SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk begins right now.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: I'm an astrophysicist and director at New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.
SPEAKER_1: My co-host today, Chuck, nice!
SPEAKER_1: Chuck, you practically have a fan club out there, you know.
SPEAKER_3: Practically.
SPEAKER_3: I'm almost there.
SPEAKER_3: We are almost at fan club status.
SPEAKER_1: Great having you on the show.
SPEAKER_3: Thanks for agreeing to do this.
SPEAKER_1: We're doing part two of my interview with Peter Diamandis, the founder of the X-Prize.
SPEAKER_1: We spent a whole hour talking about the X-Prize getting us into space, but the X-Prize is more than space.
SPEAKER_1: The X-Prize is anything that's just beyond our reach today.
SPEAKER_3: Wow.
SPEAKER_1: That needs to be invented and no one is trying to invent it yet.
SPEAKER_1: I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_3: That's pretty cool.
SPEAKER_1: You need somebody to lead that charge.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: Peter Diamandis is your man.
SPEAKER_1: And let's find out just about the general X-Prize concept and what else he's doing with this thing.
SPEAKER_2: We ended up calling that specific prize the Ansari X-Prize.
SPEAKER_2: The X stuck around because we had taken so long to find the Ansari family and that enabled us to do further X-Prizes.
SPEAKER_2: X-Prizes got a brand of being a prize for a bold, audacious thing you actually had to build and demonstrate.
SPEAKER_1: You branded the phrase X-Prize by what you've done with it, right?
SPEAKER_1: All right, so going into space is a natural extension of the aviation industry in terms of prize money to boldly go.
SPEAKER_1: All right, but from the homework I've done on you, this X-Prize is no longer just space, which is very intriguing to me.
SPEAKER_1: So where else have you taken it?
SPEAKER_2: So on the heels of the X-Prize being won, the question was where could this model work in addition?
SPEAKER_2: And the thinking was any place that there was a market failure or any place that stuff was stuck, it was a stigma, people didn't think it was possible, the commercial markets weren't doing it.
SPEAKER_1: Like that phrase, they're stuck.
SPEAKER_2: There's something in place, there could be regulations in place preventing it, there could be people's belief, they had a bad experience with something.
SPEAKER_2: I've always wanted to do, for example, an X-Prize for like cold fusion.
SPEAKER_2: No scientist will touch cold fusion because of the stigma that it had gotten.
SPEAKER_1: It's a tabletop fusion without a nuclear reactor.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, and whether or not it's possible, sometimes putting out an incentive gets people to think about a problem in a brand new dimension and brings new players into the field that would not otherwise.
SPEAKER_2: If I can digress, one of the stories I love is the Longitude Prize.
SPEAKER_2: So the year is 1714.
SPEAKER_2: The British Admiralty are ruling the seas, and they are able to tell latitude for navigation but not longitude.
SPEAKER_2: And what's happening is that they are losing lots of their navy at sea because ships are crashing on the rocks.
SPEAKER_2: And so they offer up this king's fortune for the team, for the investigator, for the scientist that can be able to tell longitude.
SPEAKER_2: And they were absolutely sure it was going to be done by an astronomer, because astronomers were the smartest dudes in the universe back then.
SPEAKER_2: And so they create...
SPEAKER_2: We still are, back then.
SPEAKER_2: They actually stack the judging board, the longitude board with astronomers to evaluate the winning approach, because they're sure it's going to be an astronomer who's competing for this.
SPEAKER_2: And this guy, John Harrison, who is a watchmaker, he's a tinkerer, he builds small watches in his lab, if you would, in his shop, comes up with this watch, the H1, as he calls it, that is able to tell time accurate in a rocking boat, he basically shows how to do the longitude.
SPEAKER_2: But they're so sure it's going to be won by an astronomer, they refuse to recognize this guy's approach.
SPEAKER_2: And so sometimes, you know, I define the expert as a person who can tell you exactly how it can't be done.
SPEAKER_2: And it isn't many times the expert who's going to win these competitions, it's someone with a crazy idea, because the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.
SPEAKER_2: If it wasn't a crazy idea, it'd be an incremental improvement.
SPEAKER_2: And so these competitions, these X-Prizes, really encourage people to come out of right field with a audacious crazy idea that the traditional thinkers would discount out of hand.
SPEAKER_2: And that's where the breakthrough comes from.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, you got to break the box.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: Rebuild the box.
SPEAKER_1: Take the stuff in the box, dump it out, throw away the box, make another box, or make a bigger box.
SPEAKER_1: Box with no walls.
SPEAKER_3: Or maybe a cylinder.
SPEAKER_3: Why does it have to be a box?
SPEAKER_3: Why can't it be like a can of Pringles?
SPEAKER_1: What?
SPEAKER_3: Potato chips?
SPEAKER_3: Not in a bag?
SPEAKER_3: That's revolutionary.
SPEAKER_1: Think outside the cylinder.
SPEAKER_3: Think outside the cylinder.
SPEAKER_3: You know, let's do that.
SPEAKER_1: Think outside the dodecahedron.
SPEAKER_3: So now, you know, here's the thing, though.
SPEAKER_3: When he talks about cold fusion.
SPEAKER_3: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: If anything's got a stigma in this world, it's cold fusion.
