genetic testing

Anne Wojcicki explains how her experience investing in health care led her to found 23andMe and put people in control of their genetic information. She describes how consumer access, crowdsourced data, and research could help shift health care toward prevention and better align incentives around keeping people healthy. She shares lessons on educating customers, learning from feedback, publishing evidence, hiring humble scientists, and staying focused through slow early sales. She closes with a long-term vision for personalized prevention, large-scale studies, and drug discovery.

Musk says useful work does not need to change the world: even a small improvement can help many people. Asked what he would focus on at age 22, he names AI as the most pressing area for humanity’s future, emphasizing the importance of making its development go well. He also points to genetics as a way to address inherited diseases and conditions such as dementia and Alzheimer’s. Finally, he highlights brain-computer interfaces as a way to reduce the bandwidth constraint between the brain and people’s digital tools.

Elon Musk says he chose work by looking for ways to be useful and for technologies approaching a steep growth curve. In college, he considered several areas, including sustainable energy, spaceflight, the internet, genetics, and AI, without expecting to work on all of them. He began with energy storage for electric cars, then paused graduate studies to start an internet company when he saw an opportunity. The talk’s lesson is to pursue work with practical impact while staying alert to the right moment for a technology.