[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
PETER DIAMANDIS: Thank you,
Jack, a force of nature here.
So, a pleasure to be here.
I want to just actually tee up
a bunch of quick conversations
that we can carry to our
fireside chat and conversation
with you.
So first of all,
I'm clear that we're
alive during the most
extraordinary time
ever in human history.
There's never been a better time
to be alive, other than perhaps
tomorrow.
We're in a time
where each of us have
more power than nation-states
had, heads of industries had,
just decades or a century ago.
We forget how
amazing the world is.
We forget that 100 years ago,
in 1918, in that one year
alone, 50 million people
died from the Spanish flu.
20-odd million people died
from World War I. Scale that
to today's population,
you'd be talking
about a quarter of
a billion people
that would have
passed away this year.
So we forget, despite all
of the negative news--
what I call the Crisis
News Network and so forth--
we're still living
in an amazing time.
It's also true that
I think none of us
really understand how fast
the world is changing.
We're living in a world where
technologies across the board
are growing exponentially.
Computation, sensors, networks,
AI, robotics, 3D printing,
synthetic biology, AR, VR, block
chain-- all those technologies
are themselves accelerating.
But it's the combination
of two, three, or four
of those together that
are accelerating things.
Add to that the notion
that in the next six years,
we're going from 3.8 billion
people connected on planet
Earth last year at the end
of 2017 to 8 billion people
connected.
We're adding 4 billion new minds
into the global conversation
that have never
been there before.
And that's a massive
empowerment for acceleration.
Add to that the
fact that we've got
more capital available,
flowing, than ever before.
We hit all-time highs in
venture fund, seed funding,
crowdfunding, ICOs,
sovereign investments.
So more capital flowing
at the same time
that all the technology that
we're using to make stuff
happen is demonetizing
faster than ever before.
The human genome was sequenced
for $100 million in 2001.
Today it's circa $500.
Illumina is projecting
$100 in one hour,
as is the Beijing
Genome Institute.
So there's more money.
Everything we need
to do is cheaper.
Look at Google Cloud and
computational capabilities.
And so more people, more
money, cheaper stuff,
more experimentation.
And what it means
is we're entering
a period of hyper-acceleration.
As I think about how
fast the world is going,
it's not slowing down.
And in fact, it's
an acceleration
of the acceleration
that we're hitting.
So that makes for an
amazing, amazing future.
And one of the things that I
focus on a lot is the notion
that there is no
problem we cannot solve.
And I'm clear that the right
combination of technology,
talent, and treasure
can take on any problem.
And my message to a lot
of people around the world
is you're now empowered.
If you are sick and
tired about a problem
or you're inspired to
solve something, you can.
It's a matter of do
you give yourself
permission to be that
audacious and go do it?
100 years ago, the only people
could actually solve a problem
at any scale were
the nation-states
or were the robber barons,
the industrialists.
And even all they could do
was unleash monetary policies
or troops or so forth.
Today, I just want you
to feel and understand
how empowered you are to find
a problem and solve a problem.
That's what gives me hope, that
entrepreneurs by definition
are individuals who find
problems and solve problems.
And there are more and
more entrepreneurs,
with more and more data, with
more and more computational
power, with more and
more access to capital,
solving more and more problems.
So I want to give you that
perspective for a moment.
Another area I'm
excited about, I
serve as founder and
executive chairman
of the XPRIZE Foundation.
Jack is-- for a while now,
since the earliest days--
one of my trustees.
And so we focus on what are the
world's biggest problems that
are not being solved?
And how do we set a
very clear objective
and say, I don't
care who you are
or where you went to school,
what you've ever done,
if you solve this problem and
hit these metrics, you win.
And to the very first XPRIZE
was for my 9-year-old childhood
passion of spaceflight.
I gave up on NASA being the
way I was going to go to space.
I did the math, and your
chance are-- right, Mark?--
one in 1,000 of being
a NASA astronaut.
I had a better chance of
becoming an NBA all-star at 5'
5" than I did a NASA astronaut.
And so when I read
that Lindbergh in 1927
crossed the Atlantic
to win a $25,000 prize
and looked at the
numbers, nine teams
spent $400,000 trying to
win this $25,000 prize.
And Raymond Orteig spent
nothing on the losers, only paid
the winner.
And Lindbergh was the most
unlikely guy to do it.
So I said, OK, I'm going to
create a prize for spaceflight.
It's going to be a
$10 million prize.
$10 million was enough money
to inspire the entrepreneurs,
but not the Airbus, the
Boeing, the Lockheed.
I didn't want the large
players just buying the prize.
