EP #28 The State of America (Live Twitter Spaces AMA) w/ Anthony Scaramucci

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Anthony, you there?

I am here. Dr. Diamandis, how are you? And happy, happy birthday to your mom.

Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it was so funny. I was on CNBC yesterday. I guess you saw the segment at the end. I said, hey Kelly, one sec, my mom's watching. Gotta wish her a happy birthday. And the other, the other guy who's on the show with me said, well, it's my dad's birthday today, so both of us were on the, on the show.

It was very sweet. It's very nice here and God bless.

I'm a good Greek wife.

Thank you for having me on.

Yeah, of course. So, you know, something most people don't know is we grew up really close together. We're both Long island boys. You were in Port Townsend and I was in Great Neck.

That is a fact. We also, I think people probably do know this about us, that we were on the same basketball team, given the fact that we're both below five feet. So we were, we were on the basketball team. We were on the vertically challenged basketball team growing up. But you were a great out, you had a great outside shot. So we always beat the taller guys, didn't we, Peter?

Yeah, we did. You know, I used to tell people my chances of becoming an astronaut were better than my chance of becoming an NBA all Star. But you know, I'm not only vertically challenged at 5 4, but I'm also challenged from a point of view of sports and anything that's, you know, socially acceptable these days. But that's a different story.

Well, I, I'm sure your mom told you that good things come in small packages. I was, I was told that every single day as I was, you know, trying to get my posture up to gain a quarter of an inch.

You know, in all seriousness, there is a direct correlation, inverse correlation between longevity and height. The taller you are, the, you know, the the shorter your lifespan. So you and I have a real advantage there for sure.

All right, well, don't tell Dwight Howard that. He's become a new friend of mine. We did the special Forces show together for Fox and he's, he's a solid 7 foot one. And I have to tell you, he's probably as he has no body fat, but I have read those studies.

Well, you should get to know him quick while he's still around. Anyway, so, buddy, it's been, it's been an incredible journey and I've enjoyed our friendship. I mean, I can't turn left, right or center without seeing you on, on Twitter or on the news. Are you having fun?

Yeah, but I mean, apparently I'm like the most important asset manager in the world because they write about me every week. You know, as you know, I'm running about $3 billion, but they make it like we're running 3 trillion or something like that, I guess. You know, I don't know, it's a. I'm saying that obviously with great irony, but truth be told, we got into a couple of bad situations last year. One was, you know, we're into growth in bitcoin digital assets. As you know, that was a rough year. Down 60% across the board. Our core fund was down 38 because of that. And then, of course, I sold a piece of my business to Sam Bankman Fried, who became, you know, arguably the largest fraud in the space. And there were several other flop frauds in the space last year that he was competing with, so. So it was a double kick. If you.

All up from here, buddy. All up from here.

Well, amen. I mean, listen, I think you and I know that because of our three decades plus of being in business, there are trials and tribulations. And it's like what Churchill once said, when you're in the middle of hell, keep going. When you're going through hell, keep going. You know, you gotta, you gotta get to the other side of things. And so we will. Then, of course, we're off to a very strong start this year. I don't know if that's a bold trap. It could be a, you know, a bear market trap, making you think it's a bull market, or we really could be on the start of something that's more robust than that. If you follow the stock trading Almanac and you listen to the Hirsch family, who's been writing that almanac for 50 years, this being the best January, the best four or five week start in a long period of time is Usually a good sign for the.

Yeah, it's really tough. You know, reading Ray Dalio out there and reading many others, we're like, you know, the end is coming. You know, money is, you know, going to become disintermediated as we know it. It's really tough. But the important thing is you got to be looking at the long term trends. And for the last 150 years, and specifically over the last 40 years, we've had this incredible growth in abundance. Right. The amount of time you have to work in order to earn any commodity goods or Service has dropped 72% in the last 40 years. And it's driven by technology. It's not politics, it's not human intelligence. And as long as we have this innovation engine, we're going to be creating greater and greater abundance on this planet. And you know, it's not for the faint of heart to stick it out in, in terms of days, weeks and months. You need to have a 10 year journey here at least.

Well, I mean, there's so many different reasons why I love you, but one of the main reasons is you are the anti Thomas Mal. You are the anti Malthusian. And so what happens is people think linearly. We're encapsulated in this 100,000 year old piece of machinery known as the human body. It hasn't had a software upgrade for 100,000 years, yet. You were watching our phone go from iPhone One to iPhone 14 in 15 years. And so we're trained to think linearly. It's part of our survival mechanisms. But as you point out in your bestselling books, the world is growing exponentially. And so Malthus got it wrong. He said we were going to starve the population was going to outpace our ability to produce food. But he left out all the great technology. Turns out we have more people dying from obesity related illnesses. Yeah. Than food. You're old enough and I'm old enough to remember peak oil.

I remember that, yeah.

I was sitting in a class in 1985. My economics professor told me we were running out of oil. I said, okay, sir, when is that? He said, well, that'll be 2010. Oil will be $2,000 a barrel. I said, oh wow, this is going to be an apocalypse. We're running out of oil. He left out fracking. He left out the redrilling of wells, the vertical nature of mining, now some of these natural resources. And so, so what ends up happening is people, the doomsayers, the apocalyptic people get things wrong. But I want to ask you a question, if you don't mind.

I know it's your man, it's ours.

I want to ask you a question. 2023. I want to take you back 100 years to 1923, and I'm going to give you $150,000.

I'm a wealthy. Which is 100.

Yes, you're a very wealthy man. So that's equivalent to almost $12 million of purchasing power today if you do the inflation adjustment. Or you can live then with $150,000, or you can live today with $150,000 of $2023. But you're living today in this society versus the society from 100 years ago. Which one are you?

100 today? Not even by a little bit. Right?

Okay, so say why for people that are listening in. So provide them inside as to why.

So here's the reality. And I actually did this work. I run my Abundance360 program for CEOs, and every year in this. In this program in March, I need to get you to come out and be with me on stage for one of these sessions, buddy. I know the salt events you have are epic. Every year I talk about what's occurred in the last year, what are the breakthroughs, and it's extraordinary breakthroughs in the last 12 months. I look back 100 years ago, and I say, okay, what were the breakthroughs 100 years ago? What was the rate of innovation? And it's pretty easy to go and look at the headlines and the patents filed and so forth. So I don't have it for 2023 yet, but for 2019, 22, there were seven breakthroughs. Want to hear what they were? I mean, like. Like for the entire, entire year. First of all, Vegemite was created in Australia. Insulin was used for the first time.

The.

The retractable hard top for a car was invented. The water ski, which was two boards and a rope, was invented. And there was a couple of others, but that was for the entire year. And today we demonetized and democratized so much, Right? We don't. We don't realize that on our cell phones we have what's equivalent to millions of dollars of free stuff that we would have had to pay millions of dollars just 30 years ago. And we're all living like kings. You could have never purchased the luxurious life that the average person has today. Infinite access to entertainment, education, you know, music. It's amazing. So why do people so. So back to you, Anthony. Why are people so dystopian? You know, I have one I have one group that I blame. See if you have the same one. But why are people so bummed out about, about life? I mean, too many people are depressed.

So there's a, there's a couple of, there's a couple of answers to that, and I'm going to give my answer. And then two people I respect a lot, although don't always dis, Always agree with. So my answer is we are living with more abundance, but we're also living with a, a feeling of doom because the world order has been shaken. And so if I take you back 50 years ago, we had a cold war going on, you know, at least in our minds, U. S good, Russia bad. There were protocols in place that were keeping a cold peace. Okay? We got through the missile crisis. There was a nuclear test ban treaty. Nixon was going to China, he was meeting with Brezhnev and there was a cold piece. And the people that we were fighting had uniforms on. And there were some kind of order at least. So we thought it was good and bad.

It was clear.

