XPRIZE Foundation

But anyway, there was a scramble.

There was an X Prize.

And I can't remember what it was.

And there were a bunch of people who were competing.

SpaceX actually won the X Prize for putting something into space.

But one of the people that had this a rocket company for a while was John Carmack, who invented Quake and Doom and then wound up becoming the director of technology for Oculus, which became Meta and the Metaverse.

Right.

But he had a company called Armadillo Aerospace.

I've been a student of his work for 10 plus years.

And Peter's best known for Moonshots and the X Prize, which he founded 20 plus years ago, which was the first prize to put private people in space, right? Which he's been a mentor and friend of Elon Musk for 25 plus years.

And now if you pay attention to his world is Abundance A360 Group, which I'm a member of.

It's the nexus of everything AI, robotics, longevity.

who wound up doing one of the entrepreneur in residence programs for Barack Obama that was a suggestion of Elon Musk that I worked on.

And he ran the XPRIZE after we did this crazy museum in Las Vegas called the Springs Preserve, which was supposed to be a nexus for sustainability.

And what was funny, and I was the creative director on the media for that project.

And what's funny about it is that Las Vegas is the most unsustainable place on the planet.

And so putting a nexus of sustainability in Las Vegas is kind of funny.

But anyway, there was a scramble.

There was an XPRIZE.

And I can't remember what it was.

Yeah.

So I'm, um, I, I just, uh, three weeks ago, um, was one of the judges on a SpaceX, not SpaceX, XPRIZE, competition to make films that presented technology and particularly AI in a somewhat more encouraging light.

Go ahead.

Do you feel like you at all have a...

It was the machine that builds the model.

And then... after about a year and a half, CMS, which is the federal organization that runs Medicare, they sponsored this million dollar, $1.6 million XPRIZE basically, which is like, hey, anybody can sign up, you submit an application, and then we're going to try to see who is the best at healthcare AI in the country.

And we're like a 12 person startup at this point, but we're like all in on it.

And we're just, okay, we're going to go.

So we've seen this in Red Cross ads.

We've seen it for XPRIZE.

I'm not sure if you know that, but XPRIZE is actually part of this kind of first prices that were given to the first, you know, Elon Musk, for example, that, you know, taking rockets to space and, you know, the big societal challenges.

But they also started to test with neuroscience to test, you know, new other health related stuff, for example, which, you know, which things should we fund next, for example, which things should win the prize.

And what we saw is that when people had a, you know, a personal story about Alzheimer's, for example, And it was something that was a resolution at the end, made all the difference.

And this week, we're going to start with Peter Diamandis, who is an American engineer, a physician and entrepreneur.

He's best known as the founder and executive chairman of the X Prize Foundation and the co founder of the Singularity University.

This was his introduction to the Singularity Summit South Africa.

Welcome you as delegates to the Singularity South Africa Summit here in Johannesburg.