Big Technology Podcast - Anthony Scaramucci: Elon Musk’s Trump Exit, Tim Cook’s Tariff Problem

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner at SkyBridge Capital, and host of The Rest Is Politics US. Scaramucci joins Big Technology Podcast to talk about his brief experience as Trump's ...communication director, what derailed Elon Musk’s White House stint, the problems with Trump’s 'Big Beautiful Bill,' the state of the trade war, Tim Cook’s tariff troubles, bitcoin, and more. We also cover Long Island culture at the top of the show, if you’re into that. Tune in for a fast paced, fascinating look into the state of the global economy and the tech titans trying to ride it to results. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b Questions? Feedback? Write to: bigtechnologypodcast@gmail.com

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 Where do Elon Musk and Tim Cook stand with Donald Trump? And where does the economy go from here? We're joined today by a special guest. Anthony Scaramucci is here with us. He is the host of The Rest is Politics, U.S., which you can find on your podcast player of choice. He's also the founder and managing partner of Skybridge Capital. And he's here with us in studio to talk about all of this fascinating, breaking news. What a great time to speak with you, Anthony.
Starting point is 00:00:26 Thanks for being here. It's a big honor to be here. You've got a great studio. And you got a great show. So I immediately responded to your DM. I think you DM me, right? Yeah, we just met via DM. I've been obviously following you for a while.
Starting point is 00:00:39 I listened to you on Keras Wisher's podcast, and you spoke a lot with her about how you're from Long Island. I'm from Long Island. I figured it was time for us to meet. All right, amen. Something about the water on Long Island that makes everybody crazy. So I'll evaluate you at the end of this, and I'll determine if yours nuts as the rest of us.
Starting point is 00:00:55 So do you think it's the water? I always thought it was we're close to New York City, but we're not quite in New York City. So we know we have access to the show, but we know we're not part of it, and that makes us angry. Is that your Long Island philosophy? It's an interesting perspective.
Starting point is 00:01:09 So I don't see you that way already. You're giving off a vibe of a comfortable outsider. So there are uncomfortable outsiders that are angry, but then there are comfortable outsiders that almost enjoy the voyeurism of being an outsider. But I don't know, maybe are you angry? No, I don't think angry. Maybe angry was the, you know what?
Starting point is 00:01:28 I was when I was a kid. But now I think it's just a healthy chip on my shoulder. Okay. Because I feel like when you're from Long Island, you have to work a little bit harder than everybody else than the city kids. I'm all about that. I agree with that. I do. You know, you know, we're going to probably talk about Trump at some point.
Starting point is 00:01:44 He's got a chip on his shoulder. Queens guy. Because he was not that dissimilar. But the difference between Long Island and guys like Trump is we're comfortable outsiders. I don't mind. I can't get into certain country clubs. They probably would want me to landscape. their greens as opposed to the put on them. Totally fine by me. Don't care. Guys like Trump
Starting point is 00:02:03 to get worked up about that stuff, they're out to prove something. I'm just happy to be here. You know, I'm very grateful to be sitting here. But also, maybe the, I'm too short to see the glass is anything other than half full. When I look up at the glass, it looks full to me. So, but it's great to be on with you. But I love Long Island and do you still live out there? No, I'm in Brooklyn now. Okay. Close enough. How about you? Yeah, yeah. I'm two miles from the house I grew up in. amazing local boy yeah well we still spend a lot of time there and then looking for our international listeners or those who are in the bay area who are like what's all this long island talk to start
Starting point is 00:02:37 the conversation long island nassal county suffolk county it's right outside the city you could take the train in take the train out good place but yeah like i said you grow up there and you realize that there's something big happening pretty close that you're not quite a part of that motivates a lot of long island yeah i think it's well said all right so you go from long island to the white house and i just want to start briefly about your time in the white house So you spent 11 days there. I'm not going to shortchange it. I'm not going to say 10.
Starting point is 00:03:02 Some people have said 10 days as a scaramucci. Yeah, it hurts my feelings. And they're not doing the math. I mean, you have tech people listening, right? That's right. We need to be precise here. These are good math people. If you start on the 21st and you get your ass fired on the 31st and you work the 31st.
Starting point is 00:03:17 That's 11 days. Count the days, guys. I'm saying it's 11. Don't chip me out of 9.1% of my federal career. And by the way, why jip me out of that last egg? I'm my ass fired on that last day. a big day for me. It's important day. So let's not go into too much depth about what it was like in that moment, but I just want you to give our listeners and viewers a feel for what working in the
Starting point is 00:03:38 Trump White House was like. Just a very brief, like tell us the vibe, the experience of those 11 days in the White House. Because we want to know how it works inside the Trump White House. So I don't want to put any hay geography on it. It's eight years later. So I don't want to spin it. I'm just trying to remember it as clearly as I can remember it. I will say a couple of things. Number one, it was very different than working on the campaign. At least that was my experience. I had a decent relationship with Donald Trump. You're not friends with Donald Trump. Let me give a newsflash. If you've got a tech CEO listening, kiss his ass all you want, wait for him at the service entrance at Mar-a-Lago, write him checks, do whatever the hell you want. You're not friends with a guy.
Starting point is 00:04:21 He will never see you as a friend. He sees you as an object. in his field of vision. He's a transactionalist. And if he can get something out of you that helps him, if it turns out that five minutes later, you can't help him, he'll run you over with the car. Trump is the type of guy where he could play golf with you for 45 years. You have a heart attack on the ninth hole at the halfway house. And he's like, who was that guy, Alex, I was playing golf with? I don't barely know the guy. Can we get another guy out here to finish the round with me? That's Donald Trump. And I knew. that. I had a comfortable enough of self-awareness of him and myself. I knew that. But when I was on
Starting point is 00:05:02 the campaign with him, it was very loosey-goosey. It was very decentralized. And we were doing a lot of different things at the same time. I was working in communications and media advocacy. I was working in fundraising. I was working on speech writing. I was working on logistics for some of these rallies. We were doing a little bit of everything. And the relationship with Trump, because he is also loosey-goose, if that's a term I could use, probably a little old-fashioned, where you could talk. You could talk to him straight up. You say, well, that idea sucks.
Starting point is 00:05:33 Why did you lie about that? What are we doing here? This doesn't make any sense. And Jared once said to me, Jared Kushner, he said, you know, Mooch, he likes talking to you because you remind him of his dad. He made your old money. Actually, don't give a shit. You're here to try to help him, but you're not here to kiss his ass.
Starting point is 00:05:50 There's so many of these politicos that go into the situation that are just, you know, I mean, to put their whole head up, somebody's ass, and they have like a ring on their neck, you know, like a ring around the collar. Is that what happens afterwards? Yeah, I think it's sort of revolting. So what happened to me, though, I got into the administration foolishly. So cautionary tell young people, don't do things that are out of your depth or your experience, but also don't chase your ego.
