Elon 离场、美国如何赢下 AI 时代与 Bitcoin 接管美国——与 Anthony Scaramucci 对谈｜EP#180

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 can pick your eyeball out with an ice pick, drop it in a dirty martini glass, and leave you bleeding at the table. They’re still talking to you like nothing happened. That’s Washington.

The China–US tension makes very little sense. I’m a believer that we have 2 different systems, but we have to be compatible. 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 could put my Bitcoin at JPMorgan 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 Blundin; and our special guest for today, the Mooch, Anthony Scaramucci.

Last time we were together, Scaramucci made some extraordinary predictions. If you know Anthony, he’s amazing. He is a financier extraordinaire through SkyBridge Capital. He’s the father of one of my best Strikeforce members ever, AJ Scaramucci. He’s the creator and host of SALT, and the host of The Rest Is Politics: US podcast. He was voted the podcaster with the best hair and the spiciest attitude. Anthony, welcome, buddy.

There’s a lot of PRP. Stop combing your hair, for God’s sake. Let’s just talk about the hair for a second because, you know, I take it all from your longevity. There’s a lot of PRP that’s gone on up here. I just want to let you know. There’s also a lot of bald ancestry in that family, so this whole thing is costing a lot of money to keep together. You’ve got to keep it up.

For viewers and listeners, this is Latin American dictator brown. I was using Cuban leader black, but it looked like shit on the podcast. I’ve got the right color now that I’ve got the right colorist.

You’re making Salim very jealous.

I do certain heads perfectly, like Salim’s, and the rest of us have to get hair. You know why? Unlike you, Peter Diamandis has hair, Dave, to hide his horns, because we both have a little bit of that mischievous streak in our personalities. Peter’s the guy. Actually, he’s got the pope hat under there.

Let’s jump into this episode here. You know, we haven’t even started. My God, for those of you who don’t know, we haven’t started yet.

On a previous podcast starring the Mooch, Anthony, you made a prophetic prediction. I think your prediction was something around the notion that Elon would last about 10 Scaramuccis. We can go back and figure out what it was exactly. For those of you who don’t—

Wait, wait. I’m going to define this stuff.

For those of you who don’t know this, Anthony obviously made a stint in the last Trump White House. He lasted 11 days. Anthony has defined that as a Scaramucci unit of length, like a Planck length in physics. You can use it in a sentence: Kevin McCarthy lasted 24.5 Scaramuccis as speaker. Prime Minister Liz Truss lasted 4.1 Scaramuccis.

Do you know how many Scaramuccis Elon lasted?

It was 11.8, but I’m the official scorer of Scaramucci, and I put out on X: We round up. We’re generous here. Big balls. He lasted 14 Scaramuccis, so you’ve got to give the kid credit.

Elon, by the way, as you know, I’m a huge fan of the guy. I’m an investor in xAI. I’m an investor in SpaceX, and I only wish I had more money in those 2 things. My heart goes out to him because Trump is seductive, and he got seduced by Trump. I understand why, but then the disillusionment process happens when you realize what Trump really is.

There you go. Twelve Scaramuccis later, Trump’s on the Epstein files, and away we go.

Before we move off the unit, because that’s going to last hundreds of years, the Mass Ave Bridge here in Cambridge is measured in Smoots. They repaint it every year with the number of Smoots. Dave, how many Smoots do you remember it being?

Oh, that’s good. I should know. It was like 300 and an ear.

Is Toscanini’s, the ice cream place, still over there?

Toscanini’s? Is that still there? Oh, my God. I used to play pickup basketball at Toscanini’s.

Yeah, it’s still there. I think there are 2 of them now. I think that’s the best ice cream in Cambridge, by the way. That’s 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. That’s why the ice cream is so good.

My favorite flavor from Toscanini’s was Vienna Fingers, just to show my junk-food alcoholism—something that Peter wouldn’t let me eat today.

Sugar is a poison.

I think I look good for 91, though.

Sugar is a poison.

Okay. Okay.

Back to the unit. So, it’s exactly 11 days for 1 Scaramucci? Is that what we’re defining?

Some people say I was there for 10 days. That does hurt my feelings. I really feel like I got fired on the 11th day.

Since you’re a math expert, Dave, if you start on the 21st, work a full day on the 31st, and leave at 2:30, I think you get a full 11 days there. Even when the president shits on me and puts out on Truth Social that I’m a major loser, he says I lasted 11 days.

It’s defined. It’s defined for all time. Let’s move on.

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—a pro-technology thrust of using AI in the government and using knowledge and information to make decisions.

The overall question I want to have a conversation with you about and with my moonshot mates here is: Is the current administration still tech-forward even with Elon leaving? We’re going to talk about things like GovAI and all that’s coming there, but what’s your opinion in general, Anthony?

I always try to be objective. I don’t like Trump, and I can explain why. I think I’ve done that on prior podcasts. Listen, I don’t want to go into politics. I’m not doing that. I’m just trying to point out that I’m going to say a lot of objective things, but I also want to be self-honest that that’s my personal feeling.

I think they will be tech-forward. They do have a lot of very smart people working in the administration who 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. Sriram Krishnan—am I saying it right?

Yeah.

I think he’s a phenomenal guy. He’s doing a great job. There’s a guy who was at Stanford whom AJ, my son, knows, and I believe he’s involved in the personnel area and is helping to staff tech-forward people. I think he’s doing a great job.

To give the president credit, the president knows that this has to be a broad-scale initiative. Let me give him credit even for Trump 1, when he recognized the AI race. If we had a space race in the ’60s, we’re having an AI race, perhaps with China and a few other competitive economic adversaries.

