How AI Is Impacting Politics & Accelerating the Need For UBI w/ Andrew Yang | EP #61

In this episode, Peter and Andrew discuss the challenges and potential solutions for modern democracy including reinventing voting systems, potential threats from AI in the upcoming presidential elections, and UBI (Universal Basic Income). 03:13 | AI vs. Democracy in 2024 37:05 | Elon For President? 44:59 |Reducing Fear: UBI Explored Andrew Yang is an American businessman, attorney, and politician. He was a candidate in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries and the 2021 New York City Democratic mayoral primary. Yang is the co-chair of the Campaign for a Human-Centered Economy. His signature policy was a universal basic income (UBI) of $1,000 a month as a response to job displacement by automation. Yang has been credited with popularizing the idea of universal basic income through his candidacy and activism. Visit Andrew’s website Visit the Forward Party website _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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• 1:01Peter Diamandis?

  There are forces out there that want to utilize AI to tilt the next election cycle. Is the US government ready to call it out when they see it or defend against it?

• 1:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're going to be one disaster behind on this one, too, I'm sure. Our founding fathers were not fans of direct democracy. The founding design was, look, we'll have different coalitions, we'll come together, we'll come apart, we'll do different things. They never imagined that you'd wind up in these two increasingly polarized tribes.

• 1:33Peter Diamandis?

  Most people say, listen, if you're sending people $500 a month, it's going to be used for beer and Netflix.

• 1:39Speaker 04

  The challenge is trying to prepare us for abundance in a time when scarcity actually, unfortunately, is the lived experience of many of our fellow Americans and humans.

• 1:54Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, Peter Diamandis here with Moonshots. Today, we have an incredibly brilliant guest. His name is Andrew Yang. You may know him as the head of the Forward Party, who ran for the US presidential election in the last cycle. He's also a businessman and entrepreneur. We're going to be talking about two things that are his moonshots. One, how do we fix democracy? And he's got some brilliant ideas, including how do we reinvent how we vote so you can vote for almost anyone who puts their hands up? Imagine a vote between Mark Cuban and Tony Robbins for president. We're going to go someplace like that. The other side is universal basic income. As we have technological unemployment, AI and robotics, is UBI a real thing? What is the data show? How do you fund it?

• 2:38Peter Diamandis?

  All right, join me with Andrew Yang. And if you love conversations like this and want me to bring them to you, please subscribe to this show. It means a lot to me and gives me the fuel to really go out there and bring the smartest, most brilliant moonshot engineers on the planet directly to you. Let's jump into the episode. Everybody, welcome to Moonshots. I'm here with a friend and someone who got a standing ovation at Abundance 360, the first -- I'm not sure I want to call you a politician. I want to call you an entrepreneur. I want to call you a change maker in the political realm, Andrew Yang. Andrew, good to see you, my friend.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  Oh, great to be here, Peter. And yeah, I'm something of -- I dislike the title politician, so I appreciate your exempting me.

• 3:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you're far more than that. And you're a strategist and an innovator, and I'm excited to jump into it. As is usual, before we dive into a show, let me ask you, what is your moonshot?

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Most people who sat in the 2020 race remember my moonshot was universal basic income, which is eradicating poverty in our time. And that's still the vision, the goal. But I've now identified that there's an intermediate moonshot, which is fixing American democracy so that it actually can solve meaningful problems effectively. So doing that first, and then hopefully we can turn back to eradicating poverty.

• 4:08Peter Diamandis?

  All right, well, let's jump into both of those moonshots. But before we do, I've got a question for you, and it's a conversation I've had going on with a number of AI experts on this podcast, which is the coming US election 2024 looks like catnip for AI disruptors, for deep fakes, for people who want to get in there and sort of cause trouble. What is your thought about how AI, generative AI, is going to start playing a role in the next 18 months?

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's going to be a big part of this cycle and not in a good way. And I try to explain to folks, look, imagine if the incremental cost of a video, an email, a text, an image is zero, and I can make those images or videos true to life convincing, and they're completely made up and fabricated. Where you saw even recently, there was, I think, a picture of the Pentagon being on fire and stock markets moved before anyone could say, wait a minute, that was AI generated. Now, you can imagine that times 100 or 1,000

• 5:23Speaker 04

  in this next cycle. I'd almost advise people down the stretch is just turn off your social media feed, because I think it's going to be that cacophonous, unfortunately.

• 5:36Peter Diamandis?

  I can, I can imagine that. I mean, I'm wondering how much democracy is going to be threatened in the near term, like in 2024 presidential elections. Mo Godot, who's been on my podcast a few times, who wrote Scary Smart, calls it patient zero for the disruptions that we're going to see from AI. Now, I'm the guy out there saying AI is the most important invention ever that's going to help us solve humanity's grand challenges, uplift, you know, create abundance, all those things. But I can imagine patient zero being in the elections and making Cambridge Analytica look like, you know, kindergarten.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  I can imagine both of those things, too, Peter. I mean, I tell people, look, if you want to improve the human condition, AI could be the most positive development in generations, maybe ever in human memory, really, in terms of alleviating.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  Alzheimer's and cancer. I know you're working on aging, which is the greatest, you know, the greatest.

• 6:39Peter Diamandis?

  As hard as I can, as hard as I can.

• 6:40Speaker 04

  Really, I know. I mean, it's fantastic. I'm super glad you're doing it. But in the interim, this 24 cycle could end up being patient zero.

• 6:51Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think that politicians out there are ready for this? Do you think the existing parties are ready? Are they scrambling? Are they scared? Are they in the heightened sense of, oh, my God, how do we either use this or defend against this?

• 7:08Speaker 04

  Well, one of the reasons why I don't think you're seeing much in the way of countermeasures or concerns or precautions or whatnot is that most political figures are more like rats in a maze than anything. You know what I mean?

• 7:21Peter Diamandis?

  Can we just stop with, can we stop with rats?

• 7:24Speaker 04

  Well, they, they're just going out there and they're thinking, okay, what do I need to do to keep my seat, to raise this money, to make this person like me, to get this positive press cycle, to get this social media post to, you know, like get more likes? I mean, like that, that's where most people's heads are. And the system-wide problem of eroding or collapsing trust and integrity of our democracy fall by the wayside. I mean, one of the things that I'm arguing now is that America's democracy is actually very, very dysfunctional and has been for quite some time. But if you're an existing political

• 8:06Speaker 04

  figure, your problem is not fixing the dysfunction. Your problem is just fulfilling your role within the maze or within the cage. I mean, one fact I think most people know, but I just want to put a fine point on it. Most elected officials in DC spend between 30 and 60% of their days dialing for dollars, you know? So imagine if you had half your schedule calling rich people and then the other half the time, you know, theoretically legislating or running around meeting people or constituents. You don't have a lot of bandwidth left over for trying to insulate the system from AI.

• 8:43Peter Diamandis?

  I can imagine that, but I bet you there are forces out there that want to utilize AI to tilt the next election cycle. Is the US government ready to call it out when they see it or defend against it? Have you been in any of those conversations?

• 9:00Speaker 04

  I've been in rooms with various folks who are making the case to government officials or the government officials themselves. We're totally unprepared, truthfully. The current American political system is reactive, not proactive. And so we're going to go through at least one cycle of real, real damage before anything meaningful is done.

• 9:23Peter Diamandis?

  I imagine that, right? We had been talking about airplanes being used for terrorism for a long time. And it was 9/11 that got people to change behavior. We've been talking about pandemics for a long time. And it was finally COVID that got us to accelerate vaccine development. I'm afraid that we don't take action until there's a disaster and the horse is out of the barn.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're going to be one disaster behind on this one, too, I'm sure.

• 9:55Peter Diamandis?

