yeah.
Okay. I mean, look at this, right?
Yeah, throw that one away, because that's worthless now.
You know Ben. Ben Franklin, who was, to me, my favorite founding father because he was so cheeky, right? But Ben Franklin, if you were alive today, he'd be like, okay, we gotta. We gotta start a new party. Wake people up, okay? Ben Franklin wrote a lot of different things. But my favorite thing that Ben Franklin wrote, he wrote a small book called Fart Proudly. No. He talked about the joy of flatulence. And, of course, you may remember this from the Isaacson biography. We had no money. The Continental government had no money. They were over in France together, sleeping in the same room, him and John Adams. And he was ripping farts on Adams to the point where Adams had to open the window and he was freezing his ass off. He caught himself a Colt, and they argued about it for 30 years after the thing happened.
They didn't know about Franklin was my.
Guy, because Franklin was about Fart Proudly and tell Elon, let's start the Fart Proudly party, okay? Fart for freedom, as Franklin would say. Fart for liberty. Because what you gotta do is you gotta get these young people involved, okay? And they don't like what's going on any more than you and I, okay? So get them involved. And I'm just for viewers and listeners at home. I'm just showing the book here. Right there. Writings of Ben Franklin you never read in school. You see, it says far proudly. You can buy that book on Amazon and it's great essays on the power of flatulence. And what is Franklin's point? Don't take yourself that seriously, fellas. Okay? Let's get in there, let's win together, let's help each other, let's share the credit. We don't have, you know, Trump's big issue. He's got to be the one guy in the spotlight, you know, no other people can be on stage with him. What did Reagan say? You can get anywhere you want in life as long as you don't care who gets the credit.
A quick aside. You probably heard me speaking about Fountain life before and you're probably wishing, Peter, would you please stop talking about fountain life? And the answer is no, I won't. Because genuinely, we're living through a healthcare crisis. You may not know this, but 70% of heart attacks have no precedent. No pain, no shortness of breath. And half of those people with a heart attack never wake up. You don't feel cancer until stage three or stage four until it's too late. But we have all the technology required to detect and prevent these diseases early at scale. That's why a group of us, including Tony Robbins, Bill Capp and Bob Hariri, founded Fountain Life, a one stop center to help people understand what's going on inside their bodies before it's too late. And to gain access to the therapeutics to give them decades of extra health. Spanish. Learn more about what's going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to fountainlife.com Peter and tell him Peter sent you. Okay, back to the episode. Anthony, let's jump into US versus China in particular. You know, one of the things we've been discussing on our WTF episodes with my moonshot mates here is in fact, you know, the chip race and the chip wars going on. The notion that by 2030, China is going to be building the entire equivalent of US electric energy production, production, the entire for the US country every year in China, that they are running away with energy production and could potentially be running away with chip production and AI. What are your thoughts about that? Is the current administration taking the right tack? Are they too slow? Should we be unifying on these fronts?
Well, again, again, this is stuff that we're fighting over that we shouldn't be fighting over. Like the people on this call, we know we should not be fighting over bitcoin. Bitcoin is a non partisan issue, the way oil is. If I said to you we have rare earth minerals in our reserve, if you're a Democrat, are you going to fight that or you're Republican? Hey, I don't want rare earth minerals. So we got to get certain things into a nonpartisan category of policy. I hate you, Peter. You're a Democrat, I'm a Republican, I hate you. But we're both going to agree on this. We need to compete with China on the issues that you're describing.
For the record, I used to be a Democrat and I would.
No.
Yeah.
No, no, no. I love you, Peter. You're like one of my brother. I mean, you're like my brother from another mother. You've been a great dad to my son. Better than me actually, because he actually listens to you. Kids don't listen to me. I brought more props. Can I show another prop? Look, here we go. Yeah, this is the Eurasian century. It was written by Hal Brands. And this is a great book about Eurasia. And of course, if you know your Mackinder, the Oxford historian. What did Mackinder say in the 1850s? He said, who's ever controlling Eurasia is going to control the world because it's the largest landmass, slightly larger than Africa, but you've got tremendous resources there. And the Chinese understand this. Henry Kissinger understood it. Zibinu Brzezinski understood it. Jimmy Carter understood it. Reagan had it explained to him and then he understood it. But we're not doing that anymore, okay? And we gotta understand this and we gotta make sure that we're part of this. So when you're building the Silk Road, when you're building that whole thing out, the belts and suspenders of it, okay, The Chinese are not thinking in two year election cycles, four year election cycles. They're thinking in 100 year periods of time. That's why people say, oh, the Chinese are going to go after Taiwan. Why would they? They have to do it right now. The Chinese are expecting in the next 20 to 50 years that Taiwan falls in their lap the way Hong Kong did. They don't have to fight over Taiwan. By the way, just for news flash for Everybody, that's an 80 mile straight, okay? It's a very difficult straight. And there's a lot of mountainous terrain on that island of Formosa. It's not an easy thing to do. Okay? And you know, it was a 20 mile straight in D Day. Think about all the logistical problems we had there. That's four times. And you got to get ground troops in there, okay? And so they're not going to do that. What they're going to do is do what you just said. They're going to outproduce. They're going to be way more productive than us, and they're going to get the power through the soft power. This is something I disagreed with with Elon about that, okay? The Doge thing, going after usaid. I understand there's some graft. I understand there's some fraud in there. I'm not. I know that people are not perfect, but we need our soft power to preserve our currency advantage. We need our soft power to preserve our brand. The Chinese have a shitty brand, okay? You know, I was at the Chalk History Festival last week. Some old lady. My demo, by the way, guys, is like 70 to 90, okay? That's my demo. If the women are 70 to 90, they love me. My wife is like, that's fucking great. You know, no one below 70 likes you, so I'm no problem, right? So the lady's raising her hand and she says, the question about China and how should we think about China? They're pumping money into Africa, they're pumping money into Eurasia. How should we think about it? And the answer is, they're getting a demultiplication from their money because their culture sucks. They're not a free country. So when they put a dollar in on a multiplication level, it's like 0.3. When the Americans put in a dollar, because we got Madonna and Bruce Springsteen and Peter Diamandis, that sexy Greek. When we get those guys in the mix, okay, we get an exponent, okay? Because people love America. Now Trump's hurting our brand because he's trying to be too aggressive with adversaries and with allies. But you got to go back to usaid, use the soft power flex on people. And by the way, just think about this. We have the international stars. Europe creates international stars. China creates no international stars because anytime they create a star, they arrest them, they put them in a jail, and they say, you got to submit to the Communist Party, okay? So we have a material advantage over them, and we have to be smart about the exercise of that advantage around the world.
