The Tim Ferriss Show - #90: Peter Diamandis on Disrupting the Education System, The Evolution of Healthcare, and Building a Billion-Dollar Business

Episode Date: July 16, 2015

Dr. Peter Diamandis (@PeterDiamandis) has been named one of “The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” by Fortune Magazine. His accomplishments are far too many to list, but here are a few:... Peter is Chairman and CEO of the X PRIZE Foundation. He is also the Co-Founder (along with Craig Venter and Bob Hariri) of Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI); and the Co-Founder of Planetary Resources, a company designing spacecrafts to mine asteroids for precious materials (seriously). His latest book, Bold, has endorsements from Bill Clinton, Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil. Peter knows how to think and play big, and he can show you how to do the same. This episode features the top-10 most popular questions you wanted Peter to answer, including: How do we disrupt the education system? What does the future of healthcare look like? When should you start building your billion-dollar business? Will technology destroy all the jobs? This podcast is brought to you by LegalZoom. Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic – now worth more than a billion dollars) first incorporated his company on LegalZoom. LegalZoom, which I’ve used myself, can help you with almost anything legal, including setting up a will, doing a proper trademark search, forming an LLC, setting up a non-profit, or finding simple cease-and-desist letter templates. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they do have a network of independent attorneys available in most states. They can provide contract review and help you run your business. Use the code “Tim” at checkout to get $10 off your next order. Take a gander at everything you can get for a fraction of what you’d expect — LegalZoom.com This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run. Enjoy! ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Starting point is 00:03:07 Hello, my frisky little kittens. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I interview and deconstruct world-class performers of all types, ranging from chess prodigies to actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger to people in the military to people in sports, and including Peter Diamandis. Peter had his first debut a while back on this podcast. It was a huge hit with Tony Robbins. Then he did a separate standalone interview with me, and that was titled How to Think Like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. That was a huge hit, and he's come back to answer your top questions, which you submitted and voted up. Who is Peter? Well, Dr. Peter Diamandis has been named one of, quote, the world's 50 greatest leaders by Fortune magazine. His accomplishments are far too many to list.
Starting point is 00:03:57 And it would bore you. It wouldn't bore you. It'd actually be fascinating. It'd be super long. But here's a taste. So Peter is chairman and CEO of the XPRIZE Foundation. He is also the co-founder, along with Craig Venter and Bob Hariri of Human Longevity, Inc., HLI, and co-founder of Planetary Resources, a company designing spacecraft to mine asteroids for precious materials. And that's serious. That's not a joke. His latest book, Bold, has endorsements from people like Bill Clinton, Eric Schmidt, and Ray Kurzweil. Peter knows how to think and play big, and he can show you how to do the same thing step by step. This episode answers the top 10 most popular questions you all had for Peter, including things like,
Starting point is 00:04:39 how do we disrupt the education system? How do your first 10 minutes after you open your eyes in the morning look? Do you have a morning routine? What are some unrealistic goals you think entire nations could aspire to solve? And it goes on and on. These questions are actually really, really good. And I'm excited for you to hear Peter's answers. So without further ado, please enjoy yet another with Peter Diamandis. Hi, this is Peter Diamandis. Hi, this is Peter Diamandis,
Starting point is 00:05:06 and it's a pleasure for me to be back to answer these questions for Tim Ferriss' podcast. Finn in England asks a question. How do we disrupt our education system? So, Finn, first of all, education's got a couple different parts. There's the part of socialization, of getting to know kids, getting to know people, how to be a good citizen, how to interact with people socially.
Starting point is 00:05:29 Then there's the part about learning. And the challenge with our education system, and you know this, we all know this, is it is 150 or 200 years old and it just sucks. I don't know how else to put it. In any classroom, half the class is bored. The other half of the class is lost. And even the best teachers can only teach to the median. And as classroom sizes grow, our ability to really provide personalized educations just isn't happening. So for me, the ability to scale is the use of technology. I always ask the question, how do you dematerialize, demonetize, and democratize different systems?