  On the flip side, AI could play a massive role in helping to educate the electorate on what's going on. I mean, my biggest problem as a voter here in California is I go to the polls, I look at all of these, you know, individuals and what's being voted on. And, you know, I'm busy. I've had very little time to get educated on them. And getting a clear answer is really hard. And you're dependent upon these commercials that you may or may not have seen. There's got to be some mechanism that, you know, better generative AI can sort of position the situations and compare and contrast them and allow me to make a decision. But

• 10:38Peter Diamandis?

  Is that happening, or do people not want that?

• 10:42Speaker 04

  I would love to help make that happen in the form of the forward party. You're right that most people right now both have too much information overload and not enough information simultaneously. It's a good time. You show up. It's one reason why, what is the main form of political communication you see? It's just someone's name, really. They're just trying to get their name imprinted into your mind so that when you show up, you can vote for them. It's very seldom the political party. One of the dirty secrets in California and the rest of the country is that most of us don't have a two-party system. You have a one-party system. Where you are in California, there's zero suspense, I guess, I'm guessing.

• 11:27Speaker 04

  It's going to be a Democrat, and so which flavor of Democrat? You're not sure, so you show up. And then it's going to be a name you recognize, perhaps. It's one reason why at the federal level, you have a 94% reelection rate for incumbents.

• 11:41Peter Diamandis?

  94%? That's...

• 11:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, 94% congressional incumbent reelection rate, and only a 15% to 20% approval rating of Congress writ large. So that they've drawn a completely uncompetitive, unrepresentative system, and then told us, "Hey, it's a two-party system, you're competing." Like, they're not. In California, you know, Democrats run everything. They have three-quarters of the legislature, having conversations with themselves. And by the way, in California, they're not delivering on things like homelessness, or public safety, or education. But then they just pat you on the head and say, "Well, what are you gonna do? Like, you're stuck with us." And if you go to a place like Texas, it's the reverse, where the Republicans would be

• 12:29Speaker 04

  like, "What are you gonna do?" So that there is very, very little actual competition in this system. It's one of the things that we're trying to change.

• 12:38Peter Diamandis?

  I have to say, when you stood on the stage of A360 and spoke your heart, I was so impressed at what you had to say, and you had standing room only, and you're a follow-on. It's nice to hear, and I'm not gonna call you a politician, a presidential candidate, and a political entrepreneur...

• 12:57Peter Diamandis?

  Thinking logically about this. And so one of the things, you know, that's important for people to realize, and hopefully you realize this in grade school, is we don't actually have a direct democracy. We have a representative democracy. And I assume that's because, you know, when America was born, the idea of getting everybody in the country to actually vote was not viable. But it is viable now. Can you talk to, how is technology, how could technology save the American or democracy, the American political system?

• 13:31Speaker 04

  So our founding fathers were not fans of direct democracy, as you observe. And it wasn't because there was some logistical limitation. Really, they just didn't trust people. They said, you know what, we're going to have this representative system. We're going to, we're going to sort it out, and you have three branches. And you also had these two legislative bodies, one of which was supposed to be a little bit more close to the people in the form of the House of Representatives, and then the Senate was supposed to be more elevated, if you will, and deliberative. Though, they did not envision, our founders, the two-party system. George Washington famously warned against political

• 14:16Speaker 04

  parties on his way out. John Adams said two parties would be a great evil across the land. James Madison said you can't have factions that don't shift. And so you had this representative system that was set up that did not reckon with the fact that you'd have the domination of these two parties the way that took place. And even then, the two parties, until the, let's call it the 70s, 60s and 70s, were sort of like vanilla and French vanilla. They weren't that opposed. And if, you know, a Republican brought a Democrat home as their boyfriend or girlfriend, you know, the parents were like, cool. You

• 14:57Speaker 04

  were more concerned about, let's call it race or religion than your party, because the two parties were not that dissimilar. And then over the last 40 some odd years, then the two parties have started to peel off ideologically and polarize in the way that they have. So you have now this urban versus rural.

• 15:21Speaker 04

  Educated versus less educated, diverse versus more homogeneous, etc. Like these things that are becoming more and more entrenched. And none of this, by the way, is in the founding design. Like, the founding design was, look, we'll have different coalitions, we'll come together, we'll come apart, we'll do different things. They never imagined that you'd wind up in these two increasingly polarized tribes that now don't need to deliver for us. And this is why so many Americans are so frustrated, is that with this 94% incumbent reelection rate, and the fact that 90% of districts are drawn to be either blue or red and uncompetitive in the general, the big myth in American life is that our leaders

• 16:06Speaker 04

  have to please 51% of us to stay in office. It's just not true.

• 16:10Peter Diamandis?

  What is it?

• 16:11Speaker 04

  The reality is, they just need to placate or please the folks who vote in either the Democratic or the Republican primary, which is generally between 10% and 14% of people in the district. So if I'm a member of Congress, I just need to placate the most extreme folks in my party, and then I'm on a glide path to reelection. The only way I can-

• 16:34Peter Diamandis?

  I don't normally get into politics in this program, but I do want to talk about your roadmap, your solutions, because I do think that technology can play a role in some of those solutions. And I want people to hear what's coming and what's possible. I also want to get to the importance of UBI in this period of AI and robotics, which we'll get to in a moment. But let's continue on with this. So what is the roadmap for fixing democracy? And just to note, you have a book coming out called The Last Election, right around the time this episode is coming out. Is it on this subject?

• 17:17Speaker 04

  Well, The Last Election is a piece of fiction, actually. It's, I'm trying to drag people into the message in different ways. And so we decided just to have this political thriller about an independent presidential candidate that's loosely based on Mark Cuban. Sorry, Mark.

• 17:39Speaker 04

  Then what happens throughout that election with this new independent candidate?

• 17:47Peter Diamandis?

  How much of the book did ChatGPT write for you?

• 17:52Speaker 04

  Unfortunately, I finished the book with my writing partner before ChatGPT really hit the scene. So, you know, zero, unfortunately. But the book I wrote about our political system is called Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy. It's now out on paperback. So I've written a couple of books on this subject. But I was trying to codify and lay out what most Americans sense on some level. It's been fun on some occasions, like frankly, at Abundance 360, where you talk to entrepreneurs, leaders, technologists, builders. And then you say to them, hey, you know, this allergy you have to politics?

• 18:37Speaker 04

  It's totally rational. And what's irrational is the setup where you have a bunch, a series of fictions that are presented to the American people about our political system. That after you start digging in, you realize, okay, they're not true. And then the question is, how do you actually fix it? So that's what I've now been involved in. And I'm happy to say we're actually making some progress.

• 19:00Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome. And I fall into the camp where, listen, talk to me about anything, just not politics, right? If I want to fix something, I'm going to start a company. I'm going to go and work on fixing it. The last thing I want to do is get involved in politics. And I have lost belief in the political process to fix problems. I believe that entrepreneurs are individuals who find juicy problems, building your product or service, demonetize, democratize it, and solve that problem.

• 19:30Speaker 04

  I think you are a very smart and wise man, Peter. I spoke to 20 business leaders and I actually posed this question. And they were CEOs. They were, you know, very, very. eminent folks. And I said, how many of you at some point in your career considered running for political office? And a majority of hands went up because, you know, that these are accomplished people. And then I said, how many of you have now concluded that you should not run for office because the system is so irrational, you're going to get dragged through the mud? And even on the chance that you manage to prevail over the machine, you're not actually going to be get anything done anyway. And then they all laughed, but then all of their heads go up. You know, reasonable people have just drawn this conclusion based on evidence because they're smart.

• 20:14Peter Diamandis?

