Pod Insights Big Technology Podcast Anthony Scaramucci: Elon Musk’s Trump Exit, Tim Cook’s Tariff Problem About this episode Anthony Scaramucci is the founder and managing partner at SkyBridge Capital, and host of The Rest Is Politics US. Scaramucci joins Big Technology Podcast to talk about his brief experience as Trump's communication director, what derailed Elon Musk’s White House stint, the problems with Trump’s 'Big Beautiful Bill,' the state of the trade war, Tim Cook’s tariff troubles, bitcoin, and more. We also cover Long Island culture at the top of the show, if you’re into that. Tune in for a fast paced, fascinating look into the state of the global economy and the tech titans trying to ride it to results.
---
Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice.
Want a discount for Big Technology on Substack? Here’s 25% off for the first year: https://www.bigtechnology.com/subscribe?coupon=0843016b
Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected]
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 12,301 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Alex Kantrowitz? This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put Agentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large-scale Agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade-offs, and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today. It's never been more challenging to get frontier compute. How do you know where to look, who to trust, or how much to pay?
0:43 Alex Kantrowitz? Akash is an open cloud that provides easy access, flexibility, and peace of mind. That's how companies like Razer were able to cut their inference cost by 15 times. Visit akash.network/alex for a free consultation. That's akash.network/alex for a free consultation.
1:03 Alex Kantrowitz? Where do Elon Musk and Tim Cook stand with Donald Trump? And where does the economy go from here? We're joined today by a special guest. Anthony Scaramucci is here with us. He is the host of The Rest Is Politics US, which you can find on your podcast player of choice. He's also the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital. And he's here with us in studio to talk about all of this fascinating breaking news. What a great time to speak with you, Anthony. Thanks for being here.
1:30 Speaker 01 It's a big honor to be here. You've got a great studio. You've got a great show. So I immediately responded to your DM. I think you DM'd me, right?
1:39 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, we just met via DM. I've been obviously following you for a while. I listened to you on Kara Swisher's podcast. And you spoke a lot with her about how you're from Long Island. I'm from Long Island. I figured it was time for us to meet.
1:50 Speaker 01 All right, amen. Something about the water on Long Island that makes everybody crazy. So I'll evaluate you at the end of this and I'll determine if you're as nuts as the rest of us.
1:58 Alex Kantrowitz? So do you think it's the water? I always thought it was, we're close to New York City, but we're not quite in New York City. So we know we have access to the show, but we know we're not part of it. And that makes us angry. Is that your Long Island philosophy?
2:11 Speaker 01 It's an interesting perspective. So I don't see you that way already. You're giving off a vibe of a comfortable outsider. So there are uncomfortable outsiders that are angry, but then there are comfortable outsiders that almost enjoy the... voyeurism of being an outsider, but I don't know, maybe, are you angry?
2:29 Alex Kantrowitz? No, I don't think angry. Maybe angry was the, you know what, I was when I was a kid. But now I think it's just a healthy chip on my shoulder.
2:36 Speaker 01 Okay.
2:36 Alex Kantrowitz? Because I feel like when you're from Long Island, you have to work a little bit harder than everybody else than the city kids.
2:42 Speaker 01 I'm all about that. I agree with that. I do, you know, you know, you were talking, we're gonna probably talk about Trump at some point. He's got a chip on his shoulder.
2:49 Alex Kantrowitz? Queens guy.
2:49 Speaker 01 Because he was from Queens. But the difference between Long Island and guys like Trump is we're comfortable outsiders. I don't mind. I can't get into certain country clubs. They probably would want me to landscape their greens as opposed to me putt on them. Totally fine by me. Don't care. Guys like Trump, they get worked up about that stuff. They're out to prove something. I'm just happy to be here, you know, I'm very grateful to be sitting here, but also maybe the, uh, I'm too short to see the glass as anything other than half full. Like when I look up at the glass, it looks full to me, so. Uh, but it's great to be on with you, but, uh, and I love Long Island and do you still live out there?
3:26 Alex Kantrowitz? No, I'm in Brooklyn now.
3:27 Speaker 01 Okay.
3:27 Alex Kantrowitz? How about you?
3:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, I'm two miles from the house I grew up in.
3:31 Alex Kantrowitz? Amazing.
3:32 Speaker 01 Local boy.
3:33 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, well, we still spend a lot of time there. And then look at for our international listeners or those who are in the Bay Area who are like, what's all this Long Island talk? To start the conversation, Long Island, Nassau County, Suffolk County, it's right outside the city. You could take the train in, take the train out, spend time in the city. I don't know, good place, but yeah, like I said, you grow up there and you realize that there's something big happening pretty close that you're not quite a part of. And motivates a lot of Long Island people.
3:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's well said.
3:58 Alex Kantrowitz? All right, so you go from Long Island to the White House, and I just want to start briefly about your time in the White House. You spent 11 days there. I'm not gonna shortchange it. I'm not gonna say 10. Some people have said 10 days is a scaremucci.
4:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, hurts my feelings. And they're not doing the math. I mean, you have tech, you have tech people listening, right?
4:13 Alex Kantrowitz? That's right. We need to be precise here.
4:15 Speaker 01 These are good math people. If you start on the 21st and you get your ass fired on the 31st and you work the 31st.
4:22 Alex Kantrowitz? That's 11 days.
4:23 Speaker 01 Count the days, guys. Count the days.
4:25 Alex Kantrowitz? That's 11.
4:26 Speaker 01 Don't shit me out of 9.1% of my federal career. And by the way. Why'd you get me out of that last day? I got my ass fired on that last day. It was a big day for me.
4:33 Alex Kantrowitz? It's an important day. So, let's not go into too much depth about what it was like in that moment, but I just want you to give our listeners and viewers a feel for what working in the Trump White House was like. Just a very brief, like, tell us the vibe, the experience of those 11 days in the White House. Because we want to know how it works inside the Trump White House.
4:54 Speaker 01 So, I don't want to put any hagiography on it. It's eight years later, so I don't want to spin it. I'm just trying to remember it as clearly as I can remember it. I will say a couple of things. Number one, it was very different than working on the campaign. At least, that was my experience. I had a decent relationship with Donald Trump. You're not friends with Donald Trump. Let me give a news flash. If you've got a tech CEO listening, kiss his ass all you want. Wait for him at the service entrance at Mar-a-Lago. Write him checks. Do whatever the hell you want. You're not friends with the guy. He will never see you as a friend. He sees you as an object in his field of vision. He's a transactionalist. And if he can get something out of you that helps him, great.
5:37 Speaker 01 If it turns out that five minutes later, you can't help him, he'll run you over with the car. Trump is the type of guy where he could play golf with you for 45 years. You have a heart attack on the ninth hole at the halfway house. And he's like, "Who was that guy Alex that I was playing golf with? I barely know the guy. Can we get another guy out here to finish the round with me?" That's Donald Trump. And I knew that. I had a comfortable enough of a self-awareness of him and myself. I knew that. But when I was on the campaign with him, it was very loosey-goosey. It was very decentralized, and we were doing a lot of different things at the same time. I was working in communications and media advocacy. I was working in fundraising.
6:21 Speaker 01 I was working on speech writing. I was working on logistics for some of these rallies. We were doing a little bit of everything. And the relationship with Trump, because he was also loosey-goosey, if that's a term I could use. It's probably a little old-fashioned.
6:35 Alex Kantrowitz? We understand that, yeah.
