the bureau of justice statistics and nirvi shah. >> coming up tonight, one .enriquez --juan enriquez then, at 8:00 30, live, a chance .or you to talk to mr. enriquez we will follow that with a look at the impact of the internet and other technology on the human brain and child development. next up, we will hear from juan enriquez, the founder of the life science project at the harvard university business school and the cfo. we mention a couple of ways for you to participate in a half hour or so. we will open up your fold lines .nd take your tweets

use his name and we will search for those. we also posted a facebook question for you this evening on the deficit economy and scientific research funding. should we invest in scientific research funding. if you have questions for mr. enriquez, you can post those as well. a couple posts already. jeffrey says, replay teddy cruz speeches. what is the point, congress does not understand what that is? -- of that coming up again in about a half-hour. next up from earlier this month, juan enriquez spoke at the peterson fiscal summit and looked at the impact the .rowing deficit and debt we will show you his comments and then hear from you.

[applause] ♪ >> good morning. let's go up to the first slide, please. all of you know the story of paul revealed -- were -- paul revere. the british are coming and people paid attention and that was a good thing. a modern paul revere looks like this. [laughter] he has been wandering around and saying, hey, folks. the dutch are coming, the dutch are coming. he has been doing that for decades. of course, even though he has been warning about this stuff, nothing happened. usually, impolite capitalist -- one of them came out and said there are decadence -- decades where

nothing happened in decades where they do. you can accumulate that -- and then there are weeks where decades happen. can accumulate that until the european union begins to figure out when you promise to much and your debts get too big and you end up with taxes that look like 75%. if you think about what the life of a minister in the european union looks like and what it looks like every month, over the past several years, this is what they spend their weekends doing. [laughter] you can call this iceland or portugal or spain or italy or greece or cyprus. but basically, the overpromise, you overspend, and you spend your weeks making sure the

entire european union does not go off the cliff. those are the consequences if you do not act. those are the consequences if you save for decades, nothing has happened, until it does. as you are thinking about that, what will happen in the united states, mandatory spending, when the peterson foundation start thinking about stuff like this, relatively minor surgery. you are sitting here basically at 38% of the u.s. federal budget. today, what you are looking at is about 64%. as you look toward the future, the future is beginning to look like this. -- minor page and outpatient surgery is becoming critical surgery. if you have a debt problem, you do not exhibit debt by doubling or tripling the debt. let me show you what $1 trillion in $100 bills looks like when it is stacked up.

please note the gentleman sitting to the left of the picture is six feet tall. that is about $1 trillion. here is what has been happening in the u.s. with federal gross debt. you take about 1.3 of these stacks in 1983. you take about 4.4 a decade later. you take about 6.8, and then today, you are sitting at 17.2 of those stacks. by the time you project those forward, by 2040, you are talking about almost two times the gdp of the united aids. you have got to ask yourself, is that sustainable or does it again to look like a fun european weekend? , itou go through this stuff is really important you start reading documents like this, which are not the usual language of the federal reserve

subsidiary board. they are normally very boring documents and do not have ,eadlines like, deficits, debt and looming disaster. what i want you to note on this oldment is that this is an document from 2009 and was talking about the crisis when the debt was $10 trillion, not when it was $17 trillion four years later. as the system goes forward, let me remind you again, it does not seem like anything happens or interest rates go up, it does not he liked the debt matters, because we have got a lot of disciples of the fiscal -- the fictional french economist. the disciples advocate and say, you can have two major wars, and not pay. at the same time, you can give yourselves a major tax cut.

at the same time, you can increase benefits for all, and you will have no consequences. when the disciples go through the new machines at airports, the ones that do full image a- day scans, you can always tell the disciples because they look a little bit like this. [laughter] as you are thinking about this stuff and see signs looking like this, one of the things michael has just said, there is not much difference in the short term projection between the government and think tanks on the left and right. in terms of what happens over the next few years. and right,, left see a way going forward. it is painful. it would have been far less painful five or 10 years ago. this is not pleasant trade-offs.