  So the it stacked, the system is stacked against us. I said years ago, with due respect to yourself, my friend, anyone who wants to run for president shouldn't be allowed to. It should be a drafted position for some of the smartest operators in the planet.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  I totally agree. And I also said to that group of business leaders, I said, I don't know you all that well, but I would put you all in charge of the country ahead of the people who are actually running the country 100 times out of 100. And they all laughed and they said, yeah, like we would too. Because they they're rational, they'd be evidence based, they'd just be trying to get things done, their motivations would be generally good, all of which doesn't apply to the current.

• 20:57Peter Diamandis?

  Is there, is there a path forward? I mean, you know, obviously, the the forward party is been doing a lot of the strategic thinking. And we can talk about what the forward party is. I view myself as really a libertarian capitalist if I had to if I had to position myself in some fashion. But what is your roadmap? How do we make change here? How do we save ourselves from what's happened in this two party system?

• 21:26Speaker 04

  Thank you, Peter. I have many friends who would describe themselves the same way. What I'd say is the, the whole path is to make the fiction real.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  Now, how the heck do you do that in real life?

• 21:39Peter Diamandis?

  Which fiction real?

• 21:41Speaker 04

  The fiction is that our leaders need to make 51% of us happy and deliver for us in order to keep their jobs.

• 21:47Peter Diamandis?

  Ah, instead of just the 10 to 12%.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  The primary electorate in the wings with their 94% reelection rate. So, how the heck do you make the fiction real? So, it turns out that because our founding fathers did not like political parties, there's not a word about being a Democrat or Republican anywhere in the Constitution, and all of the party mechanisms are established at the state level. It's all made up. Now, if you wanted to, you could change those mechanics in each state. And in 25 states, you could do so via ballot initiative where 50.1% of the people in that state decide to, they could, for example, get rid of party primaries in that state.

• 22:35Speaker 04

  Now, as I'm saying this, it sounds made up and impossible to.

• 22:39Peter Diamandis?

  But just understand what this means. It means any candidate who wants to run independent of the party, they all go up against each other at the same time.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Yes, imagine an all-party primary where you run as a Libertarian, I run as Forward Party, there are two Democrats, there are three Republicans, what have you, and we all line up and make our case to the folks in that state. And then the top four of us get through to a general election, and then the winner is chosen via ranked choice voting. Now, this is not a thought experiment. Everything I just described happened.

• 23:17Peter Diamandis?

  You mean a democratic process?

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I mean a democratic process. Now, everything I just described happened in Alaska in 2022.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Where in 2020, a majority of Alaskans voted to get rid of the party primaries and said, you know what, for any statewide race, it's all candidates in the same mega primary, and then the top four get through and are put through ranked choice voting to determine who wins. Now, in 2022, when you had a genuinely democratic process, you know what happened? Sarah Palin lost to a woman named Mary Peltola, who in the conventional system would not have won, but Mary Peltola, because of ranked choice voting, managed to win by, I think, four points in the second or third round of voting. Same principle, a woman named Lisa Murkowski, who's the incumbent one, despite voting to

• 24:13Speaker 04

  impeach Donald Trump, and she'd managed to defeat a Trump-endorsed challenger named Kelly Shabaka, because a majority of Alaskans said, look, maybe I didn't love her decision on that one, but I generally think Lisa Murkowski is a reasonable person. In a conventional system where Lisa Murkowski and Kelly Shabaka just went through a Republican primary, Shabaka wins easily. Lisa Murkowski's approval rating among Alaskan Republicans went down to 8% when she voted to impeach Trump, but there's no Republican primary anymore. By the way, half a dozen US senators went to Lisa Murkowski on the Senate floor and said, we envy you so much, you don't have a primary.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  Imagine if all of the senators in the US, all of a sudden, could say no to their party's base and instead would go to their constituents and say, I'm gonna make 51% of you happy. Our decision-making policy improves just like that.

• 25:09Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. I've been asked over and over again, what do I do for my own health? Well, I put it down in this book called Peter's Longevity Practices. It's very readable in just an hour. In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep, my annual sound upload, meds and supplements, longevity mindset. It's literally consumable in just an hour's time, hopefully to incentivize you to make a difference in your life, to intercept the technologies coming our way. If you want this, it's free, just check out the link below and download it right now. So, so what enabled Alaska to put that ballot forward and get it supported? I would assume that the... You know, the political parties would have fought it tooth and nail.

• 25:52Speaker 04

  That is right, Peter, but it turns out that Alaska is a very cheap media state. You and I could be on Alaskan TV tomorrow if we so desired. So the ballot initiative in Alaska to get rid of the primaries costs $6 million. The same ballot, I know, it's the best bargain in history. I mean, you get, you get Sarah Palin out, you get Kelly Shabak out, and it's evergreen. It's not like you have to spend $6 million every cycle. You spend $6 million just to get rid of the primaries. You know where else they wanted to get.

• 26:24Peter Diamandis?

  I love Alaska. It's a frontier state, right? The frontier mindset is still there and good for them to lead the way.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  But, but I want to paint this picture because it's so important. So then the same principle applied in Nevada. Now, a lot of people listening to this think, okay, Alaska's weird. Nevada's a little bit more normal. And like you said, the two parties decided to fight this ballot initiative tooth and nail. But the winning advertisement in Nevada was a military veteran looking at the camera saying, I went overseas to defend our country for years. I came back and I can't vote in our primaries. And I don't think that's right.

• 27:01Peter Diamandis?

  Why couldn't he vote in the primary?

• 27:03Speaker 04

  Because you need to be a registered Democrat or Republican to participate in either primary. And he was an independent, like 50% of military veterans. And like, at this point, 50% of Americans functionally. So that ad went out on Nevada TV and millions of Nevadans saw it and were like, that guy should be able to vote. So the Democratic Party came out against it. The Republican Party came out against it. But 53% of Nevadans said, that guy should be able to vote and I should be able to vote for whomever I want in an all-party primary. So what we're doing is we're going state to state and then flipping over the primary system. Because if you put it in front of the American people, of course, they want to be able to vote for whomever they want.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  The fact that our tax dollars are subsidizing these party primaries is ridiculous. It's distorting everything. And the only people it's good for are the people embedded in the machine who don't want to have to actually submit themselves to us.

• 27:59Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. It's got my vote for sure. I mean, it's like, wait, this sounds really logical.

• 28:05Speaker 04

  It's logical. And if someone wants to dig into this, the progenitors of this set of reforms, it's Michael Porter, who's a Harvard Business School professor and godfather of management consulting, and a woman named Catherine Gale, they co-authored a book called The Politics Industry that said, you know why we're seeing our political system flail and fumble this way? It's because of bad incentives in the system. And the way to fix the incentives is to get rid of the party primaries, and here's how to do it. So the ballot initiative in Nevada costs 17 million, which is more than the six in Alaska.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  If someone were to say to me, how much does it cost to fix American democracy? I would say approximately $200 million, which in our world, Peter, is a very manageable sum.

• 28:57Peter Diamandis?

  That's nothing.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. In the context of a system where we're going to spend $8 billion, beating each other up and hating each other in 2024.

• 29:05Peter Diamandis?

  Just one of the Forbes 500 individuals listening here, please just, you know.

• 29:11Speaker 04

  Please get in touch with me. You can grab me on socials, Andrew Yang, Peter has my number and email. But how does the $200 million fix democracy? Check it out. You run the same ballot initiative that won in Alaska and Nevada in 10 states. It fails in five of them, but that's okay. You succeed in five, and then you liberate 10 US senators to do whatever they think is best and not be enthralled to their parties on either side? That changes the nature of American politics.

• 29:44Peter Diamandis?

  It's no longer a deadlock.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  And that's very, very real. That's very, very doable.