Joe Biden didn’t do this. Joe Biden was not on this. You have to be honest about this stuff. Trump is on it. I like Elon closer to the situation than not in the situation, but I also understand Washington. I have an 11-day PhD in Washington scumbaggery. 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.

I can also tell you about the hot-and-cold streak of Donald Trump, where he gets hot on you and then drops you like a hot potato. That’s what happened.

But you’re asking me the question, and I want to be as objective as possible. Trump is better on AI. He’s better on crypto. He’s generally better on deregulation. He’s not great on batteries—or energy policy in general, if we’re just being open and honest.

Sometimes Trump gets the culture war in his mind. The culture war to him is, “Drill, baby, drill. Don’t tell me I need to be in an electric car.” His base likes the meat-eating aspects of “Drill, baby, drill.”

There’s a group, Bob Vylan—they were in the UK last week. I think they made an antisemitic remark. It’s a rock band, and now they’re banning them from getting their visas to come into the United States. I disagree with it. I think it’s a bad policy to implement, but that’s the culture-war stuff.

When Trump has the culture war going, he can tip himself into making 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 dmandis.com/tatrends. That’s dmandis.com/metatrends to gain access to trends 10 plus years before anyone else.

Let me hit you with a tweet from David Sacks, who I think is brilliant. I feel extraordinarily positive that he’s in that position, and I hope he remains there. Yesterday, David Sacks tweeted, “What is the most realistic way for the U.S. 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 1,000 bills have been introduced into state legislatures to hobble AI. We need preemption in OBBB, in one big beautiful bill.” So, thoughts on this?

We have to apply historical context. There were people running stagecoaches who did not want the railroads. There were people who had a horse and buggy who did not want the horseless carriage. There were people who did not want the commercialization of the airline industry. On and on and on it goes.

The most contemporary example I can give you is that there was not one mayor, not one regulator in any urban area, who wanted Uber. Not one. They fought it tooth and nail. They fought Bitcoin, baby. The American Bankers Association eliminated aspects of the GENIUS Act. The whole nonsense that you can’t get yield on the stablecoin is an example of that.

What ends up happening in a society like the one in Gulliver’s Travels is that the Lilliputians want to tie down society. They want to tie down innovation. It’s incumbent upon smart leaders to step over those people and go directly to the American public.

A smart leader like FDR says, “We need the bomb. Can’t tell anybody about it. We’re going to put $2.5 billion, which is almost $100 billion in today’s dollars, into the Manhattan Project. We’re building the bomb.”

What’s happening now is that we have too much money in the political system. In January 2010, Justice Scalia’s Citizens United decision said you can light up the political system and 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 agendas at the state and local level, and in the U.S. Congress, all skewed now toward big money and special interests. I’ve got a lot of money, and I don’t want 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 AI. Here’s the money.”

Let’s take the money out. Let’s show people the money. These are Italian singles. See those? Does everybody see them? What the hell is that? You never know. You could get invited to Rao’s one night, Dave. They don’t take credit cards at Rao’s. You get them ready.

Okay, how long? This is ruining the system. Everybody see that? It’s depreciating as we watch. Look how it is depreciating. How long before those pieces of green paper are no longer part of our economy? That’s a bet I want to take, Dave and Salim. How long before—

But you’re asking the question: Is the dollar going away, or is the piece of paper going away?

The piece of paper is going away. Whether the dollar goes away is another conversation.

Okay, but let’s go back to David Sacks.

It’s the same way the typewriter went away. There will always be dollars, like there are typewriters, but the paper dollar is going away. It’s going to be on your phone. You’re going to trade with people on the phone.

All right. 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?

We don’t want to see a big, bloated bill. We want to see a big, beautiful bill. We wanted Elon to be in there changing everything. We didn’t want him to get booted out. Backtracking is sort of the political way, right? You promise the world, then you get elected, and then you go back to bureaucracy as usual. Is that what’s happening here, or what?

Well, see, it’s too academic, Dave. Let me tell you what’s happening. They call it a swamp. It is not a swamp. It is a gold-plated hot tub.

What they do is they sit in a hot tub. They pass Cubanos. They pass Krugerrands to each other. Then they have a 0/1, like your computer goes 0/1. They look at you, look at my hand, they look at you, and they say, “Is he bought or can’t be bought?”

“Okay, can’t be bought. Okay, fuck Salim. Let’s get opposition research on him. Let’s say he’s got platform problems related to his ketamine. Let’s say he’s this. Let’s say he’s that. Okay, fuck Elon. He’s not coming into the hot tub and letting us play in the hot tub.”

If you can be bought, here are the Cubanos. Here are the Krugerrands. 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 bloat these bills. There’s a lot of bloating in the bills because it’s going to go to our constituents. We’re going to feed our kids and our grandkids, and we’re all going to get rich.

You don’t want to do that. You’re a scumbag. You’re a bad guy. Let’s go set fire to Salim’s factory or his electric vehicles. That’s what they do. That’s the game. Don’t be academic about it. You have to understand what they’re doing.

The prediction, then, if that’s the game, is: Is David Sacks going to be there at the end of the administration or not? He’s clearly not in that camp, right?

No, but David is different. David’s different because David is a duck. Elon is not a duck in the hot tub; he’s like a rubber duck. Elon is an eagle. David’s a duck.

The duck is in the fucking 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. He’s done a couple of really smart things. Let’s talk about 3 of them quickly.

Number 1, the executive order on the sovereign wealth fund—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 2, I can’t get everything I want. The American Bankers Association has brought the lube. They brought the Vaseline and the microwave oven to the table, and they’re going to jam me. I can’t get everything, so what I’ve got to do is go for 80% of it. That’s David Sacks.

