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. Uh somebody minor in the administration can 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. The China uh US tension makes 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
[00:01:01] gentlemen. Everybody welcome to moonshots. I’m here with the emperor of exponentials Ismael uh the extraordinary alchemist of AI Dave Blondon and our special guest for today the mooch Anthony Scaramucci. Uh so uh you know last time we’re together uh Scaramucci made some extraordinary predictions. Uh if you know Anthony, he’s amazing. He is a finance year 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, 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 PR. Stop combing your hair for God’s sake. A lot of PRP. Let’s just talk about the hair for a second because you know I I I I take all from your
[00:02:01] longevity. There’s a lot of pure pee that’s gone on up here. Okay. Just want to let you know, okay? And there’s a lot of bald 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 podcast. So, I’ I’ve got it. I got the right color now. when I got the right colorist. You’re making You’re making Seem very jealous. I do certain heads perfect like Seems and the rest of us had to get hair. You know why? Unlike you. You know why Peter Deiamus has hair, Dave? To hide his horns, okay? Cuz 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 guy now. Actually, he’s got he’s got the pope hat under there. Let’s Let’s jump into this episode here. Uh, you know, we haven’t even started. My god, for those of you we haven’t started yet. Uh, on a previous podcast starring
[00:03:02] the mooch, uh, Anthony, you made a prophetic prediction. Um, and I I think your prediction was something around the notion that Elon would last about 10 Scaramucci. 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 define this stuff. For those of you who don’t know this, obviously uh Anthony made a stent in the last uh Trump White House. Uh he lasted 11 days. Uh Anony’s defined that as a Scaramucci unit length, like a plank length in physics. Yeah, you can use it in a sentence, you know, like Kevin McCarthy lasted 24.5 Scaramuis as speaker. Prime Minister Liz Truss 4.1 Scaramuis. Well, do you know how many Scaramucci Elon lasted? So, it was 11.8, but I’m a I’m the official scoreer of Scaramucci, and I put out on X. We round up. We’re generous here. Okay. Big balls. Big balls. He lasted 14 Scaramucci. So, you
[00:04:02] got to give the kid credit, you know. But Elon, Elon, by the way, I’m a, as you know, and I said this last time, I’m a huge fan of the guy. 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 I 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. Uh you know the Massav Bridge here in Cambridge is measured in Smoots and they repaint it every year the number of smoots and and in a couple years to uh to measure the length. How many do you remember how many Smoots it is, Dave? Oh that’s good. That’s good. I should know. It was like 300 and an ear. And an ear. Y is
[00:05:00] Tuscanini. Is the ice cream place still over there? Tuscaninis. Is that still Oh my god. I used to play pass pickup basketball with Tuscanany. Uh yeah, it’s still there. I think there are two of them actually now. Yeah, I think that’s the best ice cream in Cambridge, by the way. That’s go good home turf stuff. Actually, our our good buddy Brian Mox used to work there and he would dump this big bag of lard into the mixing machine. Like that’s why the ice cream is so good. All right. Well, that’s why you know I my favorite flavor from Tuskania 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 like 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 and you leave at 2:30, I think you get a full 11 days there. And I don’t even when the president shits on me and puts out on
[00:06:00] Truth Social that I’m a major loser, he says I lasted 11 days. does I I I sort of feel like the president deserves some official scoring as well. It’s 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 uh potentially super exciting was the fact that Elon was there and we had a very pro technology um 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 uh and my moonshot mates here is is the current administration still tech forward even with Elon leaving. We’re we’re going to talk about things like uh gov.ai um and all that’s coming there. But
[00:07:01] 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 podcast. Listen, I don’t want to go into political I’m not doing that. And 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 Saxs has done a great job. I’m not going to pronounce his name well, but he’s a great guy. Sheream Krishnan. Am I saying it right? Yeah. Okay. I think he is a phenomenal guy. He’s doing a great job. I think that uh there’s a 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 broadscale initiative. And
[00:08:01] 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 a 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 [ __ ] 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
[00:09:00] you’re asking me the question. I want to be as objective as possible. Uh Trump is better on AI. He’s better on crypto. He’s better generally on dereg. He’s not great on batteries. Again, if we’re just being open and honest, or energy policy in general, or energy policy in general, if we’re just being honest and objective, 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 there’s a group in uh 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
[00:10:01] 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 metatrens 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.