• 29:48Peter Diamandis?

  That's huge. And that's, again, it's the first piece of clear and logical thinking I've heard in a while. So thank you for making that. Thank you for explaining that. What's next on the roadmap? Where do we, you know, okay, we'll pull that off. What's the next step in heading us towards a true democracy?

• 30:07Speaker 04

  So I concluded all of these things now about 18 months ago, and so I've been running around with forward. Now, let's say that we pull off what I'm describing. We get rid of the party primaries in five states, 10 US senators, all of a sudden lucid. And clear they could.

• 30:25Peter Diamandis?

  With lots of time on their hands.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  I mean, it's pretty wild, like, you know, that they would, they'd be like, hey, all of a sudden I'm

• 30:31Peter Diamandis?

  They have their own, they have their own opinion.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Yes, they have their own opinion. Uh, and in the other 25 states, you have mayors and county executives and city council members and occasional members of Congress also throwing off the yoke of the false blue versus red and saying, I'm also part of this new positive, independent political movement forward. Now you fast forward to the next cycle. This is the great frustration that you and many others share is that we might be faced with a Joe Biden, Donald Trump rematch in 2024.

• 31:04Peter Diamandis?

  God forbid.

• 31:05Speaker 04

  And it's patently ridiculous.

• 31:07Peter Diamandis?

  By the, by the way, uh, what do you put the odds that that could happen or would happen?

• 31:14Speaker 04

  Uh, the odds are very high, uh, because Trump will probably win the Republican nomination despite his legal troubles. He's up 20 some odd points. Joe Biden, by all accounts, is running again. There's some rumor that he's going to step aside at the last minute next year, but you know, uh, like I'll believe it when I see it kind of thing. Um, so the Biden Trump rematch combined age 160 is very much on tap. Nothing against, you know, folks of an advanced age, but these are not the octogenarians you want.

• 31:48Speaker 04

  Couple others I know I'd be fine with, but, but these are not the two.

• 31:52Peter Diamandis?

  Before age reversal has been implemented, yes.

• 31:55Speaker 04

  Yes, you know, like what, what, uh, these aren't the 80 year olds you want anyway. Um, so, uh, but it, it's just a clear emblem of how bizarre and dysfunctional a two party system is that in a country of 330 million people, those will be the choices. I mean, gosh, Peter, like I was with you at abundance 360 and I could almost just throw a rock and just take any of the people that the rock hits and say, you'd be a better choice than uh, Joe or, or Donald Trump. So, so if we get presented with this choice.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Many Americans are going to be looking for an alternative. Now, I, my organization Forward, what we'll be doing is we'll be trying to organize swing voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, swing, genuinely independent swing voters, and say, we're going to go with whichever party is on board with getting rid of the party primaries and implementing ranked choice voting and reforming the system itself. So that's our project for 2024, but I'm going to project in the not so distant future, let's call it 2028. We can all vote for, so this will be fun. Let me set the stage a little bit more.

• 33:12Speaker 04

  So imagine there was an independent presidential primary where it's Mark Cuban, The Rock, me, Oprah, Matthew McConaughey, Justin Amash, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, whoever your favorite figures are. I don't know if you want to throw someone into this mix, Peter, if I miss someone that you like.

• 33:35Peter Diamandis?

  Is this, is this, they have to agree or are they being drafted?

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Either, for the sake of the exercise.

• 33:41Peter Diamandis?

  Maybe, maybe we'll throw Tony Robbins and Elon into the mix, too.

• 33:44Speaker 04

  Holy cow. So Elon unfortunately is not born in the US, so there's like, but Tony Robbins, love, love, love it.

• 33:52Peter Diamandis?

  Jeff Bezos, you know, Jeff's gonna, you know, he's, he's got the Washington Post, he's building rockets, you know, he's got a, you know, it's gotta be something new he's going to go do.

• 34:00Speaker 04

  Let's throw Tony and Jeff into the mix, sure. And we can all vote in this primary on our smartphones, say, I like Tony, I like Andrew, I like Mark Cuban. And then our vote is verified via personalized QR code that gets sent to our mailing address. You scan it. Congratulations, your vote has been verified. Millions of Americans are participating in actual democracy. And then the legacy parties would be left saying, no, none of that is real. What is real is waiting to hear what 6% of Iowans think in February. And then millions of Californians and New Yorkers and everyone else would be like, wait a minute, that makes zero sense.

• 34:45Speaker 04

  I don't give a shit what Iowans think any other time. Why am I caring this time? Or, no offense to anyone, because I love you all, but like, South Carolina, I mean, you could just like, throw whatever the heck the early basket of states. I mean, I went through this process. Only 6.5% of Iowans participated in the Democratic caucus I was a part of. It's probably going to be a not that much higher percentage of Iowans in this Republican caucus.

• 35:08Peter Diamandis?

  So let me get this straight. There is a process by which you raise above some threshold. And I don't care if you're the Kardashians or whomever, if you want to run for president, what would be the criteria for getting yourself on this digital ballot?

• 35:24Speaker 04

  This is so fun, Peter, because those 20 people, your 20 people, whomever, most of them know that if they ran for president as a Democrat or Republican, it would be miserable. You know, that they would get shived, the same way that we've seen, let's call it, Mike Bloomberg get shived, or whomever. But if you got to run in this independent primary, then you could genuinely make your case. You could be positive. There's not a machine trying to oppress you at every turn. And real Americans could get behind you and vote for you in real time. So the wonder of this is that a political party can design its nomination process however it wants.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  The Democrat and Republican Party have chosen to design it in a particularly anachronistic, nonsensical way, not because they think it's smart, but mainly because of inertia and they prefer to control.

• 36:19Peter Diamandis?

  It gives them control, of course.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  It's just control, right. And part of that control has been the media, where if you see how the media covers various candidates, and I was part of this too, in my book, Forward, they very much have their thumb on the scale for certain candidates. And so that's how they try to make sure that their chosen candidate or candidates win. But now all of that's falling apart. And so what is the new process that replaces it all? There is, we all, you and I both know, and everyone listening to this know, the tech, for what I'm describing, is completely mature. A political party can, again, nominate however it wants. The only things that you need are, number one,

• 37:04Speaker 04

  some heavyweights who are willing to run in this kind of process. And number two, ballot access in all 50 states. Now, the ballot access is, if you had to put a price tag on it, maybe it costs you about $50 million. Now, the forward party already has legal recognition in about eight states. We're kind of marching towards 20 by the end of 2024, let's say. So this is the infrastructure so that reasonable candidates actually can submit themselves genuinely to the American people without the massive gatekeeping function of the two legacy parties that just want to keep everyone out.

• 37:45Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. It's the way it should be. I mean, we do, you know, we move millions of dollars, and some people, billions of dollars, on Bitcoin on your smartphone. You have all of your functions in life in verified fashion. Why not vote? That's brilliant. Now, you've mentioned Mark Cuban three times. Have you spoken to him about this?

• 38:08Speaker 04

  I have, and he is one of my, one of my top draft picks for this endeavor. If you don't know, check out his cost plus drugs. I mean, he's literally saving Americans.

• 38:20Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 38:21Speaker 04

  Great stuff. Love you, Mark.

• 38:23Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so listen, I think, I think this is a fantastic idea. And, you know, at this point, hopefully, it's not just about a popular individual. It's hopefully going to be being popular and being intelligent and having good policies. I mean, why do people, why do people say this wouldn't work? I mean, I would imagine people say, well, a populist politician or president doesn't have the experience that's needed to run. They have to rise through the ranks of, you know, local state and federal politics.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Most people have not dug into it even that deeply, Peter, honestly. Most people just knee-jerk think, well, third-party, hopeless.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jill Stein, et cetera, et cetera. Now, if they looked at the numbers, they would see that now 49% of Americans self-identify as independents, almost twice as what identify as Democrat or Republican, that this kind of internet voting is now very, very doable and natural for Americans in a way it was not even in the 90s. But their reservations are not the ones you just cited, because most Americans are fed up. They would happily take a reasonable human that is not of the machine at this point. They just don't think it's possible because of the conditioning, particularly from the

• 39:52Speaker 04

  media, that you must choose either column A or column B and nothing else exists.