but it is doable. it is doable without the types of crises you have seen in europe here at what is not sustainable is the current policy, which takes us in this direction. it is better to act now. as you are thinking about what acting might look like, it is a series of compromises and trade- offs. it is not either or. either or is too darn expensive. only cuts, you cut 28% of gdp. only revenue, you have to increase revenue 38% of gdp. a thirday, there is thing you have got to do. as mandatory spending starts crowding out everything else in the economy, you cannot fund growth because there is no money left to fund education, r&d, and infrastructure. the combination -- the accommodation of fun stuff, some

increase in revenue, some cuts. it is a moderate compromise in those three things. takes these two new paul revere's in a new direction. what i would love to do is take this fiscal summit and a year in two years, three years, in this direction. please get on with it. let's put ourselves out of the business of discussing the fiscal deficit and talk about important things like long-term trends. isht now, the fiscal debate taking all the oxygen out of the room. you are either on this or this side. you have all kinds of fights about stuff, which is reasonable compromises that have not happened. when you do that, what happens is you do not understand the truly important transition taking place because you are focused all day, all the time, just on the deficit. you might be missing the big

victor. here is what it looks like. humans are the only species on earth that transmit data consistently to their kids across time. dog learns commands and a parent learns words, but there is not an animal on earth that rights on cave walls except a human being. why is it so important to write on cave walls? this is how you have a baby. this is how we cook it. this is how we dress. this is how many of us there are. these are our musical instruments. you learned a whole lot about what is happening in argentina 2000 years ago. as you think about how we transmit knowledge, that is enough for a try but not an empire. why. here you have to go to a cave to learn what is going on. in empire, on the other hand, looks like this. two things have happened. you standardize the language and put it on paper, so you can

transmit data across time and you can learn the lessons of why egypt fell. all of you clearly know you can read that, right? deficit.lly says, then you standardize language and you put it in 26 letters and it looks like this. you have huge data. in this, you can write sentences that say, cut the deficit. what has happened over the last 30 years is you have collapsed all the languages in ones and zeros. that is -- it is the countries that understood the transition because they were not worried about the current problems but look at the future. of understand the rise silicon valley, taiwan, boston, singapore, india, if that transition right there. the first line of code says, i

love you. the second says, i hate you. the difference between love or hate, green or purple. what have you done? you have collapsed every word written or spoken in england and condensed it into two letters, and chinese, and japanese, every chine -- every language in the world. , and everyusic photograph, and every video, and every film. that translation in code is what generated most of the big companies you look at. write sentences like this. guess what this one said here it cut the deficit. as you are looking at this transition, you can take the world's first trillion operations per second per computer and put this into an intel chip in your computer, which gives a street salesmen

in mom by as much information as the president of the united states had 20 years ago. take all the satellite images and maps and bios and send them to your smart phone. as you begin to think of those transitions, what is really important to understand is the transition took place really quickly. the world was basically 98% analog in 1996. it is about 96% to juggle today. you blow up xerox and all these enormous businesses. you have built enormous businesses, if you were paying attention to the transition. here are the top 10 fastest- growing u.s. industries for the last decade. you want to understand where jobs are? where growth is? it is countries that spend money on education and infrastructure as codes transition. every single one of those has to deal with the transition of ones and zeros. you are all a bit -- a very competitive group.

let's try the following experiment. see if you can get more answers than your neighbors on this question. for the next 15 seconds, come up five large u.s. companies that did not exist 10 years ago, 20 years ago, or 30 years ago? just think them through. all right. now tell your neighbor how many you came up with and see if they have more or less. all right. for the winners. here is a bonus question. do exactly the same thing with either major european companies that did not exist a decade ago,

