Anthony Scaramucci: Elon, DOGE & America’s Fate Under New Leadership (w/ Salim Ismail) | EP #132

In this episode, Peter, Salim, and Anthony discuss the future of the Department of Government Efficiency, how long Elon will last in the White House, and how the new Administration should handle Bitcoin. Recorded on Nov 20th, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice 10:37 | The Path to Solving Debt 33:10 | Bitcoin Set to Reach $1M by 2030 52:03 | Gold vs Bitcoin: Who Wins? Anthony Scaramucci is an American financier who briefly served as the White House Director of Communications from July 21 to July 31, 2017. Between 1989 and 1996, Scaramucci worked at Goldman Sachs's investment banking, equities, and private wealth management divisions. After leaving Goldman Sachs, he founded Oscar Capital Management and, in 2005, SkyBridge Capital. Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University, and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. Pre-Order Anthony’s Little Book of Bitcoin Check out Anthony’s podcasts: The Rest is Politics, Open Book and Wealthion Network Join Salim’s OpenExO Community Join my executive summit, Abundance360: https://www.abundance360.com/summit ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter Reverse the age of your skin with OneSkin; 30% off new subscription orders with code PETER at oneskin.co/PETER _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  Hi everybody, Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moon Shots. In this episode, we'll be diving into the Department of Government efficiencies, Elon, Bitcoin, and the broader effects of the new administration on technology. I'm joined by previous White House Director of Communications and Financier Anthony Scaramucci and Salim Ismail in our normal WTF just happened in tech this week. Views expressed in this conversation belong to individuals expressing them. My hope is that you are open to this conversation and the many ideas put forward for the future of America. You know me, I'm not political. I am pro-technology. I am pro-creating an extraordinary world ahead. For the record, I'm excited about the coming

• 0:45Peter Diamandis?

  four years. I believe it could be a true roaring twenties. Like all things, time will tell. Okay, enjoy this episode. All right, first question. Everybody wants to know this. Mooch, is Elon gonna make it in the White House?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I know you're friends with Elon, so you want me to be as honest as I usually am, or what?

• 1:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, tell me, how many days do you think Elon's gonna exist in this White House?

• 1:09Speaker 01

  So, you know, for politics, I measure things in 11-day units of time, also called a Scaramucci. Okay, so, and you could use it in a sentence, like Liz Truss lasted 4.1 Scaramuccis, right? Or Kevin McCarthy lasted 24.5. Okay, so I think Elon Musk is gonna last, in my opinion, 30 Scaramuccis. That's 330 days from the inauguration.

• 1:35Peter Diamandis?

  That's pretty good. That's 10x.

• 1:36Speaker 01

  Primarily because he's, yeah, because he is the richest person that Trump knows, personally. Okay, now, maybe Putin and MBS are richer, but they're governmental riches. This is commercial riches. And Trump will bite, I know this sounds crazy to people, but Trump will bite his tongue at times. But he heard Elon already. And, you know, you know how he heard Elon, Peter, right?

• 2:04Peter Diamandis?

  Well, he's already started heading towards towards coal and regular gas cars because they're cheaper and more reliable. What else? How else has he done that?

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're saying you're saying you heard him economically. I'm talking about politically. He teamed them with Vivek. Okay, and so Elon is not an equal to Vivek. I like Vivek. I respect Vivek, but they're not equals. Okay, that was a Trump move to stuff Elon a little bit.

• 2:30Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, can I ask, is all of this on the record?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I have the Trump decoder ring, you know, I, you don't even, Diamandis, you don't even have to buy the cereal. Okay, you don't have to dig into the cereal like when you were a kid to get the Trump decoder ring. I have it, and I'll give it to you.

• 2:49Peter Diamandis?

  What's it say?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  So, so you want to, you want to hear how it's gonna go?

• 2:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I want to hear the details. No, this is moonshots and, and, and, you know, listen, Elon in the White House is a moonshot, actually it's a Mars shot, but I want to hear how it's gonna go.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, first of all, you got to start at the origin. You have to start at the origin. Okay, I don't know Elon. You know Elon. Okay, I obviously respect Elon. I think he's a very incredible figure and a brilliant entrepreneur, but, but you have to start at the origin, and it always starts this way. You get punished by Trump. Elon came to visit me. He was on his knees. Okay, you remember those tweets? Or you don't remember those tweets?

• 3:28Peter Diamandis?

  I don't.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  So you get punished by Trump. What's that?

• 3:32Peter Diamandis?

  I don't remember.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  You don't remember those tweets?

• 3:34Peter Diamandis?

  But I can imagine them. I mean, you know, it's all within the-

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no. He was, he was, he was eviscerating, he was eviscerating Elon in 2018 and 2019. And so, because Elon was a Democrat. Okay, and so, the, the, the game changed when Elon went to him and said, I have to leave the Democratic Party because they wouldn't invite me to his EV summit, which was a big mistake. You know, the UAW went to Biden and said, you can't invite Elon to the EV summit. And Biden said, okay, no problem. Meantime, Elon has got more EVs going than anybody else. It was a colossal mistake. Why upset Elon? But you have to understand, it started in antagonism, and this is how Trump's relationships go. If you're in Trump's world, there's one spotlight.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  It's on Donald Trump. He's inverse Reagan. Okay, so what was Reagan? Reagan had a plaque on his desk that said, you can get anywhere you want in life, as long as you don't care who gets the credit. Trump is inverse Reagan. I get all the credit, you get none of the credit. Don't get too famous, don't get too big for your britches, or I'm gonna hit you with a ray gun. And that's what he does. So, you guys are pretty smart guys, right? I'm not as smart as the two of you, but we all know that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and predict a different outcome. So let me submit to you rhetorically and you both answer the question. If there were 40 of us that went to work for Donald Trump, and 40 of us got eviscerated in different ways, and blown out,

• 5:03Speaker 01

  and interacted with the mania that Donald Trump represents, and then we spoke out against him and said, "The guy's nuts", including his former vice president, are you telling me now the new group of people around him are gonna have a totally different experience than the last group of people?

• 5:21Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, people can change. I mean, people can change. Uh, maybe just not that much. So, I am... Listen, I think the data-

• 5:30Speaker 01

  So, I thought this was like, oh, this is an un- Salim, this is an unfiltered, you know, he's got a lot of economic interests here, right? You know, I, you know-

• 5:38Peter Diamandis?

  Hey, so a quick question for you-

• 5:39Speaker 01

  He's telling me that people can change. A guy 78 years old-

• 5:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I'm kidding.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  A guy 78 years old, he can change, Salim-

• 5:44Peter Diamandis?

  So, the probability is you're playing with fire. Um, listen, I am so excited about the next four years, uh, from a technology standpoint, which is, by the way, the, you know, the topic of this conversation. This is our WTF just happened in tech this week.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Well, that's a separate topic, so-

• 6:02Peter Diamandis?

  So, from a technology standpoint, it is-

• 6:03Speaker 01

  So, I'm with you, I'm with you on that.

• 6:04Peter Diamandis?

  So, can I ask you a question? If you were going into this administration, not saying that you are, but if you were gonna go, what title would you like in this administration? I want, I want sort of like, uh, Secretary of Abundance would be mine. Um, Salim, how about you? What do you want?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  I would go after the Doge thing, just because I think there's an unbelievable opportunity to shift things, just not in the style that's going on right now.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Problem with the Doge thing, if you don't know what he says, austerity is a bummer and a buzzkill for everybody. And so, yes, is there on the margin things that can be cut and on the margin, are there things that can be made more efficient? I'm certain that that's true, but I don't see $2 trillion in that budget cutting. You know, I don't see it, and it'll cause a colossal collapse in the US economy. So, I don't see that. I mean, we could manage our way out of the debt crisis, but that would be a 15-year management of it. But, but I, you know, when he say, you know, Peter's the Secretary of Abundance, I see that, but like, the best job, the best job?

• 7:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  Would be Secretary of the Constitution. That'd be the best job.

• 7:12Peter Diamandis?

  Is that what you want?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Because, because you have to understand something. Your prosperity, your life as Peter Dionis has been created by that Constitution. Okay? You're from a family of Greek immigrants. You came to the country, I'm gonna guess, not as wealthy as you are now.

• 7:29Peter Diamandis?

  No, very, very little.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  That's probably true for most people.

• 7:31Peter Diamandis?

  And you're Italian immigrants? Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  I came from Italian immigrants, and, and this country's flat, decentralized system, that's lasted 250 years, you and me, Salim, we are direct beneficiaries of that. So, if you said to me, I was going into the administration, which of course I would never be asked to go into this administration, I would want to be Secretary of the Constitution.

• 7:56Peter Diamandis?

  Uh-huh.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Okay? Because in order to get the abundance right, we have to reframe the Constitution, probably add at least two amendments to that Constitution. And I'll submit to you guys, because you're technologists, we are dealing with an old operating system. That Constitution has 27 amendments. That Constitution should be amended every eight years by virtue of that. We have not had a significant amendment to that Constitution, to the 1965 Civil Rights, Voting Rights Amendment. And so, we've gone 59 years without a significant amendment to the Constitution.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  And that's very, very dangerous. That's not what the founders wanted. And we need to reframe, reset the boundaries of what our checks and balances are. And we got to make, we got to remake the system.

• 8:48Peter Diamandis?

  Salim, I'm going to jump you in here because you know, you came from the two extremes, right? Your family comes from India, which is all about hierarchy. And it's about, you know, where you were born and, you know, what your origin story. The caste system is crazy and you then go to become a successful US entrepreneur. So you've got far more the extreme of any of us. How do you think about that?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  So I agree with, I totally agree on the constitution side. If you could change it, for me, constitution is the software that runs the country and you have to be able to update it. The problem is, is in this political environment, you can't update it very easily. And you've got this whole segment of originalists that are like, oh, let's go back to what the framers were thinking and try and guess what they were thinking. The problem is you can't and they built it in so that you would update the constitution. I totally agree that that's where a whole bunch of things need to start. But how do you update it in this environment? So I think that's a valid starting point.

• 9:49Peter Diamandis?

  It was built, this constitution and this nation was built, you know, 200, 300 years ago, under a very different situation where people were not educated. You couldn't communicate other than, you know, days worth of horse, piggyback horsing across the country. We have representative government and not a actual democracy. So I'd like to be able to vote on issues or assign my votes to Scaramucci here on things dealing with the constitution, to Salim on things dealing with hair growth. And basically change the picture there.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Low blow, low blow.

• 10:29Peter Diamandis?

  I'm sorry, I couldn't.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think this is the biggest. Couldn't resist. I think this is the biggest structural issue. But I have a question. Anthony, when you look at the debt issue, how do you see, forget the politics of it, is there any viable path to solving the debt problem?