SPEAKER_1: Because the dudes, we were around when they, Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischman got together and had a press conference saying that they created sustainable fusion on a laboratory table without requiring a thermonuclear reactor.
SPEAKER_1: And it was page one story.
SPEAKER_1: And everyone said, well, where's your research paper?
SPEAKER_1: What does your experiment look like?
SPEAKER_1: Because in science, you have to duplicate the result before it is an emergent truth.
SPEAKER_1: The press doesn't seem to care about that fact.
SPEAKER_1: Any research result, they will put forth his truth.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: But there needs to be some kind of experimental observational consensus, which was not achieved by Pons and Fleischman.
SPEAKER_1: And so their work was considered, I don't know if it was fraudulent, but it was certainly wrong.
SPEAKER_1: Right, junk.
SPEAKER_1: And it required palladium.
SPEAKER_1: The futures price for palladium skyrocketed over that time.
SPEAKER_1: So the world was reacting to this one scientific result that was put forth that turned out to be false.
SPEAKER_1: So I don't think he literally means cold fusion, but he's our guy here.
SPEAKER_1: I think what he's referring to is, wouldn't it be cool if we had fusion that didn't require a nuclear fusion reactor?
SPEAKER_1: Right.
SPEAKER_3: So now let me ask you this.
SPEAKER_3: Let's look at in your sphere of expertise, which is?
SPEAKER_1: My dodecahedron.
SPEAKER_3: You're a particular dodecahedron, which is the cosmos.
SPEAKER_1: The cosmos.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, so now all of that fusion that's happening up there.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, out there.
SPEAKER_3: Out there.
SPEAKER_3: Not up there, but out there.
SPEAKER_1: It's also happening below your feet.
SPEAKER_3: So true.
SPEAKER_1: Up for the Aussies, okay.
SPEAKER_3: That all has heat as a byproduct, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, that is the energy liberated by thermonuclear fusion.
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_1: Yes.
SPEAKER_3: So my point is, if nature does it this way.
SPEAKER_3: Then isn't there a reason for that?
SPEAKER_3: Isn't just heat the byproduct?
SPEAKER_1: Yes, but we can do that too.
SPEAKER_1: When we do what the center of the sun does, it's called a bomb.
SPEAKER_1: We have no problems engaging in uncontrolled thermonuclear fusion.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: That's what a bomb is.
SPEAKER_1: What you want to do is control it and sustain it, and that's what we are helpless at this moment of accomplishing.
SPEAKER_1: That's all.
SPEAKER_3: Got you.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but fusion is easy as pie.
SPEAKER_3: It's easy.
SPEAKER_1: In space.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, the universe got that down.
SPEAKER_1: I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_1: When we come back, more of my interview with Peter Diamandis and the X-Prize.
SPEAKER_1: Welcome back to StarTalk Radio, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.
SPEAKER_1: Find us on the net at startalkradio.net.
SPEAKER_1: Find us on Facebook, StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: On Twitter, at guess what?
SPEAKER_3: StarTalk Radio, here you go, Chuck.
SPEAKER_1: I got Chuck with me here.
SPEAKER_1: We've got my interview with X-Prize founder, Peter Diamandis, the guy's a dreamer.
SPEAKER_3: The guy is a dreamer.
SPEAKER_1: I don't say that in a great way.
SPEAKER_1: In a great way, thank you.
SPEAKER_1: Not in a the guy's out of touch way.
SPEAKER_1: That the guy's there and he's on it.
SPEAKER_1: And we were at a conference together at this huge conference hotel.
SPEAKER_1: And we're friends.
SPEAKER_1: I've known him from way back.
SPEAKER_1: And I want to make sure I got a StarTalk interview with him.
SPEAKER_1: So we got a quiet place over in the corner.
SPEAKER_1: I pulled out the microphone and we've got these interviews.
SPEAKER_1: You heard the first part earlier with the X-Prize going into space.
SPEAKER_1: And now it's X-Prize for everything else.
SPEAKER_3: Everything.
SPEAKER_1: Everything that we need the X-Prize has.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: So let's find out all the kinds of X-Prizes that he has in mind.
SPEAKER_2: At the X-Prize Foundation today, we think about X-Prizes in five different areas.
SPEAKER_2: Exploration Prizes, which is space and oceans.
SPEAKER_2: And...
SPEAKER_1: Right, cause land is done.
SPEAKER_2: Well, land as well.
SPEAKER_1: No, it is.
SPEAKER_1: We've been to the top of Mount Everest.
SPEAKER_2: We've been to the peaks.
SPEAKER_1: We've been to the poles.
SPEAKER_1: You know, what's left, right?
SPEAKER_1: So...
SPEAKER_2: Well, there may be subterranean...
SPEAKER_1: Splunking.
SPEAKER_2: Why not?
SPEAKER_2: As you well know, we've discovered a new essentially form of life, archaeobacteria, which represent the overwhelming mass of all life forms, all life mass.
SPEAKER_1: The biomass.
SPEAKER_2: The biomass of the earth is below the land.
SPEAKER_2: It's not in the oceans.
SPEAKER_2: It's not on the land.
SPEAKER_2: It's actually in the deep crevice of the earth.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe it's powered by heat, maybe sulfur-based life forms.