Salim, what do you got to counterpoint here?
In a world of abundance, a China, US Tension makes very little sense, right? If it was a zero sum game, yes. But in an abundance world, once you have abundant energy, so how does that play into your thinking because you're one of the few that can see that tension clearly and also see where the technology is going.
No counterpoint needed. I'm in agreement on that. If you've heard my other interviews, I'm a China rationalist. I have taken Kissinger's view of China. I would recommend that book on China from Henry Kissinger. I'm a believer that we have two different systems, but we have to be compatible. And if anything, I want to get deeper into the economic dependency, the interdependency with China, because what we find through 5,000 years of recorded history, the more economically interdependent we are, the harder it is. See, when Trump is tariffing them or they're going to tariff us, that's going to make us go apart. No bueno. You're way better getting deeper with China, which will stall China from making decisions to hurt you and vice versa. And I'm not saying they're not adversaries, I'm not saying they're not stealing our intellectual property. I'm not saying I'm a China realist. But I think it is very, very important that we figure out a way to get closer to China and not have these separate silos, these separate stove tops would be very dangerous and very bad long term for the world.
Have you heard my one line summary of China?
Go ahead.
I think China, the native capitalism of the Chinese people is so ridiculously high that they need socialism to keep a lid on it, otherwise they'd sell their grandmother for a profit.
It's probably true. You know, you probably, you know China better than me. Slim. I, I would say this to you, that the forces in China are different on the ground than people expect. You know, there are seven balkanized provinces that are being glued together by 90 to 100 million people in the Chinese Communist Party. There's a lot going on in there. The Uyghurs, the situation with Tibet, you know, Everybody's got a VPN. 10% of the Bitcoin mining still getting done in China, 15% of the transactions still getting done in China. There's a lot going on in China. And you know, China, the Chinese may take Taiwan or the Chinese may morph into something totally different than is existing in China right now. We don't know. But if you were sitting with a Sovietologist in 1987, they would have said to you, well, you know, the Berlin Wall is going to be there for 2,000 years and it's going to be like the wall in Jerusalem. And then the other thing's going to happen? Is the Soviets going to be there forever and then two years later, bada bing, bada boom, the thing's down and the flag's coming down and the Russian flag's going up. Christmas Day of 1991, okay? And so, so, so you don't know what's gonna happen, but what you need to do is focus on us. Fix the inside of us. This way the people on the outside will love us more. Fix the inside of us and let's give the Chinese a break because they got their own problems, okay? We don't need to be overly fighting with them while we're trying to fix the inside of us.
So, recent news, Trump says he's gotten a group of wealthy individuals together to buy TikTok.
Yeah, not going to happen.
Not going to happen. It's going to stay, it's going to stay in Chinese hands and it's going to stay as something that people play with every day. It's just going to stay status quo.
I think so, yes. Unless Trump wants to pull the plug on. First of all, they're never. That is weapons grade. That is weapons grade surveillance software. That is about as good a spyware as you can get.
And it's influence.
Where I was just going to say that it's influenceware. And so it is moving a nation. They've got people thinking that the moon landing is fake. They got people thinking Osama bin Laden did some good things. I mean, they got 31% of the boys in this country below the age of 30 that think that we faked the moon landing. Okay? So TikTok is a powerful source in China, but Trump's bought and paid for by the guys that own TikTok with the Chinese. And so he's not going to bust them, okay? And that's a big problem in the country, okay? Because Trump cares about two fucking things. He cares about money and he cares about attention. He wants to be on the top fold of your newspaper and he wants the four of us talking about him. And so he will do. He's like a. He's a reality television producer. He'll come up with the project and the script every day to get you hyper analyzing him and get your cortisol levels up, okay? But if he was a great leader, he would say, you know, this is really bad for us. So either we have to take it over or shut it down.
