How To Win The $10 Million Evolution 2.0 Prize?

Andrea Macdonald, founder of ideaXme interviews Perry Marshall, founder of Evolution 2.0 Prize and Natural Code LLC.

Perry Marshall Disseminator of Biological and Inorganic Information Systems

Perry Marshall is a high level connector and multi-disciplinary disseminator of both biological and inorganic information. He is most recently famous for corralling some of the world’s top scientists and entrepreneurs to found the $10 Million Evolution 2.0 Prize, a challenge which focuses on one of the biggest questions: How did DNA get code?

Perry, a former engineer is prolific in the business world. He is one of the most expensive business consultants on the planet. Moreover, authored the world’s best selling books on Google and Facebook advertising. His 80/20 Sales and Marketing is the definitive text of its kind and the rules therein can be applied to business and science alike.

In this ideaXme interview Perry reveals the essential qualities a team or individual will need to win the Evolution 2.0 Prize. What’s more, he shares the key role Rich Connectedness and serendipity is anticipated to play in contestants arriving at a solution to the problem set by the Evolution 2.0 Prize organisers.

Evolution 2.0 Prize: The Problem

Natural Code LLC is a Private Equity Investment group formed to identify a naturally occurring code. Their mission is to discover, develop and commercialise core principles of nature which give rise to information, consciousness and intelligence.

Natural Code LLC will pay the researcher $100,000 for the initial discovery of such a code. If the newly discovered process is defensibly patentable, they will secure the patent(s).

The discoverer will retain a percentage of ongoing ownership of the technology, sharing in future profits of the company, while benefitting from the extensive finance, marketing and technology experience of our investment group. Prize amount as of May 31, 2019 was $10 million.

Code is absolutely necessary for replication and for life. Code is needed for cells to have instructions to build themselves; code is required for reproduction. Code that has the ability to re-write itself is essential for any kind of evolution to occur.

We define code as a symbolic information passed between an encoder and a decoder (Claude Shannon 1948).

So, where did the information in DNA come from? Currently, no one knows the answer.

The ideaXme interview with Perry Marshall

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:00:00] Welcome, everybody again to another episode of the ideaXme show. I’m Andrea Macdonald, the founder of ideaXme. ideaXme is a global network, a podcast, creator series and mentor program. More recently, we’ve launched a research project called Rich Connectedness, where we look at the connections, human to human that move the human story forward.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:00:25] Today in 2021, we sit in the information age in which all of us are encouraged to connect with vast numbers of people across the world, most of whom we’ve never met. In this episode of the ideaXme series, we are going to look at a more local level of connection. We’re going to look at rich connectedness, human to human and rich connectedness at a cellular level.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:00:55] I’m here with the founder of the $10 Million Evolution 2.0 Prize. The international competition is intended to speed up breakthroughs around the still unknown process of cell communication that organizers predict can turn off cancer, allow robots to think for themselves, and even create new plant life to combat climate change.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:01:21] No one knows how the cell came about, but there’s a simpler, more fundamental question. Where did the information come from? An answer will trigger a quantum leap in artificial intelligence. This may be as big as the discovery of DNA itself, so let’s find out more. Who are you?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:01:49] I am Perry Marshall, I’m from Chicago and founder of the Evolution 2.0 Prize, which is a $10 million prize for the origin of the genetic code.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:01:59] I’m also author of a number of business books, including 80/20 Sales and Marketing and Ultimate Guides to Google and Facebook Ads. I’m involved in cancer research and virus research and all kinds of interesting things. To me, it all connects. It all flows together and I’m happy to be talking to you today. So nice to meet you Andrea.