SPEAKER_2: You know, there's still a lot of exploring to be done there.
SPEAKER_1: That's exploration, that's one.
SPEAKER_2: Life sciences, in which we include robotic X-Prizes and life sciences.
SPEAKER_2: Energy and the environment is the third, education is the fourth, and then global development is the fifth area.
SPEAKER_1: What does global do?
SPEAKER_2: Global development is how do we use incentive competitions to address the needs of the rising billion, of the poorest people on earth.
SPEAKER_2: We've just launched with Robinhood.
SPEAKER_2: Robinhood is one of the large organizations here in New York City that raises money to fight poverty.
SPEAKER_2: And they raised $19 million to launch a series of poverty alleviation X-Prizes.
SPEAKER_2: So that's in our global development space.
SPEAKER_1: So if you're really successful, you will supplant half the mission statement of the United Nations today.
SPEAKER_1: It's a lot of politicians with a lot of hot air trying to solve a lot of problems.
SPEAKER_2: Well, ultimately, we're genetically bred to compete as humans.
SPEAKER_2: We do it in sport, we do it in finding our spouse, we do it in business.
SPEAKER_2: And my goal is to try and sort of drive that human nature into solving the world's biggest problems.
SPEAKER_2: But they have to be described.
SPEAKER_2: So, not all things are great X-Prize.
SPEAKER_2: You need to have something that's measurable.
SPEAKER_1: Give me an example of a bad X-Prize and a good X-Prize.
SPEAKER_2: So, every time I speak, people say, hey, can you use an X-Prize to reinvent the government?
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, a lot of frustrated people out there.
SPEAKER_2: So, that one is really a fuzzy X-Prize.
SPEAKER_2: You need a concrete objective.
SPEAKER_2: Flying three people to 100 kilometers and bringing them back safely.
SPEAKER_1: You need metrics.
SPEAKER_2: Yeah, you need metrics, it has to be clear, concrete and ultimately, it should be something that a small team of people can do.
SPEAKER_2: And so, it works really well around technology.
SPEAKER_2: We are looking at behavioral prizes.
SPEAKER_2: So, can we in fact use an X-Prize to reinvent how we think about childhood incentives on food and exercise?
SPEAKER_2: Because as you well know, childhood obesity is reaching epidemic proportions and it's driving a lot of healthcare disease, heart disease in kids, diabetes in kids and it's terrible.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so there's a social consciousness going on here because otherwise, if you just say we can go 100 kilometers, it's not necessarily a socially driven mission statement.
SPEAKER_2: We're looking really to drive breakthroughs.
SPEAKER_2: So in exploration, in addition to space flight, we're working with Shell to look at mapping the ocean floor.
SPEAKER_1: What, is it non-mapped?
SPEAKER_2: Less than 1% of the ocean floor really is mapped at high resolution.
SPEAKER_2: And we don't know what's down there.
SPEAKER_2: And so we're looking at can teams build technologies that would allow us to rapidly, robotically map the ocean floor.
SPEAKER_1: Oh wait, that's not an X-Prize.
SPEAKER_1: That's just, no one's done it yet.
SPEAKER_1: That's different from people think it can't be done.
SPEAKER_2: But the challenge is no one is doing it.
SPEAKER_1: When I'm thinking X-Prize, I'm thinking people are naysayers out there.
SPEAKER_1: They're saying, we don't know how to do it.
SPEAKER_1: We don't know what the technology is required.
SPEAKER_1: It is beyond our reach.
SPEAKER_1: Nobody's saying that about the bottom of the ocean.
SPEAKER_2: But no one's saying that about space flight.
SPEAKER_2: They were saying the government's done it.
SPEAKER_2: And you know, it's just not, it's just expensive.
SPEAKER_2: So it depends on the perspective.
SPEAKER_2: Our goal is to accelerate the future and bring about capabilities that are gonna benefit humanity.
SPEAKER_2: Our mission statement is-
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so sorry then.
SPEAKER_1: So in the, with your original X-Prize, it wasn't that it couldn't be done technologically.
SPEAKER_1: It's that no one knew how to do it cheaply.
SPEAKER_1: That's-
SPEAKER_2: And it was not-
SPEAKER_1: It was an economic X-Prize in a sense.
SPEAKER_2: So it was economics and also no one thought it could be done by the private sector.
SPEAKER_2: So I was trying to change people's belief of what was possible.
SPEAKER_2: And our mission statement is driving radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity and being able to understand, you know, and map the ocean floor, which has resources, which has life forms, which has environmental implications is important for us.
SPEAKER_2: You know, we know more about the surface of Mars than we do about the ocean floor.
SPEAKER_2: And so in exploration, we're doing that.
SPEAKER_2: In energy, the environment, I'm very interested in driving battery technology, accelerating battery technology.
SPEAKER_1: Is that one of the exercises?
SPEAKER_1: I'm tired of using 19th century technology to run everything in my house.
SPEAKER_2: It's crazy.
SPEAKER_1: Did I blame you?
SPEAKER_2: So yesterday.
SPEAKER_1: It's so, two centuries ago, my gosh.
SPEAKER_1: It seems like it's the great Achilles heel of modern technology.
SPEAKER_2: It is, and liberating us from how we store energy today would change everything, right?