two decades ago, or three decades ago, and see how many names you come up with. that one is a little harder. whywant to understand there is 40% unemployment in spain? you want to understand why there is huge debt crises? partly it was because there was no growth, not because there are no smart people. there were no startups. partly because they spent a whole series of mandatory spending items and did not invest in the future. as you think about this stuff, job growth only comes from startups. it is not the fortune 500. it is not the fortune 50 that generate net new jobs. it is the start up economy. people are investing in the future. they got dreams and they invest in the stuff. it is important for education,

infrastructure, r&d. let me tell you about the current transition. again, we are transitioning in code. we move from hieroglyphs to abc's, to ones and zeros, and we are transitioning in dna now. 60 years ago, they began to argue that all life is coded in what they call a double helix. this double helix of dna has four little runs in it. waterfe is coded in levels. , every orange,ng every politician, they are all made of the same stuff. as you are thinking about this stuff, you can write incredibly boring books. you can write trillions of letters of this stuff. why is this important? it means this orange executes code. how does it work? it is simple.

it begins to execute code and says -- make a little rude. -- root. make some leaves. make some oranges. remember those ones and zeros? . love you, i hate you it really matters which string you send. same thing with life. orange. this becomes a grapefruit. this becomes a lemon. maybe he becomes a watermelon. you change one out of the letters, you become the person you are sitting next to today. the more careful where you sit next time. as you are thinking of the consequences of this stuff, it turns out life is code. , we can read it, we can copy it, we can edit it,

just as we do with ones and zeros, or words or hilar breaths. -- hieroglyphs. you can go to argentina, they will introduce you to your friend, the cal. as you are petting the cal, these to show up and you say to yourself, those two look really similar. they do. -- cow take the cal -- how genome, you can take the g -- the genome of every cal and give birth to two clones. this is what cloning looks like. . placing a bunch of clone met -- embryos. there are a lot of cal was that look really similar.

i did not expect to find this in argentina. why are you taking so many pictures? do you understand? they are all the same. [laughter] stage one, we read the genome. states two, we photocopy it. stage three, we edit it. is important because we edited the genome. we did not copy it -- in such a way this animal produces medicine used to create cancer in its milk. substitute animals for this factory right here. and where wehings make things will fundamentally change. those countries did not just focus on things.

they invest in the future and r&d and had startups and became the powerful countries on earth. the same thing is happening now if life code makes its way across the economy. how and where we make things will change in a fundamental way. of course, no red-blooded american would ever want to be treated with a medicine used were created in argentine cloned cows. that is why americans are using goats. these are goats in western massachusetts worth about a million dollars apiece. forward,uff moves this is beginning to move through college campuses. college kids are beginning to ask the question, can these simple biological systems be build and operate within living cells? the answer is yes. what these kids have been doing is building everything you can build in electronics but they

have been building it themselves. all the switches, mathematical compilers, etc., that you have in a computer ship, you can build the cell and you can build it in a robust system. you can copy. you can make this standard. you can build all the things that make a logic circuit on a computer. what are the consequences of being able to do that? five years ago, in a bar across the river, after three scotches, ande two guys, sat down said, would it be cool if we could program cells as you program computer chips? we decide to find -- fund the company, and it helps when you're partner sequenced the genome. it also helps when the guy sitting down one a nobel for enzymes. a mere four years and $32

million later, we are able to take this picture. why is this picture important? it is the first time you transform one creature into a completely different creature. one species into a different speeches. some people thought was the world's first synthetic life form. 4800 papers and magazines and the science discovery of the year. this is interesting because there are two big differences between what happened over the last 30 years with digital code and it what is about to happen. you can make anything you program the cell to make. to make gasoline, machines, information storage, foods, and we are doing all of that. but the second big difference is, the software makes its own hardware. it does not matter how i

program a computer. i will not have 1000 computers in the morning. if i program cells, they go from one of the test tubes and we go back to our greenhouse in san diego and they look like this. what we are doing is buying a tiny piece of the valley, and here is what our factory will look like. some of those will make energy and some will make textiles and some will store information and some will make -- store other stuff. we will make a transition on how and where we make things. let me tell you about the second big difference. the speed with which this is happening. the cost of sequencing a full human genome dropped in four years. it is a decline factor of 800 times compared to when computing dropped by about four times. .his is happening a lot faster the cost per genome has dropped off the cliff. we cannot build computers fast enough to