Starting point is 00:06:14 In the case of education, what I believe is going to happen is that we're going to develop artificial intelligence systems, AIs, that are using the very best teaching techniques. And basically an AI can understand a child's language abilities, their experience, their cognitive capabilities, where they've grown up, even know what their experiences are through the days, and give that individual an education that is so personalized and so perfect for their needs in that moment that you couldn't buy it. And the beautiful thing about computers and AI is that they can scale at minimal incremental cost. The son or daughter of a billionaire or the son or daughter of a poor African villager have equal access to the best education. And we're seeing that today in knowledge, right? Because Larry Page on Google has access to the same knowledge and information that the poorest person on Google has. It's a flattening of this capability. So AI for me
Starting point is 00:07:26 is the answer to global, dematerialized, demonetized, and democratized education. We have to separate learning things from actually socialization and being inspired and so forth. And humans are going to be part of that, always will be. But AI is going to be the way that I learn something, where an AI can really deliver the information in a way that's compelling and meaningful. In fact, we're going to have a situation where that AI may be watching my pupillary dilation or how I tilt my head or asking me questions to really understand, did I understand that concept or was I just sort of faking it by nodding my head? I mean, how many times are you speaking to someone and they're trying to teach you something?
Starting point is 00:08:07 And you say, yeah, yeah, yeah, and really in the back of your mind, you're going, I have no idea what this person just said. Well, I think education driven by neuroscience and by artificial intelligence will know that you didn't get it, will back up to the point you lost the idea, and then bring you step by step so you really do learn these things. I think we're going to really transform education very quickly, and it's a huge and critically important part of our society. So as the father of two four-year-olds, I am personally passionate and excited about solving that challenge. HGH asks the question, what's your first 10 minutes in the morning look like?
Starting point is 00:08:50 What do you do after you open your eyes? What's your morning routine? Well, HGH, I get up typically because I have two four-year-old boys jumping on the bed and asking me to watch cartoons with them. That's not been the routine for years, but it is a routine at this very moment. And the first thing I do is I scan my email. It turns out I personally read and return all of my email. I delete most of the things that are junk, forward the things that I can forward to individuals, and then save the things I'm going to respond to later in the day. So I'll do a quick email review from the night before. I will, if I – depending on where I am, do a quick workout, typically 20 or 30-minute jog,
Starting point is 00:09:41 and then shower, change, and then go to XPRIZE if I'm in Los Angeles, go to Singularity University if I'm in the Bay Area, Human Longevity in San Diego or Planetary Resources up in Seattle. And my schedule is pretty much set. I've got an amazing team who manage me minute to minute. If I'm in the midst of reading a book, I'll be reading it on my phablet and basically squeezing in minutes where I can to be inspired by it. I've got my go-to team called my PhD Ventures team, an amazing group who I work with and I'll be on the phone with them brainstorming when I have free time. But basically for me, it's a matter of juggling four ventures through the day and trying to have fun. I mean, for me, the most important thing is having fun and being inspired just to keep up the pace because it'll go 24-7 if you let it. Anyway,
Starting point is 00:10:35 nothing routinely special. Oh, I will do a whole stretching routine in the shower if you wanted to know. Mike from Santa Cruz asks a fun question. What are some unrealistic goals that you think an entire nation could aspire to? So, Mike, I think that there are some smaller nations, take Holland or UAE or Israel that could actually aspire to some real transformational goals. And those goals might be something like going to a complete digital currency. Imagine if paper money was gotten rid of and everything was digital, the ability that you have all of a sudden to get rid of all bribery, a good amount of crime. The second part is going to a full digital election where it's one digital vote per person going to a pure democracy.