I wanted true innovation.
That $10 million prize
inspired 26 teams
around the world, who
spent $100 million.
They're all optimists.
And Burt Rutan, backed by
Paul Allen, who we just lost,
funded that prize development
and won it with SpaceShip One.
Richard Branson came in
and bought the rights
to create Virgin Galactic.
Richard has publicly announced
he expects a flight to space
approximately this month.
So fingers crossed
we'll see something.
There's-- what?-- three
weeks left in the month,
or thereabouts.
And then we, on the heels of
that, created an amazing board.
Very proud that we've had as
board members and benefactors
Larry and Sergey
and Eric and Ann
and a multitude of Googlers
in the earliest days.
And folks like Elon Musk and
Jim Cameron and Ratan Tata.
And so we've launched
a bunch of prizes.
I'm going to give you a few
that are active right now
just for fun.
Elon funded a Global
Learning XPRIZE.
And we asked teams,
can you build
a piece of Android
software that could
take a child in the
middle of no place
from illiteracy to reading,
writing, and numeracy
in under 18 months?
And so Sundar very kindly
gave us 5,000 Android tablets.
With the World Food Programme,
we went into Tanzania,
where we are right now.
We interviewed
hundreds of villages.
And we found 2,500 kids who
knew no Swahili and no English
and put the tablets
in their hands.
We had 800 teams
enter the competition.
141-ish delivered software.
We narrowed that
to five finalists.
Those five finalists are in 500
tablets each in the villages
right now.
We're measuring the impact
on the child, the family,
and the village.
And then we're going to open
source the winning software.
The goal would be that this
becomes part of Android kernel,
for example, and the notion that
every time an Android device
is built, it's a teacher.
We're building a
billion teachers a year.
We had to go in those villages
and set up power there.
So that's one
XPRIZE we're doing.
One that we just awarded is
called the Water Abundance
XPRIZE.
Half the disease
burden on planet Earth
is due to unclean
drinking water.
And so we asked the team,
could you pull water out
of the atmosphere-- there
are quadrillions of liters
of water in the atmosphere.
When it condenses on
particles, we call it rain.
And could you pull the water
out of the atmosphere, 2,000
liters, for under
$0.02 per liter
from all renewable energy?
And we just awarded the
winner of that competition
about a month ago.
I just came back from Greece.
And we have an XPRIZE
going on right now
on mapping the ocean floor.
We've mapped less than
5% of the ocean floor.
The physics of saltwater
makes it very difficult.
And so we said, to
win this prize--
it's $7 million put up
by Shell and by NOAA--
you've got to build an
autonomous vehicle that
can launch from land, go
out some distance, tens
of kilometers, into
the ocean, then go down
4,000 meters and map 250
square kilometers in 24
hours on its own, return,
and provide the data.
So fully autonomous,
large-scale mapping.
We're down to five finalists
that are in Greece right now,
off the coast of the mainland.
And I met two of the five teams.
One team is a group
of 13 academics
and grad students from Germany.
Another team is two
people out of Switzerland.
Another team is out of Japan.
And it's amazing
what they're doing.
It's transforming what's
possible in the ocean.
One of my favorite
XPRIZEs going on right
now is called the Avatar XPRIZE.
And we asked teams to
build a robotic avatar.
So a robot-- so
imagine I'm not here.
I'm back in Santa
Monica, where I live.
And at home, I've
got on a pair of VR
goggles and a haptic suit.
And as I'm moving around,
the robot's moving around.
As I'm looking at you, the
robot's looking at you.
So it's basically a
remote avatar telepresence
to allow you to go
and solve a problem,
do a medical diagnostic, go into
a disaster zone, and so forth.
We've had over 400 teams
entering that competition.
So a lot of XPRIZEs going on.
We can dive into more
when Jack and I talk
or you have your questions.
Another area I'm passionate
about is human longevity.
I'm clear we're going to be able
to add 10, 20, potentially 30
healthy years in
everyone's life.
Google's got a massive
investment in Calico.
Besides Calico,
there is a multitude
of different companies
going on right now.
A company down in
San Diego, Samumed,
that's manipulating
Wnt pathways, which
is a communication pathway.
That's a $13 billion
private company
because their results
are extraordinary.
They're in phase
2 clinical trials
on a multitude of
different anti-cancer,
hair growth, anti-wrinkles,
osteogenesis.
I mean, it's incredible
what they're doing.
You see companies like
Unity Biosciences, which
are working on
senolytic medicines
to kill senile cells, cells
that have grown to the Hayflick
limit and have
stopped replicating
and then are becoming
inflammatory agents.