Rich Connectedness and Information

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:02:26] It’s wonderful to meet you, too. Today I’d like to explore rich connectedness, human to human, but also extremely importantly at a cellular level. You have spoken about communications with cells potentially being at the heart of curing cancer, curing climate change, developing a higher form of artificial intelligence and finding out where we all came from, the origin of life. So, let’s start with Rich Connectedness™.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:03:04] Well, I think the starting point of rich connectedness is that all living things, virtually without exception, are communal. One of my mentors, James Shapiro, wrote a book in the 1980s called Bacteria as Multicellular Organisms. In fact, it’s right behind me. It explains in beautiful detail that even something as seemingly simple as leaving a coffee cup with cream and sugar on the counter for a week. It will have mould growing on the top of it and those little mould cells will not be just little lone rangers eating everything they can find. They form communities and they cooperate, and they divide labour. They do division of labour as though different parts of the colony were different organs and they actually change their genetic expression and rearrange their genes to better serve the function that they’ve been assigned by the colony.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:04:29] They have words like you and me and us and them, and they talk to each other. I’m not joking. This is not just a silly little metaphor that you would tell a child, this is actually what they do. So, they’re small, but they’re not stupid and you can zoom out to any level of magnification that you want, and you’ll see the same pattern repeating over and over and over again. What’s the worst thing you can do to a human being? It has put them in solitary confinement.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:05:09] I think there’s much for us to learn from nature, especially with the political and social debates and polarization that’s going on in the world. There’s nothing more apt than looking at nature.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:05:26] Can we go back to the beginning of the important human to human connection that led to you becoming the founder of the Evolution 2.0 Prize. I know it was a connection with your brother that led you along this pathway. You were already hugely successful within the marketing and advertising world, but it was this important rich connection with your brother, with a little serendipity thrown in that led to where you are today. You were working on the ethernet and simultaneously you had a fascination with DNA which was linked to the heated discussions you were having with your brother at the time, that led to this breakthrough. You have said that it has led to a number of key questions you have in relation to the origin of life and communication within cells. Can you start at the human-to-human connection side of the story?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:06:31] Yes. I think all human stories are family stories. Even if we’re talking about The Republican Party or if we’re talking about the United Nations, it’s all family dynamics.

Religion and Science

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:06:47] My younger brother and I took different paths. I went into business and marketing and entrepreneurship. He went into seminary. He was studying to go into the ministry. We are both pastors’ kids and instead of being a pastor, he actually ended up moving to China, to teach English and do missionary work on the side. He started asking lots of questions and asking hard questions. In a lot of ways, he was growing up. We started having discussions and debates. He started questioning his faith.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:07:32] So, I went to visit him in China, and I discovered, to my surprise, that he had pretty much thrown it all out the window. He said: I don’t believe this anymore. The Earth is not 6000 years old. And he also said: I’m not sure about all this Bible stuff.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:08:02] This was very upsetting. I fast forwarded in my mind six months and thought: Six months from now it’s going to be Thanksgiving and I don’t think we’re going to have the same sort of Thanksgiving dinner that we had last time. He’s about to become the family atheist!

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:08:34] We were riding together in this little bus and I said: Brian, look at the hand at the end of your arm. This is a nice piece of engineering and I’m an engineer so I should know. You don’t think this is an accumulation of random accidents, do you?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:08:59] And he: Fired back, hold on!