[00:11:01] That’s dmandis.com/metatrends to gain access to trends 10 plus years before anyone else. Let me hit you on a a tweet from David Saxs, who I think is brilliant, and I’m I feel extraordinarily positive that he’s in that position, and I hope he remains there. So yesterday, David Saxs tweets out uh what is the most realistic way for the US to lower debt and uh increase GDP growth. What’s the best driver for growth? Productivity. What is the uh what’s expected to drive productivity most? AI. Yet over a thousand bills have been introduced into state legislators to hobble AI. Uh we need uh preeemption in OBB in one big beautiful bill. So, uh, thoughts on this and I I welcome you. We have to apply we have to apply historical context. So, let’s thoughts on this. There were people that were running stage coaches that did not want the railroads. There were people that
[00:12:01] were 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, baby. Yeah. The American Banking Association liquidated aspects of the Genius Act. Uh the the whole nonsense that you can’t get yield on the stable coin is an example of that. And so what ends up happening in a society, the society like in Governor’s Travels, the Liilipuchian want to tie down the society. They want to tie down the innovation. And so, 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.
[00:13:00] We’re going to put $2 and a half billion dollars, which is like almost a hundred billion dollars 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. 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,
[00:14:01] I always 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 people the money. These were Italian singles. See those? Everybody see them? What the hell is that? You never know. You could get invited to Rayos one night, Dave. They don’t take credit cards at Ryos. You get them ready. 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 I want to take I want to take a a bet on that one, Dave and Seem, you know, how long before but but you’re you’re 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. 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 type 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. Comments. Well, let’s
[00:15:00] talk about backtracking in general here because that’s the 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. Uh that’s that’s what people wanted, right? And and we don’t want to see a big bloated bill. We want to see a big beautiful bill. Uh so we we wanted Elon to be in there changing everything. We didn’t want him to get booted out. Uh and uh 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. Uh is that what’s happening here or what? Well well see but it’s too 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 goldplated hot tub. Okay. And what they do is they sit in a hot tub. They pass Kubanos. They pass Krug to each other. And then they have like a zero one, you know, like your computer goes 01. Sure. They look at you, look at my hand, they look at you, they say, “Seem bought or can’t be bought.” Okay. Can’t be bought. Okay.
[00:16:02] [ ] Salem. Let’s get opposition research on him. Let’s say he’s got platter problems related to his ketamine. Let’s say he’s this. Let’s say he’s that. Okay, [ ] Seline. He’s not coming into the hot tub and letting us play in the hot tub. If you if you can be bought, here are 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 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. See, you don’t want to do that. You’re a scumbag. You’re a bad guy. Let’s go set fire to Sem’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. The prediction then if if that’s the game, is David Saxs gonna be there at the end of the administration or not? He’s clearly not in that camp, right? No, but David Well, see, David’s
[00:17:00] different. See, David’s different. Okay. Cuz 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 loop. They brought the Vaseline and the microwave oven to the table and they’re going to jam me. And so I can’t
[00:18:00] get everything. So what I got to do is I got to 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 facetime 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. Yeah. See, 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. You 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
[00:19:00] got to fake liking each other. We’re going to 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. Okay. 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, I know I was only there for one Wednesday, so I know it was a [ __ ] Wednesday. Okay. 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 can pick your eyeball out with an ice pick, drop it in a dirty martini glass like it’s an olive, 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,
[00:20:00] 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 if 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 Saxs is a duck with AI inside. I don’t know how that that makes your analogy, but No, but he’s a brilliant duck. I’m just making the point about a duck is that he’s moving quietly through the water. He looks like he’s effortless, but he’s working away. Yeah. 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. All right. I I want to hear not pissing people off. So, what are your thoughts on all this, buddy? So Mooch, you mentioned earlier that the the 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 Saxs, counteract that and get AI
[00:21:03] 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 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 uh 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, 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 nats to get the thing done. And so I I applaud
[00:22:01] the guy. I think the guy is uh 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 Saxs if he listens to your podcast. He did bring up the scaramucci as a unit of time on allin. 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= MC standard measurement of like 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 uh on June 30, 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 you know or part of humanity at any point maybe were the most efficient of the most inefficient part of governments but could be using this for uh every agency for the FDA for the FAA for the DOT for the DOE to move
[00:23:00] 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. Yes. 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 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
[00:24:02] 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 a presidential daily brief that says that we are, but I’m talking about the Hoy Poy 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 were like, “Well, wait, wait. Who’s the that’s my little sister running against Donald Trump? Who’s that person?” And wait a minute, Joe 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