6:36 Speaker 01 Where you could talk to him straight up. You say, "Well, that idea sucks. Why did you lie about that? What are we doing here? This doesn't make any sense." And Jared once said to me, Jared Kushner, he said, "You know, Mooch, he likes talking to you because you remind him of his dad. He made your own money. Actually, don't give a shit." You're here to try to help him, but you're not here to kiss his ass. There's so many of these politicos that go into the situation that are just, you know, I mean, to put their whole head up somebody's ass and they have like a ring on their neck, you know, like a ring around the collar. Is that what happens afterwards? Yeah, I think so. Sort of revolting. So, so what happened to me, though, I got into the administration foolishly. So cautionary tale to young people, don't do things that
7:17 Speaker 01 are out of your depth or your experience, but also don't chase your ego. So I went into work for Trump for pride and ego reasons. I grew up like you out on Long Island. My dad was a crane operator, went to Tufts Harvard Law School, built a successful business on Wall Street. Now I got the chance to work for the American president. And he calls you and says, come be the director of communications? Yeah, it was irresistible. My wife was like, you're crazy, don't do it. My, my wife probably hates him like almost as much as Melania hates him, which is like through the roof of what we're talking about here. And she told me not to do it. We almost got divorced over it frankly. But I did it because my pride was involved and my ego was involved. So now I'm in there and it's different. He's president. Guess what? You're not president.
8:02 Speaker 01 He's president. It's not a campaign, which is like a startup and it's flat and you could tell, hey, Alex, you're not doing this right, or Alex, move the microphone closer or move the microphone back. Couldn't do that with him. He was very, he got very tight, somewhat insecure and mercurial. And so it was a lot of flattery. If you're flattering him, you're doing better. If you're not flattering him, you're not doing well. And I made a lot of big mistakes there. I was talking to him the way I'm talking to you now and the way I talked to him on the campaign. And that was getting me in trouble. And then finally we got into a fight, which I really can't get into because it was sort of some national
8:44 Speaker 01 security issues related to it. And then we got into that fight on Friday. I was fired on Monday. And he had the right to fire me and I deserved to be fired and learning lesson number two, be accountable. You know, I got fired. I got fired because he's the president. I'm not the president. He wanted to do something I was not comfortable with. He's going to find somebody that's more comfortable than me in doing what he wanted to do. He fired me and life goes on. I tried to stay loyal to him. I was loyal to him until 2018. I broke from him. After the tweeting related to the women of the squad. So you're a New Yorker, maybe your friends outside of New York may not know this, but there were several women, hard left-leaning women, which I don't agree with ideologically,
9:29 Speaker 01 but Donald Trump in 2019 said, "Time to go back to the countries you originally came from." Well, three of them were born in the United States, one was naturalized from Africa. These were members of the House of Representatives, and it was a very harsh nativist, very harsh racist statement. And it triggered me a little bit because my grandmother was told in the 1920s, "Go back to the country you originally came from." And so I was on the Bill Marshia, I was trying to defend Trump. It was August of 2019, defending him, defending him. Somebody then asked me a question, "Well, what about the comments that he made about the women in the House?" And I said, "I don't really like that very much. I don't think he should talk like that.
10:13 Speaker 01 It's nativism, it's racism, and by the way, he's the American President, he shouldn't talk like that." The next day, he's lighting my ass up on Twitter. What's that like when you get put on blast by Trump? Yeah, that sucks. That sucks. You go white as a ghost. You can pretend otherwise, he's the President of the United States, you're not. And when he hit me on Twitter with his 80s, got like maybe 150 million X followers now, but back then, 80 million followers on Twitter, he's hitting you, you go white. It's a nervous feeling. Phone calls? You go white. From people or DMs? Yeah, people start calling, "What the hell's going on?" I then took a New Yorker's approach. Okay, you can take a couple of different approaches. I took the New Yorker's approach, and I hit him hard.
10:56 Speaker 01 I said, "So said the fattest president since William Howard Taft. I'm a New Yorker." It got me knocked off of Twitter for 12 hours. You can't fat shame people on Twitter, even though he's ripping me to pieces. This was before Elon? Yeah, before Elon. Maybe you can fat shame now on X, but you couldn't fat shame. Got knocked off of Twitter for 12 hours. He was all guns a-blazing at me. I was hitting him left and right because I know all of his weaknesses, so I was hitting him left and right. And then he started attacking my wife. I was like, alright, this is it, you know?
11:25 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
11:26 Speaker 01 You know, I'm not Ted Cruz. Don't go after my wife. I'm a New Yorker.
11:28 Alex Kantrowitz? But so through that lens, I mean, it's the perfect setup to explain what's happened with Elon. Now Elon is not in the middle of a, you know, flame war with Trump. Or maybe he is. Uh, cause he did just say that something about the big, beautiful bill. He says it's a massive outrageous pork-filled congressional spending bill and a disgusting abomination, which is a bill Trump supports. So we'll get to that in a moment.
11:49 Speaker 01 Yeah.
11:50 Alex Kantrowitz? But just through-
11:50 Speaker 01 Trump's gonna be very careful with him.
11:52 Alex Kantrowitz? Correct. But through the lens of what it was like in the White House, uh, how it changes from campaign to governing. Give us your best insight into what happened with Elon. He spent 135 days as this special government employee. And you, you're, I think you had predicted that he would be there for a year. So it seems like a little bit shorter, uh, than you initially thought.
12:12 Speaker 01 I got this thing completely wrong. I was shooting all over the place. I thought six or seven weeks. And I said, wow, he made it six or seven weeks. Maybe he would make it a year. And I got it wrong. He lasted, as you said, 135 days. And so just to do the calculation for everybody listening at home, that's 12.2 Scaramucci.
12:32 Alex Kantrowitz? That's important, important data there.
12:33 Speaker 01 Pretty, pretty big. It's a lo- long enough time in Trump world, 12.2. Uh, Walsh, the Nat Security Advisor lasted 9.1. Okay.
12:42 Alex Kantrowitz? Do you calculate everybody's tenure in Scaramucci?
12:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, you got it. Don't you think you have to just like measure them?
12:47 Alex Kantrowitz? I guess I would do that.
12:48 Speaker 01 And Scaramucci. And so, uh, you know, Kevin McCarthy, 24.5 Scaramucci as Speaker of the House. So when you're in and around Trump, you get blown up definitionally. Bad things start to happen to you. You get excoriated. I said on CNN in December, uh, I was on Wolf Blitzer's show. What do you think's gonna happen with Elon? I said, well, he's gonna get hurt. And the hard right came at me and the hard right Twitterati or Xerati came at me and said, I'm physically threatening Elon and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, actually, guys, I am not physically threatening Elon. I love Elon. Full disclosure, I am
13:30 Speaker 01 an investor in XI, XAI. I was an investor in Twitter. It got converted into XAI. It's, you know, sort of Twitter merged with Grok now. I have a small investment in XAI prior to that. I have an investment in SpaceX, me personally. I'm very close friends with Antonio Gracias, who's on his board, and I love Antonio. We worked at Goldman together. And I am a huge Elon Musk fan, huge. And so when I said he was going to get hurt, I was basing that on my life experience as a business person going to work for Donald Trump. Because what happens to you is you get a 360-degree shootout at the OK Corral.
14:14 Speaker 01 The politicos don't like people like Elon. And I'm going to give you a number of reasons why. Number one, he's a very rich guy. Newsflash, they are not rich people. Number two, you can't control somebody like Elon. He's not a corruptible guy. Like, people say Washington is a swamp. I don't see it as a swamp. It's a gold-plated hot tub. Okay, you go into the hot tub, they look at you and they say, can I buy you, Alex? Are you somebody that's capable of being bought? And they size you up like a 0-1 switch in a computer. Bought? Not bought. Bought? Not bought. Ah, you can be bought? Okay, here's two bottles of Cristal.
14:55 Speaker 01 Come sit in the hot tub. Let's smoke a Cubano together, and we're going to talk about how we're going to milk this system to make money for ourselves.