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:09:00] Everybody’s had this argument with somebody where they say you don’t need some deity tinkering with things. Life evolves on its own and all you need is time and natural selection. You get some [00:09:17] copying errors [00:09:18] with DNA, and you’re going to get a hand.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:09:21] I remember thinking: I’ve spent five years in engineering and there’s a lot of weird stuff that’s very counter-intuitive and I already know this. So, I have an intuition about this, but I know a lot of biologists would agree with him and not me, and frankly, I know that I don’t know and us sitting here arguing is just making us miserable and ruining our vacation trip. Why don’t I just shut up and go figure this out when I get home. And that’s what I did.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:10:03] It sent me down a deep rabbit hole that I couldn’t have imagined. I would have never done that had I not been shaken to the core because I was sufficiently comfortable with my existing beliefs. He forced the question, and I think a subtext to this entire story was that: I want to maintain a good relationship with my brother, despite our assumptions being shaken and changing. And I have to figure this out in a way that honours our relationship.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:10:55] That ended up being a really important determination because as things move forward, I’d say within a few months, he became completely disinterested in continuing to argue about any of it. It wasn’t that he had made up his mind, he still had tons of questions, but arguing and debating was not going to be a good way for him to sort it out. Meanwhile, he had seeded me with a ton of questions that I now needed to go and find answers to. So, I had to go out on my own. I couldn’t work this out in some sort of co-dependent way. I couldn’t say: As long as I’m smart enough to convince Brian, it’s all ok. He said: I don’t want you to try to convince me. Go talk to somebody else. Go convince them.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:11:57] Him deciding to do that was a big part of how I decided to engage with a much wider part of the world. In hindsight, that was an absolutely crucial decision.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:12:14] So you went on to launch the Evolution Prize 2.0. What was your major motivation, because the story that you describe was sparked by spiritualism in a sense? But then the Evolution Prize is absolutely rooted in science. You’re saying that the two are connected; spiritualism, God and the part of science that we still need to crack such as evolution, cancer and climate change.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:13:14] Your brother, an atheist, ended up, I’m not sure if he still is, president of your company.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:13:20] He is just in the process of moving on to some other things. He was the president of my company for about 12 years.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:13:31] So, as an atheist, he was president of your company, presumably, not just because he’s your brother, because he believes and believed in the science. Can you describe your journey of corralling all these top scientists of the world to support the Evolution Prize and then go on to talk of the cellular level?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:14:22] Where this connected spirituality and science for me was that before I ever had that conversation, I had a very primal, intuitive and experiential perspective, which was I’m an engineer and I’ve designed lots of things. I understand all of the very careful thought and analysis and trade-offs and everything that happens when you design anything. When I look at a hand, I see a remarkable set of choices that have been made. Therefore, a hand is purposeful, therefore life is purposeful. I know this as an engineer.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:15:12] This doesn’t exactly prove God, or it doesn’t make a big theological statement. But to me at least, it all points everything in the direction of something very big and purposeful going on in the universe. I was always comfortable that that was necessarily true. Brian was challenging that stating that blind, purposeless processes will do this. Well, what I realized was any theory of evolution is a theory of engineering. If a camera is something that an engineer designs and if evolution produces an eye and an eye is like a camera, then evolution is engineering.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:15:55] So, wait a minute, there’s a bunch of missing stuff that nobody ever even mentioned in engineering school. There must be some whole missing part here. Well, it turned out there was, but I had no idea what it was. I think most importantly, none of the popular evolution books were actually properly explaining it. To be completely honest, the popular books were mostly terrible. They left out entire professions of science and just sort of pretended that the last 50 years of molecular biology never even happened. I was so puzzled by this, but I didn’t know what the missing part was. The best term for the missing part was something that is now called natural genetic engineering, which you can go and look up, there’s a Wikipedia entry on it.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:17:11] Brian and I argued. Brian argued that cells were not engineered, and I said: Cells were engineered.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:17:17] The truth is that cells are engineers. There’s no question like it when you read the literature, if you study bacterial resistance to antibiotics, if you study viruses, if you study cancer, oh my goodness, the level of engineering the cells do in real time and evolving in real time is astonishing. What was interesting was that it’s not particularly politically correct to describe it in the exact way I just have, because it raises too many unanswered questions.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:18:01] I became very interested in the unanswered questions. What I found was that the polarized sides of the debate were all clinging to certain answers that they had or that they thought they had, and they were just using them like sticks to beat the other side. What I saw was that there was this very deep well between the two sides. It was like, well, if I come off of this little hill over here and this one over here, there’s this Grand Canyon in the middle that nobody’s really talking about and it’s just laden with treasures.

Professor George Church Judge Evolution 2.0 Prize

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:18:46] To make a very long story short, I realized that the best way to put a spotlight on the unanswered questions was to pick the biggest unanswered question I could find and attach a $10 million prize to it. And I did and I needed to find Judges. What I found was that to most scientists this was too hot a potato to be associated with. The only scientists who were in a place in their careers where they could afford to be associated with something controversial like this were rock stars. George Church, PhD, is one of the most famous geneticists in the world, his student, Jennifer Doudna,PhD, just won the Nobel Prize about four months ago. Everybody in genetics knows who he is. I said to George: Do not do this if you don’t want controversy. He said: Perry, everything I do is controversial. I’m trying to recreate woolly mammoths at Harvard, don’t worry about it, it’s fine.