• 39:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I think people don't realize the influence the media has on politics. And we, for I don't know what reason, think of the media as still Concreit, you know, what's his name, Howard?

• 40:14Speaker 04

  Walter Concrite?

• 40:15Peter Diamandis?

  Walter Concrite, yes. I mean, it's independent, it's truthful, it's, you know, representing, you know, truth in the American way, but that's anything but.

• 40:23Speaker 04

  Well, this podcast will probably get a similar audience to, you know, one of the major cable channels, you know?

• 40:29Peter Diamandis?

  Well, so, you know...

• 40:32Speaker 04

  And a much cooler audience, I will say, a much better audience.

• 40:34Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, thank you.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  Most of the people watching this are not, you know, tuning in nightly.

• 40:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, they're entrepreneurs, they care about changing the world and they want, you know, the mindset is, let's find out where we can make things better, you know, up and to the right. You know, it's interesting, right? Because maybe it's going to be Twitter, maybe it's going to be Google, maybe it's going to be some other platform, but the platforms exist for full verification and to reach everybody in America.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Well, you talk about the media, I mean, I think that's what motivated Elon in buying Twitter slash X now, is that he thought, you know, this is going to be one way, I can actually try to improve the nature of the messages that are getting out. But what I'm describing, it's right there for us, man. The fun thing is, you can imagine who would run. And a lot more excellent people would run if they thought they would be treated fairly.

• 41:26Peter Diamandis?

  Do you think the US people would change the rules about being born in the US if Elon wanted to run?

• 41:32Speaker 04

  I don't know, but I'd certainly love to test that proposition out. I was with Arnold Schwarzenegger not that long ago. I said, you should test that proposition out. But here's one of the fun things, Peter. Let's say that this independent primary does come to pass. Let's, I'm just going to speak for myself. If I were part of it, and let's say I lose to, I'll keep using Mark just as my example.

• 41:55Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 41:57Speaker 04

  I would then endorse Mark and say, hey, man, like, let me go campaign for you around the country. And you could campaign anywhere. You'd end up with a team of a dozen high-powered surrogates and something of an administration or a cabinet in waiting. And the American people would be like, that crew is, as a crew, I would trust and prefer much, much more than the current freaking panoply of, you know, frankly, mostly second graders.

• 42:25Peter Diamandis?

  I, I love it. You're right. Once it flips, you've got, you know, 30 incredible influencers ready to back the independent candidate.

• 42:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's the vision, man. It's going to be the Avengers of rationality and, you know, true progress.

• 42:43Peter Diamandis?

  And so can people, have you written up these ideas in a concrete fashion someplace?

• 42:49Speaker 04

  So if you go to Forward Party, that this is the movement. I have not written up the independent primary plan, though there have been frankly, versions of this that have been written up. I've written up the other stuff around getting rid of the party primaries, shifting to an all-party primary ranked choice voting. I'm going to be excited to get energy behind the 2028 plan. One reason why I'm not hammering that that hard is because we are stuck in 2024 right now, to our earlier conversation. And so we're trying to organize independent swing voters in swing states to try and keep the current thing from collapsing.

• 43:32Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. And this, in fact, is the Digitization and democratization of democracy.

• 43:39Speaker 04

  It's making the fiction real, Peter. And, and to you, the way you described me before. Uh, my dad was a PhD in physics out of Berkeley. So when I saw Oppenheimer, I was like, oh my gosh, this is like the freaking family tree in action. My, my brother is named after Ernest Lawrence. Uh, the, which Josh Hartnett's character. Um, but I, I'm, uh, a deeply flawed politician, shall we say, in that I, I just want to try and make things work better. Uh, I would prefer to be doing something else. Very frankly, I mean, I, I'm like you where you also are trying to solve problems and you wisely said, you know what, I'm going to solve the problems that are solvable through entrepreneurship in the private sector.

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Um, for better or for worse, uh, the problems I started getting animated about like poverty, um, were things that I thought you needed the public sector, uh, to, to, um, um, solve. And then now I've gotten, um, very deep into the, okay, how the heck do you build a functional public sector?

• 44:41Peter Diamandis?

  Well, I, I wish you luck and I'm going to help spread your meme virus here of those two approaches because they're the most logical, smartest approach I've heard. So thank you for that. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. 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

• 45:21Peter Diamandis?

  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 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 news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to diamandis.com/blog and learn more. Now, back to the episode. Andrew, let's flip to your second moonshot, which is the idea of universal basic income.

• 46:06Peter Diamandis?

  So, the idea, just to lay it out, as I understand it, and I welcome your modification here, is as AI and robotics and other exponentials, 3D printing, AR, VR, blockchain, start to disrupt the job markets and people lose their jobs to technology, that we need to do a few things. One of them is going to be to help level up those individuals, upskill them to better skills. But potentially, at least in the interim, is give them reliable income, a universal

• 46:46Peter Diamandis?

  basic income that allows them to, you know, put food on the table, get insurance, not feel panicked, perhaps get a better education, perhaps invest in whatever tech they need to start a small business. And it's about human dignity to a large degree and getting rid of fear, because there's going to be a lot of fear as AI steps in in a bigger way in the next few years. I'll say one more thing, and then, this is your platform, and you did a huge amount to, I don't want to say necessarily popularize, but educate people about universal basic income, which I'm grateful for.

• 47:29Peter Diamandis?

  The other thing I wanted to mention is, it is something that's not a theoretical concept. It's been implemented and tested and studied over dozens, if not hundreds, of experiments, both in the United States and around the world. So that's my setup for it, and I want people to understand it's, uh, this is coming because we need a countervailing force to the fear that people have about potentially losing their jobs.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  Oh, I, I love the way you frame that, Peter. The, the way I describe it is that you have a mindset of abundance and possibility and optimism and entrepreneurship, and then you have a mindset of scarcity, fear, us versus them, xenophobia, uh, uh, and negativity towards technology, honestly. And so which of these things is winning? Which of these is going to win? Um, I think you'd be hard pressed to say that nationwide, the mindset of optimism and possibility is winning. It's definitely winning at Abundance 360, which was a blast. You know, I go there and it's like, I was uplifted because here are people who are literally building the, the future.

• 48:42Speaker 04

  But then, you know, you drive a few hours in any direction and you wind up at like a, uh, let's say a different mindset. Uh, and so the, the question is, how do we help people transition? There are a lot of very smart folks who are deep in AI who've also been, um, studying the effects of UBI or cash relief programs. And one of the things I think is going to appeal to folks, uh, like you is that right now we have the worst of all worlds where we're spending so much money and energy on dysfunctional administration of programs that are really punitive and dehumanizing. I spoke to thousands of Americans who are on various aid programs and the single biggest

• 49:26Speaker 04

  thing that motivates them is fear. Um, they are scared stiff of losing their benefits. There was a woman in Iowa who said to me, uh, I would like to volunteer for my local nonprofit, but I'm scared to because I'm on disability and I'm afraid that if someone saw that I could volunteer, they'd take my money away. And so you listen to that story and you think, my gosh, like, what have we done? Where, where this woman's getting the money, but instead of using the money to live a better life, she's staying in because she's afraid of being seen as able-bodied. I mean, like that, that's what's happening right now for millions and millions of Americans where we've set up this.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  This unfeeling machine above them that they do not trust at all, by the way, and said, hey, your subsistence is going to be reliant upon your staying on the good side of this bureaucracy. And if you fill out the form wrong, we're going to pull the rug out from under you. I mean, like, I've spoken to military vets who are in this boat. I've spoken to so many Americans and it's, we can do better, let's say.