transmit it. that is one of the reasons amazon is seven percent of the cloud. everybody is uploading this stuff. companies like ibm, not just the , istups, but cambridge interested in the stuff. you hear general electric talking about this. life sciences and healthcare four percent of the revenue. that is why you see genomes and proteins and cell discovery. and why dupont is beginning to make all of the stuff not out of petrochemicals but out of cells. they are programmable. they make plastic. by the way, life sciences is 42% of total earnings. these are big transitions in the economy that are taking place very quickly, not just elsewhere.so here is the bottom line. you do not have to invest a lot of money.

these startups that start small and become the big companies in the united states, it is .2% of gdp invested through then -- ventral capital. -- venture capital. these are 21% of u.s. economic output. deficit?to address the start investing in this kind of stuff. understand the transitions. do not cut research budgets for r&d. here is my specifically. can we please get on with it already? can we quit talking about deficits and start talking about the future? you want to keep this country as the greatest power on earth? it is about investing in the future and understanding these transitions. it is about letting kids dream. changing the conversation. at this point, it is a painful operation but it is doable. it will take decades to get it done.

in europe, it has become critical and the survival of some countries and the sovereignty is at stake. let's just not reached that point. there are too many other things to talk about. thank you all very much. [applause] ♪ [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2013] [captioning performed by national captioning institute] >> next on c-span, joining us live from newton, massachusetts, is juan enriquez, the ceo of i/o tech economy. here to your comments and calls about what you just heard, the investments in research and the amounting debt in the u.s.. there are a couple of ways you -- participate by phone, turn off your

television. we will read some of your postings, as well. if you are on twitter, if you .ust use juan enriquez thank you for taking your time out this evening to talk about some of your ideas. to start off, how do you get lawmakers to be the visionaries you need to get to where you want to go with scientific research? >> you have to go back to the origins. there are a lot of people talking about what the founding fathers want to talk about. one of the real magic of the u.s. is a lot of the founding fathers fathers were interested in science and science research and entrepreneurship and building new things. stuff thatk of the jefferson did and his great library and architect are --

architecture and you talk about franklin and his inventions and research, and the other founding fathers, you go back to original principles and follow those. other talksoned in i have seen online that the whole talk about the fiscal debate is taking all of the air out of the room. how do you get lawmakers to listen to these ideas? >> part of the tragedy, what is happening, they are taking your and my credit card and charging everything on it. they are saying, we are having a great quarter or a great year. they are basically charging all of that to our kids. what is important to understand is when you spend the day but your kids have to pay later, that is not a tax cut. that is a long-term loan, which may have a very high rate of interest that our kids will have to pay.

what you have to think about now is to you invest in science, innovation, infrastructure, or do you invest in paying the current account deficit, which is what we are doing. >> your primary field is genomics. where do you see it growing in the next 20 or 50 years? >> i think the transitioning happened -- happening today in science -- during the korean war, when people worried about a possible nuclear war between the soviet union and the united states, when people worried about transitioning all the -- out ofut of two, world war ii, very few people were paying attention to transitions like these of of secure little nerves inside bell labs inventing the transition or. they ended up being one of the biggest single drivers of the

low -- of the global economy .ecause it led to the internet the biggest transition is not only in reading and writing in digital code, but the biggest transition in the world today is the transition into reading and writing life code. that will change every business on this planet. imagine if i were sitting here in the late 1970's and early 1980's, and i told you the singular -- single biggest change in the world and in your kids lives, the single against change in the position of relative countries, who is rich and who is poor, is the ability to write in ones and zeros. like a nerdlym

and obscure argument. it turns out to be true. 99% of the trans--- the information we transmit today is in digital code. that is why we do not use vinyl records. that is why we do not use manual typewriters. that is the reason why we can use the internet. that is the reason why you have wonderful posters out on the internet. your parents never had access to google and wikipedia in school. we are beginning to understand how the code of a virus is written, how the coat of a bacteria is written, how the code of the plant is written, how the code of an animal is written, how the coat of a human being is written, even how the coat of a politician is written. as you begin to think about that stuff, what is interesting and important is very small changes could leave -- lead to a big difference. the difference between a chihuahua and a great dane is a single gene out of 20,000 genes.