Yeah, it's you. Fast forward. We're in guerrilla warfare. We're in an age of terrorism. And we're in an age where personal safety, at least for Americans, rightly or wrongly, even though the incidence of a terrorist attack is quite low, but because we went from zero to some terror attacks, we have some personal safety issues. We've decided, rightly or wrongly. And again, I'm just being observational, we don't make this political, but we've decided, rightly or wrongly, that we're going to adopt certain policies that are going to allow for petty crimes to exist in our, in our cities. And, you know, from the broken window theory, as it relates to crime theory, you clean up the broken windows and the petty crimes, people feel safer. They don't feel safer in these inner cities. Now we can go across the country and even though, Peter, some could make the case that crime is down or murder rates are down, there is a feeling of unsafety. So those are my opinions.

All right, let me give you, let.

Me give you mine.

One second, you're dead. I put the blame squarely on two things. One are the way our brains are wired. And the second is the news media, right? Our brains are wired to pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news. The news media has one business model. Deliver your eyeballs to their advertisers. And because we pay 10 times more attention to negative news and positive news, you are constantly being fed every murder on the planet over and over. And over again in your living room.

Yes.

And we're, you know, our brains are neural nets. Our brains are wired by the information we bring in, what's on your walls, who you talk to, what you see. And if you're constantly being bombarded by negative news from on every source of news media, you're going to think the world's going to hell in a handbasket and you're running for cover.

Right?

But if we ignore all the incredible breakthroughs going on all the time, it's extraordinary, but we just don't hear about it.

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Well, let me, let me test something on you. Get your reaction. Okay, so Charlie Munger, who just turned 99, I don't agree with him on his opinion on cryptocurrency. He said recently, to your point, in the last 100 years we've had a six times move in the standard of living. So whoever was considered to be not wealthy or underprivileged 100 years ago is doing way better by a factor of six. Obviously the wealthy are doing better than that. But. But the point being is why are people dissatisfied? He blames it on social media. He blames it on the filter effect that we are feeling in social media and the comparative analysis that people are making now to each other as they look over each other's fence.

I agree with that.

And they see greener grass on the other side of the fence, not their side of the fence. And so he says it's related to the human feelings of comparison, envy, etc. I want to, again, if you don't mind, you agree with this.

Let me, let me, let me say one thing there and then come back to your question, which is, I agree that people are comparing themselves to their neighbors in the moment, not to what their life was like 10 years ago. What their parents life was, was, you know, 30 years ago. Because the trend is up and to the right. But social media allows you to see everyone that you think is your peer group, even if they are or not. And you're constantly comparing yourself and you forget of the incredible access to everything that we have. And like your original question said, would I rather have that money 100 years ago? Hell no. Anyway, your question please, buddy.

Yes, so. So this is related to this. Okay, so I read Blake Crouch's book Upgrade. I don't know if you know Blake. I know Blake.

I haven't read it.

Okay, so it's a great science fiction writer. I'm not going to give away the whole plot, but there's the idea of an upgrade. There's a mad scientist that's working on upgrading a human's capacity to learn. It's sort of.

Actually, I, I did read the book. Yes. Genetically upgrading the human capacity. Sure.

Yeah, right. So it's, it's a biological neural link, if you will. Not, not, not. Yeah, it's. And, but what he says in the book at the end, I'm not giving up. The book is the great story. But what he says is we were designed to get to where we are by having empathy and relationships with about 200 people. When you talk about that neural network of your brain, we have the capacity to get in touch with and get close to about 200 people. And that was sort of the community. The smaller it's called.

It's called Dunbar's number. And the number is about 150. And it was based on. Again, okay, there you have neural engineering from the size of tribes, which is why in military, 150 people. I don't know anything about the military services anywhere near what you do, but the size of a. What. What's 150 size in the military?

But, yeah, yeah, it's probably a brigade or battalion, I'm not sure. But. But the point he's making is that Dunbar's number is limiting us now because we've got 8 billion people and we have a trash issue, a potential environmental issue, and. But yet we're drinking our bottled water out of plastic and we're throwing the plastic away with relative disregard because we're not able to upgrade empathy into thinking. Yes, we're not able to upgrade beyond Dunbar's number to think of the consequences multiplied by billions of these plastic bottles being thrown into the ocean.

There is another point there to make, which is when you think about who your peer group is, you. It used to be your peer group was your neighbors, the people that you ran into the street, who lived next door. Now your peer group on social media, on your Facebook group or whatever, are they Cardassians? You tend to have those individuals that you follow consider part of your Dunbar's number. You know, and that's where the. This disequilibration, you know, whatever comes into effect that you're comparing yourself to people that are not. Have not typically been the people you compare yourself to. And it. It sets up for a. A very difficult challenge. Let me switch our subject here to something that we might talk about in our. In our conversation with everyone on. On Twitter, which is coming up in a few minutes, because when we're getting ready for this, we were talking about longevity. So one of the big conversations I spend, as you all know, through your. Your son aj Who I love dearly, who I've had a chance to mentor. We can talk about that, too. But I'm spending most of my time these days focused on how to add 20, 30 healthy years on a person's life. How do you make 100, 100 years old and you're 60? How do we really bust through the upper limits? How do you feel about that? I mean, you and I are about the same age. You know, do you feel like you have more energy and more excitement about life now, or are you ready to, you know, retire in five years?

No. I mean, come on.

I'm giving you a shoe.

Yeah, come on. I'm doing special forces, I'm jumping out of helicopters. I was these 30 year old Olympics.

I was trusting buddy.

I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready to go. But you know, I'm a little different than you this way. And I want to set the scene for you. I grew up in an accordion playing cigarillo, smoking bocce ball corded family that was crushing grapes in a bathtub. They were slaughtering pigs and turning them into prosciutt in the cellar, salting them and drying them in the basement. And so this looks like a Port Washington. This is in Port Washington, yeah, My uncle John's house. He was stepping on grape, he was cutting the head off of eels on the morning of the 24th of December, skinning them and frying them for the seven fishes. Okay, so, so we're. And, and we are pasta lovers, okay? And, and I'm telling you right now, it's your mother's birthday and I guarantee that your mother thinks you're too thin.

You'Re not eating enough, you're getting thinner.

Yeah. Because you're into all of this like, you know, deprivation and thinking like probably 47 different supplements. And you got David Sinclair is your like spiritual guru, he's now the new Orthodox Greek priest for your religion. And like, you know, so we're a little different that way though. Meaning like, you know, you're gonna probably live to be 300, okay? So we'll have to see what happens. You know, you gotta probably get, you get a new set of teeth and all kinds of stuff like that. I'm not living at 300 because I'm eating the pasta. You know, like my relatives that still live in Italy, half of my family still lives there. When I go back and visit them once a year, they tell me that I'm not Italian, Peter. And it hurts my feelings. And they remind me that I'm an American. And I say, well, why do you say that to me, it hurts my feelings. Well, you're American, you think you're going to live forever. Okay? You know, you've got Peter Diamandis and David Sinclair Terry telling you not to eat the cookie and drop the pasta. He said, but we're here in Italy, we know we're going to die. Okay? So what we do is we have an extra piece of cheese, we drink an extra jug of wine. You know, they end up having four mistresses, you know, the whole thing, right? And so, so for me, you know, I love you and you're going to be like 300 years old, which is good for me because my sons are close to you and they'll always have you in their lives. But I'm probably checking out a lot earlier than you. I don't want to be 150 years old because I think I'm going to look like, you know what, at 150 and, you know, I mean, you know, I'm living my life. You get one great life if you're lucky. You and I have been very blessed with great lives. We have, you know, But I mean.

Well, listen, you know, the good news is I'm Greek. You're a huge rate.

Did somebody pass me the cookies? Excuse me? Like eating wheatgrass if somebody passed me those. Oh, man. Davis could have.

I'm having Mediterranean diet.

When is the last time. When is the last time you shot a PEZ out of a PEZ gun? Is your mouth.

Sugar is a poison. There's no question. Sugar or cocaine is a poison. I got it. But you can still enjoy life. And I did have some red wine last night, but I think.