• 10:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is definitely a viable path and you guys are close to Elon, I'm not. And if I tweeted this, it's coming from me, so it would be perceived as negative from the Trump administration. But let me give you some things to think about. In the Alan Greenspan book, The Age of Turbulence, which was written in 2007, okay, there was an exposition of what the pay-as-you-go legislation was. And so let me discuss that with you. Do you know what that is, pay-as-you-go legislation? I do not, tell me. If you don't know, I'll give a brief explanation. So Richard Darmen, Office of Management and Budget, he's working for George Herbert Walker Bush. He goes to Bush and says, listen, we had tremendous deficit spending under Reagan.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  We're going to have a peace dividend, the walls come down. We're going to have this peace dividend, but we've got to create some guardrails on the Congress. And so I'm going to propose legislation, we've got to get Democrats and Republicans to vote on it. Here's the legislation, pay as you go. If you want a tax cut, that's fine, but then you have to find something in the government to cut. If you want an increase in social services, that's fine, but then you have to raise taxes somewhere. And so Richard Gephardt worked on this with them, some Democrats actually lost their seats. They passed this legislation. And then we went to war, accidentally, the Gulf War. We had a recession in the United States and they wanted to increase social services.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  And so all of us remember, Bush raised taxes pursuant to pay-as-you-go. Read my lips, no new taxes, but he violated that, right? And he raised taxes. Okay, when Clinton won the presidency, Bush said to him, "Listen, we put this pay-as-you-go legislation in. If you adhere to it, you'll run a budget surplus by the end of the decade." And Clinton said, "Okay." Robert Wright, my old law school professor, wanted to run deficits. He was the Secretary of Labor. Robert Rubin, my old boss from Goldman, he said, "No. Go for the tax increase, stick to pay-as-you-go. You'll send a big message to the bond markets, and we'll get to a surplus in this country."

• 13:00Speaker 01

  So Clinton listened to Rubin. At the end of his term, we printed a $240 billion surplus. And just to remind everybody, the CBO, Nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, estimated that there would be a $5 trillion budget surplus by the end of calendar year 2010. Okay, that did not happen. And the campaign, Bush versus Gore, Gore said, "I want to push that money into the environment." Bush said, "I want to give it back to the taxpayers." Bush won the race. He cut taxes in March. But then, guys, we went to war in October of 2001. It's the first time in U.S. history that we went to war without a tax increase.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  In fact, we had a tax cut before the war, and it started this deficit trajectory that we're on now. So if you want to curb that, you have to restore pay-go. You've got to get somebody like Elon Musk behind it. Yes, he can shave a point here or a point there off of the growth of these governmental agencies. But if you actually put the guardrails in, over time, what will happen is you'll get to a surplus again. Now, could it take 15 years? Salim, yes, it could, but you would stop the exponential bleeding that we're in right now. So I submit to you, guys, you can't cut $2 trillion from the budget. It would be too austere. It would cause an economic collapse.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  But you could put the country on a controlled diet.

• 14:32Peter Diamandis?

  What is the total budget today that you're cutting $2 trillion?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  $6.7 trillion.

• 14:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, so, listen...

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're taking in about 5 trillion in tax revenues, and we're running about a $1.6, $1.7 trillion deficit.

• 14:46Peter Diamandis?

  One question, which is, do you guys agree that there is most likely $2 trillion of fat and unrequired expense?

• 14:57Peter Diamandis?

  In the government budget.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  I don't, I do not, I do not agree with that. I don't think you have that.

• 15:02Peter Diamandis?

  You don't think we can have a fish, you don't think we can have a fish.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  You'd have to really cut entitlements or cut military.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  Could you, could you cut six, seven percent from the budget? Uh, yes. Could you find three to 500 billion dollars of stuff to cut from the budget? Yes, I do believe that.

• 15:18Peter Diamandis?

  Well, that's a start.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Could you cut $2 trillion from the budget without, without causing a colossal contraction in the economy? No.

• 15:26Peter Diamandis?

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• 16:10Peter Diamandis?

  like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of the recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, members reported the following: a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize

• 16:54Peter Diamandis?

  health. If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine, who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter. Saleem, you know, given where we are in the steepness of this curve, when we talk about AI, humanoid robotics, Bitcoin, a whole slew of other technologies, we have the ability to accelerate the US economy significantly. I mean, for me, I think that we're about to enter a period of the roaring twenties, that if we can stop, if we can, you know, really hit on deregulation across a number of industries, if we can increase

• 17:37Peter Diamandis?

  our energy budget across the United States, if we can give people who get their PhDs at our top universities a green cards, they stay here, we increase the intellectual capacity of this nation, that we can have a renaissance that really drives the nation's revenues up into the right, in addition to cuts. I mean, I think this is the most exciting time ever to be an entrepreneur and a technologist. I'm curious, I mean, do you agree with that, that thesis?

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Yes, but I think there's so many structural issues happening, like potential war. I think there's, there has to be a structured path, a glide path to balancing the budget, because otherwise, if we run up, we keep running up debt. And this is the problem that neither party dealt with in the election, is the unbelievable debt cycle, because that, that's an exponential curve in the wrong way. It doesn't matter much else what we do, is you'll, you'll hobble the government and the country so much by doing that, and the whole thing will implode. And that's the, I think, the danger that Anthony's pointing out.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's never worked, though. I mean, so the, the idea has never worked, that 14 years of austerity in Great Britain has left the country weaker, and combined with Brexit, Ronald Reagan understood that, FDR understood that. Austerity does not work, and that type of radicalism at the governmental level. Remember, everybody says the government should be run by, like a business. I can prove to you empirically, I can prove to you through history, that the government should not be run like a business. And it's not a business. The government has to be run... With a public service orientation towards policy and whether people like this or not, the bottom rungs of the people in a society have to be protected by a government.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  And I would submit to you that Henry Ford got this right. Henry Ford was a great social engineer. He told people, "You are going to make enough money to afford the car that you're producing. Moreover, I'm going to make sure you're in a small house with a great school system because I don't want you descending on my Dearborn, Michigan mansion with a tiki torch and a pitchfork. I just don't want that." Okay? And so he understood that good social engineering from the government is aspirational. My dad is a crane operator out here on Long Island with a good union wage, could afford a $16,000 house in 1962. And we could live, it was a small, little hallway kitchen, one regular bath, but five of us lived there very comfortably.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Went to a good public school system and we rose in America. We had an aspirational, blue collar family. Governments have to protect that. You know, Trump got the SALT deduction wrong and to his credit, it wasn't his fault. It was policy that was put on him by the Koch family and by Paul Ryan. But what he got wrong, he now understands. Okay? In December of 2017, when I was still talking with Trump, he said, "What do you think of the SALT tax deduction?" You know, and again, that's a limitation of $10,000 of state income taxes off your federal return. And what I said to the president at that time, "It's going to hurt the economy. It's going to hurt the engines in the economy." He said, "Well, why is that?"

• 20:56Speaker 01

  I said, "Well, these coastal cities, Santa Monica, New York, Philadelphia, these coastal cities need safety nets. They're blue for a reason. Poor people are teeming into the place." Did Sergey Brin, was he super wealthy when he arrived in the United States? Was Elon Musk a multi-gajillionaire when he arrived in the United States? No. And so what you need from your government is you need a platform. Of equal opportunity. We don't want equal outcomes. The three of us, I think, agree on that. We are libertarians. I want there to be Jeff Bezos's, Peter Diamandis's, Elon Musk's. But what we have to make sure, though, the government's got to supply a smart kid,

• 21:39Speaker 01

  growing up in a poor neighborhood, or growing up with a dysfunctional family, at least has a shot at aspirational opportunity in America. So for all of those reasons, you can't run the government like a business, and you can't take a hacksaw to the government. If you do that, you'll paralyze the system, and it'll be very bad for the culture.

• 21:59Peter Diamandis?

  So, and how do you really feel about that?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  You invited me out for Peter. You invited me out for a reason.

• 22:05Peter Diamandis?

  I did, I did. Absolutely. I love it. Listen, so Trump taps Musk to lead the Doge, and then adds as a buddy. It's very funny. One of the tweets that came out is, oh my God, you know, Department of Government Efficiency is getting off to a bad start because it's being run by two people instead of one. How do you think that's going to go?

• 22:29Speaker 01

  It's not going to go well. There's a number of different reasons. Number one, you have to understand something about Washington. Washington has an immunological system.

• 22:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I agree with that.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  What's the immunological system? An antigen comes into Washington, and they recognize it, and then they blow the antigen out. Okay? They discredit the person, they drop opposition research on them, or they grind them. There's four ways to get grinded in Washington. You want to hear the four ways?

• 22:54Peter Diamandis?

  I do.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Okay, way number one is you get an oppo drop. You get an oppo drop. Peter Diamandis, here's the USB, here's all the bad things about Peter's life. Go write that. I owe you a favor, you owe me a favor. Let's get it on the front page of the Washington Post. That's number one. Number two, you grind Peter with a security clearance.

• 23:17Speaker 01

  So you say, "Okay, I really hate Peter's guts. Let me call my buddies that are gonna give him a security clearance and tell him that you can't get the security clearance." They did that to Jared Kushner, grinding, grinding, grinding. Okay, number three, Peter has an asset on his balance sheet that he has to dislodge, okay, to get into the government. Sometimes there's exceptions. Let me find the most painful asset on Peter's balance sheet. Maybe it's his favorite thoroughbred horse. Maybe it's his favorite hockey team. And we say, "Well, Peter, you gotta sell that hockey team, otherwise you can't be the Secretary of Abundance," right? So they have processes to grind you, okay? The fourth way is the front step. They come right at your face and they say, "Peter,

• 24:02Speaker 01

  we hate your guts here in Washington. We don't want you anywhere near Washington." Okay, now, the fourth way never happens. That's never happens. That's a Wall Street thing, okay? So there's three ways, not four. I just wanted to point out that the fourth way never happens, okay? So they're gonna grind Elon. They're gonna grind Vivek. And remember, the Department of Governmental Efficiency is not a department. It's never been created. You would need a vote in the Congress to create that department. You'd have to supply budget. Is it gonna be a cabinet-level department? And if it is, then there's a whole rigmarole that has to go through in the Congress. Just ask the people that formed the Department of Homeland Security. So, you know, this is not something that can happen easily. And him teaming Elon with

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Vivek was a way for sending both of those guys out to pasture.