You know, I don't watch, I don't watch the news. They couldn't pay me enough to watch what these producers are Feeding us all this dystopian news. I do watch our podcast, and for those of you who are on our podcast today, this is the real news. You know, the technology that's gonna transform.
Every aspect of our lives. It's not edited. You're not getting a homogenized version. You're getting people on the ground telling you what they really think, talking about.
Farts all the time.
Fart proudly. That's what I want. I want it to be the Franklin Party, and I want the symbol to be fart proudly. Fart for freedom and fart for liberty. You're upset with the status quo. Fart proudly.
Okay. All right, Dave, what's your thoughts on all this?
Oh, God, so many thoughts. So, on China. Well, first on the centrist party idea. One of the things Donald Trump figured out is that voter turnout turns out to be more important than voter appeal. And the way you get voter turnout is to whip people up, get them super, super angry or super excited or super motivated to show up. So if you grab the middle 80% of America, which would be the perfect outcome, and I'm not denying that that would be phenomenal. But what tends to happen is if it rains a little or it's cold that day, they don't show up to vote. Where that really hits you is in the primary. I mean, everybody was shocked when Donald Trump got elected the first time that he, that he got through the primaries. But when you get a big support base, it can only be a couple percent, but they show up. That's what dominates the primary. So the primary system has fundamentally got some really weird behavior early on. But then you get this centrist party that has sort of lukewarm passion. And so that's why you see it merge with one party or the other at the finish line all the time, is because it can't stand alone in the middle. It gets co opted by, by someone who's really passionate about immigration or really passionate about human rights, really passionate about abortion, whatever it is. They show up to vote and the centrists kind of sit at home watching tv.
I agree with you, but let me give you a counter narrative. I'd like Dave to react to it. So everything you just said is true, but now you've got Elon Musk on the team and he's a great engineer, and you just told us what the problem is. And so now how do we engineer out of that problem? Can we create entertainment content? Can we create policy content? Can we create educational content where we ignite a fire under the Most powerful voting bloc in the country. Now let me tell you about that voting block. There's 140 million people in this country. They vote exactly the same way every election. Most powerful voting block. You know who that is, Dave? The non voter.
Right.
They've given up on the system. But you're telling me that we don't have smart programming, we don't have smart entertainment people, we don't have ideas through TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat where we can draw people in. You're saying that they're just too lukewarm, they don't want to fix the country. You don't think bankruptcy could be a sell to a very large group of people like immigration and abortion? You don't think debt super cycle. You don't think a hey, I can get you more per capita income if we're moving in the AI based world, you may have a four hour work week and you may be richer than you were with a five hour work week. If you're telling me none of those ideas will sell, Dave, then I'm with you. We are fucked. Let's take the canoe and ride it over the Niagara Falls.
Well, we don't have to be fucked. I don't think that national bankruptcy motivates people to vote, which is pathetic because it's the biggest crisis. I mean, yeah, yeah, no, but it's obvious that we'll, we'll run the debt up to any level. The way to win elections is to run up the debt even more, buy a bunch of votes and then get reelected. It's a perpetual, perpetual cycle. It's going to lead to disaster and people just don't react to it. But I think there is a fix which is make it easier to vote. And if Elon Musk was really playing the cards right, he would have stayed ducky in the, in the hot tub and said hey, why don't we use gov AI to make it much easier for people to vote, especially in primaries early on and get that centrist, rational, middle of the road, broad thinking American to actually show up and vote in a primary. And then you get better candidates. Everybody agrees, you survey everybody, 90 plus percent agree that we're not getting great candidates. Why is that? And you dig in the cause one of them, the job is too loaded with baggage risk, like actual getting shot risk. But also social media risk like try to de risk the job. So great people want the job but then the bigger thing make it much easier.
You know my policy here, Dave. Anyone who wants to be run for president should automatically be disallowed. It should be like a drafted position.
Alan Greenspan said that, you know, but again, the incentives are wrong. Dave is right about everything he's saying. But then again, the question is, can you get like they'll vote down the voting. Let's just be very clear about that. They don't want the people to vote. They've got themselves in these, well, gerrymandering, like you said, gerrymandering. Politicians are picking the voters in this country. The voters don't pick the politicians. So they've got a system in place. Let me say an Andrew Yang thing here because you guys brought him up. Andrew said to me once, and I checked the statistics, they're true. The politicians in Washington have a 14% approval rating, the Congress has a 14% approval rating, yet the incumbent, when he runs for reelection, he has a 95% reelection rate. It's like being a chef at a really bad fucking restaurant and you're getting a one star Yelp rating. But you never get fired. And this is because of the voting, David. So you're telling me with the 50 billion we couldn't get Musk's help and we couldn't say to people, listen, we gotta get more people voting. If more people vote, we'll liquidate the extremists in the society, will make it better for all of us. You don't think, Listen, no, I think.
I think that can work.
Australia has mandatory voting, you know, and they. And you get fined if you don't vote.
Now that's interesting.