the difference between a tree a fewrows at this size is genes. if you think about life at those terms, how long a human being lives, what the quality of our life is, what diseases we die of, how we feed ourselves, what medicines we take, how we clothe ourselves and create energy, all of that will change in a fundamental way as we begin righterstand, read, and life code. >> we have a lot of callers and comments waiting. joining us from newton massachusetts. caller is in new york city. thank you for taking my call. you paint a grand picture of science and the future and its place in humanity. i really appreciate that. resonate with a lot of it

because i am an engineering student. you mentioned the importance that spending has, as well. mandatory spending, for example. ,ocial security, entitlements education, etc., and connecting that with science. you mentioned that investments in science and engineering and innovation, they take small amounts of spending. people, inow general, view that sort of spending, the culture of science, and the way people how cany see science, you bridge the divide that currently exists from what most people think about science, which is not much, and it shows in a lot of international at , and-- international exams the digital divide that exists

between first world and third world countries. it is extremely large. you may talk about the importance of reading and this new way to speak, speaking in the language of the life of code, but a lot of people do not have that sort of opportunity in the world. >> i will let you go there and hear the response. thank you for your call. , you know, computers used to be incredibly insensitive -- expensive. having access to a computer used to be a big wheel. people stayed up until 2:00 in the morning to be able to program a few lines of code into the computer. today, everyone has access to a massive supercomputer called cell phones. the amount of data you have access to on your iphone or on your cell phone or on your android phone, is equivalent to what the president of the united states had a couple decades ago.

if you look at all the maps and biographies and information. if the president said, i want all the data on this, you now have that as a fruit salesman in for a few cents. it has shut down the whole discussion of the digital divide. 10 years ago, we were worried about those who would have access to information and those who did not. basically, the information has become so cheap and ubiquitous and large, wikipedia, google, and this that the other, that there is no longer a talk of a digital divide. what has happened is countries like india and taiwan and singapore, korea, basically now have a standard of living equivalent to that of the united states because they educated their children in the new language, they took education seriously, they took the digital education seriously, and all of a sudden you have all these countries growing at nine at

nine percent every single year on a compounded basis. and you get this massive growth. something similar will happen in life sciences. the rich countries today may be that justcountries educate their kids in the stuff. that is why the stuff is so important. that is why the deficit stuff is so important. we are spending a lot of money today on a whole series of mandatory programs. a lot of other countries are spending money on the next generation. they are spending money on education. it is not a lot of money. growthnough to have a rate that is different between this country and this country and when you have a growth rate that is three times as large in one country versus another, year after year after year, those countries catch up very quickly. >> for a quick snapshot of where things stand with the deficit and that's -- and that's --

, 642 billiondebts dollars is four percent of gdp. the national debt is 6.8 chilean dollars. -- $6.8 trillion. i sold the program microsoft word to bill gates in 1980. software is one of the reasons it has gone overseas. i wonder if the wonderful technology you are talking about, that everyone in america should see that talk, i am just wondering if it will bring jobs back from the united states or will further move american jobs offshore. still united states is the most innovative place on the planet. when you look at the entrepreneurship, when you look at the men and women wanting to start new companies, when you look at the research going on in

the universities, particularly life sciences, the united states is so far ahead of the rest of the world, the u.s. is to lose. this is one of the key instruments. what the united states can do that very few other countries can is they can take the energy out of research come out of the universities, out of people like you, and turned it into these enormous companies. the union, state in just to take your particular story, should be new mexico. because that is where microsoft was started. because microsoft moved from albuquerque to seattle, all the sudden, washington state became a huge hub of growth and it has and allhat and amazon these companies. it is because it is where people like you choose to live that generates enormous growth, just to repeat one statistic. .2% of the u.s. economy is invested in venture back startups. , andf u.s. economic output