If you can kill those cells
and make room for new cells
to generate from
endogenous stem cells,
the organism regenerates and
you get an extended lifespan.
Another-- I have two companies
in the longevity business.
One is in the stem cell
business, called Celularity.
We have the world's
largest bank of placentas.
Turns out you can think of
the placenta as the 3D printer
that manufactures the baby.
And that placenta is the
richest source of stem cells.
And so those stem
cells, delivered back
to an aging organism, can
extend life 30-plus percent.
As we age, our stem cells in our
bodies in all the compartments
fall off very rapidly over time.
And so one of the
reasons for aging
is we lose the ability
to regenerate ourselves,
to repair ourselves.
Or the stem cells in our body,
they will drop 100x to 1,000x
in population.
But they undergo epigenetic
changes, mutations,
and so forth, and they're not
capable as they were before.
So stem cell replenishment
is another area.
One fun one that I co-founded
called Human Longevity,
we're down in San Diego.
We'll be opening
around the country.
And what Human Longevity does
is you come in for three hours,
we sequence your genome--
all 3.2 billion letters.
We do a 30x sequencing on you.
We sequence your microbiome.
We look at your metabolome,
basically the top
100-plus proteins and
chemicals and small molecules
in your bloodstream.
We do a full body MRI,
head to toe, a brain MRI,
brain vasculature,
coronary CT, lung CT.
And then we feed about
150 gigabytes of data
into our system to
determine two things.
Number one, is there anything
going on inside your body
right now that you
should know about?
And number two, based
upon your genetics,
what are you likely to die from,
and how do you find it before?
So the numbers are
pretty telling.
The price point
initially for HLI--
what's called the
health nucleus,
the facility-- was $25,000.
So it's not cheap.
All these people who came
were very well-to-do patients,
so to speak.
The price has dropped
down to $5,000 and $3,000
for subsequent visits.
But still, in 2%--
so we're in a room
of roughly 100.
Two of you have a brain
or aortic aneurysm
you don't know about,
which is kind of shocking.
2%-- and this is for populations
older than you are here, for 50
and older--
have a high-grade cancer tumor.
3.4% have a significant cardiac
condition-- atrial fibrillation
or a bundle branch
block or [INAUDIBLE]..
And we find 14% of the
people who come through
have significant findings they
take action on immediately.
So the fact of the matter
is we're all optimists.
We think everything's
fine in our body.
And then, until you go to
the hospital, at which point
you're like, oh shit.
I didn't know that.
But I'm a pilot.
I fly a couple of planes.
Before I take off, make sure
everything's in the green.
But for most of us,
we don't know that.
Eventually we'll
all have wearables.
We were talking about, I
have my Oura ring here,
with about 14, 15
different sensors that
measure my pulse wave form, my
temperature, my acceleration,
and give me sleep data.
I've got my Apple Watch.
I've got a small little RFID
chip implanted over here.
It's got my business card on it.
Completely useless,
but eventually it'll
be something useful.
But we'll all have
this data uploaded
to give us minute by
minute how are we doing.
And the goal--
people say, I don't
want to know if
anything's wrong with me.
Bullshit.
Of course you want to know.
And you want to solve it right
then at the very beginning,
when it's most solvable.
So it's going from sick care,
which is what is right now--
we take care of you
after you're sick--
to health care, to find
anything at stage zero.
So I'll close.
Singularity University,
Ray and I, 10 years ago--
what month are we in?
10 years ago, two
months ago, we announced
Singularity University.
I was reading Ray's book,
"The Singularity Is Near,"
and I said, there's no place
in the world you can go--
not Harvard, not MIT, not
Stanford, not [INAUDIBLE]
or whatever it might
be-- that you can go
and actually get
an overview of all
the exponential technologies
and understand what they're
able to do in convergence.
So we created a
graduate program.
It's now called the
Global Startup Program.
Our goal is 1,000
start-ups a year.
And then we started executive
programs, six-day programs
where executives come
in and we give them
an overview of what's going
on and all the technologies
and how they're converging.
And it's really about
awareness and education.
But we're growing a good clip
of 30% to 50% year on year.
So I'll pause there and
bring in the maestro.
[APPLAUSE]
JACK HIDARY: Thanks, Peter.
Great opening talk.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Thank you.
JACK HIDARY: Let's
start with connectivity.
1969, ARPANET.
It's taken 50 years since
then to get 3 billion,
just about 40%, of
the world connected.
4 billion people not yet
connected to the internet,
to everything that in this
room we work on, we build on,
we engage in, and other
companies up and down
Silicon Valley and
around the world.