• 24:53Speaker 01

  All right, now, they'll both probably be mad at me if they listen to your podcast, and they'll be like, "Fuck, Mooch, what is he talking about?" But I know, fellas, I have the Trump decoder ring. I know how the guy operates. If you give me a call, I can tell you what he's gonna do, how he's gonna do it, because it's fairly predictable. It's a fairly predictable Trump algorithm.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Do you think there's some softening between the first term and some of the rhetoric and the second term, where now he can set a legacy?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so that's the hope, right? So let me say it this way. The stock market believes that Donald Trump is going to run the country as a moderate, centrist, center-right Republican.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Stock market believes what Peter is saying. You're going to get mild to massive deregulation, beneficial to biotech, beneficial to banking, beneficial to crypto. Okay, you're going to get policies that will foment peace in the Middle East and the Ukraine. You'll figure out a way to dial down the tension globally. And the market is telling you that the cultural stance that Donald Trump has taken, and don't underestimate the cancel culture in our society, the negative impact that it's had on people. As evidence, my friend Scott Galloway would tell you that men, white men 18 to 36, have a 33% higher incidence of suicide

• 26:20Speaker 01

  than any other group of people. Okay, and this cancel culture has really hurt the society. And this is one of the reasons why you know, women were voting for their husbands, and they were voting for their sons, and they were voting for their brothers in the 2024 election. Forty-six percent of the women voted Donald Trump. Over 50% of the white women voted Donald Trump. When asked, why are they doing that? We're done. We're tired of the cancel culture, and the pronoun usage, and the different bathrooms, and the sports being screwed up by this nonsense that we're doing in the country. So, so for me, there is a shot here. Trump's 78 years old. He's got four years to run. If he's going to respect the democracy, some people think he's not going to.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  His rhetoric suggests that he may not. But if he's going to respect the democracy, why not run as a, why not run the government, I should say, as a transformative, bipartisan figure? He has this unbelievable opportunity. Seventy-eight to 82, transform the country. You know, the guy got shot at, I think on the 13th of July. Okay, where it nicked his ear or something like that. I don't know exactly what happened, but he was bleeding. He was shot at and it was a near miss, a near death experience. God forbid, no one would want that. We don't, we abhor political violence. But one would hope that that type of near death experience would hopefully transform

• 27:49Speaker 01

  him. Maybe he'll sit there and say, I've got four years. I'm going to bring Peter in to learn about abundance, I'm going to bring Salim in to learn about entrepreneurship, and I'm going to push an agenda that's healing and unifying to the country. That could happen, but there's another scenario that happens that could be ugly for the country and it would be sad if it happens.

• 28:11Speaker 02

  What do you think is the worst case scenario?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Oh, I mean, unfortunately, the worst case scenario is he takes the Project 2025 playbook and he begins a process of deportation. So the deportation would be cataclysmic. I would hope somebody like Elon Musk, who's a very smart man, would get in his ear and beg him not to do that because the deportation comes with SWAT vehicles, armored vehicles, concentration camps. It's a, it would be one of the bloodiest cultural exercises and it would ruin the welcome mat that this society presents. Lee Kuan Yew told Graham Allison, the dean of the Kennedy School of Government, the founder of Singapore, said that America will always be preeminent. Why do you feel that way?

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Because of the welcome mat. You can come to America from any part of the world, rich or poor, you can arrive in America and in five short years, you become an American. Maybe it's an Indian American, maybe it's a Greek American, maybe it's an Italian American, but you become an American. It's very, very hard to do that in other cultures, a result of which the balance sheet of intellectual capital that can arrive in America is unlimited. If you graphically deport 15 million people from America, and again, don't go by me, that's what he's saying, that's what Tom Homan is saying. Okay, if you do that, you will destroy the fabric of what this thing represents to the rest of the world.

• 29:43Peter Diamandis?

  So I agree with you, but there are two sides to that equation. Right now, we, you know.

• 29:49Speaker 01

  Be careful, you don't want to agree with me because I'm, you know, I'm on the Trump enemy list.

• 29:54Peter Diamandis?

  No, no.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  And about three, Peter, about three days ago, Trump said I was a major loser on Truth Social. So, how much you think Trump loves me on a scale of one to ten?

• 30:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:04Speaker 01

  I got that at a 9.5, right?

• 30:05Peter Diamandis?

  So, I, I agree with you.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Why is he still talking about me?

• 30:07Peter Diamandis?

  I agree with you on the mass deportation. I do believe there is a percentage of those individuals who are criminals, who should not be in this country, who we should be looking at removing them out of society. I also think, unfortunately, that we send so many people back with a PhD that they earned at MIT or Harvard or Stanford, and then they're exited from the country. Right? It's perverse and in reverse. And so, you know, how do we stamp a, you know, green card, a stapled green card on those diplomas? These individuals who come to the US to get the best education, they, you know, there should be, in fact, not only a welcoming, but like, you know, a requirement for them to stay in country and build their companies.

• 30:50Peter Diamandis?

  You know, we have our, our native Indian Indian here, Salim, and we have, you know, the CEOs of the top tech companies in the US have come from India. It's an incredible engine where we can attract those who have the aspiration and the drive and the willpower to the United States. We should keep those people here, for sure.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  So, listen, we, we, we agree, but you have to understand something. When the leader of the free world and the leader of a country that Lincoln called the last best hope for mankind is using the rhetoric of dehumanization on non-white immigrants of the country, okay? When he's dehumanizing those people and he's talking about those people as us versus them and vermin and they're eating dogs and cats, okay? Very, very bad symbolism for the United States. It just is. It's not, that's not the symbolism, okay, that we should be projecting in the United States. Okay? You can get Trump policies that you may like.

• 31:54Speaker 01

  Without that type of brutal rhetoric that creates Nazis walking around in Columbus, Ohio this weekend, SWAT stickers getting sprayed on synagogues, we don't need that, Peter. We do not need that. I will continually speak out against that. It's totally unnecessary. Yes, it's a rough sport, politics, I get it, but we don't have to go into the realm of hate speech. We just don't have to do that.

• 32:22Peter Diamandis?

  I want to go into the realm of Bitcoin. So you've got a book coming out on December 4th, The Little Book of Bitcoin. You just released a revision of The Little Book of Hedge Fund. We're going to put a link in the notes here for your pre-orders for Little Book of Bitcoin. And today, OMG, we're at-

• 32:42Speaker 01

  Thank you for your help on it, by the way.

• 32:44Peter Diamandis?

  You're welcome, buddy. A pleasure to have contributed in a small way. Today, we're at $94,000 per Bitcoin. And Salim, the bet you took by mortgaging your house and spending it on buying Bitcoin, good move, buddy. Good move. So, 94,000.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Well, my wife wouldn't let me do all of it, but yeah.

• 33:06Peter Diamandis?

  Well, okay, time to mortgage again and put more in. So here's a question, right? So Kathy Wood is predicting by 2030, we'll see 1.5 million to $2 million per Bitcoin. I've seen higher and lower estimates. You know, I remember this great cartoon that had a father and a son talking and it said, "Dad, do you remember when Bitcoin was under $100,000?" You know, and we're seeing that. We're seeing this massive increase. So, Mooch, what's your prediction? What are you feeling? What are you seeing? And let's talk about underlying forces here.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing I want to say is that I didn't see it. I got it wrong. I went to this wonderful event at Singularity University, and I heard Salim speak, and I heard you speak, and you may or may not remember this, but I think you wrote, actually, you contributed this to my book, so you do remember. I met Hal Finney, and he was describing to us what Bitcoin was. And I don't know, was it $100, Salim? $200? I don't remember exactly what it was, but I didn't understand it.

• 34:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Okay, about, like, $300. So I didn't understand it. And so, as Salim said, Michael Saylor says you get Bitcoin at the price you deserve. It took me a long time and I, and I finally, finally got it. I started buying it in October of 2020, November, December. Still a great time. Price for the block. Yeah, the average price for the block I bought was 17,000. I've held every, every coin. I bought more coins in the weakness into 2022. But the reason I'm starting with, I didn't understand it is there might be viewers and listeners to your show that are our age, Peter, that may not understand it or they may be afraid of it. Okay. And so I appreciate you bringing up my book because I tried to write a book

• 34:58Speaker 01

  the way Salim wrote that entrepreneur's book, you know, 10 or so years ago, about what it actually is. So you could open the book. It's not going to intimidate you. You could read what it actually is. And then maybe at the end of the book, I would make the case, this is the best investment of my lifetime. And I would make the case that this is probably still got a 10x in it, I would think. It can get to the market capitalization of gold. And I, what I would say to people is I don't know anyone that's done the homework, Peter, Salim, anyone that's done the homework that hasn't gone towards Bitcoin. I, I've never met somebody who said, you know, Peter, I did a tremendous amount of homework on this,

• 35:40Speaker 01

  hours and hours and hours, and I wouldn't touch this with a 10 foot pole. Paul Tudor Jones, Stan Druckenmiller, Howard Lutnick. I could name a legions of people. Michael Saylor. Michael Saylor told me, and he'll tell you this, Bitcoin is a joke. That's what he said. Okay. It was like 2016, 2017. He started, yeah, early on. He started buying Bitcoin in August of 2020. His first Bitcoin he bought. Yep. 2020. And then he, you know, he got into a conversation with my partner and says, you guys have to buy some of this Bitcoin. You know what he said? Once I figured it out, I couldn't sleep. I couldn't sleep. Once I figured it out.

• 36:24Speaker 02

  I think his framing of do 100 hours of research on it and then see, and it's really an arbitrage on intellect and studiousness is what it is. That's a huge, huge framing it for me.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what I would say to you too, okay, and I would say to your viewers and listeners, please give Bitcoin a chance, okay, and recognize, like me, Michael Saylor, perhaps the two of you and others, we did start out as skeptics about what it actually was, and until we fully understood it, we didn't gain confidence in it as being part of our investment portfolio. Can I tell you a quick Saylor story before we go on to something else because you'll enjoy this? Yeah, I'll be seeing Mike next week. I call Saylor, okay, so I call Saylor and I say, "Michael, I need you to write the introduction of my book." Happy to do it, but I need the manuscript and I gotta

• 37:16Speaker 01

  read the book. No problem. I sent him the manuscript. He calls me late August and he says, "Mooch." I said, "Yes, sir." He said, "You know, I hate the last chapter of your book." I said, "Oh, God, whoa, whoa, whoa." I'm looking through the... He said, "Yeah." He goes, "You say at the end of this book, after you wonderfully explained this thing, and I learned a lot in this thing, actually a lot of stories that you put up, the amount of contributions, all different types of stories, I learned a lot, but your last chapter says that someone should put 2% of their money in Bitcoin. Let me ask you something. How much of your net worth is in Bitcoin?" I said, "Michael, 55%." He said, "55%? Okay." He says, "You're 55% in Bitcoin. So why are you recommending 2%? Let me ask you something.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  You said this is the best investment you've come across." "Yes, Michael." "Do you have 50 other investments that are as good as this?" I said, "No, Michael." "Then why the hell are you putting 2%?" I said, because I have no balls and I'm under great regulatory scrutiny as a registered investment advisor. So we rewrote the last chapter and now the last chapter regals that story. And I say, I'm at 55. The I'm supposed to tell you to be at two, but you should pick a number that's good for you.

• 38:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It's my largest investment. It's my largest asset myself. Salim, where is it fair in your portfolio?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's in it's not for me. It's in the 40% range, 35 to 40%. What I love about it is as time goes by, the percentage of my portfolio represents.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  It's the path man of your portfolio. It's eating up the percentages in your portfolio.

• 38:56Speaker 02

  Fantastic. For me, the book by Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow.

• 39:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Is what nails it. Where he says the we're we're growing the global economy with 4X the debt per dollar increase in GDP. And that just tells you everything you could possibly need to know. And I love the back to the technology framing, which is that when they floated off the gold standard, they did not know the technology was deflationary. And so more advanced technologies cost a lot differ. You could borrow $10 million, build a TV factory, and a year later, those TVs should be worth more or cost more. But no, the TVs are worth half as much a year later. And if you borrow $10 million to to to chase after a deflationary technology, you're never getting your money back.