11% of u.s. jobs and 21% of u.s. economic output. 10,000 brains like yours, and what we have to do is not just this cost the deficit and whether it is democrat versus republican, but discuss how we take the 100 smartest people in each high school, the hundred smartest people in each college, and give them an opportunity to build colleges that are 10 times or 100 times the size of microsoft or amazon or intel and make the u.s. remain the economic power it is. by the way, it would be good for the u.s. to have this happen overseas as well. the more the world gets smarter and the more the world gets richer, we take more care of the

environment, we consume less resources, we do better as a world, and it does not help us to have more poor countries and more isolated countries. have moret help us to divided democrats or republicans. we have to start talking about how we deal with a very big issues in the world, as to how we reach structure the european economy -- restructure the european economy, how we solve crises in medicine so we double human lifespan. those are the challenges our kids and congress should be talking about. >> we go to chicago next on our independent line. caller: good evening. there is quite obviously a huge backlash against a biotechnology and me personally, looking into this more, more transparency is needed, more of a public dialogue. because obviously some of the

consequences of biotechnology is controversial, from the human genome roger, and even agriculture. there was a large demonstration this past weekend against one of andlarge biotech companies people are adamantly against the kinds of genetically modified organisms and the supreme court is hearing a case on whether you can patent genes. we could foresee a future where you could have surgeries targeted on specific gene patents. the big question is whether or not this seems like we could be giving god-like powers to scientists. what are your thoughts on that and how safe could this be? with the consequent -- the concept of biotechnology in agriculture, a lot people are worried about inadequate modified organisms and how that

creates huge health problems. >> thank you. we appreciate your call. , first, no technology is perfectly safe. the problem with countries starts when countries start to make a reasonable-sounding ledges nation that turns out to be completely unreasonable. parts of europe have adopted the precautionary principle. the precautionary principle says you prove to me this is completely safe and i will approve it. think about that for one second. intellectually, it sounds interesting and attractive because you want what is approved to be safe. but you would not be allowed to build a staircase, and automobile, and electric light socket, if that was the principle applied to technology. unless the biotechnology is the first technology humans have ever invented that is completely 100% guaranteed safe,

then you and i know we will make mistakes. the question is not whether we will make mistakes. the question is what is the alternative and how expensive is it to not apply this? let's talk about agriculture for one second. if you do not have increased products, crops, if you do not use less pesticides, if you do not use less fertilizers, if you make it all organic, part of what will happen is you will take an area the size of the amazon and put it under cultivation to feed the next 2 billion people. either we wipe out all of the rain forest in the world to feed the next 2 billion people, or, we begin to increase the productivity per acre that we form. .hat we -- farm what we have been doing is increasing the productivity of corn, wheat, reducing the use of pesticides.

so far, at least, there has yet to be a case i am aware of where somebody has a serious reaction to a genetically modified organism. which, you cannot say for peanut butter, which you cannot say for a whole series of foods. you do not ask people if they are allergic to genetically modified foods. you ask them if they are allergic to stuff which many of us live with everyday. so far, and this is not a guarantee of what will happen in the future, genetically 70% ofd foods, about the grains we consume today are genetically modified, have been very safe. have to be careful. we still have to test the stuff. but it makes a huge difference if you can generate four times as used tod per acre generate per acre. it makes a huge to france if you use less test decides. sometime soon, what will happen

is you will start getting food to fight specific diseases. you will have cancer fighting corn. at that point, there will be interesting trade-offs. >> we are talking about the federal debt and how we fund research.entific 15 more minutes of your calls. on twitter, you can use juan enriquez in your tweet. here is a tweet. >> there is a whole series of ways of building companies. the tax structure is one of the pieces. but the main piece of the whole thing is really important the