And then David Sacks says, “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?

No, no, no. I’m not saying he’s not interfacing with the president, but there aren’t any pictures. Elon hurt himself when he jumped on Air Force One every weekend with the president. Elon hurt himself when he was standing in the Cabinet Room with the president. Elon hurt himself when he was in the Oval Office with the president.

These people suck, okay? They’re envious, jealous people. You know why Washington sucks? Because the stakes are so small. Let’s take out the money again. You see the money? The Washington 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’d have to fake liking each other. We’re going to do that. But not in Washington. There are blue teams, red teams, purple teams. If you’re too close to the president, I’m envious. The stakes are small. I’m going to try to pick your eyeball out with an ice pick.

Trump said something to me and Peter on a Wednesday when I was in the White House. I know I was only there for 1 Wednesday, so I know it was a fucking Wednesday. What he said to me was, “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.”

Trump said to me that somebody minor in the administration can pick your eyeball out with an ice pick, drop it in a dirty martini glass like it’s an olive, and while you’re bleeding at the table, they’re still talking to you like nothing happened. That’s Washington. Does everybody understand that?

Elon got nailed because he’s Elon Musk. David Sacks is moving like a duck, so he’ll last in the administration as long as he wants to.

I think the duck analogy, though—although I really feel like Mark Zuckerberg and 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, but—

No, but he’s a brilliant duck. I’m just making the point about a duck: he’s moving quietly through the water. He looks like he’s effortless, but he’s working away. He’s really smart. He’s good on policy, he’s good on commerciality, and he understands the significance and importance of AI being the tip of the spear for the future of American productivity.

All right. I want to hear about not pissing people off. So, what are your thoughts on all this, buddy? Mooch, you mentioned earlier that a wealthy guy goes to the state senator and tries to get a bill passed. How do you, at the federal level, if you're David Sacks, counteract that and get AI regulated 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 and Zuckerberg, who understand the issue. And the way you do that is you catch the president and explain to the president that he's going to get a lot of accolades and a lot of attention as a visionary if he helps you push that agenda. Trump is very smart that way. Again, he's got great political instincts.

So, I think David is doing all those things and more. Back to the first question: Is this administration tech-forward, tech-positive? It is because you have people like David in the room who actually understand the stakes are so large, and they're willing to take the nicks and knocks to get the thing done. So, I applaud the guy.

I don't know him. I think you guys probably know him personally. 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. Of course, I retweeted that. I think it's very important that we have—you have, like, E=mc², a standard measurement of time and relativity. I think you have to have a time, buddy, for all time. You have to have a unit of time named after you.

So, we're recording this on June 30, with July 4 coming up. There's supposed to be the release of AI.gov. 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 parts of government—could be using this for every agency, for the FDA, the FAA, the DOT, and the DOE, to move things rapidly through and optimize things: Do you think that's going to happen? To what extent is that thing going to happen?

Yes, to an extent, that thing is going to happen. There's a great book behind you called Bold. You also wrote a book called Abundance. In those books, if it were going to happen the way you wrote about them, it would be revolutionary and transformative. It would unleash a wild amount of productivity and probably solve things like our imbalances, our credit imbalances, debt, et cetera.

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 was the worst form of government until you consider all the other forms of government. So, it's not going to happen like that. Can you get 30% of it this year and 50% or 60% of it in the years to come? Yes, you can.

The big problem right now for that movement is complacency. You say, “What do you mean by complacency?” We're not facing a kinetic or ideological threat. We're not in the Cold War. It's 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, 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 were like, “Well, wait, wait. Who's that? Is that my little sister running against Donald Trump? Who's that person? And wait a minute—Joe Biden dropped out? Okay, what are you talking about?” 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 3 of you, and you get the confirmation biases of the people you're hanging out with. You have to go to the man or woman on the street and talk to them. You have 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 1957, the man on the street understood: “Holy shit. We've got to get our shit together.” Then Eisenhower said, “Holy shit. We've got to get our shit together.” Then they brought in the German scientists, handed the ball to Kennedy, and we got our asses on the moon—the moonshot, right? But that's because the people felt the threat.

It was because the media made them feel threatened, right? It all comes down to the dystopian news that our media spreads and what they're going to be teaching you about tomorrow. But this is why, in this country at this moment, you need a transcendental, transformative leader.

Lincoln understood that the slavery issue was an original stain in the Constitution. 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 has very selfishly 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 27 amendments to that Constitution. The document is 235 years old. There are 27 amendments. Do the math: You're picking up an amendment every 8 or 9 years. And yet we have not had a significant amendment since 1993. That was a procedural one. 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. These sons of bitches won't move on the document. You have to 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. We're not doing that, but we have to do that because we have to re-engineer and renew the promise that America is for the rest of the people. I always think of the Constitution as software. You have to update software occasionally to keep it current, and the founders knew that. They framed it that way. This is my issue with the originalists.

But a quick question back to the tech-forward question: If the administration is so tech-forward, why the reticence on solar?

Solar? Culture war. Culture war. Straight-up culture. “Drill, baby, drill.” Amen. We're meat eaters. We watch Fox News. You like F-150s. 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 Elon Musk could say it, you'd be 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. 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 so many different things at our disposal now to make this energy renewable and to clean up.

I think you're going to be sitting here someday—people who are related to us, 100 years from now—saying, “From 1850 to 2150, they're going to call that the dirty period of civilization.” These idiots were burning fossil fuels and ruining the Earth. It was like they had an open garbage pit for an atmosphere. What the hell were these people doing?

