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

Dr. Peter Diamandis http://www.xprize.org/about/staff/peter-h-diamandis-md (@PeterDiamandis https://twitter.com/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 http://www.xprize.org/. 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 http://www.amazon.com/Bold-Create-Wealth-Impact-World/dp/1476709564/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1437117966&sr=1-1&keywords=bold+peter+diamandis/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, 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 http://www.legalzoom.com/. Matt Mullenweg (CEO of Automattic – now worth more than a billion dollars) first incorporated his company on LegalZoom http://www.legalzoom.com/. 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 http://www.legalzoom.com/ 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 http://www.legalzoom.com/ This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run. Enjoy!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, we're just seeing appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor, and there is a fun story behind it. Legalzoom.com. I've used them for a number of businesses. And Matt Mullenweg, you might recall, a guest on this podcast, CEO of Automattic, now valued at more than a billion dollars. And he is one of the developers behind WordPress, which powers roughly 23% of the internet. He first incorporated Automattic on Legalzoom.com. Now, LegalZoom can help you do a number of things that I might recommend, like setting up a will, doing a trademark search, a proper trademark search, so you don't put a ton of time and effort into a business and then get shut down, for instance, or have to change your name. More than a million people have already trusted LegalZoom over the last decade

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  to help start and build their businesses. So if you need to, say, form an LLC or a nonprofit, anything like that, if you're doing business solely in your own name, as a friend told me recently, you're kind of flying naked. You're opening yourself up to a lot of liabilities and issues. So check out Legalzoom.com. You got to protect yourself. They have been helping people not only with the docs, because you don't want to pay necessarily someone thousands of dollars to just copy and paste something from one Word doc to the next. So you can not only find things like cease and desist letters and so on, but they have helpful support, so they have people on hand to answer your questions, all based in the US. And, obviously, you're looking for legal advice? Well, they're not a law firm,

• 1:50Tim Ferriss?

  but LegalZoom has built a network of independent attorneys available in most states. So they can give you advice on the best way to get started, plus provide contract review and other services to help run your business. And they're no surprises. LegalZoom provides complete transparency, upfront pricing, and customer reviews, and 100% satisfaction guarantee.

• 2:10Tim Ferriss?

  So take a look, LegalZoom.com. Chances are you will find something that brings up the thought, "Oh, God, I didn't even think of that. I really need to take care of that." So do the boring legal stuff upfront, so you don't risk a lot later. Go to LegalZoom.com, use the code TIM at checkout, T-I-M. Use the code TIM at checkout, and you will get $10 off. That's LegalZoom.com.

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I have used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project, and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite, and you have an original that you love, or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are

• 3:17Tim Ferriss?

  listening have already used it and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 3:37Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 4:20Tim Ferriss?

  Peter Diamandis has been named one of "the world's 50 greatest leaders" by Fortune Magazine. His accomplishments are far too many to list 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 X Prize 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.

• 5:03Tim Ferriss?

  This episode answers the top 10 most popular questions you all had for Peter, including things like, "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 with that further ado, please enjoy Yet Another with Peter Diamandis.

• 5:36Speaker 00

  Hi, this is Peter Diamandis, and it's a pleasure for me to be back to answer these questions for Tim Ferriss's podcast. Finn in England asks a question, "How do we disrupt our education system?". So Finn, first of all, education's got a couple of 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. 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.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  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...

• 6:32Speaker 00

  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? 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

• 7:10Speaker 00

  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 costs. So you can imagine a world in the future in which 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.

• 7:53Speaker 00

  It's a flattening of this capability. So AI for me 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, they're trying to teach you something?

• 8:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  HGH asks the questions, "What's your first 10 minutes in the morning look like? 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. 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.

• 9:58Speaker 00

  I will, if I, depending on where I am, do a quick workout, typically 20 or 30-minute jog, and then shower, change, and then go to X Prize 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 fablet 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, amazing group who I work with, and

• 10:43Speaker 00

  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, nothing routinely special. 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?