Starting point is 00:11:38 I mean that's an aspirational goal that I think a nation could go for. Another is basically providing a guaranteed minimum income for every person in the country. I think that's something that as we start to head towards a world of AI and robotics beginning to displace jobs, which it will do, these technologies will also help elevate jobs, elevate people to higher levels of jobs. I think a guaranteed minimum income provides people with a floor revenue so that it takes away that anxiety. But along that lines, I think giving everybody access to a free education and free healthcare, but not just any free education, free healthcare. Imagine if the aspiration of the nation was access to the world's best education and the world's best healthcare. So what's that look like? For me, the world's best education is going to be
Starting point is 00:12:37 sort of a digital version where the best teachers are digitized and I can learn anything I want and it's free from the best people on the planet delivered to me in a way that's compelling and it's personalized for me. It's sort of the future of where we're going with AI professors. On the healthcare side, I think nations will begin to sequence their entire populace. So imagine if in a population of a few million citizens, you were able to do a full genome sequence on every single individual. But besides their genome
Starting point is 00:13:11 sequence, imagine if you did their microbiome, in other words, all the bacterial and viral and fungal DNA that inhabits us. We as humans are a collection of 10 trillion human cells and 100 trillion members of the microbiome. And besides that, it might be your phenotypic data, your MRI data. All that data represents your physical state. But if we had that for every citizen of a country, we would be able to predict what that citizen is likely to come down with. Will they come down with heart disease? What type of cancer is neurodegenerative disease? And actually provide those people with preventative services before they come down with it.
Starting point is 00:13:51 It's a way of dropping the health care costs precipitously for a nation and providing people a healthier, longer life. So I think those are some really great moonshot goals that countries in fact can and will and should take. So Carlson BJJ from Lincoln, Nebraska asked the question, what are some of the most exciting changesers of a company called Human Longevity, Inc., with Craig Venter, who sequenced the first human genome, and Bob Hariri, who is one of the pioneers of stem cells, placental stem cells to be exact. And we've started a company called HLI that is the largest genome sequencing facility in the world. We've sequenced more human genomes at this medical grade level than the
Starting point is 00:14:46 entire world combined to date. And we're heading towards a world in which we're going to be sequencing millions of individuals, not only the 3.2 billion letters from their mother and from their father, but your microbiome, getting your full digital MRI, your health records, all of this information compiled into an integrated health record per individual. Now imagine millions of these integrated health records. And our next step is to data mine that information. So if you came to HLI, to our health nucleus, which is our sort of medical hub where we intake people join this, we fully are digitizing your body, your DNA, your microbiome, your brain structure, all of this and goes into the database.
Starting point is 00:15:31 And you're in this database now with millions of individuals and your data along with those individuals' data is mined to look at, look, everybody who had this genome sequence had a high probability of living over 100. In fact, they had no probability of cancer, but they did have a probability of this kind of heart disease. And so we're able to really mine the largest data mining project in history, understanding the correlation between genome and outcome. So this is what's going on right now.
Starting point is 00:16:02 It's going to transform all of healthcare. It's going to make healthcare predictive and preventative. The other side of the equation that we're doing in HLI, which is part of what we're talking about here, is actually the stem cell side of the company. One of our investors is a company called Celgene. It's a $100 billion company that's done a lot of work in stem cells. And our mission is to look at how do we rejuvenate your stem cell population? Because it appears to be that the stem cell are your rejuvenating engine of your body. So if you have children, or when you were a kid, you had stem cells coursing through your body, and those stem
Starting point is 00:16:43 cells are able to repair any kind of damage to any kind of tissue or muscle or skin or connective tissue, whatever it is. But as we get older, our stem cell population does two things. One, it begins to dwindle and our stem cell reserves get reduced. The second is our stem cells undergo these epigenetic changes, these mutations, deletions, insertions, and our stem cells, proliferate them, provide them back to you, and restore your regenerative engine. So our mission is to extend the healthy human lifespan 30 to 40 years, to make 100 years old the new 60. at 100 that you'll have the cognition, the aesthetic, and the mobility. Look good, think clearly, and be strong at 100 that you did at 60. So I think this is where we're heading. I think the other big revolutions in healthcare are going to be around making it data-centric.