You need that, you need mandatory voting like Australia. But again, that requires a big change. I've got a bigger structural question to ask you, Anthony, which is that the. In 2015, Yale did a survey and they found that the US is not a functioning democracy in any way, shape or form, meaning that no amount of voter willpower can result in legislation. Gun control is an example where 84% of the people want gun control, yet we can never get the legislation passed for all of the factors that you have. So there's headwinds here that go much, much deeper than even the political party system. And how do you defeat and counteract that is the question I've got because I think you need a whole new system.
Revolution, baby.
Well, listen, I want to go back to Dave. I think Dave's onto something. He's saying something that we all, I believe is very true. You can't get the attention, you can't get the passion going on the stuff that we would need them to get going on. Right, but the question is, could you publicize and explain to people the necessary steps of reform? See, I don't want a revolution. I would like reform. Okay, See what's happening right now is fat cats have taken control. They lit up the government through Citizens United. They got this great corporate welfare system going and they're all shooting for $50 million weddings and a trillion dollar net worth. Okay, that's great. But every time you do that in a system, you break the system and you get the revolution and you get a guy like the kid here in New York that wants a socialism take over production and all this stuff that's happened throughout American history. Who stopped it? Teddy Roosevelt stopped it. The name Progressive came from Roosevelt. He was a Republican. He went to the robber barons and fat cats and said, knock it off. You're taking too much economic rent from the society. You're worth a lot of money. You're not going to get an extra yacht. Calm down. We got to help the lower middle income people feel like the system is fairer for them and that they have an aspirational arc of a potential career. Knock it off. He busted Rockefeller, he busted the banking trust, he busted some of the other trust and he did it. Reagan did it. Reagan went to ATT with Judge Harold Green and said, knock it off. Okay? He's sitting on all this technology that we need. Knock it off. And in 1984, we busted AT&T. Okay? The irony is these seven big tech companies, they don't exist if we don't bust AT AND T. So guys, knock it off.
So let me go a slightly different direction.
Funding. What's that?
We're all techno optimists on this, on this podcast right now. You know, technology. I do believe that technology is what's going to drive gdp. It's going to drive. It's going to ultimately be the mechanism by which we solve our debt crisis. But we have a lot of people who watch this podcast that are asking about the implications of AI for the lower and middle class, right? How can you make AI for everyone? How you can get this technology for everyone? What are your thoughts there? Because I think a lot of us are just like super excited about what's coming on the AI front, but it's skating over the majority of the public thoughts.
So I am a big believer in equal opportunity and I am a big believer that we need a package of services in this country that provide people with a platform of equal opportunity. What's in that is health care, education and AI. Just like we did with Social Security and we did with other things we have to deliver to the kid when he's born. The promise that he's going to get fairly educated. And you know this because you've worked with Kahan Academy and others. We can use AI, we can use visuals, we can take the smartest teachers in the world and bring them into every fifth grade classroom in the country and we can have an hour a day with the smartest teacher in the world for a fifth grader. The Steven Spielberg, the George Lucas of teaching.
Yeah.
Peter Diamandis. And we can talk to the kid and we can almost, almost have a hologram at this point where the person's actually there with them and it's free.
And it's fully democratized.
Okay. So that now the teachers are going to be upset with that and they're going to stop that. Okay? So that's why you need the third party, because Democrats say I can't do that, because I'm tired of the teachers union, you know, and the Democrats, I mean, they're funny people, you know. We're gonna block Elon, last time I checked. Does Elon make electric vehicles? I think he does. I mean, I don't know, but let me give me a news flash. If he doesn't, they kick him out of the electric Vehicle Summit. Well, the UAW got on the phone with the Biden administration. We know it wasn't Biden cuz he's brain dead. So they got on with somebody and they said, oh, hey, he can't come to the electric Vehicle summit. So you kick him out of the electric Vehicle Summit.
One of the stupidest Johnson they could have ever made.
I mean, come on, what are you guys, you bunch of imbeciles. You want the people in the tent so when they piss, they piss outside the tent. That's what Johnson would say. You don't want the people outside the tent like Bobby Kennedy and Elon pissing back into the tent. What are you guys doing? What are you doing? Okay, so very simply, you need a bill. You want to talk about big beautiful spending, let's spend where there's a multiplier effect. We know bridges, roads, tunnels and airports, they create a multiplier effect. We know in the city of Boston, where Dave is sitting at MIT, we know that the Big Dig had a 5x overrun in cost.
Insane.
But it totally gentrified and created a new ecosystem in Boston. It created better exurbs, better suburbs, more better living standards, higher disposable income and easier access to the Airports. And even though it was five times the cost, it generated six to eight times whatever the cost was in terms of positive externalities for the area. So we need a form factor like that. We need critical capital, human capital, infrastructure. You want to rebuild the airport? I'm for that. But I also want to rebuild the human capital infrastructure of the K through 12 person. And part of that is this package of AI where they get issued an AI tutor, they get issued somebody to help them get through their lives where they lose their cognitive edge.