• 39:42Speaker 01

  It's a it's a good. It's a good point. I mean, so there's so many different reasons to own it. But but I'm grateful for the people like Michael Saylor, who have been great evangelists of it. Grateful to you, Peter. You introduced me to it. Grateful to you, Salim. I confess, I didn't understand it. And again, if you're out there, you don't understand it, please listen to us and take the time to learn more about it.

• 40:05Peter Diamandis?

  You know, Michael Saylor and I were roommates at our fraternity together. Didn't you know that?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, MIT, right?

• 40:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, MIT, yeah. Yeah, I'll tell you some I'll tell you some fun stories when we're not on there. Yes. So, so

• 40:17Speaker 01

  I look forward to that.

• 40:18Peter Diamandis?

  We we hit 94,000 per Bitcoin today. Pretty amazing. Right? I was like, can I move money fast enough a few days ago to get it at 90? No. But the question is, you know, if my if my head of finance is listening, let's still move that money in. You know, when's the best time to buy Bitcoin?

• 40:39Peter Diamandis?

  Now.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, today.

• 40:41Peter Diamandis?

  Today.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  As fast as you can.

• 40:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and I have no interest in it other than if enough people buy it, the price goes up, but that's a different story. You know, where is there any risk that you foresee? You know, we've talked about Salim on previous episodes, quantum computing, breaking various encoding, and whether we can get quantum encryption up and whether that can work. You know, you've made the point that Satoshi's wallet, which is now worth how many billions now?

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Seventy billion?

• 41:14Peter Diamandis?

  Is the greatest...

• 41:15Speaker 01

  No, I think it's more, because he's got 1 million tokens and we're at 94, it's 94 billion.

• 41:21Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, you can think of that...

• 41:23Speaker 01

  It's 1 million times 94 dollars.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  When that gets hacked, then it's time to work.

• 41:27Peter Diamandis?

  It's the greatest X Prize ever. If you can achieve hacking Bitcoin, you get 94 million, billion dollars.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  But, but hold on, this is an important distinction here, is you could hack the wallet, right? You could get somebody's private key, but that doesn't break Bitcoin.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  Right? So, quantum encryption may solve the encryption issue, but it doesn't solve the distributed nature of the token. So, you have resiliency at two levels there.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Well, here's what I would say to both of you guys. I would say that one thing that I would worry about, and this is an existential thing, is we, you know, listen, I, you've got people in the Scandinavian region of Northern Europe preparing themselves for nuclear war, okay? And so, we know that. Vladimir Putin has changed his rules of engagement in terms of using a nuke. And so, you know, if we're going in that direction, it's going to hurt Bitcoin, it's going to hurt other assets, and it will put us in a situation, an unknown situation.

• 42:31Peter Diamandis?

  Why?

• 42:32Speaker 01

  You know, and so, what I would say to you...

• 42:34Peter Diamandis?

  Here's my question, I understand, if the world was going to hell in a handbasket, I would imagine that for some degree, because you can't eat your Bitcoin, you can't eat your gold, it's better to have a farm, but to some degree Bitcoin would seem to be the most protected asset across national boundaries. And why isn't disruption in economies and governments increasing the price of Bitcoin for security purposes?

• 43:04Speaker 01

  So, it's not, it's not... It's not about increasing or decreasing it. It's about your quality of life and it's about your ability to use it if you needed to use it. Because if you've destabilized the global order to the point where we're irradiating each other on the planet, that is an existential threat to every part of your asset portfolio. And that's an existential threat to your standard of living and your great grandchildren's standard of living. And so we've been able to avoid this since the 1940s because there have been rational actors in control of these warheads. And you can't, you have to pray that a regional conflict.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  You see, the Europeans see the conflict differently than us, guys. When you go to the European capitals, what do they say to you? Well, you know, Hitler walked into Poland in September of 1939. Okay, and it took one year, but he ended up in France and he ended up in, he ended up in France in June of 40. And he ended up bombing the UK in September. And what I would say to you guys, Finland and Sweden were not members of NATO for 74 years. Yet in the 75th year, they raised their hand and said, look, we'd like to join NATO. And so there's a, there's a, there's a threat going on.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  And if that threat is nuclear, okay, yes, maybe your Bitcoin would go up because of the instability, Peter, and I accept that. But you're going to have so many problems and I'm going to have so many problems. Aline, the people listening, okay, we have to, to get to the world that Peter wants. And you've written some amazing books about this and I often cite your books. But to get to that world of abundance and get to that world of technological advancement, where we're deepening the wealth of everyone, and I'm talking about lower middle income people.

• 44:58Peter Diamandis?

  Uplifting all of humanity.

• 45:01Speaker 01

  Uplifting all of humanity, the first thing we have to do is not kill each other. That's the number one priority. So if you, we have to be engaged in civil discourse, rational discourse. Okay, the, the bellicosity of Donald Trump's rhetoric. Is not beneficial. It just isn't. We can pretend that it is and we can make allowances for him, but we can't do that. Any more than we can accept that we're going to lower the threshold for nuclear weaponry deployment in Europe or potentially in the US. You've got people on national TV in Russia talking about blowing up London.

• 45:39Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode to talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life and it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day when you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time, but because we never look, we don't find out. So what we built at Fountain Life

• 46:23Peter Diamandis?

  was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics. We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics

• 47:07Peter Diamandis?

  that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life and we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people who reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends. It's a chance to really add decades on to our

• 47:49Peter Diamandis?

  healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode.

• 47:59Speaker 02

  There's this America First approach, Anthony, that is, for me, a threat to the hegemony of the dollar, right? Because if you stop being the world's policeman, there's a higher chance that people stop using the dollar. Do you see that correlated and do you see that as a real threat?

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Of course I see that. So of course I see that correlated. I'm going to recommend a book to both of you called America First. It's by H. W. Brands. And America First is the first America First movement, which was a hostile movement started by Charles Lindbergh and Father Coughlin, U. E. Long. And anytime you move in that direction, you create legal instability. Okay. And so if we're going with America First, and the America First movement challenges the system, this unbelievable legal system that's very predictable in the United States, the property rights of the United States, you know, you have impractical and unpredictable

• 48:59Speaker 01

  property laws in places like Russia and China, because you don't have a dispassionate legal system. Okay. And so you don't have the legal precedent to protect you, no matter who the ruler is. And so if you move in that direction, you lose dollar hegemony. And let me provide a quote to you from the Leviathan. 350 years ago, Thomas Hobbes wrote the following paragraph, and I'm paraphrasing, but you'll get it. What Hobbes said, that the world has its greatest level of peace. When one hegemon, when one hegemon with military superiority over the other nations,

• 49:38Speaker 01

  uses the force of its military might to put down the internecent conflicts around the world. So in other words, it's a force for good. Pax Romana, Pax Britannia. Whatever the vagaries are of the colonialism and stuff like that, I'm just talking about the military suppression. Okay, Pax Americana. And so what Hobbes said 350 years ago, they teach at West Point, and they say that we need to be a force for good. You know, when Trump was talking about the, why aren't they paying their fair share? I was on the campaign plane with him in 2016. I said, Mr. President, I want to provide some historical context. Our military leadership actually did not want them to pay their fair share. And he was like, man, what the hell are you talking about?

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Why is that? They wanted military hegemony. They wanted military superiority. They did not want Germany or Japan to rearm after the Second World War. And so even though we had that treaty in 49 related to NATO, they allowed them to have that laxity so that we could be a form factor of 10 over the other people because we saw ourselves rightly or wrongly as a benevolent democracy. Okay, and so, yes, that whole idea, that rhetoric threatens that position. Okay, and so, so that's why I want to be Secretary of the Constitution.

• 51:05Peter Diamandis?

  I think, I think that world safety and predictability and stability, I think no, everybody believes that is, is key. Let me share this, this quick video here. This is, so Anthony, you're going to be on stage with me in March at the Abundance Summit. We have a two-hour session on.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Big, big honor to be invited there. Thank you.

• 51:29Peter Diamandis?

  A pleasure, buddy. And Kathy Wood's going to be with us as well at the summit in, in early March. Let me play this quick video of Kathy and let's talk about it.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  We have a 2030 target. In our base case, it's around $650,000. In our bull case, it's between $1 and $1.5 million. Now, remember, we were the first public asset manager to gain exposure to Bitcoin in 2015 at $250,000. And we still, at $90,000, I think we have a long way to go.

• 52:03Peter Diamandis?

  All right. Thoughts?

• 52:05Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I not only agree with her, I admire her because she was shaken to the core by the financial media in 2022, and she was unwavering. And I'm also an investor. I will fully disclose to you, I'm an ARK investor. And so I have a lot of admiration for her. But I want to point out something to you. What she's talking about is insignificant in terms of the overall global market capitalization of assets. So let me just explain that quickly.

• 52:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, let's do that. Let's do that. That's important.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  Let's use the $18 trillion number, which is what the total capitalization is of gold. And let's stipulate for viewers and listeners that gold is perceived as a store of value by people around the world. Okay. But there's, you know, tens, hundreds of trillions of dollars.

• 52:53Peter Diamandis?

  Do you still own gold?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Do I own gold?

• 52:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  I don't own gold. I don't own gold. But many people our age, Peter, do own gold.

• 53:01Peter Diamandis?

  Do you know what I own?

• 53:02Speaker 01

  And gold is at an all time high.

• 53:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I went back in 2008. This is pre my abundance mindset, exponential mindset. 2008, when the economy is being hit by the housing crisis and all, these predators will call you up and say, hey, you need to buy gold. You need to buy gold and have it available. And so I bought like, you know, a few ounces of gold just to have them in the safe so that if I ever, if martial law came in, I need to go and, and trade gold for, for, you know, food that was available. And, you know, I went on, I went on TV, it was, I forget what it was, CNBC, I think, in 2014 and 2015, say, sell your gold, buy Bitcoin.

• 53:47Peter Diamandis?

  And I wish I had sold even more and bought only Bitcoin. So 18 trillion dollars and what's the total market capitalization of Bitcoin today?

• 53:59Speaker 01

  So it's 1.9 trillion. Yeah, just under two. Yeah, okay, just under two, okay. So, you know, forgive me because this thing's updating every moment, but let's say it's 1.9 for the sake of this argument. If it goes 10x, it becomes an equivalent in the overall asset tabulations of the global capital equivalent to gold.

• 54:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 54:24Speaker 01

  And so, you know, we know that technology, the portability, the immutability, the scarcity of Bitcoin, it should trade to a higher multiple than gold. And that's why Kathy's saying her bull case, one and a half million, you know, would get you to the 25 trillion dollar number. But here's the thing that I would tell listeners. At 18 trillion, it's not even a pimple on the ass of the global economy. Does everybody understand that? Yeah, gold has a 1%, 2%, 3% asset allocation, big deal, central banks own gold, but we're talking about something at 18 trillion dollars that is a non-event in terms of the overall capital allocation.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  But let me tell you what's going to happen because I spent 35 years on Wall Street, less my 11-day fiasco in Washington. But let me tell you what's going to happen, okay? These people are going to sell this idea to their investors. The great Wall Street sales machine, we suck at so many things on Wall Street, fellas, but selling is not one of them, okay? And there are legions of financial advisors, there are legions of financial consultants, there are PowerPoint presentations coming out of Fidelity and BlackRock and PowerPoint presentations coming out of Galaxy that are absolutely legendary and you're going to get people off zero.

