Anthony Scaramucci: Elon Musk’s Trump Exit, Tim Cook’s Tariff Problem

27:00Why is it difficult? Because he's a powerful guy and... Everyone thinks you're coming in when you speak about Elon with an axe to grind. But that's not you. You're an investor in Elon's companies. I think that's the right diagnosis, by the way. I have no ax to grind. I know. That's why I'm glad you're here. I want Elon to go back to work. I think he is literally the quintessential American hero entrepreneur. I think he's a brilliant visionary. I think he's gotten so many things right in his career. This XAI, the Grok stuff is phenomenal. It's helped me in my business. It's helped me as a person.

27:36I think the stuff he's doing with Neuralink is going to be transformative to so many people with disabilities. We had Nolan Arbaugh, the first Neuralink patient on the show a couple months ago. Yeah. I've seen four technological miracles in my life. The iPhone, chat GPT, driving in a driverless Waymo car, and watching Nolan play a video game and beat me in a video game using just his brain. I find that people are nervous about saying things about Elon because he's a powerful guy and they don't want to get in his field of vision and they don't want to cross him. But I'm, you know, my attitude is, you know, I want to be real with people because I think that really smart people are real with people and then they gravitate to each other.

28:16Like if I've got a booger in my nose, do I have a booger in my nose, Alex? All clear, Anthony. Okay. But if I had one, I would want you to say, hey, Mooch, you got a booger in your nose. That's why I could excuse myself and rip the booger out of my nose. and you got to be with people in life that are going to talk to you straight, but they're going to talk to you straight out of love where they want to help you. And if anything, I think Tesla is 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.

28:50The great news about America, F. Scott Fitzgerald got something really wrong. He was a brilliant writer, 100th anniversary of a Long Island novel, The Great Gatsby. Yes. 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 acts. Second and third acts, for sure. Third, tenth acts. You know, Trump is an example of that. I'm an example of that. I don't know your life story, but I bet if you had a shortcoming or a failure, you could pull yourself together and come back from it.

29:27America 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. His businesses will be flourishing because he's that kind of a guy. But, you know, politics is a rough sport, man. And you're talking to somebody who's got tired tracks on his back. Yeah. Okay. 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.

30:06Elon 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. He says it will massively increase the already gigantic budget deficit to$2.5 trillion. I think it's even more than that. And burdened American citizens with crushingly, I think even by$2.5 trillion. And burdened American citizens with crushingly unsustainable debt. Anthony, you're a business person. You know, for years, people ignored this mounting debt that the U.S. had. Now, I think we're about to hit a moment where the country is going to pay a trillion dollars a year or more just in the interest payment on debt, which is, I think, close to a fifth of all U.S.

30:50government spending. So can you talk about this brand new consensus, I think, that is emerging in the business world about why all this deficit spending might not be wise? Well, 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 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 so they can understand it, because if they're actionable, they can help fix it.

31:32And so what basically happened is Ross Perot ran for office in 1992. He won 19.9 % of the vote. Bill Clinton became the president, but he scared the living daylights out of the two parties. So the two parties got together and created this bone-crushing duopoly. They strengthened themselves in a way that has prevented for 33 years a third party to come on the scene to try to liquidate the 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.

32:15And 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. He'll be there for another 100 years, I guess. Nancy Pelosi's 85. Schumer's 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 the sclerosis. And to keep the sclerosis going, they pile on the pork and they pile on the spending. And it's an unstoppable train, to quote the economist Lynn Alden. And why is this important to bring up? Because it wasn't that way.

32:57You 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. He said, we get too much deficit spending. If you want a social program, no problem. Have to raise taxes. If you're a Republican, you want to cut taxes, no problem. You have to find something in the budget to cut. We got to have guardrails on the system and Clinton adhered to those guardrails. But this group of drunkards has pulled the guardrails off the system and they're spending like maniacs.

33:39And 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, okay, this is catastrophic for my fellow citizens of the United States. You have to stop what you're doing. Now, the flip side is he also knows you can't pull the rug on people because if you pull the rug on people, it'll be deconsumptive.

34:24It could touch off a recession, but you could slow the growth. You could slow you go with 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 the Americans that. But you can't fix this thing in two weeks. You can't cut a trillion dollars, or Lutnik was saying two trillion, and you can't take the chainsaw out. You're going to hurt people if you do that. But you can set it up so that the growth of the budget slows, and the economy outpaces the growth. You could do that and you could fix it.

35:03So 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 on interest. You're only taking in$3.5 to$4 trillion 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, he's the Admiral Yamamoto. He's got a Pearl Harbor attack going. Trade War One has been started by Admiral Yamamoto Trump.

