Your area of expertise is difficult to pin down, although I’ll hazard a guess that no one has ever mistaken you for a creationist.

I keep reinventing myself because I want to learn new stuff. I started out thinking that the most important things in the world were politics and economics, so I studied political philosophy and economics. I then did international finance and business. These are 10-year periods I’m talking about. I think you should reinvent yourself every 10 years. And then I started asking myself what makes countries appear and disappear and what makes a country powerful. It wasn’t inflation or corruption, it was not geography or whether the leaders went to Harvard or Yale. A lot of countries that had presidents from Harvard and Yale have failed. I think it’s the ability to understand and apply new languages and technology that makes a country succeed. When I realized that, I started studying technology and life sciences.

If your theories are accurate, we will all have to be very efficient learners to keep up with these advances.

If you think about a newspaper in the Renaissance, the headlines would have been “At War with Islam Again,” “Crime and Corruption Rampant,” “Kidnappings Increase,” “Oil Sales Manipulated,” “French Treachery.” Among the stories the media would have missed would have been that Michelangelo finished his painting of the right hand of God in the Sistine Chapel. But that is what was lasting. The news media today are not focused on a change in global language, a change in the way we see life and energy. We are sitting in the front seat of a renaissance. We are going to double the amount of data generated by humans throughout history in the next five years. That presents incredible opportunities to build a country, an industry, a company.

How are corporations and the investment community adapting to the changes?

A big part of anyone’s investment portfolio is already invested in the life sciences. IBM is spending on life sciences as a way of trying to manage the costs of health care, which is now more expensive than steel and cars. We are beginning to see a pattern of industrial realignment, and it is not just pharmaceutical companies acquiring other pharmas. It’s GE acquiring a pharma company, or chip manufacturing companies focusing on life sciences, because life sciences will be part of all kinds of manufacturing and information management. It’s a really exciting time to be alive.

In the beginning there was what?

Cave drawings. The difference between a tribe and an empire began when the Egyptians standardized cave wall paintings into hieroglyphs. All of a sudden you can build an empire because you can give instructions.
 

We live in a country that has been around only for five lifetimes, which is not very long. What makes us think this flag is going to be stable?

The Europeans collapsed all notations into 26 letters. Then over the last 30 years we have moved into an alphabet where all the words we know are collapsed into digital format. So you don’t need separate alphabets for different languages. You don’t need a musical notation system, because you can transmit any piece of music digitally. You can transmit all of the contents of the Library of Congress in some 1.6 seconds across a single fiber optic cable. Now that changes the rules of the game fundamentally, because it means that the richest societies on the planet are those that speak digits. Take a look at the rise of Singapore, Manhattan, the music industry, aerospace, lawyers, consultants. All of these entities have risen because they know how to manipulate the digitized information.

And digital-speak led to mapping the genome?

Yes. Take, oh, a grape. Like all life forms, it is coded in a spiral staircase that is called DNA, which is like a diskette that holds program information. If you drop the program for a grape into the ground, it will begin to execute long strings of AAATCGCGCATA. That’s an instruction. If you tweak the DNA code for an orange, you will get a tangerine. If you tweak a little more, you go to a grapefruit. If you tweak a little more, then you can make a vaccine that immunizes people against cancer.
 
This operating code is going to become the world’s dominant language. The life code and the ability to read it will be the greatest single driver of the global economy. The countries, the people, the industries that get rich are going to get rich from life sciences and their application. What I’m interested in is what it will do to countries.

It takes more than a group of researchers in a lab to unravel the structure of a country.

You really have to be careful with countries; they’re very fragile. They are going to be there only as long as the next generation supports the myths that you believe and support. The economy and life sciences and technology are the gasoline that enables you to survive, but they don’t guarantee your survival. There can be very divisive issues, and if you have that gasoline but do not generate wealth, it will be very hard to keep the engine running. We have to quit having these bitter debates about how everyone on the right is nuts and nasty and antiscience, while everybody on the left is against life and religion. The consequence of pushing that debate forward can tear a nation apart.

How many stars were on the American flag when George Washington was born? None. When Ronald Reagan was born, Alaska and Hawaii were not part of the U.S. The last time the flag changed was 1959. Until you get a president born after 1959 and the flag stays stable, you are not going to have a president buried under the same flag that was flying when he was born. We live in a country that has been around only for five lifetimes, which is not very long. What makes us think this flag is going to be stable? Most countries actually get smaller after independence. In Africa, Asia and Europe the number of nations has tripled since the mid-20th century. It has not happened in North or South America. The Americas is a very strange place.

But we have had a good run, from sea to shining sea and all that.

Our country began in the days of the British Empire, when acquiring land was what made a country rich. The way we generate wealth has changed. Most of the wealth that flows from the United States comes from places like Manhattan, and goes into states that are still agricultural or manufacturing states. In an agricultural economy, you could not remove the fields and mines, which were the sources of wealth, from the land. If you didn’t like the government of that land, you were stuck with it. Today you can take an electronic bank account and transfer most of the wealth offshore without having to move anything physically. Everything will look the same the next morning.

If you look at the wealthiest country on the planet in terms of productivity per person, it is not the United States anymore. It’s Luxembourg. It generates about 33 percent more wealth per person per year than the U.S. does. Even in a small landlocked state, you can generate wealth. Luxembourg has no oil or excess water. Instead it has assets that manipulate data that people need and are willing to pay for. They call them trusts, legal agreements, financial services, futures. Today the most successful nations are those that control the financial sector.

Going forward, the dominant nations will be those that control the evolution of life on the planet, the ones that educate their kids in areas like molecular biology, the ones that build industries around medical treatments involving the genome map.