SPEAKER_2: I mean, we have 5,000 times more energy hits the Earth's surface than we consume as a species in sunlight.
SPEAKER_2: It's just not stored.
SPEAKER_2: It's not usable.
SPEAKER_2: And imagine having 10 times more energy on Earth than we could possibly use.
SPEAKER_2: It would liberate society in an unknown.
SPEAKER_1: We finally get jet packs.
SPEAKER_2: Is that all you really want?
SPEAKER_1: I want the X-Prize jet pack.
SPEAKER_1: Chuck, he's got five categories here.
SPEAKER_1: What do you want?
SPEAKER_1: You're a man about town.
SPEAKER_3: I am.
SPEAKER_1: What are we missing that you think we should have?
SPEAKER_3: Personally, I would like to see sex bots.
SPEAKER_3: I'm sorry, but I'm just going to be honest.
SPEAKER_3: Sex bots.
SPEAKER_1: I think, okay, you can just be being honest.
SPEAKER_3: I'm being honest here.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, just think about what you would do for humanity if you were able to create a fully functional sex bot.
SPEAKER_3: That would be awesome.
SPEAKER_3: I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, first of all, are you cheating if you were the sex pot, right?
SPEAKER_3: You could be married to your wife.
SPEAKER_3: Baby, she's not even human.
SPEAKER_3: She's not even human, baby.
SPEAKER_3: What you talking about?
SPEAKER_3: You know, I'm not cheating on you.
SPEAKER_3: This is just my sex bot.
SPEAKER_3: But you gotta make a sex bot who is also-
SPEAKER_1: I'll call Peter Diamandis now.
SPEAKER_1: Please do.
SPEAKER_3: Let's get to something important here.
SPEAKER_3: Mapping the ocean floor.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, so you come up with a sex bot that no one will go to work in the morning, right?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, I'll send my sex bot.
SPEAKER_3: Chuck can't make it today.
SPEAKER_3: Worn out.
SPEAKER_1: Okay, okay, so you got that out of the way.
SPEAKER_1: Yes, I got that out of the way.
SPEAKER_3: You know what I would love to see is advancements in brain disorders, because I got a feeling I suffer from several.
SPEAKER_1: You mean advancements in cures of brain disorders.
SPEAKER_3: Because that would be kind of counterintuitive, right?
SPEAKER_3: Let's advance brain disorders, and you'll get a brain disorder, and you'll get a brain disorder.
SPEAKER_1: No, that would be cool.
SPEAKER_1: Some device where you don't, perhaps where you don't have to cut open the skull.
SPEAKER_3: Right, well you don't.
SPEAKER_1: They did this on a Star Trek movie, Star Trek IV, okay?
SPEAKER_1: I think it was Zulu had brain damage from falling on his head, and they're ready to cut open his skull.
SPEAKER_1: This is, he goes back in time, so it's 1984, which was the present day of the film, and they're ready to cut open the dude's skull, and Bones comes back, and he's like, he's freaking out.
SPEAKER_3: I'm a doctor, not a butcher.
SPEAKER_3: Look how they butcher him.
SPEAKER_1: And so he puts some thing on this head, and it goes, and it's rebuilding the neural synaptic, the broken neural synapse.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly, yeah.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, I'd love to see something like that happen.
SPEAKER_1: If you can do that, then you can make someone smarter.
SPEAKER_3: Oh God, would I love to see that happen.
SPEAKER_1: Oh yeah, yeah, that'd be cool.
SPEAKER_3: Because we live in a world of idiots, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_3: Listen.
SPEAKER_1: Line up the idiots first.
SPEAKER_3: I'm sorry, line up the idiots and get that little brain device on them, and maybe people will start believing in climate change.
SPEAKER_3: I'm just saying, I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_3: If you don't believe in climate change, you're an idiot, I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_1: And he talks about energy liberating society.
SPEAKER_1: There's a whole episode of Cosmos where we address that very theme.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_3: You did a great thing online where you were talking about how we basically don't have the political will to use the most available resource that we have which is the sun.
SPEAKER_3: I mean, seriously, the answer is there, people.
SPEAKER_3: We look at it every day.
SPEAKER_1: No, well, I joke about it in my Twitter stream.
SPEAKER_1: I say if an alien came to visit, I'd be embarrassed to tell the alien, look, you know, we're getting energy out from under the ground after we fight a war to gain access to it.
SPEAKER_1: They'd be laughing, slapping their knee.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly.
SPEAKER_1: If they had a knee.
SPEAKER_3: That big yellow thing in the sky.
SPEAKER_3: How about you use that?
SPEAKER_1: You're listening to StarTalk Radio when we come back for more StarTalk Interview with X-Prize founder Peter Diamandis.
SPEAKER_1: We're back, StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: Chuck Nice.
SPEAKER_1: Thanks for being here.
SPEAKER_3: Always good to be here, man.
SPEAKER_1: Ooh, what, do you take Barry White lessons overnight?
SPEAKER_1: Always good.
SPEAKER_3: And I was drinking scotch last night, and this is my residual scotch for this.
SPEAKER_1: Scotch, the day after.
SPEAKER_1: Well, we've been, we're catching up with my interview with Peter Diamandis, founder of the X-Prize, originally conceived for going into space.