35:54Okay. 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. You've got to tariff the penguins. Yeah. They've been getting away with it for too long. So he's sitting there with the Orange Moses, you know, Ten 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.

36:37But 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. And now there's a billion of us. And let's go after our economic adversary, China. But I didn't do that. Okay. So now he's got the Canadians mad at us.

37:13All 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 the room that won't tell him the truth. Okay. So I definitely want to cover tariffs also. But let's just go back to deficit for a minute. I mean, the argument that's gotten the politicians or the people who the ideological supporters of this deficit spending to the point where we're at now, which I think is not the level of debt we have. The argument that they've made is the U.S. has the reserve currency so we can just keep borrowing and everything will be fine.

37:51We can print dollars and we can pay it off whenever. But that seems to have sort of crossed into territory where people don't believe that anymore. Yeah, I don't 100 % buy that. I would say we're not there yet. Okay. I think they're still okay with it. It's still the tallest of the shortest people. Right. Can't use the word midget anymore, so we'll just say the tallest of the shortest people. Breaking all the rules. You're going to get me demonetized, man. No, I'm kidding. You get demonetized? We'll bleep that out. It'll be fine, yeah. All right, bleep it out. I'm not trying to demonetize you.

38:24I'm just trying to say that, you know, we're the tallest, shortest person in the room. Yes. So we're probably still okay. So I don't 100 % buy that. But we are going to get to that point. OK, 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.

39:02Because this is a populist, emotionally driven idea. So if you have big, beautiful spending and you have an American Brexit at the same time where you're trying to isolate us from the rest of the world, you're going to cause capital movement on the margin to move away from the United States. And the interest rate will keep going further. And then the interest rate will go further. That's why Jamie Dimon is saying that bonds are going to have a reaction to this because of those two forces in combination. Well, 100%. He's not stupid and he should be president, frankly, but he's not stupid. He knows.

39:38And 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 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.

40:26But 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. And this is the reason why they went after Musk because they know Musk is the truth. He might. Musk is the truth teller. So he's telling you the truth. This is a disaster. and oh, by the way, you know it's a disaster, but you're acting with one indifference because you want to stay in power. Right. Okay, let me read to you a response that I heard from a tech CEO who supports Trump and supports these tariffs.

41:11And 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? Well, I mean, I think it's a little bit bullshitty. I think it's a little bit too simplistic. But it sounds like you think there's some truth behind it. There are carnals.

41:48This is the brilliance of Trump. There's carnals of truth to what he's saying. Okay. But it's a little bullshitty. Okay. 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.

42:29We didn't want that. So we created the General Agreement of Trade and Towers. We made it uneven. 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 U.S., but the U.S. leadership like Dean Agassin, 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.

43:12Tom Friedman said it differently. Two countries that have a McDonald's in each country typically don't fight with each other. He said they never go to war, but that's changed. Yeah, the Ukraine and Russia. Yeah, exactly. So that changed. It was a decent rule, though. But it was a decent rule. So what your CFO or 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.

44:00We would have had a downward shift in the supremacy of the dollar, and we didn't have that. You've had 1980 to today, 45 years, 26 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 7 or 10 ,000 Americans in the wars, 20-year wars to nowhere, trillions of dollars of spending, decoupled ourselves from pay-as-you-go.

44:59and 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 from man and womankind. Lincoln said we're the last best hope for mankind. It's the most interesting political experiment in the world. The U.S. The U.S. We have 5.7 billion people in the world living under some form of autocracy right now. And we have to be a beacon and an anchor of leadership for the free world.

45:52We 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. 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 the podcast a year from now, like, wow.

46:36Yeah. You know, he'll come around. Yeah. He'll see what I see. We should have him back. It was just a sort of newsletter interview, but he should come back again. So I want to take a break, And on the other side of this break, we only have a few minutes left, but talk about one company in particular that you can look at through this lens of trade, which is Apple. And I also want to make sure to shout out your show again. It's called The Rest is Politics U.S. And you also have a show with Scott Galloway, a limited run, I think, about American men. Yeah, it's called Lost Boys. Yeah, so Scott and I are close friends, and we did a six-part miniseries on what's going on with males age 18 to 30.

47:19We got to pull these guys out of the depression that a lot of them are in and the lack of self-confidence. And, you know, there's been an attack. Listen, I'm all about making the society 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 guess what? 46 % 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. And it's had a big impact on men. And so Scott and I did a six-part miniseries called Lost Boys, interviewing a lot of very clever people, sociologists, psychologists, et cetera.