[00:25:01] say no. And that slows down everything. When Sputnik went off in October of 1957, the man understood October. Holy [ ] Holy [ ] We got to get our [ ] together. Okay. And then Eisenhower said, “Holy [ ] we got to get our [ __ ] 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 because the media made them feel threatened, 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
[00:26:01] to renit and reashion 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 27 amendments to that constitution. The documents 235 years old. There’s 27 amendments. 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 [ __ ] [00:27:02] 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. And so, 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 the founders and and they knew that. They framed it that this is my issue with the originalist. But quick question back to the tech forward question. If the administration is tech so tech forward, why the reticence on solar? On solar culture war. Culture war. Straight off 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 it’s a culture war
[00:28:02] issue. You see, if you said it the way an 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. 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 I think you’re going to be sitting here someday, people that are related to us, 100 years from now, said, “These [ ] 1850 to 2150, they’re going to call that the dirty period of civilization.” These [ ] were burning fossil fuel and they were ruining the earth. these idiots. It was
[00:29:01] 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 going to take down statues of us. They’re going to say, “These [ __ ] try to destroy the earth.” And the good news is we move to carbonfree, 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 got to go. This is where the future. 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?” Well, I’m finally releasing all the talks. You can access my conversation with Kathy Wood and Mogadot for free at dmandis.com/summit. That’s the talk with Kathy Wood and Mogadot for free at diamandis.com/summit. Enjoy. I’ll ask my team to put the links
[00:30:01] in the show notes below. On June 5th, Elon tweets out, is it time to create a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle. Uh he puts it out as a poll and he gets an 80% positive response. Then on June 6th, 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 um or his post again. I I wish I wish X would come up with a verb instead or keep tweeting. Um and I remember I texted you right away, Anthony, because I 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 uh the American party. Do you think this has a hope? Well, you got to tell me who’s going to find if if you tell me we’re showing up at the table with 50 billion
[00:31:03] 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 part is actually going to represent. But you got to have $50 billion. So, let me tell you what these guys did. And they did it right after the Ross Perau election. They got the [ __ ] 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 jerrymander your district. You’re going to let me jerrymander 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
[00:32:00] 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, $50 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 Salem’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
[00:33:01] 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 with that. So, if I was Elon Musk 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 principal-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 elicitate what the platform is to the American people. And we go out and we
[00:34:00] 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. An X and X. And guess what happens? Because you guys are entrepreneurs. We’re all zero to one people. Y 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 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 got to figure out a way to stop that from happening See that? Isn’t 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
[00:35:00] 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 in 30 years, we’ve lost 50% of the purchasing power. Look at this [ __ ] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I mean, look at this. Right. Yeah, throw that one away because that’s worthless now. You know, but look, you know, you know, Ben, Ben Ben Franklin, who was to me my favorite founding father because he was so cheeky, right? But Ben Ben Franklin, if he were alive today, he’d be like, “Okay, we got to we got to 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. Did you ever hear the book? He talked about joy. He talked about the joy of flatulence. And of course, you may remember this from the Isacson 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
[00:36:00] to the point where Adams had to open the window and he was freezing his ass off. He got himself a cold and they argued about it for 30 years after the thing happened. But but 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 got to do is you got to 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
[00:37:00] 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 healthc care 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 Cap, and Bob Heruri 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 span. Learn more about what’s going on inside your body from Fountain Life. Go to
[00:38:00] fountainlife.com/per and tell them 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 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? Uh are they too slow? Should we be unifying on on these fronts? Well, 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
[00:39:00] over Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a nonpartisan 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 a Republican, hey, I don’t want rare earth minerals. So, we got to get certain things into a non-partisan 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’m I I I love you, Peter. You’re like one of my brother. I mean, you’re like my brother from another mother. And you’ve been a great 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 Brand. And this is a great book about Eurasia. And of course, if you know your Mckinder, the Oxford historian, what did Mckinder say in the 1850s? He said, you
[00:40:01] who’s ever controlling Eurasia is going to control the world because it’s the largest land mass, slightly larger than Africa, but you’ve got tremendous resources there. And the Chinese understand this. Henry Kissinger understood it. Zebin Brazinski 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 gota we got to we got to understand this and we got to we got to 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 100year 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 that Taiwan falls in
[00:41:00] their lap the way Hong Kong did. They don’t have to fight over Taiwan. By the way, and 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 on 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 USAD. I understand there’s some graft and 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?
