someone was leaking information on
Google and this stuff is incredibly
secret so what are the secrets well the
first is Eric Schmidt is the former CEO
of Google who grew the company from $100
million to 180 billion and this is how
as someone who's LED one of the world's
biggest tech companies what are those
first principles for leadership business
and doing something great well the first
is risk taking is key if you look at
Elon he's an incredible entrepreneur
because he has this Brilliance where he
can take huge risks and fail fast and
Fast failure is important because if you
build the right product your customers
will come but it's a race to get there
as fast as you can because you want to
be first because that's where you make
the most amount of money so what are the
other principles that I need to be
thinking about so here's a really big
one at Google we have the 72010 rule
that generated 10 20 30 40 billion
dollar of extra profits over a decade
and everyone could go do this so the
first thing is what about AI I can tell
you that if you're not using AI at every
aspect of your business you're not going
to make it but you've been in the tech
industry for a long time and you've said
the Advent of artificial intelligence is
a question of human survival AI is going
to move very quickly and you will not
notice how much of your world has been
co-opted by these Technologies because
they will produce greater Delight but
the questions are what are the dangers
are we advancing with it and do we have
control over it what is your biggest
fear about AI my actual fear is
different from what you might imagine my
my actual fear
is that's a good time to pull the plug
this has always blown my mind a little
bit 53% of you that listen to the show
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much
[Music]
Eric I've read about your career and
you've had an extensive a varied a
fascinating career completely unique
career and that leads me to believe that
you could have written about anything
you know you've got some incredible
books all of which I've been through
over the last couple of weeks here in
front of me I apologize no no but I mean
these are subjects that I'm just
obsessed with but this book in
particular of all the things you could
have written about with the world we
find ourselves in why this why Genesis
well first thank you for I wanted to be
on the show for a long time so I'm
really happy to be able to be here in
person in London Henry Kissinger Dr
Kissinger ended up being one of my
greatest and closest friends and 10
years ago he and I were at a conference
where he heard heard Demis hbus speak
about Ai and Henry would tell the story
that he was about to go catch up on his
jet lag but instead I said go do this
and he listened to it and all of a
sudden he understood that we were
playing with fire that we were doing
something that we did not understand it
would have the impact on and that Henry
had been working on this since he was 22
coming out of the army after World War
II and his thesis about Kant and so
forth as an undergraduate at Harvard so
all of a sudden I found myself in a
whole group of people who are trying to
understand what does it mean to be human
in an age of AI when this stuff starts
showing up how does our life change how
do our thoughts change humans have never
had an intellectual Challenger of our
own ability or better or worse it just
never happened in history the arrival of
AI is a huge moment in history for
anyone that doesn't know your story or
maybe just knows your story from sort of
Google onwards can you tell me the sort
of inspiration points the education the
experiences that you're draw on when you
talk about these subjects well like many
of the people you meet um as a teenager
I was interested in science I play with
model rockets model trains the the usual
things for a boy in my generation I was
too young to be a video game addict but
I'm sure I would be today if I were that
age um I went to college and I was very
interested in computers and they were
relatively slow then but to me they were
fascinating to give you an example the
computer that I used in college is 100
million times slower 100 million times
slower than the phone you have in your
pocket and by the way that was a
computer for the entire University so
Moes law which is this notion of
accelerating density of chips has
defined the wealth creation the career
creation the company Creation in my life
so I can be understood as lucky because
I was born with a with an interest in
something which was about to explode
and when when sort of everything happens
together everyone gets swept up in it
and of course the rest is history I was
sat this weekend with
my partners little brother who's 18
years old yes and as we ate breakfast
yesterday before they flew back to
Portugal we had this discussion with her
family that um her dad was there her mom
was there Raph the younger brother was
there and my girlfriend was there
difficult because most of them don't
speak English so we had to use funnily
enough AI to translate what saying but
the big discussion at breakfast was what
should Raph do in the future he's 18
years old he's got his career ahead of
him and the decisions he makes as is so
evident in your story at this exact
moment as to what information and
intelligence he acquires for himself
will quite clearly Define the rest of
his life if you were sat at that table
with me yesterday when I was trying to
give Raph advice on what what knowledge
he should acquire at 18 years old what
would you have said and what are the
principles that sit behind
that the most most important thing is to
develop analytical critical thinking
skills I to some level I don't care how
you get there so if you're if you like
math or science or if you like the law
or if you like you know entertainment
just think critically in his particular
case as a as an 18-year-old what I would
encourage him to do is figure out how to
write programming to write programs in a
language called python python is easy to
use it's very easy to understand and
it's become the language of AI so the
the AI systems when they write code for
themselves they write code in Python and
so you can't lose as developing Python
Programming skills and the simplest
thing to do with an 18-year-old man is
say make a game because these are
typically Gamers stereotypically make a
game that's interesting using python
it's interesting because I wondered if
coding you know I think 5 10 years ago
everyone's advice to an 18-year-old has
learn how to code but in a world of AI
where these large language models are
able to write code and are you know
increasing every month in their ability
to write better and better code I
wondered if that's like a dying art form
yeah a lot of people have posed this and
that's not correct it sure looks like
these systems will write code but
remember the systems also have
interfaces called apis which you can
program them so one of the large Revenue
sources for these AI models because
these companies have to make money at
some point right is you build a program
and you actually make take an API call
and ask it a question typ typical
example is give it a picture and tell me
what's in the picture now can you have
some fun with that as an 18-year-old of
course right so so when I say python I
mean python using the tools that are
available to build something new
something that you're interested in and
when you say critical
thinking how does one what is critical
thinking and how does one go about
acquiring that as a skill well the first
and most important thing about critical
thinking is to to distinguish between
being marketed to which is also known as
being lied to and being being given the
argument on your own we' have because of
social media which I hold responsible
for a lot of ills as well as good things
in life we've we've sort of gotten used
to people just telling us something and
believing it because our friends Believe
it or so forth and I strongly encourage
people to check assertions so you get
people say all this stuff and I learned
at Google all those years somebody says
something I check it on Google do I and
you then have a question do you
criticize them and correct them or do
you let it go but you want to be in the
position where somebody makes a
statement like did you know that only
10% of Americans have passports which is
a widely viewed but false statement um
it's actually higher than that although
it's never high enough in my view in
America but that's an example of
assertion that you can just say is that
true right
there's a a long meme of American
politicians where the Congress is
basically full of criminals um it may be
full of one or two but it's not full of
of 90 but again people believe this
stuff because it sounds plausible so if
if somebody says something plausible
just check
it you have a responsibility before you
repeat something to make sure what
you're repeating is true and if you
can't distinguish between true and false
I suggest you keep your mouth shut right
because you can't run a government a
society without people operating on
basic facts like for example climate
change is real we can debate over
whether it's how to address it but
there's no question the climate is
changing it is a fact it is a
mathematical fact and how do I know this
and somebody will say well how do you
know and I said because science is about
repeatable uh uh experiments and also
proving things wrong so let's say I said
that um climate change is real uh and
this was the first time it had ever been
said which is not true then a 100 people
would say that can't be true I'll see if
he's fa and then and then all of a
sudden they'd see I was right and I'd
get some big prize right so so the
falsifiability of these assertions is
very important how do you know that
science is correct it's because people
are constantly testing
it and why is this skill of critical
thinking so especially important in a
world of AI
well partly because AI will allow for
perfect misinformation so let's use an
example of Tik Tok Tik Tok can be
understand it's called the Bandit
algorithm in computer science in the
sense of the Las Vegas one arm Bandits
do I stay in the Bandit machine and I
keep on this slot machine or do I move
to another slot machine and the the Tik
Tok algorithm basically can be
understood as I'll keep serving you what
you tell me you want but occasionally
I'll give you something from the
adjacent area and is highly addictive so
what you're seeing with social media and
Tik Tok is a particularly bad example of
this is people are getting into these
rabbit holes where they all they see is
confirmatory bias and and the ones that
are I mean if it's fun and you know
entertaining I don't care but you'll see
for example there are plenty of stories
where people have ultimately self harm
or suicide because they're already
unhappy and then and then they start
picking up unhappy and then their whole
environment online is people who are
unhappy and it makes them more unhappy
because it doesn't have a positive bias
so there's a really good example where
um let's say in your case you're the dad
you're going to watch this as the dad
with your kid and you're going to say
you know it's not that bad let me show
you some let me give you some good
Alternatives let me get you inspired let
me get you out of your funk the
algorithms don't do that unless you
force them to it's because the
algorithms are fundamentally about
optimizing an objective function
literally mathematically maximize some
goal that has been trained to they just
in in this case it's attention and by
the way part of it part of we have we
have so much uh outrage is because if
you're a CEO you want to maximize
Revenue to maximize Revenue you maximize
attention and the easiest way to
maximize attention is to maximize
outrage did you know did you know did
you know right and by the way a lot of
the stuff is not true
they're fighting over scarce attention
there was a recent article where there's
an old quote from 1971 from herb Simon
an economist at the time Carnegie melan
who said that um economists don't
understand but in the future the
scarcity will be about attention so
somebody now 50 years later went back
and said I think we're at the point
where we've monetized all attention an
article this week two and a half hours
of videos consumed by young people every
day right now there is a limit to the
amount of video you can you know that
because you have to eat and sleep and to
hang out but these are significant
societal changes that have occurred very
very quickly um when I was young there
was a great debate as to the benefit of
television and you know my argument at
the time was well yes we did you know we
did you know rock and roll and and drugs