Starting point is 00:18:02 We'll all be wearing biometric sensors on your Apple Watch, your Google Watch, whatever it might be, sensors that are in our clothing, sensors that we've swallowed, sensors that are under our skin. All of these things measuring constantly what we eat, what we breathe, our glucose levels, blood pressure, looking in your blood for microRNAs and it's effectively a onboard sensor system like your car or your refrigerator or your airplane has that is constantly making sure everything is working well. Because right now, the way the healthcare system works is when you break down, when you end up with cancer, a heart attack, that's when you go.
Starting point is 00:18:45 So it's like imagine an airplane in the sky that only got serviced after the engines quit. You have a lot of lethal accidents. But today we actually in our airplanes, GE jet engines, for example, have hundreds of sensors monitoring every aspect of that jet engine. When anything goes out of a little bit of tune, what happens? That jet engine goes into immediate service before anything dangerous occurs. So we're heading that way. We're going to be monitoring your body and looking for anything that might be out of whack. Your check engine light goes on and you get preventative service instead of critical care service at the end.
Starting point is 00:19:24 Next question is from Mikey in Laguna Beach, California. Mikey asks, a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved. How do you go about defining a problem or how do you ask better questions? So that's, Mikey, a really important question for an entrepreneur. I think of problems as gold mines. And when I'm trying to help a Fortune 500 CEO move his company forward, my question to him is, why don't you hire a bunch of 20-something-year-olds who don't know about your business but can go and interview your customers, your suppliers, your employees, and ask the question, what do you wish was different?
Starting point is 00:20:16 What isn't working for you? If you can get a list of the problems that your business has or that you have in your life or that you have in your products or services, really being able to define what people don't like, what's not working for people. That list is incredibly valuable as targeting data for improving your business, but also creating new businesses. I like telling people that the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities. You want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. So defining a problem is critically important.
Starting point is 00:20:57 Now, the question is can you define the problem yourself or are you blind to it? And that's a challenge, right? We don't know how to think any other way than the way we do think. So defining a problem sometimes comes best in conversation or by asking other people to come in, look at what's going on, evaluate, and generate a list of problems, and then review it with them and see, oh, well, you didn't understand that. Or maybe they did and you didn't. So I agree with you. A problem is a terrible thing to waste. Next question comes from Bob Capel in Texas.
Starting point is 00:21:34 Bob asks, what is the most important thing for a 16-year-old to do this summer vacation to keep moving forward and be prepared? So that's a great question and one which when I speak to high school students, I try and address off the bat. The single most important thing for a high school student, college student, even for anyone listening here, but in particular for a high school student, is understanding what his or her passion is. I consider myself lucky and you may as well that I got my passion in life, my mission and my purpose in life when I was a child. It happened when I was about eight or nine. It was Apollo.
Starting point is 00:22:21 It was Star Trek. It was a complete love affair with opening the space frontier. And that passion drove me to want to learn, drove me to do research on my own, drove me to build rockets, build rocket engines, blow things up, all kinds of crazy stuff. But it drove me. It wasn't something that my parents made me do, my teachers made me do. I did it because I wanted to. And so when I'm in the classroom, in fact, just a couple of days ago, I was at Singularity University. We have 80 graduate students. And those graduate students come from 40 countries around the world.