What are your thoughts here? Well, the timeline is really interesting if you, if you think about the next election cycle is right when we're going to be running out of electrical power. Like you mentioned, the Big Dig. And in hindsight, it did pay off. But if we had taken all that money, $14 billion, and rerouted it to power generation, of course we didn't know we would need it at the time, but then we'd be in a much, much better spot. As Peter was saying, we're going to be miles behind in power generation versus China. But right when the next election cycle is coming on, there's going to be massive job displacement and a massive threat of an arms race with China in AI and the creation of all the data centers that we need to keep up is going to be a huge job opportunity. And so we'll actually be rational to invest like crazy in that one specific area. What's beautiful about data center creation too is it's, you know, it's everything from physical infrastructure, real estate, you know, foundations, plumbing, all that, plus operating system design, plus racks, plus, yeah, it hits every legal. Everybody can participate in it. So if you think about, you know, the, the run up to World War II and the beginning of World War II, it should be very similar to that, if anything, more acute but all encompassing. Everyone can contribute. So if someone can rally everyone around that cause because the job displacement is going to come long before the next election at the rate things are changing right now. So that would be the galvanizing moment. And I think the China thing is not going to go away. You guys agree that we shouldn't be picking a fight with China. But we started it. We started it under the Biden administration, perpetuated it. It's both parties with the Chips and Jobs act before.
So yeah, before Anthony jumps in, I would like to hear Saleem respond to that, but finish up, Dave, please.
Well, so. So there was absolutely no hostility at all prior to the US unilaterally saying, hey, you can't have our best chips. And that that alone isn't the big deal. It's the reason you can't have our best chips is because there's no way that we're going to tolerate you catching up to us in AI. So if that doesn't do the job, then we're going to do the next thing, then we're going to do the next thing, then the next thing. So Chinese reaction to that is like, okay, you have told us what your position is. There's no going back from that. So any amount of reconciliation at this point isn't going to change the fact that next election cycle we'll be in a full bore AI arms race with China. Whether it was rational or not, it's going to exist on that day. And that's going to be a big motivating, galvanizing force. I got some other outcomes and side effects that will come from that that we can talk about. But Peter, I know you want to.
Yeah, I know. 2028, the timing is like spot on. Salim, what are your thoughts on that?
Well, it's clear we need radical energy expansion, which is the root cause of a lot of this. And this is the big structural tension. I think we don't see a clear path to getting there. It takes too long to build fossil fuel. We have to get around this culture world problem with solar very quickly.
Every day I get the strangest compliment. Someone will stop me and say, peter, you have such nice skin. Honestly, I never thought I'd hear that from anyone. And honestly, I can't take the full credit. All I do is use something called One Skin OS one twice a day. Every day. The company is built by four brilliant PhD women who've identified a peptide that effectively reverses the age of your skin. I love it. And again, I use this twice a day. Every day. You can go to Oneskin Co and write Peter at checkout for a discount on the same product I use. That's Oneskin Co. And use the code Peter at checkout. All right, back to the episode, Anthony. Was the move where the administration took the entire sort of royal family of AI on a shopping spree to Saudi and the Emirates, a brilliant move. Do you congratulate the Trump administration on that?
Well, I like the concept. I mean, I like the tactic of it. You have to tell me what the outcome is. I don't know what the outcome of it was. I know the UAE is pushing a lot of money into AI and yes, I mean, generally, I would like our allies to be partners with us on these projects. And I would like their capital because that's what makes a better look. You know what Churchill said, right? The worst, let me phrase it exactly. It's terrible to work with your allies in a war, except when you don't work with your allies in a war. You know what I mean? And you got to get the allies involved even though they're pains in the asses. Right? He said it better than me. I'm paraphrasing, but you get my point. So I think it's smart. Again, that's an example to me of what we said earlier in this podcast about that. The administration has some very good ideas on this stuff. There's a lot of people out there, a lot of Lilliputians out there, they're going to want to block them and slow this thing down that are very short sighted. If I said to you, here is an AI, it pops up like a hologram. It's one part Diamandis, it's one part David, one part Salim. And it can teach the kid about exponential organizations and longevity and AI. And it, and it actually interfaces with the kid where the kid can talk to it. And it's helping the kid with its grammar and its spelling and it's forcing the kid to think. So remember, you don't want the AI to make the kid cognitively atrophied. You want to have the AI give the kid a lot of intellectual crossword puzzles. So the kid is ginned up and you're telling me the teacher's union is like, you know, that is the best thing we can do for our children.
Hmm.
I'm going to take a step back and let that happen. Is that our country? Is that our society?
Well, by the way, that is what's happening in the Emirates. Emirates is going, you know, with AI first across the board, making ChatGPT available for free to all of its citizens. I think the outcome, by the way, of those delegations to the Middle east were to block China from coming into the Middle east and making investments there. Because I guarantee you, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates want to be just behind the US in AI as infrastructure. And they're buying capacity, they're buying chips, they're buying investments and partnerships with the magnificent seven, eight or nine, whatever they're going to be. So that's pretty extraordinary.
Yeah, I think the Churchill analogy that Anthony just made is perfect too, because the other thing the Emirates can do and Saudi can do is they can act fast and unilaterally. And a lot of these areas we can't move quickly and they can. And they have a trillion dollars of capital. They can throw at anything we might need. So I don't think they want to see China run away with AI either. So we have that common bond.