[00:42:01] You know, I was at a 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 [ __ ] great.” You know, no one 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
[00:43:00] trying to be too aggressive with adversaries and with allies. But you got to go back to USAD, use the soft power flex on people. Uh, 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 in adv advantage over them and we have to be smart about the exercise of that advantage around the world. See can I give a counterpoint here? Um in a world of abundance a China uh US tension makes very little sense right in 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, no
[00:44:00] 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. Uh I’m 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 got 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
[00:45:00] and not 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 Have you heard my oneline summary of China? Go ahead. Um, 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 you know China better than me. So, 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 Weaguers, the situation with Tibet, you know, that everybody’s got a uh VPN, 10% of the Bitcoin mining still getting done in China, 15% of the transactions still getting done in China. There’s a lot
[00:46:00] going on in China. And you know, 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 Soviet in 1987, they would have said to you, “Well, the, 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. Uh Christmas Day of 1991. Okay? And so, so, so 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 cuz they got their own problems, okay? Okay, we don’t need to be overly fighting with them while we’re trying to fix the inside of
[00:47:00] us. So, recent news, Trump says he’s gotten a group of wealthy individuals together to buy Tik Tok. 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. I unless Trump wants to pull the plug on. First of all, they’re never That is weaponsgrade. That is weaponsgrade surveillance software that is about as good a spy wear as you can get. And it’s also it’s Yeah, I was just gonna say that it’s influence wear 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, so Tik Tok is a powerful source in China, but Trump’s bought and paid for by the guys
[00:48:00] that own Tik Tok with the Chinese. And so he’s not going to he’s not going to bust them. Okay? And that’s a big problem in the country. Okay? Because Trump cares about two [ __ ] 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. Um they couldn’t pay me enough to watch what these producers are 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 is going to transform every aspect of it’s not edited. You’re not getting a homogenized version. You’re getting people on the
[00:49:00] 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. 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, so on China, well, first on the centrist party idea, you know, one of 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, 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
[00:50:00] 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 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. 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 you just told us what the problem is. And so now do we 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
[00:51:00] fire under the most powerful voting block 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 Tik Tok, 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 cell to a very large group of people like immigration and abortion? You don’t think debt super cycle? You don’t think a uh hey, I can get you more per capita income. If we’re moving in the AI based world, you may have a 4-hour work week and you may be richer than you were with a 5 hour work week. If you’re telling me none of those
[00:52:01] ideas will sell, Dave, then I’m with you. We are [ ] Let’s take the canoe and ride it over the Niagara Falls. Well, we don’t have to be [ ] Uh I I don’t think that national bankruptcy motivates people to vote, which is pathetic because it’s the biggest crisis, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, but it’s 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. uh and people just don’t react to it. But I think there is a fix which is make it easier to vote. Uh and 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, you know, rational, middle-of the road, broad-thinking American to actually show up and vote in a primary and then you get better candidates.” Yeah. Everybody agrees like you you survey everybody 90 plus% agree that we’re not getting great candidates. Why is that? And you dig in
[00:53:02] the cause. One one of them the job is too too loaded with baggage risk, you know, like like actual getting shot risk, but also uh social media risk. Like try to derisk 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. Yeah, it should be like a drafted position. Green Alan Allen Greenspan said that, you know, but the 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 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 profession 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 them up. Andrew said to me once and I checked the statistics. They’re true. The
[00:54:00] politicians in Washington have a 14% approval rating. The Congress has a 14% approval rating. Yet the incumbent when he runs for re-election, he has a 95% re-election rate. It’s like being a chef at a really bad [ __ ] 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 got to get more people voting if more people vote we’ll liquidate the extremist 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 um Anthony which is that the in 2015 yield did a a survey and they found that the US is not a functioning democracy in any way, shape or form meaning that no
[00:55:00] amount of voter willpower can result in legislation. Right? 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 are 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, I you know, listen, I want to go back to Dave because I think Dave’s on to something. He’s saying something that we all I believe is very true. You 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 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
[00:56:00] 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. Uh 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 rev 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 and middle inome 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 trusts and he did it. Reagan did it. Reagan went to AT&T with Judge Harold Green and said, “Knock it off.”