Starting point is 00:06:16 So I went into work for Trump for pride and ego reasons. I grew up like you out on Long Island. My dad was a crane operator. Went to Tufts, Harvard Law School, built a successful business on Wall Street. Now I got the chance to work for the American president. And he calls you and says, come be the director of communications. Yeah, it was irresistible. My wife was like, you're crazy, don't do it.
Starting point is 00:06:36 My wife probably hates them, like almost as much as Melania hates them, which is like through the roof of what we're talking about here. And she told me not to do it. We almost got divorced over it, frankly. But I did it because my pride was involved and my ego was involved. So now I'm in there, and it's different. He's president. Guess what? You're not president. He's president. It's not a campaign, which is like a startup, and it's flat. And you could tell, hey, Alex, you're not doing this right. Or Alex moved the microphone closer or moved the microphone back. Couldn't do that with him. He got very tight, somewhat insecure and mercurial. And so it was a lot of flattery. If you're flattering him, you're doing better. If you're not flattering, you're not doing well. And I made a lot of. of big mistakes there. I was talking to him, the way I'm talking to you now, and the way I
Starting point is 00:07:29 talked to him on the campaign. And that was getting me in trouble. And then finally, we got into a fight, which I really can't get into because it was sort of some national security issues related to it. And then we got into that fight on Friday. I was fired on Monday. And he had the right to fire me, and I deserve to be fired. And learning lesson number two, be accountable. You know, I got fired. I got fired because he's the president. I'm not the president. He wanted to do something I was not comfortable with.
Starting point is 00:07:59 He's going to find somebody that's more comfortable than me and doing what he wanted to do. He fired me and life goes on. I tried to stay loyal to him. I was loyal to him until 2018. I broke from him after the tweeting related to the women of the squad. So you're a New York or maybe your friends outside of New York may not know this, but there are several women, hard left-leaning women, which I don't agree with ideologically, but Donald Trump in 2019 said, time to go back to the
Starting point is 00:08:26 countries you originally came from. Well, three of them were born in the United States. One was naturalized from Africa. These were members of the House of Representatives. And it was a very harsh nativist, very harsh racist statement. And it triggered me a little bit because my grandmother was told in the 1920s, go back to the country you originally came from. And so I was on the Bill Marsha. I was trying to defend Trump.
Starting point is 00:08:53 It was August of 2019, defending him, defending him. Somebody then asked me a question, well, what about the comments that he made about the women in the house? And I said, I don't really like that very much. I don't think he should talk like that. It's nativism. It's racism. And by the way, he's the American president. He shouldn't talk like that.
Starting point is 00:09:11 The next day, he's lighting my ass up on Twitter. What's that like when you get put on blast by Trump? Yeah, that sucks. That sucks. You go white as a ghost. You can pretend otherwise he's the President of the United States. You're not. And when he hit me on Twitter with his 80s, got like maybe, I don't know, 150 million X followers now.
Starting point is 00:09:30 But back then, 80 million followers on Twitter, he's hitting you. You go white. It's a nervous feeling. Phone calls. You go white. Yeah, people start calling. What the hell is going on? I then took a New Yorker's approach.
Starting point is 00:09:45 Okay, you can take a couple different approaches. I took the New Yorker's approach. and I hit him hard. I said, so said the fattest president since William Howard Taff. I'm a New Yorker. It got me knocked off a Twitter for 12 hours. You can't fat-shame people on Twitter. Even though he's ripping me to pieces.
Starting point is 00:10:01 This was before Elon. Yeah, before Elon. Maybe you can fat shame now on X, but you couldn't fat-john. I got knocked off of Twitter for 12 hours. He was all guns ablazing at me. I was hitting him left and right because I know all of his weaknesses. So I was hitting him left and right. And then he started attacking my wife.
Starting point is 00:10:18 I was like, all right, this is it. it, you know. I'm not Ted Cruz. Don't go after my wife. I'm a New Yorker. But so through that lens, I mean, it's the perfect setup to explain what's happened with Elon. Now, Elon is not in the middle of, you know, Flamor with Trump. Oh, maybe he is. Because he did just say that something about the big, beautiful bill. He says it's a massive outrageous pork-filled congressional spending bill and a disgusting abomination, which is a bill Trump support. So we'll get to that in a moment. Yeah, Trump's going to be very careful with him. But through the lens of what it was like in the White House, how it changes from campaign to governing.
Starting point is 00:10:52 Give us your best insight into what happened with you. And he spent 135 days as this special government employee. And I think you had predicted that he would be there for a year. So it seems like a little bit shorter than you initially thought. I got this thing completely wrong. I was shooting all over the place. I thought six or seven weeks. And I said, wow, he made it six or seven weeks.
Starting point is 00:11:13 Maybe he would make it a year. And I got it wrong. He lasted, as you said, 135 days. And so just to do the calculation for everybody listening it at home, that's 12.2 scaramuchis. That's important. Important data there. It's a pretty big. It's a long enough time in Trump world, 12.2.
Starting point is 00:11:32 Walsh, the Nat Security Advisor, lasted 9.1. Do you calculate everybody's standard in scaramuches? You got it. Don't you think you have to just measure them in scaramuchis? And so, you know, Kevin McCarthy, 24. point five scaramucci's as Speaker of the House. So when you're in and around Trump, you get blown up. Definitionally, bad things start to happen to you. You get excoriated. I said on CNN in December, I was on Wolf Blitzer's show. What do you think is going to happen with Elon? I said,
Starting point is 00:12:06 well, he's going to get hurt. And the hard right came at me and the hard right Twitterati or Xerati came at me and said, I'm physically threatening Elon. and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, actually, guys, I am not physically threatening Elon. I love Elon. Full disclosure, I am a investor in XI, XAI. I was an investor in Twitter. It got converted into XAI.
Starting point is 00:12:32 It's, you know, sort of Twitter merged with GROC now. I have a small investment in XAI prior to that. I have an investment in SpaceX, me personally. I'm very close friends with Antonio Gracius, who's on his board. And I love Antonio. We worked at Goldman together, and I am a huge Elon Musk fan, huge. And so when I said he was going to get hurt, I was basing that on my life experience as a business person going to work for Donald Trump. Because what happens to you is you get a 360-degree shootout at the OK Corral.
Starting point is 00:13:08 The politicos don't like people like Elon. And I'm going to be a number of reasons why. Number one, he's a very rich guy, newsflash, they are not rich people. Number two, you can't control somebody like Elon. He's not a corruptible guy. Like people say Washington is a swamp. I don't see it as a swamp. It's a gold-plated hot tub.