15:03 Alex Kantrowitz? But I understand he's the richest person in the world, or private citizen in the world, but can't he be bought in some ways? Contracts with SpaceX, contracts with Tesla.
15:13 Speaker 01 Not, not, not in the-
15:14 Alex Kantrowitz? He does a lot of government business.
15:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, but he's not a corrupt, but he's not a corrupt guy. He has no, there's no, yes, could he?
15:22 Alex Kantrowitz? So maybe he's corruptible, but not corrupt?
15:25 Speaker 01 No, I don't see him as even corruptible. He's, he's not, he's not that kind of a guy. He's a execution-oriented entrepreneur. Would he certainly lobby the government for a contract? Certainly he would do that. But he's not a corruptible guy. He doesn't, I mean, he could be. I don't know him that well. I mean, he could be, but I'm just giving you my impression of him. Sixty-one years on planet Earth, thirty-eight years in business. I don't see Elon as a corruptible guy, and I know the way Washington works. Bought can't be bought, bought can't be bought, Elon can't be bought. Okay, we gotta excoriate the guy. So how are we gonna trash the guy? We're all gonna trash his businesses. We're gonna trash him personally. We're gonna leak information on him. Cabinet member's gonna leak information on him. Susie Wiles is gonna go after him.
16:11 Speaker 01 Uh, but I did predict that Trump would never go after him. There wouldn't be a pyrrhic demise to Elon like there was to Steve Bannon, or me, or Mark Esper, or General Kelly. Because Elon's a loaded guy, and Trump got several hundred million dollars out of him to help him win the campaign. And he's not gonna wanna piss off Elon too much. Trump is too smart of a guy to make Elon into an adversary. Now, that's a separate conversation. The Democrats, for the life of me, God almighty, how could you let Elon leave the tent?
16:48 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
16:48 Speaker 01 That I don't get. You don't invite him to the EV thing. Are you guys crazy? Uh, you invite him to the EV thing, even if the UAW president doesn't want him there. Moreover, you, you leave him in the tent. You left Bobby Kennedy and Elon Musk out of the tent. And I'm gonna use the Long Island expression that your Silicon Valley people won't know. You're stupid. You know what stupid means?
17:11 Alex Kantrowitz? I wanna explain it for our listeners.
17:12 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, you stupid, okay? That's an Italian, uh, guttural, uh, phrase for stupid.
17:19 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, but...
17:20 Speaker 01 So, but let me just finish.
17:21 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, yeah.
17:21 Speaker 01 You don't let, Johnson, Lyndon Johnson would've said, keep everybody in the tent. When they gotta take a piss, let the elephants piss outside the tent. Don't let an elephant outside the tent that could piss back into the tent. That was Elon. It was a disaster for them. But I don't see him as a corruptible guy. They didn't see him as a corruptible guy. So they put the hurt on him the way I predicted. Again, not a physical hurt. But they went after him and it was an inside job there. Uh, make no mistake about that, that was MAGA people.
17:51 Alex Kantrowitz? Bannon.
17:52 Speaker 01 Uh, Bannon, Bannon went after him right away.
17:55 Alex Kantrowitz? From the beginning.
17:56 Speaker 01 Steve Miller went after him.
17:57 Alex Kantrowitz? And these are the people that have stuck with Trump from the first term.
18:01 Speaker 01 Also cabinet members went after him. You know, they, they went after them. They didn't like the power they had. Remember, Washington is not like tech and it's not like Wall Street. See, when you're in tech and you're on Wall Street, you're on the green team, okay? And I'm just for the demonstration purposes, I'm showing Alex the green, right? Well, that's Swiss money, but you know, you get the point. Okay, this is green, right? This is green, see it? There's a, there's a red party, there's a blue party, and there's a green party. I'm not talking about the environment. This is the party. And so Silicon Valley, they know how to play on the green team. They can get along when necessary if this is involved. Same on Wall Street. In Washington, you don't know what's going on. There's a blue team, a red team, a yellow team.
18:46 Speaker 01 One guy wants to be closer to the president. The other guy's jealous that Elon's traveling with Trump. Back and forth to Mar-a-Lago and Air Force One, they start shooting at the guy. And that's what happened.
18:56 Alex Kantrowitz? So you just think it was an inside job, basically?
18:58 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:58 Alex Kantrowitz? That Trump allies who didn't like Elon's vision just said, just slowly pushed him out of favor with the president?
19:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, and these, and these attacks on his companies were orchestrated.
19:09 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
19:09 Speaker 01 But to think otherwise, you don't understand how it works. They orchestrated these attacks on his companies.
19:13 Alex Kantrowitz? What about like what he was there to do? Uh, because his signature project was Doge. Do you think that was a success?
19:22 Speaker 01 Uh, well, I don't think it was a failure. I don't think it was as successful as perhaps as they wanted it to be. I think, I think they learned something that it's harder to cut the government than people had anticipated. If you had said to me... And you can find this in recordings about me, he said, "Well, Doge, what's gonna happen? He's gonna find some things to cut, he's gonna find it harder to cut other things. He's gonna realize that the government is not a business. You know, it's just a weird thing, this is eternal."
19:53 Alex Kantrowitz? It's almost like he tried to do the Twitter cuts when the government, and it just didn't work.
19:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't do that. So, he tried to, let me give a newsflash to the Silicon Valley people listening in. The government is not a business. You don't need a businessman to run the government. You need a policy wonk to run the government, who can build a consensus and can provide long-term guidance to a government. You gotta move the aircraft carrier slowly. It's not gonna turn in the water like a speedboat. And so, you have to target things. You know, Clinton understood that. You know, "We're gonna target the budget, and we're gonna get the budget in a certain sequence so that the growth of the economy's gonna exceed our spending.
20:37 Speaker 01 And when we get to the end of the Clinton term in 2000, we're printing a $240 billion budget surplus. Last budget surplus that the US printed." So, you have to think of the government very differently than a business. You're a conductor. You've got an orchestra. On some days, they wanna play from the same sheet music. On other days, they don't wanna play together, and the cacophony of sounds coming out of the government is very nasty. And it's your job to try to calm everybody down and get them on the same sheet music. It's harder to do today, because we've gotten way more polarized, and there's a lot more entrenched interests that keep themselves perpetually in power, as opposed to serving
21:22 Speaker 01 the people. So, so Elon's stint in the government, very well-intended. I think, successful. He's pointed out a lot of mistakes. I think the declarative statements that he's making on X today are evidence of his knowledge and his now worldly understanding of what goes on in the government, which is why he is being so critical. He knows that that spending bill is going to increase the slope of spending at too fast of a rate. To the growth of the US economy, which means the deficit is going to widen, which means that we're stealing from future generations of Americans, which is very unfair
22:06 Speaker 01 at this point in our history. It's very unfair to the next two generations coming up in the country.
22:13 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, can I give you one more explanation? By the way, this is not pro/anti Elon. I'm just trying to like, think through what happened with him. It's a very consequential moment for him to ju-
22:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I'll tell you some negative things about Elon too. I'll tell you positive and negative, am I?
22:24 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, yeah, okay.
22:25 Speaker 01 Am I trying to be pro Elon or-
22:26 Alex Kantrowitz? We're doing this as, yeah, straightforward analysis.
22:28 Speaker 01 I'll tell you what he got wrong.
22:30 Alex Kantrowitz? So, but let me, let me just kind of throw this other idea out there, which is that maybe it wasn't, maybe there were people within the government that didn't like what he was doing. Uh, maybe the Democrats, you know, sort of had it out for his businesses because he had become so close to Trump. Uh, but maybe the reason why he's left the, left the government is because Doge wasn't, I mean, he aimed to cut trillions of dollars. He ended up cutting, you know, I think a couple hundred billion, maybe. And he went to Wisconsin to try to sway an election. He failed after spending a lot of money and his poll numbers were bad. So it's just simple politics.