In the same way that we hate slavery, they're going to take down statues of us. They're going to say, “These idiots tried to destroy the Earth.” The good news is we move to carbon-free, we move to solar, we move to the future. What Musk is trying to say—and he said it beautifully on Twitter the other day—is, “This is where we've got to go. This is where the future is.” By the way, the Chinese are there, guys.

Hey everyone, as you know earlier this year I was on stage at the Abundance Summit with some incredible individuals: Kathy Wood, Mo Gdat, Venode Kosla, Brett Adcock, and many other amazing tech CEOs. I’m always asked, Hey Peter, where can I see the summit? I’m finally releasing all the talks. You can access my conversation with Kathy Wood and Mo Gdat for free at dmandis.com/summit. That’s the talk with Kathy Wood and Mo Gdat for free at diamandis.com/summit. Enjoy. I’ll ask my team to put the links in the show notes below.

On June 5, Elon tweeted, “Is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle?” He put it out as a poll, and he got an 80% positive response. Then, on June 6, he said, “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 of “tweet,” or just keep “tweeting.” I remember I texted you right away, Anthony, because I was like, “Oh my God, this is the inflection point where hopefully a third party can come into existence.” They name it the American Party. Do you think this has any hope?

Well, you've got to tell me who's going to fund it. If you tell me we're showing up at the table with $50 billion, we can get to people and say, “We're going to have a $50 billion endowment to start a new party.” Then we have to have a convention, and we have to put the platforms and planks together for what that party is actually going to represent.

But you've got to have $50 billion. So, 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, conjoin, and strengthen our duopoly.”

So, we’ll make it impossible through voter registration, signatures, petitions, and lawsuits. I’m going to let you gerrymander your district, and you’re going to let me gerrymander my district. We’re going to strain out all the people, and 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, the right people operationally, the right tech people, and the right people on software. You could do this, but then you still have to appeal to one of the other 2 parties because they have the machinery. They have the architecture.

And Trump did this. Trump took over the Republican Party. He decapitated the party—a hostile takeover. His third party is MAGA, and he inserted it on top of the Republican Party. He took operating software, to use Salim’s analogy, and overlaid it on the old tech. 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 by 1 other important thing: Donald Trump. 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.”

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 with it.

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’ve got to have a convention.” So, it’s a principle-based party, which means we’re going to have a little bit of a push and pull in the party and some consensus-building. Then we elicit what the platform is from the American people.

We go out and explain to the American people the rigged system of the duopoly. We’ve got to get to them on Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and all these other places—and X. And guess what happens? Because you guys are entrepreneurs, we’re all zero-to-one people. You can go from zero to one, liquidate those 2 parties, and force them back into the middle.

So, we should get things right, and that party should be, “This isn’t left or right; this is right or wrong for America.” We need good solar policy. We need good space policy. We need good crypto policy. We’re not going to make it partisan. And, oh, by the way, that guy’s trying to lobby me to stop something from happening. We’ve got to 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? 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. So, no. Look, man, these bills, man—we’ve lost 50% of our purchasing power in 30 years. Look at this shit.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, look at this. Right. Yeah, throw that one away because that’s worthless now.

Ben Franklin, who was my favorite founding father because he was so cheeky, would say, “Okay, we’ve got to start a new party. Wake people up.”

Ben Franklin wrote a lot of different things, but my favorite thing that Ben Franklin wrote was a small book called Fart Proudly. Did you ever hear of the book? He talked about joy. He talked about the joy of flatulence.

Of course, you may remember this from the Isaacson biography. We had no money. The Continental Congress had no money. They were over in France together, sleeping in the same room—he and John Adams—and Franklin was ripping farts on Adams to the point where Adams had to open the window. He was freezing his ass off, got himself a cold, and they argued about it for 30 years after the thing happened.

What they didn’t know about Franklin was that he was my guy, because Franklin was about “fart proudly.” Tell Elon, “Let’s start the Fart Proudly Party.” Fart for freedom, as Franklin would say. Fart for liberty.

What you’ve got to do is get these young people involved. They don’t like what’s going on any more than you and I do, so get them involved.

For viewers and listeners at home, I’m just showing the book here. It’s Fart Proudly: Writings of Benjamin Franklin You Never Read in School. You can buy that book on Amazon, and it has great essays on the power of flatulence.

What is Franklin’s point? Don’t take yourself that seriously, fellas. Let’s get in there. Let’s win together. Let’s help each other. Let’s share the credit.

We don’t have Trump’s big issue, where he’s got to be the 1 guy in the spotlight and no other people can be onstage 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.

Anthony, let’s jump into the U.S. versus China, in particular. One of the things we’ve been discussing on our WTF episodes with my Moonshot mates here is the chip race and the chip wars going on—the notion that by 2030, China is going to be building, every year, the equivalent of the entire U.S. electric energy production. 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, this is stuff that we’re fighting over that we shouldn’t be fighting over. The people on this call know we should not be fighting over Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a nonpartisan issue, the way oil is.

If I said to you, “We have rare-earth minerals in our reserves,” if you’re a Democrat, are you going to fight that? Or if you’re a Republican, are you going to say, “Hey, I don’t want rare-earth minerals”?

So, we’ve 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—

Yeah.

No, no, no. I love you, Peter. You’re like 1 of my brothers. I mean, you’re like my brother from another mother, and 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. What is this?

This is The Eurasian Century. It was written by Hal Brands, and this is a great book about Eurasia.

Of course, if you know your Mackinder, the Oxford historian, what did Mackinder say in the 1850s? He said, “Whoever is 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.

The Chinese understand this. Henry Kissinger understood it. Zbigniew 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.