Let me tell you about something that I think we should all be humbled by. And this is mistakes that we make when we're thinking about our lives and we think linearly and the world's moving the way Saleem thinks exponentially. And we make these mistakes. And I want to take you back to 1999 and we were at the World Trade Organization protests and the blue collar people are up there in Seattle and they're saying, you're going to kill us. You're going to knock out all of our jobs. And all the smug Wall street types said, oh, that's not true. And lower cost of capital. I got that wrong. We hurt every one of those people. And what the thinking was in 1999 let shine into the WTO. They're a friendly neighbor now they want our help. They're moving people from the farmland into the urban centers and they're creating this massive amount of wealth and a burgeoning middle class, which means they're eventually going to embrace. Are you ready? The end of history and democratic capitalism. That's what we thought, guys. And so now it's 25 years later and they did not do any of that. Everybody got that and do none of that ugats, okay? And the Armandis lived close enough to me in Queens, Nassau county to know that we got ugats, okay? And so that's what happened. And so now we're sitting here right now thinking about the next 25 years and we're going to get a lot wrong, guys. We have to be humbled by life. We have to be humbled by the fallibility of our decision making and the fallibility of our expectations. Because where you want to talk about software, Salim brought up a good idea. He said, constitution software. You want something that hasn't gotten a software upgrade. You, me, no software upgrade. 100,000 years. The phone went from iPhone 1 to 16 on its way to 17. But not you. You're walking around with a cave stick in your hand and you.
And our mindset is the software upgrade that we need. I want to turn the conversation.
That's my point. We have to talk to people like this to say we're going to make some mistakes. We got China wrong in 2000 and 1999. We're going to get things wrong. We're going to be sitting here. I mean, I won't be here unless he gives me the right stem cells. He saves all the stem cells for himself, fellas. That's why he looks so good. The Amanda's okay. You know, eventually, I don't want to lose Mooch. He's going to say, I'm 150. I don't want to lose Mooch. Let's send Mooch some exosomes so he stays alive.
By the way, kudos to the state of. Kudos to the state of Florida that just passed. Let me give you on this one. Kudos to the state of Florida that just passed legislation allowing for stem cell treatments.
Finally fly down there and get some. But Diamantis hoards these things. You know what he's like, okay, but I'm just saying 50 years from now, when he see her and I'm long gone, we're going to look back and say, well, we made some mistakes.
Come down to fountain life, buddy. I will guarantee we've got. I don't know if I can say this. We have the president and first lady of a country coming to visit us tomorrow.
That's really vague.
I love it, I love it. They're amazing.
I'm a very vain gu. You can shrink my middle aged man boobs. I'll go anywhere that you want to send me.
Okay, all right.
It's not even about health at this point. It's just about vanity.
We're going to one more subject here that I, I need to get your input on. And that is the whole crypto bitcoin world. Let's talk about that. How do you see the importance of, of bitcoin in America? In our strategic reserves? It looks like I talk about the digitization, dematerialization, demonetization, democratization of industries. Because of this, it looks like the entire banking and finance industry is about to get transformed. Do they know what has hit them? You're in this game and you're playing at it across the board. Talk to me.
Yeah, well, they know what's hit them. They're absolutely scared shit about it. And they've gone to the American Banking association, very strong lobbyists, and they're trying to liquidate progress so that they can catch up. Okay. That's what's going on. So like, holy shit. Circle's gonna control. Could you imagine if I can put my bitcoin at JP Morgan and get yield off it and there's a structure around it that protects it. Forget it, it's over. Right. And so they know that that's coming. They know Brian's ahead of them. They're going to try to buy Brian, probably buy circle alongside of Brian. You know, they. They have to move. But here's the thing I would say to them, like, when they invite me in to talk, I say, guys, the phone company, when I was in Europe and I had to make a call, say I was In Italy in 1985, I had to go to the post office. I had to get a card. It gave me 15 minutes for, I don't know, it was like $3aminute, $45, talk to my mom. Now I can go to any cafe in Rome, plug into the WI fi, talk to my mom for no dollars. Okay? Probably even do a George Jackson FaceTime call, right? And so. But the phone companies didn't go to zero. They're still here. And what they do is they morph. And so what the banks have to do is provide different services. The banks see American Express, okay? Scuteri's a very smart guy. He's teamed up with Brian. You get 4% back in Bitcoin.
I love that. By the way, I just ordered mine.
You use the code. So they even got to lose a little bit of money on it. But they want your business.
Yeah.
Okay. And they have figured out we got to be in the customer capture and we've got to offer service. You know, you're getting your wifi from the phone company or the cable company, some fiber optic company. They didn't go to zero. Well, you got to tell the banks, calm down. There's other services that you can put on the, on the chain and you can do everything that you want, but you gotta move. We gotta get out of. You can be a carriage maker and make Body by Fisher. You can make the inside of the carriage of the horseless carriage. Yeah, okay, you know, and you gotta, you gotta think like that and you gotta. And you gotta adapt. We hate adaptation, guys. Okay? I was in the typewriter business. I was in a fund of funds business. I had to make a decision. Am I going to stay in the fund of funds business? The reason why Skybridge got to the 20th birthday is we did 20 iterations. At Skybridge, I got out of the typewriter business and moved into the digital asset space to save my business and to save my customers. Well, what do you guys want to do?