Unbelievable, Unbelievable.

Having said on that, there is a question, right. There's been a little Twitter debate going back and forth that I've jumped into with Sinclair and Elon, which is, should you have the right to live as long as you want? And, you know, I think very much so that you should have the right if you can extend your life. And this is the conversation. It's happening seriously right now. It used to be like this crazy idea. You would lose all your funding research five years ago if you talk about the idea of age reversal. But now, epigenetic reprogramming is a real thing we're talking about. Can we add 10, 20, 30 years on your healthy life? And then, by the way, science doesn't stop during that 10, 20, 30 extra years. It's continuing. And so the question is, if you, Anthony Scaramucci, beloved European brother of mine, had the ability from some breakthrough that AJ funded or David created, whatever it might be, and get ready for a longevity X prize, I wouldn't say more than that. But wouldn't you want to add an extra 30, 40 years? I mean, if you could have your current diet, is that the only thing or you can import with life?

No, I love. I. No, no, no, no, no. Don't misunderstand me. I want to live. I absolutely love life. But I just want to. I just want to point this out. Where did Elon come out on this? He wants to stay alive.

Remember no, no. I had this conversation with him at SpaceX, right, eight years ago. He said, I don't think people should live that long, okay? With the. On the basis that I'm going to die to make room for people to.

Come, I'm going to tell you. I'm going to tell you why I'm in his camp, okay?

I'm going to tell you that way.

Let me just explain to you why I'm in this camp, okay? Because. Because right now as we're sitting here, okay, without the longevity movement, okay, 100 years from this moment, okay, very few people alive today will be here on Earth. And 100 years ago, we've had almost 100% turnover. Let's use 120 to make the example more vivid. 120 years from now, exhuming the longevity movement is not making people live to 200. But you get my point. Just in the current medical health where we are right now, 120 from here today, none of us will be here and there'll be a whole new group of people here. And 120 years prior to today, there was a different set of people on this planet than today. And I think that there's something human about that. And I think there's something about the human condition that makes life, for whatever reason, richer or sweeter. And you now I'm going to say something you're really not going to like. The super wealthy, okay, will have the capacity to do that, right? And the poor will likely not have the capacity to do that. And there's a little bit of a dystopian thing that happens when that happens. And so, you know, as an example, if I can live to 300 with my earnings capacity, you know, I'm going to be very wealthy just because of the laws of compounding, Peter, you know, and a result of which there'll be even greater concentrations of wealth in the society. So. So I hear you. I absolutely love life. Don't get me wrong. I want to be a vampire and live 5, 10, 15 centuries. I'm totally into life. But I'm talking about it from a literary perspective. I'm talking about it. Let's use the word, the Greek word, pathos. Let's use the words that Sophocles would describe about being human. The frailty of being human, the recognition that there's impending death which increases the intensity of your life decisions. You see what I'm saying?

I see what you're saying. I totally disagree. Okay, that's going to questions, but I.

Want to ask Me more cookies. Can someone dash this guy?

I mean, this guy pass the olive oil.

This guy is going to be. This guy's going to be 300 years old. Can you, can you pass him some more nad this guy?

Hey, listen, you're paying attention to this.

Your mother is telling you too thin. Eat manga Painter.

So listen, the average human lifespan used to be less than 30 years old, right? So by that same logic, we should not be alive today at, you know, you had 58, 59, me at 61. At the end of the day, you know, if we make it 120, I would love to be able to have this and the technologies we're talking about which are eventually going to actually make a dent in human lifespan. This epigenetic reprogram in success. It is going to be, you know, under 100 bucks. The we're heading towards a period where we're going to have a massive underpopulation of planet Earth, right? We're going to peak at 9 and a half, 10 billion and then drop off another conversation for Twitter spaces. I'm going to say two things and invite everybody in here. Number one, I'm going to make a statement that maybe someone will pick up as a question. I think anyone who wants to run for president should be allowed to. I think it should be a drafted position. I'd love your thought on that. And number two, question of on education. What the hell should someone who's in their 20s today be thinking about getting as an education? Does an MBA even matter anymore? Or should you go and be doing an apprenticeship and learning on the job? Those are two ideas I'd love to put out there. The ethos.

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Let's talk about about this. Does an MBA degree have any real value? Instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, would you advise someone who's looking to go into business to instead actually go into business?

So, so the short answer is it's conditional on the person's circumstance. When you and I were kids, I would have said that it was mandatory. I don't think as, I don't think it's as mandatory today since you're a surrogate father to my oldest son Alexander, known as aj. I know he worked for you for many years and you know he applied to it and got accepted to Stanford Business School. When he asked me about it, I said you should do it. The network effect of Stanford Business School and the Alumni association and the brilliant people, the men and women that you're going to meet at Stanford, not just your classmates, but I'm talking about people trafficking through Stanford to speak the professors. I think it's worth it. What I said to AJ at that time, he was 25 or 26, I said join Stanford Business School. It's almost like you'll have some great flexibility in your mid-20s to do some really fun things that I don't want you waiting to your mid-60s to do. And so he made the decision to go. I don't think he's on this Twitter spaces right now. But if he was, I think he would tell you that it was the right decision for him for, for the network.

Right?

Yeah. I know people, I know other people. That's not the right decision. I, you know, you and I both know the computer entrepreneur and brilliant, incredibly generous man Michael Dell, he dropped out of school. I'll just tell this story quickly. He's a contemporary of ours, right? He's 56 or 57. Michael Dell dropped out of school. He told me this story. He was one of the early investors in Skybridge, helped me get the firm started. He told me this story that he was building computers in his dorm room. He was buying wholesale parts, and he figured out that he could build them themselves cheaper than what they were being sold to people. And he convinced his fellow students in the student body to buy the computers from him, and he would service them for him. And he was not doing as well in his pre med curriculum. His father, who I believe was an eye doctor, came to the University of Texas and said, michael, you got to stuff this out. You got to be my son the doctor. My son, the doctor. Michael turned to his dad, said, well, dad, what if I could make $200,000 a year doing this? And his father lit up. He said, well, of course, if you can make $200,000 a year doing this, you should do this, but you're not going to make $200,000 a year doing this is your hobby. And then Michael turned to daddy, said, well, it's February. I've already made more than $200,000. And the point being is that people either have it and they're driving. You know, Bill Gates was that way. Michael Dell was that way. I'm sure we figure out, you know, other people that are that way. You know, my other son, Anthony, I'm very proud of, dropped out of school. He's produced 75 music videos, has over a half a billion views, and he's now working on three different screenplays as he transitions from music to. To film and moviemaking. And so I'm very proud of him. That is a journey he's taking without college. Not to say that he's not taking courses in writing and editing and English, and he's not on Kahan Academy learning and doing all different types of reading. He's still educating himself, but he's not educating himself in that formal structure that you and I were taught to educate ourselves. So. So to me, I think it is situational. And as a parent, since you're asking me the question, I have great flexibility with my children. I'm not the parent that says, oh, I'm disappointed in you. You didn't follow this to the T of whatever it is. And remember, I will tell parents that, listen, you don't want to be that douchey parent at the cocktail party. Bragging about your kids. You want to be the parent where your kids know you're their advocate and you're there to help them find the thing about their lives that they're the most passionate about so that they never have to work a day in their life.

Yes, I agree, by the way.

That's my focus. So, you know, some people should go to school, other people frankly should not.

Yeah. The three things I want for my two 11 year olds is find their passion that will drive them because I found my passion with space, it was Star Trek and Apollo and that got me going. Learn how to ask great questions and grit. Right. And if you have those as engines, you'll, you'll succeed in life. But what are you advising that 20 something year old would be entrepreneur to go towards anything in particular? Obviously whatever they're passionate about, but anything else.

So what would you, what would you.

Tell a 20 year old version of yourself today?

So what I would tell the 20 year old, I got lucky because I ended up doing something I really love. But what I would tell the 20 year old version of myself.

Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, well, yeah, but that wasn't invented back then. But I would say to my, my 20 year old self, and this is something that Byron Wein, Peter, do you remember Byron Wein? Do you know he is. He was strategist. Okay, so he's over 90 now. He's a brilliant man. He was adopted, was an orphan, lived in Chicago, went on to become a brilliant economic and stock market strategist for Morgan Stanley. He's now at emeritus. He's in an emeritus position at Blackstone. I've known him for 30 years. He was a guest of mine on Wall Street Week. He said something to me that I'll share with everybody, which I believe is true. There's something that you did from the age of 12 to 19. Maybe it was you pricking your finger and looking at blood cells under a microscope. Maybe it was me hawking Long Island News Newsday to Italian, Irish and Jewish women in the, in the local blue collar apartment buildings. But the point being there's something that you were doing 12 to 19. Figure out what that was and do it and figure out what that was and stay on it because. Because what ends up happening, that's the true labor of love for you. So he was a coin collector and he was a baseball card collector and he transitioned all of that into analyzing security stock and bond securities and then the overall macroeconomic market. He's still working today. Warren Buffett. You want to talk about longevity, he's 91 or 92. I'd have to Google it on Wikipedia. I think Munger's 99. People that love their work stay working. And I think work gives them a level of vitality.

So I was a purpose driven life.

Yeah, A hundred percent. And I would say to the 20 year old version of me, what do you like doing? Well, it turns out what I like doing is blabbing, Peter. I like blabbing, okay?

And you do it so well, brother.

Yeah, so I'm blabbing. I've been blabbing, you know, since the age of 12. I'm now 59. I'm still blabbing. And it's been very fun. And the great thing is, because of my intellectual curiosity, I'm on Wall street, which is basically a business where you get to learn about all different types of business, including biotech, computer technology, nanotechnology, insurance companies, financial services companies. Right. And you get a smattering of all these things. And so I am forever energized by that and ever alive. My son Anthony, he has no interest in that, but he could watch every one of Stanley Kubrick's films and he could take notes on them. And then he could go to Stanley Kubrick interviews on YouTube at the time those films were made, or shortly thereafter to understand the craft. Or he could take Oliver Stone's movies. And, you know, when we used to buy DVDs, they always had these little special feature sections. You can get an Oliver Stone movie where he's narrating over the movie and explaining why he cut it a certain way or why the lighting on Anthony Hopkins face in Nixon is a certain way in the beginning of the movie. And it's a darker lighting towards the end of the movie as Nixon's going through his. His problems. And so to me, that's a labor of love for him. And so I want him to do that. I want him to be successful in it. You mentioned aj. AJ is into what you're into, which is the life sciences unlocking starting companies.

Yeah.

You and David Sinclair believe, and I've read both of your works, and I love your writing by the way you're writing always inspires me and makes me feel more optimistic about life. And what Sinclair writes and what the Amanda writes is that longevity, aging may in fact be an illness. Aging may be, in fact something that we can correct. Okay. And we can stave off the aging. Okay. And so that is, you know, brilliant, eureka, like stuff. And, you know, so listen, for me, I'M sitting here with you, super optimistic about the world. But I would tell the 20 year old today, what'd you do from 12 to 19? Let's reverse engineer into a career that associates you with that feeling that you had as a kid.

Let me, let me add to that. What did you do between 12 to 18 or 19 before your mom and dad said that's not a profession, or before the world said, you can't do that?

Exactly.

We're living in a world where you can't exactly. You can make a career out of, out of anything.

Well, that's the other thing. You know, we're parent, you know, what do your parents want to do? Your parents want. You have a great life, right?

Yeah.

So my, my mother told her if I probably shouldn't tell people this, but I am going to. My, my mother told people that Goldman Sachs was a law firm, okay. And, and I was in Rosado's Deli on Main street in Port Washington and one of her Italian friends was in the deli and I was ordering, I don't know, like a prosciutto hero. And she turned to me and said, oh, Anthony, your mother's so proud of you that you're working at that law firm, Goldman Sachs. These people didn't know anything, right? They weren't educated. I said, really? I said, Goldman Sachs is a law firm? She said, yeah, yeah, the law firm Goldman Sachs. I said, oh, yeah. Thank you, Mr. So and so.

Right.

I went home and I said, mom, why are you telling your friends that Goldman is a law firm? And she's like, oh, I'm just so distraught that you went to law school. I thought my son was going to be a lawyer and you didn't become a lawyer. So I can't break it to my friends. Can't break it to my friends.

I've got this thing, right? So I go in medical school and I graduate, you know, just barely graduate from Harvard. And I go into my space businesses and every time I come home, my mom would ask me two questions. First of all, are you, are you dating anybody serious yet? And the second thing is, it's not too late for you to go to do your internship in residency, become a real doctor.

Well, your mother, that's what they knew.

That's what they knew. They knew. Lawyer, doctor, engineer, that was it.

But also they wanted to go. They were playing peanut col. My mother wanted to tell friends, my son, the lawyer, Peter, my son, Dr. Diamandis. What do you mean? He's got some biotech company or he invented the Young Prize, which is like the Nobel Prize for innovation. What do you mean? Who cares about that? Is he practicing medicine? Is he writing prescriptions? You follow what I'm saying? And this is. This is the gift that you can give your children. This is the gift that I can give my children is the neuroplasticity of life and their careers and their experience and the boldness, the braveness, the permission. The permission, yes. Something out of that realm. Another thing I'll say to you, okay, not to get overly philosophical, but I get my ass kicked in the public domain. So if I'm having a bad year, it gets reported by every newspaper outlet. And if I get fired from the White House, which is absolutely brutal, I get lit up by Saturday Night Live, although I thought Bill Hader needed more hairspray. And I get lit up by all the. The cable news pundits.

But was that the best thing ever happened in the last 10 years for you?

Getting fired?

Yeah.

Well, we'll talk about that in a second. But I'm making this point that I want my kids to see the travails and the tribulations. You and I have a lot of rich friends that try to pretend to their kids that everything went up smoothly. My life went up on a four. You know, many memoirs I've read where the guy's life is going up at a 45 degree angle perfectly, and there's no flip. What is this guy talking about? I would rather my kids see the whole thing, okay? Because then they can. They have space now to fail. And then they also have role modeling about resilience and get your ass up. Dust yourself off. Take the millstone of regret of bad decision making and put it down. Take it off of your neck and put it down and go forward and, and, and, and so forth. But yes, you're asking about the firing. No, the firing was absolutely brutal. Beetle. Peter, I don't. I'm not going to B.S. you. Oh, it was the greatest thing ever. No, it sucked. If anybody's on this space is listening. And it's not a health issue, and you're having a bad day, Peter will give you my cell phone number. I will call and cheer you up. And I will. I will offer you a comparison to my day on the 31st of July, 2017, where I was blown out the front door of the White House, rolled into Pennsylvania Avenue, and then lit up and destroyed by every media outlet globally, to the point where my son was actually working for you at the time. Okay? I met him in Santa Monica, where I believe your X Prize offices are near there. And we were walking on the third or fourth Street. That open shopping mall.

Yeah, the third street promenade.

Yeah, the promenade. I'm walking on the promen with him. It's a week after I've been fired. He's 25. He turns to me and he says, hey, hey, Pop. Are you going to be okay? And I looked at him, I said, what do you mean? He goes, well, this is a disaster. I mean, you're getting destroyed by everybody. And I looked at him and I said, first of all, it's not a health issue. Secondarily, if you're going to go into politics, you got to be able to take your lumps. It's like being in the NFL. You wear a helmet in the NFL, you're guaranteed to get a concussion. This happened abruptly. It was embarrassing. It was very humbling. But watch what I do with it. And so I took lemons, Peter, and did the very best I could to turn them into lemonade. But I'm not.

You are. You are one of the most.

Sucked. Sucks.