[00:57:02] Okay? You’re 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&T. So guys, knock it off. So let me let me go a different slightly different direction. Funding. What’s that? Well, we’re all technoptimists on this on this podcast right now. You know, techn 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. Um, but we have a lot of people who watch this podcast uh that are asking about the implications of AI for the lower and middle class, right? Um, how can you make AI for everyone? How you can get this technology for everyone? Uh, what are your thoughts there? Cuz I 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
[00:58:00] 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. So what’s in that is healthcare. Mhm. Education and AI. And 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 use 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
[00:59:00] to the kid and we can almost almost have a hologram at this point where the person’s actually there with him and it’s free and it’s fully democratized, right? So, so that now the teachers union is going to be upset with that and they’re going to stop that. Okay. So, that’s why you need the third party cuz Democrats say, “I can’t do that cuz I got I’m tired of the teachers union, you know, and the Democrats, I mean, they’re funny people, you know, 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 me a news flash if he doesn’t. They kick him out of the electric vehicle summit. Well, the UAW got on a phone with the Biden administration. We know it wasn’t Biden cuz he’s brain dead. So they got on with someone 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 decisions they could have ever made. I mean, come on. What are you guys 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
[01:00:00] Elon pissing back into the tent. What are you guys doing? What are you doing? Yeah. 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 overrunning cost. Insane. But it totally gentrified and created a new ecosystem in Boston. It created better burbs, better suburbs, more better living standards, higher disposable income, 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
[01:01:02] 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. Not too much though where they lose their cognitive edge. Yeah. 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. You know, 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
[01:02:03] 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. is 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 runup 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. So, so that would be the galvanizing moment. And I think the China thing is not going to go away. I agree. You guys agree that we shouldn’t be picking a fight with China. But we started it, we started it under the Biden administration
[01:03:00] perpetuated it. It’s both parties, you know, with the Chips and Jobs Act. So, yeah. Before Anthony jumps in, I would like to hear Salem 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 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 fullbore 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 thing outcomes and and side effects that’ll come from that that we can talk about but Peter I
[01:04:00] know you want to Yeah, I know 2028 the timing is like spot on. See, 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. Um, it takes too long to build fossil fuel. 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 onskin.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,
[01:05:00] back to the episode. Anthony, um, was the move where the administration took the entire, uh, 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 like the tactic. You have to tell me what the outcome is. I don’t I don’t know what the outcome of it was. I know the UAE is pushing a lot of um 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 you know what Churchill said right the the the worst you know let me phrase it exactly the you know 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 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
[01:06:00] but you get my point. So, I 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 little out there that are going to want to block them and slow this thing down that are very shortsighted. 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 Salem. 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 and it’s helping the kid with its grammar and it 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, you know, intellectual crossword puzzles. So the kid is jinned up and 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
[01:07:01] 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 chat GPT available for free to all of its citizens. Um, 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. Cuz I guarantee you, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Emirates want to be just behind the US in AI as infrastructure. Uh, and and they’re buying capacity. They’re buying chips. they’re buying investments and partnerships with, you know, the magnificent seven, eight or nine, whatever they’re going to be. Uh, so that’s pretty extraordinary. Yeah, I think the Churchill analogy that that Anthony just made is perfect, too, because the other thing the Emirates can do and and Saudi can do is they can act fast and unilaterally. And a lot of these areas we we can’t move quickly and they can and they have, you know, a
[01:08:00] trillion dollars of capital they can throw at anything we might need. So, 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 Sealem thinks exponentially and we make these mistakes and I want to take you back to 1999 and we’re at the World Trade Organization protests and the bluecollar 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 heard every one of those people. And what the thinking was in 1999, 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
[01:09:02] 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. Who gots? Okay. in the amas live 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 we’re bi You want to talk about software? Selene 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
[01:10:02] stick in your hand. And and our our mindset is the software upgrade that we need. I want to I want to turn We have I want to turn this. 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. Demandas, okay? You know, eventually. 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 exoome so he stays alive.” By the way, kudos to the state kudos to the state of Florida that just passed legis Let me give you this one. Kudos to the state of Florida that just passed legislation allowing for stem cell treatments. Right. Finally, fly down there and get some. But Deionis 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 We’ll guarantee we we’ve got I don’t know if I can say
[01:11:01] this. We have a We have the president and first lady of a country coming to visit us tomorrow.” That’s really big. I 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. Okay. All right. It’s not even about health at this point. It’s just about vanity. Do you We’re going to one more subject here that I I need to get your input on. Uh and that is the whole crypto bitcoin world. Um let’s talk about that. H how do you see the importance of of Bitcoin in America in our strategic reserves? Um you know it’s it looks like you know I talk about the you know 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 you’re in this game and you’re playing at it across the