• 55:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Okay, now, before you came on, Peter, Celine told me, and I don't know the answer to this, but Celine told me that he thinks approximately 20% of the Bitcoin has gone missing as a result of early adoption, somebody lost their hard drive, somebody lost their laptop. So, I don't know, so let's say that's three and a half to four million Bitcoin. So you're telling me, because we've got to mine it over the next 100 years. Let's say there's 19 million that we think is out there. 4 million is gone. We have 60 million global millionaires. We have 15 million Bitcoins. So, you know, you tell me what's going to happen.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Okay, I believe that this asset will trade to that million and a half dollar number. And if you get the regulation right in the deepest, most liquid capital market in the world, the United States, we have a very friendly crypto congress coming in and a crypto president. Okay, I think this stuff happens fast. And can I say one last thing is very important.

• 56:54Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  We're at prices right now that we should have been at in January of 22. This got suppressed by Gary Gensler. You had a approval of the Bitcoin futures ETF. The administrative law required you to approve the cash ETF right away. We didn't do that. We had to have a lawsuit with that man. And here we are now.

• 57:18Peter Diamandis?

  All right, so let's react to this Washington Post headline here. Trump Eyes Pro Crypto Candidates For Federal Financial Agencies. Do you know these folks here, Anthony? What do you think of them?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I do. I know Hester very well. I know Dan Gallagher. I've been on television with Dan Gallagher. Christian Carlo has come to my conferences. I worked with the man Gary Gensler at Goldman Sachs. Paul Atkins is actually one of my best friends from high school. Went to law school with Paul Atkins. So yes, I know those people very well. We know that Gary is obviously, you know, surprising because he did teach a class at your alma mater that was pro Bitcoin, pro crypto. But he decided politically he needed to be anti crypto. One will someday have to ask him why because he knows the tech, the promise of that technology. But those other people will be very good for the industry.

• 58:17Peter Diamandis?

  And here's a Fox News article here that said Pennsylvania House introduces bill to implement a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Talk about this one.

• 58:27Speaker 01

  So this is monumental on so many different levels because what they're basically telling you is that this is going to be important strategic asset globally. And they are looking at this thing. And if Kathy Wood is right, and I believe she is, you're going to buy a dollar at six cents right now. If that thing goes to a million dollars, I predict it will, you can buy it at nine cents, ninety or 0.94 cents. And so, yes, I think that will be the first of many. There will be a avalanche of corporates, an avalanche of sovereigns,

• 59:09Speaker 01

  an avalanche of states that do exactly that. And by the way, the state of Wisconsin, this is a beautiful story, they put $150 million into IBIT, the BlackRock ETF. And then the guy was asked, well, why the hell did you do that? He's saying, listen, if you're not long Bitcoin, you're short Bitcoin. Someday, some consultant is coming into my office, and they're going to tell me that I need to own stocks and bonds and hedge funds and private equity. And they're going to say, you know, you need a one or 2% position in Bitcoin. And I'm going to be like, short Bitcoin. Why not own it now? And so when they eventually get there, I've already got my position at a lower cost basis. And so that's, that's also happening, guys.

• 59:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So, Liam, where's this going in the long term?

• 59:51Speaker 02

  The stat I saw that I loved was if, if you put 1%, if 1% of the Fortune 1000 puts their treasury in Bitcoin, just that drives it to a million dollars of Bitcoin. And I think there's a bigger picture here, which is that there's about 600 trillion in global assets, but half of that is real estate.

• 1:00:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yep.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  And so in that, Anthony is absolutely right. There's like, gold is still a couple of percent on that. It's on that. It's a dot. On that whole picture.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  I said it was a pimple on the ass of the economist. I'm trying to be graphic for you.

• 1:00:24Speaker 02

  I'm trying to be, I'm Canadian, so I'm a little more polite. Is that you can, it's just got so much range to go. And in the absence of anything else, a true deflationary, limited scarcity model like this gives you unbelievable upside. And again, 15 years later, nobody's found a way of hacking it. And even the guys that I know that built Cosmos and built Ethereum and so on are like, you know, we first hated the proof of work thing, so we built proof of stake networks. Now we see the proof of work as a really powerful foundation. Because the act of doing the work just gives you so much confidence in the foundational aspects of it. So just watching the, the, the kind of, the dominoes topple everywhere that I can see around this.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  It's

• 1:01:11Speaker 01

  unknown to the majority of the people. Okay, I went to a 35 year reunion at Goldman Sachs. I started there in August of 1989. They gave me five minutes to speak. I said, guys, I just want to do a survey. How many of you in this room own Bitcoin?

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  Nobody. How many of you have kids that own Bitcoin?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Maybe three or four. And there was 150 people in the room. And so it's so early. And it's so scarce. Okay, and then when somebody says it's rat poison, Buffett says it's rat poison, it's rat poison scare. But ask him, has he done any work on it? Does he understand the technical properties that you've described? Does he understand where it fits in terms of the Neil Ferguson checklist of how we think about money and stores of value? Okay, this thing is technologically perfect for that. And that's not my quote, that's Michael Saylor's.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  And I'm just saying, but people, what you just said, there's only 5% global adoption. This is where Web 1 was in 1999. What you just said, 95% of the available investors does not know.

• 1:02:31Peter Diamandis?

  Let me give an example here.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, Peter, go ahead.

• 1:02:34Peter Diamandis?

  No problem. I talk about what I call the six D's, which is a way to think about and predict the impact of technology on different industries. Anything you can digitize enters a period of very slow deceptive growth and eventually disrupts. And along the way, it dematerializes, it demonetizes, and it democratizes. Right? So we've seen that the first 3D printers were these little cross-linking with ultraviolet light stereolithography. And it was very slow and very deceptive in the beginning. And now we're 3D printing entire rockets, we're 3D printing homes, you know, it's disrupting industries.

• 1:03:16Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the Kodak digital camera that was devised in Kodak Labs was, you know, .01 megapixels originally, then .02, then .04, and .08, all looked like zero. And Kodak ignored the digital camera, and it put them out of business when it digitized, you know, and dematerialized, and then democratized, where, you know, these things, we have happy snaps now in the trillions. And so what we're seeing here is that Bitcoin is in the same area. It was deceptive in the very beginning, right? When it was going for, you know, pennies to dollars, 300 bucks, it was insignificant. Well, guess what? It's now at $100,000, almost there. It's becoming disruptive.

• 1:04:00Peter Diamandis?

  And it has dematerialized our financial systems, dematerialized banks and traders and exchanges, and it is being, it's democratizing access. So I think this is just one of the normal transitions that we're seeing in this exponential Potential growth curve across industries. Salim, I am curious, a decade from now, is Bitcoin something which is what nations are basing their reserves on, what companies are basing their reserves on? How fast are we going to see this transformation?

• 1:04:41Peter Diamandis?

  And there is a, there is a point at which it flips, in which you need to have what you're doing based on a Bitcoin platform. When do you think that's coming?

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  Every Treasury Secretary in the world is looking at this now, right? And every Fed and every central bank, they can't not look at it. At some point, the braver ones will start over. And then you're right, there will be a flipping point, and then the whole thing will go. I was asking Jeff Booth about this, right? Because the key question is, when do we hit that little tipping point? He's like, which snowflake creates the final snowflake that has the avalanche come down? It's hard to predict that one. All you know is the avalanche is going to happen. And so you basically bet on the avalanche on that sense. I think this is, I would take, I would say it takes about another year or two in the middle of some of this uncertainty we're dealing with. And people go, oh, my God, I have to be in it. And then it'll just start a cascade from there. That's my rough guess.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  You know, I agree. I guess the only thing I wanted to say from a example point of view is you are going to have a permissionless base transfer of wealth system. And so when I went to Rome for the first time, I was 21, it was 39 years ago. I waited in line at the post office to buy a calling card to call my mom. It was 15 US dollars, okay? And it gave me five minutes of calling time, $3 a minute. Now I can go to Rome, I can log into any internet cafe, and I can FaceTime my mom for no dollars a minute.

• 1:06:18Peter Diamandis?

  Or any wifi.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  And so to understand what Yeah, so what's going to understand, well, understand what's going to happen. You have $7 trillion that we're spending globally to verify transactions, to codify transactions, credit card fees, wire fees, all different types of ancillary third-party verification that ends with this cryptology, that ends with this blockchain. And said differently, two guys came to see me from El Salvador, economic advisors to the president. They said, if we can set up a wallet-to-wallet transfer, we have 15 million expats in the US, they want to send money to their parents or family, they've got to go to Western Union.

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  10 cents on a dollar goes to Western Union, so if a thousand, they're all unbanked, guys, they're all unbanked. 10 cents goes to Western Union, 90 cents goes to mom and dad. They would save $400 million a year with a wallet-to-wallet transfer, okay, over the blockchain. So you guys know, because you're technologists, when it works better, it's more efficient and it saves money, it gets adopted. Even if the government doesn't like it, the government hated Uber, who liked Uber? The people liked Uber.

• 1:07:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I talk about countries that made Uber illegal as the anti-technology nations you don't want to start your startup in. We're seeing a-

• 1:07:50Speaker 02

  Can I do a quick side story on Uber?

• 1:07:53Peter Diamandis?

  Of course.

• 1:07:54Speaker 02

  Just for the heck of it?

• 1:07:55Peter Diamandis?

  Of course. I'm going to, by the way, I have Travis, the founder of Uber, is going to be speaking at Abundance 360 as well, and we're going to be talking about Moonshot, so you'll have a chance to ask him or tell these additional stories.

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  So, so a few years ago, one of my community members says, hey, can you help me? I've got a meeting with the Finance Minister of France, and I would love some guidance. I'm like, yeah, what's he going to meet about? He says, yeah, he's only, he's got one question, which is, how does he shut down Uber? Because the taxis go on strike, the buses go on strike, the airport goes on strike, the president yells at him, his life's a mess. So he's like, I need to figure out a way of shutting down Uber. So he did five minutes of research, and around Paris, you have the banlieue, the suburbs of North African horrible drug crime-infested neighborhoods. It turns out the French government has spent $40 billion over the decades trying to solve that problem with zero outcome. Except over the 18 months previous because of Uber, prime rates have dropped 10x because

• 1:08:54Speaker 02

  they're all are driving. So, so this guy's trying to shut down the thing that's saving him a $40 billion problem. And those are the little ancillary benefits that people don't see when you see this type of systemic change.

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  It's incredible.

• 1:09:09Peter Diamandis?

  How, how do you think about the age curve for Bitcoin adoption, Anthony? I'm, you know, is it something that younger adopt it faster? Is it a generational issue right now?

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  No, no question. Our generation, me and you, okay, I don't know how old Salim is, but you're an old bastard, as am I.

• 1:09:35Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, you look fantastic. What, what are you?

• 1:09:38Speaker 01

  I'm taking all the supplements you gave me 10 years ago. You know, I'm 95 years old. I think I look great for 95.

• 1:09:44Peter Diamandis?

