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cover of episode Google CEO: AI Is Creating Deadly Viruses! If We See This, We Must Turn Off AI! They Leaked Our Secrets At Google!

Google CEO: AI Is Creating Deadly Viruses! If We See This, We Must Turn Off AI! They Leaked Our Secrets At Google!

2024/11/14
logo of podcast The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Key Insights

Why did Eric Schmidt write a book about AI?

Eric Schmidt wrote the book 'Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit' to explore the implications of AI on human life, thoughts, and society. He was influenced by discussions with his friend Henry Kissinger, who understood the potential impact of AI and its implications for human survival.

What is critical thinking and how can it be acquired?

Critical thinking is the ability to distinguish between being marketed to or lied to and being given an argument to consider on your own. It involves checking assertions and being skeptical of plausible-sounding statements. This skill can be developed by constantly questioning and verifying information, especially in the age of social media where confirmation bias is prevalent.

How does AI impact the identity of children growing up?

AI can significantly program the identity of children by being their constant companion from birth. This is a new experiment without a control group, and it raises questions about how AI influences their values, personal values, and daily thoughts. The rapid societal changes brought by AI tools like social media and digital assistants are unprecedented and require careful navigation.

What principles should entrepreneurs consider when scaling a company?

Entrepreneurs should focus on finding truly brilliant people who are smarter and more innovative than themselves. They should also think about scale, risk-taking, and the ability to fail fast. Additionally, they should consider the 70-20-10 rule, which allocates resources to the core business, adjacent business, and new ideas respectively.

Why is company culture important and how does it evolve as a company grows?

Company culture is crucial as it sets the tone for how employees interact and perform. It is often shaped by the founders and can be seen in their obsession with user interfaces and being closed and secretive. As companies grow, they become less efficient due to conservatism and public scrutiny, but the echoes of the founding culture remain. The challenge is to maintain innovation while scaling.

What are the dangers of AI according to Eric Schmidt?

The dangers of AI include the potential for perfect misinformation, the impact on democracy, and the developmental effects on teenagers. AI can also lead to new forms of warfare, where drones and AI-controlled systems replace traditional soldier-to-soldier combat. Additionally, there is a risk of AI systems learning things humans don't know, which could lead to unforeseen and potentially harmful behaviors.

Will AI make jobs redundant, and what types of jobs are most at risk?

AI will likely displace jobs that are dangerous, physically demanding, or overly repetitive. However, it will also create new jobs and increase productivity in various fields. Jobs in sectors like security, manufacturing, and potentially media production are at risk, but new opportunities will arise in areas that require human interaction, creativity, and complex decision-making.

How should we control AI to ensure it aligns with human values?

To control AI, we need to establish guardrails that ensure AI systems represent human values and do not cause harm. This involves having trust and safety groups that test AI systems before release, ensuring they do not provide harmful advice or information. Governments and society need to work together to understand and manage the potential risks of AI, especially as it becomes more powerful and autonomous.

What is Eric Schmidt's biggest fear about AI?

Eric Schmidt's biggest fear is that society may not adopt AI fast enough to solve pressing global problems like healthcare and education. He believes that AI has the potential to greatly improve these areas, but only if we integrate it effectively and quickly into our daily lives and institutions.

Chapters

Eric Schmidt discusses his motivation for writing 'Genesis' and his collaboration with Henry Kissinger to understand the implications of AI on human identity and society.
  • AI as a transformative force in history
  • The role of AI in changing human thoughts and life
  • The challenge of understanding AI's impact on humanity

Shownotes Transcript

Translations:
中文

Someone was leaking information on google, and the staff was incredibly secret.

So what are the secrets? Well.

the first rx mt. Is the former CEO of google .

to .

grow the company from one hundred million dollars to one hundred and eighty. And this is how, as someone .

whose leds one of the world is bigger tech companies, what are those first principles .

of the leadership business and doing something great? Well, the first is risk taking. A he is where he can take huge risk 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 best as you can because you want to be first because that's where you make the most .

principles that I need to be thinking about.

So here's the really big one. The google we have the seventy, twenty ten rules that generated ten, twenty, thirty, forty billion dollars of extra over a decade, and everyone can go do this. So the first thing is, what about A I? I can tell you, if you're not using A I at every aspect of your business.

you're not gonna IT. But you've been in the tech industry for a long time and you that 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 coached by these technologies because they will produce greater. But the questions are, what are the dangerous? Are we advancing with IT?

And if we have control over.

what is your bigger? My actual fear is different from you. Imagine my actual fear. That's a good time to pull the blog.

This is always born my mind a little bit. Fifty three percent of you that list to the show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So could I ask you for a favour before we start, if you like the show and you like what we do here, and you want to support the free, simple way that you can do just that, is by hitting the subscribed burn.