23:05 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, I mean, but worse than that, worse than that. So Model S comes out. Uh, do you know who Elon Musk is? Seventy percent of the Americans say they know who Elon Musk is. Do you have a favorable opinion of Elon Musk? Seventy percent of the Americans that know Elon Musk say they have a favorable opinion of Elon Musk. He is the Tony Stark of our era. Most people that know who he is, wow, we're glad he's one of us. He's an American entrepreneur. Half the country has a favorable opinion of him. You ask people now, do you know Elon Musk? Ninety percent of the Americans know who he is. Seventy percent of those Americans have an unfavorable opinion of him. So look at the numbers.
23:45 Alex Kantrowitz? There you go.
23:45 Speaker 01 You've got a sixty-three percent negative opinion. And, and when you go into politics, that happens. And what, what, if he had talked to me, not that he would have, he had talked to me and said, "Listen, you're selling cars to progressives. You're selling cars to people that believe that you are an environmental pioneer. You're trying to help heal this environmental catastrophe that we've created. And so you're a hero to these people. If you're going to side with Trump, and I get why, because the Democrats are out to lunch, they're breaking your balls on SpaceX launches, they're torturing you with the electric car company because of the love affair they have with the auto worker unions, and I get why
24:29 Speaker 01 they're doing that to you. But if you take a chill, this group of Democrats, this older group of Democrats is gonna pass. And then you could align yourself with a newer group, like a Ro Khanna group of Democrats. It'd be a way better experience for you if you decide to become politically active. But he sees the shooting, and God forbid, and thank God Trump wasn't killed in Butler, PA, July of 2024, and he's like, "Okay, this guy's gonna win." That visual picture of Trump with his hand up in the air, blood on his ear, American flag behind him, is a winning picture. Let's just be honest with everybody. Elon sees this, he immediately goes out and endorses him.
25:12 Speaker 01 Sean Maguire from Sequoia goes out and endorses him. And now you've created this portal for other Silicon Valley people who have typically hid their political stripes. They were way more conservatives in Silicon Valley than they were willing to admit to in 2012 or 2016, or even 2020, but now it's 2024, and they're like, "Okay, the portal's open. There's space for David Sacks, there's space for Chamath, there's..." Mark Andreessen? Mark Andreessen, there's space for Elon. I think Horowitz was there, then he backed off. Right. Okay, and, and so now, but you're with the wrong guy. Let me give you a news flash. You're with the wrong guy because this is a transactionalist.
25:55 Speaker 01 It's not just that he's a narcissist, he's an angry guy, he hates himself, and he's projecting that hatred into the society.
26:03 Speaker 01 And he's a divisive guy and he's got ill-founded policies as it relates to economics and ill-founded policies as it relates to tariffs. And I know Elon thinks he's an imbecile. Let me just give you my proof because like geometry in ninth grade. Elon thinks he's an imbecile. Uh, let me apply the proof. He's tweeting about Peter Navarro a couple of weeks ago. He says, he says, Peter Navarro is as dumb as a bag of rocks. And then there's another tweet, which I adored. No, no, I apologize. I just want to personally apologize to the bag of rocks.
26:36 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
26:37 Speaker 01 Okay. So you gotta love Elon for this, but look at me. The fingerprint of Peter Navarro and Donald Trump on trade and economics is identical. So when you're saying that someone's an imbecile and the person that's identical to that person, that person therefore definitionally also has to be an imbecile. So, so Elon's not a dummy.
26:57 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
26:58 Speaker 01 He knows these tariffs are wrong. He knows they're bad for the society and he knows this big, beautiful spending bill is actually atrociously ugly, big but atrociously ugly spending bill and very harmful long-term to the interests of America and its citizens, but very good short-term for these pigs in Washington free, feeding at the trough.
27:22 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. And Anthony, by the way, this is why it's so great to have you here and folks, this is why I wanted to have this conversation with Anthony. It's so difficult to speak about Elon's role in politics. But here we have a Republican, former communication director of the Trump White House.
27:36 Speaker 01 Why is it difficult? Because he's a powerful guy and...
27:38 Alex Kantrowitz? Everyone thinks you're coming in when you speak about Elon with an ax to grind. But that's not you. You're an investor in Elon's companies. So I, and I, but I think that's the right diagnosis, by the way.
27:47 Speaker 01 By the way, I have no ax to grind.
27:48 Alex Kantrowitz? I know. That's why I'm glad you're here.
27:50 Speaker 01 I want Elon to go back to work. I think he is literally the quintessential American hero entrepreneur. I think he's a brilliant visionary. I think he's gotten so many things right in his career. Uh, this XAI, the Grok stuff is phenomenal. It's helped me in my business. It's helped me as a person. Uh, I think the stuff he's doing with Neuralink is gonna be transformative for so many people with
28:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
28:17 Speaker 01 disabilities.
28:18 Alex Kantrowitz? We had Nolan Arba, the first Neuralink patient on the show a couple of months ago.
28:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
28:21 Alex Kantrowitz? It was pretty, I've seen four technological miracles in my life. The iPhone, ChatGPT, driving in a driverless Waymo car, and watching Nolan play a video game.
28:30 Speaker 01 I have, I have.
28:31 Alex Kantrowitz? And beat me in a video game.
28:32 Speaker 01 I have no axe to kind, but I, I find that people are nervous about saying things about Elon because he's a powerful guy and they don't want to get in his field of vision and they don't want to cross him. But I'm, I'm, you know, my attitude is, you know, I want to be real with people. Because I think that really smart people are real with people and then they gravitate to each other. Like if I've got a booger in my nose, do I have a booger in my nose, Alex?
28:56 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, clear, Anthony.
28:57 Speaker 01 Okay, but if I had one, I would want you to say, hey Mooch, you got a booger in your nose. This way I could excuse myself and rip the booger out of my nose. And you gotta be with people in life that are gonna talk to you straight. But they're gonna talk to you straight out of love where they want to help you. And I have, if anything, I think Tesla's a great company. I think this robotic stuff he's doing at Tesla is amazing. I think he hurt his brand by going into Washington. And I think there's plenty of time to repair the brand. The great news about America, F. Scott Fitzgerald got something really wrong. Uh, he was a brilliant writer, 100th anniversary of a Long Island novel, The Great Gatsby.
29:37 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, yes.
29:37 Speaker 01 Came out in April of 1925. But Fitzgerald got one major thing wrong, Alex. He said, there are no second acts in American life. Very famously said that 100 years ago. He got it wrong. There's hundreds of second.
29:52 Alex Kantrowitz? Second and third acts, for sure.
29:53 Speaker 01 There are 10th acts, you know, Trump is an example of that. I'm an example of that. I don't know your life story, but I bet if you had a shortcoming or a failure, you could pull yourself together and come back from it. America loves to come back. They want the success story. So if you invite me back in a year, I'll make a prediction on your show. Elon will be flourishing in a year. Uh, his businesses will be flourishing because he's that kind of a guy. Uh, but you know, politics is a rough sport, man. And I, and, and you're talking to somebody who's got tire tracks on his back.
30:24 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah. Okay, I want to, so now let's talk a little bit about Elon's economic criticism, or criticism of this big, beautiful bill, because I think it's important for us also to get into current day policy and current day politics. So, big, beautiful bill, it's going to increase the deficit, I think, by three to five trillion dollars. Elon says, "I'm sorry, I can't stand it anymore." This is on Tuesday. "This massive outrageous pork-filled congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it. You know you did wrong. You know it." He says, "It will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to 2.5 trillion dollars." I think it's even more than that. "And burden American citizens with crushingly," I think he meant "by 2.5 trillion."