You are the most giving, loving, intelligent people that I know. And, you know, the fact of the matter is one of my biggest concerns. I think America is the greatest country on the planet. One of my greatest concerns is that our political system is. Is fraught with too many lawyers and professional politicians and not enough scientists, doctors, engineers, entrepreneurs who are actually driving things.

Hey, everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. You know, I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world is the only real news out there worth consuming. I don't watch the Crisis News Network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net the way I see the world by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology. How entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog. One blog is looking, looking at the future of longevity, Age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies. AI 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR.VR blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of muse you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to dmandis.com blog and learn more. Now back to the episode.

Yeah. Hey, Peter. It's been a long time.

Hi there.

It's nice to see you. Okay, so the education piece. You brought up the education piece. There's actually a few things I want to touch on. One, Anthony, I know an entrepreneur that is in that space on that day right now. And so it's really, really great to hear you guys talk about the, the stories that it's like. It's really not a linear trajectory to success. And I think a lot of people struggle with that perception. And so, so it's, it's always good to hear the people that have been successful kind of like been through their year as well. But yeah, I wanted to touch on the education piece. So there's something that I think anybody who's a parent now can do to start really early. And I actually had a friend of mine who has a small child and he had received a video from his wife that was, it was like around the time his child was four or five years old and he just had joy. He was singing a Beatles song, he was coloring this really creative thing. He was just very like fully self expressed. And I remember my friend saying, my only job in the world is to make sure that he doesn't lose that. So that's like something that I think parents should keep in mind very early on with their children. And then you don't even have to do this backwards exercise where you're like, what did you like between 12 and 18 years old or whatever. So I think that that's, that's one thing we can really nurture. And then in terms of the education piece, besides just really concentrating on obviously mathematics and spelling, grammar kind of that piece, I think we really need to shift the education system completely. And this might have been one of your ideas that I'm absolutely stealing from you, Peter, is we really need to be teaching the four skills, communication, collaboration, critical thinking and creativity. Because every job that exists now is probably going to be obsolete in the future. And any kid going into kindergarten, if they don't have those skills, they won't be agile and able to adapt to this new economy. So I think that that's really the direction we need to go with education sooner rather than later. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, Septima, first of all, thanks for the questions here. And I'll jump on the second part first and hand it over to Anthony. I don't think our educational system is getting our kids ready for anything. The problem is testing to the test. And I speak a lot on large stages like Anthony does. And I ask in the audience, you know, how many of you here are using any of the skills that you Learned in seventh, eighth, ninth grade. Like, you know, whether it's multivariable substitution or, you know, trigonometry or geometry and so forth, and the majority of people are not. What we need is, is passion driven education where you find your passion, your goals, and you learn what you need to do to implement that. But the other thing is, the stuff that I do use now was never the stuff even I learned at mit. It's how to, how to organize your thinking, how to present your ideas, how to lead, how to put compelling arguments right. How to, to envision strategically where you're going. These are skills that are independent of technology, they're human to human leadership skills, which I think are so critically important. Anthony?

Oh, first of all, I think it's, it's incredibly insightful and I don't know exactly how to pronounce your name. Is it, is it Septima? Is that how you pronounce it?

Yes.

Okay. What I, what I would say, Septima, is that where we're failing. And I want to make it too broad because I want to be specific in answer your question, but I want to explain to you is my philosophy where we're failing now as a society is in the business of equal opportunity. Okay? So I am not for equal outcomes. I can prove to you sociologically, as human beings, we're just not geared for equal outcomes and it would diminish innovation and economic efficiency and growth. I want there to be Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos who are adding value and are getting excessive economic rent from the society. We can debate how much they can be taxed and so forth. But I want those things to happen. What, what I don't like of what's going on in the society is the unevenness. We're too rich of a country. There should be a platform of services for people from K through 12 or pre K through 12 that get them educated. If you tell me the public school system, you tell me the zip code of that public school district, I can tell you with pretty good clarity whether or not that kid is going to get a good education. And so Peter's right. The curriculum may be flawed, but it's more than just the curriculum. There's a gross unevenness to the way we are educating our children in the country. And then secondarily, and some people are not going to agree with me, particularly Republicans, but we have to come up with a package of services on the health and jobs training for all Americans. Okay? Because I'm telling you right now, you could grow up in the middle class like I did or Peter did. You could get ahead if you were born in the 1960s. If you're born in the 2000s, it's way harder. That's what led to the angst. You know, whether you like Donald Trump or dislike him or Bernie Sanders or you dislike them. They both saw that 20% of the country has disaffected from the social contract because they no longer feel, feel that they're getting a fair shake in the country. You know, and I, and I'll just speak for myself for a moment, I grew up in an aspirational working class family. My father was a crane operator. 42 years in hot and cold weather operating a crane. But he knew that one of his kids was going to, you know, be successful or two of his kids would achieve the American dream. Those very same people forget it. You know, that that job that my dad had, the real wages associated with that job today are down about 30% in terms of purchasing power. So, so there's a big systemic problem. So yes, there's certain things in the course curricula and there's certain things that we have to do broadly in terms of defining the agenda for education. But we have a very uneven and in my belief, an unfair system. You know, I didn't pick the family of my origin. I believe you didn't either. And yet, you know, if I was born in the inner city, I don't know if I could have achieved the level of success that I have right now.

But I would add, Anthony, that the mechanism, and I love this idea of equal opportunity versus equal outcomes. I mean, the only mechanism by which we enable equal opportunity across the board is going to be these converging exponential technologies. Right. We are going to demonetize and democratize education. Just like Google for the poorest child and the wealthiest child is identical. We're going to head to a place where AI driven education and AI driven healthcare is identical for the wealthiest and for the poorest. And it's 10 times better than what we have today. So it's not going to happen by political decree. It's not going to become by new institutes. It's going to have to be driven by, by a new generation of technologies which I think we're going to see in this decade. I think we're going to destroy and disintermediate today's educational healthcare system. And it should be because it's, it's antiquated.

Amen.

Those are heavy words, but I believe it. It's, it's. Yeah, especially In America, we're paying so much for these and getting so little.

Hello, I'm from Borneo.

Pardon?

For my English, but I try my best.

First thing, Peter diamond is my idol. You're very kind.

Chris, what do you think about people from ASEAN or Southeast Asia in terms of technopreneurship?

Yes. So listen, Chris, thank you very much and your English is excellent. And thank you for jumping on. This is an amazing world where you and I can connect like this, literally from the other side of the planet. I'm in California and you're in the Pacific right now. And the opportunities that you have are, I think, immense because ultimately when I, when I speak to entrepreneurs, I say it's okay for, you know, you can either be an expert in the technology, like in AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, or you can be an expert in the problem space. Right. And if I had to choose, I would be an expert in the problem. In other words, understanding what are the challenges for the people that you care about and you love in Borneo? What are they? What do they need? And then how do you bridge this exponential world that you're obviously following through these technologies. Right. Because access to all this information, this conversation is, I mean, that's amazing. So how do you, how do you bridge the challenges that you have in uplifting your, your fellow citizens and people in the region of your world with these technologies? I mean, your job is to, to pick something that you're most passionate about. Because doing anything big and bold is hard. And unless you're driven by passion that wakes you up in the morning and keeps you going through the day and when you hit a wall after a wall after a wall. Right. Anthony was talking about that. I got told 150 times no on my crazy idea about this $10 million spaceflight competition, but I believed in it so much. So what is it that, what is a first problem that you want to solve? Don't try and do everything. Pick something specific and unique. And when you solve that thing, when you solve that thing, people will then believe in you to solve the next thing. And I think that. And I wrote a book called Bold, how to Go Big, Create wealth and Impact the World. And all the lessons I've known for entrepreneurs and particular someone like yourself. So get a copy of Bold if you can. Yeah, that'd be what I would say.