We’ve got to understand this and 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—the Chinese are not thinking in 2-year election cycles or 4-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 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 a news flash for everybody: That’s an 80-mile strait. It’s a very difficult strait, and there’s a lot of mountainous terrain on that island of Formosa. It’s not an easy thing to do.

It was a 20-mile strait on D-Day. Think about all the logistical problems we had there. That’s 4 times the distance, and you’ve got to get ground troops in there. They’re not going to do that.

What they’re going to do is 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 soft power. This is something I disagreed with Elon about. The DOGE thing going after USAID—I understand there’s some graft, and I understand there’s some fraud in there. I’m not saying that people are perfect, but we need our soft power to preserve our currency advantage and our brand.

The Chinese have a shitty brand, okay? I was at the Chalk History Festival last week. Some old lady—my demographic, by the way, guys, is like 70 to 90. That’s my demographic. If the women are 70 to 90, they love me. My wife is like, “That’s fucking great.” No one below 70 likes me, so no problem, right?

The lady’s raising her hand and asks a question about China: They’re pumping money into Africa. They’re pumping money into Eurasia. How should we think about it? The answer is that they’re getting a demultiplication from their money because their culture sucks. They’re not a free country.

When they put in a dollar, on a multiplication level, it’s like 0.3. When the Americans put in a dollar, because we’ve got Madonna and Bruce Springsteen and Peter Diamandis, that sexy Greek, we get an exponent. People love America.

Now, Trump’s hurting our brand because he’s trying to be too aggressive with adversaries and allies. But you’ve got to go back to USAID and use the soft-power flex on people. 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 jail and say, “You’ve got to submit to the Communist Party.”

We have a material advantage over them, and we have to be smart about the exercise of that advantage around the world.

Can I give a 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, how does that play into your thinking? You’re one of the few people who can see that tension clearly and also see where the technology is going.

No, no counterpoint needed. I’m in agreement on that. If you’ve heard my other interviews, I’m a China realist. I’ve taken Kissinger’s view of China. I would recommend that book on China from Henry Kissinger.

I’m a believer that we have 2 different systems, but we have to be compatible. If anything, I want to get deeper into the economic dependency—the interdependency—with China. What we find through 5,000 years of recorded history is that the more economically interdependent we are, the harder it is to go apart.

When Trump is tariffing them, or they’ve got to tariff us, that’s going to make us go apart. No bueno. You’re way better off getting deeper with China, which will stall China from making decisions to hurt you, and vice versa.

I’m not saying they’re not adversaries. I’m not saying they’re not stealing our intellectual property. 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 stovepipes 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’s native capitalism 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 China better than me. I would say this to you: The forces in China are different on the ground than people expect. There are 7 Balkanized provinces 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—everybody’s got a VPN. Ten percent of the Bitcoin mining is still getting done in China, and 15% of the transactions are still getting done in China. There’s a lot going on in China.

The Chinese may take Taiwan, or the Chinese may morph into something totally different from what is existing in China right now. We don’t know. But if you were sitting with a Soviet in 1987, they would have said to you, “The Berlin Wall is going to be there for 2,000 years, and it’s going to be like the wall in Jerusalem. The Soviets are going to be there forever.” Then, 2 years later, bada bing, bada boom, the thing’s down, the flag’s coming down, and the Russian flag’s going up—Christmas Day of 1991.

You don’t know what’s going to 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’ve got their own problems.

We don’t need to be overly fighting with them while we’re trying to fix the inside of us.

Recent news: Trump says he’s gotten a group of wealthy individuals together to buy TikTok.

Yeah, not going to happen. 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, unless Trump wants to pull the plug on it.

First of all, they’re never going to sell it. That is weapons-grade surveillance software, about as good spyware as you can get. It’s also influenceware, and it is moving a nation. They’ve got people thinking that the moon landing is fake. They’ve got people thinking Osama bin Laden did some good things. They’ve got 31% of the boys in this country below the age of 30 who think that we faked the moon landing.

TikTok is a powerful source in China, but Trump’s bought and paid for by the guys that own TikTok with the Chinese. He’s not going to bust them, and that’s a big problem in the country.

Trump cares about 2 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 4 of us talking about him. He’s like a reality television producer. He’ll come up with the project and the script every day to get you hyperanalyzing him and get your cortisol levels up.

But if he was a great leader, he would say, “This is really bad for us. Either we have to take it over or shut it down.”

You know, 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. The technology is going to transform every aspect of it. 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 now—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. If you’re upset with the status quo, fart proudly.

Oh, God, so many thoughts. 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. The way you get voter turnout is to whip people up, get them super angry or super excited or super motivated to show up.

If you grab the middle 80% of America, which would be the perfect outcome—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. Everybody was shocked when Donald Trump got elected the first time, 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.

The primary system has fundamentally got some really weird behavior early on. Then you get this centrist party that has sort of lukewarm passion. That’s why you see it merge with one party or the other at the finish line all the time: It can’t stand alone in the middle.

It gets co-opted by someone who’s really passionate about immigration or human rights or 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 counternarrative. I’d like Dave to react to it. Everything you just said is true, but now you’ve got Elon Musk on the team, and he’s a great engineer. You just told us what the problem is, so 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 bloc. There are 140 million people in this country. They vote exactly the same way every election. It’s the most powerful voting bloc. You know who that is, Dave?

The nonvoter, 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, and 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 supercycle? You don’t think, “Hey, I can get you more per-capita income”?

If we’re moving into an AI-based world, you may have a 4-hour workweek and you may be richer than you were with a 5-hour workweek. If you’re telling me none of those ideas will sell, Dave, then I’m with you. We are [inaudible]. Let’s take the canoe and ride it over Niagara Falls.