SPEAKER_1: He said, let's just break it up, break it open, and just get an X-Prize for everything.
SPEAKER_1: Everything.
SPEAKER_1: Everything you need.
SPEAKER_1: And I wondered if there are any X-Prizes that had been awarded so far, because maybe all the goals are a little bit out of everybody's reach, and people are just ascending a mountain that has no top.
SPEAKER_1: And he said, no, no, there have been a couple that came through, so let's find out, let's find out about one.
SPEAKER_1: Quickly, what are the four that got awarded?
SPEAKER_2: I'm sorry, X-Prize for Space Flight, the Progressive Automotive X-Prize for 100 mile per gallon cars, the Northrop Grumman Lunar Landing Challenge for Vertical Takeoff Vertical Landing Vehicles, and the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X-Prize.
SPEAKER_1: Oil Cleanup X-Prize, whoa.
SPEAKER_2: So on the heels of the BP oil spill, when that spill was going on and on and on, James Cameron had just joined our board, he's a big oceanographer, as you know, and he said, you gotta do something about this oil spill.
SPEAKER_2: And when we looked at what we could do, we realized that the technology for cleaning up oil spills had not changed in 21 years since the Exxon Valdez.
SPEAKER_2: And we said, let's ask teams to compete on how you clean them up.
SPEAKER_2: And if you have to, if you at least double the oil spill cleanup rate of 1,100 gallons per minute, which should have been the standard, you can qualify to win, whoever did the most.
SPEAKER_2: So 350 teams entered, 350 teams around the world entered.
SPEAKER_2: We had 10 finalists go head to head in the world's largest oil spill cleanup facility located here in New Jersey.
SPEAKER_1: And of course, New Jersey.
SPEAKER_2: I wasn't going to go there.
SPEAKER_2: And the seven of the 10 teams actually doubled the oil spill cleanup rate.
SPEAKER_2: Seven, and these are all small teams under 100 person in size.
SPEAKER_2: The winning team did a six fold increase.
SPEAKER_1: Whoa.
SPEAKER_2: And one of the teams that doubled the oil spill cleanup rate, I kid you not, was a team that met in a Las Vegas tattoo parlor.
SPEAKER_2: The tattoo artist was the designer, one of his customers.
SPEAKER_1: This is like you're saying, it's people who are not the folks you'd otherwise look to.
SPEAKER_2: These are people way outside the field with a crazy idea who say, I'm gonna give it a shot.
SPEAKER_2: They built a scale model of the guy's swimming pool.
SPEAKER_2: And the first time the full scale model saw, you know, oil and water was in the test facility, and they still doubled the oil clean up rate.
SPEAKER_2: Now, you would have never backed a team.
SPEAKER_2: As Matt in Las Vegas said, two parlor.
SPEAKER_2: And so the beautiful thing about X-Prizes and these incentive competitions, are they really crowdsource innovative approaches.
SPEAKER_2: And you automatically back the winner, no matter how crazy the idea might have sounded.
SPEAKER_1: Well, actually I have an issue.
SPEAKER_1: I must take issue.
SPEAKER_2: Okay.
SPEAKER_1: You're put out an X-Prize for oil clean up.
SPEAKER_1: That's like putting on an X-Prize for an acid rain proof umbrella.
SPEAKER_1: Shouldn't you put out an X-Prize for tankers that don't spill oil in the first place?
SPEAKER_1: Isn't that really the goal here?
SPEAKER_1: Or independence from oil entirely?
SPEAKER_2: So let's think about that because it informs us on what a great X-Prize is.
SPEAKER_2: I'm looking for something that a team of 20, 30 guys, gals could do that could be funded by themselves.
SPEAKER_2: So reinventing and building an oil tanker.
SPEAKER_2: Well, that should be what the oil industry does with the shipping industry.
SPEAKER_2: But there's lots of platforms out there, there are lots of tankers out there that are going to have accidents.
SPEAKER_2: And we just said, you know, the cleanup industry, that's something that we can attack.
SPEAKER_1: Well, at least he's doing something practical on the spot.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: But what I want to know is this, why is it that, honestly, when you see an oil spill on the news, they're like using bounty paper towels.
SPEAKER_1: I've seen that.
SPEAKER_3: What's up with that?
SPEAKER_3: I mean-
SPEAKER_1: And just washing liquid to clean the ducts.
SPEAKER_3: It's Dawn and Bounty.
SPEAKER_3: Stuff you can find at the supermarket.
SPEAKER_3: Why aren't we using these advancement that he has actually made?
SPEAKER_1: You know, and actually, when I was in college, I took a couple, sorry, in graduate school, I took a couple of walks along the Galveston Beach and you get tar on the bottom of your feet.
SPEAKER_1: There's oil just there.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, and it doesn't come off.
SPEAKER_1: You need like turpentine or something to get it off, which takes off your skin.
SPEAKER_1: That's how you get the oil off.
SPEAKER_3: Well, that's one way to clean it off.
SPEAKER_3: You remove your outer layers of skin.
SPEAKER_1: You skin yourself.
SPEAKER_1: So what's weird is that that oil spill went for long enough to like set up a prize and then have someone win the prize and then use the, if I understood this story correctly, I hope I'm wrong.