and all of that and we watched a lot of
Television but somehow we grew up okay
right so it's the same argument now with
a different a different term will we
will those kids grow up okay um it's not
as obvious because these tools are
highly addictive much more so than
television ever was do you think they'll
grow up okay I personally do because I'm
I'm inherently an optimist I also think
that Society um begins to understand the
problems typical example is there's an
epidemic of harm to teenage girls uh
girls as we know are uh more advanced
than boys at those uh you know below
uh and the girls seem to get hit by
social media at 11 and 12 when they're
not quite capable of handling the the
rejection and the emotional stuff and
it's driven uh you know emergency room
visits self harm and so forth to record
levels it's well documented so Society
is beginning to recognize this now F
schools won't let kids use their phones
when they're in the classroom which kind
of obvious if you ask me um so
developmentally uh one of the core
questions about the AI Revolution is
what does it do to the identity of
children that are growing up your values
your personal values the way you get up
in the morning and think about life is
now set it's highly unlikely that an AI
will change your programming but your
child can be significantly reprogrammed
and one of the things that we talk about
in the book is what happens when the
best friend of your child from birth is
a
computer what's it like now by the way I
don't know we've never done it before
but you're running an experiment on a
billion people without a control right
and so we have to stumble through this
so at the end of the day I'm an optimist
because we will adjust
Society with biases and values to try to
keep us on a moral High Ground human
life and so you should be optimistic for
that because these kids when they grow
up they'll live to a 100 their lives
will be much more prosperous I hope and
I I pray that there'll be much less
conflict uh certainly lifespans are
longer the the likelihood of them being
injured and and in wars and so forth are
much much lower statistically it's a
good message to kids as someone who's
LED one of the world's biggest tech
companies if you were the CEO of Tik
Tok what would you do because I'm sure
that they realize everything you've said
is true but they have this commercial
incentive to drive up the addictiveness
of that algorithm which is causing these
Echo Chambers which is causing the rates
of anxiety and depression amongst young
girls and young people more generally to
increase what would you do so so I have
talked to them and to the others as well
and I think it's it's pretty
straightforward there's sort of good
revenue and bad Revenue when we were at
Google uh Larry and ser and I we would
have situations where we would improve
quality you know we would make the
product better and the debate was do we
take that to revenue in the form of more
ads or do we just make the product
better and and that was a clear choice
and I arbitrarily decided that we would
take 50% to one 50% to the other because
I thought they were both important so
and the founders of course were very
supportive so Google became more moral
and also made more money right all of
the the there's plenty of bad stuff on
Google but it's not on the first page
that was the key thing the alternative
model would be say let's maximize
Revenue we'll put all the really bad
stuff the lies and the cheating and the
deceiving and so forth that draws you in
it will drive you insane and we might
have made more money but first it was
the wrong thing to do but more
importantly it's not sustainable uh
there's a law called gresham's law uh
it's a verbal law obviously um where bad
speech drives out good speech and what
you're seeing is you're seeing in online
communities which have always been um
present with bullying and this kind of
stuff now you've got crazy people in my
view who are building Bots that are
lying right misinformation now why do
you do that you've got in there was a
there was a hurricane in Florida and
people are in serious trouble and you
sitting in the comfort of your home
somewhere else are busy trying to make
their lives more difficult what's wrong
with you like let them get rescued you
know human life is important but there's
something about the the human psychology
where people uh people talk the there's
a German world called shoden Freud you
know there's a bunch of things like this
that we have to address I want social
media and the online world to represent
the best of humanity hope excitement
optimism creativity invention solving
new problems as opposed to the worst and
I think that that is achievable you have
arrived at Google at 46 years old 2001
2001 2001 um you had a very extensive
career before then working for a bunch
of really interesting companies Sun
Microsystems is one that I know um very
well you've worked for zero
in California as well Bell Labs was your
first um sort of real job I guess at 20
years old first sort of big Tech
job what did you learn in this journey
of your life about what it is to build a
great company and what value is as it
relates to being an
entrepreneur and people in teams like if
there were like a set of first
principles that everyone should be
thinking about when it comes to doing
something great and building something
great what are those like first
principles so so the first rule I've
learned is that you need a truly
brilliant person to build a really
brilliant product and that is not me I
work with them so find someone who's
just smarter than you more clever than
you moves faster than you changes the
world is better spoken more handsome
More Beautiful You know whatever it is
that you're optimizing and Ally yourself
with them because they're the people who
are going to make make the world
different um in one of my books we use
the distinction between divas and naves
and a Diva and we use the example of
Steve Jobs who clearly was a diva
opinionated and strong and argumentative
and would bully people if he didn't like
them but was brilliant when he was he
was a diva he wanted Perfection right
aligning yourself with Steve Jobs is a
good idea uh the alternative is what we
call a Nave and a Nave which you know
from British history is somebody Who's
acting on their own um their own account
they're not they're not trying to do the
right thing they're trying to benefit
themselves at the at the at the cost of
others and so if you can identify a
person in one of these teams that
they're just trying to solve the problem
in a really clever way and they're
passionate about and they want to do it
that's how the world moves forward if
you don't have such a person your
company's not going to go anywhere and
the reason is that it's too easy just to
keep doing what you were doing right and
and Innovation is fundamentally about
changing what you're doing up until the
this generation of tech companies the
most companies seem to me to be one-hot
wonders right they would have one thing
that was very successful and then it
would sort of um it was typically follow
an scurve and nothing much would happen
and now I think the the people are
smarter people are better educated you
now see repeatable waves a good example
being Microsoft which is you know an
older company now founded in basically
81 82 something like that so let's call
that 45 years old but they've reinvented
themselves a number of times right in in
a really powerful way we should probably
talk about this then um before we move
on which is what you're talking about
there is that sort of founder things
people now refer to as founder mode that
founder energy that high conviction that
sort of disruptive thinking um and that
ability to reinvent yourself I was
looking at some stats last night in fact
and I was looking at how long companies
stay on the S&P 500 on average now and
it went from 33 years to 17 years to 12
years average 10 year and as you play
those numbers forward eventually in sort
of 2050 an AI told me that it would be
about eight years
well I'm not sure I agree with the
founder Mort argument and the reason is
that it's great to have a brilliant
founder and um and there's this it's
actually like more than great it's like
really important and and we need more
brilliant Founders universities are
producing these people by the way they
do exist and they show up every year you
know another Michael Dell at the age of
19 or 22 these are just brilliant
Founders obviously Gates and Ellison and
sort of my generation of brilliant
founders
Larry and Sergey and so forth for anyone
that doesn't know who Larry and Sergey
are and doesn't know that sort of early
Google story um can you give me a little
bit of that backstory but then also
introduce these characters called Larry
and Sergey for anyone that doesn't know
so Larry pagee and Sergey Bren met at
Stanford um in they were on a grant from
believe it or not the National Science
Foundation as graduate students and
Larry pagee invented a algorithm called
page rank uh which is named after him um
and he and Sergey wrote a paper which is
still one of the most cited papers in in
the world and it's essentially a way of
understanding priority of information
and mathematically it was a forier
transform of the way people normally did
things at at the time and so they wrote
this code I don't think they were that
good a set of programmers you know they
sort of did it they had a computer they
ran out of power in their dorm room so
they um borrowed the power from the dorm
room next to and plugged it in and they
had the data center in the bedroom you
know in the dorm classic story um and
then they moved to a u building that was
owned by um the sister of a girlfriend
at the time and that's how they founded
the company their first investor was a
one the founder of Sun micr System whose
name was Andy bealine who just said I'll
just give you the money because you're
obviously incredibly smart how much did
he give them
$100,000 or yeah maybe it was a million
but in any case it It ultimately became
any billion ions of dollars so it gives
you a sense of this early founding is
very important so the founders then set
up in this little house in menla park
which ultimately we bought at Google you
know as a as a museum and they set up in
the garage and they had Google Google
world headquarters in neon made and they
had a big headquarters um with the four
employees that were sitting below them
and the computer that Larry and sery had
built Larry and sery were very very good
software people and obviously brilliant
but they were not very good hardware and
so they built the computers using
corkboard to separate the CPUs and if
you know anything about Hardware
Hardware generates a lot of Heat and the
corkboard would catch on fire So
eventually when I showed up we started
building proper Hardware with proper
Hardware Engineers but it gives you a
sense of the scrappiness that that was
so
characteristic um and you know today
there are people of enormous impact on
society um and I think that will
continue um for many many years what did
they call you in and at what point did
they realize that they needed someone
like you well Larry said to me uh now
these were they're very young he looked
at me and says we don't need you
now but we'll need you in the future
we'll need you in the future yeah so one
of the things about Larry and Sergey is
that they thought for the long term so
they didn't say Google would be a search
company they said the mission of Google
is to organize all the world's
information and if you think about it
that's pretty audacious 25 years ago
like how are you going to do that and so
they started with web search eventually
and Larry had studied AI quite
extensively and he began to to work and
ultimately he uh acquired uh with with
all all of us obviously uh this company
called Deep Mind here in Britain which
essentially is the um the first company
to really see the AI opportunity and
pretty much all of the things you've
seen from AI in the last decade have
come from people who are either at Deep
Mind or competing with deep mind going
back to this point about principles then
before we move further on um as it
relates to building a great company what
are some of those founding principles we
have lots of entrepreneurs that listen
to the show one of them you've expressed
as this need for the Divas I guess these
people who are just very high conviction
and can kind of see into the future what
are the other principles that I need to
be thinking about when I'm scaling my
company well the first is to think about
scale uh I think a current example is
look at Elon um Elon is an incredible
entrepreneur and an incredible scientist
and if you study how he operates he gets
people by I think sheer force of