You're brilliant.
You want to stick in mud, stick in the mud. We don't want to stick in the mud.
We did a study of Fortune 100 in 2015. Scored them against The EXO model, which essentially measures adaptability and agility. And seven years later, the top 10 that followed, the attributes and the model of adaptability and agility, the most delivered. 40 times the shareholder returns.
No question.
Of the bottom 10, it didn't. It's just like crazy numbers.
Well, I, I want to show you could send it to me because I want to send it to my staff. But this is why I like Zuckerberg, because Zuckerberg's like, we're going to call it Meta. He thinks we're going into the Metaverse, but he gets it wrong. But he changes the name of the company to Meta. But guess what he gets right? We're going A.I. look at him. He's not sitting there.
$70 billion purchasing power. He's got a $70 billion wallet in his pocket and he's buying as much as he can.
He's not stuck in the mud, that guy.
Yeah.
Are you and Zuck buddies? Are you connected to Zuckerberg?
Yeah. No. I don't know. No, I'm just impressed with him. Once I was in Sun Valley with him at the Allen & Co. Conference and I remember feeling so insecure. He was like 24 at the time, worth like 10 billion. And I was like 44, worth no billion. And now he's only worth like 200 billion. You know what I mean?
God bless him. We all need to get to know him.
But I love that though. Here's the thing. Equal opportunity. Sergey Brin can come in from Eastern Europe, Let him make 200 billion. Equal opportunity. Not equal outcomes. Not equal outcomes. We got to help. We're rich enough country to help. These people feel like there's some fairness in the society. They want to get socialism. Have the people think the society's unfair. They're going to come at you with a howitzer.
Two questions. What percentage of your assets, if you're willing to say are in bitcoin, and what's your end of the year prediction?
Well, I mean, listen, I just got done with AJ telling them this. I have 70% of my money in bitcoin. Now that's either I own Bitcoin on my balance sheet, I own bitcoin on the corporate balance sheet, I own Bitcoin in the funds. So if you look at all the pass throughs and you look at my net worth, 70% of is in bitcoin. Now, it wasn't that, but it did this. You know, it's a. Bitcoin is a pizza eater. Let me explain that. It starts out as a small Slice of the pizza. And look at me. It's like a fucking pac, man. It goes like this. That's what's happening to me, okay? So it's not because I'm even buying more of it, right? So, but it's 70%. And I think if you look at the power law, and by the way, I want you to do this, go to ChatGPT or Grok and say, I need a sensitivity analysis. If a trillion dollars comes into Bitcoin, and here is the volume and supply over the last five years, and there's some elasticity, it'll trigger some whales to sell, figure out how many whales are going to get triggered, and figure out what a trillion dollars of buying power does to the asset. Okay? And I think the asset goes, and I'm not exaggerating when I say this, it goes to 500,000. That's a 5x number, which would be consistent with happen to Amazon, Nvidia, happened to Tesla. When you have purchasing power moving over time. So 500 in five years, 200 at the end of this year, and a million dollars at the end of 10 years.
Yeah.
By the way, but you're going to have some, you're going to have some hyperinflation if we don't fix this goddamn thing. And so it could go higher than what I'm saying. I'm talking about 2% inflation with a smart Federal Reserve chairman trying to manage this debacle we're in. If Trump decapitates the current Fed chair and he puts in Mickey Mouse or Johnny Bozo, okay, he's gonna want to do whatever Trump wants. Let me not say Mickey Mouse, because I like Mickey. I didn't mean to disparage Mickey. You know, I knew, I knew, I knew Musk thought Trump was a dummy. The day that he said that Peter Navarro was as dumb as a bag of rocks. And then he put out the next tweet, he said, I want to apologize to the bag of rocks. I didn't mean to insult the bag of rocks because look at me, Navarro and Trump are like this. So that was a way through derivatives, that was a way through differential calculus to tell people before he exploded on Trump that Trump was a jackass. And I love that about Elon because he's a 19 level, 19 dimensional thinker, right? But on this topic, I think it's very, very simple, okay? You don't want Johnny Bozo running the Fed, but if you got Johnny Bozo running the Fed, it's going to go to $15 million a coin.
Yeah.
And that's not gonna be good for the society, though. A million dollars is. It's the next gold and it's a digital asset. And we got things under control. We didn't get into it because I know we're running out of time. But you could fix the deficit, by the way. It's a totally fixable thing, but it would require about two decades of fiscal discipline. And again, I'm talking about fiscal discipline is just slowing down a little bit of the governmental growth and getting the economic growth through. All the innovation you talk about on your podcast to exceed the governmental growth.
Yeah, I think the other way.
And you could do it in 25 years. You'll have the whole thing arrested. People will be looking around saying, wow, how do we do that? That was great. But you got to have smart people in the room that are patient.
Hey, folks, Liam here. Hope you're enjoying these podcasts and this one in particular was amazing. If you want to hear more from me or get involved in our Exo ecosystem, on the 23rd of July, we're doing a once a month workshop. Tickets are $100. We limit it to a few people to make sure it's intimate and proper. And we go through the EXO model. What we do there is we basically show you how to take your organization and turn it into one of these hyper growth AI type companies. And we've done this now for 10 years with thousands of companies. Many of these use the model that we have called the exponential organizations model. Peter and I co authored the second edition a couple of years ago. So it's 100 bucks. July 23rd.