Starting point is 00:23:00 Top 5,000 applicants for 80 spots. And I asked the question of them, how many of you know your mission in life, know what your purpose is, know why you're on this planet, are driven by something big that excites you every morning? And only about a third of them raised their hands, which was kind of surprising to me. And I said to them, listen, for the other two-thirds, your goal this summer is to find your passion, to figure out what it is or at least what you think it might be and explore that. So it goes double or triple for a high school student because if you know your passion at that age, you can start to really use that to drive where you go to college, what you learn in college, what you do in building companies. So for this summer, I mean, I would ask if that's your son or daughter or your cousin or whatever it might be, the question, do you know what you're passionate
Starting point is 00:23:53 about? Now, where might one identify their passions? I have two tasks that I use. One is, what did you want to do when you were a kid, right? Before your mom or your dad or your teachers told you what you were supposed to do, what was exciting for you? For me, again, it was space. It was really simple. So make a list of those things. The second is if I gave you a billion dollars and said, can't spend it on yourself, but I want you to spend it to make the world a better place, where would you spend that money? What would you try and do with that money? So if you ask that 16-year-old to make a list of what they think their passions might be and then spend a week, come up with the top five or six and spend a week investigating each of
Starting point is 00:24:37 those and narrow it down to a top two or three, that would be an amazing summer well spent. All right, next question comes from Mike in Santa Cruz, California. And Mike asked the question, whenever the question of ending hunger in Africa arises, someone always says, quote, there's no sufficient distribution system. And the question is, why couldn't we just feed African countries with a mere billion dollars using food and a small army of powerful delivery drones? So, I mean, Mike, I think, yes, distribution is one part of it. But it's also reinventing how we produce food, where we produce food, and how food is delivered. If you think about what is food, I mean, what is food? Food is a mechanism for converting sunlight, which is energy, into useful energy our cells of our body can consume. Like if we were photosynthetic organisms, we just like convert the sunlight directly into energy in our bodies.
Starting point is 00:25:43 But that's not what happens, right? The sunlight hits the trees or the grass. The trees grow oranges. The oranges have fructose and various hydrocarbons. The grass is ate by cows that build muscle tissue or produce milk. And ultimately, we consume the oranges or the milk or the cows and we live by that conversion process. So the question really is how could we actually produce that food product in a much more efficient way? And what I'm interested in is the impact of technology.
Starting point is 00:26:18 Now, drones are one mechanism, but I think that we can now grow food in much more efficient ways in a much more decentralized fashion. Because today what happens is if we're living in New York, for example, actually you're from Santa Cruz. So if you're living in Santa Cruz and you have a dinner at a nice restaurant, your meal travels an average of 1600 miles, right? Your wine may come from France, your beef may come from Brazil or Argentina. Your corn may come from – I don't know. Where does corn come from? Middle America.
Starting point is 00:26:53 And ultimately, it ends up on your dinner plate. LA or New York, I'll get to Africa in a second, the food is actually produced in what are called urban or vertical farms where it's built a farm that's a multi-story, maybe 30, 40 stories high, but it is operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week with artificial light at the perfect frequency, providing humidity and rain at the perfect pH, growing plants in a 24-hour, 7-day-a-week growth cycle. And that is part of perhaps a protein-based fish system. And you can imagine these sort of vertical farms that are in cities and towns around the world where the distribution is not 1,600 miles but 10 miles. So the food is always locally grown.
Starting point is 00:27:52 The other side of the equation is work being done by various companies. One of them is Modern Meadows, which came out of Singularity University, which it turns out that a cow is like the most efficient way to generate meat. Think about it. Again, the son grows the food stock, the grass, the cow eats it. Over this long period of time, you basically slaughter the cow, which is a, if you've ever seen a slaughterhouse, not a pretty sight. And most of the cow is thrown away, and you basically use the meat of the cow. Imagine instead if you could take some cells from the cow and grow those cells at scale in culture and actually have those cells generate the perfect proteins with the right vitamins and grown at scale. We could produce various meat products that are a thousand times more efficiently grown from an energy standpoint and have exactly the proteins and exactly the vitamins and have the flavors and tastes that
Starting point is 00:28:52 are perfect. And if people say, my God, that's disgusting. Listen, go visit a slaughterhouse and you tell me what's disgusting. But I think it's about reinventing how we generate food. The distribution system, sure. Drones, absolutely. But I think it's about reinventing how we generate food. The distribution system, sure. Drones, absolutely. But I think it's more about regenerating it 100 times more efficiently where we have an overabundance of food and food becomes much more nutritious. So the next question comes from Jeremiah in Chicago. And Jeremiah asks, have you considered crowdfunding the XPRIZE? I would love to regularly contribute on a micro level, $100 or $1,000 a year. So, Jeremiah, absolutely we have.