personal will to overperform to take
huge risks which somehow he he has this
Brilliance where he can make those
tradeoffs and get it right so these are
exceptional people now in our book with
Genesis we argue that you're going to
have that in your pocket but to whether
you'll have the judgment to take the
risks that Elon does that's another
question the one of the other ways to
think about it is an awful lot of people
talk to me about the companies that
they're founding and they're they're a
little widget you know like I want to
make the camera better I want to make
the dress better I want to make book
publishing cheaper or so forth these are
all fine ideas I'm interested in in
ideas which have the benefit of scale
and when I SC I say scale I mean the
ability to go from zero to Infinity in
terms of the number of users and demand
and scale
um there are plenty plenty of ways of
thinking about this but what would be
such a company in the age of AI well we
can tell you what it would look like you
would have
apps one on Android one on iOS maybe a
few
others those apps will use powerful
networks and they'll have a really big
computer in the back it's doing AI
calculations so future success companies
will all have that right exactly what
problem it solves well that's up to the
founder but if you're not using AI at
every aspect of your business you're not
going to make it and the distinction as
a programming matter is that when I was
doing all of this way back when you had
to write the code now ai has to discover
the
answer it's a very big deal and of
course this was a lot of this was
invented at Google you know 10 years ago
but basically all of a sudden an
analytical programming which sort of
what I did my whole life you know
writing code and you know do this do
that add this subtract this call this so
forth and so on is gradually being
replaced by learning the answer right so
for example we use the example of transl
language
translation uh the the current large
language models are essentially
organized around predicting the next
word well if you can predict the next
word You can predict the next sequence
in biology You can predict the next
action You can predict the next thing
the robot should do so all of this stuff
around large language models and deep
learning that has come out the
Transformer paper gpt3 uh chat GPT which
for most people was this huge moment is
essentially about um predicting the next
word and getting it right in terms of
company culture and how important that
is for the success and Prospects of a
company how do you think about company
culture and how significant and is it
and like when and who sets it so I'll
give well it's almost always set company
cultures are almost always set by the
founders I happen to be on the board of
the Mayo Clinic Mayo Clinic is the
largest healthc care system in America
it's also the most highly rated one and
they have a rule which is called the uh
the needs of the customer come first
which came out of the Mayo brothers
who've been dead for like 120 years um
but that was their principle and I when
I initially got on the board I started
wandering around I thought this is kind
of a stupid you know stupid phrase and
nobody really does this and they really
believe it and they repeat it and they
repeat it right so it's true in
non-technical cultures in that case it's
a healthcare for Service delivery you
can drive a culture even in non-tech in
Tech it's typically an engineering
culture and if I had to do things over
again I would have even more technical
people and even fewer non-technical
people and just make the technical
people figure out what they have to do
um and I'm sorry for that bias because
I'm not trying to offend anybody but the
fact of the matter is the technical
people if you build the right product
your customers will come if you don't
build a product then you don't need a
Salesforce why are you selling an
inferior product so in in the how Google
works book and the ultimately in the
trillion dollar coach book which is
about Bill Campbell we talked a lot
about how the CEO is now the chief
product officer the chief Innovation
officer because 50 years ago you didn't
have access to Capital you didn't have
access to marketing you didn't have
access to sales you didn't have access
to distribution hours I was meeting
today with an entrepreneur who said yeah
you know we'll be 95% Technical and I
said why I said well we have a contract
manufacturer and our products are so
good that people will just buy them this
happened to be a a a technical switching
company um and they said it's only a
100,000 times better than its
competitors and I said it will sell
unfortunately it doesn't work yet yeah
it isn't the point but if they achieve
their goal people will be lined up
outside the door so as a matter of
culture you want to build a technical
culture with values about getting the
product to work right and working me is
not another thing you do with with
Engineers is you
say they make a nice presentation to you
and they go I said that's very
interesting but you know I'm not your
customer your customer is really tough
because your customers wants everything
to work and free and work right now and
never make any mistakes so so give me
their feedback and if their feedback is
good I love you and if their feedback is
bad then you better get back to work and
stop being so arrogant so what happens
is that in in the invent in the
invention process within firms people
fall in love with an idea and they don't
test it one of the things that Google
did and this is largely Marissa mayor we
back when is one day she said to me I
don't know how to judge user interface
mer was the previous CEO she was the CEO
of Yahoo and before that she ran all the
consumer products at Google uh and she's
now running another company in uh in the
Bay Area but the important thing about
Marissa is she said I can't I I said
well you know the UI the user interface
is great at the time and it was
certainly was and she said I don't know
how to judge the user interface myself
and none of my team do but we know how
to
measure and so what she organized were
AB tests you test one test another so
remember that it's possible using these
networks to actually kind of figure out
because they're highly instrumented uh
dwell time how long does
somebody how long does somebody watch
this how important it is if you go back
to how Tik Tok Works uh one of the
things the signals that they use include
the amount of time you watch commenting
um forwarding uh sharing all those kinds
of things and those you can understand
those as analytics that go into an AI
engine then makes a decision as to what
to do next what to make
viral and on this point of um culture at
scale is it right to expect that the
culture changes as the company scales
because you came into Google I believe
when they were doing sort of hundred
million doll in revenue and you left
when they were doing what 180 billion or
something staggering but is it right to
assume that the culture of a growing
company should scale from when there was
10 people in that garage to when there's
100 so when I go back to Google to visit
and they were kind enough to give me a
badge and treat me well of course um I
hear The
Echoes of this um I was at a lunch where
there was a lady running search and a
Gentleman runting ads you know the
successors to the people who worked with
me and I I asked them what's it going
and they said the same
problems you know the same problems have
not been solved but they're much bigger
and so when you go to a company I
suspect um I was not near the founding
of Apple but I was on the board for a
while um the founding culture you can
see today in their Obsession about user
interfaces their Obsession about being
closed and their privacy and secrecy
it's just a different company right I'm
not passing judgment um setting the
culture is important the echo are there
what does happen in big companies is
they become less efficient for many
reasons the first thing that happens is
they become conservative because of
they're public and they have
lawsuits and um a famous example is that
Microsoft after the antitrust um uh case
in the 90s became so conservative in
terms of what it could launch that it
really missed the web Revolution for a
long time they they have since recovered
and I of course was happy to exploit
that as a competitor to them when we
were at Google but but the important
thing is when big companies should be
faster because they have more money and
more scale they should be able to do
things even quicker but in my industry
anyway the the tech start that have a
new clear idea tend to win because the
big company can't move fast enough to do
it another example we had built
something called Google video I was very
proud of Google video and David Drummond
who was the general counsel at the time
came in and said you have to look at
this YouTube people I said like why
right who cares and it turns out they're
really good and they're more clever than
your team and I said that can't be true
you know typical arrogant Eric and we
sat down and we looked at it and they
really work quicker even though we had
an
incumbent and why it turns out that the
incumbent was operating under the
traditional rules that Google had which
was fine and the competitor in this case
YouTube was not constrained by that they
could work at any pace and they could do
all sorts of things intellectual
property and so forth ultimately we were
sued all over all of that stuff and we
ultimately won all those suits but it's
an example where there are these moments
in time where you have to move extremely
quickly you're seeing that right now
with generative uh technology so the AGI
the generative Revolution generate code
generate videos generate text generate
everything all of those winners are
being determined in the next six 12
months and then once once the slope is
set once the growth rate is you know
quadrupling every uh six months or so
forth it's very hard for somebody else
to come in so so it's a race to get
there as fast as you can so when you
talk to the the great Venture
capitalists they are they're fast right
we'll look at it we'll make a decision
tomorrow we're done we're in and so
forth and we want to be
first because that's where they make the
most amount of
money we were talking before you arrived
I was talking to Jack about this idea of
like harvesting and hunting so
harvesting what you've already sewed and
hunting for new opportunities but I've
always found it's quite difficult to get
the Harvesters to be the hunters at the
same time so so Harvesters and hunting
is a good metaphor um I'm interested in
entrepreneurs and so what we learned at
Google was ultimately if you want to get
something done you have to have somebody
who's entrepreneurial in their approach
in charge of a small business and so for
example Sundar when he became CEO had a
model of which were the little things
that he was going to emphasize and which
were the big things some of those little
things are now big things right and and
he managed it that way so one way to
understand innovation in a large company
is you need to know who the owner is
Larry Page would say over and over again
it's not going to happen unless there's
an owner who's going to drive this and
he was supremely good at identifying
that technical Talent right that's one
of his great founder strengths so when
we talk about Founders not only do you
have to have a vision but you also have
to have either great luck or great skill
as to who is the person who can lead
this inevitably those people are highly
technical in the sense that they can and
very quick moving and they have good
management skills right they understand
how to hire people and deploy resources
that allows for Innovation um most of
the if I if I look back in my career
each generation of the tech companies
failed including for example Sun at at
the point at which it became
noncompetitive with the future is it
possible for a team to innovate while
they still have their day job which is
harvesting if you know what I mean or do
you have to take those people put them
into a different team different building
different p&l and get them to focus on
the disrupt div evation there are almost
no examples of doing it simultaneously
in the same building uh the Macintosh
was famously um Steve in his typical
crazy way had the this very small team
that invented the Macintosh and he put
them in a little building next to the
big building uh on bub Road and and um
Cupertino and they put a pirate flag on
top of
it now was that good culturally inside
the company no because because it
created resentment in the big building
but was it right in terms of the revenue
and path of of Apple absolutely why
because the Mac ultimately became the