Talk to us about a world--
the numbers
indicate, not from us
but from third-party sources,
that, well, it took 50 years
to get to 3 billion.
We might get the
next 3 billion--
that is, the doubling
of the number of people
on the internet-- in about
within six, maybe seven years.
So very, very soon.
Paint us a picture of
that world, a world
where suddenly, huge swaths
of countries and others
that are not online
today suddenly become
part of not just the
information flow,
but also the global economy--
buying, selling, putting stuff
into markets.
Talk to us about
that kind of world.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Great question.
So first of all, the
layers of connectivity
that are coming online.
And 5G is probably one of the
biggest, incredible explosions
coming online.
We'll see test
deployments in 2019
and really full deployments
in 2020 and onward.
And 10 gigabit
connection speeds means
you're downloading a movie
in a fraction of a second.
You take your new LG TV
set, you put it on the wall,
you plug in the
power, and it's got
500 channels all of a sudden.
So 5G is going to spread
like kudzu on the planet.
But on top of that,
obviously, Loon
has now been spun out
as its own company.
You've got $1.2 billion
of money from Masa Son
at SoftBank backing OneWeb.
Then you've got Elon, who
has gotten FCC permission
for 11,000 satellites,
a 4,000-satellite layer
and a 7,000-satellite layer
called Spacelink, right?
Starlink.
Which is incredible.
And then you've got
terabit Boeing satellites
in a MEO orbit.
So we're basically covering the
entire planet with bandwidth.
And then, on top of
that, we're going
to all have all of
these microcells
on non-licensed bands.
I think eventually we're all
going to be dribbling bits
all the time.
And our AI is going to
be negotiating prices
on different mechanisms.
JACK HIDARY: Now that sounds
like a great feature, dribbling
bits.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Dribbling bits.
We're all dribbling bits.
We're all going to
be dribbling bits.
I think we're all going to
have our own personal version
of JARVIS eventually.
Google Now and Echo and
Siri are all versions
of that, which you
give permission
to have access to everything--
your email, your conversations,
your microbiome,
your bloodstream.
And it's transacting constantly.
But so 8 billion
people potentially
connected in the next six
years as the price comes down.
Now the question is can
they afford these devices?
So can the poorest people in
the world afford those devices?
So I've seen, years ago,
engineering drawings
for a $20 cell phone
or a $20 tablet.
There is a price point at
which the price of the device
gets so cheap that Google
is going to give them away
and Amazon is going to give
them away to get the traffic,
to get the data, to
get the transactions.
So I think we are
heading very quickly
towards a world of
8 billion people
that are digitally connected.
And if you do the math, I
mean, I'm screaming this
from the rooftops,
and no one's talking
about this, which drives
me nuts, because four
billion new people connected.
And if they're just transacting,
on the average, $10 a day,
that's tens of
trillions of dollars
flowing into the global economy
that no one is talking about.
And the markets-- all of these
4 billion digital newbies
are all going to want insurance
and banking and education
and health care.
JACK HIDARY: They're also going
to be creating content, right?
PETER DIAMANDIS: They're
going to be creating content.
JACK HIDARY: So
right now, there's
a certain number of
dominant players creating
a lot of the content.
And also, of course,
there's distributed
content and
crowd-sourced content.
But 4 billion people are not
yet part of that conversation.
PETER DIAMANDIS:
And what's going
to happen is they'll
generate content,
they'll generate revenue.
But they're also going
to demand these services
at de minimis, freemium prices.
And I talk to insurance
companies and banks,
and I say, listen,
this is coming.
They say, but that's
not my marketplace.
So fine, it's not your
marketplace today.
But some entrepreneur within
50 kilometers of ground zero
here is working on
delivering value
to those individuals with
a new business model.
And then when it
starts working, they'll
bring it back to
New York and Chicago
and eat your lunch there.
JACK HIDARY: Great.
Let's switch gears, because
we have a limited time.
Let's go-- you
opened with genomics.
The first genome sequence,
Craig Venter's, as you know,
was about $3 billion, went
down to $100 million, hit
$1,000, now about $500.
And as you mentioned,
probably we're
on the way to $100 or even less.
And of course, the
analysis with that
is as important as
the sequencing itself.
And that's starting to ramp up
the bioinformatics around it.
Estimates are that
right now, in total--
putting aside smaller
genomic tests,
but in terms of whole
genome sequencing--
there maybe are a
few hundred thousand,
maximum a million
people, who maybe have--
out of 7-plus billion people.
When do we get to a
critical mass that
helps us understand the
significance of billions
of those base pairs that
we don't understand yet
the sequence significance of?