SPEAKER_1: But I mean, that's how long that oil spill lasted?
SPEAKER_3: Right.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, come on now.
SPEAKER_3: That people could actually come up and compete to clean it up.
SPEAKER_3: Ridiculous.
SPEAKER_1: Now, apparently the government concluded that only 3% of the 5 million barrels of oil was actually retrieved by these skimmers.
SPEAKER_1: So that's not even very much.
SPEAKER_1: Well, at least we wonder where the hell the rest of it went.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, I know where it is.
SPEAKER_1: Where is it?
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, it's in the fish you're eating right now.
SPEAKER_3: That's where it is.
SPEAKER_1: That's why I didn't have to add butter to the pan.
SPEAKER_1: It's just fried right up.
SPEAKER_3: No oil necessary.
SPEAKER_1: That's the self-basting fish.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, that's great.
SPEAKER_1: All right, so when we come back, more of my interview with the X-Prize founder, Peter Diamandis.
SPEAKER_1: The guy's crazy.
SPEAKER_1: Come down a really good, Crazy, but great one.
SPEAKER_1: Good, good crazy.
SPEAKER_1: Good dreamer, good guy.
SPEAKER_1: We'll be right back.
SPEAKER_1: Thank This is StarTalk, you're back.
SPEAKER_1: We're back.
SPEAKER_1: I got Chuck Nice with me here in the studio.
SPEAKER_1: Chuck, you're eating oily fish.
SPEAKER_3: I'm still laughing about it.
SPEAKER_1: If you're just joining us.
SPEAKER_3: The self-oiling fish.
SPEAKER_1: Self-oiling, self-basting.
SPEAKER_1: That's why I was eating shrimp the other day, just slipped out of my hand, popped into the next person's bowl.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, that's good, gulf shrimp there, baby.
SPEAKER_1: Gulf.
SPEAKER_1: Well, all right, so, we were interviewing, my interview with Peter Diamandis, and, you know, an interesting, I'm an astrophysicist, so one of the X-Prizes that intrigued me was not only the one going into sort of above the atmosphere, that was the Ansari X-Prize, he also has an X-Prize to land on the moon.
SPEAKER_1: Oh.
SPEAKER_1: The lunar X-Prize.
SPEAKER_3: Nice.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_3: Since we haven't been back there since God knows when.
SPEAKER_1: We ain't been back since 1972.
SPEAKER_3: That's insane.
SPEAKER_1: It's insane.
SPEAKER_1: So let's find out what that next X-Prize is gonna do.
SPEAKER_2: The other competition we have going that is a big space prize is the $30 million Google Lunar X-Prize.
SPEAKER_2: We have 25 teams building private lunar lander vehicles and to win this $30 million that Google put up, all you have to do is build a robot, land on the surface of the moon, take photos and videos, row 500 meters and take more photos and videos.
SPEAKER_1: And send them back to Earth?
SPEAKER_2: No, it doesn't have to come back to Earth.
SPEAKER_2: It's a one way mission.
SPEAKER_1: The photos have to come back.
SPEAKER_1: Need evidence that it actually got there.
SPEAKER_1: So you're saying all you have to do is land on the moon.
SPEAKER_1: This is, that's an extraordinary.
SPEAKER_2: Well, it is extraordinary.
SPEAKER_1: Maybe you need a hundred million.
SPEAKER_2: Maybe.
SPEAKER_2: At the end of the day, the $30 million prize that Google has put up is being matched with $30 million of contracts from NASA.
SPEAKER_2: NASA stepped up because ultimately if you think about who's the biggest beneficiary to really low cost, reliable lunar lander capabilities.
SPEAKER_1: NASA, of course.
SPEAKER_1: This one's, this one's $30 million.
SPEAKER_3: Hell, you want to do, let's do it.
SPEAKER_3: I say we get a Volkswagen and modify it.
SPEAKER_1: Get some strap-ons.
SPEAKER_3: Get some rockets on a Volkswagen and shoot that sucker up there, man.
SPEAKER_1: Except I live in an apartment.
SPEAKER_1: You live in Jersey, you got a garage.
SPEAKER_1: You live in a house, right?
SPEAKER_3: I live in a house.
SPEAKER_1: You have a garage?
SPEAKER_3: I do not have a garage, though.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, man.
SPEAKER_3: Yeah, so, you know, I have a basement.
SPEAKER_3: Does that count?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, but you gotta get the sucker out of the basement.
SPEAKER_3: That's true, that's true.
SPEAKER_1: But $30 million, that's something I could, now, you know, the Chinese landed something on, landed on the moon.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: Jade Rabbit.
SPEAKER_3: The Jade Rabbit.
SPEAKER_3: I'm gonna tell you, that sounds like a vibrator, if I remember what.
SPEAKER_3: I'm sorry, it does.
SPEAKER_3: The Jade Rabbit, something you find in the nightstand of a lonely woman's bedside drawer.
SPEAKER_1: Well, who knows what it otherwise is in China, but I know what jade means, and I know what rabbit means, and I don't have the dirty minds you do, so it's very clean to me.
SPEAKER_1: But they couldn't win the 30 million because that's a government, and the whole point of the X-Prize is to get private enterprise engaged so that it becomes a business, a competition, and ultimately possibly a marketable product that becomes business.