platform that established the UI the
user interface ultimately allowed them
to build the iPhone which of course is
defined by its user interface why
couldn't they stay in the same building
it just doesn't work you you can't get
people to play two roles the incentives
are different if you're going to be a
pirate and a disruptor you don't have to
follow the same rules
so um there there are plenty of examples
where you just have to keep inventing
yourself now what's interesting about
cloud computing and essentially cloud
services which is what Google does is
because the product is not sold to you
it's delivered to you it's easier to
change but the same problem remains if
you look at Google today right it's
basically a search a search box and it's
incredibly powerful but what happens
when that interface is not really
textual right will have to reinvent that
working on Tech it'll be the system will
somehow know what you're asking right it
will it just it will be your assistant
um and again Google will do very well so
I'm in no way criticizing Google here
but I'm saying that even something as
simple as the search box will eventually
be replaced by something more powerful
it's important that Google be the
company that does that I believe they
will and I I was thinking about it you
know the example of Steve Jobs and that
building with the pirate flag on it my
brain when
um there's so many offices around the
world that were trying to kill Apple at
that exact moment that might not have
had the pirate flag but that's exactly
what they were doing in similar small
rooms so what Apple had done so smartly
there was they owned the people that
were about to kill their business model
and this is quite difficult to do and
part of me wonders if in your experience
it's a Founder that has that type of
conviction that does that it's extremely
hard for non-founders to do this in
corporations because if you think about
a
corporation what's the duty of the CEO
many there's the shareholders there's
the employees there's the community and
there's a board trying to get a board of
very smart people to agree on anything
is hard enough so imagine I walk in to
you and I say I have a new idea I'm
going to kill our profitability for two
years it's a huge bet and I need1
billion
now would the board say yes well they
did to Mark
Zuckerberg he spent all that money on um
essentially VR of one kind or another
doesn't seem to have produced very much
but at exactly the same time he invested
very heavily in Instagram WhatsApp and
Facebook and in particular in the AI
systems that power them and today
Facebook to my surprise is a very
significant leader in AI having released
this uh language called or version
called llama 400 billion which is
curiously an open source model open
source means it's available freely for
everyone and what what Facebook and meta
is saying is as long as we have this
technology we can maximize the revenue
in our core businesses so there's a good
example and uh and Zuckerberg is
obviously an incredibly talented
entrepreneur um he's now back on the
list of the most rich people um he's
feeded at you know and everything he was
doing and he managed to lose all that
money while making a different bet
that's a unique founder the same thing
is almost impossible with a hired
CEO how important here is focus and
what's your your sort of opinion of um
the importance of focus from your
experience with Google but also looking
at these other companies because when
you're at Google and you have so much
money in the bank there's so many things
that you could do and could build like
an endless list you can take on anybody
and basically win in most markets how do
you think about focus at Google
focus is important but it's
misinterpreted in Google we spent an
awful lot of time telling people we
wanted to do everything and everyone
said you can't pull off everything and
we said yes we can we have the
underlying architectures we have the
underlying reach we can do this if we
can imagine and build something that's
really transformative and so the idea
was not that we would somehow focus on
one thing like search but rather that we
would pick areas of great impact and
importance to the world many of which
were free by the way this is not
necessarily Revenue driven and that
worked I'll give you another example
there's an old saying in the business
school that you should focus on on what
you're good at and you should simplify
your product lines and you should get
rid of product lines that don't work
Intel famously had a the term is called
arm it's a risk uh chip and this
particular risk chip was not compatible
with the architecture that they were
using for most of their products and so
they sold it unfortunately this was a
terrible mistake because the
architecture that they sold off was
needed for mobile phones with low memory
with small batteries and and heat
problems and so forth and so on and so
that decision that faithful decision now
15 years ago meant that they were never
a player in the mobile space and once
they made that decision they tried to
take their expensive and expensive and
complex chips and they kept trying to
make cheaper and smaller versions but
the core decision which was to simplify
simplify to the wrong outcome today if
you look at I'll give you an example the
Nvidia chips use an arm CPU and then
these two powerful uh gpus it's called
the b200 they don't use the Intel chip
they use the arm chip because it was for
their needs faster I would never have
predicted that 15 years ago so at the
end maybe it was just a mistake but
maybe they didn't understand in the way
they were organized as a corporation
that ultimately battery power would be
as important as computing power right
the amount of battery you use and that
was the discriminant so one way to think
about it is if you're going to have
these sort of simple rules you better
have a model of what happens in the next
five years so the way I teach this is
just write down what it'll look like in
five years just try what will look like
in five years your company or whatever
it is right so let's talk about AI what
will be true in five
years that it's going to be a lot
smarter than it is be a lot smarter but
how many companies will there be in AI
will there be five or 5,000 or 50,000
50,000 how many big companies will there
be will there be new companies what will
they do right so I just told you my view
is that eventually you and I will have
our own AI assistant which is a polymath
which is incredibly smart which helps us
guide through the information overload
that it is today who's going to build it
make a prediction what kind of hardw
will be on make a prediction how fast
will the networks be make a prediction
write all these things down and then
have a discussion about what to do that
what is interesting about our industry
is that when something like the PC comes
along or the internet I lived through
all of these things they are are such
broad phenomena that they really do
create a whole new Lake a whole new
ocean whatever metaphor you want now
people said well wasn't that crypto no
crypto is not such a platform crypto is
not transformative to daily life for
everyone people are not running around
all day using crypto tokens rather than
currency crypto is a specialized Market
by the way it's important and it's
interesting it's not a horizontal
transformative Market the arrival of
alien intelligence in the form of savant
that you use is such a transformative
thing because it touches everything it
touches you as a a producer as a star as
a narrative it touches me as an
executive um it will ultimately help
people make money in the stock market
people are working on that there's so
many ways in which the technology is
transformative to start you in your case
when you think about your company
whether it's little you know itty bitty
or a really big one it's fundamentally
how will you apply AI to accelerate what
you're doing right in your case for
example here you have I think the most
successful show in the UK by far right
so how will you use AI to make it more
successful well you can ask it to
distribute you more right to make uh
narratives to summarize uh to to come up
with new insights to suggest uh to have
fun to create contest there all sorts of
ways that you can ask AI um I'll give
you a simple example if I were a
politician thankfully I'm not um and I
knew my district I would say uh to the
computer write a program so I'm saying
to the computer you write a program
which goes through all the constituents
in my interest figures out roughly what
they care about and if and then send
them a video which is labeled you know
of me digitally so I'm not fake but it's
kind of like my intention where I
explain to them how important I as their
constituent have made the bridge work
right and you sit there and you go
that's crazy but it's possible
now politicians have not discovered this
yet but they will because ultimately
politicians are around a human
connection and the quickest way to have
that communication is to be on their
phone talking to them about something
that they care about when chat GPT first
launched and they sort of scaled rapidly
to 100 million users there was all these
articles saying that um the founders of
Google had rushed back in and it was a
crisis situation at Googled and there
was panic and there was two things that
I thought first is is that true and
second thing was
how did Google not come to Market first
with a chat GPT style product well well
remember that Google also that's the old
question of why did you not do Facebook
well the answer is we were doing
everything else right so my defensive
answer is that Google has eight or nine
or 10 billion user clusters of activity
which is pretty good right it's pretty
hard to do right I'm very proud of that
I'm very proud of what they're doing now
um my own view is that what happened was
Google was was working in the engine
room and a team out of open AI figured
out a technology called rhf and what
happened was when they did gpt3 and GP
the t is Transformer which was invented
at Google when they did it they had sort
of this interesting idea and then they
own then they sort of casually started
to use humans to make it better and rhf
refers to the fact that you use humans
at the end to do ab tests
where humans can actually say well this
one's better and then the system learns
recursively from Human training at the
end that was a real breakthrough right
and uh I joke with my open a eye friends
that you were sitting around on on
Thursday night and you turn this thing
on and you go holy crap look how good
this thing is it was a real Discovery
right that none of us expected certainly
I did not um and once they had it um the
opening eye people Sam and and and so
forth we'll talk about this they didn't
really understand how good it was they
just turned it on and all of a sudden
they had this huge success disaster
because they were working on GPT 4 at
the same time it was an afterthought
it's a great story because it just shows
you that even the brilliant Founders do
not necessarily understand how powerful
what they what they've done is now today
of course you have uh GPT 40 um
basically a very powerful model from
open eye you have Gemini 1.5 which is
clearly in clearly roughly equivalent if
not better in certain areas um the
Gemini is more multimodal for example
and then you have other players llama
the Llama architecture l l la ma uh does
not stand for llamas it's large language
models um out of Facebook and a number
of others uh there's a startup called
anthropic um which is very powerful
founded by one of the inventors of gpt3
um and a whole bunch of people and they
formed their company knowing they were
going to be that successful it's
interesting they actually formed as part
of their incorporation that they were a
public benefit Corporation because they
were concerned that it would be so
powerful that some evil CEO in the
future would force them to go for
Revenue as opposed
to world world goodness so the teams
when they were doing this they
understood the power of what they were
doing and they anticipated the level of
impact which and they were right do you
think if Steve Jobs was an apple they
would be on that list
um how do you think the company would be
different well Tim has done a fantastic
job in Steve's Legacy and what's
interesting is normally the successor is
not as good as the founder but somehow
Tim having worked with Steve for so long
and having set the culture having Steve
having they've managed to continue the
focus on the user this incredible safety
focus in terms of apps and so forth and
so on and they've remained a relatively
closed culture I think all of those
would have maintained detained had St
you know tragically died uh he was a