31:09 Alex Kantrowitz? "And burden American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt." Anthony, you're a business person. Just, you know, for years, people ignored this mounting debt that the US had. Now, I think we're about to hit a moment where the country is going to pay a trillion dollars a year, or more, just in the interest payment on debt, which is, I think, close to a fifth of all US government spending. So, can you talk about this, this brand-new consensus, I think, that is emerging in the business world about why all this deficit spending might not be wise?
31:43 Speaker 01 Well, first thing I'm going to say is buy Bitcoin. That's the first thing I'm going to say. And a lot of people that really analyze and study this understand why. But the second thing I'm, the second thing I'm going to say to you is that this is a fixable thing. But we have a disease now in the system, and the disease is one born from complacency. And so, I want to articulate this for your listeners that can understand it, because if they're actionable, they can help fix it. And so, what basically happened is Ross Boro ran for office in 1992. He won 19.9% of the vote. Bill Clinton became the president, but he scared the living daylights out of the two parties.
32:27 Speaker 01 So the two parties got together and created this bone-crushing duopoly. They strengthened themselves in a way that has prevented for 33 years, a third party to come on the scene to try to liquidate the extremists of the two parties. And so what ended up happening is they allowed each other to gerrymander, they gave each other breaks on each other's situations. The fat tails of the extremists of the two parties started to run things, and now they've stayed in perpetual power. So Chuck Grassley, I think he was like George Washington's great-grandfather, maybe. He's like 900 years old. He's in the Congress, so he'll be there for another 100 years, I guess.
33:09 Speaker 01 Nancy Pelosi's 85, Schumer 75, Trump on his way to 79, Biden 81. They don't want to leave. They don't want to leave. And they're all there in this sclerosis. And to keep the sclerosis going, they pile on the pork and they pile on the spending. And it's an unstoppable train, to quote the economist Lynn Alden. And why is this important to bring up? Because it wasn't that way. You know, after Reagan did the deficit spending to help bring down the Iron Curtain, George Herbert Walker Bush passed, with the help of Dick Gephardt, these pay-as-you-go legislation. And pay-as-you-go was a guardrail on the Congress.
33:53 Speaker 01 He said, "We've got too much deficit spending. If you want a social program, no problem, have to raise taxes. If you're a Republican, you want to cut taxes, no problem. You have to find something in the budget to cut. We've got to have guardrails on the system." And Clinton adhered to those guardrails.
34:12 Speaker 01 But this group of drunkards has pulled the guardrails off the system and they're spending like maniacs and you can't get the economic growth to track the spending. But they won't stop the spending and they will tell you that something's been cut, something's growing at 6%, but they had it targeted at 8% and they'll tell you it was cut by 2% even though it's growing by 6. So you have to really understand what they do in Washington, which Elon does, and he's looking at it and he's saying, "Hey, this is catastrophic for my fellow citizens of the United States. You have to stop what you're doing."
34:57 Speaker 01 Now, the flip side is he also knows you can't pull the rug on people because if you pull the rug on people, it'll be de-consumptive, it could touch off a recession, but you could slow the growth, you could slow the growth and you could reimpose the pay-as-you-go legislation from the 1990s and it would take about 20 years and you could bring the deficit down. Now, that's the bad news for the politicians because they don't want to tell all the Americans that, but you can't fix this thing in two weeks, you can't cut a trillion dollars or Lutnik was saying 2 trillion and you can't take the chainsaw out, you're going to hurt people if you do that. But you can set it up so that the growth of the budget slows and the economy outpaces the growth.
35:42 Speaker 01 You could do that and you could fix it. So this bill is an abomination and what this bill is doing is it's wildly increasing the growth of deficit spending. And you brought this up, Alex, and let's just point this out to people. If you get a rise in interest rates, you could be spending 1.5 trillion dollars on interest. You're only taking in 3.5 to 4 trillion dollars in tax revenues. Okay, max 5 trillion. You're spending 6 or 7 trillion, depending on what's going on. Not sustainable, no way, no how. Moreover, if you have a nutty president... That wants to declare war on everybody.
36:25 Speaker 01 He's the Admiral Yamamoto. He's got a Pearl Harbor attack going. Trade War One has been started by Admiral Yamamoto Trump.
36:35 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
36:36 Speaker 01 And he's hitting everybody in a 360-degree move. So he's going after our allies and he's going after our adversaries. In this maniacal way, he's like Orange Moses coming down from Mount Evil with the tablet. He's walking in with the tablet. Nobody understands the tablet. Everybody's afraid of him. And he's got 145% tariffs and tariffs on the penguins and all this crazy shit that...
37:02 Alex Kantrowitz? You gotta tariff the penguins.
37:03 Speaker 01 Yeah.
37:04 Alex Kantrowitz? They've been getting way...
37:04 Speaker 01 Absolutely crazy shit. So he's sitting there with the Orange Moses, you know, 10 commandments of tariffs. And people are looking around at the rest of us, the rest of the world going, wow, this is a disaster for the United States. But he could have said, hey, the Chinese, which is true. They were supposed to buy certain agricultural products. They signed a deal with me back in 2018, 19. They didn't live up to it. The minute Joe Biden came in, they stopped obligating themselves to the agreement. And so I need to go back to them in a tough way and enforce that. But before I do that, let me call my European allies. Let me call my Canadian friends. And let me say, hey, guys, let's team up.
37:45 Speaker 01 And now there's a billion of us and let's go after our economic adversary, China. But you didn't do that. Okay? And so now he's got the Canadians mad at us, all the Europeans mad at us, the Greenlanders are mad at us, the Panamanians are mad at us. It's just totally freakishly irrational and unnecessary. But he's got a group of sycophants in a room that won't tell him the truth.
38:09 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so I definitely want to cover tariffs also, but let's just go back to deficit for a minute. I mean, the argument that's gotten politicians or the people who, the ideological supporters of this deficit spending to the point where we're at now, which I think is nuts, the level of debt we have. The argument that they've made is the US has the reserve currency, so we can just keep borrowing and everything will be fine. We can print dollars and we can pay it off whenever. But that seems to have sort of crossed into territory where people don't believe that anymore.
38:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I don't 100% buy that. I would say we're not there yet.
38:47 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
38:48 Speaker 01 I think they're still okay with it. It's still the tallest of the shortest people.
38:53 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
38:53 Speaker 01 Can't use the word midget anymore, so we'll just say the tallest of the shortest people.
38:57 Alex Kantrowitz? Breaking all the rules. You're gonna get me demonetized, man. No, I'm kidding.
38:59 Speaker 01 Why? You get demonetized? We'll bleep that out.
39:02 Alex Kantrowitz? It'll be fine.
39:03 Speaker 01 Bleep it out. I'm not trying to demonetize you. I'm just trying to say that, you know.
39:06 Alex Kantrowitz? It's okay. I hear you.
39:06 Speaker 01 We're the tallest, shortest person in the room.
39:08 Alex Kantrowitz? Yes.
39:09 Speaker 01 So we're probably still okay. So I don't 100% buy that. But we are gonna get to that point, okay? It's a year, two years out on this trajectory. And also, Trump is trying to Brexit us from the rest of the world. And so he's trying to cut our air supply with the rest of the world. And when the UK brexited from Europe, they became weaker. They became poorer. They have less disposable income in the country, and they have really bad morale in the country as a result of what they did. And Trump's trying to do that to us. Because this is a populist, emotionally driven idea. So if you have big, beautiful spending, and you have an American Brexit at the same time,
39:53 Speaker 01 where you're trying to isolate us from the rest of the world, you're gonna cause capital movement on the margin to move away from the United States.
40:03 Alex Kantrowitz? And the interest rate will go, keep going further.