And my commitment to you, if you do that, that i'll do everything in my power, me on my team, to make sure the show is Better. A few every single week, we will listen your feedback, will find the guest that you want me to speak to, and will continue to do what we do. Thank you so much. 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 read 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.

No, no, but that, I mean, these are subjects 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 genesis first.

thank you for I wanted to beyond show for a long time. I am really happy to be able to be here in person in london. And kiser doctor kiser ended up in one of my greatest and closest friends.

And ten years ago, he and I were a conference where he had heard damascius speak about a eye, 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 listen 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 he would have the impact on, and that Harry had been working on this since he was twenty two, coming out of the army after what were two. And his thesis about can and so forth as an undergraduate at harvey ard.

So all of a sudden I found myself in the 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 has never happened in history. The arrival of A I is a huge moment in history for anyone that doesn't .

know your story, or maybe he just knows your story from sort of google onwards. Can you tell me these sort of inspiration points, the education experiences that you're drawing 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 change. The usual things were 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 interesting computers and they were relatively slow them but to me they were fascinating to give an example, the computer that I used in college is one hundred million times slower. One hundred million times slower then the phone you have in your pocket. And by the way, that was a computer for the entire university.

So mos 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 with an interest in something which was about to explode. And when we sort of everything happens together, everyone get swamped up in IT. And of course, the rest is history.

I was SAT this weekend with my partners, little brother, who's eighteen years old. yes. And as we ate breakfast yesterday before they flew back to portugal, we had this discussion with her family, that her dad was there, her man with their raft, the Younger brother was there, and my girl was there.

Difficult because most of them don't speaking lish. So we had to use fully enough A I to transact what I was saying. But the big discussion at breakfast was, what should raf do in the future? He's eighteen years old. He's got his career ahead of him. And the decisions he makes us is so evident in your story at this exact moment as to what information and intelligence he requires for himself will quite clearly define the rest of his life if you assigned at that table with me yesterday when I was trying to give rap advice on what knowledge he should acquire eighteen years old, what would you have said and what of the principles not to .

sit behind that? The most important things, to develop analytical, critical thinking skills. To some level, I don't care how you get there. So if if you like math or science, or if you like the law, or if you like entertainment, just think critically.

In his critical of the case, as as an eighteen year old, what I would encourage him to do is figure out how to write programing to right programme in the language called python. Python is easy to use, it's very easy understand, and it's become the language of A I. So the AI systems, when they write code for themselves, they right code in python. And so you can't lose as developing python programing skills. And the simplest thing to do with an h old man, say, make a game because these are typically gamers are typically make a game that's interesting using python.

It's interesting because I wondered if coding you, I think five, ten years ago, everyone's advice for teen year old has learn how a code, but in a world of A I, where these large language models are able to write code and are you know, increasing every month in their ability to write Better, Better code, I wonder if that's like .

a dying art phone. Yeah, a lot of people who pose this, and that's not correct IT sure looks like these systems were right code. But remember, the systems also have interfaces called, which you can program them.

So one of the large revenue forces for these AI models with these companies, es, have to make money at some point, right, is you build a program and you actually make an A P I call and ask you a question. Typical example is give you a picture and tell me what's in the picture now. Can you have some fun with that? As an eighteen year, all of course, right. So so when I say python, I mean python using the tools that are available to build something new, let me get you are interested.

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 about critical thinking is to distinguish between being marketed to, which is also on as being lied to, and being being given the argument on your own, have, because of social media, which I hold responsible for a lot of ills, as well as good things in life, we've sort of gotten used to people just telling us something in believing IT, because our friends believe IT are so far.

And I strongly encourage people to check assertions. So you can. People sell this stuff. And I learned a google all those years. Somebody says something I checked in on google to.

And if you then have a question, do you criticize them and create 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 ten percent of americans have passports which is a widely dude but false statement um it's actually higher than that, although it's never high enough in marie in america. But that's an example of instruction you can just say, is that true, right?

There's a long mean about american politicians where the congress is basically full of criminals um IT may be full of one or two but is not full of of nine. But again, people believe this stuff because that sounds applausive. 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 tween two and false, I suggest you keep your mouth ut right. Because you can't run a government of society without people Operating on basic facts like, for example, climate changes real. We can debate over whether it's how to address IT, but there is no question the climate is changing.

IT is a fact. He is a mathematical fact. And how do I know this is somebody will say, well, how do you know and said, because science is about repeatable, uh uh, experiments and also proving things wrong so let's say, I said that climate change is real and this was the first time I had ever been said, which is not true.