good friend but the important point
is Steve Steve believed very strongly in
what are called close systems where you
own and control all your intellectual
property and he and I would battle over
open versus closed because I came from
the other side and I did this with
respect I don't think they would have
changed that and they've change that now
no I think still apple is still
basically a single company that's ver
Ally integrated the rest of the industry
is largely more open I think everyone
especially in the wake of the recent
launch of the iPhone 16 which I've got
somewhere here um has this expectation
that Apple would if Steve were still
alive taken some big bold bet in some
and I think about you know Tim's tenure
he's done a fantastic job of keeping
that company going running it with the
sort of principles of Steve Jobs but has
there been many big bold successful bets
a lot of people point at the airpods
which have a a great product
but I think AI is one of those things
where you go I wonder if Steve would
have understood the significance of it
and Steve was that smart that he I would
never you know he's an Elon level
intelligence
um when when Steve and I worked together
very closely which was what 15 years ago
for his death um he was very frustrated
at the success of MP4 over uh mov
um format files and he was really mad
about it and I said well you know maybe
that's because you were closed in quick
time was not generally available said
that's not true my team you know our
product is better and so forth so his
his core belief system he's an artist
right and and given the choice we used
to have this debate where do you want to
be Chevrolet or do you want to be
Porsche do you want to be you know
General Motors or do you want to be BMW
and he said I want to be BMW
and during that time Apple's margins
were twice as high as the PC companies
and I said Steve you don't need all that
money you're generating all this cash
you're giving it to your to your
shareholders and he said the principle
of our profitability and our value in
our brand is this is this luxury brand
right so that's how he thought now what
How would how would AI change that
everything that he would have done with
Apple today would be a I inspired but it
would be beautiful that's the great gift
he had CU I think Siri was almost a
glimpse at what AI now kind of looks
like it was a glimpse at what the I
guess the ambition was we've all been
chatting to the Siri thing which is I
think most people would agree as kind of
like largely useless unless you're
trying to figure out something super
super simple but now I this weekend as I
said I was sat there with my my
girlfriend's family there speaking to
this voice activated device and it was
solving problems for me almost
instantaneously that are very complex
and translating them into French and
Portuguese welcome welcome to the
replacement for Siri and again would
Steve have done that quicker I don't
know it's very clear that the first
thing Apple needs to do is have Siri be
replaced by an AI and call that Siri
hiring we we're doing a lot of hiring in
our companies at the moment and we're
going back and forward on what the most
important principles are when it comes
to hiring making lots of mistakes
sometimes getting things right
sometimes what do I need to know as when
it comes to hiring startups by
definition are huge Risk Takers you have
no history you have no incumbency you
have all these competitors by definition
and you have no time so in a startup you
want to you want to um prioritize
intelligence and quickness over
experience and sort of stability you
want to take risks on people and the
great and part of the reason why
startups are full of young people is
because young people often don't have
the baggage of Executives have been
around for a long time but more
importantly they're willing to take
risks so it used to be that you could
predict whether a company was successful
by the age of the founders and in that
20 and 30y old period the company would
be hugely successful startups um Wiggle
they try something they try something
else and they're very quick to discard
an old idea corporations spend years
with a belief system that is factually
false and they don't actually changed
their opinion until after they've lost
all the contracts and if you go back the
all the signs were there nobody wanted
to talk to them nobody cared about the
product right and yet they kept pushing
it so um if you're a CEO of a larger
company what you want to do is basically
figure out how to measure this
Innovation so that you don't waste a lot
of time Bill Gates had a saying a long
time ago which was that the most
important thing to do is to fail fast
right that the charact from his
perspective as the CEO of Microsoft
founder Microsoft um that he wanted
everything to happen and he wanted to
fail quickly and that was his theory and
do you agree with that theory yeah I do
fast failure is important because you
can say it in a nicer way but
fundamentally um at Google we had this
72010 rule that Larry and Sergey came up
with 70% of the Core Business 20% on
adjacent business and 10% on other what
does that mean sorry cor Core Business
means search ads adjacent business means
something that you're trying like a
cloud business or so forth and the 10%
is some new idea so Google created this
thing called Google X the first product
it built was called Google brain which
is the one of the first machine learning
architectures this actually precedes
Deep Mind Google brain was used to power
the AI system Google brin's team of 10
or 15 people generated 10 20 30 40
billion dollars of extra profits over a
decade so that pays for a lot of
failures right then they had a whole
bunch of other ideas that seemed very
interesting to me that didn't happen for
one or another and they would cancel
them and you you and then the people
would get reconfigured and one of the
great things about Silicon Valley is
it's possible to spend a few years on a
really bad idea and get cancelled if you
will and then get another job Having
learned all of that my joke is the best
CFO is one who's just gone bankrupt
because the one thing that CFO is not
going to let happen is to go bankrupt
again yeah well on this point of culture
as well Google as such a big company
must
experience a bunch of microcultures one
of the things that I've always I've kind
of studied it as an as a cautionary tale
is the story of TGIF at Google which was
this sort of weekly All Hands meeting
where employees could ask the executives
whatever they wanted to and the Articles
around it say that it was eventually
sort of changed or canceled because it
became
unproductive it's more complicated than
that so lar and serus started TGF
uh which I obviously participated in and
we had fun uh there was a sense of humor
it was all off the Record um a famous
example is the VP of sales whose name
was Omid um was always predicting lower
Revenue than we really had which is
called sandbagging so we got a sandbag
and we made him stand on the sandbag in
order to present his numbers it was just
fun humorous you know we had skits and
things like that um at at some size you
don't have that level of intim intimacy
and you don't have a level of privacy
and what happened was there were leaks
uh eventually there was a presentation I
don't remember the specifics where the
Pres presentation was ongoing and
someone was leaking the presentation
live to a reporter and somebody came on
stage and said we have to stop now I
think that was the moment where the
company got sort of too
big
h I heard about a story that um because
from what I had understood this might be
totally wrong but it's all just things
that Google employees have told me was
that there wasn't many sackings firings
at Google's wasn't many layoffs wasn't
really a culture of layoffs and I guess
I guessed in part that's because the
company was so successful that it didn't
have to make those extremely extremely
tough decisions that we're seeing a lot
of companies make today I reflect on
elon's running of Twitter when he take
took over Twitter the you know the say
the The Story Goes that he went to the
top floor and basically said anyone
who's willing to work hard is committed
to these values please come to the top
floor everyone else you're fired um this
sort of extreme culture of culling and
people being sort of activists at work
um and I wanted to know if there's any
truth in that there's some um in in
Google's case
um we had a position of why lay people
off just don't hire them in the first
place it's much much easier and so in my
10 year the only layoff we did was uh
200 people in the sales structures right
after the 2000 epidemic and I remember
it as being extremely painful right it
was the first time we had done it so we
took the position which is different at
the time that you shouldn't have an
automatic layoff what would happen is
that there was a belief at the time that
every six months or nine months you
should take the bottom five% of your
people and lay them off problem with
that is you're assuming the 5% are
correctly identified and furthermore
even the lowest performers have
knowledge and value to the corporation
that we can take it so we took a a very
much more positive view of our employees
and the employees like that and we
obviously paid them very well and so
forth and so on I think that the the
cultural issues ultimately have been
addressed but during there was a period
of time where there were uh because of
the free willing nature nature of the
company there were an awful lot of
internal distribution lists which had
nothing to do with the company what does
that mean they were distribution lists
on topics of War peace politics so forth
what's a distribution list a
distribution like an email dist think of
it as a a message board okay roughly
speaking think of it as message boards
for employees and at one I remember that
one point somebody discovered that there
were 100,000 such me message boards and
the company ultimately cleaned that up
because companies are not like
universities and that there are in fact
all sorts of laws about what you can say
and what you cannot say and so forth and
so for example the majority of the
employees were uh Democrats in the
American political system and I made a
point even though I'm a Democrat to try
to protect the small number of
Republicans because I thought they had a
right to be employees too so you have to
be very careful in a corporation to
establish what what does speech mean
within the corporation and uh what you
what you are hearing as wokeism is
really can be understood is what are the
appropriate topics on work time in in a
work venue should you be discussing my
own view is stick to the business and
then please feel free to go to the bar
scream your views talk to everybody you
know I'm a strong believer in free
speech but within the corporation let's
just stick to the corporation and its
goals because I was hearing these
stories about I think in more recent
times in the last year or two of people
coming to work just for the free
breakfast Pro protesting outside that
morning coming back into the building
for lunch as best I can tell that's all
been cleaned
up I did also hear that that it had been
cleaned up because I think it was
addressed in a very high conviction way
which meant that it it was um seen to
how did how do you think about
competition for everyone that's building
something how much should we be focusing
on our comp competition I strongly
recommend not focusing on competition
and instead focusing on building a
product that no one else has and you say
well how can you do that without knowing
the competition well if you study the
competition you're wasting your time try
to solve the problem in a new way and do
it in a way where the customers are
delighted U running Google we seldom
looked at what our competitors were
doing what we did we spent an awful lot
of time was what is possible for us to
do what can we actually do from our
current situation and sort of the
running ahead of everybody turns out to
be really important what about
deadlines well uh Larry established the
principle of um okrs which were
objectives and key results in every
quarter Larry would actually write down
all the metrics and he was tough and he
would say that if you got to 70% % of my
numbers that was good and then we would
grade based on are you above the 70% or
you below the 70% and it was harsh and
it works you you have to measure to get
things done in big Corporation otherwise
everyone kind of looks good makes all
sorts of claims feels good about
themselves but it doesn't have an impact
what about business plans should we be
writing business plans as found us
Google wrote A business plan there was a
run by a fellow named solar and I saw it