Starting point is 00:29:31 In fact, we ran a crowdfunding campaign for part of our global learning XPRIZE. And it's something I'm passionate about and want to experiment with. And one of the areas I would commend you to look at is a spin-out from XPRIZE called HeroX, H-E-R-O-X, HeroX.com. And HeroX is a platform that XPRIZE has spun out where what we've learned and how to design XPRIZE, run XPRIZE, judge XPRIZE is actually created on a platform where you can go and see right now dozens, soon hundreds of prizes out there that you can fund. You can fund part of the purse. You can register as a team to compete. And you can be part of my goal is the whole notion to change the conversation that we go from complaining about problems to fixing problems. And Jeremiah, I am grateful for your support.
Starting point is 00:30:34 I think you'll start to see much more crowd involvement in the XPRIZE Foundation in helping us design our prizes, choose which prizes we launch and launch and fund our prizes than ever before. In the interim, please go check out HeroX. Get involved. It's an amazing platform. It's a chance in my mind to take this concept of incentive prizes globally to scale and change our culture of complaining to a culture of solving. Our next question comes from Spiro in Montreal.
Starting point is 00:31:13 And Spiro asked the question, will technology increase unemployment? And will robots replace many of the blue collar workers, as well as white collar worker jobs as the media is lately reporting? Or is that a myth? So Spiro, the answer is yes, but. So yes, a lot of today's blue-collar and even white-collar States will be replaced in the next 20 years. But here's the catch. Those jobs will be replaced by AI and robots, but new jobs will be created for those people who lost their jobs. And to give you some examples here, 150 years ago in the mid-1800s, two-thirds of Americans were farmers. We were all farmers. Two-thirds of your friends would have made their living working on a farm in some place. Today, it's under 2%.
Starting point is 00:32:12 And those farmers displaced by automation, tractors and the like, got new jobs. They got jobs as Wall Street investment bankers or accountants or website designers or people who on Second Life designed virtual clothing. I mean, the challenge is that we don't realize, we recognize the jobs today that will be lost, but we can't conceive of the jobs that are going to be created that don't yet exist. I'll add a couple of points here. The stat from a recent poll that was taken says that 70% of Americans hate their jobs. And I know the stats for the US. I realize you're from Montreal. But 70% of Americans hate their jobs.
Starting point is 00:33:03 They don't like stacking boxes or cleaning toilets or taking money at a toll booth. That's something they do to put money to take on something that really inspires you. Instead of stacking boxes at the local store, you could become someone who worked as a healthcare worker in a hospital. And you did that by virtue of collaboration with artificial intelligence. So I think we're going to be creating a lot of jobs. I think we're going to be changing the meaning of work from something that you do because you have to to you do something you love empowered by technology that helps you do that. So for example, if you're a trucker, let the robot drive the truck and instead maybe you should be doing sales and marketing and maybe you should be painting or maybe you should be reading books out loud to your elderly parent.