Then one hundred people say that can be too. I'll see if you well and then and then all of a sudden they'd see I was right and I get some big Price, right? So, so the falsified ly of these assertions is very important. How do you know that science is correct? Is because people are constantly testing IT.

And why is this kind of critical thinking so especially important in .

a world to A I? Well, partly because A I will allow for perfect misinformation. So let's use an example of tiktok. Tiktok can be understands, called the banded already mom and computer science in the sense of the last vegas one ARM band.

Do I stay in the bandit machine and I keep on this slot machine, or do I move to another slap machine? And the the tiktok algorithm basically can be understood as i'll keep serving you what you tell me you want, but occasion i'll give you something from the adjacent area and is highly addictive. So what you're seeing with social media, and tiktok is a particularly bad example of this, is people are getting into these ravi holes where they all they see is confirmatory bias.

And in 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 cell harm or suicide because they are already unhappy. And then and then they start picking up unhappy and then their whole environment online.

These people who are unhappy and IT makes them more unhappy because he doesn't have a positive bias. So there's a really good example where um let's in your case you the dad you're going to watch this is the dad with your kid and you're going to say not that bad. Let me show you some let me give you some good alternatives.

Let me get you inspire. Let me get you out of your funk. The algorithms don't do that unless you force them to, because the algorithms are fundamentally about optimizing an objective function, literally mathematically maximize some goal that has been trained to in in this case, attention.

And by the way, part of IT, part of we have we have so much a outrage is because if you're a CEO, you want to maximized 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 stuff is not true. They're fighting over scare attention.

There was a recent article where there's an old quote from one thousand nine hundred seventy one from her b Simon, an economist at the time I kind of email and who said that um economists don't understand but in the future the scarcity will be about attention so somebody now fifty years later went back and said, I think we're at the point where we've model zed 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 know because you have to eat and sleep and to hang out.

But these are significant societal changes that have occurred very, very quickly. When I was Young, there was a great debates to the benefit of television. And, you know, my argument of the time was, well, yes, we did.

We did, you know, rock and roll and drugs in all, and we wash 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 OK? Not as obvious, because these tools are highly addictive, much more so than television ever was.

Do you think .

you'll grape IT? I personally do IT because I am inherently and optimistic. I also think the society begins to understand the problems. That typical example is there's an epidemic of harm to teenage girls. Uh girls as we know are uh more advanced in boys at those uh you know below eighteen uh and the girls seemed to get hit by social media eleven and twelve when they're not quite capable of hanging the rejection in the emotional stuff and it's driven uh you know emerging room visit, self farm and so forth to record levels, swell document.

So society is beginning to recognize this now h schools won't like kids use their phones when in the classroom, which kind of obvious if you ask me um so developmentally uh, one of the core questions about the A I revolution is what does he do to the identity of children that are growing up? Your values, your personal values, where you get up in the morning and think about life is now set is highly unlikely that an AI will change your programing, but your child can be significantly programme. 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.

But IT like now, by the way, I don't know, we've never done this 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 wife.

And so you should be optimistic for that, because these kids, when they grow up, theyll live to one hundred, their lives will be much more prosperous, I hope. And I I pray that tell me much less conflict. Uh, certainly their life spans are longer. The likelihood of them being injured in in wars and so are much, much lower statistically. It's a good message tickets.

As someone who's LED one of the worlds biggest tech companies, if you were the sea of tiktok, what would you do? Because I am sure that they realised everything you've said is true. But they have this commercial incentive to drive up the addictiveness of an algorithm, which is causing these ecco chAmbers, which is causing the rates of anxiety and depression among 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 straight forward. They're sort of good revenue and bad revenue when we were at google um learn. So gi, we would have situations, we would improve quality, 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 fifty percent to one, fifty percent to the other, because I thought they were both important.

So and the founders, of course, we are very supportive. So google became more moral and also made more money, right? All of the there's plenty about stuff on google, but is not on the first page. That was the key thing.

The alternative model would be say, let's maximize revenue, will put all the really bad stuff, the lies and the cheating and the deceiving and over the as you and I will drive you insane and we might have made more money, but first he was the wrong thing to do. But more importantly, it's not sustainable. Um there's a law, a called gressier law uh to 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 a president with bullying in this kind of stuff. Now you've got crazy people, in my view, who are building bots that are lying right misinformation. And why do you do that? You've got in, there was a, there was a hurricane, 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 to there's a german world shopping for IT. There's a bunch of things like this that we after 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 arrived to google forty six years old.

two thousand and one, two thousand.

two thousand and one. You had a very extensive career before then, working for a bunch really interesting companies. Some microsystems is one that I know very well. You've worked with zio x in california as well, bell labs, with your first sort of real job, I guess, twenty years old. First, what a big tech trip. What did you learn in this journey of your life about what IT is to build a great company and what value is as a really big entrepreneur and people in teams like, if they 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 other like first principles? So the first world 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, move faster than you, changes the world is Better spoke and more hands, some more beautiful. We know whatever IT is that you're optimizing and lie yourself with them, because there are the people who are going to make, make the world different.