Starting point is 00:13:31 Okay, you go into the hot tub. They look at you and they say, can I buy you, Alex? Are you somebody that's capable of being bought? And they size you up like a zero-one switch in a computer. Bought, not bought. Bought, not bought. Ah, you can be bought. Okay, here's two bottles of crystal. Come sit in the hot tub. Let's smoke a Cubano together. And we're going to talk about how we're going to milk this system to make money for ourselves. But I understand he's the richest person in the world or private citizen in the world. But can't he be bought in some ways? Contracts with SpaceX, contracts with Tesla. He does a lot of government business. I'm just throwing out there for sake of argument. But he's not a corrupt. But he's not a corrupt guy. he has no there's no yes could he want so maybe he's corruptible but not corrupt
Starting point is 00:14:19 no i don't see him as even corruptible he's he's not he's not that kind of a guy he's a execution oriented entrepreneur would he certainly lobby the government for a contract certainly would do that but he's not a corruptible guy he doesn't i mean he could be i don't know him that well i mean he could be but i'm just giving you my impression of him 61 years on planet earth 38 years in business. I don't see Elon as a corruptible guy. And I know the way Washington works, bought, can't be bought, bought, bought, Elon can't be bought. Okay, we got to excoriate the guy. So how are we going to trash the guy? We're all going to trash his businesses. We're going to trash him personally. We're going to leak information on him. Cabinet members are going to
Starting point is 00:15:02 league information on him. Susie Wiles is going to go after him. But I did predict that Trump would never go after him. There wouldn't be a Pyrick demise to Elon. like there was to Steve Bannon or me or Mark Esper or General Kelly because Elon's a loaded guy and Trump got several hundred million dollars out of him to help him win the campaign and he's not going to want to piss off Elon too much. Trump is too smart of a guy to make Elon into an adversary. Now that's a separate conversation. The Democrats, for the life of me, God Almighty, how could you let Elon leave the tent?
Starting point is 00:15:42 That I don't get. You don't invite them to the EV thing. Are you guys crazy? You invite them to the EV thing, even if the UAW president doesn't want them there. Moreover, you leave them in the tent. You let Bobby Kennedy and Elon Musk out of the tent. And I'm going to use a Long Island expression that your Silicon Valley people won't know. You're stu-not.
Starting point is 00:16:04 You know what stu-not means? You're explaining for our listeners. Yeah, well, you're stupid. Okay, you have to Italian guttural phrase for stupid. Okay, but so let me just finish. Yeah, yeah. You don't let Johnson, Lyndon Johnson would have said, keep everybody in the tent. When they got to take a piss, let the elephants piss outside the tent.
Starting point is 00:16:24 Don't let an elephant outside the tent that could piss back into the tent. That was Elon. It was a disaster for them. But I don't see him as a corruptible guy. They didn't see him as a corruptible guy. So they put the herd on him the way I predicted. Again, not a physical hurt, but they went after him, and it was an inside job there. Make no mistake about that.
Starting point is 00:16:44 That was MAGA people. Bannon? Bannon. Bannon went after him right away. From the beginning. Steve Miller went after him. And these are the people that have stuck with Trump from the first term. Also, cabinet members went after him.
Starting point is 00:16:58 They went after him. They didn't like the power. Remember, Washington is not like tech, and it's not like Wall Street. See, you're in tech. And you're on Wall Street, you're on the green team, okay? And just for the demonstration purposes, I'm showing Alex the green, right? Well, that's Swiss money, but, you know, you get the point. Okay, this is green, right?
Starting point is 00:17:18 This is green, see it? There's a red party, there's a blue party, and there's a green party. I'm not talking about the environment. This is the party. And so Silicon Valley, they don't have to play on the green team. They can get along when necessary if this is involved. Same on Wall Street. in Washington, you don't know what's going on.
Starting point is 00:17:38 There's a blue team, a red team, a yellow team. One guy wants to be closer to the president. The other guy's jealous that Elon's traveling with Trump, back and forth to Mara Lago and Air Force One. They start shooting at the guy. And that's what happened. So you just think it was an inside job, basically, that Trump allies who didn't like Elon's vision just said,
Starting point is 00:17:55 just slowly pushed him out of favor with the president. And then these attacks on his companies were orchestrated. Right. I have to think otherwise. You don't understand how it works. They orchestrated these attacks on his companies. What about like what he was there to do? Because his signature project was Doge? Do you think that was a success? Well, I don't think it was a failure. I don't think it was as successful as perhaps as they wanted it to be. I think they learned something that it's harder to cut the government than people that anticipated. If you had said to me, and you can find this in recordings about me, and said, well, Doge, what's going to happen?
Starting point is 00:18:36 He's going to find some things to cut. He's going to find it harder to cut other things. He's going to realize that the government is not a business. You know, it's just a weird thing. It's just like he tried to do the Twitter cuts when the government just didn't work. You can't do that. So he tried to, let me give a newsflash to the Silicon Valley people listening in. The government is not a business.
Starting point is 00:18:57 You don't need a businessman to run the government. You need a policy walk to run the government who can build a consensus and could provide long-term guidance to a government. You've got to move the aircraft carrier slowly. It's not going to turn in the water like a speedboat. And so you have to target things. You know, Clinton understood that. You know, we're going to target the budget, and we're going to get the budget in a certain sequence so that the growth of the economy is going to exceed our spending. And when we get to the end of the Clinton term in 2000, we're printing
Starting point is 00:19:35 a $240 billion budget surplus, last budget surplus at the U.S. printed. So you have to think of the government very differently than a business. You're a conductor. You've got an orchestra. On some days, they want to play from the same sheet music. On other days, they don't want to play together and the cacophony of sounds coming out of the government is very nasty. And it's your job to try to calm everybody down and get them on the same sheet music. It's harder to do today because we've gotten way more polarized and there's a lot more entrenched interests that keep themselves perpetually in power as opposed to serving the people. So Elon's stint in the government very well intended. I think successful. He's pointed out. He's pointed out of
Starting point is 00:20:24 out a lot of mistakes. I think the declarative statements that he's making on X today are evidence of his knowledge and his now worldly understanding of what goes on in the government, which is why he is being so critical. He knows that that spending bill is going to increase the slope of spending at too fast of a rate to the growth of the U.S. economy, which means the deficit is going to widen, which means that we're stealing from future generations of Americans, which is very unfair at this point in our history. It's very unfair to the next two generations coming up in the country. Okay. Can I give you one more explanation? By the way, this is not pro-A-Lan. I'm just trying to like think through what happened with him. It's a very consequential moment
Starting point is 00:21:14 for him to jump into the government. I'll tell you some negative things about Elon too. I'll tell you positive and negative. I'm not trying to be pro-E-Lon. We're doing this as yeah, straightforward analysis. I'll tell you what he got wrong. So, but let me just kind of throw this other idea out there, which is that maybe it wasn't, maybe there were people within the government that didn't like what he was doing. Maybe the Democrats, you know, sort of had it out for his businesses because he had become so close to Trump. But maybe the reason why he's left the government is because Doge wasn't, I mean, he aimed to cut trillions of dollars. He ended up cutting, you know, I think a couple hundred billion maybe. and he went to Wisconsin to try to sway an election.