In other words, we have a lot of
good sense about the usual 500
that are cancer drivers,
that are oncogenes.
We don't have a good sense
of literally billions-plus
of some of those base
pairs in sequence.
Tell us about the
critical mass we
need to start to
understand the sample size
that we need to really
draw conclusions.
PETER DIAMANDIS: So we're
getting amazing results
with tens of thousands
right now at HLI.
I can't state this stuff
until it's published.
But traditionally we
talk about the exome,
the part of the genome
that codes for proteins.
And yes, it has been
euphemistically called
junk DNA.
But it's not junk DNA.
None of it's junk DNA.
It's all, in some way,
structural or coding or control
segments.
And it's interesting
that as you look
at a large-enough
population, you
start to say, listen, these
segments of DNA are protective.
Any mutation here is
lethal to the person.
So we start to
discover by elimination
and by subtraction fascinating
parts of the genome that
are worth looking at.
And the other thing I might just
say is it's the correlation.
What was real exciting
is the correlation
between genome and then rich
phenotypic data, when we've
got your genome and then
we have full-body MRI
and coronary and heart CT
and metabolome and so forth.
Then you start to
really correlate, aha,
that's what this does.
JACK HIDARY: Right.
And I was going to
get to methylation.
Right now, genome
sequence is coming down.
But the ability to
get to epigenetics,
in terms of methyl
groups, things like that,
talk to us about all the
other rich information
that's necessary to really
draw those conclusions.
PETER DIAMANDIS: So I think
one of the things that is true
is this next decade
is going to be
just discovery after discovery.
And I think AI is going
to play the most--
is the only way we're going
to make sense of all of it,
the amount of data
that's coming out.
And I remember when I was
in medical school, what
got me on this path of--
one of my massively
transformative purposes
is making 100 years
old when you're 60.
How do we have at 100 the
cognition, the aesthetics,
mobility that we had at 60?
I remember watching a TV
show on long-lived sea life,
that some whales could
live hundreds of years.
Sharks could live
400 or 500 years.
Turtles could 600, 700 years.
And I was like, if
they can, why can't we?
It's either a software
problem or a hardware problem.
JACK HIDARY: Or we
need to swim more.
PETER DIAMANDIS: We have
to be in the water more,
cool our body temperatures down.
But I really think we're
going to start to unravel
that and understand it.
JACK HIDARY: And let's jump
to another area of health
care, which is our brains.
You mentioned that we're
going to live longer,
and it's already happening
in a number of countries.
But that also now is
revealing greater populations
with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's,
neurological diseases.
We've had a good handle so
far on cardiac diseases.
Morbidity from cardiac
has actually come down.
Diabetes is on the rise, but
there's some hopes there.
But talk about the
neurological diseases.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah, so
we have cardiac conditions
in our 50s and 60s.
We have cancers in
our 60s and 70s.
And we have neurological
disease in our 70s and 80s.
And the fact of the matter
is just for context--
JACK HIDARY: Now
that's a bright future.
I like that.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Until
you prevent it, right?
Life is short until you
extend it, and so forth.
But the human body was never
intended to live past age 30.
I mean, just to put it
on the table here, right?
You would go into
puberty at age 13.
You'd have a baby.
And then by the
time you were 26,
your baby was having a baby.
And back then,
100,000 years ago,
before Whole Foods and
McDonald's was around,
when food was scarce,
the last thing
you wanted to do
for the selfish gene
was to take the money out of
your grandchildren's mouths
and now compete with them.
So you would do the best thing
you could-- give your bits back
to the environment.
But of course,
that's changed now.
And we're beginning
to extend life.
And as we extend life,
we run into new problems.
There is amazing drugs in phase
2 clinical trials right now.
We're seeing impact from
senolytic medicines.
We're seeing impacts from
Wnt pathway manipulations
on cancers and Alzheimer's.
I think one of the areas that
is super-exciting as well
is the whole field of
brain computer interface.
My last count, there's
probably $1 billion a year
going into interfacing your
neocortex with the cloud
in buildings not far from here.
And so at the end
of the day, we're
going to learn a lot about how
the brain works and the root
causes of these diseases, as
we have over and over again.
But a lot of it's going to
come because our ability
to sense and gather data
and analyze the data
is billions, trillions of
times better than ever.
JACK HIDARY: Let's turn to one
of your first passions, space.
Let's talk about
really space travel.
We hear from Branson
that it may be imminent.
Virgin Galactic may be
launching imminently
with paying customers.
