Until African-Americans and Hispanics can get serious, not just about area studies, which are important, but also about science and technology, they're not going to generate that wealth and that job within those communities. And that has absolutely devastating consequences for the places where people live, for the jobs and for the wealth.
As countries appear and disappear, then I began to ask, what makes countries successful? And it turns out, after a long slog through geographies and ethnicities and all kinds of variables, it's the ability to adapt and adopt, what Darwin talked about.
The definition of who's literate and who's not keeps changing. So, in Neanderthal times, if you painted on a cave wall, that was enough to transmit how you hunt, how you eat, how you cook, how you dress, and we can read about that.
If you depend on a single industry, if you don't continuously upgrade it, if that industry is not producing real wealth, if it's simply shuffling paper from here to here in a very efficient manner sometimes, that's not enough and that's not where you begin to get the rest of your jobs.
Not only are we reading life code, we're beginning to copy it through cloning, and we're beginning to write, and in the measure that we do that, boy, you can build a lot of very powerful companies in a short period of time.
Try to live without something digital - without digital code for about two hours, very hard to do if you're awake.
It's actually very hard to find an area of the economy that doesn't fundamentally change in the measure that we are able to read and write life code.
It's not fear that keeps me up. I mean, every generation has thought, this is the worst generation; the world's going to hell in a hand basket. The reality is, people are living longer, and they're living better.
Within the United States, there is a real division between the PhDs given in science and math to the Asian community, to the traditional white community, and then to African-Americans and Hispanics.
If I had a wand and could put statues in different places, one of the statues would go to a man who just died, called Norman Borlaug, who came up with the Green Revolution.
The thing that's really important to understand is, the last thing an empire traditionally does is drive itself into bankruptcy. You've seen that with the great empires.
Real estate prices are way out of whack with what people earn.
The U.S. started with no stars. In fact, it started with a completely different flag. The last two were added in 1959, Hawaii and Alaska.
I've always been interested in why countries appear and disappear. And the curious thing is how often it happens.
There has to be some more regulation. But our kids have this incredible buffet of they can work in genomics, they can work in pre-omics, or they can work in robotics, or they can work in this, or they can work in that. And within the next five years there will be entirely new industries that come out of nowhere that kids are working in that would have been inconceivable when they started college. Not when we started college.
If you had a front row seat at the Renaissance, you would have seen Machiavelli come by plotting, and you would have seen murders in the streets, you would have seen violence, you have seen people burning books and it would have looked like the world was a horrible place, but that's where all these incredible stuff we're still living with comes out of.
The housing crisis may not be the worst thing that's happened to New York City because it was becoming impossible for some of the young doctors, for some of the young artists, for some of the people that make the city so special to be able to live here.
If you don't have that science and technology and brains as an input, as you don't have in large parts of Latin America, if you don't focus your education on that, if you don't find your 10,000 best scientists, but you do find your 10,000 best soccer players, the consequences are, you become a World Cup Champion in Soccer, like Brazil, but you don't become Korea, which earned 1/5 of what a Mexican did in 1975 and today earns five times more.
We are beginning to shift into life code. And in the process of shifting into life code, every life form on this planet is coded in a double helix with a sugar phosphate backbone. And that codes whether you become a bacteria, an orange, a lemon, a Lemur, a Cow, a sheep, a human being, a politician, any one of these things is all coded in this four-letter code.
People thought this was a computer IT gig, and that will flow through those nerdy departments and it won't come into fashion photography, it won't come into television, it won't come into my daily communications, it won't come into my telephone, my microphone, my light control, my microwave radio, my - I mean, just name it.
We're beginning to enter an era where it gets really cheap and really fast to begin to do things like make fuels, and make textiles, and make extra teeth for ourselves. And we're beginning to think about how we regrow our bladders.
It's not going to surprise me if our kids end up running on the beach in Florida when they're 100 years old on regrown body parts with a much higher quality of life than we can begin to imagine.
Anytime you bring a really powerful new technology to market there are multiple implications. You start changing the relative position of countries.
When you brought the digital revolution in, all of a sudden, you could build a country like Singapore and take that country, which had the income per capita of Ghana in 1965, and make it something similar to the United States in one generation.
As from the 1970's onward, digital code started to drive the global economy, now life code is beginning to be the fundamental driver of the global economy over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