Starting point is 00:21:54 He failed after spending a lot of money, and his poll numbers were bad. So it's just simple politics. Yeah, well, I mean, but worse than that, worse than that. So Model S comes out. Do you know who Elon Musk is? 70% of the Americans say they know who Elon Musk is. Do you have a favorable opinion of Elon Musk? 70% of the Americans that know Elon Musk say they have a favorable opinion of Elon Musk.
Starting point is 00:22:18 He is the Tony Stark of our era. Most people that know who he is, wow, we're glad he's one of us. He's an American entrepreneur. Half the country has a favorable opinion of it. You ask people now, do you know, we must 90% of the Americans know who he is. 70% of those Americans have an unfavorable opinion of them. So look at the numbers. You've got a 63% negative opinion.
Starting point is 00:22:43 And when you go into politics, that happens. And if he had talked to me, not that he would have, but he had talked to me, I said, listen, you're selling cars to progressives. You're selling cars to people that believe that you are an environmental pioneer. You're trying to help heal this environmental catastrophe that we've created. And so you're a hero to these people. If you're going to side with Trump, and I get why, because the Democrats are out to lunch, they're breaking your balls on SpaceX launches. They're torturing you with the electric cars. company because of the love affair they have with the auto worker unions. And I get why they're
Starting point is 00:23:23 doing that to you. But if you take a chill, this group of Democrats, this older group of Democrats is going to pass. And then you could align yourself with a newer group, like a Rokana group of Democrats, and be a way better experience for you if you decide to become politically active. But he sees the shooting. And God forbid, thank God Trump wasn't killed. in Butler, PA, July of 2024, and he's like, okay, this guy's going to win. That visual picture of Trump with his hand up in the air, blood on his ear, American flag behind him is a winning picture. Let's just be honest with everybody.
Starting point is 00:24:03 Elon sees this. He immediately goes out and endorses him. Sean McGuire from Sequoia goes out and endorses him. And now you've created this portal for other Silicon Valley people who have typically hid their political stripes. There were way more conservatives in Silicon Valley than they were willing to admit to in 2012 or 2016 or even 2020, but now it's 2024. And they're like, okay, the portal's open. There's space for David Sachs. There's space for Chamath. There's space. Mark Endrescent. Mark Endrescent. There's space for Elon. I think Horowitz was there. Then he backed off.
Starting point is 00:24:39 Right. Okay. And so now, but you're with the wrong guy. Let me give you news flash. You're with the wrong guy because this is a transactionalist. It's not just that he's a narcissist. He's an angry guy. He hates himself. And he's projecting that hatred into the society. And he's a divisive guy and he's got ill-founded policies as it relates to economics and ill-founded policies as it relates to tariffs. And I know Elon thinks he's an imbecile. Let me just give you my proof because it's like geometry in ninth grade. Elon thinks he's an imbecile. Let me apply the proof. He's tweeting. He's tweeting about Peter Navarro a couple of weeks ago. He says, he says, Peter Navarro is as dumb as a bag of rocks. And then there's another tweet, which I adored. No, no, I apologize.
Starting point is 00:25:27 I just want to personally apologize to the bag of rocks. Yeah. Okay, so you got to love you love for this. But look at me, the fingerprint of Peter Navarro and Donald Trump on trade in economics is identical. So when you're saying that someone's an imbecile and the person that's identical to that person. That person, therefore, definitionally also has to be an imbecile. So Elon's not a dummy. He knows these tariffs are wrong. He knows they're bad for the society. And he knows this big, beautiful spending bill is actually atrociously ugly, big, but atrociously ugly spending bill and very harmful long term to the interests of America and its citizens, but very good short term for these pigs in Washington, eating at the trout. Yeah. And Anthony, by the way, this is why it's so great to have you here. And folks, this is why I wanted to have this conversation with Anthony.
Starting point is 00:26:22 It's so difficult to speak about Elon's role in politics. But here we have a Republican, former communication director of the Trump White House. Why is it difficult? Because he's a powerful guy. Everyone thinks you're coming in when you speak about Elon with an axe to grind. But that's not you. You're an investor in Elon's companies. And I think that's the right diagnosis, by the way.
Starting point is 00:26:41 I have no axe to grind. I know. That's why I'm glad you're here. I want Elon to go back to work. I think he is literally the quintessential American hero entrepreneur. I think he's a brilliant visionary. I think he's gotten so many things right in his career. This XAI, the GROC stuff, is phenomenal.
Starting point is 00:27:02 It's helped me in my business. It's helped me as a person. I think the stuff he's doing with NeurLink is going to be transformative. There's so many people with disabilities. But we had Nolan Arbaugh, the first NeurLink patient on the show. a couple months ago. Yeah. It was pretty, I've seen four technological miracles in my life, the iPhone, chat GPT,
Starting point is 00:27:20 driving in a driverless Waymo car, and watching Nolan play a video game and beat me in a video game using just his brain. I find that people are nervous about saying things about Elon because he's a powerful guy and they don't want to get in his field of vision and they don't want to cross them. But I'm, you know, my attitude is, you know, I want to be real with people because I think that really smart people are real with people. and then they gravitate to each other. Like, if I've got a booger in my nose,
Starting point is 00:27:48 do I have a booger in my nose, Alex? All clear, Anthony. Okay, but if I had one, I would want you to say, Hey, Mooch, you got a booger in your nose. This is why I could excuse myself and rip the booger out of my nose. And you've got to be with people in life
Starting point is 00:28:00 that are going to talk to you straight, but they're going to talk to you straight out of love where they want to help you. And if anything, I think Tesla's a great company. I think this robotic stuff he's doing at Tesla is amazing. think he heard his brand by going into Washington. And I think there's plenty of time to repair the
Starting point is 00:28:19 brand. The great news about America, F. Scott Fitzgerald got something really wrong. He was a brilliant writer, 100th anniversary of a Long Island novel. The Great Gatsby came out in April of 1925. But Fitzgerald got one major thing wrong, Alex. He said there are no second acts in American life. Very famously said that 100 years ago. We got it wrong. There's hundreds of second and third acts for sure. Tenth acts. You know, Trump is an example of that. I'm an example of that. I don't know your life story, but I bet if you had a shortcoming or a failure, you could pull yourself together and come back from it. America loves the comeback. They want the success story. So if you invite me back in a year, I'll make a prediction on your show. Elon will be flourishing in a year. His businesses
Starting point is 00:29:08 will be flourishing because he's that kind of a guy. But, you know, politics is a rough sportman. And you're talking to somebody who's got tired tracks on his back. Okay, I want to, so now let's talk a little bit about Elon's economic criticism or criticism of this big, beautiful bill, because I think it's important for us also to get into current day policy and current day politics. So big beautiful bill, it's going to increase the deficit, I think, by three to five trillion dollars. Elon says, I'm sorry, I can't stand it anymore. This is on Tuesday. This massive outrageous
Starting point is 00:29:40 pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for. You know you did wrong. He says it will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to $2.5 trillion. I think it's even more than that. And burdened American citizens with crushingly, I think even by $2.5 trillion. And burdened American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt. Anthony, you're a business person. You know, for years, people ignored this mounting debt that the U.S. had. Now I think we're about to hit a moment where the country is going to pay a trillion dollars a year or more, just in the interest payment on debt, which is, I think, close to a fifth of all U.S. government spending.