• 50:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Giselle sent me an article which framed it as insecurity versus inequality as the issue people are facing. They don't feel secure.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  They do not feel secure in the least. And if we can change that, then we have a much better chance of building a society where if someone else makes some rapid advance, you look at it and say, oh, good. Like, maybe that's good for me in some way. Right now, unfortunately, it's more like, look at that jerk over there who's doing well, like, you know, like, I'm not seeing any of that.

• 51:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. So you've studied this. If you had to, you know, most people say, listen, if you're sending people 500 bucks a month, it's going to be used for beer and Netflix, and it's a waste of money, for God's sakes. Why are you going to spend my tax money to do that? How do you respond to that? What's the data show?

• 51:36Speaker 04

  Well, the data shows that people tend to spend the money on food, fuel, shelter, books for their kids, activities for their kids. And the biggest example of that data set was the enhanced child tax credit that was implemented in 2020 and 2021, yeah, in the US, where it lifted millions of American kids out of poverty. And 130 economists who looked at it said, we should keep doing this because the money is getting used very, very effectively. And American politics being what it is, we then pulled the plug on that, even though

• 52:17Speaker 04

  there were so many, literally, there were Nobel laureates saying, this is the best thing we've done in a generation to alleviate poverty. But the data is there for anyone to find. You also saw decreases in things like domestic violence, child abuse. I mean, if you put a little bit of money into people's hands. You talked about the data, Peter. There was one study I found very, very compelling out of an Indian tribe in North Carolina, where one tribe started giving people a certain amount of money because they had a casino, honestly. There was another tribe that didn't.

• 52:52Peter Diamandis?

  I've got it here. It's the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Casino Dividend in North Carolina, and giving them no strings attached between 4,000 and 6,000 per year is that particular one.

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you probably have it there, that you had the kids learn better, and even their personalities became more conscientious, more trusting.

• 53:18Peter Diamandis?

  Improved education, mental health, decrease in addiction and crime.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, and by the way, if you wound up with people who do turn to crime and drugs, we end up paying for that, too, in ways big and small. I mean, like, we're spending $30,000 to $50,000 per individual, per year, who is homeless or incarcerated in our country. So if it hits our institutions, it's a lot more expensive than that $4,000 and $6,000 that those kids got.

• 53:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, lest you think that this is a new idea, I'm just going to rattle off here the research that my producer Nick did. You know, we've seen this in Alaska since 1982. Alaska's had their fund funded by oil. I mentioned North Carolina. We've had experiments in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Iowa, North Carolina, Seattle, Denver, Gary, Indiana. A number, there's a big study done in Stockton, California, Canada, England, Brazil, Germany, Spain, the Netherlands has done a number, Finland. Iran, Kenya, Namibia, India, China.

• 54:33Peter Diamandis?

  So, I mean, this has been done hundreds of times. And as I read through the details here, it's consistent that this investment has super positive outcomes. I haven't read any place where it's been, had negative outcomes or a waste of money.

• 54:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's much more effective than frankly, starting up a new bureaucracy and then saying, hey, guys, improve the lives of people that are not you. One of the organizations in this space that some people might have heard of is GiveDirectly, which is it transfers money directly to people in developing countries. Now, there's probably some skepticism among your audience, rightly so, of kind of a nonprofit industrial complex or an NGO industrial complex. There's probably that mistrust when it comes to certain government bureaucracies that are

• 55:30Speaker 04

  terrible at administering benefits in a, like a frankly, a sane way. This skips the middleman and gets the resources to where it'll actually do good.

• 55:44Peter Diamandis?

  And I've been a donor to GiveDirectly. I think it's a brilliant, you know, super low overhead, minimized overhead process.

• 55:54Speaker 04

  On a personal level, Peter, the way that you and I do this probably is we just tip really well, you know, because you're around someone that's like, hey, this is going to be dollar for dollar.

• 56:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and it's such a beautiful thing when someone unexpectedly gets a large tip and you know for that evening, that moment, you've changed their life.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a great, great feeling. I highly recommend it.

• 56:15Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah. So the question becomes where does this money come from? You know, can we afford it? And I'd like to play a few conversational games here. I remember Jeff Bezos and a few other folks said, well, if we're going to start to see technological displacement of jobs and a robot takes, you know, a house cleaning job or a robot takes a factory working job or an AI takes a physician's job, why don't we just tax that robot and that AI for that work it's being done and then use that tax base to fund a UBI program? Does that make sense?

• 56:53Speaker 04

  I think taxing AI makes a lot of sense. I think.

• 56:57Speaker 04

  The practice of it might be a little bit trickier. Uh, the where the money comes from, for starters, I don't know what people are gonna receive this. So our data right now is worth hundreds of billions of dollars a year to various companies. Your data is going to be worth more than others, Peter.

• 57:14Peter Diamandis?

  Thanks.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Um, but, uh, we're not seeing a dime of that. So, uh, one of the proposals I had was, look, there should be a data dividend where I'm not one to hold back, uh, certain forms of development, but if you're going to be buying and selling my data, uh, maybe I should see what's going on and get a cut and I, you know, and, and, um, that could be the start of, uh, uh, multi hundreds of billions of dollars, uh, type measure. Uh, AI itself, um, could also, and one of the examples I use is that there are 2 million Americans who work at call centers still. And let's say that AI is going to be able

• 57:59Speaker 04

  to do that job pretty soon. Uh, how much do those 2 million Americans pay in taxes right now? I'm going to guess that they do pay taxes. And then the question is, will the tech company that uses the AI pay anywhere near that level in taxes? History suggests it will not. Um, and so you'll wind up replacing tax paying humans with AI that, um, we might not see that kind of revenue from unless we change the system.

• 58:25Peter Diamandis?

  You know, I've had this conversation with Elon and we've been trying to go back and forth on when we're going to do another podcast together on the subject of abundance. And, you know, his first reaction is yes, we're going to have full up abundance post AGI, right? And I get that, you know, uh, once we have artificial general intelligence, which leads rapidly to artificial superintelligence and let's put away the dystopian scenarios, the Terminator, and we have AI, uh, we're heading towards what I would call technological socialism. Um, you know, uh, being a good, uh, you know, capitalist entrepreneur, the term socialism and communism sort of like, you know,

• 59:08Peter Diamandis?

  Are knives into you, but technological socialism is an idea where technology is taking care of you. And it's what will happen, right? AI, your best physician in the world will be an AI. Your best diagnostician, your best surgeon will be an AI and a robot. And those things will rapidly demonetize towards zero cost. Your best educator, we saw this with with Sal Khan, who's a real hero, as you had said on stage.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, he is a hero. I had dinner with Sal last month and what a privilege.

• 59:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he's such a sweet man and brilliant entrepreneur. And so the things that we spend a large amount of money on today, we spend a disproportionate amount on healthcare and education.

• 59:56Speaker 04

  A lot of Americans are nodding right now, Peter.

• 1:00:00Peter Diamandis?

  Well, and and what we're going to see is the very best healthcare and the very best education is eventually going to be free because it's going to be delivered by these these AI or AGI systems, right? It's the cost of electricity. And so that's going to be a significant, I mean, if our cost of living, so we spend our money on, we spend our money on health, on education, on transportation. Eventually, an autonomous Uber will be four times cheaper than owning a car. And if you don't need to live in downtown Manhattan or downtown Boston because your job is there, because you can commute via Zoom, or because you can commute in an autonomous

• 1:00:44Peter Diamandis?