[01:12:00] board. Talk to me. Yeah. Well they know what’s hit them. They’re absolutely scared [ ] about it. And they’ve gone to the American Banking Association, a very strong lobbyist, and they’re trying to liquidate progress so that they can catch up. Like, that’s what’s going on. So, like, holy [ ] Uh, Circle is going to 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, and so, and so they know that that’s coming. They know Brian’s ahead of them. They’re going to try to buy Brian. They’ll 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. They gave me 15 minutes for, I don’t know, it’s like $3 a minute, $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
[01:13:00] dollars. Okay. Probably even do a George FaceTime call, right? And so, but the 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, Scutter is 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 you. So, they’re 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 c customer capture and we’ve got to offer service. You know, you’re getting your Wi-Fi from the phone company or the cable company, some fiber optic company. They didn’t go to zero. And we 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 got to move. We got to get out of you can be a a carriage maker and make body by Fisher. You can make the
[01:14:00] inside of the carriage of the horseless carriage. Yeah. Okay. You know, and you got to you got to think like that and you got to and you got to 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, you’re you’re brilliant. 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 of the bottom 10 that didn’t. It’s just like crazy numbers. Well, I I
[01:15:01] want to see if you could send it to me because I want to send it to my staff. But this is why I like Zuckerberg cuz 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 AI. 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 He’s not He’s not stuck in the mud. That guy. Yeah. Are you Are you in Zuck Buddies? Are you 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 and Company conference u 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. I love that, though. Here’s the thing. Equal opportunity. Sergey Brink can come in from Eastern Europe, let him make 200
[01:16:02] 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. You want to get socialism, have the people think the societyy’s unfair. 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 him 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 the all the passroughs and you look at my net worth, 70% of it 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 [ __ ] Pac-Man. It goes like this. That’s what’s happening to me. Okay. So it’s
[01:17:01] 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 and and by the way, I want you to do this. Go to chat GBT or Grock 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 happened to Amazon, Nvidia, happened to Tesla when you have purchasing power moving into that time. So 500 in five years, 200 at the end of this year, and a million dollars at the end of 10 years. Yeah. And I think by
[01:18:02] the way, but but you’re going to have some h 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 going to want to do whatever Trump wants. I 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 Mus thought Trump was a dummy the day that he said that Peter Navaro 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. Navaro 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
[01:19:01] 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 going to 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 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 in your podcast to exceed the governmental growth. Yeah. I I think the other way and you could do it in 25 years, you’ll have the whole thing arrested and people be looking around saying, “Wow, how do we do that? That was great.” But you got to have some more people in the room that are patient. Hey folks, Lim here. Hope you’re enjoying these podcasts and this one in particular was amazing. Um,
[01:20:01] 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. Uh, we limit it to a few people to make sure it’s intermittent 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 hypers growth AI type companies. And we’ve done this now for 10 years with thousands of companies. Uh 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 a 100 bucks June July 23rd. Come along. It’s the best $100 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. you enable people to be healthier an extra decade where they’re productive serving them to processed food because that would serve you that would save a trillion dollars off of Medicare. For sure. For sure. Uh See and Dave, any last uh you know digs
[01:21:00] at at at Mir. I mean he’s like no I just want Dave to recognize this. I asked for help with my man boobs. He totally disregarded it. But thinking about it in the background helping his friends. Okay. I need man boob reduction and he could help me with some, you know, he’s got some cocktail there that helps him with man boob reduction. He’s not sharing. Go ahead. I have a question. Um, 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, the 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
[01:22:00] more evidence 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. Dave, you want to 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. That a lot. So, so we need much law to m to match that pattern. I’ll give you give you a chance to think about it. Unless you have it top. Yeah. I mean, I I probably have to need 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 cadaavver in their basement. And
[01:23:00] 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 News podcast, getting to know Eli. We got no choice, Dave. We got no choice. 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 [ __ ] 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.
[01:24:00] Okay, but I just want to finish this one point because it’s very important about Lincoln. The wigs, he went after them. He said, “The abolitionist wigs 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. Uh Anthony, where do we find you on social? Talk to us about your
[01:25:01] podcast. Give us I’m scar I’m at Scaramucci. My younger son took mooch. So I’m at Scaramucci on Instagram and Twitter. And uh I have a podcast called the rest is politics US. It’s me and Caddyy 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 biblio file and I like I like reading and I like talking to authors. I just I’m extraordinarily impressed by your brilliance every time I chat with you. Uh, thank you for being very kind. You don’t 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 ranker of social media. Let’s get to the
[01:26:00] future together. Dave Shale, 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 Metatron newsletter twice a week as a quick two-minute readover 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. [Music]