Well, we don’t have to be [inaudible]. I don’t think that national bankruptcy motivates people to vote, which is pathetic because it’s the biggest crisis, right?

Yeah. No, but it’s obvious that 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 cycle. It’s going to lead to disaster, and people just don’t react to it.

But I think there is a fix: make it easier to vote. If Elon Musk was really playing the cards right, he would have stayed ducky in the hot tub and said, “Hey, why don’t we use GovAI 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? Then you get better candidates.”

Everybody agrees. You survey everybody, and 90-plus percent agree that we’re not getting great candidates. Why is that? You dig into the causes. One of them is that the job is too loaded with baggage and risk—not just actual getting-shot risk, but also social-media risk. Try to derisk the job so great people want the job. But the bigger thing is to make it much easier.

You know, my policy here, Dave: anyone who wants to run for president should automatically be disallowed.

Yeah, it should be like a drafted position. Alan Greenspan said that, but again, the incentives are wrong.

Dave is right about everything he’s saying. But then again, the question is, can you get them to vote? 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 positions through, 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. Congress has a 14% approval rating. Yet the incumbent, when he runs for reelection, has a 95% reelection rate. It’s like being a chef at a really bad restaurant and getting a 1-star Yelp rating, but you never get fired.

So you’re telling me that with the $50 billion, we couldn’t get Musk’s help and say to people, “Listen, we’ve got to get more people voting. If more people vote, we’ll liquidate the extremists in society. We’ll make it better for all of us”? You don’t think that can work?

No, I think that can work. Australia has mandatory voting, and you get fined if you don’t vote. Now, that’s interesting. 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 in 2015, Yale did a survey and 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: 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 are headwinds here that go much, much deeper than even the political-party system. How do you defeat and counteract that? That’s the question I’ve got, because I think you need a whole new system. Revolution, baby.

Well, I want to go back to Dave because I think Dave’s onto something. He’s saying something that we all, I believe, agree is very true: you can’t get the attention, and you can’t get the passion going on the stuff that we would need them to get going on.

But the question is, could you publicize and explain to people the necessary steps of reform? I don’t want a revolution. I would like reform.

What’s happening right now is that 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. That’s great, but every time you do that in a system, you break the system and you get the revolution.

You get a guy like the kid here in New York who wants a socialist takeover of 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 society. You’re worth a lot of money. You’re not going to get an extra yacht. Calm down. We’ve got to help the lower- and middle-income people feel like the system is fairer for them and that they have an aspirational arc toward a potential career. Knock it off.”

He busted Rockefeller. He busted the banking trust. He busted some of the other trusts, and he did it. Reagan did it. Reagan went to AT&T with Judge Harold Greene and said, “Knock it off. You’re sitting on all this technology that we need. Knock it off.” In 1984, we busted AT&T.

The irony is that these 7 big tech companies don’t exist if we don’t bust AT&T. So, guys, knock it off.

So let me go in a slightly different direction: funding. What’s that? We’re all techno-optimists on this podcast right now. I do believe that technology is what’s going to drive GDP. 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 who are asking about the implications of AI for the lower and middle class. How can you make AI for everyone? How can you get this technology to everyone? What are your thoughts there? I think a lot of us are super excited about what’s coming on the AI front, but it’s skating over the majority of the public.

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 provides 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 other things, we have to deliver to the kid when he’s born the promise that he’s going to get fairly educated. You know this because you’ve worked with Khan 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.

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 have a hologram at this point where the person is actually there with him, and it’s free and fully democratized.

The teachers’ union is going to be upset with that, and they’re going to stop that. That’s why you need the third party, because Democrats say, “I can’t do that because I’m tied to the teachers’ union.” And the Democrats, I mean, they’re funny people: “We’re going to 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 you a news flash: if he does make electric vehicles, they kick him out of the electric-vehicle summit. One of the stupidest decisions they could have ever made. I mean, come on. What are you guys, a 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?

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 create a multiplier effect.

We know in the city of Boston, where Dave is sitting at MIT, that the Big Dig had a 5x cost overrun. Insane. But it totally gentrified and created a new ecosystem in Boston. It created better suburbs, better living standards, higher disposable income, easier access to the airports, and even though it was 5 times the cost, it generated 6 to 8 times whatever the cost was in terms of positive externalities for the area.

So we need a form factor like that. We need critical 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–12 student.

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.

Not too much, though, where they lose their cognitive edge. What are your thoughts here?

The timeline is really interesting. If you think about it, the next election cycle is right when we’re going to be running out of electrical power. Like you mentioned with the Big Dig, 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. 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 that it’s everything from physical infrastructure, real estate, foundations, plumbing—all that—plus operating system design and racks. It hits every level; everybody can participate in it. So if you think about 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 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.

I agree. Do you guys agree that we shouldn’t be picking a fight with China? But we started it under the Biden administration and perpetuated it. It’s both parties, with the Chips and Jobs Act. So, yeah. Before Anthony jumps in, I would like to hear Salim respond to that, but finish up, Dave, please.

Well, there was absolutely no hostility at all prior to the U.S. unilaterally saying, “Hey, you can’t have our best chips.” And that alone isn’t the big deal. 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 the Chinese reaction to that is like, “Okay, you have told us what your position is. There’s no going back from that.” 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’ve got some other outcomes and side effects that’ll come from that that we can talk about, but Peter, I know you want to—

Yeah, I know. 2028—the timing is 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. 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, and we have to get around this cultural war 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 OneSkin OS1 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 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 like the tactic. 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 generally, I would like our allies to be partners with us on these projects. I would like their capital, because that makes it better.