Emeritus Professor Denis Nobel Judge Evolution 2.0 Prize

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:20:07] With Denis Noble,CBE, PhD, FRS it’s the same thing. Denis has been intensely interested in the parts of evolution that nobody’s been discussing for about 50 years. He’s 84. And because he’s retired, he has the academic freedom to pretty much do anything he wants. So, he has created a group called The Third Way of Evolution, which is bringing all this stuff to the forefront.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:20:42] Here’s what I found, and, by the way, I’ve consulted in hundreds of industries and find this to be consistently true in any field. It can be science. It can be medicine. It can be chiropractic. It can be bowling alleys. Here’s the truth. You have these layers, you’ve got the rank and file and then you got the management and then you’ve got the administration and at the very top, you have the true adventurers and innovators. What the adventurers and innovators always have the courage to do is to kick over the sacred idols and cows and question everything, and it just doesn’t bother them that we don’t know certain things. It terrifies everybody else.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:21:41] What I find is that the very best people who have earned a certain degree of respect have the latitude to go ask the hard questions. If you have lunch with them, you’ll find out that their mind is like a playground. There’s way more stuff than you even hear them talking about. Einstein and Niels Bohr and Schrodinger and even the more recent modern minds, the very best ones were way more willing to question the boundaries of everything than everyone else. Isaac Newton was the same way. In fact, Isaac Newton has been boxed in by historians as being some kind of reductionist. He spent 20 years of his life doing alchemy experiments which would horrify most of the people who worship him. But he was out on the bleeding edge trying crazy stuff.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:22:55] This has been the most fascinating thing about it because there’s a point where you break through the clouds and the sun is shining again. The earth is not all grey. I just want to encourage people because there’s no way that the people listening to this podcast are not kind of like me. If you’re listening to this podcast, you’re asking big questions and most people who ask big questions are just sort of lost in some university or some institution and trying to get a scholarship or a fellowship or you’re trying to get a job or you’re trying to get a promotion or whatever. You’re dealing with the mundane so much of your life. But maybe an hour a day, you can go over here, and you can kind of chisel away at something. Dude, keep chiselling because most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in five.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:24:11] In launching the prize, I’m really fascinated to hear whether it led to unanticipated questions being asked of the prize and yourself and the scientists involved. What happened after the launch of the prize?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:24:33] The official launch of the prize was a little less than two years ago. You do things like this and you have this idea of how it’s going to go and then there’s how it actually goes. What I thought would happen would be that it would generate a lot of newspaper headlines and social media and it might go viral. That’s not really what happened. What happened was, within some number of months, I was contacted by one of my science friends, James Shapiro, and a couple of his friends. One of them was Frank Laukien at Bruker Corporation, and they wanted to put together an evolution and cancer conference. I said yeah in a second, I’m all over it, let me help you.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:25:51] Now what on earth does an origin of life prize have to do with cancer? Well, actually everything, because fundamentally it’s the same question underneath both of them, which is, where does information come from and where does intelligence come from and how is it produced and how does it work? The answer is nobody knows, but the fundamental problem with cancer is that cells are intelligent. Cancer cells are intelligent, and tumours are intelligent. When you nuke a tumour with chemo, it’s kind of like dumping napalm on a Vietnamese village. What happens is if you don’t kill all of them, if you only kill 98% of them, the 2% that you didn’t kill, they’re coming back and they’re mad. They’re going to get every kind of gun, weapon, knife, boat, submarine, nuclear weapon, airplane and missile and they’re going to come back at you.