• 11:26Speaker 00

  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

• 12:07Speaker 00

  person going to a pure democracy. 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 takes away that anxiety.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  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 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 the future of where we're going with AI professors.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  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 sequence, imagine if you did their microbiome, in other words, all the bacterial and viral and fungal DNA that that in 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

• 14:11Speaker 00

  that citizen is likely to come down with. Will they come down with heart disease? What type of cancers? Neurodegenerative disease? And actually provide those people with preventative services before they come down with it. It's a way of dropping the healthcare 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 changes happening in healthcare? And what are the timetables for them to affect the general population?

• 14:50Speaker 00

  So Carlson, you may know I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Human Longevity, Inc., with Craig Venter, who sequenced the first human genome, and Bob Horey, who is one of the pioneers of 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 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,

• 15:34Speaker 00

  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. 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,

• 16:18Speaker 00

  but they did have a probability of this kind of heart disease. And so we're able to, you know, 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. It's going to transform all of healthcare. It's going to make healthcare predictive and preventative.

• 16:40Speaker 00

  The other side of the equation, what we're doing at HLI, which is part of what we're talking about here, is actually the stem cell side of the company.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  One of our investors is a company called Cell Gene. 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 cells are able to repair any kind of damage to any kind of tissue, or muscle, or skin, or connective tissue, or 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,

• 17:35Speaker 00

  these mutations, deletions, insertions. And our stem cells become less and less able to repair our body's injured tissues.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  So, one of the ideas for Human Longevity, Inc. is can we in fact extract your stem cells, identify what epigenetic changes are taking place, repair your stem cells, proliferate them, provide them back to you, and restore your regenerative engine. So, our mission is to extend the healthy human lifespan, thirty to forty years, to make a hundred years old than you sixty. And the goal is at a hundred that you'll have the cognition, the aesthetic, and the mobility, you know, look good, think, you know, think clearly and be strong at a hundred that you did at sixty. So, I think this is where we're heading.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  I think the other big revolutions in healthcare are going to be around making it data-centric. 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's working well.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  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. 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, you know, anything that might be out of whack. Your check engine light goes on, and you get preventative service instead of, you know,

• 19:52Speaker 00

  critical care service at the end.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  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, you know, why don't you hire a bunch of 20-something-year-olds who have, don't know about your business, but can go and interview your customers,

• 20:38Speaker 00

  your suppliers, your employees, and ask the question, you know, "What do you wish was different? 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. You know, I like telling people that the world's biggest problems are the world's biggest business opportunities.

• 21:22Speaker 00

  You want to become a billionaire, help a billion people. So defining a problem is critically important. 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.

• 22:05Speaker 00

  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, a college student, even for anyone listening here, but in particular for a high school student, is understanding what his or her passion is. You know, 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.

• 22:50Speaker 00

  It happened when I was about eight or nine. It was Apollo, 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 was, 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. A top 5,000 applicants for 80 spots.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  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." You know, 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...

• 24:18Speaker 00

  If that's your son or daughter, or your cousin, or whoever it might be, the question, do you know what you're passionate 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 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,

• 25:02Speaker 00

  and then spend a week, you know, come up with the top five or six, and then spend a week investigating each of those, and narrow it down to a top two or three, that would be an amazing summer well spent.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Alright, next question comes from Mike in Santa Cruz, California. And Mike asks 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,

• 25:44Speaker 00

  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. You know, 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'd just like, convert the sunlight directly into energy in our bodies, 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.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  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. 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,

• 27:10Speaker 00

  your meal travels an average of 1,600 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's corn come from, Middle America. And ultimately, it ends up on your dinner plate. But imagine a future in which in Santa Cruz, or 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, you know, 30, 40 stories high, but it is operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, with artificial light at the perfect

• 27:50Speaker 00

  frequency, providing humidity and rain at the perfect pH, growing plants in a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week growth cycle. And that is part of a, 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, you know, not 1,600 miles, but 10 miles. So the food is always locally grown. 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.

• 28:34Speaker 00

  Again, the sun grows the, you know, the food stock, the grass, the cow eats it over this long period of time. It, you basically slaughter the cow, which is a, you know, 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

• 29:16Speaker 00

  from an energy standpoint and have exactly the proteins and exactly the vitamins and have the flavors and tastes that are perfect. And if you, you know, 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 more about regenerating it a hundred 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 X Prize? I would love to regularly contribute on a micro level, a hundred bucks or a thousand bucks a year."