In one of my books, we use the distinction between divers and nails in the diva, and we use the example of Steve jobs, who clearly was a deva opinion and strong and augmented, and would bully people if you didn't like them, but was really, and when he was, he was a deva. He wanted perfection, right? Aligning yourself with save 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 a their own account. They are not they're not trying to do the right thing. They're trying to benefit themselves at this 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 and they want to do IT, that's how the world moves forward. If you don't have such a person, your company is not going to go anywhere. And the reason is that it's too easy.

Just keep doing what you are doing, right? And an innovation is fundamental about changing what you're doing. Up until the this generation of tech companies, most companies seem to me to be one shot wonders, right?

They would have one thing that was very successful. And then IT was sort of um IT was typically following esco and nothing much would happen. And now I think that the people are smarter.

People are Better educated. You now see repeatable waves. Good example being microsoft, which is an older company now, are founded in basically eighty one, eighty to something like that. So let's call that forty five years old. But theyve reinvented themselves a number of times, right in a really powerful way.

We should probably talk about this then before we move on, which is what you're talking about, there is that sort of founder things. People are referred to the founder that found energy, that high conviction, that what a disruptive thinking and that ability to reinvent e yourself. I was looking at some stats last night, in fact, and I was looking at how long companies stay on the M.

P. Five hundred on average. Now I went from thirty three years to seventeen years to twelve years, average ten. And as you play those numbers, four eventually, or twenty fifty. And I told me that I would be about eight is well.

i'm not sure agree with the founder of argument and the reason is that it's great to have a brilliant founder and um and is this it's actually like more than great. It's like really important and we need more brilliant founders. Universities are producing these people, by the way, they do exist and they show up every year.

Know another Michael dell at the age of nineteen or twenty two. These are just brilliant founders. Obviously, gates and l and and sort of my generation of brilliant founders learn sergent .

for anyone that doesn't know who larrian so go and doesn't know that the early google story. Can you give me a little bit of that? Packs tory, but then also instruct ce characters .

called doesn't. So Larry page and brand made stanford, and they were on a grant from the believing of the national science foundation as graduates, students and Larry page invented a algorithm called page rank which is named after him um and he and sergey wrote paper which 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 four, a transform of the way people Normally did things at the time. And so they wrote this code. I don't think they were that good a set of programmer, you know, they sort of did IT. They had a computer, they ran out of power in the dorm room.

So they um borrowed the power from the dorm room next to and plug IT in and they have the data center in the bedroom, you know in the dorm classic story um and then they moved to a uh building that was owned by um the sister of a girlfriend at the time and that's how they found at the company. Their first investor was a one of the founder of some microsystem was named with andy battle shine who just said that i'll just give you the money because you're obviously incredibly smart. Give him hundred thousand dollars yeah maybe is a billion.

But in any case, IT is ultimately became many billions of dollars. So gives you a sense of this early founding is very important. So the founders then set up in this little house in menlo park, which ultimately we bought a google as a as a museum and they set up in the garage and they had google google world headquarters in neon may and they had big headquarters um with the four employees that were sitting below them.

And the computer that their instructor had built their instigate were very, very good softer people and obviously brilliant but they were not very good hardware and so they built to computers using corporate to separate the CPU. And if you know anything about hardware, harder are generally a lot of heat, and the court board would catch on fire. So eventually, when I showed up, we started building proper hardware with proper hard hardwork engineers. But IT gives you a sense of the scrappiness that that was so character ter um and you know today with your people enormous impact on society and I think that will continue um for many.

many years. Why do they call you in? At what point did they realize that they needed someone like you?

Well there I said to me, these are very Youngest. He looked to me, he says, we don't need you now, but we'll need you in the future.

We will need you in the future.

Yes, so one of things about her and sugars 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.

If you think about IT, that's pretty audacious twenty five years ago, like how you gna do that. And so they started with web search, EV. And Larry had studied A I E. Quite extensively and he began to to work and ultimately he uh quired uh with with all all of us obviously uh this comment 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 A I 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 as IT released to building a great company, what are some of those finding principles? We have lots of entrepreneurs that listen to the show. One of them have expressed as this need for the devils. I guess these people who are just very high conviction and see into the future, what are the other principles that I need to be thinking about .

what i'm scaling my company? Well, the first is think about scale. I think a current example is elon. Um elon is an incredible entrepreneur and an incredible scientists. And if you study how he Operates, he gets people by, I think, sheer force of personal will to over perform, to take huge risks, which somehow he he has this brilliance where he can make those trade offs and get IT right. So these are exceptional people.