40:05 Speaker 01 And then the interest rate will go.
40:06 Alex Kantrowitz? That's why Jamie Dimon is saying that bonds are gonna have a reaction to this, because of those two forces in combination.
40:12 Speaker 01 Well, 100%. Well, he's not stupid, and he's, he should be president, frankly, but he's, he's not stupid. He knows. And again, all of these things are fixable. One of the best lines ever uttered from a presidential podium was in June of 1963 at American University. Jack Kennedy got to the podium in the flowing robe at a commencement address. And he basically said that these problems are created by us. And so therefore, we can fix the problems. It's not like the earth is opening up and it's swallowing us. It's not a natural disaster. We're creating this as a disaster. He was really talking about...
40:55 Speaker 01 Nuclear weapons and nuclear proliferation and he wanted a test ban treaty to stop the testing of these bombs because it was poisoning the water and the air that we lived in. But this is a different thing. This is a catastrophe of mismanagement. This is a catastrophe of political expediency. You don't have people in Washington like Elon Musk who are trying to tell people the truth and they don't want to do it.
41:27 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
41:28 Speaker 01 And this is the reason why they went after Musk because they know Musk is a truth teller. So he's telling you the truth. This is a disaster and oh, by the way, you know it's a disaster, but you're acting with one indifference because you want to stay in power.
41:44 Alex Kantrowitz? Right. Okay, let me read to you a response that I heard from a tech CEO who supports Trump and supports these tariffs. And I'm curious what your perspective is because I think this sort of sums up the ideological backing of why this trade war is happening. He said, "Every nation in the past that's run a really aggressive trade deficit for a long period of time bankrupts itself. When you're sending all your wealth overseas such that the overseas entity can own your property and equity, you're in a very tricky position." What do you think about that?
42:19 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, I think it's a little bit bullshitty, but I think it's a little bit too simplistic.
42:24 Alex Kantrowitz? But it sounds like you think there's some truth behind it.
42:27 Speaker 01 There are kernels, like this is the brilliance of Trump. There's kernels of truth to what he's saying.
42:32 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
42:33 Speaker 01 But it's a little bullshitty.
42:34 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
42:35 Speaker 01 So, so, understand something. You had to even the playing field. Trump is correct about that. But understand what America got from the whole experience. We ended the Second World War with 2% of the world's population, 50% of the world's GDP. I got that from Grok, by the way, so you can verify it. And we made a decision that we needed to help the rest of the world. We didn't want another Versailles experience where our vanquished adversaries were impoverished and taken over by Joe Stalin. We didn't want that. So we created the General Agreement of Trade and Towers. We made it uneven.
43:15 Speaker 01 We allowed free trade to flow into the United States unfettered, by and large, and we accepted protectionism from other countries. You can read Robert Lighthizer's book, No Trade is Free, to understand the history of this. Now, he would argue in the book that that was unfair to the US, but the US leadership like Dean Agathon, Truman, et cetera, argued that this would create rising living standards and it would eliminate higher risk of another global conflict. Because if we're all integrating and eating together at the same table, probably not going to shoot each other. Tom Friedman said it differently. Two countries that have a McDonald's in each country typically don't fight with each other.
43:59 Alex Kantrowitz? He said they never go to war, but that's changed.
44:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, the Ukraine and Russia. Yeah, exactly. So that changed.
44:05 Alex Kantrowitz? It was a decent rule, though.
44:06 Speaker 01 But it was a decent rule. So what your CFO or your CEO is saying is sort of true. But you can't change the system, and it's ignoring what William F. Buckley would say to you and others, that you are creating the deficit because you're getting a good from the other country that is of value to you. Moreover, if what this gentleman was saying is 100% true, we would have had a downward shift in our economic supremacy. We would have had a downward shift in the supremacy of the dollar. We didn't have that. You've had, 1980 to today, 45 years.
44:51 Speaker 01 Twenty-six percent of the world's GDP, four and a half percent of the world's population. And so it's evidence that the policies that we have in place do work for the country. But we made a mistake. We were fixing the deficit problem at the end of the year 2000, 25 years ago. But then Bin Laden hit us, right here in this location that you and I are speaking from. We overreacted, if we're going to be brutally honest with hindsight now. And we declared war in two different places, spent $7 trillion, killed hundreds of thousands of people, lost seven or 10,000 Americans in the wars, 20-year wars to nowhere, trillions
45:36 Speaker 01 of dollars of spending, decoupled ourselves from pay-as-you-go, and we've now lost the plot. So what he's saying, I agree that we have to right-size things. I agree that we have to surgically go through the tariffs and make them fairer to the American worker. But we don't have to do that and wreck our standing in goodwill, particularly with our allies. We don't have to do that, okay? We are a beacon for freedom, for man and womankind. Lincoln said we're the last best hope for mankind. It's the most interesting political experiment in the world. The US.
46:18 Speaker 01 The US. We have 5.7 billion people in the world, living under some form of autocracy right now. And we have It's crazy. We have to be a beacon and an anchor of leadership for the free world. We have to fortify and we have to help them. Now, did we do some things wrong? Could we have changed some of the protocols at USAID? Certainly. Could we right-size some of the tariffs? No question. But why blow up the whole apple cart that has led to us having 30-plus trillion dollars of GDP for a population of 330 million people? Why do that? I think it's absolutely asinine.
47:02 Speaker 01 And and and whoever said that, by the way, will come around. Okay, the same way I predicted Musk would get there with Trump, which he's there right now. This person, whoever this person is, invite him on to a podcast a year from now, like, wow.
47:17 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
47:18 Speaker 01 You know, he'll come around.
47:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah.
47:21 Speaker 01 He'll see what I see.
47:22 Alex Kantrowitz? Uh, we should have, we should have him back. He wasn't, it was a, just a sort of newsletter interview, uh, but he should come back again. So I, I want to take a break and on the other side of this break, we only have a few minutes left, but talk about one company in particular, uh, that you can look at through this lens of trade, which is Apple. And I also want to make sure to shout out your show again. It's called The Rest, The Rest is Politics U.S. And you also have a show with Scott Galloway, a limited run, I think, about, uh, American men?
47:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's called Lost Boys.
47:52 Alex Kantrowitz? Lost Boys.
47:53 Speaker 01 Scott and I are close friends and, uh, we did a six-part mini-series on what's going on with males age 18 to 30. Uh, we got to pull these guys out of the depression that a lot of them are in and the lack of self-confidence and, uh, you know, there's been an attack. Listen, I'm all about making the society fairer and having there be more equity in the society, but I don't think we realize what we did to white males in the last 15 years. And, and guess what? Forty-six percent of the women in the country voted for Donald Trump, 54% of the white women. And when you ask them why they voted for him, you know, we're tired of our men getting picked on in this culture.
48:35 Alex Kantrowitz? Hmm.
48:36 Speaker 01 And it's had a big impact on men. And so Scott and I did a six-part mini-series called Lost Boys, interviewing a lot of very clever people, sociologists, psychologists, et cetera. And, uh, you know, I, it's near and dear to my heart. I have four sons. I want them to grow up and, uh...
48:52 Alex Kantrowitz? This episode is brought to you by App Point. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Co-pilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what App Point does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended across your entire AI estate, your data, your cloud, and the agents acting on your behalf. It's how more than 28,000 organizations deploy AI with confidence. So innovation scales without scaling risk. AV Point, the unifying trust layer for AI.