SPEAKER_1: But I can tell you, going to the moon, because we hadn't been in a long time, it's a nice nearby target, because you know how long it takes?
SPEAKER_1: It takes three days to get to the moon.
SPEAKER_1: We did the math on that.
SPEAKER_1: And so you can actually track it.
SPEAKER_1: It's not one of these, oh, we'll get there in four years, chill out until then.
SPEAKER_1: All missions to the moon happen within a news cycle.
SPEAKER_1: That's why they're good, and that's why they're fun.
SPEAKER_1: And so send me.
SPEAKER_1: Hell, I'll go.
SPEAKER_3: Listen, I would go with you.
SPEAKER_3: Now, that's a trip.
SPEAKER_3: That would be a good trip.
SPEAKER_3: That's a good road trip.
SPEAKER_1: And Google's getting in on it.
SPEAKER_1: Google, it's about time.
SPEAKER_1: I said, I remember when Google began, it was like, will they ever be anything more than a search engine?
SPEAKER_1: Google, be something more to me.
SPEAKER_1: Come on.
SPEAKER_1: And yes, they are.
SPEAKER_1: They're getting into all the rest.
SPEAKER_1: And they have the car that drives itself.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: We're way past due for those.
SPEAKER_3: But still now, if you can make a car that drives itself, why can't you make a car or a vehicle that drives itself to the moon?
SPEAKER_3: I mean, it's not too far off course.
SPEAKER_1: No, no, we got that.
SPEAKER_1: No, what are you saying?
SPEAKER_3: I'm saying, like, you know.
SPEAKER_1: Most things in space don't have drivers.
SPEAKER_3: Right, so $60 million that we're talking about, 30 million from Google, 30 million from NASA.
SPEAKER_1: With the matched money, right?
SPEAKER_3: So it shouldn't be that hard.
SPEAKER_3: We've already been to the moon.
SPEAKER_1: Not for $60 million.
SPEAKER_1: We've been for billions of dollars.
SPEAKER_1: That's the problem here.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, I get it now.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, it's really about cost.
SPEAKER_1: We know you can do it for a billion dollars.
SPEAKER_1: Duh, right.
SPEAKER_3: See, that's why.
SPEAKER_1: Well, wait, no, it's worse than that.
SPEAKER_1: Today, we can't even do it for billions of dollars because we don't have the spacecraft to do it.
SPEAKER_1: It's multiple billions of dollars to get to the moon.
SPEAKER_3: Really?
SPEAKER_1: Well, sorry, sorry, for people to get to the moon.
SPEAKER_1: For people.
SPEAKER_1: No, for, how much would it take NASA to put a bot on the moon?
SPEAKER_1: I don't know, but it surely would take more than $60 million.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Oh, for sure.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, so this would be truly revolutionary.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, the Hubble telescope is billions of dollars and that didn't even go to the moon.
SPEAKER_1: I'm just saying.
SPEAKER_3: Okay, all right, I got it now.
SPEAKER_1: All right, when we come back on StarTalk Radio, more of my interview with X-Prize founder, Peter Diamandis.
SPEAKER_1: Stay with us.
SPEAKER_1: StarTalk Radio, I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice.
SPEAKER_1: Cross the table for me.
SPEAKER_3: Yes, sir.
SPEAKER_1: We are in studio at New York City.
SPEAKER_1: Thanks for being here, Chuck.
SPEAKER_3: It's a pleasure.
SPEAKER_1: More of my interview with X-Prize founder, Peter Diamandis.
SPEAKER_1: Do you know, the Lunar X-Prize, the prize is gonna go, not if you just go to the moon, but there's like a bag of tricks they want you to perform when you get there.
SPEAKER_3: Oh, really?
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, as he said in the clip, you photographed the lunar surface, but there's another interesting one.
SPEAKER_1: So one of the extra little tricks you had to do, if you can land close enough or rove close enough to one of the Apollo landing sites, and take pictures of it and send it back.
SPEAKER_3: So you get extra money.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah, you get some cash for that.
SPEAKER_1: A little extra cash.
SPEAKER_1: No, what worries me is that I think they're only doing that because they still think they're people who don't believe we landed.
SPEAKER_1: I said, don't feed the trolls, leave.
SPEAKER_3: Right, exactly.
SPEAKER_1: But it would still be kind of cool to see the landing site.
SPEAKER_3: I just love the fact that this is how much selfies have invaded our culture, is that even in something like this, you send a robot to the moon, it's like, oh yeah, take a selfie with the Apollo.
SPEAKER_1: No, no, it's worse than that.
SPEAKER_1: Don't take a picture of the moon, take a picture of other robot stuff we left there.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly, other robot stuff that we left up there.
SPEAKER_3: That's great.
SPEAKER_1: So, my favorite recent X-Prize that they're talking about is inspired by Star Trek.
SPEAKER_3: Sweet.
SPEAKER_1: As so much of our culture is.
SPEAKER_2: In Star Trek, of course, the medical tricorder is that device that Bones McCoy used to use that you'd hold over a person and you'd know everything about them, what they had, what was going on.
SPEAKER_1: Plus, it's gotta make the cool sounds.