• 30:01Speaker 00

  So Jeremiah, absolutely we have. In fact, we ran a crowdfunding campaign for part of our global learning X Prize. 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 X Prize called HeroX. H E R O X, herox.com. And HeroX is a platform that X Prize has spun out where what we've learned and how to design X Prizes, run X Prizes, judge X Prizes 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.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  You can fund part of the purse, you can register as a team to compete, and you can be part of that ecosystem. So, you know, part of my, 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. I think you'll start to see much more crowd involvement in the X Prize Foundation in helping us design our prizes, choose which prizes we launch, and launch and fund our prizes never before. In the interim, please go check out HeroX, get involved. It's an amazing platform.

• 31:23Speaker 00

  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. And Spiro asks 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, is yes, but. So yes, a lot of today's blue collar and even white collar jobs will be replaced by AI and robots.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  The statistic from the Martin School at Oxford says that 48% of today's jobs in the United 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, 2/3 of Americans were farmers. We were all farmers. 2/3 of your friends would have made their living working on a farm in someplace. Today, it's under 2%, right?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 33:28Speaker 00

  And I know the stats from the US, I realize you're from Montreal, but 70% of Americans hate their jobs. You know, they don't like stocking boxes, or cleaning toilets, or taking money at a toll booth. That's something they do to put money and food on their table and get insurance. But imagine instead if a robot or an AI could take that job, but you could collaborate with a robot, or collaborate with an AI to take on something that really inspires you. Instead of, you know, stacking boxes at the local store, you could become someone who worked as a healthcare worker in the hospital. And you did that by virtue of collaboration with artificial intelligence.

• 34:13Speaker 00

  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, you know, reading books out loud to your elderly parent. 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.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  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...

• 35:25Speaker 00

  Greg Wyler 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 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 US. And I think it's going to be a lot of these different solutions are working with local

• 36:07Speaker 00

  telecom authorities, PTTs, where they're local service providers. There is opportunity for global spectrum. I know that Greg Wyler at OneWeb has harmonized global spectrum to provide a solution. Others might go with unlicensed spectrum or laser. But I think it's a giant market. It's one of the most important things. We effectively are building the last mile of this global nervous 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 and one that's just really exciting.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 37:35Speaker 00

  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?

• 38:20Speaker 00

  And how's 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. So, you know, 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 Aach, 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 Horey, we are really becoming a pioneer in how do we use stem cells to rejuvenate

• 39:04Speaker 00

  your regenerative engine of your body. The next question comes from Jepe Rasmussen, and Jepe 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, Jepe, is I would do something. 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

• 39:48Speaker 00

  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, my first effort was really, you know, getting a petition going

• 40:29Speaker 00

  to support space when I was a freshman in college, and then I started a space organization called SEDS, and then I started my next organization, my next organization. And so, you know, 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 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

• 41:13Speaker 00

  one to two, two to four, or 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.

• 41:39Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I've used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a T-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it

• 42:23Tim Ferriss?

  and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 42:43Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by a new sponsor and there is a fun story behind it. Legalzoom.com. I've used them for a number of businesses. And Matt Mullenweg, you might recall, a guest on this podcast, CEO of Automattic, now valued at more than $1 billion. And he is one of the developers behind WordPress, which powers roughly 23% of the internet. He first incorporated Automattic on Legalzoom.com. Now, Legalzoom can help you do a number of things that I might recommend, like setting up a will, doing a trademark search, a proper trademark search, so you don't put a ton of time and effort into a business and then get shut down, for instance, or have to change your name. More than a million people have already trusted Legalzoom

• 43:25Tim Ferriss?

  over the last decade to help start and build their businesses. So if you need to, say, form an LLC or a nonprofit, anything like that, if you're doing business solely in your own name, as a friend told me recently, you're kind of flying naked. You're opening yourself up to a lot of liabilities and issues. So check out Legalzoom.com. You got to protect yourself. They have been helping people not only with docs, because you don't want to pay necessarily someone thousands of dollars to just copy and paste something from one Word doc to the next. So you can not only find things like cease and desist letters and so on, but they have helpful support. So they have people on hand to answer your questions, all based in the US. And obviously, you're looking for legal advice. Well, they're not a law firm,

• 44:10Tim Ferriss?

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