The authors received a lot of great help from a lot of wonderful people along the way. For starters, our wives, Kristen Hladecek Diamandis and Joy Nicholson, without whose love and support this book could never have been written (we’re also indebted to Kristen for designing this beautiful book jacket). Our agent, John Brockman, and our editor, Hilary Redmon, were both warriors for this project. We’d also like to thank everyone at Free Press, whose hard work helped bring this vision to fruition. Of course, a deep and special note of appreciation goes to Ray Kurzweil for his inspiration and (in Peter’s case) partnership in the creation of Singularity University. We are grateful to the dozens of innovators, philanthropists and thinkers who gave freely of their time to be interviewed for this book.
Incredible feedback along the way was provided by a host of great minds: Carl Bass, Salim Ismail, Dan Barry, Gregg Maryniak, Naveen Jain, Doug Mellinger, Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman, Kathryn Myronuk, Bob Hariri, Rafe Furst, Tim Ferriss, Chris Anderson, and Neil Jacobstein (we’d also like to thank Neil for suggesting the book’s title). Kathryn Myronuk, SU’s Knowledge Sommelier, did a great job gathering and editing the data in the reference section. Claire Lin, our creative marketing instigator, coordinated and implemented a world-class marketing campaign with enthusiasm and grace. Connie Fox handled two driven individuals and two impossible schedules and made it all look easy. We are grateful to Mark Fortier for his PR leadership, Joe Diaz for his social media prowess, Jesse Dylan for his cinematic kung fu, and Vj Anma for his assistance on taking the pulse of the public. Thank you to everybody at Singularity University—students, faculty, alumni, and staff—and the X PRIZE Foundation team—for their ideas, enthusiasm, and support. Lastly, the authors want to thank Dezso Molnar, who brought us together over a decade ago.