And there's been a
long line of thousands
of people putting their bets
in terms of their down payments
on getting a seat on that ride,
which it's great to see that.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Any Virgin
Galactic ticket holders
here in the audience,
out of curiosity?
I am.
Lots of customers, potentially.
JACK HIDARY: Exactly.
PETER DIAMANDIS: I'll
take checks later.
JACK HIDARY: But talk to us
about what you see as the odds
that we're going to be
a multiplanet species
within, say, 10 years,
20 years, 50 years.
We obviously have the
potential, the technology.
I don't think there's
doubt that we can actually
get to another planet now.
But talk to us about the
will and the mobilization
to make that happen.
PETER DIAMANDIS: So probably
the single most important driver
that's making that happen is the
individual, passionate actor,
in this case in the form of Elon
Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard
Branson and-- just passed--
Paul Allen.
And it's interesting.
A lot of these individuals
grew up-- in the case of Jeff,
who I've known for 35 years,
since the early days of SEDS.
I was a founder of SEDS, and
Jeff ran the Princeton chapter.
And I remember meeting Jeff
after he started Amazon.
I said, what are you doing
with this Amazon thing?
He goes, well, I'm going
to make a lot of money
there and spend it on space.
No shit.
Really.
And Elon's committed-- said
I will spend all his money
on opening up space.
Both of them are that committed.
And I think a lot
of it was those
who were born during the Apollo
and shuttle era got enamored
with this vision, from "Star
Wars" and "Star Trek" and all
of those things.
And then NASA never implemented.
It never paid off on the deal.
And so now you've got
individuals saying,
we'll do it.
I've known Elon since he
sold PayPal and watched
what he did with SpaceX,
with the Falcon 1
and 1e and Falcon 9 and Heavy.
And I would never
bet against him.
He is dead set on
making that happen.
And I think he will.
He set a target at landing in
2024 on the Martian surface.
OK, listen, I'll give
him an extra four years.
But could he get there by 2028?
I would bet on him over
any government, hands down.
And then Jeff is sort of
the tortoise in the race.
He's committed $1
billion a year.
And he's just--
that is his endgame.
And so I think we're
going to do it.
I think it's going
to be a function of--
I don't think governments
can take the risks anymore
that were inherent in the
early Apollo program days.
It's way too-- failure is
not an option for them,
and therefore risk
is no option either.
But individuals can say,
I'm going to do this.
I mean, there is a Tesla
on a Earth asteroid.
That's insane.
I mean, just like, game over.
Proof point.
JACK HIDARY: Yeah.
You mention a number
of great entrepreneurs,
and we can see how they're
changing the world.
So let's talk about
entrepreneurship now.
Here in Silicon Valley, we know
the power of entrepreneurship.
We see it.
We feel it.
There's other key
entrepreneurial centers
around the world.
But it's not spread
evenly enough yet.
It's not as inclusive as it
needs to be and could be.
And not only is
that the case, we're
missing out on the
talents of many
of those people from
diverse backgrounds
that could be part of
the entrepreneurial lift
and journey.
What are your thoughts around
how to change that game?
PETER DIAMANDIS: So
first of all, we're
dematerializing, democratizing,
and demonetizing all the tools
for entrepreneurship.
So it used to be that
to be an entrepreneur,
you needed to have
computational power.
You needed to have an
ethernet cable or a modem plug
or whatever.
And you needed to have--
now, obviously with
Google Cloud and AWS,
you have all the
computational power you want.
The number is by
2023, I believe,
there'll be $300 billion
available in crowdfunding,
which means anyone around
the world with a good idea
can launch a crowdfunding
campaign to get the capital.
So capital becomes
less of a restriction.
Obviously, Google makes the
world's information available.
So what used to be
scarce resources--
I mean, bandwidth, I
remember back in 2001,
I had a stealth company
called Blastoff.
My number-one expense
was Akamai on bandwidth
to send video to people.
It was ridiculous.
And now it's nothing.
So literally everything
you need to be
to create an
entrepreneurial startup
is becoming available globally
at lower and lower costs.
And so it's now, the
number-one scarce resource
that I see in entrepreneurship
around the world is mindset.
So I was just in Greece
at an SU Athens summit,
meeting there with heads of the
country and the entrepreneurs.
And they were saying,
what do we need to do
to become more innovative?
It's a country of
10 million people.
It's like one Google-size
success story dwarfs
the budget of the country.
So it's like you need to create
a mindset of entrepreneurship.
You need to have--
some venture capital
would be great.
But failure needs
to be an option.
So a lot of Central and
South American countries,
if you fail, it's a
black mark for life.
Here we call it success.