49:36 Alex Kantrowitz? Head to AVpoint.com to see how enterprises deploy AI with confidence. Learn more at AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast. That's AVPT.co/bigtechnologypodcast. Violent threats against executives are growing at an alarming rate. When a company experiences backlash, executives are the first people blamed. When their address and other personal details are sitting online, this backlash can lead right to their front door. The team at Ironwell knows this better than anyone. They've protected some of the most targeted executives and individuals on the planet for almost two decades. As a wide-glove enterprise security service, they protect your people with continuous
50:17 Alex Kantrowitz? personal data removal, proactive prevention tools, and human-led emergency support. So when someone goes looking for your executives, Ironwell ensures they hit a dead end. So here's what to do. Go to ironwall.com/bigtechnology, fill in the quick form, and request your free risk assessment. Their team will show you just how exposed your executives are and how to lock it down before a threat reaches their front door. That's ironwall.com/bigtechnology. Learn how to stop online threats before they become real-world attacks. The link's in the show notes.
50:52 Speaker 01 Be fair and kind to people, but I also want to have a lot of self-confidence.
50:55 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so definitely wanted to shout that out. Let's take a quick break and come back and talk about Apple. And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony, so great to have you here. So let's just pick up our conversation.
51:06 Speaker 01 Is it though? I mean, am I blowing up your podcast? I mean, am I gonna get you demonetized or something? Why are you crazy?
51:12 Alex Kantrowitz? Maybe this one video, but I don't care.
51:14 Speaker 01 All right, all right, all right. Yeah, bleep out the stuff you don't like.
51:17 Alex Kantrowitz? It's okay. No, I'm not complaining. But I do want to talk to you about Apple, because we just talked previously about the trade relationships that we've had. And Apple, I think, sort of epitomizes this conversation of like, the US creates the IP, makes the products in China. And even if all this stuff is made out, you know, made elsewhere, the US gets the better deal. I'm curious to hear two things from you. First of all, what do you think about that trade off? And then second, you know, one of the most interesting narratives that we've seen people follow that follow this podcast is the relationship that Tim Cook has had with Trump. So I'd love to hear your perspective on what might be happening there.
51:56 Speaker 01 Well, again, it's very transactional. So when Trump needs, um, they'll bring him to the White House, they'll call him Tim Apple. When he wants to showcase American manufacturing, he'll fly to Texas with his daughter and they'll tour a factory together. And when Trump feels like he wants to beat up on him because he wants to beat up on everybody, you know, you know, let me give it, you know, Mark Zuckerberg a memo, you can do whatever you want to do and you lay in front of him if you want and the Washington Post can give up their editorial content. It's not going to matter. If he's going to come for you, he's coming for you. There's nothing you're going to be able to do. There's no push buttons.
52:38 Speaker 01 I mean, maybe you can go play golf with him and kiss his ass on the golf course all day. Uh, you know, Shinzo Abe, may his soul rest in peace, great guy. Uh, Trump liked him, they played golf and he flattered him all day on the golf course. I guess maybe that, but you know, to me, I don't think that's even workable. Just go do your job, practice your business, work as hard as you can. This cat is going to be gone in three and a half years from the system and see if you can work with other political leaders to find people that are more common sense oriented about the economy and not as vengeful and as short sighted as Donald Trump. That would be my message to the Apple people.
53:22 Speaker 01 I would also say to Tim Cook, I would say, you've done a really good job, a phenomenal job, post Steve Jobs, and you had rules. What were the rules? The US set it up. The US let China into the WTO. The US created the trading system that we're now living in.
53:46 Speaker 01 And if we made some mistakes, let's correct them. But you can't take a manufacturing company like Apple and bam bam, change it in five minutes. It just doesn't work that way. So if you need guidance from our government to say, listen, we'd really like to get your factory out of China, we'd like to get it back here to the United States, or we'd like to get you into another part of the world, you gotta give them some time to do that. Okay, the same way you gave them time to move it off the shore of the US. Can I tell a quick story? I know we're running out of time, but I want to tell the story. Yeah, definitely. Because it's an illustration of how stupid I am as a person. And it's a good cautionary tale for others.
54:27 Speaker 01 In 1999, I was 35 years old, I was on Wall Street, and I believed in the lower cost of capital, lower cost of labor ideas at that time. And we were gonna offshore manufacturing to lower the cost of the per unit of manufacturing, which was gonna benefit the American consumer and benefit the American shareholder. At that moment in time, there was a protest in Seattle. WTO protest. Yeah, WTO protest. It was the Teamsters and the Turtles. Yeah, the Teamsters and the Turtles, Ralph Nader went up there, and they said, please do not let China into the WTO.
55:09 Speaker 01 And at 29, I very smugly was like, look at these socialist bozos, what do they know? And they were right, Alex, and I was wrong, and the bozos turned to be, turned out to be us on Wall Street. And I say this to you with great humility, because we should have had a hybrid strategy in place, and we should have said, okay, China, we're gonna let you in to help you urbanize some parts of your population, to raise your living standards, but we're gonna check a lot of things that you're doing at the door to protect these American workers. We did not do that. Donald Trump is right about that.
55:49 Speaker 01 That was a shortcoming of the establishment, and I always attribute this to the establishment's indifference born from their very strong duopoly. They weren't listening to the people. So much so that the grandparents...
56:05 Speaker 01 And the great grandparents of the Trump supporters voted for Lyndon Johnson and they voted for FDR, but they turned and switched parties and voted for Donald Trump. So we got this wrong, but you can't blame Tim Cook for this. This was our idea in 1999. This is the rollout of the idea over 15 or 20 years, really ended in 17 when Trump called it out. So from 1999 to 17, this is what we were doing. And Apple did what they thought was the right thing to do for themselves, their shareholders and their customers. And so I don't like seeing Apple, which is one of the greatest American companies in the history of mankind, on its back foot.
56:49 Speaker 01 I want Apple on its front foot and I want Apple explaining that to the American people. I want Apple explaining that you want to bring the iPhone back, great, it's going to cost $3,500 on iPhone. And I don't think we're ready to do that. And I think we need to come up with a plan that's more sensical than this reactionary thing that we're doing. And I just want to make one last point. You could have said to people, hey, I'm going to give you a 50-year tax abatement, you know, and here's US federal land. And we're going to build a city, we're going to put plumbing and architecture and a power plant, and we're going to work alongside of you and Apple and Taiwan Semiconductor. You guys come back.
57:33 Speaker 01 You come back, we're going to give you this tax abatement, and you're going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs, and we'll collect the taxes off the taxpayers that you're paying in salary and take the taxes from you guys yourselves. And then we could do something that Clinton always wanted to do, have a sort of omnibus 15% corporate tax, which would help us in places like Ireland and other places like that, create more tax equity in the system. And you could have your cake and you could eat it too. But we got Donald Trump yelling and screaming, flexing, Sharp-oh-boing people, going out on Truth Social like a maniac, and he scares the living shit out of these people. And so they won't...
58:20 Speaker 01 They won't operate offensively and so my message to them is start playing a little offense. He's a declining, he's a decaying political asset. He's got three and a half years to go. Get focused on who's going to replace him and make sure you've got money behind smart, clear-thinking people who are going to help your company, help your employees, help America instead of this nonsense that we're perpetrating right now.
58:47 Alex Kantrowitz? It could happen. I mean, it's just going to be tough for them. Like, the idea that they're gonna, Apple will make any big changes to their operation is, doesn't seem feasible to me.
58:56 Speaker 01 It's not even fair, though. But you gotta start saying that. You gotta say, "Look, I'm really sorry."
59:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Can't do it.
59:01 Speaker 01 "This is what you guys told me to do. We went and did it. Now you want me to do something different. I'm open to it, but I can't do it in five minutes. It's just not going to happen. So if you want to criticize me for something you told me to do, and I ended up doing it, and now you want me to do something different, okay, but I need more than five minutes to reset myself."
59:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, even this whole India thing. It's like, they're moving to India, but they have Foxconn that's setting up the assembly product process in India. They're not really moving to India. They're just, you know.