Starting point is 00:30:21 So can you talk about this brand new consensus, I think, that is emerging in the business world about why all this deficit spending might not be wise? Well, the first thing I'm going to say is buy Bitcoin. That's the first thing I'm going to say. And a lot of people that really analyze and study this understand why. But the second thing I'm – the second thing I'm going to say to you is that this is a fixable thing. But we have a disease now in the system, and the disease is one born from complacency. And so I want to articulate this for your listeners that can understand it because if they're actionable, they can help fix it.
Starting point is 00:31:02 And so what basically happened is Ross Perrault ran for office in 1992. He won 19.9% of the vote. Bill Clinton became the president, but he scared the living daylights out of the two parties. So the two parties got together and created this bone-crushing duopoly. They strengthened themselves in a way that has prevented for 33 years a third party to come on the scene to try to liquidate the extremis of the two parties. parties. And so what ended up happening is they allowed each other to gerrymandar. They gave each other breaks on each other's situations. The fat tails of the extremists of the two parties started to run things. And now they've stayed in perpetual power. So Chuck Grassley, I think he was
Starting point is 00:31:50 like George Washington's great-grandfather, maybe. He's like 900 years old. He's in the Congress. So he'll be there for another 100 years, I guess. Nancy Pelosi's 85. Schumer, 75. Trump on his way to 79. Biden, 81. They don't want to leave. They don't want to leave.
Starting point is 00:32:08 And they're all there in the sclerosis. And to keep the sclerosis going, they pile on the pork and they pile on the spending. And it's an unstoppable train to quote the economist Lynn Alden. And why is this important to bring up? because it wasn't that way. You know, after Reagan did the deficit spending to help bring down the Iron Curtain, George Herbert Walker Bush passed with the help of Dick Gephardt these pay-as-you-go legislation. And pay-as-you-go was a guardrail on the Congress.
Starting point is 00:32:42 He said, we get too much deficit spending. If you want a social program, no problem, have to raise taxes. If you're a Republican, you want to cut taxes, no problem. You have to find something in the budget to cut. But we've got to have guardrails on the system, and Clinton adhered to those guardrails. But this group of drunkards has pulled the guardrails off the system, and they're spending like maniacs. And you can't get the economic growth to track the spending, but they won't stop the spending. And they will tell you that something's been cut, something's growing at 6 percent,
Starting point is 00:33:24 But they had it targeted at 8 percent, and they'll tell you it was cut by 2 percent, even though it's growing by 6. So you have to really understand what they do in Washington, which Elon does, and he's looking at it and he's saying, okay, this is catastrophic for my fellow citizens of the United States. You have to stop what you're doing. Now, the flip side is he also knows you can't pull the rug on people because if you pull the rug on people, it'll be deconsumptive. that could touch off a recession, but you could slow the growth. You could slow the growth, and you could reimpose the pay-as-you-go legislation from the 1990s, and it would take about 20 years, and you could bring the deficit down. Now, that's the bad news for the politicians, because they don't want to tell all the Americans that,
Starting point is 00:34:13 but you can't fix this thing in two weeks. You can't cut a trillion dollars, or Lutnik was saying two trillion, and you can't take the chainsaw out. You're going to hurt people if you do that. But you can set it up so that the growth of the budget slows and the economy outpaces the growth. You could do that and you could fix it. So this bill is an abomination. And what this bill is doing is it's wildly increasing the growth of deficit spending. And you brought this up, Alex, and let's just point this out to people.
Starting point is 00:34:46 If you get a rise in interest rates, you could be spending $1.5 trillion on interest. You're only taking in three and a half to four trillion dollars in tax revenues, okay, max five trillion. You're spending six or seven trillion, depending on what's going on, not sustainable, no way, no how. Moreover, if you have a nutty president that wants to declare war on everybody, he's the Admiral Yamamoto, he's got a Pearl Harbor attack going, Trade War I, has been started by Admiral Yamamoto. Trump. Okay. And he's hitting everybody in a 360 degree move. So he's going after our allies and he's going after our adversaries. In this maniacal way, he's like Orange Moses coming down from Mount Evil with the tablet. He's walking in with the tablet. Nobody understands the tablet. Everybody's afraid of them. And he's got 145% tariffs and tariffs on the penguins and
Starting point is 00:35:50 all this crazy shit that you got to tariff the penguins. Yeah. Well, it's just absolutely. crazy shit. So he's sitting there with the Orange Moses, you know, 10 commandments of tariffs, and people are looking around at the rest of us, the rest of the world, going, wow, this is a disaster for the United States. But he could have said, hey, the Chinese, which is true, they were supposed to buy certain agricultural products. They signed a deal with me back in 2018-19. They didn't live up to it. The minute Joe Biden came in, they stopped obligating themselves to the agreement. And so I need to go back to them in a tough way and enforce that.
Starting point is 00:36:27 But before I do that, let me call my European allies. Let me call my Canadian friends. And let me say, hey, guys, let's team up. And now there's a billion of us and let's go after our economic adversary, China. But you didn't do that. Okay. And so now he's got the Canadians mad at us, all the Europeans mad at us, the Greenlanders are mad at us, the Panamanians are mad at us. It's just totally freakishly irrational and unnecessary,
Starting point is 00:36:55 but he's got a group of sycophants in the room that won't tell him the truth. Okay, so I definitely want to cover tariffs also, but let's just go back to deficit for a minute. I mean, the argument that's gotten the politicians or the people who, the ideological supporters of this deficit spending to the point where we're at now, which I think is not the level of debt we have. The argument that they've made is the U.S. has the reserve currency, So we can just keep borrowing and everything will be fine.
Starting point is 00:37:21 We can print dollars and we can pay it off whenever. But that seems to have sort of crossed into territory where people don't believe that anymore. Yeah, I don't 100% by that. I would say we're not there yet. Okay. I think they're still okay with it. It's still the tallest of the shortest people. Right.