years later and it was actually correct
and I told salar that the this is
probably the only business plan ever
written for a corporation that was
actually correct in hindsight so what I
prefer to do and this is how I teach it
at Stanford is try to figure out what
the world looks like in five years and
then try to figure out what you're going
to do in one year and then do it right
so if you can basically say this is the
direction these are the things we're
going to achieve within one year and
then run against that as hard goals not
simple goals but hard goals then you'll
get there and the general rule at least
in a consumer business is if you can get
an audience of 10 or 100 million people
you can make lots of money right so if
you give me any business that has no
revenue and a 100 million people I can
find a way to to monetize that with
advertising and sponsorships and
donations and so forth and so on focus
on getting the user right and everything
else will follow the Google phrase is
focus on the user and everything else is
handled Sergey and
Larry you work with them for 20 years
many decades yeah two decades what made
them special frankly raw IQ they were
just smarter than everybody else really
yeah and
uh in sergey's case his father was a
very brilliant Russian mathematician his
mother was also highly technical his
family is all very technical and he was
clever he's a clever
mathematician uh Larry
different personality but similar so an
example would be that Larry and I are in
his office and we're writing on the
Whiteboard a long list about what we're
going to do and he says look we're going
to do this and this and I said okay I
agree with you I don't agree with you we
make this very long list and Sergey is
out playing
volleyball and so he runs in in his
little volleyball shorts and his little
shirt all sweating he looks at our list
and said this is the stupidest thing
I've ever heard and then he suggest five
things and he was exactly right so we ar
red the Whiteboard and then he of course
went back to play volleyball and that
became the strategy of the company so
over and over again it was the it was
their Brilliance and their ability to
see things that I didn't see that I
think really drove it can you teach that
I don't know I think you can teach
listening and
um but I think most of us get caught up
in our own
ideas and we are always surprised that
something new happened like I've just
told you that I'm I've been in AI a long
time I'm still surprised at the rate uh
my favorite current product is called
notebook
LM and for the uh listeners notebook LM
is an experimental product out of Google
Deep Mind basically Gemini um it's based
on the Gemini back end and it was
trained with high quality podcast voices
it's terrifying and you basically give
it a so what I'll do is um I'll write
something again I don't write very well
and I'll ask Gemini to rewrite it to be
more beautiful okay I'll take that text
and I'll put it in Notebook LM and it
produces this interview between a man
and a woman U who don't exist and for
fun what I do is I play this in front of
an audience and I wait and see if anyone
figures out that the humans are not
human it's so good they don't figure it
out we'll play it now so this is the big
thing that everyone's making a big fuss
about you can go and load this
conversation now it's going to go out
and create a conversation that's in a
podcast style where there's a male voice
and a female voice and they're analyzing
the content and then coming up with
their own kind of just uh creative
content so you could go and push play
right here we are back Thursday get
ready for week three the injury report
this week was a doozy it's a long one
yeah it is and it has the potential to
really shake things up so for that to me
gem notebook LM is my chat GPT moment of
this
year it was mine as well and it's much
of the reason that I was um deeply
confused okay because as a podcaster
who's building a media company we have
an office down the road 25,000 square
feet we have studios in there um we're
building audio video content at this in
the dawn of this new world where the
cost of production of content goes to
like zero or something and I'm trying to
navigate how to play as a media owner so
first place you're you're what's really
going on is you're moving from scarcity
to ubiquity you're moving from scarc to
abundance so one way to understand the
world I live in is it's scale Computing
generates abundance and abundance allows
new strategies in your case it's obvious
what you should do you're a really
famous podcaster and you have lots of
interesting guests simply have this fake
set of podcasts criticize you and your
guests right you're you're essentially
just amplifying your reach they're not
going to substitute for your honest
Brilliance and Charisma here but they're
going to accentuate it they will they
will they will be entertaining they will
summarize it and so forth it amplifies
your reach if you go back to my basic
argument that AI will double the
productivity of everybody or more so in
your case you'll have twice as many co
podcasts what I do for examples I'll
write something and I'll say I'll have
it respond and then to Gemini I'll say
make it longer and it adds more stuff I
think God I do this in like 30 seconds
then how powerful in your case take one
of these uh lengthy interviews you do
ask the system to annotate it to amplify
it and then feed that into fake
podcasters and see what they say you'll
have a whole new set of audiences that
love them more than you but but it's all
from you that's the key idea here I
worry because there's going to be
potentially billions of podcasts that
are uploaded to RSS feeds all around the
world and it's all going to sort of chip
away at you know the the moat that I've
so
so many people have believed that but I
think the evidence is it's not true um
when I started at Google there was this
notion that celebrity would go away and
there would be this very long tale of
micro markets you know Specialists
because finally you could hear the
voices of everyone and we're all very
Democratic and liberal in our view
that's the what really happened was
networks accentuated the best people and
they made more money right you went from
being a local personality to a national
personality to a global personality and
the globe is a really big thing and
there's lots of money and lots of
players so you as a as a celebrity are
competing against a global group of
people and you need all the help you can
to maintain your position if you do it
well by using these AI Technologies you
will become more famous not less
famous
Genesis I am I've had a lot of
conversations with a lot of people about
the subject of AI um and when I read
your book and I've watched you do a
series of interviews on this some of the
quotes that you said really stood out to
me one of them I wrote down
here which comes from your book Genesis
it's on page five the Advent of
artificial intelligence is in our view a
question of human
survival yes that is our view so why is
it a question of human
survival AI is going to move very
quickly it's moving so much more quickly
than I've ever seen because the amount
of money the number of people the impact
the
need what happens when the AI systems
are really running key parts of our
world what happens when AI is making the
decision my my simple example you have a
car which is AI controlled and you have
a emergency or a lady's about to give
birth or something like that and they
get in the car and there's no override
switch because the system is optimized
around the whole as opposed to his or
her
emergency right we as humans accept
various forms of efficiency including
urgent ones versus system systemic
efficiency you could imagine that the
Google Engineers would design a perfect
City that would perfectly operate every
self-driving car on every street but
would not then allow for the exceptions
that you need in such a in such an
important issue so that's a trivial
example and one which is well understood
of how it's important that these things
represent human values right that we we
have to actually articulate what does it
mean so my favorite one is all this
misinformation um democracy is pretty
important democracy is by far the best
way to to live and operate societies
look at there are plenty of examples of
this none of us want to work in
essentially an authoritarian
dictatorship so you better figure out a
way where the misinformation components
do not screw up proper political
examples another example is this
question about teenagers and the develop
their mental development and growing up
into these societies I don't want them
to be constantly depressed there's a lot
of evidence that dates around 2015 when
all the social media algorithms changed
from linear feeds to targeted feeds in
other words they went from time to this
is what you want this is what you want
that hyperfocus has ultimately narrowed
people's um political views as I as we
discussed but more importantly it's
produced more depression and anxiety so
all the studies indicate that basically
if you time it to roughly then when
people are coming to age they're not as
happy with their lives their behaviors
their opportunities for this and the
best explanation is it was an
algorithmic change and remember that
these systems they're not just
collections of content they are
algorithmically deciding
you know the algorithm decides what the
outcome is for humans we have to manage
that um what we say in many different
ways in the book is that you have sort
of a choice of whether the um the
algorithms will advance that's not a
question the question is are we
advancing with it and do we have control
over it um there are so many examples
where you could imagine an AI system
could do something more efficiently but
at what cost right
um I should mention that there is this
discussion about something called AGI
artificial general
intelligence and there's this discussion
in the Press among many people that AGI
occurs on a particular day right and
this is sort of a popular concept that
on a particular day five years from now
or 10 years from now this thing will
occur and all of a sudden we're going to
have a computer that's just like us but
even quicker that's unlikely to be the
path much more likely are these waves of
innovation in every field better
psychologists better writers you see
this with g chat gbt already better
scientists is a notion of an AI
scientist that's working with the AI
real scientists to accelerate the
development of more AI science people
believe all of this will come but it has
to be under human
control do you think it will be I do and
part of the reason is I and others have
worked hard to get the governments to
understand this it's very strange in my
entire career which has gone for you
know 50 years the um we've never asked
for government for help because asking
the government help is basically just a
disaster in the view of the techn
industry in this case the people who
invented it collectively came to the
same view that there need to be
guardrails on this technology because of
the potential for harm the most obvious
one is how do I kill myself give me
recipes to hurt other people that kind
of stuff there's a whole Community now
in this in this part of the industry
which are called trust and safety groups
and what they do is they actually have
humans test the system before it gets
released to make sure the harm that it
might have in it is suppressed it's
literally won't answer the question when
you play this forward in your brain you
you've been in the tech industry for a
long time and from looking at your work
you it feels like you're describing this
as the most sort of transformative
potentially harmful technology that
humans have really ever seen you know
maybe alongside the nuclear bomb I guess
but some would say even potentially
worse because of the nature of the
intelligence and its
autonomy you must have moments where you
you think forward into the future and
your thoughts about that future aren't
so
Rosy well because I have those moments
yes but but let's let's think let's
answer the question I said think five
years in five years you'll have two or
three more turns of the crank of these
large models these large models are
scaling with ability that is
unprecedented there's no evidence that
the scaling has laws as they're called
have begun to to stop they will
eventually stop but we're not there yet
each one of these cranks looks like it's
a factor of two factor of three factor
of four of capability so let's just say
turning the crank all of these systems
get 50 times or 100 times more powerful
in it of itself that's a very big deal
because those systems will be capable of
physics and math you see this with o.