At X, you celebrate
a failure every week
when someone gives
up their company
and say we're going
to spend our money
and our time
someplace else better.
That's amazing.
So it's teaching that
mindset of failure.
I had this conversation
with Ratan Tata, one
of our fellow trustees, who--
in India, it's really hard.
If you fail, you're screwed.
And so you don't take big steps.
And so he wanted to sort
of dismiss that ethos.
And so he was like, we're
going to celebrate failure.
We're going to celebrate
a great idea that
was worth trying
that failed and give
this person their next shot.
JACK HIDARY: So speaking of
that mindset breakthrough--
and then we'll turn to
one or two questions.
So if you want to line up at the
mike, if people have questions.
You've now-- [INAUDIBLE]
has now trained,
I don't know, thousands
of people, it must be now,
in exponential thinking.
And through XPRIZE
and others, you've
also touched a lot
of people and changed
a lot of people's mindset
about what is possible.
When you go back
to the news reports
on polio back in the early
part of the last century,
it's written in such a
way that people never
thought it could be overcome.
Today, when people
speak about cancer,
yes, incremental progress.
But most people,
when you ask them,
they don't believe
that in their lifetime
we're going to
see the management
and containment of cancer.
So identify for us
three or four things
that you think we should apply--
exponential breakthrough
thinking-- and we're
not doing today.
And we're going to look back
30, 40 years from now and say,
we were people like polio,
looking at polio the same way.
That we should have had
a different mindset.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Sure.
So let me talk about
where the places
we're doing XPRIZEs
as a perfect example.
So first of all, we
are in final steps
for what I hope will
be a $100 million
cancer XPRIZE for going beyond
liquid biopsy, but very early
detection.
Something like a blood test,
or something like a Pap smear,
or something that
is tens of dollars,
very easy to do
type of detection.
We're also working on an
Alzheimer's XPRIZE, same order
of magnitude.
One of my favorite prizes
that I want to do right now
is a fire detection
and extinction XPRIZE.
The idea that we don't know when
a fire starts is ridiculous.
So this is a simple
XPRIZE for me.
A team is given 500 square
kilometers of forest land.
And you have to detect a fire
above a certain lumen level--
let's say five campfires' worth.
And you have to put it
out within 10 minutes.
And I don't care how
you do it-- with drones,
with water balloons,
whatever the case might be.
I think if that
technology exists,
insurance makes it
possible and deploys it
across all forest lands.
We don't have devastating
forest fires again.
So I'd love to do that.
Working on a earthquake
prediction XPRIZE, I think,
is a massive data play.
There's no way in the world
that a magnitude 6 earthquake
doesn't leave digital
trails before it unleashes
30 Hiroshima bombs of energy.
Working on a hurricane
trajectory prediction XPRIZE.
So it turns out that all
those wide-area projections
of a hurricane
cause devastation.
And if you can
measure wind velocity
at 10 meters above the center
of the eye of a hurricane,
that's the missing data.
So is there a drone
or a technology
for doing that accurately?
There's energy XPRIZE.
We're working on a feeding
the next billion XPRIZE
for massive protein
food production.
The way that we grow
our protein today--
this is a planet for
cows, if you didn't know.
One-third of our non-ice
landmass is used--
hey, Peter-- is used for
livestock production.
And that's crazy, with CO2,
water, energy, and so forth.
So we've been working with
a lot of the companies that
are in the beginning
of cultured meat
to create a large-scale cultured
meat XPRIZE for stem cell
meat and plant-based
derivative that tastes
better than what you buy.
JACK HIDARY: And
I guess finally, I
know you've been thinking about
housing for a while, in terms
of the ability to-- not
necessarily from an XPRIZE--
but in general, could we
provide housing for folks.
So with that, we have
time for two questions.
And we have two questioners.
AUDIENCE: Most of
these XPRIZEs have
to do with science
and technology.
Or when they
involve humans, they
treat humans as
individual units.
How would you do an
XPRIZE that involves
connections between humans
in the social space?
What would they be?
JACK HIDARY: Groups
of people, or--
PETER DIAMANDIS: You
mean behavioral prizes?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Yeah.
So to be clear, XPRIZEs
that have been successful
so far have been for widgets,
devices, transportation modes,
and things like
that, where people
can go and have a very
clear, measurable objective
and can rapidly iterate.
We've talked about
doing competitions
between regions, like cities
or companies and so forth.
One my favorite XPRIZE ideas--
and actually, the very first
person to ever mention this
was Larry Page--
would be a-- it's
a two-part prize.
One would be a happiness X--
it's called a Happiness XPRIZE.