government understands what it does and does not do well. the government funds basic research very well. if there is basic research at nih, basic research at nasa, basic research at the national academy of science, basic series oft a whole organizations, that is fantastic. once the research starts becoming, how do you apply this to business, governments do that very poorly. that is the point where you get investors, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and part of the magic of the u.s. is in the places where that bridge works, you get a lot of economic growth. let me give you an example of this. if you walk around m.i.t., the difference between that area of cambridge 30 years ago and that avery -- that area today is night and day in terms of buildings, restaurants, art,

museums, economic output. the same thing is true in silicon valley. simply because stamford m.i.t. were very good at taking a sick science research and translating it into companies that look like google. andasic science research i translating it into google companies that look like google. not want to walk 10 blocks in the university of chicago. there are huge ghettos university has not been able to create jobs and it has not been able to create startups. it has not been able to create a local economy. as a result, you have poor people sitting around the university. a lots what happens in of europe. it is hard for some of the european if her -- universities to make the bridge between a lot of government funding and the university and the start up business. the magic of the u.s., the

power of the u.s., is a continuous ability to reinvent itself, to generate new jobs, to generate new technologies, to take stuff which did not exist and make it true. of the lot of the rest world follows and also makes itself rich. that is the thing the u.s. will do not just in life sciences at it is doing it right now in robotics, nano tech, the data research. there are so many interesting areas where our kids can work. but it is really important to get our schools right. it is really important to invest not just in the elderly, which is where we are spending most of the money, but to invest in the next generation and the schools and the basic research and infrastructure. >> back to our phone calls. robert, good evening. caller: yes. i appreciate c-span. i tuned into your program a little late.

i have been able to figure out biotechnology. theuestion would be religious aspect. i recently became a christian. that peopleeel realize you are messing with dna, genome projects, and it soundsnimals, and great, cancer fighting milk and everything, but what is your opinion on the religious aspect and how people are afraid we are doing what god does? >> one of the interesting things about religion is religion's appear and disappear. most of the religions that humans have generated, most of the gods humans have worshiped across time, have ended up in parts of history museums or art museums or part of

archaeological sites. and that is the reason why you go to a series of races and people used to worship the god of thunder or the god of rain or the god of this and that. religions that tend to survive across time just as species are the religions that adopt and adapt as things change. because there are two visions of how to think about religion. areis, we know, if we believers, everything that god taught us and intended and we know it from the beginning. and those religions tend to disappear. other religions tend to say, you know, as you get smarter, we adopt and adapt to what is happening. the religions that tend to last across time are those that understand we are taking a small green poisonous berry and cultivating it to the point where it becomes a big, beautiful, heirloom tomato or many efferent versions of

tomatoes. -- efferent versions of tomatoes. there are religions that understand we have taken a small grain the size of your thumbnail the size of corn. we have taken moles and turned them into dogs. we have been doing this for a long time. as we breathe -- read festivals -- breed vegetables, animals, we begin to understand how to modify gene code so we live longer, because we double the lifespan of human beings over the last hundred years, those religions tend to do very well. back the religions that knowledge, learning, education, and the religions that are humble to say, i am still learning, that tend to generate both successful worshipers, successful congregations, successful countries across time.

that is something the u.s. is allowed. the u.s. is allowed tolerance. the u.s. is allowed learning. the u.s. is allowed for many different believes to coexist. >> on the extended lifespan of human beings, i heard the talk you did, not the one we showed this evening, but you talked about the human lifespan going up to 120, 130 years. do you think that is possible? how many years down the road do you see that happening echo -- happening? our grandparents were around, they were around my age, those who were 65 looked pretty old. when social -- when social security was established, the average lifespan was a couple of years. part of the problem would be deficit, retirement deficits, and all this, is because we have increased it to the point where someone dies at 75, they are dying young.