Cancer & Evolution Symposium

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:27:03] One of the things that the Cancer & Evolution Symposium did was it brought all of these forward thinkers from a bunch of different fields. It wasn’t just cancer, it was physics and chemistry and physiology and systems biology, and they’re all unafraid to ask these questions. It’s been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done, seeing all of that come together. I just submitted a paper that should be published in the next couple of months saying that actually origin of life, cancer, A.I., evolution and a couple of other things are all one question, they’re not six questions. It is delightful to be with people who think like that. I think that’s the kind of thinking that we’re going to have to have in order to make progress on cancer. It’s thrilling, honestly.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:28:15] It’s really fascinating because we sit here in the information age and even at a cellular level, it’s all about information and communications, it would appear.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:28:30] It is. It totally is. Humans didn’t invent the internet, bacteria did. They’ve been communicating for three billion years and they’re way better at it than we are. The technologies that humans produce are crude tinker-toys. One blade of grass is 10,000 years ahead of any human technology and I completely stand behind that statement. I think for the most part, we have drastically underestimated the power of nature and it’s one of the reasons why a lot of our problems aren’t getting solved the way everybody said that they would.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:29:21] The $10 Million Evolution Prize is a real thing. There is a lot of money, you went after investors. I was listening to one of the talks by one of your investors and his story. Can you talk a little bit about how people go after this prize, if they think they have the solution? I read that teams can go and make a submission, but also individuals. Can anyone submit and has anyone so far? Yes. We actually get submissions every couple of weeks or so. To be quite honest with you, most of them are kind of pitiful, just to be perfectly blunt about it. But some of them are good and interesting. I’d say about once every three to six months we get something that has some pretty interesting angles and we do publish the interesting ones on our website. I think there’s about five or six that we have published, so you can go look through what they’ve sent in. Nobody’s really cracked it. I did get a phone call about a month ago from a fairly famous scientist and I don’t think this guy has ever called me on the phone. You know when somebody calls you out of the blue and you’re like, why is he calling me? I answered the phone and he said, Perry, I figured out the origin of the genetic code. He was all excited and says I’m 92% sure. I said, well ok, send me what you’ve got. I’m still waiting for him and I know what he’s doing. He’s lining his ducks in a row and all of that. So, there’s no telling.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:31:27] This is a very hard problem and people will be working on it in 100 years. There’s just something about when you draw attention to a particular problem and people start paying attention to that particular problem, eventually stuff starts to happen. I think there’s going to be serendipities. I think this is going to be a situation where you thought you were going to answer this question, but you really ended up answering that question, which is beautiful.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:32:04] It’s really fascinating that you say serendipities because that goes back to your work on the ethernet and simultaneous interests about DNA because of your Rich Connectedness™ story with your brother. That was serendipity.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:32:22] Oh, yes, it was like my brain set on fire. It was incredible.

Multi-Disciplinary Team to Win the Prize

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:32:31] You speak of instinct quite a lot and intuition. Intuitively, if it is in fact a team that wins, how wide do you think the expertise needs to be? You’ve said that it requires multiple disciplines. For example, should it include artists, bio artists, artists fascinated in exponential technology? I think you have a philosopher on your team who is deliberately an atheist (of course he is deliberately an atheist) but you chose him on the basis of not wanting to be seen as not just pursuing religious motives. You want this to be very much seen as a scientific project. What is your intuition? How do you see the composition of the winning A-Team?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:33:50] I’ll give you two answers to that. The first answer is, about five years ago, I was out raising money, trying to get investors to back this thing, and I found myself in the office of the director of investments for the company in Dubai that built the Burj Khalifa, which was incredible. I just knew somebody, and he said: Let’s go meet this guy.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:34:23] He was a really sharp guy. His name was Nasser Batha and he looked at what I was doing, and he said: This is really cool, I love what you’re doing but unfortunately, I can’t invest in this because my investment charter is real estate and this is not real estate, but I know who’s going to win this.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:34:43] I said: You do? Well, let’s hear it.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:34:48] He said, I don’t think an American scientist in a white lab coat is going to win this thing. I think it’s going to be a 14-year-old Montessori school kid from Sweden or Italy or some artistic country.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:35:06] I thought I could totally believe that, and he says when they figure it out, everybody will go, that is so obvious, why didn’t we think of that? I think there is a part of this that is going to require people to be childlike and just set aside what they know and get lost in the wonder of it and be willing to ask, “stupid questions”.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:35:45] Could you elaborate on that a little bit more and describe the problem in greater detail that these people need to solve, or children need to solve?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:35:45] The problem is where does information come from? Where does code come from? So, I’m an Engineer and I wrote an ethernet book and if you look at digital code and the whole programming world, every bit of it comes from humans typing on keyboards, putting commands in and writing programs. Language is code and you and I talking is code and our computers sending the information back and forth is code. It’s all code. Code is a sign of intelligence. You’re in evolution science and soon as you talk about intelligence, you step on a landmine because now you’re talking about intelligent design and that’s creationism and the whole thing just blows up in your face.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:36:52] We can be politically correct about it, but let’s just keep asking the questions, because if the question isn’t answered, then we’re going to keep going. The reasoning was DNA is code, just like ethernet or your computer is code, all the other codes are designed, therefore DNA is designed. But cells are not just engineered, they’re actually engineers. What this brings you to is that the real question is: What is consciousness and where does that come from?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:37:43] We’re not just talking about ones and zeros. This isn’t just a computer science problem. This is also a philosophical problem. It’s also an A.I. problem, because none of the A.I. has any of this. All the A.I’s are just as dumb as a box of rocks. You can tell a story about how smart Google is but if all of the engineers took their fingers off the keyboards the whole thing and crash. I don’t know if It’d take a day, an hour or week or a month, but it would all eventually just grind to a halt.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:38:17] We’ve got to get to the real question behind all of this, and the real question is: What drives biology?