  Uber back and forth, and the hour of travel time is usable, then you can live someplace where the real estate is four times cheaper, you know, and still we have a beautiful backyard. So we're heading towards a world of mass massive demonetization, I think, and efficiency of our time. So.

• 1:01:04Peter Diamandis?

  I think the cost of living should go down while the standards of living go up. Do I have it wrong in any way in your mind?

• 1:01:11Speaker 04

  I love the vision and I agree with the mega trends. The problems are twofold. Number one is the regulatory problem, and this is where the public sector comes back in. Let's say I invented AI that could do the job of a surgeon tomorrow. You wouldn't see that happen in hospitals because the surgeons would just lobby the legislators and say, hey, it's gotta be a human surgeon. Or at a minimum, it's gotta be a human surgeon advising the AI.

• 1:01:40Peter Diamandis?

  Overseeing, right.

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  So there's this regulatory capture that's going to make it rough. Now, there are certain sectors, and I'm going to use my call center worker example, where legislators aren't going to give a shit about them, you know, they don't have a lobby.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  So there you'll see it go very rapidly. It's one reason why this political reform is so important is because there's going to be a race toward regulatory protection. It's like, who's gonna be viewed as like, oh, you know, indispensable human worker, like, can't replace you.

• 1:02:20Speaker 04

  The AMA, by the way, why do we have a physician shortage in the US of humans? I mean, which is one of the reasons why AI doctors will be such a massive value add. It's because of the American Medical Association artificially

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  keeping the number of doctors low. Because they didn't want there to be real competition.

• 1:02:41Peter Diamandis?

  People got smarter and realized they don't want to actually spend four years in medical school, five, six, seven years with internship and residency, come out such massive debt just at the time that AI is going to take their job, so that's why.

• 1:02:54Speaker 04

  No, no, because if you think about it, there are all of these folks who are below the line in terms of applying to medical school. You know, I'm, I'll make an insert Asian joke here. Anyway. Where, uh, so, um, there's been an artificially curbed supply and then you know that, uh, those professionals are going to lobby very, very furiously. And it's not just the doctors themselves. You see it with certain device manufacturers where, do you know Dean Kamen by chance?

• 1:03:24Peter Diamandis?

  I was with him for dinner at his home in New Hampshire on Friday night. Yes.

• 1:03:29Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh. All right. So, so Dean told me a story, might have told you too, um, where he invented a portable dialysis machine, which would improve people's standard of living dramatically. But then the folks who profit from inpatient dialysis said, no, no, no, that's not safe. And that their, their motivation was obviously that they make a whole lot more money.

• 1:03:49Peter Diamandis?

  It's actually evil.

• 1:03:52Speaker 04

  It's evil. There, there's a lot of evil going on in the system because people are making money off of the inefficiency and they will fight, fight, fight to keep the inefficiency because that's their business now. So, uh, so the future you're describing is a future that would be happening in the absence of this regulatory capture, uh, and but there are going to be some folks who get displaced very summarily. And so managing this transition in both groups is a must. And right now, the, the question is, how can you coax some folks be like, look, guys, you're going to be okay, but AI is going to start doing this lifting for us or this surgery for us and you're not, you know, you're not going to starve to death. You'll be fine. And then also go to the folks whose work is made irrelevant very quickly.

• 1:04:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. Um, by the way, for those who don't know Dean Kamen, you may know him as the creator of the Segway, which is unfortunate because the things that he's actually done in the world have been so extraordinary. One of the most brilliant inventors on the planet, uh, creator of implantable infusion pumps, the Luke arm, the iBot, uh, and, and I don't know, 1,500 patents, one of the most generous, brilliant individuals. Um, he'll be joining us at A360 this year. We'll spend five days with him, uh, in a few different dimensions, both. He's got, uh, a, a company right now. We toured it, um, a few myself and a few of my abundance members called the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute.

• 1:05:19Peter Diamandis?

  It's government funded, good thing, good thing the government's doing, they're basically regrowing organs. You give them a skin sample and they turn that skin sample into induced pluripotent stem cells and then grow a pediatric heart, a bone, ligament bone, new islet cells for your pancreas. It's amazing. The guy is one of the most brilliant engineers on the planet.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  Dean Kamen is a genius and a force for good. And it surprised me not at all that you had dinner with him last week.

• 1:05:51Peter Diamandis?

  And his, of course, his most important invention is first, which is his high school, junior high school, high school level educational program that is in 85,000 schools around the world.

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  Teaching the next generation robotics, indeed, you know, like movable wheelchairs that help people live more functional lives. I mean, the guy's improved a lot of people's existences.

• 1:06:17Peter Diamandis?

  So I get the idea that we're going to have ingrained biases and self motivation, keeping things the way they have. And that's always been the case, right? I'm sure it falls eventually. I mean, there will be a point where when you see that human surgeon coming at you and you say, oh, no, no, no, I do not want that human touching me. You know, I don't know how much coffee they had, if they had a fight with a boyfriend or girlfriend last night. I want the robot, I want the robot that has seen this surgery a million times and cost, you know, a hundred times cheaper. I want it doing the surgery. And so the question becomes, you know, we're going to have to be

• 1:06:58Peter Diamandis?

  data driven evolution. And I think we're going to see, it's not going to be a little fuzzy. It's going to be the AI is making the right diagnosis, you know, 99 times out of 100 compared to the, to the human. And one of the biggest problems is humans make a lot of mistakes.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:07:21Speaker 04

  I mean, your entire had a fight with their partner or got drunk or something. I mean, that stuff's real. You know, it's not like our physicians are superhuman or whatnot. I mean, like they're, I mean, they have problems and their problems do not keep them from coming in and operating on us, or whatever the case may be.

• 1:07:44Peter Diamandis?

  So we're gonna have, I hope, the cost of living is going to demonetize. I mean, it has tremendously, right? But we don't, we don't count those things that have demonetized. We don't count the fact that our communications are world-class, as good as the president of nations had, you know, decades ago, and it's free video conferencing on FaceTime or Zoom. I mean, that's insane. We don't count that. We don't count the, all of the free entertainment we have, the free knowledge, even free AI we have. But the things that we do pay for, there's going to be demonetization pressures.

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  I agree, Peter. And in many ways, so someone once described me in a flattering way, as wanting to be America's wet blanket. Like, I just want everyone to chill out while we make this set of transitions. And right now, Americans are getting the opposite of more chill. Shall we, shall we say? Like, we're getting, we're getting, yeah, we're getting stressed down, inflamed, and polarized, and scarcity is taking over, and more and more insecurity, as Giselle put it. So I see my role as trying to make it so that we can actually enjoy the bounty of this.

• 1:09:00Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing time to be alive. Yes, it's extraordinary. You know, one of the other ideas that one of my A360 members has spoken about, I think you've spoken about this as well, is basic living as a service, you know, a community where for 250 bucks a month,

• 1:09:18Peter Diamandis?

  You get housing, internet, water, food. What else do you want to throw in there? Right? So a fixed cost.

• 1:09:27Speaker 04

  Sure. Entertainment.

• 1:09:28Peter Diamandis?

  Entertainment, sure. Which I love that idea because at scale, this is what technology can do. It can, it can give us a constantly demonetizing, meeting all our basic needs and allowing you to earn a living that allows you to put away money and reinvest it.

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I joked, Peter, at one point, it's like, we have to enter the era of terrible artwork because we just have people who are able to chill out and paint terrible paintings or whatever the heck it is, you know what I mean?

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  Some of them will be awesome, I'm sure, but also terrible.