it is not unusual to see 80- year-olds. it is not unusual to see 90- year-olds running a marathon. which would have been really hard to conceive of for our grandparents. what we are doing today is adding about one year of life for every 10 years. every decade, we add about a year. it is notthat, inconceivable that our grandchildren will live pretty and the new 60 will be 100. were will be a point where are going to reach some really interesting and complicated ethical dilemmas. because we can now ready much know that we can clone our bodies out of any one of ourselves. we have not done that. we should not do that. it is a risky technology. it is highly experimental. until we make it safe, that is

not a choice we should face or discuss. thennce you make it safe, there is an interesting question. would you like to have an identical twin that happens to be 30 years younger or 50 years younger? what would you teach it? would you want it? how would you do that? how would you deal in the world where that became commonplace? if you could have an identical twin that was frozen because you can freeze cells and it was born 500 years, would you want that to happen? there is a whole big complicated thatal, moral structure andges with this technology there will be a healthy, interesting, open debate on this stuff. some veryng transformative stuff. we shouldw and 2020,

be able to tell if landis that look like earth have life in other places. >> let's get back to our call here. sorry to interrupt you there. a number of folks standing by want to ask you questions. alabama, next up. alex, go ahead. .aller: good afternoon i really enjoyed the conversation. i would like to make two questions. ,ne thing that is very clear the democrats, republicans, fight each other. that is the sad part. secondly, most of us know [indiscernible] does not work and does not align us to use the technology of biotech and computer marriages that could tour of the future of

the country. the country four years ago, [indiscernible] the best plate -- place was united states. today, i am considered by my grandchildren, i am afraid for them to learn chinese. i am disappointed. i do not know what to do to wake up republicans to tell them we have to not fight each other. nothing but lies and fights. we all know. i know. you know. everyone hearing knows that these guys forget about the country, forgot about my taxes for the salary. it don't matter what i do. let you know there. going back to the original point, how do you get lawmakers to listen to your ideas and work on the deficit issue and scientific research? >> that is part of the problem we have with deficits. what is happening in europe is

they never faced a series of this debate in a series of countries. all of the sudden, the credit ran out. what ends up happening is nothing happens and nothing happens and nothing happens and then over the course of a weekend, you get the explosion in the bond markets. then you wake up and you have no banks, no credit, you have a system where all, people realize you are broke because you spend more money than you had, not for, not for a month, not for a year, not for a decade, but for several decades. part of what the u.s. is doing right now, which is very healthy, is just recognizing how big the problem can be before we reach a situation like that faced by iceland or ireland or greece or spain or portugal or perhaps italy and france. if we can solve this, if we can get democrats and republicans to say, ok, look, we do not like

the increase in revenues, we do not like the programs, -- the cuts in the programs, but we will have to blend these two alongside economic growth. if we can do the three things together, it is manageable, with some pain, but we get on with the debate. if the u.s. were able to do that, if it could just show the sign where it is bending that deficit curve, this becomes the world's reserve current see again and we can get on with funding our schools, funding our infrastructure, funding economic growth. the other thing we have to do is, frankly we are spending so much money in the last three years of life, the last five years of life, the last 10 years of life, versus what we are spending at the beginning. we are not spending the money on basic nutrition, a six vaccines, basic trees goal, raising basic preschool, basic education, and the difference between investing on compound entrance -- interest in

50 years versus in the months. >> i want to get your reaction from a comment on laura on facebook who said the adaptation is to invest in carefully credentialed science investments -- >> your quick thoughts on that? >> i could not agree more. we have to discover new things, as opposed to, many scientists are very conservative. they move in these incremental steps because they do not want to be wrong. there are a few who are just great radical entrepreneurs. they are the steve jobs, the

benjamin franklin's, the creators who take these wild bets and sometimes the bets pay off. i completely agree with laura. we should be funding a whole series of things that are carefully researched science but are mavericks some of the stuff that the pew foundation does, and they have some of the highest paid out. >> let's get some quick comments from our viewers. i agree with the things you said about organic and the same people that want to promote organic also want to preserve the amazon. but if you have a 6000 cal dairy,