Look, you know what Churchill said, right? Let me phrase it exactly: “The only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.” You’ve 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: The administration has some very good ideas on this stuff. There are a lot of people out there, a lot of lobbies out there, that are going to want to block them and slow this thing down. They’re very short-sighted.

If I said to you, “Here is an AI. It pops up like a hologram. It’s one part Peter Diamandis, one part Dave, one part Salim. It can teach the kid about exponential organizations, longevity, and AI. It actually interfaces with the kid, where the kid can talk to it, and it’s helping the kid with grammar and spelling, and it’s forcing the kid to think.”

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 jacked up. And you’re telling me the teachers’ union is like, “You know, that is the best thing we can do for our children. 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. The Emirates is going 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 was 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 U.S. in AI infrastructure.

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 and Saudi can do is act fast and unilaterally. In a lot of these areas, we can’t move quickly, and they can. They have $1 trillion 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. We have that common bond.

Let me tell you about something that I think we should all be humbled by. These are mistakes that we make when we’re thinking about our lives and thinking linearly, while the world is moving the way Salim thinks—exponentially.

I want to take you back to 1999. We’re at the World Trade Organization protests, and the blue-collar people are up there in Seattle saying, “You’re going to kill us. You’re going to knock out all of our jobs.” All the smug Wall Street types said, “Oh, that’s not true. It will lower the cost of capital.” I got that wrong. We heard every one of those people.

What the thinking was in 1999 was: Let China 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.

Now it’s 25 years later, and they did none of that. Everybody got that? They did none of that. Who gets it? Okay. Those in the audience who live close enough to me in Queens and Nassau County know that we got “ugatz.”

And so now we’re sitting here 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 we’re biological.

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 and me. No software upgrade in 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.

Our mindset is the software upgrade that we need. That’s my point. We have to talk to people like this and say, “We’re going to make some mistakes.” We got China wrong in 1999 and 2000. We’re going to get things wrong. We’re going to be sitting here—

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. Diamandis, okay?

Well, 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 Florida, which just passed legislation allowing for stem cell treatments.

Right. Finally, fly down there and get some. But Diamandis hoards these things. You know what he’s like.

I’m just saying, 50 years from now, when he’s here and I’m long gone, we’re going to look back and say, “Well, we made some mistakes.”

Come down to Fountain Life, buddy. We’ll guarantee—although 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 big. I love it. I love it. They’re amazing.

I’m a very vain guy. If you can shrink my middle-aged man boobs, I’ll go anywhere that you want to send me. It’s not even about health at this point. It’s just about vanity.

We’re going to one more subject here, and I need to get your input on it. That is the whole crypto-Bitcoin world. Let’s talk about that. How do you see the importance of Bitcoin in America and in our strategic reserves?

It looks like—I talk about the digitization, dematerialization, demonetization, and 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 shitless about it. They've gone to the American Bankers Association, a very strong lobby, and they're trying to litigate progress so that they can catch up. That's what's going on. Holy shit.

Circle is going to control it. Could you imagine if I could put my Bitcoin at JPMorgan and get yield off it, and there's a structure around it that protects it? Forget it. It's over. They know that's coming. They know Brian Armstrong is ahead of them. They're going to try to buy Brian. They'll probably buy Circle alongside Brian. They have to move.

But here's what I would say to them: 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. They gave me 15 minutes for, I don't know, something like $3 a minute—$45—to talk to my mom. Now I can go to any café in Rome, plug into the Wi-Fi, and talk to my mom for no dollars. I could probably even do a FaceTime call, right?”

The phone companies didn't go to zero. They're still here. What they do is morph. The banks have to provide different services. American Express—Squeri is a very smart guy—has teamed up with Brian. You get 4% back in Bitcoin. I love that, by the way. I just ordered it. They even have to lose a little bit of money on it, but they want your business. They've figured out, “We've got to be in the customer-capture business, and we've got to offer service.”

You're getting your Wi-Fi from the phone company or the cable company, some fiber-optic company. They didn't go to zero. We've got to tell the banks, “Calm down. There are other services that you can put on the chain, and you can do everything that you want, but you've got to move.”

You can't be a carriage maker and make Body by Fisher. You can make the inside of the carriage of the horseless carriage. You've got to think like that, and you've got to adapt. We hate adaptation, guys.

I was in the typewriter business. I was in the fund-of-funds business. I had to make a decision: am I going to stay in the fund-of-funds business? The reason SkyBridge got to its 20th birthday is that 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, you're brilliant. You want to stick in the mud? Stick in the mud. We don't want to stick in the mud. We did a study of the Fortune 100 in 2015 and scored them against the ExO model, which essentially measures adaptability and agility. 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 of the bottom 10 that didn't. It's just crazy numbers.

Well, I want to see if you could send it to me because I want to send it to my staff. 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. He changes the name of the company to Meta. But guess what he gets right? We're going AI. Look at him. He's not sitting there. He's got $70 billion in 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.

Are you and Zuck buddies? Are you connected to Zuckerberg?

No, I don't know him. I'm just impressed with him. Once, I was in Sun Valley with him at the Allen & Company conference, and I remember feeling so insecure. He was 24 at the time, worth like $10 billion, and I was 44, worth no billion. Now he's only worth like $200 billion. You know what I mean? God bless.

I love that, though. Equal opportunity. Sergey Brin can come in from Eastern Europe and make $200 billion. Equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. We're a rich enough country to help these people feel like there's some fairness in society. You want to get socialism? Have the people think society's unfair. They're going to come at you with a howitzer.