  You're amazing.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  And by the way, I, you know, my face is pinned back. Salim, my face is pinned back like Joan Rivers. Okay, I've got enough, I've got enough botox in my face to kill a snake. You follow what I'm saying? But, but I, but I am taking the Peter Diamandis cocktail of supplements that he suggested to me about eight years ago, just so you know. But, but, but I, I think our generation is going to miss it. Frankly, again, like I said, 6% adoption globally. If you're 60, you're not buying Bitcoin 20 years from now at 80. And I think our generation is going to miss it. Some people will get it. There are people in our generation, Howard Marks told me he hated Bitcoin. Obviously the CEO of Oaktree, multi-billionaire, but his son got him into it.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  So there will be a group of people from the 30 years junior to us that knock on the melons of their parents and say, hey, I don't know what you're doing, but you have to have some of this in your portfolio.

• 1:10:40Peter Diamandis?

  I asked my mom, God bless her, she's 88, and I said, where are you putting your distributions? And, you know, show me your portfolio. I said, you gotta put it into Bitcoin. Mom, please do that. And she calls me back and she says, my financial advisor, Morgan Stanley, won't allow it. And they don't have a mechanism for doing it. And I'm like, that's, that's immoral. I mean, it pisses me off. I said, change financial advisors.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  You know, there's something happening in the younger generation that is really fascinating because I've been dragged into this entire NFT world over the last. Two, three years and you sit in these Discord channels where they're trading NFTs and now trading ordinals and whatever. And what's fascinating is you never, ever, ever, ever hear the word US dollar. It's all Ethereum or it's all Bitcoin. So the unit of account for this next generation is not tied to the dollar. For us and everybody older than us, the only thing we ever knew was the dollar. And therefore, there's something really big because a mindset shift is that that state change is going to allow them to be flexible as to what they view as where their stores of value are. I think that's a game changer for the next generation.

• 1:11:49Peter Diamandis?

  I have a question for both of you guys.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  I, I agree with that. You go ahead.

• 1:11:53Peter Diamandis?

  So I remember in 2017, as Bitcoin was peaking back then, everybody was buying and trading shitcoins 24 hours a day, right? It was, and I, I looked in my, my treasure, you know, hard wallet and said, I have all these coins, you know, half are dead, a few are still sort of like, barely alive. What do you think about anything other than Bitcoin? What do you think of Ethereum? What do you think of other cryptocurrencies? Is there anything else worth looking at?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  You know, so listen, I, I, I'm a big believer in Solana as a, as a utility token, as a layer one utility token. It's, it's got properties I like. It's very fast, low gas fees. It's easy to build on. It has a big TVL, big community. And I imagine a day, to Salim's point about, we lived in a dollar-based world, but now our kids don't live in that world. I'm going to imagine a day, five years from now, where this phone that I'm holding is going to have a tokenized version of my Disney stock, a tokenized version of Walmart, a tokenized version of Starbucks. It'll likely be on Solana. I walk into Starbucks

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  and they say to me, hey, we're having a share repurchase going on here. And so that $4 coffee, we're going to give it to you for $3.50, but can we take a sliver of your stock out of your portfolio from your phone? Or the same thing could be happening at Walmart or Home Depot. And I think that stuff is going to happen on Ethereum or Solana. Okay, but I like Solana better because I just think Solana is a better mousetrap for speed and for cost. Now, you guys know, there was Ask Jeeves, there was AltaVista, there were all kinds of search engines to get access to the internet before Google showed up. And so maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's something out there that's going to be a

• 1:13:54Speaker 01

  better operating system than them. But I do think that over the next 10 years, I think they will do well.

• 1:14:00Peter Diamandis?

  Salim, how do you think about Ethereum, Solana?

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I've got a slight extension to that, which what I'm hearing right now, talking to the various folks in the crypto trading world, is you're going to have Bitcoin for being safe, you're going to have meme coins for gambling, and the utility tokens become less relevant from a gambling perspective, but much more relevant from a solid bet on certain use cases, as Anthony just mentioned. So I think you end up with three categories: meme coins to do, you know, trying to get 100x on something, the utility tokens where people are excited to have Filecoin because of that use case, or Solana for payments or whatever, and then Bitcoin is a safe place to be.

• 1:14:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's worth noting Dogecoin surged 150% since the election day, right? So Dogecoin spikes after Trump announces Department of Doge.

• 1:14:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, I mean, that's Elon. I mean, that's his gift. You know what I mean? Listen, I mean, the guy is a brilliant guy. He's going to out-AI all the AI people. You know, he's gonna, he's gonna out-bore the tunnel people.

• 1:15:09Peter Diamandis?

  But he's done it over and over again. He's done it over and over again.

• 1:15:14Speaker 01

  No, no, he's the man. Listen, he's, he's the man. I guess my only thing with Elon, I'm not a friend of his, but my only thing with Elon, we all have blind spots in life, and you are an ancient Greek, Peter, and you know that the gods have gifted us with many different things, but they take certain things too from us. And I'm telling you,

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  You gotta be very wary of Donald Trump because he's hurt a lot of people, a lot of, forget about me, there's a lot of people in his wake. And Elon has got a great life, he's built some amazing businesses, and I know he wants to help the country, I wanted to help the country, and I wish him well, and I hope he'll be unbelievably successful, but you gotta be careful in the midst of that man.

• 1:16:00Peter Diamandis?

  Real quick, I've been getting the most unusual compliments lately on my skin. The truth is, I use a lotion every morning and every night religiously called OneSkin. It was developed by four PhD women who determined a 10 amino acid sequence that is a senolytic that kills senile cells in your skin. And this literally reverses the age of your skin, and I think it's one of the most incredible products, I use it all the time. If you're interested, check out the show notes, I've asked my team to link to it below. All right, let's get back to the episode. By the way, I think it is worth noting that Elon's points of view here, he honestly believes them, right?

• 1:16:42Peter Diamandis?

  I don't see these as, maybe I'm naive, but I don't see them as manipulations. I mean, he honestly believes that, you know, X was required to enable truthful conversations. He honestly believes that Tesla is important for a global electric economy, that SpaceX is gonna make us a multi-planetary species. He's got enough money, he's driven by doing things that he finds meaningful. And so I was surprised by his jumping into the election as much as he did, I mean, he bet everything, he went all in.

• 1:17:16Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, listen, again, he helped Trump tremendously, particularly in Pennsylvania, and I want him to help Trump, you know, I hope, I hope Trump listens to him. You know, the problem with Trump, though, if Elon gets a little bit more famous than him, or blah blah, you know, he's gonna hit with the ray gun, that's what happens. You know, Trump said something the other night, and I laughed, he was at the America First Policy Institute dinner, and he said, "Bobby, Bobby, you're getting more famous than me, Bobby, don't get too famous." And that's the, that's the sentence before he hits you with the fucking ray gun, you know, I mean, that's the sentence, you know? And I've seen him do it to so many people, you know? So I hope, I hope that doesn't happen.

• 1:18:00Speaker 01

  You know JD Vance, since the election, look at me.

• 1:18:05Speaker 01

  JD, are you down there? JD, where are you? JD! Because JD's smart. He's like, "This is Trump's show, let me get the fuck out of here, man." JD, you want to do an interview? "No, no, I'm good." JD!

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Where are you JD?

• 1:18:23Peter Diamandis?

  Uh...

• 1:18:24Speaker 01

  He's got the fucking Waldo hat on now, Peter. You know what I'm saying? Where's Waldo?

• 1:18:29Peter Diamandis?

  Wow. Um, you learned a lot in those 11 days, didn't you?

• 1:18:36Speaker 01

  But remember, I worked for him for nine months. I traveled around on a plane with him.

• 1:18:39Peter Diamandis?

  I remember when, when your son, uh, brought me in.

• 1:18:42Speaker 01

  You know, and I, you know, I used to really piss him off, Reinspre, your Greek friend, Reinspre. He used to really piss him off. Because the way I'm talking to the two of you, I would talk to Trump like that. And Prebus didn't understand that because he was like a major, you know, DC ass kisser. And he was like, "How the hell is he talking to Trump like that?" And the truth is, we're New Yorkers. You know?

• 1:19:01Speaker 02

  I have a, I have a framing I'd love to bounce off you, Anthony.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  You're good.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  You know, in an ideal world, you end up with win-win outcomes. And my concern with, um, at least the way Trump has been in the past is there's no win-win. Everything's win-lose. And if you play the game, you're gonna lose. So best not to play the game would be the, would be the outcome there. And that's why lots of very smart people don't want to get involved. Do you agree with that? Don't agree with that?

• 1:19:26Speaker 01

  Well, yes, I do agree with that, but I don't agree with that very smart people don't want to get involved because Elon is probably the smartest people, one of the smartest people on the planet. People are intoxicated to get involved. And if I will tell you guys, and I will confess this to you, and again, going back to the ancient Greeks, right? "My pride and my ego will be my mortal enemy." And so my wife hates Donald Trump almost as much as Melania hates him. And that's like, way up here. Okay? And like crazy hatred. And, and she told me not to do it, but I did it because I was, my ego talking. I need to go work for the president. I, I built a, I built a business. I went to Harvard. I gotta go work for, I gotta work in the White House.

• 1:20:10Speaker 01

  And there were, there was a guy, I can't tell you his name, but you would really respect this. He got a big appointment and he called me in December and he said, "I'm withdrawing my name." I said, "What?" Yeah, I'm enjoying it. Yeah, I met with Trump three or four times. And it dawned on me that I'm gonna get hurt and this is gonna hurt my family. And I'm putting my ego in the right place. And I'm pulling myself out of the position. And I was like, wow, this guy. So stupid. How could he do something like that? He was right, Salim. I was wrong. He was right. And sometimes the big lesson in investing, the big lesson in life.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  Get your pride and your ego out of your decision making, you know, be be self aware. You know, my wife said to me, you and Trump on a campaign, no problem. Two jackasses going back and forth with each other. Him as President of the United States, you working for him? You're gonna be in a nightmare. Okay, because you know, he wants now sick of it. There's nobody talking to Trump the way we're talking right now. Nobody. Nobody. I tell, I believe I know a lot of people that are still working with him. They call me all the time. Nobody sitting there with the straight shot to really have the hash out.

• 1:21:26Peter Diamandis?

  All right, I'm going on to next subject here. We've covered this one before and in full respect.

• 1:21:33Speaker 02

  We've crashed it to death.

• 1:21:34Peter Diamandis?

  RFK, coming in. Health and Human Services. Reinventing our food system, our medical system, our healthcare system. I mean, first of all, our food system is killing us. Let me just. Put that on the record. I think that we are. We are being destroyed. We're being manipulated. The fact that kids cereals don't have black box warnings on them for the amount of sugars in there is just is pathetic. And just cheap salty sugary foods for the poorest. It's sinful for us to have that as our baseline. And we need a reinvention of the entire healthcare system.

• 1:22:15Peter Diamandis?