[00:38:28] To get to the second answer to your question, I’ve been having this conversation with Anna Barker, PhD, who is the former director of the National Cancer Institute. She has been wanting to put together a bioinformatics group to understand how information flows in biology. She would tell you that our understanding of how cells communicate is at the most rudimentary kindergarten level at this point in time. We need to understand it. We’ve been talking about what kind of people do you bring into a project like that, and it was a lot like what you said. It needs to be incredibly smart people across any innumerable disciplines, possibly including art, psychology and music. I would definitely want musicians in a project like that. I remember Steve Jobs saying that his top 12 engineers, the really wicked good ones that pulled off the iPhone and pulled off the iPad, he said every single one of them had a major place for music in their life.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:39:54] Going deeper and deeper and deeper into a discipline isn’t how you solve this. I think you’re going to find that the people who make progress are very deep in multiple disciplines and they’re good at explaining them.

[00:40:11] Let me tell you another story that I think is very related. I’ve got this friend named Emerson Spartz. He’s in his early thirties and he’s independently wealthy because he invested in cryptocurrency a few years ago and he pretty much spends all of his time just learning anything he wants to learn. He’s like a professional learner. He’s like, well, it’s February and March I’m going to go learn about, slime moulds or whatever. He’ll just go down these rabbit holes. He said something super interesting. He said Perry, now that I’ve gone deep in like 40 different fields here’s the pattern, here’s what always happens. I pick a field and start reading all the experts and after about 20 hours of reading, I figure out the terminology and who the major people are and I’m starting to figure it out, kind of the lay of the land. Then, somewhere in there, I find somebody who teaches me more in one hour than the previous 20 guys taught me in 20 hours. He says that person is what I call an interdisciplinary explainer.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:41:44] They are always adept in not one field, but probably four or five completely different fields, and they can explain each of them in plain English. That person is never obvious at the beginning, I have to dig a few layers deep to find that person, but then I find it and now all of a sudden, I understand it completely. When he said that, I thought all the people that I have admired and followed in my learnings have been interdisciplinary explainers, I can make a whole list of them. I think that kind of skill, anybody can cultivate it, you just have to decide to, that is how we get a new Renaissance. That is the signature of Renaissance thinking. It’s connecting dots between seemingly unrelated fields because it’s actually all related.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:42:58] It is all connected. On that note, could you please give our audience the details of how they might apply for the Evolution Prize and find out more about you?

How to Enter the Evolution 2.0 Prize?

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:43:10] If you go to evo2.org you can click on prize and it’ll take you to the prize application, you can click on book and find out about my book, Evolution 2.0. It’s all there. In fact, on the home page, there is a sign up on how to win the Evolution 2.0 Prize and it’ll take you into a conversation that I had. I talk about the dozen ways that I think someone could possibly end up approaching the prize that would produce fruit.

Andrea Macdonald, founder, ideaXme: [00:43:54] Perry Marshall, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the ideaXme show, which explores connection, rich connection, human to human as well as cell to cell.

Perry Marshall, founder of the $10 Million Dollar Evolution 2.0 prize: [00:44:06] Thank you. That was beautiful.

Credits: Andrea Macdonald, founder ideaXme.

If you enjoyed this interview please check out our interview with Professor Stephen Furber, creator of SpiNNaker.

Find ideaXme across the internet including on iTunes, SoundCloud, Radio Public, TuneIn Radio, I Heart Radio, YouTube, Vimeo, Google Podcasts, Spotify and more.

ideaXme is a global podcast, creator series and mentor programme. Our mission: Move the human story forward!™ ideaXme Ltd.