Starting point is 00:37:42 Can't use the word midget anymore. So we'll just say the tallest of the shortest people. Breaking all the rules. You're going to get me demonetized, man. kidding we get demonet it we'll bleep it out i'll be fine yeah let me bleep it out i'm not trying to demonetize you i'm just trying to say that you're the tallest shortest person in the room so we're probably still okay so i don't 100% buy that but we are gonna get to that point okay it's a year two years out on this trajectory and also trump is trying to brexit us from the rest of
Starting point is 00:38:14 the world and so he's trying to cut our air supply with the rest of the world And when the U.K. Brexited from Europe, they became weaker. They became poorer. They have less disposable income in the country and they have really bad morale in the country as a result of what they did. And Trump's trying to do that to us because this is a populist emotionally driven ideas. So if you have big, beautiful spending and you have an American Brexit at the same time where you're trying to isolate us from the rest of the world, you're going to cause capital moving. on the margin to move away from the United States. And the interest rate will go, you keep going further. And then the interest rate will go. That's why Jamie Damon is saying that bonds are going to have a reaction to this because of those two forces in combination. Well, 100%.
Starting point is 00:39:01 Well, he's not stupid. And he should be president, frankly. But he's, he's not stupid. He knows. And again, all of these things are fixable. One of the best lines ever uttered from a presidential podium was in June of 1960. at American University, Jack Kennedy got to the podium and the flowing robe at a commencement address, and he basically said that these problems are created by us. And so therefore, we can
Starting point is 00:39:32 fix the problems. It's not like the earth is opening up and it's swallowing us. It's not a natural disaster. We're creating this as disaster. He was really talking about nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation and he wanted a test ban treaty to stop the testing of these bombs because it was poisoning the water and the air that we lived in. But this is a different thing. This is a catastrophe of mismanagement. This is a catastrophe of political expediency. You don't have people in Washington like Elon Musk who are trying to tell people the truth. And, And they don't want to do it. Right.
Starting point is 00:40:17 And this is the reason why they went after Musk because they know Musk is a truth. Musk is a truth teller. So he's telling you the truth. This is a disaster. And oh, by the way, you know it's a disaster. But you're acting with one indifference because you want to stay in power. Right. Okay.
Starting point is 00:40:34 Let me read to you a response that I heard from a tech CEO who supports Trump and supports these tariffs. And I'm curious to what your perspective is because I think this sort of sums up the ideological backing of why this trade war is happening. He said every nation in the past that's run a really aggressive trade deficit for a long period of time bankrupts itself when you're sending all your wealth overseas such that the overseas and overseas entity can own your property and equity. You're in a very tricky position. What do you think about that? Well, I mean, I think it's a little bit bullshit. I think it's a little bit too simplistic. But it sounds like you think there's some truth behind it.
Starting point is 00:41:16 There are colonel. Look, this is the brilliance of Trump. There's kernels of truth to what he's saying. Okay. But it's a little bullshity. Okay. So understand something. You had to even the playing field. Trump is correct about that.
Starting point is 00:41:30 But understand what America got from the whole experience. We ended the Second World War with 2% of the world's population, 50% of the world's GDP. I got that from Grock, by the way, so you can verify it. And we made a decision that we needed to help the rest of the world. We didn't want another Versailles experience where our vanquished adversaries were impoverished and taken over by Joe Stalin. We didn't want that. So we created the General Agreement of Trade and Towers who made it uneven. We allowed free trade to flow into the United States unfettered by and large.
Starting point is 00:42:10 and we accepted protectionism from other countries. You can read Robert Leidheiser's book, No Trade is Free, to understand the history of this. Now, he would argue the book that that was unfair to the U.S., but the U.S. leadership like Dean Agneson, Truman, et cetera, argued that this would create rising living standards and it would eliminate higher risk of another global conflict because if we're all integrating and eating together at the same table, probably not going to shoot each other, Tom Friedman said it differently. Two countries that have a McDonald's in each country typically don't fight with each other. He said they never go to war, but that's changed. Yeah, the Ukraine and Russia. Yeah, exactly. So that changed.
Starting point is 00:42:53 It was a decent rule, though. But it was a decent rule. So what your CFO or your CEO is saying is sort of true. But you can't change the system. And it's ignoring what William F. Buckley would say to you and others that you are creating the deficit because you're getting a good from the other. country that is of value to you. Moreover, if what this gentleman was saying is 100% true, we would have had a downward shift in our economic supremacy. We would have had a downward shift in the supremacy of the dollar, and we didn't have that. You've had 1980 to today, 45 years,
Starting point is 00:43:40 26% of the world's GDP, 4.5% of the world's population. And so it's evidence that the policies that we in place do work for the country. But we made a mistake. We were fixing the deficit problem at the end of the year 2000, 25 years ago. But then bin Laden hit us right here in this location that you and I are speaking from. We overreacted if we're going to be brutally honest with hindsight now. And we declared war in two different places, spent $7 trillion, killed hundreds of thousands of people, lost seven or ten thousand Americans in the wars, 20-year wars to nowhere, trillions of dollars of spending, decoupled ourselves from pay as you go, and we've now lost the plot. So what he's saying, I agree that we have to right-size things. I agree that we have
Starting point is 00:44:40 to surgically go through the tariffs and make them fair to the American worker. But we don't have to do that and wreck our standing in goodwill, particularly with our allies. We don't have to do that. Okay, we are a beacon for freedom for man and woman kind. Lincoln said we're the last best hope for mankind. It's the most interesting political experiment in the world. The U.S. The U.S. We have 5.7 billion people in the world living under some form of autocracy right now. and we have to be a beacon and an anchor of leadership for the free world. We have to fortify and we have to help them. Now, did we do some things wrong?
Starting point is 00:45:27 Could we have changed some of the protocols at USAID? Certainly. Could we right-size some of the tariffs? No question. But why blow up the whole Apple cart that has led to us having $30 plus trillion of GDP? for a population of 330 million people. Why do that? I think it's absolutely asinine.
Starting point is 00:45:51 And whoever said that, by the way, will come around. Okay, the same way I predicted Musk would get there with Trump, which he's there right now, this person, whoever this person is, invite him on a podcast a year from now. Like, wow. Yeah. You know, he'll come around. Yeah. He'll see what I see.
Starting point is 00:46:11 We should have him back. It was just a sort of newsletter interview, but he should come back again. So I want to take a break, and on the other side of this break, we only have a few minutes left, but talk about one company in particular that you can look at through this lens of trade, which is Apple. And I also want to make sure to shout out your show again. It's called The Rest is Politics, U.S. And you also have a show with Scott Galloway, a limited run, I think, about American men.