  So how do you think RFK is going to going to serve and fair in this? That's the first question. The second question I want to put out there is deregulation. I'm in the health and biotech industry. I invest a lot of biotech companies. I've started a number of biotech companies. And it has been just. Destroyed by regulation, the, you know, the FDA's thesis is we're not happy, you're not happy, right? Doing anything new and novel is effectively illegal or super hard because you're penalized for something you approve that kills one person and you are not penalized for something you don't approve, approve, approve that is killing hundreds

• 1:22:58Peter Diamandis?

  of people in that disease category. So let's talk about RFK and deregulation. Who wants to go first?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  I respect Bobby. Full disclosure, like you, he helped me on the Bitcoin book. I've helped Bobby politically. And again, we can talk about the vaccine situation with Bobby. Some of the things he's saying makes sense. Perhaps people in the medical community would challenge some of the things he's saying. So I'm going to lead that to the medical community. I speak as a dat. I believe everything that you just said and I've experienced it, Peter. If I go to Greece and I eat food, I lose weight. If I go to Italy and I eat food or drink coffee, I lose weight. If I eat food here, the same food, I gain weight because there's so many preservatives and there's so much nonsensical stuff in this stuff. Okay?

• 1:23:50Speaker 01

  And we did something to the country, which is why I want to be Secretary of the Constitution. Citizens United has corrupted the country because if I'm big food or big pharma, let me light up everybody in the Congress and then let me tell everybody in the Congress that I need to put fertilizer and additives and preservatives in the food so I can cheapen up the manufacturing of the food. Yes, cheapen up the price to your point, but it stays on the shelf for 15 years and it makes everybody fat. Now you know, because you're a scientist and a doctor, if we went back to our obesity levels in 1991, we'd save two, you want to

• 1:24:30Speaker 01

  talk about $2 trillion? We would save $2 trillion in healthcare expenses if we just went back to the portion sizes and we just cleaned up the food.

• 1:24:39Peter Diamandis?

  So by the way, I think that is the biggest savings we can have is in our healthcare costs, right?

• 1:24:45Speaker 01

  Right. Of course. So, so, so Bobby talking about this and if Bobby can implement this, I want a bronze statue to Bobby in front of the FDA.

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  Okay, and Bobby, Bobby, whatever you think of Bobby, Bobby's been on this for three decades, fellas.

• 1:25:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think he's amazing.

• 1:25:06Speaker 01

  And he's right about this. So, so you tell me, I want Bobby to get that job. I know there's some establishment people that don't want him to get that job, but if Bobby's in that job, but you know what I told you about the grind in Washington, right? They'll find something on him, they're gonna grind that guy. You know, we need 20 people going into that department with Bobby that think like Bobby. Do you understand what I'm saying?

• 1:25:30Peter Diamandis?

  I do.

• 1:25:30Speaker 01

  Because unfortunately, because I have an 11-day PhD in Washington scum-daggerery. Okay, I have 11-day, an honorary doctorate. And what I'm telling you is that he can't do it alone. He needs a legion of Bobby's to help him.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. Um, so I agree with everything you said. I think Citizens United has been a real nightmare for the country.

• 1:25:53Speaker 01

  Terrible. Has to be a constitutional amendment to reform that.

• 1:25:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a, that's a huge problem. And the problem I think we have is that it doesn't matter with Bobby Kennedy or somebody else, yes, he's got an unbelievable track record of environmental fighting, corporate interests, et cetera, and God help us, we need 10x more of that. But how much can he do to undo the regulatory capture in both healthcare and in food? And that, we need that. And it may need to happen at a level above. And the best thing we could do is just educate the population that this is really, what you're doing today is really bad, and let the market drive changes.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  So, so you and I agree, what I would say to Bobby, you gotta go district to district, there's 435 of them, and you gotta do podcasts, local radio, and you gotta do local media, and you gotta get to Peter and Salim's family in every district and say, please call your congressman. Please call your congresswoman.

• 1:26:50Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:51Speaker 01

  Knock off the relationship with big food. Michelle Obama.

• 1:26:55Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, if Bobby is listening, please come on Moonshots. I would love to have, because what you're planning to do is an incredible moonshot.

• 1:27:03Speaker 01

  No, he's the man. And I totally respect him, but I'm just saying to you, Michelle Obama tried this in 09, and in 2010, they crucified her. They started calling her Michael Obama. They put all kinds of conspiracy theories out on the internet. That was big food and big sugar that went after Michelle Obama. There's a great documentary about this a couple of years ago, I can send you the link, but they crucified her, and he wanted to win reelection, so they backed off the food safety standards in the country. But that's why she had a garden in the White House. She was growing her own stuff to feed her children. We shouldn't be doing that in this country. Too rich and too successful a country.

• 1:27:47Speaker 01

  Just use the European playbook on this stuff.

• 1:27:49Peter Diamandis?

  Let's talk about deregulation a little bit, because, you know, right now, if I want access to stem cells and various regenerative medicine treatments, I'm flying down to Costa Rica, or Mexico, or other parts outside the United States to get access to that, which I think is kind of insane. Now, does there more research needed? Sure. But at the end of the day, we have enough data to say there's a reasonable level of safety. And if I'm an intelligent adult, I should have the ability to access these regenerative medical treatments, instead of having to leave the country. I also saw, as we all have, the biotech stocks just going down a whirlpool, down the drain over the last few years with short sellers.

• 1:28:34Peter Diamandis?

  So I'm hoping and believing that we're going to see deregulation really ignite a new health dividend for biotech. How do you feel about that, Anthony?

• 1:28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, I mean, a couple, couple of things I would say to you that, again, once again, big pharma. Because big pharma is putting pressure on the FDA. MDMA, which Bobby is a proponent of, and I believe, Peter, you've helped my son

• 1:29:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:29:03Speaker 01

  with his MDMA projects.

• 1:29:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:29:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:29:05Peter Diamandis?

  I think MDMA is a incredible. Yeah, if people don't know MDMA is a psychoactive drug. It's been used over and over again with people who have severe trauma to overcome that trauma, to do it in a beautiful and graceful way. So, anyway, please go back to what you were saying.

• 1:29:26Speaker 01

  No, I'm just, I'm just saying that, hello, FDA, how are you? Yeah, this is Pfizer. Do you guys want a job here at Pfizer in two years? Oh, yes, we do. Okay, stop MDMA. Hello, this is Pfizer. We don't own everything related to stem cells yet, and so we don't want those approved in the United States. You gotta go to Costa Rica or Panama. Okay, no problem. And so, oh, semi-glutide, which you know is a peptide, okay, that's always been available. Once they license it and once they made it a drug, let's use it. But these other peptides, like the 157 peptide or others, sorry, can't use it because it's too universal.

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  So this is where Bobby's going with all this. And so, yeah, I think it's unfair and I think it's wrong and I think it's hurting the country. And we weren't like that, Peter.

• 1:30:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  You know, when Jonas Salim came up with the vaccine, he open sourced it. They didn't make any money off it. We weren't like that. Okay, and we have to go back to that sort of standard in the country. And so that's why, you know, look, look, whatever you think of Donald Trump, Bobby Kennedy is not going to be the Secretary of Health and Human Services without Donald Trump. So I spent a few moments shitting on him and some of his rhetoric. But as a disruptor, I give him credit in that era. I want to be fair and objective. I want Bobby to succeed. And if Bobby's proven wrong about a vaccine, or this, that,

• 1:31:02Speaker 01

  or the other thing, or MERS, or whatever he's talking about, okay, let's prove that wrong. But let's get the data together.

• 1:31:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, get the data. Yeah, 100%. I do agree that one of the policies that Trump put forward, and whether it was him or his advisors, that you can't regulate an industry and then jump into that industry after you retire. I mean, that is absolutely, it's a ridiculous farce, yeah.

• 1:31:27Speaker 02

  I think this goes straight back to the previous conversation on how do you get big corporate interests out of the regulatory? And it's a systemic issue. Hopefully, if there's somebody that could do it, it would be Bobby Kennedy, because he's got a track record of that. Hopefully, he has enough of a stick to be able to do it effectively.

• 1:31:45Peter Diamandis?

  So, you know, listen, we have overstayed our welcome here, Anthony, on your schedule. But, and we haven't covered AI.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  I'm thrilled to talk to both of you.

• 1:31:55Peter Diamandis?

  I want to have you back here on WTF Just Happened in tech, on our Moonshots Podcast, because I love your New York attitude. It's like, you know, and your hair is just amazing.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  You tell me when, man.

• 1:32:08Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, great. Well, we'll have.

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  I love you, Peter, you know.

• 1:32:10Peter Diamandis?

  I appreciate you too, brother. I appreciate you too. And your son AJ is doing amazing.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  You gotta have balls, though, right, Peter?

• 1:32:17Peter Diamandis?

  You do. You gotta call it, you gotta call it as you see it. Yeah.

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  When you see my son the next time, say, AJ, when you were walking on the beach at age eight, what did your dad say about your footprints?

• 1:32:32Peter Diamandis?

  I will ask him.

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  Do you want to hear what I said?

• 1:32:35Peter Diamandis?

  Well, sure. What do you say?

• 1:32:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Okay, so he's afraid, he's afraid of me to tell you on the podcast. So you ask him. You ask him.

• 1:32:41Peter Diamandis?

  All right. I will ask him.

• 1:32:42Speaker 02

  Wait, I want to know.

• 1:32:45Speaker 01

  When he shuts the recording off, I'll tell you.

• 1:32:46Peter Diamandis?

  You know, there's so much that's happened in this last month in AI and humanoid robotics and space. It's pretty extraordinary. I think people need to realize we live during the most extraordinary time ever in human history. You know, our ancestors would view us as gods. And I hope that what we're going to see over the next four years is the roaring twenties, that we're going to see the amount of capital flowing in, the amount of ease that entrepreneurs have to reinvent. You know, AI and robot and humanoid robotics can truly bring about an age of abundance. And as the Secretary of Abundance, I'm going to be pushing that as hard as I can.

• 1:33:30Peter Diamandis?

  Salim, remind me what your cabinet post is here again?

• 1:33:33Speaker 02

  I've forgotten now in the richness of this conversation. But it would be in the constitutional amendment.

• 1:33:40Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, you were on Doge. You were going to jump into Doge. Yeah.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  You said Doge. You said Doge before, but yeah.

• 1:33:47Speaker 02

  I did. But after hearing the difficulties, we have to lift up to the higher level to fix it, and then you can come back down again.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  That's the truth. And there's two things we need. Number one, we need a constitutional amendment to fix Citizens United. We've created a separate but equal democracy. Money matters more than it should in the society. Trump will say, no, I spent less than her and I beat her. It's not that, it's in the Congress. Since January 2010, that decision was rendered. The Congress is all about corporate welfare. The Congress is all about doing what big business wants it to do. Very, very bad for our society. Got to get back to the people. Second Amendment, second big amendment that we need. So that would be the 28th. And the 29th Amendment is to end gerrymandering. Has to be ended.

• 1:34:36Peter Diamandis?

  Please, yes.

• 1:34:37Speaker 01

  Sorry. You got to get these congressional districts to look like the geometric shapes that we could recognize from ninth grade geometry, not the jigsaw puzzle nonsense that we have now. And guess what would happen? You would liquidate the extremists and you would liquidate the long-tenured servants. Because, you know, hey, man, you got to get in the middle. These are marketing competitions, guys.