48:06And it's near and dear to my heart. I have four sons. I want them to grow up and be fair and kind to people, but I also want them to have a lot of self-confidence. Okay, so definitely wanted to shout that out. Let's take a quick break and come back and talk about Apple. Did you know your credit card points and miles can lose value to inflation? Credit card companies often reduce the redemption value of your points and miles. Now, imagine a credit card with rewards that can grow in value. With the Gemini credit card, you can earn Bitcoin or one of over 50 other cryptos instantly with no annual fee.

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49:26You're used to hearing my voice on the world bringing you interviews from around the globe. And you hear me reporting environment and climate news. I'm Carolyn Buehler. And I'm Marco Werman. We're now with you hosting The World Together. More global journalism with a fresh new sound. Listen to The World on your local public radio station and wherever you find your podcasts.

49:54And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Anthony Scaramucci. Anthony, so great to have you here. So let's just pick up our conversation. Is it though? I mean, am I blowing up your podcast? I mean, am I going to get you demonetized or something crazy? Maybe this one video, but I don't care. All right. All right. Yeah, bleep out the stuff you don't want. It's okay. No, I'm not complaining. But I do want to talk to you about Apple because we just talked previously about the trade relationships that we've had. And Apple, I think, sort of epitomizes this conversation of like the U.S. creates the IP, makes the products in China.

50:26And even if all this stuff is made elsewhere, the U.S. 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, one of the most interesting narratives that we've seen people follow that follow this podcast is the relationship that Tim Cook has had with Trump. So I'd love to hear your perspective on what might be happening there. Well, again, it's very transactional. So when Trump needs him, he'll bring him to the White House, 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.

51:07And 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 Mark Zuckerberg a memo. You can do whatever you want to do and you lay in front of them if you want. And the Washington Post can give up their editorial content. It's not going to matter. If he's going to come for you, he's coming for you. There's nothing you're going to be able to do. There's no push buttons. I mean, maybe you can go play golf with him and kiss his ass on the golf course all day. You know, Shinzo Abe, may his soul rest in peace, great guy. Trump liked him.

51:42They played golf and he flattered him all day on the golf course. I guess maybe that, but 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. 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.

52:27What were the rules? The U.S. set it up. The U.S. let China into the WTO. The U.S. created the trading system that we're now living in. And if we made some mistakes, let's correct them, but you can't take a manufacturing company like Apple and bam, bam, 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 and 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 got to give them some time to do that. Okay. The same way you gave them time to move it off the shore of the U.S.

53:11Can I tell a quick story? I know we're running out of time, but I want to tell the story because it's an illustration of how stupid I am as a person. And it's a good cautionary tale for others. In 1999, I was 35 years old. I was on Wall Street. And I believed in the lower cost of capital, lower cost of labor ideas at that time. And we were going to offshore manufacturing to lower the cost of the per unit of manufacturing, which was going to benefit the American consumer and benefit the American shareholder. At that moment in time, there was a protest in Seattle. WTO protest. Yeah, WTO protest.

53:54It 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. And at 29, I very smugly was like, look at these socialist bozos. What do they know? And they were right, Alex. And I was wrong. And the bozos turned out to be us on Wall Street. And I say this to you with great humility because we should have had a hybrid strategy in place. And we should have said, OK, China, we're going to let you in to help you urbanize some parts of your population to raise your living standards. But we're going to check a lot of things that you're doing at the door to protect these American workers.

54:38We did not do that. Donald Trump is right about that. 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 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.

55:22So from 1999 to 17, this is what we were doing. And Apple did what they thought was the right thing to do for themselves, their shareholders, and their customers. And so I don't like seeing Apple, which is one of the greatest American companies in the history of mankind, on its back foot. I want Apple on its front foot, and I want Apple explaining that to the American people. 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 reaction to everything that we're doing.

56:03And 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 u.s federal land and we're going to build a city we're going to put plumbing and architecture and a power plant and we're going to work alongside of you and apple and taiwan semiconductor you guys come back you come back we're going to give you this tax abatement and you're going to create hundreds of thousands of jobs 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.

56:55And you could have your cake and you could eat it too. But we got Donald Trump yelling and screaming, flexing, sharp bow-billing people, going out on truth social like a maniac. And he scares the living shit out of these people. And so they won't operate offensively. And so my message to them is start playing a little offense. He's a decaying political asset. He's got three and a half years to go. So get focused on who's going to replace them and make sure you've got money behind smart, clear thinking people who are going to help your company, help your employees, help America instead of this nonsense that we're perpetrating right now.