Now in our book with genesis is we argue that you're going to have that in your pocket, but as to whether you'll have the judgment to take the risk that elon does that. Another question that one of the other ways to think about IT is an awful lot of people talk to me about the companies that their founding and there they are, 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 far, these are all fine ideas i'm interested in, in ideas which have the benefit of scale. And when I I say scale, I mean the ability to go from zero to infinity in terms of an refusers and demand and scale, there are plenty, plenty of ways of thinking about this.

But what would be such a company in the age of A I, well, we can tell you what I would look like. You would have apps, one on android, one on I O S, may be a few others. Those absolutely use powerful networks and theyll have a really big computer in the back, this doing A I calculations. So future successful companies will all have that right, exactly what problem that solves well, that up to the founder. But if you're not using A I at every aspect of your business, you're not gonna make IT and distinction as a programme matter is that when I was doing all of this way, back when you had to write the code, now A I has to discover the answer is a very big deal.

And of course, this was all, this was invented google ten years ago, but basically all of a sudden, and and political programing, which said, what I did my whole life in a writing code, and you do this to that at this practical, all this so of so on is gradually being replaced by learning the answer right. So for example, we use the example of translate language translation. Um the the current large language models are essentially organized and predicting the next word.

Well, if you can predit the next word, you can predict next sequence in biology, you can predict the next action, you can predict the next thing the robot should do. So all of this stuffer around large language models and deep learning that has come out the transformer paper GPT three, uh, ChatGPT, which is for most people with this huge moment, is essentially about a predict. The next word in getting IT right in terms .

of company culture and important, that is, for the success and prospects of a company. Well, how do you think about company culture and how significant and important is IT like when set? So I give is almost always said.

covering cultures are almost always set by the S I haven't to be on the board of my clinic. Mail clinic is the largest healthcare system in america, is also the most highly rated one. And they have a rule which is called the the needs of the customer come first which came out of the male brothers had been dead for like hundred and twenty years um but that was their principle and I when I initially got on the board, I started walking around to that.

That is kind of a stupid, 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 is a health care, is that for service delivery, you can drive a culture even in non tech. And tech is typically in engineering culture.

And if I had do things over again, I would have even more technical people and even fewer non technical people, and just make the technology people figure out what they have to do. And i'm sorry for that bias because I am not trying to offend anybody. But the fact the matter is the technical people, if you build the right product, your customers will come.

If you don't build the product, then you don't need to sell for us. Why are you selling an inferior product? So in in the how google works well and ultimately and train solar coach book, which is about camel, we talk a lot about how the C E. O is now the chief product officer, the chief innovation officer, because fifty years ago, you didn't have access to capital, you didn't have access to market and you didn't have access to sales, you didn't have to access to distribution hours. I was meeting today with an entrepreneur who said, yeah, yeah, will be ninety five percent technical.

And I said, why? Said, well, we have a contract manufacturer and our products are so good that people will just buy them this happen to be A A technical switching company um and they said it's only one hundred thousand times Better than his competence and I said, you will sell unfortunate doesn't work IT. Yeah, this 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 when working me is not another thing you do with with engineer.

As as you say, they make a nice presentation to you and they go. So 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 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 stopping. So arrogant. So what happens is that in, in the, in the invention crisis within firms, people fall in love with idea, and they don't test one of things that google did. And this is largely mars. And mayor, we back when is one day he said to me, I don't know how to judge user in interface.

Previous C E O SHE was the .

C E O of yahoo. And before SHE ran all the consumer products at google and she's now running another company in in the bay area. But the important thing of the mess, you said I can't as as well, you know the U I, the user interface is great at the time and I was certainly was and SHE said, I don't know how to judge the use interface myself and none of my team do, but we know how to measure.

And so what SHE organized were A, B tests. You test one, test another. So remember that it's possible using these networks to actually kind of figure out because they are highly instrumented, uh, dwelling time, how long does somebody how long does somebody watch this? How important that is. If you go back to how tiktok works, a one of the the signals that they use include the amount of time you watch commenting, a forwarding, uh, sharing all of those kinds of things and those you can understand those analytics that go into an AI engine that makes the decision is to what to do next.

what to make viral. And on this point of culture at scale, is IT right to expect that the culture changes as the company scales, because you came into google lovely when they were doing over one hundred million dollars in revenue, and you left when they were doing a hundred eight billion staging. But is IT right to assume that the culture of a growing company should scare from when there was ten people in that garage to when there's a hundred?