Could you build a device that
could physiologically measure
your state of happiness?
Like if I asked you
right now, are you happy?
Ah, I'm a 7.
And other times I'd be a
10 or a 2, whatever it is.
But if you could actually
accurately measure,
then you could create a
policy change at Google
and then measure did it
make people happy or not.
So I think the ability
to measure something
first and then create
state changes afterwards
would be my approach to that.
But we haven't done
it successfully yet.
We keep on banging our heads
against it and continue to.
But thank you for that.
AUDIENCE: You talked a lot
about accelerating technologies
in the near-term future.
And my question had
to do with, do you
think there's any risk of these
accelerating technologies being
misused by bad actors in
the short or near term?
I'm thinking of things
like China's social credit
system, which just
seems kind of like,
I don't know, a nightmare to me.
But what are your
thoughts on that?
PETER DIAMANDIS: So the
answer is of course.
And I would just say, listen,
the social credit system--
first of all, anybody
who went through school
and got an A, a B, or
a C or had a review,
we've had that all
through our lives.
It's the negative externalities
that are the issue with that.
But being able to tell
a person how-- there's
good parts of a social credit
system, if it's for the upside,
not for the downside.
Just to be clear, not to defend
what they're doing there,
to be very clear.
But yeah, I'm clear that
even though the world is
getting better by
almost every measure--
the cost of food,
energy, water, health
care, all these things are
plummeting as life is going up,
as childhood
mortality rates have
plummeted from 45% percent
of kids dying under age 5
to now 4%.
All of these metrics are
getting better and better.
And I think they'll continue to.
We're still going
to have terrorism.
We're still going
to have warfare.
We're still going to have
a whole bunch of things.
The thing that gives
me the greatest hope
for not being decimated is
that it's harder and harder
to do anything in secret.
It's the flip side
of loss of privacy,
that there are cameras
all the time, everywhere.
A single autonomous
car with a LIDAR
generating 750 megabytes of data
as it's going down the roads.
So everything is being imaged.
Whatever augmented
reality goggles
we're all going
to be wearing are
going to have millimeter
cameras looking out.
1.6 million drones flying over
the skies of the United States.
So everything is going
to be visualized.
And so your ability to
do something in secret
becomes harder and harder.
And that lets me sleep a
little bit better at night.
But ultimately, when
I do my calculus,
the question is are there
more good people in the world
using these technologies or bad?
AUDIENCE: Sure.
PETER DIAMANDIS: I'll
leave that to you.
AUDIENCE: All right.
Thank you.
PETER DIAMANDIS: Thank you.
JACK HIDARY: So a final word of
advice to those in this room,
on livestream, and going
to watch this on YouTube
around the world,
you're at a company
like Google or another company.
You're managing 5, 10, 20
people, maybe 100 people.
What is your advice
to somebody as they
are growing their career, as
they're building products,
to tap in to the kind
of exponential focus
that you have and
you live every day?
But in the practical
day-to-day sense,
what is your advice to folks?
PETER DIAMANDIS:
So first of all,
don't do anything you don't
absolutely love doing.
I don't know how to say
it more clearly than that.
To do anything big
and bold in the world
and make a difference
on the planet is hard.
It's extraordinarily hard.
And if you don't love
doing what you're doing,
you're going to give up
before you get there.
So any of my successes
are overnight successes
after 11 years of hard work.
And I just did not--
I refused to give up.
And sometimes there's an
important point to give up.
But I didn't.
Because for XPRIZE, like my
Zero G company, which-- anybody
here flown in zero g?
Mark has, I know.
It took 11 years to
get FAA permission
to do this with a 727.
I had a chance to fly
Stephen Hawking in zero g.
It was amazing.
But I just refused to give up.
I mean, I was battling the FAA.
And I always think, you're
going to die or retire before I
give up, was my attitude.
And sometimes-- only because
I cared about it that much.
The other parts is--
and this is one of
the ethos of Google--
that the world's biggest
problems are the world's
biggest business opportunities.
I mean, I tell people
probably the company that's
made the biggest positive
impact on the planet
is Google, in terms of-- and
you don't have to be a nonprofit
to create an empirically
better world.
And then, when I
become a billionaire,
help a billion people.
So it's those kinds
of mindsets, I think,
that are convergent with
the power that you have.
Never underestimate
what you can do.
Each of you are extraordinarily
powerful to solve problems.
You just have to have
that committed, passionate
human mind.
JACK HIDARY: Great.
Peter--
PETER DIAMANDIS: Thank you.
JACK HIDARY: Thank
you very much.
Great to have you here.
[APPLAUSE]