57:41It could happen. I mean it's just going to be tough for them. Like the idea that they're going to – Apple will make any big changes to their operation doesn't seem feasible to me. It's not even fair though. But you got to start saying that. You got to say, look, I'm really sorry. Can't do it. 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.

58:11But I need more than five minutes to reset myself. Yeah, even this whole India thing. It's like they're moving to India, but they have Foxconn that's setting up the assembly process in India. They're not really moving to India. They're just, you know, sort of stamping. Well, that's a lot of what's going on. There's a lot of tariff washing, right? Tariff washing. Exactly right. They're sending the stuff to Vietnam. It's getting completed to Vietnam. It gets sent over. They're sending stuff, sending parts to Mexico. It's coming through NAFTA. Yeah. I mean, guys, come on. I mean, come on. Why don't we stop it?

58:40We all know what we're doing to each other. Why don't we stop it? And why don't we come up with fairness and some moderation and so that we can set a course trajectory that lasts longer than two minutes. And let's say, okay, this is our 10-year plan. And this is what we should be doing over the next 10 years, which will help heal the upside-down nature of the deficit spending, right-size some of the entitlement issues, fix the trajectory. And we could do it. But we don't want to do that, and they don't want to do that because they want to stay in perpetual power. Right. And they've got all these lobbyists in there in a feeding frenzy.

59:18We 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 to swing something. Yeah, totally predictable outcome. Yeah, terrible. Okay, so we have two minutes left.

59:56I got two questions for you. Yeah, go ahead. Are you going to go back into politics the way that you're talking makes it sound like you want to? No, I can't go back into politics. I'm trying to stay married. You just said earlier that anyone can have a second life in American life. Yeah, but I'm trying to stay married. I'm trying to have a second life in my marriage. That's okay. I'm running for re-election in my marriage. My wife literally filed for divorce on me, deservedly so, by the way. During the 11 days? Yeah. Well, actually, maybe 10 days prior to the 11 days. It was a brutal time. Oh, God.

1:00:23It was a brutal time for us. We love each other, would like to stay married. I got to raise my kids. But, you know, I'm not a politician. You know, the minute you go into politics, you start lying. Yeah. You know, I don't want to do that. Maybe not, though. I don't see that. You got to – the minute you start, you know, when a politician is lying, when his mouth is moving. You know that, right? Yeah, of course. Of course. What's the second question? What's going to happen with Bitcoin? I mean,$100 ,000 to me always seemed like it was in play. But what happens? Is this because like you have the administration that's running toward Bitcoin right now.

1:00:57This seems like it's the best that it's going to get potentially. I mean, let me throw that out there and see what you think. Well, I mean, listen, I mean, I don't know. I mean, I'm a long term bull on Bitcoin. I don't see the freight train of spending stopping. And so that's a drunk driving accident about to happen. The central banks are drunk driving with the currency. The legislature and the president are junk driving with the fiscal budget. And so you just told me that we're going to print more and more money. Right. And it's going to cause a debt crisis. But doesn't Bitcoin cause a bigger crisis because it removes the power from the Fed?

1:01:37Oh, I see the very opposite. I think Bitcoin, if anything, could check the power. Okay. 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 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.

1:02:25Oh, I'm just trying to ask the questions here that would sort of get to the truth. There's a lot of great news in the system. So maybe it's fully priced, but I don't see it that way. I see it as a very early in the game, and I see Bitcoin as a asset class. I guess the question, let me throw it back to you and your listeners. Okay. Is Bitcoin an asset class, yes or no? If it's not an asset class and it's just another investment, then you're probably right. You know, it's up there in market capitalization alongside of Apple and Microsoft and below and NVIDIA, but it's up there. But if it's an asset class, then it's going to trade to where gold is trading.

1:03:04And gold is at$23 or$24 trillion right now. And Bitcoin is at$2 trillion. And so I'm not – if you bring Saylor on, who I adore. I love Michael Saylor. He'll tell you it's the operating layer for the future of money. He'll tell you it's digital property. He'll tell you it's going to$13 million a coin. He's a lot more confident than me. And let's face it, he's a lot smarter than I am. I just look at it and say, okay, this is going to be with us. It's getting adopted. And I think it becomes an asset class. I think it's a million dollars a coin. And I have a$20 ,000 cost basis in it. I'm going to hold it.

1:03:39All 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. Hey, I hope I get invited back. I won't say too much controversy. Not at all. Real pleasure to be with you. I'm a huge fan. But likewise, strong island, man. Strong island. All right, everybody. Thank you for listening. We'll be back on Friday to break down the week's news with a WWDC preview. And then I will be live or coming to you from WWDC in Silicon Valley next week. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.