one and um and open AI all the other
things that are occurring
now what are the dangers well there's
the most obvious one is cyber attacks
there's evidence that the raw models
these are the ones that have not been
released can do what are called Day Zero
attacks as well or better than humans a
day Zero attack is an attack that's
unknown they can discover something new
and how do they do it they just keep
trying because they're computers and
they have nothing else to do they don't
sleep they don't eat they just turn them
on and they just keep going um so the so
cyber is an example where everybody's
concerned another one is biology viruses
are relatively easy to make and you can
imagine coming up with really bad
viruses there's a whole team I'm part of
a commission looking at this to try to
make sure that doesn't happen I already
mentioned misinformation
another probably negative but we'll see
is the development of new forms of
warfare I've written extensively on how
war is changing and the way to
understand historic war is that it's the
stereotypically the the soldier with the
gun you know one side and so forth World
War trenches you see this by the way in
UK in the Ukraine fight today where the
ukrainians are holding on valiantly
against the Russian Onslaught but he's
sort of you know mono Amano you know man
against man sort of all of the
stereotypes of War so in a drone World
which is the sort of the fastest way to
build new robots is to build drones
you'll be sitting in a Command Center in
some office building connected by a
network and you'll be doing harm to the
other side while you're drinking your
coffee right that's a changed in the
logic of War um and it's applicable to
both sides I don't think anyone quite
understands how war will change but I
will tell you that in in the Russian
Ukraine war you're seeing a new form of
Warfare being invented right now right
um both sides have lots of drones tanks
are no longer very useful a $5,000 drone
can kill a $5 million tank um so it's
called The Kill ratio so basically it's
drone on drone and so now people are
trying to figure out how how to have one
drone destroy the other drone right this
will ultimately take over war and
conflict in our world in total you
mentioned rural models this is a concept
that I don't think people understand
exists the idea that there's some other
model that's the role model that is
capable of much worse than the thing we
play with on our computers every day
it's important to establish how these
things work so you the way these
algorithms work is they have complicated
uh training things where they suck all
the information in and they uh one week
currently believe we've sort of sucked
all of the written word that's available
it doesn't mean there isn't more but
we've we've literally done such a good
job of sucking everything that humans
have ever written it's all in these big
computers when I say computers I don't
mean computers I mean supercomputers
with enormous memories and the scale is
mindboggling uh and of course there's
this company called Nvidia which makes
the chips which is now one of the most
valuable companies in the world um
surprisingly so incredibly successful
because they're so Central to this
revolution and good for Jensen and his
team so the important thing is when you
do this training it comes out with a raw
model right it takes six months and you
know you wait 24 hours a day you can
watch it it gets close to there's a
measurement that they use called the
loss function when it gets to a certain
number they say good enough so then they
go what do we have right what do we do
right um so the first thing is let's
figure out what it
knows so they have a set of tests and of
course it knows all sorts of bad things
which they immediately then tell it not
to answer to me the most interesting
question is in over a 5-year
period the systems will learn things
that we don't know they learn how will
you test for things that you don't know
they
know the answer in the industry is that
they have incredibly clever people who
sit there and they fiddle literally
fiddle with the networks and say I'm
gonna I'm going to see if it knows this
I'll see if it can do this and then they
make a list and they say that's good
that's not so good right so all of these
Transformations so for example you can
show it a picture of a website and it
can generate the code to generate a
website all of those were not expected
they just happened it's called emergent
Behavior scary scary but exciting and so
far um the systems have held the
governments have worked well um the
these trust and safety groups group are
working here in the UK um one year ago
was the first trust and safety
conference um the government did a
fantastic job the team that was
assembled was the best of all the
country teams here in the UK um now
what's happening is these are happening
around the world the next one is in
France in uh early February and I expect
a similar good result do you think we're
gonna have to guard I mean you talk
about this but do you think we're going
to have to guard these role models with
with guns and tanks and machinery and
stuff I worked for the Secretary of
Defense for a while uh in my in Google
you could spend 20% of your time on
other things so I worked for the
Secretary of Defense to try to
understand the US Military and um one of
the things that we did is we visited a
plutonium U Factory plutonium is
incredibly dangerous and Incredibly
secret and so this particular base is
inside of another base so you go through
the first set of machine guns and then
you have normal thing and then you go
into the special place with even more
machines guns and even because it's so
secure so the the metaphor is do you
fundamentally believe that the computers
that I'm talking about will be of such
value and such danger that they'll have
their own data center with their own
guards which of course might be computer
guards but the important thing is that
it's so special that it has to be
protected in the same way that we
protect nuclear bombs and proliferate uh
and programming an alternative model is
to say that this technology will spread
pretty broadly and there'll be many such
plac
if it's a small number of groups the
governments will figure out a way to do
deterrence and they'll figure out a way
to do
non-proliferation so I'll make something
up I'll say there's a couple in China
there's a few in the US there's one in
in Britain of course we're all tied
together between the US and Britain and
maybe in a few other places that's a
manageable problem on the other hand
let's imagine that that power is
ultimately so easy to copy that it
spreads globally and it's accessible to
for example terrorist
then you have a very serious
proliferation problem which is not yet
solved this is again
speculation because I think a lot about
adversaries in China and Russia and
Putin and I think I know you talk about
them being a few years behind maybe one
or two years behind but they're
eventually going to get there they're
eventually going to get to the point
where they have these large language
models or these AIS that can do these
Day Zero attacks on our
nation
and they they don't have the like sort
of social incentive structure if they're
a communist country to protect and to um
guard against these things are you not
worried about what China is gonna do um
I am worried and I'm worried
because you're going into a space of
great power without fully defined
boundaries what kinger and we talk about
this in the book The the Genesis Book is
fundamentally about what happens to
society with the arrival of this new
intelligence and the first book we did
age of AI was right before chat GPT so
now everybody kind of understands how
powerful these things are we talked
about it now you understand it so once
these things show up who's going to run
them who's going to be in charge how
will they be used so from my perspective
I believe at the moment anyway that
China will behave relatively responsibly
and the reason is that it's not in their
interest to have free
speech in every case in China when they
have a choice of giving freedom to their
Cit citizens or not they choose
non-freedom and I know this because I
spent through all the uh I spent all the
time dealing with it so it sure looks to
me like the Chinese AI solution will be
different from the West because of that
fundamental bias against freedom of
speech because these things are noisy
they make a lot of noise they'll
probably still make AI weapons though
well on the weapon side you have to
assume that every new technology is
ultimately strengthened in a war um the
tank was invented in World War I at the
same time you had the initial forms of
uh airplanes much of the second world
war was an air Campaign which
essentially built many many things and
if you look at the the there's a a book
called Freedom's Forge about the
American U structure according to the
book they ultimately got to the point
where they could build two or three
airplanes a day at scale so in an
emergency Nations have enormous
power I get asked all the time if
everyone if anyone's going to have a job
left to do because this is the
disruption of intelligence and whether
it's people driving cars today I mean we
saw the Tesla announcement of the robo
taxis whether it's accountants lawyers
and everyone in between that's or
podcasters are we going to have jobs
left well um this question has been
asked for 200 years um there was there
were the L eyeses here in Britain way
back when and inevitably when these
Technologies come along there's all
these fears about them indeed with a lot
I there were riots and people you know
destroying the Looms and all of this
kind of stuff but somehow we got through
it so um my own view is that there will
be a lot of job
dislocation but there will be a lot more
jobs not fewer jobs and here's why we
have a demographic problem in the world
especially in the developed developed
world where we're not having enough
children uh that's well understood uh
furthermore we have a lot of older
people and and the younger people have
to take care of the older people and
they have to be more productive if you
have young people who need to be more
productive the best way to make them
more more productive is to give them
more tools to make them more productive
whether it's a machinist that goes from
a manual machine into a CNC machine or
in in the more modern case of a
knowledge worker who can achieve more
objectives we need that productivity
group if you look at Asia which is the
centerpiece of
manufacturing they have all this cheap
labor well it's not so cheap anymore so
do you know what they did they added
robotic assembly Lin so today when you
go to China in particular it's also true
in Japan and Korea the manufacturing is
largely done by robots why because their
demographics are terrible and their cost
of Labor is too high so the future is
not fewer jobs it's actually a lot of
jobs that are unfilled with people who
may have a job skill mismatch which is
why education is so important now what
are examples of jobs that go away
automation
has always gotten rid of jobs that are
dangerous physically dangerous or ones
which are essentially too repetitive and
too boring for humans I'll give you an
example um security guards it makes
sense that security guards would become
robotic because it's hard to be a
security guard you fall asleep you don't
know quite what to and these systems can
be smart enough to be very very good
security now these are these are
important sources of income for these
people they're going to have to find
another job another example in in the
media in um Hollywood everyone's
concerned that AI is going to take over
their jobs all the evidence is the
inverse and here's why um the Stars
still get money The Producers still make
money they still distribute their movie
but their cost of making the movie is
lower because they use more they use for
example synthetic backdrops so they
don't have to build the set um they can
do synthetic makeup now there are job
losses there so the people who make the
make make the set and do the makeup are
going to have to go back into
construction and personal care by the
way in America and I think it's true
here there's an enormous shortage of
people who can do high quality
craftsmanship right those people will
have jobs they're just different and
they may not be in Los Angeles am I
gonna have to interface with this
technology am I going to have to get a
neuralink in my brain because we you go
over the subject of there being these
sort of two species of humans
potentially ones that do have a way to
incorporate themselves more with
artificial intelligence and those that
don't and if and if that is the case
what is the time Horizon in your view of
that
happening I think neuralink is much more
speculative because you're dealing with
direct brain connection and nobody's
going to drill on my brain until it
needs it trust me I suspect you feel the
same uh I I guess my O My overall view
is that
um you will not
notice how much of your world has been
co-opted by these Technologies because
they will produce greater
Delight if you think about it a lot of
life is inconvenient it's fix this call
this make this happen AI systems should
make all that seamless you should be
able to wake up in the morning and have
coffee and not have a care in the world
and have the computer help you have a
great day this true of everyone now what
happens to your to your profession well
as we said no matter how good the
computers are people are going to want
to care about other people another
example let's imagine you have Formula 1
and you have Formula One with humans in
it and then you have a a a robot Formula
1 which where the cars are driven by the
equivalent of a robot is anyone going to
go to the robotic Formula 1 I don't
think so because of the drama the human