• 1:35:00Speaker 02

  I love the term limits idea for Congress.

• 1:35:03Peter Diamandis?

  How about getting rid of the Electoral College and just going to a straight Democratic vote of 330 million Americans? Would that ever happen?

• 1:35:13Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't want that.

• 1:35:14Peter Diamandis?

  You don't?

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  I don't want that.

• 1:35:17Speaker 01

  No, no, because remember what the system is, it's a republic. And so the system is designed to have representation, but to prevent mob rule. Okay, you have to have things in place to protect minority voters. I'm not talking about black or brown people. I'm talking about the election was won forty-one to fif- you know, forty- fifty-one to forty-nine. You gotta protect the forty-nine. And the founders understood that the Electoral College does that masterfully. Now, people are upset with it because the last couple of elections, the Electoral College was diverging from the popular vote. But that, that works.

• 1:35:59Speaker 01

  If you don't do that, these candidates will sit in the coastal cities and they'll go for the popular vote and the middle of this country will be ignored by those candidates. And I'm telling you guys, you don't want that. We've already got enough strain in the country. Trust the three to two-hundred-and-fifty-year mechanism of the Electoral College. It maybe hasn't worked perfectly in the last twenty years, but trust it over the next fifty.

• 1:36:27Peter Diamandis?

  But Anthony, we're, we're, the candidates right now are focusing on five states or Pennsylvania. I mean, how, how real is that?

• 1:36:37Speaker 01

  No, I disagree. Donald Trump went to California. Donald Trump did three rallies in New York State. Donald Trump did a rally in New Jersey.

• 1:36:46Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 1:36:46Speaker 01

  Donald Trump was trying to win the popular vote as well as the Electoral College vote. Yes, that was a playbook for eight, twelve, sixteen, and perhaps twenty. That wasn't the twenty-four playbook. And, and by the way, pay attention, you may dislike Trump or like Trump, he's a formidable political beast. And he was playing to win the popular vote. He went to states that he couldn't win to improve his margins in those states and to help the representatives that were running down ballot from him.

• 1:37:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, like I say about Elon, I would never bet against Elon, ever, right? What he did with XAI going from raising $6 billion on day one to building out his Colossus Cluster in 122 days and blowing away the competition and now doubling it again in size. And I think the same thing for Trump. You're not going to bet against him.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  He's talented, but you gotta, you gotta, you gotta check his rhetoric, my friend. I'm just telling you, as a citizen that loves the country, and I certainly love the promise of Elon Musk, and I, I hope Elon Musk lives to be 150, and I hope he's worth $10 trillion because he's adding economic value and economic rent to the society. But you gotta check people that speak cruelty to other people. Can't, can't do it. Sorry, man.

• 1:38:12Peter Diamandis?

  Understood, understood.

• 1:38:13Speaker 01

  And I'll speak out against it for the rest of my life, because I am, I'm a family of immigrants. They told my grandmother to go back to the country she came from. Okay? And you can't have the President of the United States talking like that, sorry, without somebody calling him out on it and saying, hey asshole, cut it out. It doesn't help the discourse in this country.

• 1:38:31Peter Diamandis?

  Respect, respect is important across, across the board, especially from our leaders. All right, respectful dialogue. Salim, you were going to say something?

• 1:38:39Speaker 02

  If we're talking about amendments and constitutional stuff, I would go after the Second Amendment as well, just to tweak it a bit, but we don't have to touch on that.

• 1:38:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, that will light a good fire.

• 1:38:51Speaker 02

  We need a general rewrite on the Constitution.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  You and I are co-secretaries of the Constitution, okay? We're going to tweak it up. We're going to get it refreshed for the next great American century, which makes the system fairer, more plural, and protects people from tyranny. So that's exactly what our founders wanted to do. That's the reason why we're so prosperous. Let's tweak it up again and to prevent an oligarchy. We don't want an oligarchy. I want Musk to be worth $3, $4 trillion, but I want there to be a very deep, very broad, middle and positive growing aspirational middle class.

• 1:39:31Speaker 02

  One of the things that I'm incredibly encouraged by, just in the world,

• 1:39:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, amen.

• 1:39:35Speaker 02

  is that if you went back a couple of hundred years ago, the richest people in the world exclusively had inherited their wealth. And today, the richest people in the world have actually created their wealth. And I think that's incredible.

• 1:39:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of that has to do with the American model. It's been exported to India and the UK and Europe, but the Americans really came up with that, right? Andrew Carnegie came here penniless.

• 1:39:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, my venture, it's amazing. One of my venture funds, exponential ventures, it's an AI fund, investing in MIT and Harvard teams. We have two companies founded by effectively 21 year olds that have gone from zero to $2 billion valuations in under two years. The ability to create wealth today is insane. And I think it's just beginning. Now, the good news is when that wealth is created, you know, Facebook and and and Google and OpenAI have created not just a couple of billionaires at the top, but hundreds and thousands of centimillionaires below them

• 1:40:40Peter Diamandis?

  that then go and invest in the next generation. And there's this engine, right? I just got back from India, I was in India, four cities over the course of two months. And the problem is that that doesn't occur there yet. If you've got a great idea, you leave the country, you go and build in the United States, and the wealth is not being created that is flowing to a large percentage of the entrepreneurs who then reinvest. And so we need to preserve this, what this special sauce that we have here. And I think that we can.

• 1:41:09Speaker 02

  Well, and spread it, right? Because as you can spread some of these ideas to places like India, it'll completely change the game there.

• 1:41:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love it. I love it. Remember, remember something. Your freedom of press, the First Amendment, Secretary of the Constitution, drives the economic innovation. Do never forget that. Because we teach our second graders to speak and think freely. They create the X Prize. They create Singularity University, Google, Facebook. They develop Bitcoin here in the United States. And remember that. Okay, if you teach your second graders they can't talk about Dear Leader, and they got to go into a reeducation camp if they do. They don't innovate. They have to steal our intellectual property.

• 1:41:56Speaker 01

  Okay, so these sacred ideas that have been in these texts for hundreds of years are there for a reason. Okay, that is one of the fountains of our innovation and our creativity is the free press.

• 1:42:08Peter Diamandis?

  Amen.

• 1:42:09Speaker 01

  Don't go after the free press, okay?

• 1:42:11Peter Diamandis?

  Amen. But you know, the last thing I'll say is media in the United States is changing dramatically, right? The old news networks are vaporizing and slowly dematerializing on their own. I mean, this was a podcast election, I would say, for the first time ever.

• 1:42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 01

  Totally agree. Yeah, but they lost the plot, the media. Look, by the way, by the way, I don't agree with what the media is doing, the hard right or the hard left or the nonsense, okay? And so what happened? Great innovation happened. Joe Rogan comes on, I don't know, hundreds of millions of downloads? And people think of Joe as a fair arbiter of trying to get to the truth. Bobby Kennedy has a podcast talking about, Huberman has a podcast. You two guys have a podcast, okay? You know, I'm inspired by your podcast. When I listen to your podcast, I'm like, all right, things are gonna be okay. And I, and I will confess to both of you that I have stolen, and by the way, I don't give either of you two credit for anything. I steal the entire thing, full plagiarizing, okay?

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Elements of what you guys talk about in terms of exponential abundance and to get people off of thinking linearly, while the world is happening around them exponentially. I listen to you guys and I import and incorporate what you guys are saying. And that's not, that's, that's not legacy media. That's a new media.

• 1:43:33Peter Diamandis?

  I think this is a perfect-

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  And so, so, so, so, so the, the media blows, so now we've got people like you coming in to innovate and they're gonna be forced to change.

• 1:43:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, if they still exist. So-

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, but let's have the free press, though. They wanna act like assholes on the left or assholes on the right. Who cares? New media will come in and knock those guys out.

• 1:43:56Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, what I love about X, I still, I still call it Twitter, but what I love about X is the fact that anyone can post. And that I'm not beholden to some editor who's telling me what they think should be posted. I can see it all. I can follow Scaramucci here. I can follow Salim.

• 1:44:18Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, this has been a fun conversation. We still have a lot more to talk about. So let's, let's do this, uh, let's do this trio again.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  First of all, I'm grateful for all the time.

• 1:44:28Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, buddy.

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm huge fans of you guys. And, uh, and by the way, uh, thank you for introducing me to Hal Finney because it's part of my lessons in stupidity that I didn't have the insight, the judgment, or the understanding of what he was saying. And God bless him for coming up with it and saying it and helping it along.

• 1:44:50Peter Diamandis?

  So Mooch, where can people find you? I just want to remind you, The Little Book of Bitcoin is coming out December 4th. Uh, we'll put the preorder link down below or just Google it. Do you have a website up for that already?

• 1:45:02Speaker 01

  Uh, I do. Uh, but everything's on scaramucci.net. So www.scaramucci.net. Really, there are, there is a website too, for Little Book of Hedge Funds, Little Book of Bitcoin. Um, but scaramucci.net. I'm at scaramucci on X, at scaramucci on Instagram. I'm at scaramucci on Blue Sky. I'm at scaramucci. My sons are pissed at me. I took all the at scaramuccis on LinkedIn. And, uh, and, uh, what can I tell you? Okay. I got there first. I'm older than you bastards. And, uh, and listen, I have a podcast on politics. I do it with a woman named Catty Kay. Uh, she's a British journalist. It's called The Rest is Politics U.S. And, uh, it's a fun podcast because

• 1:45:45Peter Diamandis?

  Because you're involved.

• 1:45:47Speaker 01

  It's long form and I'm unfiltered. You know what I'm saying?

• 1:45:52Peter Diamandis?

  I know.

• 1:45:52Speaker 01

  Love it. I can't wait to go listen to it and super appreciate the book recommendations. If you listen to it, last week's podcast starts with Catty Kay in her British accent, reading the last Trump tweet about me, calling me a major loser. A major loser. Of course, I know that's a love message from him because I know exactly how he thinks, you know, you know, Vance called him Hitler, Bobby Kennedy had bad things to say, but everyone gets, everyone goes in and out of Trump world.

• 1:46:21Peter Diamandis?

  You know, he changes his mind sometimes. I can imagine the phone call, hey Mooch, come back, I need you.

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  He's not gonna do that, trust me. I guarantee that he won't do that.

• 1:46:30Peter Diamandis?

  I'm gonna start a betting pool. I'm gonna start a betting pool.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  But I guarantee there'll be, I guarantee there'll be peace in the kingdom because, you know, and he loves moxie and he loves balls. I'm not gonna let him go after my wife without taking him on a little. Come on, man. Come on, guys, come on. Peter, you grew up out here. What'd you want me to, you want me to go to these Italian restaurants out here with people thinking that Trump could walk on my wife without any retaliation? I mean, come on.

• 1:46:52Peter Diamandis?

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:46:53Speaker 01

  God forbid, right?

• 1:46:54Peter Diamandis?

  All right. I love you, buddy.

• 1:46:56Speaker 01

  You love this shit though, right? This is a real, this is a real Italian shit, right? It's real Italian shit. All right. All right. God bless you guys.

• 1:47:03Peter Diamandis?

  God bless. Take care, Salim. Take care, Mooch.