• 1:10:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Sid Guru, I don't know if you know Sid Guru. He, I was on stage with him years ago in St. Petersburg. And we had dinner afterwards and he said something that has never left me. He says, "Technology allows humanity to finally take a vacation from survival."

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  He, he's totally right. And we've been operating under this resource constraint mindset and institutional setup and everything else where it's zero sum. And we're about to hit a point where a lot of these goods will have essentially zero marginal cost. And then what do you do in an era of abundance? What does that become? We're not set up for it. And in many ways, I feel like the challenge is trying to prepare us for abundance in a time when scarcity actually unfortunately is the lived experience of many of our fellow Americans and humans.

• 1:11:05Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed. I mean, one of the.

• 1:11:09Peter Diamandis?

  Last point, so I want to touch base with you on here because I think it's fundamental to solving UBI in an actual functional way is that of purpose, right? I think as, as living a human experience as a biological individual, we need purpose. And just, you know, surviving is not that and just being given money isn't that. Any thoughts on, on this?

• 1:11:41Speaker 04

  Um, when I was running for president, Peter, I, I had visions of an American exchange program where when you were graduating from high school, you'd go to another part of the country and live with a family who, by the way, would send their kids someplace else too, so they'd probably be nice to you. Maybe you'd even trade.

• 1:11:55Peter Diamandis?

  What a great way of creating globalization and peace, right?

• 1:11:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. So then you'd be like, hey, when, when someone says something negative about the, those folks in the red or blue zone, you'd be like, I actually hung out with them and they're perfectly fine and they're, they're just like us. Uh, like, uh, I had notions of various types of national competitions, not because it necessarily had economic value, but because people need structure, purpose, fulfillment, goals, community. Uh, well, if you were to rewind to an earlier point in American life, um, maybe your church or religious group served a particular role in your life. Um, now that has gotten replaced unfortunately by, this is gonna hurt you in your heart,

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  but it's been replaced by politics in some, uh, it's some, some people's lives. Uh, so, so we, we do need to imbue, uh, more communities with the sense of structure, purpose, fulfillment, goals. Uh, and one of the big misconceptions about me has been that I was somehow unmindful of that. I mean, um, I'm, or, I mean, I'd like to work, honestly. Now, I'm very, very fortunate where I get to do very, very meaningful, purposeful work and I genuinely feel like, hey, if I weren't here, um, something wouldn't get done. So that's a good feeling and that the goal has to be to try and make it so that more people

• 1:13:27Speaker 04

  have that feeling and even if it's not something society wide like maybe you or or I am working on it can be something as simple as today I'm going to be very important to helping my neighbor you know clear their garage or care for their children or what have you.

• 1:13:45Peter Diamandis?

  One of the things that people hopefully realize is a lot of the jobs not all but a lot of the jobs that robotics and AI will take are jobs that were not the jobs people dreamed of doing when they were kids right it didn't dream of being a waiter or cleaning apartment buildings or whatever it might be but that was the job that you could get to put food on your table or get insurance for your family and so the question really is fine let tech take those jobs that are dull dangerous or dirty you know and how do we enable that individual now to

• 1:14:25Peter Diamandis?

  level up to what they dreamed about how do we allow people to dream into a bigger purpose and I think AI as their co-pilot to help them educate themselves and do things they didn't think they could do is critical and and I think it's almost we have to split the split what you do for a living to make money separate for what you do for a purpose right.

• 1:14:54Speaker 04

  Yeah and and one thing Peter that you suggested just now is that there is a distinction between how men and women or boys and girls experience this phenomena where and studies have borne this out by the way that if you have an idle man they volunteer less than an employed man even though they have more time and their consumption of drugs and gambling and some other things go up. And so the this, the sense of purpose and usefulness that you're describing is vital

• 1:15:36Speaker 04

  to stab off both personal and community self destruction. And one of the things that Americans are experiencing at higher levels unfortunately are those things. Deaths of despair continue to rise. And there's an asymmetry in terms of how men and women are faring in contemporary American life where now only 40% of incoming college students are men, as an example. And so there has to be a massive investment in things that help men in particular find

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  a way forward. In the absence of these kinds of measures, many men will go down dark rabbit holes and routes. And that's where the negativity takes over.

• 1:16:28Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And unfortunately, it is also the case for younger men in their teens when hormones hit, and they're not fighting the lions on the savannas of Africa.

• 1:16:39Speaker 04

  Yes. And this is something I feel very deeply where, you know, again, I've been very fortunate. But I remember as a young man, when I started a company and did not work out, and my Asian parents frankly pretended to their friends that I was still a lawyer and doing well. That, you know, you feel like this challenge to your self worth. Now, I was again, very fortunate that in my case, I joined another startup and then.

• 1:17:09Peter Diamandis?

  Which is what makes America great.

• 1:17:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. It's what makes America great. But there are lots of young men in particular who don't have this set of opportunities. And then for them, they kind of shrink inward. I'm also the parent of two young boys. So it's one reason why I feel this.

• 1:17:28Peter Diamandis?

  As am I.

• 1:17:30Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, so you feel this too.

• 1:17:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 04

  And, you know, I mean, instinctively, like, your kids will be fine, my kids will be fine. One of my boys on the autism spectrum has particular challenges. But I see American boys in different circumstances, and a lot of them, you know, if they don't find a productive direction, it'll turn inward in ways that are not positive.

• 1:17:53Peter Diamandis?

  I want to thank you, Andrew, for having the courage to run for president. It is something I will never do. Not for me, but...

• 1:18:02Speaker 04

  Not even in an independent primary, where people can vote on their smartphones, Peter? Where you can actually talk steds?

• 1:18:09Peter Diamandis?

  If logic actually rules, okay, it's a non-zero, but it's still, I'd rather spend my time solving the world's biggest problems.

• 1:18:20Speaker 04

  In many ways, my goal will be to make it so that awesome people like you have a higher chance of... You're out of the ring. That is currently the case. Currently, I would totally, you know, get it.

• 1:18:32Peter Diamandis?

  All right. But listen, I love the idea of Mark Cuban versus Tony Robbins versus Kim Kardashian on the independent spectrum for election. It would be a fun, fun election. I mean, we could actually pay for the entire thing with just the reality TV rights.

• 1:18:50Speaker 04

  And we would run the table, Peter, genuinely, because so many Americans would look up, I mean, two-thirds of Americans want an alternative to the two-party system. If you had that battalion, everyone would be like, "Okay, we're totally doing that." We would win. I mean, you know, and this is something we should be building towards as quickly as possible.

• 1:19:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you for your moonshots, my friend. Just to remind folks again, it is to reinvent and fix the democracy, no small challenge, and then to help birth UBI as a program that is recognized, understood, and rolled out. Not just here in the United States, but through an example in the United States, I think around the world. I'm looking forward to a time when kids are dreaming of the types of moon shots they had when I was a kid, right? Being astronaut, go to the moon and moon shots that really make the world a better place. So where do we find you on social media, Andrew?

• 1:19:50Speaker 04

  Well, what a vision, Peter. We'll fight alongside you to make it real for kids around the world. You can find me at andrewyang.com, Andrew Yang and most social media platforms, or you can go to forwardparty.com. But let's actually build a version of the future we know is possible. It's not going to happen without us.

• 1:20:09Peter Diamandis?

  I love it. And watch out for Andrew's new book, The Last Election. And remember, the hero is Mark Cuban.

• 1:20:22Peter Diamandis?

  But don't tell Mark that. Pal, thank you for your vision. And I'm gonna help spread your word because I believe in what you're saying. It makes a heck of a lot of sense.

• 1:20:31Speaker 04

  Well, thank you, Peter. It's about abundance, my friend.

• 1:20:48Speaker 05

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