Hi, Anthony. So Anthony and I know each other from the hedge fund business. I used to go to Salt, I used to have a small fund and I used to have a radio show a long time ago and Anthony was nice enough to be a guest of mine on my radio show a couple of times. So how you doing, Anthony? Yeah, my question for you, for you Peter or Anthony, probably a good question for Anthony is on the MBA issue. I have a kind of point of view on it. I think it probably is not worth the money anymore. I think a lot of even employers are even now starting to not look at whether someone even went to college, but like whether they can code in a certain language. But I think there are certain basic skills they teach you of an mba. I think anybody who goes into any kind of business should learn. I think you should have basic concept of difference between, you know, you know, an income statement and a cash flow statement and a balance sheet and understand, you know, the basics of that, understand the basics of the time value of money. I think there's certain basics, but I don't think you necessarily, you don't need to get an mba. I mean you can learn it on online, you can learn it from a book, but I think there's just certain, those basic things that you get from an MBA program, those, those particular ones I think is our skills that everybody should, should learn whether you get an MBA or not. And that's really my only thing. And you guys can say whatever thought you have on that.

Anthony, go ahead, buddy.

Well, I mean, first of all, it's great to hear your voice, I guess what I would say. And you know, Ken's bringing also up because I'm looking at Twitter when I said 12 million, you know, I actually got that number from Larry Summers and I'm talking about the 2023 versus 2019 23. From a CPI perspective, you're right, it's about 250,000, but I'd say 2003.

I didn't know you were talking about 1923 as I was.

Oh no, no, no. 1923. Because it's also, if you think about the housing, also the medical, you know, there's just certain things that are usually valuable. Like would you pay a million dollars for an open heart surgery? Of course you would. Or would you Pay, you know, $50,000 for that if you had that access? And in 1923. But, but let me just go to your, your other point which I again, this is just my opinion. You are a hundred percent right from an education point of view, from an academic curriculum, I think you can learn the trades of business without going to business school. But where I think it may have positive externalities that go beyond just the trade or the course Curricula is the associations. And so my son and I think Peter knows this. He just started a company called Bored Cow, which is basically making whey from plants. And so rather than bore everybody, you know, how does a cow make way whey? They chew on grass. It gets converted in their bodies into animal protein. And so you're taking the cow out of the equation, but you're using all the enzymatic properties to turn plants into animal way, if you will. The name of the company is called Bored Cow. Right, because the cow is bored. You're doing without the cow. The guy running it for him is a classmate of his, and the guy's brilliant. He would have never met the guy if he didn't go to that school.

Do you think AJ Is the best networker on the planet?

No, but. But, yeah, but he is. And he's just. And, and Peter knows this. He's a smarter and more mature version of me. And of course, I set the bar really low, so it was an easy but, but, but, but, but. The point I'm making is that he never meets that guy, Ken, that student who's now an adult and thriving if he's not in that class. So could he have learned accounting, P and L. Could he have learned business entrepreneurship courses in finance? Absolutely. Without the mba. But does he actually go to dinner with that guy six times a week while they're studying? Okay. Develops into that business relationship that probably doesn't happen without that mba. Does that make sense?

Anthony, your point is an important one, which is community matters, right? And you need to put yourself in a community of individuals who can inspire you and who you can collaborate with and have a mindset. Right? If you want to have big moonshots, go hang out with people with big moonshots. If you're eating way too much pasta and cookies and you're overweight and you want to get skinny. Just saying, Anthony. You can go and hang out with people who are in better shape and skinny, right? So it's like, who do you want to be? What mindset do you want to have? And go hang out with those mindsets?

I think Peter. Hey, Ken. I think Peter just fat shamed me on Twitter. Spaces, which is totally fine. Okay, I could own that, as I'm like, totally fine with it. But I'm telling you, Peter, well, next time I see you, I'm bringing baklava, I'm bringing that Greek pastry, and I'm going to channel Mrs. Diamandis, the 87 year old superstar. And I'm going to Tell you to eat. What the hell are you doing?

I love it. I love you and I miss you. You know, next time I come to New York, you're going to take me out for a great value, and I'll take you out for a great.

I just got fed. Thank God Elon Musk is not on here, because there'd be 150,000 followers and I'd be getting fat. Shamed by Peter Demar.

Listen, you're the only guy I know who goes and hangs out with the most extraordinary elite, you know, military forces. What? You're on Hulu now. What? How many episodes is the total? Is the total program?

So the answer to the question is there's 16 people on the show. There are 10 episodes.

This is. This is. This is the Special Forces.

Special Forces. World's ultimate test. We had two British SAS servicemen and two Navy seals take us through their survival training. They. They drown me in a car. They made me backflip off a helicopter. If I joined higher, they lit me on fire. Although when they lit me on fire, Peter, you'll enjoy this. I said, man, I've been fired before, but never like this. This is like a new form of firing. They. They dropped me off a cliff in a controlled vertical drop where I had to trust one of the other castmates to, like, break me on the way down. It was absolutely brutal car crash, like, experience. But here's the thing I learned, and people want to watch. The show's very well rated. But here's the thing I learned. I'm 58 years old. Half of it was physical. Half of it was mental. I was petering out after day six because I just didn't have the physicality to do it anymore. But here's the thing. I will tell you what that show taught me. You can do more. You can push yourself further. There could be people listening right now that may be having a tough time in business. Or maybe they got clocked in the bear market like I did last year.

Or.

Or maybe they're having a problem in their family, or maybe they're fighting with their spouse or loved one. Fix it. You can do more. It doesn't have to go in the trajectory that you think it's linearly going to go in. Nudge it, push it, get up earlier and hit the treadmill. You know, I'm teasing, Peter, but have one less cookie if you're severely overweight. Go. Go to the gym, go to the library. Read for 30 more minutes today than you read yesterday. You can do these things and all of a sudden, all these habits roll into great.

It's cut, it's caused interest on your life.

Yeah. But it's also great positivity. You know what? When I walked out of that show, I'm like, all right, I got my ass kicked, but at least I was able to fight my fear. I'm afraid of heights. And these nut cases, they made me jump off the Tower of Aqaba. You could look it up on Google. It's a 210 meters in the air, and I had to jump and rappel off the tower. Now I look like a Thunderbird Muppet doing it. I'm not saying, but at least I. I had the gumption to do it. You can push yourself to do more.

Let's keep going. And folks, this is fantastic. We got a couple more people on stage. We've got a bunch of people in the queue with their hand raised. At the same time, I'm getting DMs.

With lots of questions as well.

So, you know, Anthony, this one is for you and talking about, of course, FTX and sbf. And, you know, we know that you were close with them, and we're just wondering, can you speak a little about sbf, just in general, about him as an individual, about the marketplace, about venture capital, just all of that going on? Because I think a lot of people in the audience would be very interested about what you think about that situation.

So. And I'm happy to talk about it. And I think it surprises people how open I've been about it, but I. I feel like, you know, one of the great things about Peter Diamandis, in addition to his intelligence, he's a great educator. He takes the time to. To share with people what he's learned. Now, unfortunately for me, some of the things that I've learned have been bad things, you know, and that some of the things maybe don't reflect well on me. My judgment for working for Donald Trump, as an example or. Or what happened with me and Sam, I trusted Sam and I liked Sam, and I thought Sam was building the architecture for the next generation everything exchange, not just a cryptocurrency exchange, but he had a vision for tokenizing illiquid assets. He had a vision for using the blockchain to trade stocks and bonds, which would shorten transaction times, increase the volume of transactions and the speed of the transactions. And I bought Hope Line into. In synchronto what he was doing. I'm going to tell you right now, the CFTC did as well. They were very close to Giving him margin approval. There were 50 or so legislators and governmental officials and bureaucrats. He was the darling of Washington. There were 25 venture capitalists and sovereign wealth funds that gave him over a billion dollars in venture financing for his business. He was affiliated with the NBA and Major League Baseball. And I got to know his parents. And I got to tell you something, I liked his parents. They were tenured law professors at Stanford. And last March, which is 11 short months ago, I went with Kevin O' Leary to what was once called the FTX arena in Miami where Sam was sponsoring some public school children, middle and high school children, but they were from poorer areas of the city of Miami. They were in attendance on a Saturday morning in March of 2022 where Kevin O' Leary and myself did a mock shark tank. And we awarded prizes to people that had good business plans. And every, everyone at the table, you know, got something from, from the charity. And Sam's 80 plus year old aunt was running the charity. So I got bamboozled in a number of different ways. But I think there was a lot of people that got bamboozled. Because, guys, the way you commit a crime is you have to have a very small group of people. When I set up Skybridge, we have bank of New York as the custodian. We are overseen by JP Morgan. We have top four accounting firm blue chip accounting firms overseeing the funds. There are five or six people inside the organization that have to turn keys before money goes. Because if you have a lot of people working on something in finance, there's always a person of conscience that raises their hand and says, okay, this is wrong, something nefarious is happening. But in the Madoff case, it was three or four people. In Sam's case, he had it to a three or four people that were literally moving money out of customer accounts, but creating accounting back doors to make it look like the money was still in those accounts. So when he had audited financials or you went into his data room, the data room looked pristine. You know, you. It would have been hard for me to imagine the malevolence or the nefarious behavior, but it happened.