SPEAKER_2: It's gotta make the cool sounds.
SPEAKER_2: But ultimately, today, the health care industry is way broken.
SPEAKER_2: All right, by 2020, we're gonna be short 91,000 doctors in the United States.
SPEAKER_2: We can't train enough doctors, and that's good compared to the rest of the world.
SPEAKER_2: Africa has 25% of the disease burden and 1.3% of the health care workers.
SPEAKER_1: 25% of the world disease burden.
SPEAKER_2: A lot of it due to unclean water, by the way, but different subject.
SPEAKER_2: So the question is, could you create a device that could diagnose people accurately, rapidly, cheaply?
SPEAKER_1: Portably, presumably.
SPEAKER_2: And portably.
SPEAKER_2: Another factoid is that Rand Corporation did an analysis a few years back and said that 45% of the time you go to the doctor, you get the wrong diagnosis or the wrong course of treatment.
SPEAKER_2: It's a coin flip, that's crazy.
SPEAKER_2: And the fact of the matter is, when you go to a physician today, there's so much data that's collected from your blood work, your CAT scan, maybe perhaps that these days your genomic analysis, there's no way for a human doctor to be able to look at all that data, understand it and give you accurate diagnostics.
SPEAKER_2: So we had been at our X-Prize Visionary, our annual board get together, which we debate, we discuss what we should create as an X-Prize.
SPEAKER_2: We had been thinking about the idea of an AI physician, artificial intelligence physician.
SPEAKER_1: Sure, the American Medical Association was perfectly happy about this.
SPEAKER_1: You guys are idiots, we're putting my guy in there, my AI dude.
SPEAKER_1: I'm sure they've just endorsed this completely.
SPEAKER_1: Go on.
SPEAKER_2: Remember, we're gonna be short 91,000 doctors.
SPEAKER_1: All right, so we gotta get them to embrace this.
SPEAKER_2: We have to get them to utilize this technology to leverage themselves, to make more efficient use of themselves where physicians or human carbon-based life doctors can be of greater use than an artificial intelligence.
SPEAKER_2: So anyway, we've been discussing and debating this and we come up with this idea of a tri-quarter which conceptually would integrate a number of technologies, artificial intelligence, which might be on the cloud.
SPEAKER_1: The internet cloud.
SPEAKER_1: The total access.
SPEAKER_2: Lab on a chip technology, small chips that have microfluidics, the ability to move very small amounts of fluid and do an RNA or DNA analysis of a bacterium, a pathogen, if you would, or do your blood chemistries.
SPEAKER_2: Digital imagery that could look at your skin and say that's a melanoma or something along those lines.
SPEAKER_2: So you could imagine technology being integrated together to be able to analyze what's going on with a person.
SPEAKER_2: So I had a chance to meet Paul Jacobs, the chairman, CEO of Qualcomm Foundation, and over lunch, pitched him on the idea and he said, let's do it.
SPEAKER_2: And less than four months later, he and I were on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show, CES, the largest show in Las Vegas, announcing the $10 million Qualcomm Tri-Quarter XPrize.
SPEAKER_1: Bigger than the porn show that they have there?
SPEAKER_2: I don't know about that, but it does take place at the same time.
SPEAKER_1: Sorry, you had the triple XPrize.
SPEAKER_2: So the Qualcomm Foundation put up 10 million bucks and this Qualcomm Tri-Quarter XPrize is challenging teams to build a device that an average consumer can use, that you can cough on, that you can talk to, that you can do a finger blood prick to, and it can diagnose you better than a team of board certified doctors.
SPEAKER_2: And here's the cool thing, six months after we announced this in Las Vegas at CES, we have 230 teams from 30 countries around the world.
SPEAKER_2: It's extraordinary how many people have come to this.
SPEAKER_1: Star Trek is now.
SPEAKER_3: Yes.
SPEAKER_1: Got everything but the Klingons.
SPEAKER_3: I love it and I can't wait for them to show up and whip us in this shape.
SPEAKER_1: And I think they should give a special prize for which device has the coolest sound.
SPEAKER_3: Exactly, because it's got to make that whoa, whoa, whoa.
SPEAKER_1: Otherwise it's not working.
SPEAKER_3: It's not working.
SPEAKER_3: Tell you the light.
SPEAKER_1: The light and everything.
SPEAKER_1: Tell me about it.
SPEAKER_1: So yeah, I'm loving this X-Prize stuff and I'm going to try to maybe get Peter back on and find out what the latest stuff is on this because it's going daily and it could transform how we live.
SPEAKER_3: He's very visionary, I have to say.
SPEAKER_3: It is really to take competition and make it work for good.
SPEAKER_3: Like he said, we're all competition based.
SPEAKER_1: And at the end of the day, it's capitalist.
SPEAKER_1: I mean, that'll work right here in America.
SPEAKER_1: Yeah.
SPEAKER_1: Somebody's going to be making money on it.
SPEAKER_3: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_1: Let that be the case.
SPEAKER_1: Cool, you've been listening to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: We got to bring this one to a close.
SPEAKER_1: Chuck, thanks for being here with me as always.
SPEAKER_3: Always a pleasure.
SPEAKER_1: You've been listening to StarTalk Radio.
SPEAKER_1: I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always, bidding you to keep looking up.