Come along.
It's the best hundred dollars you'll spend. Link is below. See you there.
There's another way to fix the entire financial debacle United States, which is increases people's health span. Enable people to be healthier an extra decade where they're productive.
Stop serving them to processed food because that would serve you.
Oh my God.
I would save a trillion dollars off of Medicare.
For sure. For sure. Salim and Dave, any last, you know, digs at Mitch here? I mean, he's like, I just want.
Dave Dave to recognize this. I asked for help with my man boobs. He totally disregarded it.
In the back of my mind, helping his friends.
Okay, I need man boob reduction and he could help me with something. You know, he's got some cocktail there that helps him with man boob production. He's not sharing. Yeah, go ahead.
I have a question. Did you see this thing with the bonds that have 10 basis of Bitcoin in it. And it looked to me like a pretty brilliant idea. I wanted your reaction on that.
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very, it's a very smart, very clever idea. And that's the stuff that the people in the banking association, people in the investment banks are very worried about because that's the stuff that's going to get adopted. And remember. And now. Kidding. Now in 10 years, the 38 year old that likes bitcoin is going to be more advanced in his career. He's going to be 48. And that is going to be massive proliferation. And that provides more evidence what I'm saying, because Bitcoin is immutable. It's a finite supply of it. People trust it and they're going to use it.
Yeah, amazing.
Dave, here's my parting shot. So, you know, we have Moore's Law, we have Musk's Law. Now, you know, Musk's Law, you know, the most dramatic outcome is the one that's going to happen. Yeah, I like that. I like that. So we need Mooch's Law to match that pattern. I'll give you, give you a chance to think about it. Unless you have it up top of your head.
I mean, I probably have any more time to think about it. Here's what I would say though. Here's what I would say. This is my observation about this country, okay? My 61 year observation about this country is that the people in this country want to get it right. And what did Lincoln say? Lincoln said the people in this country are way smarter than the average politician thinks. And the exact quote said, you know, Lincoln said that the people in this country have a good nose. They can smell a rotting cadaver in their basement. And it's at a time in American history where we have to change the plot lines of these political parties. And let me just remind people, Lincoln was in a third party. He was in a third party that was established in 1856 and the name of the party was the Republican Party.
You know, really, really appreciate what you've done in terms of being a totally straight shooting, candid, say it like it is person, which is really rare, but also not tied to either party. Like, you know, hanging out on Gavin Newsom's podcast, getting to know Elon.
We got no choice, Dave. We didn't know. Let me tell you something. I'm named after somebody that assaulted Normandy beach, okay? My uncle assaulted Normandy beach at the age of 19 and took the cliff and burned out some of those cement pill boxes. So, you know, people say to me, aren't you afraid they're going to come after you? I don't give a shit, okay? If I got an uncle that I'm named after that was willing to do that, I can use my mouth and my brain to explain to people what's going on, even if it puts me at risk, okay? But I just want to finish this one point because it's very important about Lincoln. The Whigs, he went after them. He said, the abolitionist Whigs, join my new party. And then he went after the Democrats. He said, the abolitionist Democrats, join my new party. And he became the first Republican President of the United States. And he ended the slavery. Took us a civil war to do it, but he ended the slavery. And by the way, you know, Buchanan was a jackass. We probably didn't even have the war, okay? And he was sandwiched between two big jackasses, Buchanan and Johnson. But Lincoln, okay, changed it. He switched the narrative and he tried to clean out. He was the stain remover for the stain that was in the Constitution. So don't tell me our history that we can't do this. This is totally doable.
Mooch, you are brilliant. Everybody, this is Anthony Scaramucci, Extraordinary individual. Anthony, where do we find you on social? Talk to us about your podcast. Give us.
I'm at Scaramucci. My younger son took at Mooch, so I'm at Scaramucci on Instagram and Twitter and I have a podcast called the Rest is Politics. Us. It's me and Katty K. We talk about political situation, economics. And I have a pet project that I love, which is a podcast called Open Book where I interview people like Peter Diamandis and Hal Brands and different authors. Because I'm a big bibliophile and I like reading and I like talking to authors.
I just. I'm extraordinarily impressed by your brilliance every time I chat with you.
Thank you. I don't want to say I'm that bright. I just love my country like you and I love the future. Okay? You can smell the future. The future is so bright. You can inhale the future. You can smell the future. All we got to do is get to the future and we got to get people to calm down, stop hating on each other with the rancor of social media. Let's get to the future together.
Dave Shalim, brilliant as always. Thank you. If you could have had a 10 year head start on the dot com boom back in the 2000s, would you have taken it Every week I track the major tech meta trends. These are massive game changing shifts that will play out over the decade ahead. From humanoid robotics to AGI, quantum computing, energy breakthroughs and longevity. I cut through the noise and deliver only what matters to our lives and our careers. I send out a Metatrend newsletter twice a week as a quick two minute read over email. It's entirely free. These insights are Read by founders, CEOs and investors behind some of the world's most disruptive companies.
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