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