2 questions. What percentage of your assets, if you're willing to say, are in Bitcoin, and what's your end-of-year prediction?

Well, listen, I just got done telling AJ this. I have 70% of my money in Bitcoin. That's either Bitcoin on my balance sheet, Bitcoin on the corporate balance sheet, or Bitcoin in the funds. If you look at all the pass-throughs and you look at my net worth, 70% of it is in Bitcoin.

It wasn't always that way, but it did this. Bitcoin is a pizza eater. Let me explain that. It starts out as a small slice of the pizza. Look at me—it's like a Pac-Man. It goes like this. That's what's happening to me. It's not because I'm even buying more of it, but it's 70%.

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 $1 trillion comes into Bitcoin, and here is the volume and supply over the last 5 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 $1 trillion of buying power does to the asset.”

I think the asset goes—and I'm not exaggerating when I say this—to $500,000. That's a 5× number, which would be consistent with what happened to Amazon, Nvidia, and Tesla when you have purchasing power moving into that.

So, $500,000 in 5 years, $200,000 at the end of this year, and $1 million at the end of 10 years.

I think, by the way, you're going to have some hyperinflation if we don't fix this goddamn thing. 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 puts in Mickey Mouse or Johnny Bozo, he's going to want to do whatever Trump wants. Let me not say Mickey Mouse, because I like Mickey. I didn't mean to disparage Mickey.

I knew Musk thought Trump was a dummy the day that he said Peter Navarro was as dumb as a bag of rocks. 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.” Navarro and Trump are like this.

Through derivatives, through differential calculus, that was a way to tell people—before he exploded on Trump—that Trump was a jackass. I love that about Elon because he's a 19-dimensional thinker.

But on this topic, I think it's very simple. You don't want Johnny Bozo running the Fed, but if you get Johnny Bozo running the Fed, it's going to go to $15 million a coin.

Yeah, and that's not going to be good for society, though.

A million dollars is the next gold. It's a digital asset, and we've 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 2 decades of fiscal discipline.

Again, I'm talking about fiscal discipline as just slowing down a little bit of governmental growth and getting the economic growth through all the innovation you talk about in your podcast to exceed governmental growth.

You could do it in 25 years. You'll have the whole thing addressed, and people will be looking around saying, “Wow, how did we do that? That was great.” But you've got to have some more people in the room who are patient.

There's another way to fix the entire financial debacle in the United States, which is to increase people's healthspan. You enable people to be healthier for an extra decade, where they're productive, serving them to processed food, because that would save a trillion dollars off of Medicare.

For sure. For sure.

And Dave, any last digs at me?

No, I just want Dave to recognize this. I asked for help with my man boobs. He totally disregarded it, but he's thinking about it in the background, helping his friends. I need man-boob reduction, and he could help me with some cocktail there that helps with man-boob reduction. He's not sharing.

Go ahead.

I have a question. Did you see this thing with the bonds that have a 10% basis in Bitcoin? It looked to me like a pretty brilliant idea. I wanted your reaction on that.

Yeah, I think it's a very smart, very clever idea. That's the stuff that the people in the banking association and the people in the investment banks are very worried about, because that's the stuff that's going to get adopted.

And remember, I’m not kidding now: in 10 years, the 38-year-old who 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. That provides more evidence for what I’m saying, because Bitcoin is immutable. There’s a finite supply of it. People trust it, and they’re going to use it.

Yeah, amazing.

Here’s my parting shot. We have Moore’s law. We have Musk’s law now: the most dramatic outcome is the one that’s going to happen.

Yeah, I like that a lot. We need Mooch’s law to match that pattern. I’ll give you a chance to think about it, unless you have it off the top of your head.

I probably need more time to think about it. Here’s what I would say, though. This is my 61-year observation about this country: the people in this country want to get it right. What did Lincoln say? Lincoln said, “The people in this country are way smarter than the average politician thinks.”

The exact quote said that the people in this country have a good nose. They can smell a rotting cadaver in their basement. It’s a time in American history when we have to change the plot lines of these political parties.

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. I 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—hanging out on Gavin Newsom’s podcast, getting to know Eli.

We got no choice, Dave. We got no choice. Let me tell you something: I’m named after somebody who assaulted Normandy Beach. My uncle assaulted Normandy Beach at the age of 19, took the cliff, and burned out some of those cement pillboxes.

People say to me, “Aren’t you afraid they’re going to come after you?” I don’t give a fuck. If I have an uncle I’m named after who 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.

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.”

He became the first Republican president of the United States, and he ended slavery. It took us a civil war to do it, but he ended slavery. And, by the way, Buchanan was a jackass. We probably didn’t even have the war, okay? Lincoln was sandwiched between two big jackasses, Buchanan and Johnson.

But Lincoln changed it. He switched the narrative, and he tried to clean out the stain that was in the Constitution. He was the stain remover for the stain that was in the Constitution. So don’t tell me our history means that we can’t do this. This is totally doable.

Mooch, you are brilliant. Everybody, this is Anthony Scaramucci, an extraordinary individual.

I’m extraordinarily impressed by your brilliance every time I chat with you.

Thank you for being very kind. I don’t say I’m that bright. I just love my country like you, and I love the future.

You can smell the future. The future is so bright. You can inhale the future. You can smell the future. All we have to do is get to the future, and we have 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 Blundin, brilliant as always. Thank you.

If you could have had a 10-year head start on the dot 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. Why? Because acting early is everything. This is for you if you want to see the future before it arrives and profit from it. Sign up at dmmadness.com/tatrends and be ahead of the next tech bubble. That’s dmmadness.com/tatrends.