Starting point is 00:46:39 Yes, it's called Lost Boys. Yes, Scott and I are close first. friends, and we did a six-part mini-series on what's going on with males, age 18 to 30. We've got to pull these guys out of the depression that a lot of them are in and the lack of self-confidence. And, you know, there's been an attack. Listen, I'm all about making the society fair and having there be more equity in the society, but I don't think we realized what we did to white males in the last 15 years. And guess what? Forty-six percent. of the women in the country voted for Donald Trump,
Starting point is 00:47:17 54% of the white women. And when you ask them why they voted for them, we're tired of our men getting picked on in this culture. And it's had a big impact on men. And so Scott and I did a six-part mini-series called Lost Boys, interviewing a lot of very clever people, sociologists, psychologists, et cetera. And it's near and dear to my heart. I have four sons.
Starting point is 00:47:39 I want them to grow up and be fair and kind to people, but I also wanted to have a lot of self-confidence. Okay, so I definitely wanted to shout that out. Let's take a quick break and come back and talk about Apple. Hey, everyone, let me tell you about The Hustle Daily Show, a podcast filled with business, tech news, and original stories to keep you in the loop on what's trending. More than 2 million professionals read The Hustle's daily email
Starting point is 00:48:00 for its irreverent and informative takes on business and tech news. Now, they have a daily podcast called The Hustle Daily Show, where their team of writers break down the biggest business headlines in 15 minutes or less, and explain why you should care about them. So, search for The Hustled Daily Show and your favorite podcast app, like the one you're using right now.
Starting point is 00:48:19 And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony, so great to have you here. So let's just pick up our conversation. Is it though? I mean, am I blowing up your podcast? I mean, am I going to get you demonetized or something like crazy you can tell me?
Starting point is 00:48:32 Maybe this one video, but I don't care. All right, all right. All right. Yeah, bleep out the stuff you don't want. It's okay. No, I'm not complaining. But I do want to talk to you about Apple because we just talked previously about the trade relationships that we've had an Apple, I think, sort of epitomizes this conversation of like the U.S. creates the IP, makes the products in China. And even if all this stuff is made out, you know, made elsewhere, the U.S. gets the better deal.
Starting point is 00:48:58 I'm curious to hear two things from you. First of all, what do you think about that tradeoff? And then second, you know, one of the most interesting narratives that we've seen people follow that follow this podcast is, the relationship that Tim Cook has had with Trump. So I'd love to hear your perspective on what might be happening there. Well, again, it's very transactional. So when Trump needs him, you'll bring him to the White House. He'll call him Tim Apple.
Starting point is 00:49:24 When he wants to showcase American manufacturing, he'll fly to Texas with his daughter. And they'll tour a factory together. And when Trump feels like he wants to beat up on him because he wants to beat up on everybody, you know, you know, let me give it, you know, Mark Zuckerberg a memo. You can do whatever you want to do and you lay in front of them if you want and the Washington Post can give up their editorial content. It's not going to matter. If he's going to come for you, he's coming for you. There's nothing you're going to be able to do.
Starting point is 00:49:55 There's no push buttons. I mean, maybe you can go play golf with them and kiss his ass on the golf course all day. You know, Shenzhou Abe, May his soul, rest in peace, great guy. Trump liked him. played golf and he flattered him all day on the golf course. I guess maybe that. But, you know, to me, I don't think that's even workable. Just go do your job, practice your business, work as hard as you can. This cat is going to be gone in three and a half years from the system and see if you can work with other political leaders to find people that are more common sense oriented
Starting point is 00:50:32 about the economy and not as vengeful and as short-sighted as Donald Trump. That would be my message to the Apple people. I would also say to Tim Cook, I would say, you've done a really good job, a phenomenal job, post-Steve Jobs, and you had rules. What were the rules? The U.S. set it up. The U.S. let China into the WTO. The U.S. created the trading.
Starting point is 00:51:02 system that we're now living in. And if we made some mistakes, let's correct them. But you can't take a manufacturing company like Apple and bam, bam, bam, change it in five minutes. It just doesn't work that way. So if you need guidance from our government to say, listen, we'd really like to get your factory out of China. We'd like to get it back here to the United States where we'd like to get you into another part of the world. You've got to give them some time to do that. Okay, the same way you gave them time to move it off the shore of the U.S. Can I tell a quick story? I know we're running out of time, but I want to tell the story because it's an illustration of how stupid I am as a person, and it's a good cautionary tale for others.
Starting point is 00:51:46 In 1999, I was 35 years old. I was on Wall Street, and I believed in the lower cost of capital, lower cost of labor ideas at that time. And we were going to offshore manufacturing to lower the cost of the per unit of manufacturing, which was going to benefit the American consumer and benefit the American shareholder. At that moment in time, there was a protest in Seattle. WTO protest. It was the Teamsters and the Turtles. Yeah, the Teamsters and the Turtles.
Starting point is 00:52:22 Ralph Nader went up there, and they said, please do not let China into the WTO. And at 29, I very smugly was like, look at these socialist bozos, what do they know? And they were right, Alex, and I was wrong. And the bozos turned out to be us on Wall Street. And I say this to you with great humility because we should have had a hybrid strategy in place. And we should have said, okay, China, we're going to let you in to help you urbanize some parts of your population to raise your living. standards, but we're going to check a lot of things that you're doing at the door to protect these American workers. We did not do that. Donald Trump is right about that. That was a
Starting point is 00:53:09 shortcoming of the establishment. And I always attribute this to the establishment's indifference born from their very strong duopoly. They weren't listening to the people. So much so that the grandparents and the great grandparents of the Trump supporters voted for Lyndon Johnson, and they voted for FDR, but they turned and switched parties and voted for Donald Trump. So we got this wrong. But you can't blame Tim Cook for this. This was our idea in 1999. This is the rollout of the idea over 15 or 20 years, really ended in 17 when Trump called it out.
Starting point is 00:53:48 So from 1999 to 17, this is what we were doing. And Apple did what they thought was the right thing to do for themselves. their shareholders and their customers. And so I don't like seeing Apple, which is one of the greatest American companies in the history of mankind on its back foot. I want Apple on its front foot, and I want Apple explaining that to the American people.
Starting point is 00:54:13 I want Apple explaining that you want to bring the iPhone back. It's going to cost $3,500 on iPhone. And I don't think we're ready to do that. And I think we need to come up with a plan that's more sensible than this reaction. and everything that we're doing. And I just want to make one last point. You could have said to people, hey, I'm going to give you a 50-year tax abatement.
