Both Right: The Dalio/Diamandis Tension

I’ve started calling it the simultaneous truth.

Two of the people I read most published major takes last week. Ray Dalio: the world order has broken down. Peter Diamandis: AI will solve humanity’s greatest challenges by 2035. Completely opposite conclusions. Both right.

Dalio was at the Munich Security Conference describing Stage 6 of his Big Cycle. “Great disorder, no rules, might is right, clash of great powers.” The conference’s own report was titled “Under Destruction.” The post-1945 order is gone.

Diamandis, same week: we’re at the Abundance Inflection Point, when exponential technologies solve humanity’s problems faster than new ones emerge. AI cures chronic disease. Energy becomes cheap. Scarcity becomes solvable.

What makes it stick: they sat on the same podcast last year. Same room. Dalio acknowledged AI as genuinely transformative. Diamandis acknowledged the macro disruption. Neither convinced the other, and neither backed down.

Because they’re describing different layers of the same reality.

The old system is breaking down at the same time the tools to build something better are arriving. That gap between breakdown and reconstruction isn’t theoretical. It’s where we’re operating right now.

For me, it shapes what I’m building toward. Not for Dalio’s world (bunker down, wait it out). Not for Diamandis’s world (scarcity solved, everything fine). For the transition. For businesses that create real, local value while the bigger picture sorts itself out.

That’s the simultaneous truth. Things falling apart and something new arriving, at the same time.

Where do you see it from where you’re standing?