59:29 Speaker 01 Well, that's a lot of what's going on. There's a lot of tariff washing, right?
59:32 Alex Kantrowitz? Exactly. Tariff washing. Exactly right.
59:35 Speaker 01 They're sending the stuff to Vietnam. It's getting completed Vietnam. It gets sent over. They're sending stuff, they're sending parts to Mexico. It's coming through NAFTA.
59:42 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep.
59:43 Speaker 01 I mean, guys, come on. I mean, come on. Why don't we stop it? We all know what we're doing to each other. Why don't we stop it? Why don't we come up with fairness and some moderation and so that we can set a course trajectory that lasts longer than two minutes? And let's say, okay, this is our 10-year plan, and this is what we should be doing over the next 10 years, which will help heal the upside-down nature of the deficit spending, right-size some of the entitlement issues, fix the trajectory.
1:00:14 Speaker 01 We could do it, but we don't want to do that and they don't want to do that because they want to stay in perpetual power.
1:00:20 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:00:21 Speaker 01 And they've got all these lobbyists in there in a feeding frenzy. We didn't get the Citizens United, but that's another effed up thing that we did. You know, where you got all this money flowing in the politics is impossible for the little guy. That we've created the separate but equal democracy. Look at the legislative agenda in the Congress since January of 2010, when Citizens United was rendered. It's all skewed to big business, big pharma, big food, corporate welfare, kleptocracy. None of it's for the little guys because the little guys no longer have enough money in the game.
1:00:58 Alex Kantrowitz? Totally predictable outcome.
1:01:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, terrible.
1:01:00 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay, so we have two minutes left. I got two questions for you.
1:01:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, go ahead.
1:01:03 Alex Kantrowitz? Are you going to go back into politics? The way that you're talking makes it sound like you want to.
1:01:08 Speaker 01 No, I can't go back into poli- I'm trying to.
1:01:10 Alex Kantrowitz? You just said earlier that anyone can have a second life in American life.
1:01:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, but I'm trying to stay married. I'm trying to have a second life in my marriage.
1:01:16 Alex Kantrowitz? That's okay.
1:01:17 Speaker 01 I'm running for reelection in my marriage. You know, my wife literally filed for divorce on me, deservedly so, by the way.
1:01:23 Alex Kantrowitz? During the 11 days?
1:01:24 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, well, actually, maybe 10 days prior to the 11 days. Yeah, it was a brutal time.
1:01:28 Alex Kantrowitz? Oh, God.
1:01:29 Speaker 01 It was a brutal time for us. We love each other, would like to stay married. I got to raise my kids, but yeah, no, I'm but I'm not a politician, you know. The minute you go into politics, I actually start lying.
1:01:39 Alex Kantrowitz? Yep.
1:01:40 Speaker 01 You know, I'm not, I don't want to do that.
1:01:41 Alex Kantrowitz? Maybe not, though.
1:01:42 Speaker 01 No, I don't see that. You got to, the minute you start, you know, when a politician is lying? When his mouth is moving, you know that, right?
1:01:49 Alex Kantrowitz? Yeah, of course, yeah.
1:01:50 Speaker 01 Of course. Like, what was the second question?
1:01:51 Alex Kantrowitz? What's going to happen with Bitcoin?
1:01:54 Alex Kantrowitz? I mean, 100,000 to me always seemed like it was in play, but what happens is this? Because like you have the administration that's running toward Bitcoin right now. This seems like it's the best that it's going to get. Potentially. I mean, let me throw that out there and see what you think.
1:02:09 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, listen, I mean, I, I don't know. I mean, I'm a long-term bull on Bitcoin. I don't see the freight train of spending stopping. And so that's a drunk-driving accident about to happen. The central banks are drunk-driving with the currency. The legislature and the president are drunk-driving with the fiscal budget. And so you're gonna, you, you just told me that we're gonna print more and more money.
1:02:36 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:02:37 Speaker 01 And it's gonna cause a debt crisis.
1:02:39 Alex Kantrowitz? But doesn't Bitcoin cause a bigger crisis because it removes the power from the Fed?
1:02:43 Speaker 01 Oh, I see it's the very opposite. I think Bitcoin, if anything, could check the power.
1:02:48 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
1:02:49 Speaker 01 I think, I think, I think sometimes the person, because of our proclivities towards excess, the person needs guardrails and the person needs a system in place that they can't control to protect them from their worst instincts. And so Bitcoin is, I think, is a disciplinary mechanism. And we'll probably end up having Bitcoin on the corporate, on the fiscal balance sheet of the United States. We'll probably have Bitcoin as a form of currency, some form of store of value, transfer into stable coins at some point. And I think that you're right. It sounds like you're a Bitcoin skeptic, and I think people should be.
1:03:31 Alex Kantrowitz? No, I'm just trying to ask the questions here that would sort of get to the truth.
1:03:34 Speaker 01 I think you're right. There's a lot of great news in the system, so maybe it's fully priced, but I don't see it that way. I see it as a, very early in the game. And I see Bitcoin as an asset class. I guess the question, let me throw it back to you and your listeners.
1:03:49 Alex Kantrowitz? Okay.
1:03:49 Speaker 01 Is Bitcoin an asset class? Yes or no? If it's not an asset class and it's just another investment, then you're probably right. You know, it's up there in market capitalization alongside of Apple and Microsoft and Balon and Nvidia. But it's up there. But if it's an asset class, then it's going to trade to where gold is trading. And gold is at 23 or 24 trillion right now. And Bitcoin is at 2 trillion. And so I'm not, you know, if you bring Saylor on, who I adore, I love Michael Saylor.
1:04:19 Alex Kantrowitz? Right.
1:04:20 Speaker 01 He'll tell you it's the operating layer for the future of money. He'll tell you it's digital property. He'll tell you it's going to 13 million dollars a coin. He's a lot more confident than me. And let's face it, he's a lot smarter than I am. I just look at it and say, okay, this is going to be with us. It's getting adopted. And I think it becomes an asset class. I think it's a million dollars a coin. And I have a $20,000 cost basis in it. And I'm going to hold it.
1:04:45 Alex Kantrowitz? All right. The shows are The Rest Is Politics US and Lost Boys. You can find them both on your podcast app of choice. Anthony Scaramucci, great to see you. I hope you come back.
1:04:54 Speaker 01 Hey, I hope I get invited back.
1:04:56 Alex Kantrowitz? You will.
1:04:56 Speaker 01 I hope I don't say too much controversy.
1:04:58 Alex Kantrowitz? Not at all.
1:04:58 Speaker 01 Real pleasure to be with you. I'm a huge fan.
1:05:01 Alex Kantrowitz? Likewise. Strong Island, man.
1:05:02 Speaker 01 Strong Island.
1:05:03 Alex Kantrowitz? All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. We'll be back next on Friday to break down the week's news with a WWDC preview and then I will
1:05:10 Speaker 02 Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com, not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
1:05:42 Speaker 03 Every mile matters. Whether you're driving your dream car or your daily commuter, the Mobile One team knows that. It's why we created Mobile One Advanced Clean Motor Oil. It cleans your engine in one oil change and helps extend engine life, delivering performance, protection, and cleanliness for vehicles of all ages. All to help keep your engine running like new, whatever you're driving. Visit mobileone.com/advancedclean to learn more.
1:06:09 Alex Kantrowitz? be live or coming to you from WWDC in Silicon Valley next week. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.
Previous Mass AI-Driven Unemployment, NVIDIA Surges, CEOs' AI Avatars Unleashed Next Apple’s AI 'Gap Year' at WWDC?, Elon Vs. Trump Goes Nuclear, NYTimes’ OpenAI Attack Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