Starting point is 00:34:11 I don't know, but do the things that you love to do and let automation do the stuff that's the scut work that you hate. The next question comes from Biggie in Medellin. So Biggie asked the question, will Google, Facebook, or Elon Musk win the race to providing global internet? Will the FCC allow it? So I think that there is a race and we're going to see four players that are four principal players right now. There's Facebook with internet.org. There is Google with a couple of different solutions, principally Google Loon. There is Greg Weiler in partnership with Paul Jacobs and Richard Branson for OneWeb, which is a satellite solution. And there's Elon Musk with his multi-thousand satellite solution. I think that all four are going to make an attempt. My guess is there will
Starting point is 00:35:11 be two of those will deploy. There'll probably be a satellite solution and an atmospheric solution. When I say atmospheric solution, I mean drones or balloons. And the FCC, of course, will allow it because the FCC only governs U.S. And I think it's going to be a lot of these different solutions are working with local telecom authorities, PTTs, where they're local service providers. There is opportunity for global spectrum. I know that Greg Weiler at OneWeb has harmonized global spectrum system of planet Earth. And one of the biggest impacts for global economy is going to be 5 billion new mines coming online over the next five years. So I'm excited to see this deploy. I think it's a huge business opportunity
Starting point is 00:36:17 and one that's just really exciting. And the next question comes from Salty T. in New Jersey. Salty asked the question, how will human longevity differentiate itself from other biotechs? So HLI, Human Longevity Inc., is actually providing services to the biotech pharmas. We have built the largest genome sequencing facility in the world. We have more of the Illumina 10x machines, X10 machines, and the PacBio machines than anyone. But besides just the brute force, large-scale sequencing of human
Starting point is 00:36:54 genomes, our goal is 100,000 a year by the end of this year, a million a year by 2020. So we have millions of genomes in our database. Much more important than that is going to be the data mining of that. So we're going to distinguish ourselves by being a data-driven company that is mining the most valuable data set in the known universe and understanding what these integrated health records, right? We're integrating the 3.2 billion letters from your mother, from your father, the sequencing of your microbiome, your health records, your MRI, your digital imaging of your body. All of this stuff is going in and being machine data mined to extract knowledge and information, to understand what makes you tick. What's the sort of deck of cards that you as an individual were dealt? And how does it compare to the public at large? And wow, look, you have this gene sequence that this same person has, and this protects you from heart disease, protects you from cancer. This is going to allow you to live to well over 100.
Starting point is 00:38:00 So it's going to change healthcare. So how HLI is different is we're largest scale genome sequencing facility in the world, massive data mining capability. Franz Ock, who runs our machine learning team out of Mountain View, California, was the guy who built Google Translate for over 10 years. The third way is that the work we're doing right now with stem cells under the leadership of Bob Hariri. We are really becoming a pioneer in how do we use stem cells to rejuvenate your regenerative engine of your body. The next question comes from Jeppe Rasmussen, and Jeppe asks, if you were 20 and had no experience whatsoever, what would you do to get into Singularity University and after that create a change in the world? So it's a great question. I think the first thing I would do, Jeppe, is I would do something.
Starting point is 00:39:04 And then I would do something bigger and then something bigger. I wouldn't expect to get into SU at age 20 not having done anything yet. First of all, I'm going to say that part of SU's plans is going to be to take its content and curriculum and make it available online for everybody. So you'll get the benefit of that. But I definitely hope that you continue to aspire to be part of Singularity University because I think being there is an extraordinary experience. But it's taking one step at a time. So the best predictor – and I serve as part of the admissions team. The best predictor for a person's future success is what they've done historically. And everybody typically starts with zero. And so for me, my first effort was really
Starting point is 00:39:55 getting a petition going to support space when I was a freshman in college. And then I started a space organization called SEDS. And then I started a space organization called SEDS and then I started my next organization, my next organization. And so it's getting people who know you and love you and believe in you. Maybe it's your mom, your dad, your cousins, teachers, whoever it might be to back some small venture where you call your shot and you say, I'm going to achieve this goal. Would you support me? And it should be a small first goal and then achieve
Starting point is 00:40:25 that goal. And once you've achieved that goal, set your next goal and then achieve that goal. And when the people watch you achieve that, they'll be willing to back you for your next one. And so you can't expect to go from zero to a billion in one step, but you can go from one to two, two to four, four to eight, and 30 steps later be at a billion. So I think the most important thing is to begin and call your first shot, have your friends watch you pull it off, something that you can achieve, and then build on top of that a step at a time. And, you know, a few doublings later, you'll be amazed where you end up.
Starting point is 00:41:07 Music

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