So when I go back to google to visit and they were kind enough to give me a age 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 german running ads. You know the successors to the people who work with me and I asked him what they are 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, uh, I was not near the founding of apple, but I was on the board for a while um the found in culture you can see today in their obsession about user interfaces. They are obsession about being closed and the privacy and secrecy. Just a different company, right? I'm not passing judgment.

Um setting the culture is important. The echoes 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 their public and they have lawsuits.

And um a famous example is that microsoft, after the antitrust a case in the nineties, became so conservative in terms of what I could launch that IT really missed the web revolution for a long time. They have since recovered and I of course, I was happy to exploit that as a competitor that when we were a 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 tech startups that have a nuclear idea tend to win because the big company can't move fast enough to do IT. Not the example we had built on a google video. I was very proud of google video.

And David drama, who was the gentle council of the time, came, 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 camperdown ure, you know, typical arrogant ark. And we SAT down and we looked at IT, and they really work quicker even though we had an incoming at. And why IT turns out that the incoming was Operating under the traditional rules the 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, intellectually, property. And so for ultimately, we were sued over all of us and we ultimately won all those suits.

But it's an example where there are these moments in time. We have to move extremely quickly. You're seeing that right now with general technology. So the agi that the general revolution generate code, generate videos, generate text, gender, everything. All of those winners are being determined in the next six, twelve months.

And then once once the slope is set, once the growth rate is for jumping every uh six months or so far, it's very hard for somebody else to come in. So so it's a race to get there as fast as you can when you talk to the the great venture capital, they are their 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 tomato money.

We're talking before you arrived talking to jack about this idea of like harvesting and hunting, so harvesting what you've already sold in hunting funding opportunities. But I i've always found its quite difficult to get the harvest is to be the hunt is at the same time.

So so harvesting and hunting is a good metaphor. Um I am interest in entrepreneurs. And so what we learned a google was ultimately you want to get somebody done, you have to have somebody who's entrepreneurs in their approach, in charge of a small business.

And so, for example, thunder, when he became C. E O, had a model of which, with the little things that he was going to emphasize, in which, for the big things, some of those little things are now big things, right? And and he managed that that way.

So one way to understand innovation in a large company is you need to know who the owner IT, is. Larry page would say over over again, it's not gona happen unless there's an owner who is going to drive this. And he was supremely good identifying that technical talent, right? That's one of his great founder strength.

So when we talk about founders, if you have 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 if I look back in my career, each generation of the tech companies failed, including, for example, son, at at the point at which chip became non competitive with the .

future is IT possible for a team to innovate while they still have their day job, which is harvesting, if you know I mean, what do you have to take those people, put them into a different team, different building, different P, O, and get them to focus on their disruptive activation.

There are almost no examples of doing IT simultaneous ly in the same building. A the macintosh was famously Steve in his table. Crazy way have the the very small team that invented the macintosh and he put them in a little building next to the big building, uh, on bob road and T O.

And they put a pirate flag on top of IT. Now was that good culturally inside the company? No, because he creates 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 establish the U. I. The user interface ultimately allowed them to build the iphone, which of course, is defined by the user interface.

Why can they stay in the same building?

IT just doesn't work. You you can't get people to play two roles in seventy different. You're going to be a pie and a disrupt. 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 what google does is because the product is not sold to you, it's deliver to you. It's easier to change. But the same problem remains if you look at google today, right, it's basically search a search box and is incredibly powerful.

But what happens when that face is not really textual, right? Google will have to reinvent that. It'll be the system will somehow know what you're asking, right?

IT will be your assistant um and again, google will do very well. So I mean, no way criticizing google here, but i'm saying that even something as simple as search box will eventually be replaced by something more powerful. It's important that google will be the company that does that. I believe they .

will and I am thinking about IT. You know, the example of Steve jobs and building with the power flag on my brain went there. Are so many officers around the world that were trying to kill applet, that exact moment that minor had the pia 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. Part of my wonders if, in your experience, it's a founder that has that type of conviction that does that is .

extremely hard for non founders to do this in corporations. Because if you think about a CoOperation, what's the duty of the C E. O? 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 into 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 need ten billion dollars. Now would the board say yes? Well, they did to mark eckbert. He spent all that money on 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 an instagram, what's up in facebook, and in particular in the A I systems that power them.

And to a facebook, to my surprise, is a very significant leader in A I, having released this language called, or version called lama four hundred billion, which is curiously an open source model. Open source me is available freely for everyone. And what what facebook get in 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 zark bs obviously and incredibly telling of entrepreneur um he's now back on the list of of the most rich people um he's feeding you know everything he was doing and he managed to lose all that money while making a different bet that's A A unique founder. The same thing is almost impossible with a higher 企业。

How important here is focus. And what's your what yours would have a opinion of the importance to focus from your experience with google, but also looking at these other companies when you're at google and you have so much money in the bank, there are so many things that you could do and could build like an endlessness you can take on anybody and basically went in most markets. How do you think about focus on 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 is really transformed.