achievement and so forth do you think
that when they run the marathon here in
London they're going to have robots
running with humans of course not right
of course the robots can run faster than
humans it's not interesting what is
interesting is to see human achievement
so I think the commentators who say oh
there won't be jobs we won't care I
think they miss the point that we care a
great deal about each other as human
beings we have opinions you have a
detailed opinion about me having just
met me met me right now and I for you we
just are naturally set up your face your
mannerisms and so forth we can describe
it all right the robot shows up is like
oh my God what another robot how boring
why is samman working on the the founder
of open AI when the co-founders of open
a working on universal basic income
projects like worldcoin then well
worldcoin is not the same thing as
universal Bitcoin uh um Universal basic
income there is a belief in the tech
industry that it goes something like
this the politics of abundance what we
do is going to create so much abundance
that most people won't have to work and
there'll be a small number of groups
that work who typically these people
themselves and there be so much Surplus
everyone can live like a millionaire and
everyone will be happy I completely
think this is false I think none of what
I just told you is false but all of
these Ubbi ideas come from this notion
that humans don't behave the way we
actually do so I'm I'm a Critic of this
view I believe that that we as humans so
I an example is um we're going to make
legal the legal profession much much
easier because we can automate much of
the technical work of lawyers does that
mean we're going to have fewer lawyers
no the current lawyers will just do more
laws they'll do more they'll add more
complexity the system doesn't get easier
the humans become more sophisticated in
their application of the principles we
are naturally basically uh we have this
thing called um basically reciprocal
altruism that's part of us but we also
have our bad sides as well those are not
going away because of AI when I think
about AI this simple analogy often think
of is say my IQ is Steven bartett is 100
and there's this AI that sat next to me
whose IQ is 1,000 what on Earth would
you want to give Steven to do because
because that 1,000 IQ would have really
bad judgment in a couple cases because
remember that the AI systems do not have
human values unless it's added right I
would much rather talk to you about
something involving a moral or human
judgment even with the Thousand I
wouldn't mind Consulting it so tell me
the the history how was this resolved in
the past how are these but at the end of
the day in my view the core aspects of
it which have to do with morals and
judgment and beliefs and Charisma
they're not going away is there a chance
that this is the end of humanity no um
the way Humanity
does is much it's much harder to
eliminate all of humanity than you think
all the people I've looked with on these
biological attacks say it's it takes
more than one horrific pandemic and so
forth to eliminate humanity and and the
the pain can be very very high in these
moments look at the World War I World
War II the Hodor in uh Ukraine in the
1930s the Nazis you know these are
horrifically painful things but we
survived right we we as a as a Humanity
survived and we will I wonder if this is
the moment where humans couldn't see
past around the corner because you know
I've heard you talk about how the AIS
will turn in they'll be agents and
they'll be able to speak to each other
and we won't be able to understand the
language I have a specific proposal on
that um there are points where humans
should assert control
and I've been trying to think about
where are they I'll give you an example
there's something called recursive
self-improvement where the system just
keeps getting smarter and smarter and
learning more and more things at some
point if you don't know what it's
learning you should unplug it but we
can't unplug them can we sure you can
there's a power plug and there's a
circuit breaker go and turn the circuit
breaker off another example um there's a
there's a scenario theoretical where the
system is so powerful it can produce a
new model faster than the previous model
was checked okay that's another
intervention point so in each of these
cases um if the if agents and the
technical term is called agents what
they really are is large language models
with memory and you can begin to
concatenate them you can say this model
does this and then it feeds into this
and so forth you can build very powerful
decision systems we believe this is the
the the thing that's occurring this year
and next year everyone's doing them they
will arrive
the agents today speak in English you
can see what they're saying to each
other they're not human but they are
communicating what they're doing English
to English to English as long as and it
doesn't have to be English but as long
as they're human understandable but
let's so the thought experiment is one
of the agents says I have a better idea
I'm going to communicate in my own
language that I'm going to invent that
only other agents understand that's a
good time to pull the plug what is your
biggest fear about AI
my actual fear is different from what
you might imagine my my actual fear is
we're not going to adopt it fast enough
to solve the problems that affect
everybody right and the reason is that
the that if you look at every everyone's
everyday lives what do they want they
want safety they want Health Care they
want great schools for their kids we
just work on that for a while why do we
make people's lives just better because
of AI we have all these other
interesting things why don't we have a
um a teacher that is an AI teacher that
works with existing teachers in this
language of the kid in the culture of
the kid to get the kid as smart as they
possibly can why don't we have a doctor
or doctor's assistant really that
enables a a human doctor to always know
every possible best treatment and then
based on their current situation what
the inventory is which country is how
their insurance Works what is the best
way to treat that patient those are
relatively achievable Solutions why
don't we have them if you just did
education and Healthcare
globally the impact in terms of lifting
human potential up would be so great
right that it would change
everything it wouldn't solve the various
other things that we complain about
about you know this celebrity or this
misbehavior or this conflict or even
this war but it would establish a Level
Playing Field of knowledge and
opportunity at a global level that has
been the dream for decades and decades
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below throughout the pandemic I've been
a big supporter um it was a contrarian
view but I think it's now less a
contrarian view that companies and CEOs
need to be clear in their convictions
around how they work and one of the
things that I've um been criticized a
lot for is that I'm I'm for having
people in a room together so my
companies we um we're not remote we work
together in an office as I said down the
road from here and I believe in that
because I think of community and
engagement and synchronous work and I
think that work now has a responsibility
to be more than just a set of tasks you
do in a world where we're lonier than
ever before there's more disconnection
and especially for young people you
don't have families and so on um having
them work alone in a small white box in
a big city like London or New York um is
robbing them of something which I think
is important this was a bad this was a
contrarian view it's become less
contrarian as the big tech companies in
America have started to roll back some
of their initial knej reactions to the
pandemic that there a lot of them are
asking their team members to come back
into the office at least a couple of
days a week what's your point of view on
this so I have a strong view that I want
people in an office it doesn't have to
be all one office but I want them in an
office
and partly it's for their own benefit if
you're in your 20s when I was a young
executive I knew nothing of what I was
doing I literally was just lucky to be
there and I learned by hanging out at
the water cooler going to meetings
hanging out being in the hallway had I
been at home I wouldn't have had any of
that knowledge which ultimately was
Central to my subsequent promotions so
if you're in your 20s you want to be in
an office because that's how you're
going to get promoted and I think that's
consistent with the majority of the
people who really want to work from home
have honest problems with commuting and
family and so forth they're real issues
the problem with our joint view is it's
not supported by the data the data
indicates that productivity is actually
slightly higher in uh work uh when you
allow work from home so you and I really
want that company of people sitting
around the table and so forth but the
evidence does not support our view
interesting yeah is that true it is
absolutely true why is Facebook and all
these companies rolling back their uh
and like Snapchat rolling back their
remote working policies then not
everyone is um and you most companies
are doing various forms of hybrids where
it's two days or three days or so forth
um I'm sure that for the average
listener here who works in public
security or in a government they say
well my God they're not in the office
every every every day but I'll tell you
that at least for the the industries
that have been studied there's evidence
that allowing that flexibility from work
from home increases productivity I don't
happen to like it but I want to
acknowledge the science is there what is
the um the advice that you wish you'd
gotten at my age that you didn't get the
most important thing is probably keep
betting on yourself and bet again and
roll the dice and roll the dice what
happens in as you get older is you
realize that these opportunities were in
front of you and you didn't jump for
them why you were in a bad mood or you
know you didn't know who to call or so
forth life can be understood as a series
of opportunities that are put before you
and they're Tim Limited
I was fortunate that I got the call
after a number of people had turned it
down to work for Larry and for and with
Larry Sergey at Google changed my life
right but that was luck and timing my
one friend on the board at the moment
said I was very thankful to him and he
said but you know you did one thing
right I said what he said you said
yes so your philosophy in life should be
to say yes to that opportunity and yes
it's painful and yes it's difficult and
yes you have to deal with your family
and yes you have to travel to to some
foreign place and so forth get on the
airplane and get it
done what's the hardest challenge you've
dealt with in your life well on the
personal side you know I've had the I've
had a set of you know personal personal
Pro problems and
tragedies um like everyone does I think
on a business
context
um there were moments at Google where we
had control over an industry that we
didn't execute well the most obvious one
is social
media uh at the time when Facebook was
founded we had a system which we called
Orit um which was really really
interesting and somehow we we we did
everything well but we missed that one
right and I would have preferred and
I'll take responsibility for that we
have a closing tradition on this podcast
where the last guest leaves a question
for the next guest not knowing who
they're going to be leaving it for and
the question left for you is what is
your non-negotiable something you do
that significantly improves everyday
life well what I try to do is try to be
online and I also try to keep people
honest every day you keep you hear all
sorts of ideas and and so forth half of
which are right half of which are wrong
I try to make sure I know the truth as
best we can determine it Eric thank you
so much thank you it's uh such an honor
your books are have shaped my thinking
in so many so many important ways and I
think your new book Genesis is the
single best book I've I've read on the
subject of AI because you take a very
nuanced approach to these subject
matters and I think sometimes it's
tempting to be binary in your way of
thinking about this technology the the
pros and the cons but your writing your
videos your work takes this really
balanced but informed approach to it I
have to say as an entrepreneur the
trillion dollar coach book is what I
highly recommend everybody goes and
reads because it's um it's just a really
great Manual of being a leader in the
Modern Age and an entrepreneur I'm going
to link all five of these books in the
in the comment section below the new
book Genesis comes out in the US I
believe on the 19th of November
um I don't have the UK date but I'll
find it and I'll put it in but it's a
book it's a it's a critically important
book that nobody should avoid I've been
searching for answers that are contained
in this book for a very very long time
I've been having very a lot of
conversations on this podcast in search
of some of these answers and I feel
clearer um about myself my future but
also the future of society because I've
read this book so thank you for writing
it and thank you and let's thank Dr
Kissinger he finished the last chapter
in his last week of life in his deathbed
that's how profound he thought that this
book was And all I'll tell you is that
he wanted to set us up for a good next
50 years having lived for so long and
seen both good and evil he wanted to
make sure we continue the good progress
we're making as a
society is there anything he would want
to say any answer he gave would take
five
[Music]
minutes a remarkable man thank you Eric
thank you
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[Music]
ah