Did it, did it start that way for him or did.

I don't, I don't know, Peter. I can only guess at that. Okay. I don't know.

Yeah, well, what's your. What's your guess?

So I think it did, actually. I think it started.

Wow.

I do.

I was gonna give him the benefit. Doubt that.

No, I think, I think he, I think he had a God complex. I think he made a decision that his actions were justified by his righteousness. And so, okay, I'm making good money here at Alameda, but wait a minute. If I open up this thing called fdx, I can use free money from these customer accounts. I'm such a smart guy that I'll move it over when I need it, and of course, I'll trade beautifully with it, and then I'll put it right back in the account. Nobody will be worse for wear. And I'm such a brilliant guy that of course I'll be able to do all of this. And then the bottom fell out of the cryptocurrency markets in the May, June time frame. And then, then I think he said, okay, the bottom's out of the market. Let me move $7 billion over. And what I'm then going to do is use this customer money to become the white knight, to become the JP Morgan figure, the good Samaritan that's rescuing these other businesses. And that burnished his reputation and that made him look like, okay, he must have had great risk management and he must have been smarter than everybody else in the market. And here's the thing. We have circumstance where that happens. You know, I was in Davos, Switzerland, when Mark Zuckerberg arrived. He had a T shirt and a hoodie. Everyone else was in a Seville Row business suit. And people were looking at him and say, okay, this guy's 20 years younger than me. What the hell is he doing? He goes on and creates a trillion dollar company. Or maybe it's a half a trillion dollar company today, but you get the point I'm making. It goes from zero to something like a half a trillion dollars. He makes 30, 40, $100 billion for himself. Pick the number. And so you see this idiosyncratic behavior by Sam. T. Shirt wearing gym shorts from 1979, white socks from 1960, and you're like, okay, I'm going to accept this because I'm going to be open minded to it. And of course, I got it wrong. And I got it wrong alongside of a lot of other people. So now what happens is this is a weird thing about our culture and our society. We like to demonize the victims of things in our society. So when the Theranos fraud happens, we take out the list of all these brilliant luminaries and we say, look at these dopes. How could they have purchased Theranos? You know, how could they have bought into her story? And now we're doing that with Sam. Like, look at these venture capitalists. And Auburn Wealth Funds. And how could Scaramucci not see was I was at the Yale School of Management. Jeff Sonnenfeld invited me and it was an absolutely brutal situation because there were 250 people in the room, 75 of which were in the Fortune CEO category, maybe you know, the Fortune 250 CEOs. And he showed a interview of me on Squawkbox where I'm announcing the deal and Sam and I are teaming up together. That was September 7th on November 11th. So two short months later I'm sitting there with a concerned look on my face. I've just flown back from the Bahamas and I've got to tell Andrew Sorkin that something is really rotten in the Bahamas and the partnership that I thought turned me into a hero, I'm now sitting here before you as a goat. And so now he juxtaposition those two interviews and he said, well, what say you? And what I said to that group and I'll say it to this group on Twitter spaces. I got it wrong. I couldn't see the fraud because that's what good fraudsters do, they make it so clever that you can't see the fraud. I got caught in the fraud. The good news is he gave me the money, Peter, you know, so I've received the money. He bought a piece of milk company. I've now got to work on buying it back.

And you will copy?

Yeah, and I will. But I got it wrong. But here's the thing. I, I said there are people here that are CEOs hiding in these big corporate structures and God bless them, they would never want to suffer the self consciousness or the shame of what I'm going through right now as an entrepreneur. But that's okay. You don't go from the blue collar neighborhood that I, I grew up in to where I am today without taking risk. And when you're throwing the ball metaphorically, you get sacked, you get intercepted and you fumble the ball. And so this is obviously a combination of those three things, but I'm here really to speak to the young people that are going to Yale getting their mba. It's not going to stop me from taking risks, guys. I'm going to be out there again throwing the ball and I may get something else wrong. But the truth be told, I'm not going to let Sam Bankman freedom and the fraud that he perpetrated stop me from seeking economic innovation or growth or investing in something that I think could potentially dent the universe positively.

Amen brother. I love you for it. Right because if we. That's what's, that's what's amazing about America and a lot of other countries. If you have a failure like this, you're blacklisted for life and you cannot recover in America as an entrepreneur. You can pick yourself up, dust yourself off, unless you've been me too, which has much longer consequences. Why I get into that right now. But you can pursue your next start again. I am curious about one thing. The speed at which Sam made his wealth, should that have been a signal to folks? I had dinner with him. I remember I was texting with you and I was having dinner with him in New York during the Clinton Global Initiative, right. And I was talking about xprize and longevity and all of these things. We had like two hour back and forth and like he's in a T shirt and shorts and everybody else, you know, in the restaurants and a suit and tie. But it was like the speed of which his wealth creation. Was that a signal that was of. That was not witnessed?

Well, yeah, the short answer to that is yes, but let me provide context because, you know, he was a quirky guy. He was idiosyncratic. Bitcoin has gone up 132,000% since the origination of Bitcoin 14 years ago.

Not. Not long ago.

Not long ago. So if Sam was an early adopter, which he said he was, and he was exploiting the inefficiencies in the markets before the markets got more mature, they're not as mature as the stock and bond markets, but the spreads have tightened. Okay. You would have to believe that it was possible because we know, you and I do know legitimate bitcoin billionaires. We do know people like the Winklevosses, you know, that put the bitcoins away. Mike Novograst is a friend of mine. He is a billionaire. God bless.

Michael Saylor, right?

Michael Saylor. I can name you people. And so yes and no. Yes, there's all the tells. Now the way he was dressed, his quirkiness, we can all blame it on that. But the truth be told, you know, he fit the box of outliers. He fit the box of idiosyncratic behavior.

The Reverend Irreverent.

Irreverent Reverend. You know, you know, you know who. Look, I mean, I don't want to make comparisons because it's unfair to these people to sandbank and freed. But Steve Jobs, the Theranos lady, dressed like him. Do you remember this? She wanted to, yes, of course. Pick up that affect so that she could do people, you know, Bill Gates drops out of college. He's a college dropout from Harvard. He develops the greatest software company and becomes one of the richest for a long period of time. The richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, a little bit more traditional, but also, you know, idiosyncratic, goes on to create, you know, he's arguably the richest or among the richest five people in the world. Your friend and somebody that I know and admire, Elon Musk. People would describe him as idiosyncratic. Okay. I think so. I mean, look, look at where he.

Was and, and brilliant.

And brilliant. But look at where he was in 2003. Hey, listen, I'm going to take the proceeds from PayPal, I'm going to roll them into making electric cars and oh, by the way, I'm going to go into commercial space, I'm going to compete with and I'm gonna, I'm gonna spend.