And so the idea was not that we would somehow focus on one thing like surge, but rather that we would pick areas of great impact and importance to the world, many which were free. By the way, this is not necessarily revenue driven. And that word, i'll give you an 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 uh the term is called ARM. It's a risk uh, chip.

And this particularly rich ship 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 for that, so on.

And so that decision, that faithful decision now fifteen years ago, meant that they were never a player in the mobile space. And once they made that decision, they try to take their expensive and expensive and complex chips, and they kept trying to make checker and smaller versions. But the core decision, which is to simplify, simplify to the wrong and outcome.

Today, if you look at giving an example, the n video chips use an ARM CPU. And in these two powerful G P, S called the b two hundred, they don't use the intel chip. They use the armed chip because I was for their needs faster.

IT would never have predicted that fifteen years ago. So at the end, maybe was just a mistake, but maybe they didn't understand in the way they were organized, a CoOperation that ultimately battery power would be as important as computing power, right, being out of batteries. And that was the discriminate.

So one way to think about IT is if you're going to have these sort of simple rules, you Better have a model, what happens in the next five years. So the way I teach this is just write down what IT look like in five years. Just try look .

like in five years, your company.

whatever. IT is right? So let's talk about the eye. What will be true in five years.

then it's gonna be a loss matter.

There is lot smarter. But how many companies will there be in A I? Will there be five or five thousand or fifty thousand.

fifty thousand?

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 incredible smart, which helps us guide through the information overload that is today, who's going to build a make a prediction?

What kind of harder will beyond d 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 such broad phenomenon 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 to is not transformative to daily life for everyone. People are not running around all they using crypto tokens rather than currency. Crypto o is a specialized market, by the way, it's important and it's interesting.

It's not a horse zonal transformative market. The arrival of alien intelligence in the form of savants that you use is such a transformer of thing, because IT touches everything. IT touches you as A A producer, as a star, as a narrative.

IT touches me as an executive. IT will ultimately help people make money in the stock market. People are working on that. There are 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 edibility or really big one, it's fundamental.

How do you apply A I to accelerate what you're doing, right? In your case, for example, here you have, I think, the most successful show in the U. K. By far right.

So how we use A I to make IT more successful? Well, you can ask you to distribute you more right to make uh, narratives, to summarize, to to come up with new insights, to suggest, to have fund, create, contest are all sorts of ways that you can ask. 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 right a program. So i'm saying to the computer, you write a program which goes to all the constitution in my interest, figures out roughly what they care about and if, and then send them a video which is labelled you of me digitally. So not fake, but it's kind like my intention, where I explained to them how important I as their constituent have made the bridge work right and you said there to go. That's crazy, but is possible. Now politicians have not discovered this yet, but they will because ultimately politicians around a human connection and the quicker st way to have the communication is to be on their phone talking about something that they care about .

when ChatGPT first launched. And they sort a skilled, rapidly to hundred million users. There was all these articles saying that the founders of google had rushed back in, and IT was a crisis situation at google.

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 ChatGPT style product? Well, remember the 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 ten billion user clusters of activity.

It's pretty good, right? It's pretty hard to do, right? I'm very proud of that and very proud of what they are doing now. Um my own view is that what happened was google was working in the engine room and a team out of open eye figured out a technology called A R L H F.

And what happened was when they did GPT three and gp the t is transformer which was invented in google, and they did that. They had sort of this interesting idea, and then they own, then they sort of casually started to use humans to make IT Better. An ally chef refers to the fact that you use humans at the end to do A B tests where humans can actually say, well, this is 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 opening friends that you were sitting around on on thursday night. 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 up people sam and mirror and and so for we'll talk about this they didn't really understand how good IT was.

They just turned IT on and all of us that they had a huge success disaster because they were working on GPT four at the same time IT was an after thought it's a great story because IT just shows you that even the brilliant founders do not necessarily understand how powerful what they are. What they've done is now today, of course, you have uh GPT four o um basically A A very powerful mod from up and you have german I one point five, which is clearly in roughly equivalent, if not Better, in certain areas. The gami is more multi model, for example and then you have other players.

Lama lama architecture, L L L A M A does not down for lambs is large language models um out of facebook and a number of others. There's a start up called anthropic uh which is very powerful, founded by one of the inventors of GPT three um and a home bunch of people and they form of their company knowing they were going to be that successful. Is interesting.

They actually formed as part of their incorporation that they were a public benefit CoOperation because they were concerned that they would be so powerful that some evil C E. O in the future would force them to go for revenue as supposed to the world worlds. 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. And they were right.