Starting point is 00:54:36 You know, and here's U.S. federal land. And we're going to build a city. We're going to put plumbing and architecture and a power plant. And we're going to work alongside of you and Apple and Taiwan semiconductor. You guys come back. You come back. We're going to give you this tax abatement. and you're going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs,
Starting point is 00:54:58 and we'll collect the taxes off the taxpayers that you're paying in salary and take the taxes from you guys yourselves. And then we could do something that Clinton always wanted to do, have a sort of omnibus 15% corporate tax, which would help us in places like Ireland and other places like that, create more tax equity in the system. And you could have your cake and you could eat it too. But we got Donald Trump yelling and screaming, flexing, sharp bellowing people, going out
Starting point is 00:55:31 on truth social like a maniac, and he scares the living shit out of these people. And so they won't operate offensively. And so my message to them is start playing a little offense. He's a decaying political asset. He's got three and a half years to go, get focused on who's going to replace them, and make sure you've got money behind smart, clear-thinking people who are going to help your company, help your employees, help America instead of this nonsense that we're perpetrating right now.
Starting point is 00:56:07 It could happen. I mean, it's just going to be tough for them. Like, the idea that they're going to, Apple will make any big changes to their operation doesn't seem feasible to me. It's not even fair, though, but I got to start saying that. You guys say, look, I'm really sorry. Can't do it. This is what you guys told me to do.
Starting point is 00:56:21 We went and did it. Now you want me to do something different. I'm open to it, but I can't do it in five minutes. It's just not going to happen. So if you want to criticize me for something you told me to do, and I ended up doing it, and now you want me to do something different, okay, but I need more than five minutes to reset myself. Yeah, even this whole India thing. It's like they're moving to India, but they have Foxconn that's setting up the assembly
Starting point is 00:56:44 process in India. They're not really moving to India. They're just, you know, sort of stamping. Well, that's a lot of what's going on. There's a lot of tariff washing, right? I mean, the Chinese, they're sending the stuff to Vietnam is getting complete of Vietnam, it gets set over. They're setting stuff, sending parts to Mexico. It's coming through NAFTA.
Starting point is 00:57:02 Yeah. I mean, guys, come on. I mean, come on. Why don't we stop it? We all know what we're doing to each other. Why don't we stop it? And why don't we come up with fairness and some moderation and so that we can set a course trajectory that lasts longer than two minutes? And let's say, okay, this is our 10-year plan.
Starting point is 00:57:21 And this is what we should be doing over the next 10 years, which will help heal the upside-down nature of the deficit spending, right-size some of the entitlement issues, fix the trajectory, and we could do it. But we don't want to do that, and they don't want to do that because they want to stay in perpetual power. Right. And they've got all these lobbyists in there in a feeding frenzy. We didn't get the Citizens United, but that's another effed-up thing that we did, you know, where you got all this money flowing in the politics. possible for the little guy, that we've created the separate but equal democracy. Look at the legislative agenda in the Congress since January of 2010 when Citizens United was rendered.
Starting point is 00:58:05 It's all skewed to big business, big pharma, big food, corporate welfare, kleptocracy. None of it's for the little guys, because the little guys no longer have enough money in the game to swing something. Yeah, terrible. Okay, so we have two minutes left. questions for you. Go ahead. Are you going to go back into politics? The way that you're talking makes it sound like you want to. No, I can't go back into politics. I'm trying to you just said earlier that anyone can have a second life in American life. Yeah, but I'm trying to stay married. I'm trying to have a second life in my marriage. That's okay. I'm running for
Starting point is 00:58:37 re-election of my marriage. You know, my wife literally filed for divorce on me, deservedly so, by the way. During the 11 days? Yeah, well, actually, maybe 10 days prior to the 11 days. Yeah, it was a brutal time. It was a brutal time for us. We love each other, would like to stay married. I got to raise my kids. But yeah, no, I'm, but I'm not a politician. You know, the minute you go into politics, I actually got to start lying. Yeah. You know, I don't want to do that. Maybe not, though. Oh, I don't see that. You got to, the minute you start, you know, when a politician is lying, when his mouth is moving. You know that, right? Yeah, of course. Yeah, of course. Like, what's the second question?
Starting point is 00:59:10 So what's going to happen with Bitcoin? I mean, 100,000 to me always seemed like it was in play. But what happens is this? Because, like, you have the administration. that's running toward Bitcoin right now. This seems like it's the best that it's going to get, potentially. I mean, let me throw that out there and see what you think. Well, I mean, listen, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm a long-term bull on Bitcoin. I don't see the freight train of spending stopping.
Starting point is 00:59:39 And so that's a drunk-driving accident about to happen. The central banks are drunk-driving with the currency. The legislature and the president are junk-driving with the fiscal budget. And so you're going to, you just told me that we're going to print more and more money, and it's going to cause a debt crisis. But doesn't Bitcoin cause a bigger crisis because it removes the power from the Fed? Oh, I see it's the very opposite. I think Bitcoin, if anything, could check the power. Okay.
Starting point is 01:00:08 I think sometimes the person, because of our proclivities towards excess, the person needs guardrails, and the person needs a system in place that they can't control. role to protect them from their worst instincts. And so Bitcoin is, I think, is a disciplinary mechanism. And we'll probably end up having Bitcoin on the corporate balance on the fiscal balance sheet of the United States. We'll probably have Bitcoin as a form of currency, some form of store of value, transfer into stable coins at some point. And I think that you're right.
Starting point is 01:00:47 It sounds like you're a Bitcoin skeptic, and I think people should be. Oh, I'm just trying to ask the questions here that would sort of get to the truth. I think you're right. There's a lot of great news in the system, so maybe it's fully priced, but I don't see it that way. I see it as a very early in the game, and I see Bitcoin as a asset class. I guess the question, let me throw it back to you and your listeners. Okay. Is Bitcoin an asset class yes or no?
Starting point is 01:01:12 If it's not an asset class and it's just another investment, then you're probably right. You know, it's up there in market capitalization alongside of Apple and, Microsoft and below and Nvidia, but it's up there. But if it's an asset class, then it's going to trade to where gold is trading. And gold is at $23 or $24 trillion right now, and Bitcoin's at $2 trillion. And so I'm not, you know, if you bring Saylor on who I adore, I love Michael Saylor, he'll tell you it's the operating layer for the future of money, he'll tell you it's digital property, he'll tell you it's going to $13 million a coin.
Starting point is 01:01:46 He's a lot more confident than me, and let's face it, he's a lot smarter. than I am. I just look at it and say, okay, this is going to be with us. It's getting adopted. And I think it becomes an asset class. I think it's a million dollars a coin. And I have a $20,000 cost basis in it. I'm going to hold it. All right. The shows are, the rest is politics, U.S. and lost boys. You can find them both on your podcast app of choice. Anthony Scaramucci. Great to see you. I hope you come back. Hey, I hope I get invited back. I hope I'll say too much controversy. Not at all. Real pleasure to be with you. I'm a huge fan. Likewise. Strong Island, man.
Starting point is 01:02:22 Strong Island. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. We'll be back on Friday to break down the week's news with a WWDC preview. And then I will be live or coming to you from WWDC in Silicon Valley next week. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

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