Everything I've got and going to debt and against the largest companies on the planet.

Yeah. And so he, he becomes the richest man in the world, or among the richest men in the world doing that. It's idio. It's not normal. But you made bets on him, my friend Antonio. Gracias. Made bets on him and became pretty wealthy doing this. My point is, Sam fit that genre. Okay, now, am I to be cascaded for getting it wrong? Sure, I'll accept the castigation alongside of the 25 luminaries and the million people that believed in them and the NBA and Major League Baseball and everybody else. But what I'm not going to do is say, okay, now I need to wear a scarlet letter and I need to walk with shame. You know, Brett Harrison, the president of FTX US, he did everything right. He was regulated by the US regulators and so he had one to one and he was solvent the day that FTX collapsed. Okay, he left ftx, thankfully in September and he's not a target of the investigation. And he went out and raised money for a new venture which my son's fund put money in and I put personal money into the new venture because he's a good guy. I don't want him tarred and feathered by the misbehavior of Sam Bankman Fried. Moreover, we did an event in the Bahamas Assault cryptocurrency event. We called it Crypto Bahamas. Sam was the big sponsor. His imprimatur was on that event last April. It was probably one of the best events we ever, we've ever done. I'm not going to let Sam and the taint of him deter me from going back to the Bahamas. I built a relationship with the prime minister. I built a, you know, I have friends at the Balmor Hotel. I have the owner, Emory Chang who owns the Rosewood is a 30 year friend of mine. I'm so what am I going to do now? Sam tainted the Bahamas. We're never going back to the Bahamas. No, I'm calling my friends and saying, hey, let's help out that beautiful country and return to the Bahamas. We're not going to let somebody like Sam, you know, this negative yoke on things.

Listen, if the world, if the world is, is innovating and expanding and experimenting, growing at these exponential rates that we are, there are going to be disruptive moments in the negative as well as multitude in the positive. And it's going to come, you know, from people. I would like to believe it was stupidity and not, you know, malevolence that led him in that direction. But you know, we'll find out from what the investigation show. Let's try and squeeze in a couple of other subjects. But thank you Anthony for being so open, transparent with everybody about this. I love that about you.

Right.

You don't try and I think over.

You are like that. You know, look, I want people to learn from this stuff.

Yes.

I made a mistake. Here's the mistake we made, here's why we made it. And hopefully listening to me, maybe that will prevent you from being in the position that Skybridge and myself is personally. Peter. Yeah. Big fan of yours. I'm actually a medical doctor and took your exponential entrepreneurship course whilst on an entrepreneurship fellowship here in the UK as a doctor and I've gone super into tech. And Anthony, I remember your big room on Clubhouse back in the day as well. So incredible to have you both here. I had a question. So we've seen as Peter often talks about exponential, you know, change in technology and everyone's talking about augmenting humans with, you know, GPT and we're seeing these innovations come to light and I'm a big fan of health and longevity as well. And with Elon Musk Co. Like Neuralink. Peter, what are your thoughts on the convergence of humans and technology? I would love to hear that. Thanks. Yeah.

So thank you sahib. It's an area I'm excited about. We are converging with technology. We are in the process of giving birth to a new form of life and intelligence on this planet and we're either going to merge with it ultimately or be bypassed by it. You know, today, you know, I'm I'm in, I'm an audience, I'm speaking to audiences of thousands of individuals. And just for fun, I'll say, is there anybody here who does not have their cell phone? And like, raise your hand. And like nobody raises their hand. I mean like a few years back someone raised their hand and I said, oh really, you don't have a cell phone? He goes, no, I lost it in Uber on the way over here. But you know, it's like we become dependent. That's part of, we outsource our so much to that device, right? Our, our memory, our capabilities and it augments our brain. We can't make our brains any bigger today because we wouldn't be able to go through the birth canal. But what we can do, just like your cell phone is, you know, connected over 5G to the edge of computing on, on the, on the networks, we're about to connect our brain to the cloud as well. Right? There's probably about 40 companies, probably many more we don't know about that might be within defense departments and so forth, working on connecting your brain. 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections to the cloud. The person is the best predictor of this by far. When. My mentor is Ray Kurzweil, my co founder of Singularity University. He's now the futurist at Google. And his prediction of when we're going to reach high bandwidth brain computer interface is the early 2000 and 30s, call it 2032, 2033. And so what happens when that happens? Well, all of a sudden we're becoming hybrid in that regard. I can think in Google, I can in a meta intelligence standpoint, which I wrote about in my, my previous book Future is Faster, you know, if I, if you're connected to the cloud and Anthony's connected on the cloud, I'm connected on the cloud. We can basically share thoughts. And by the way, going back to one of the earlier conversations, Anthony, that level of connectivity, that level of empathy is going to be one of the most important things we have for society. One of the things I'll mention, sohib, is that we are, as you well know, as a actual practicing physician. I barely graduated medical school and never did internship or residency, but we're each a collection of 40 trillion human cells and many more, bacteria, viruses, fungi and so forth. But those cells all operate in unison to create me or you as individual life form. And we're 8 billion people who are being connected and becoming hopefully eventually conscious at a new level. Um, so I think we are giving birth to a new evolutionary version of Homo sapiens. There are many names being given to it. I think that's happening not a thousand or a hundred years from now. I think it's happening over the next 20, 30, 40 years, maximum. Ray calls the singularity as part of that. So it's an exciting time to be alive. I like to say, don't blink. Anthony, what's a, what's a closing thought for you here, buddy?

So you know I'm, you know I'm inspired by Peter Diamandis. I, I cite his books when I talk to people and when I close out a speech, I talk about Thomas Malthus, I talk about peak oil theory, I talk about historically, we're designed biologically to think linearly, but the world is moving exponentially. And when I read a book like Abundance, or I hear Peter speak, or I listen to one of his podcasts or YouTube presentation that he's making, I remind people that the things that we're worried about will likely not come to pass because of human innovation and because of the best of man and womankind. And so what I want to end this with whatever the apocalyptic stuff that's being said out there, we can rise above that, we can overcome it. It doesn't even matter who our political leaders are. The great innovation in a country like this, well, the surprise for everybody is whatever the problems are, my guess is human innovation, the technology, the best and the brightest will help us solve those problems. And I want people to think like that and stay positive.

Anthony, you're. Where else can people find your work?

I'm at Scaramucci. I also have a podcast which I'd like to get you on, Peter and some of your co authors done called Open Book. I love reading. And so the name of my podcast is Open Book. I'll just say this quickly. It used to be $10, 10 hours of reading. You got 10 years of experience. Now because of inflation it's $20. But you get the point. And authors inspire me because they work on a subject for a long period of time and they give you their knowledge. And of course we have a 5,000 year dialogue going back to the ancient Greeks. It's a one way conversation. Of course we're forced to listen to them in our heads as we read their stories and their personal feelings, their shortcomings and their philosophies. And so rather than read the whole book, you can come to my podcast and hear me hash it out with the author.

I'd love to, buddy. And for those listening here on Twitter Spaces. You can see this again on my podcast, Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm eterdiamandis. My closing thoughts here are. It's simple and I've been pretty consistent for a decade. This is the most exciting time ever to be alive. The only time more exciting than today is tomorrow. Each of us have more power than the kings and the queens, the heads of nations. Thirty years ago, we have the ability to change the world. The only scarce resource today is the passionate, committed human mind. If you think you can, you have a chance of doing it more access, technology, capital. And my mission is how do we uplift humanity? How do we uplift the life of every man, woman and child? And that's what's going to make the world an amazing place. And speaking of children, I've got two kids waiting for me to pick them up from school, which is the fun part. Being dad is still my number one desire to be the best dad I can. Anthony, it's been a pleasure to get to know your family. I love you, buddy. Thank you for being in my life. Thank you for joining us today.

Damien, man, it's amazing to be here with you. Thank you for giving me the opportunity and the honor to be on with you, man.