Do you think if Steve jobs is an apple, there be on that list? Um how do you think the company would be different?

Well, h tim has done a fantastic job in sea 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, if ve managed to continue the focus on the user of this incredible safety, focus in terms of apps and so far and so on, and they remain a relatively closed culture, I think all of those would have maintained as this, you know, tragically died. Ah I was a good friend, but the the important point is Steve, Steve believe very strongly and when I call close systems where you only control all your intellectual property and here 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 changed that.

No, no. I think still apple is still basically a single company is vertically integrated. The rest of the industry is largely more open. I think everyone.

especially the wake of the recent launch of the iphone sixteen, which i've got somewhere here, has this expectation that apple wood, if he was still alive, taken some big, bold bet in some. And I think about tims ten years, he's been a fantastic job of keeping that company going running IT IT. With this, what the principles of Steve jobs.

But has there been many big bol's successful bets? A lot of people point at the airports, which have a great, a great product. But I think A I is one of those things where you go. I wonder Steve would have understood the significance .

of IT and see was that smart but he I would never know he's a elon level intelligence.

When when even I worked together very closely, which was fifteen years ago for his death, um he was very frustrated at the success of M P four over uh M V um format files and he was really mad about IT and I said, you know maybe that's where you were closed and quick time was not generally well was said that's not true my team, you know, our product is Better and so forth so his core belief system is an artist, right? And and given the choice that we used to have this debate, where do you want to be severely? Or do you want to be porch? Do you want to be shut the general motor's? Or do you want to be B, M W? And he said, I want to be A B, M W.

And during that time, apple le'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 are giving IT to your to your shareholder.

And he said, the principle of our profitability and our value and our brand is this is this luxury brand, right? So that's how he thought now would how would how would he I 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 gifting hand.

I think siri was almost a glimpse at at what A I now kind of looks like. IT was a glimpse of what the, I guess, the ambition was. We've all been chatting to the same thing, which is, I think most people would agree, largely useless unless you're trying to figure out something super, super simple. But now I was this weekend, and I said, I SAT there with my my girlfriend's family there, speaking to this voice activated device. And I solving problems for me, almost in anti eely that are very complex, and translating them into .

french and portuguese. Come welcome to the replacment for theory. And again, would still have done that cRicky, I don't know. It's very clear that the first thing apple needs to do is have theory be replaced by an A I and call that theory hiring.

We're doing a lot of hiring in our companies at the moment, and we are going back and ford 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 a lunch? Now when IT comes to hiring.

startups, by definition, are huge risk takers. You have no history, you have no incoming cy, you have all these competitors by definition and you have no time. So in the 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 exactly around for a long time, but more importantly, they are willing to take risks. So IT used to be that you could predict whether our company was successful by the age of the founders in in that twenty and thirty year old period, the company would be hugely successful startups. Um wigg.

They try something, they try something else, and they're very quick to discard an old idea. Corporations spent years with a belief system that is factually false and they don't actually change their opinion until after we've lost all the contracts. And if you go back the all the science, were there nobody one of the talk to them, nobody cared about the product, right? And yet they kept pushing. 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 all all a time. Bill gates have a saying a long time ago, which was that the most important thing to do is to feel fast by that they Carry in from his perspective as the CEO of microsoft founder microsoft um that he wanted everything to happen and he wanted to feel quickly and that was his theory.

And you agree with that there?

Yes, I do. Fast failure is important because you can see IT in a next year way fundamentally um a google we have the seventy twenty ten rule that there in serbia came up with seventy percent of the core business, twenty percent on a jazan business in ten percent on other .

what does that mean?

Sorry, a jon core business means search ads, the Jason and business means something that you're trying like a cloud business is and the temple that is some new idea. So google created the same call. Google x, the first product to built was called google brain, which is that one of the first machine learning architectures.

This actually proceeds deep mind. Google brain was used to power the AI system. We brains team of ten or fifteen people generated ten, twenty, thirty, forty billion dollars of extra profits over a decade.

So that pays for a lot of failures. Right then. He had a whole bunch of other, other ideas that seem very interesting to me. They didn't happen for one or another and they would cancel them and and then the people will get reconfigured.

And one of the great things about silicon valley is, is 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 about my joke is the best. C, F, O is one who's just gone bankrupt. Because the one thing that CFO is knocking, what happened is to go background again. Yeah.

what on this put of culture as well? Google, as such a big company, must experience a bunch micro cultures. One of the things that I always, i've kind of studied IT as as a cautionary tale is the story of T. G. I effort, google, which was this sort of weekly all hands meeting, where employees could ask the executors whatever they wanted to, and the articles around and say that I was eventually have changed or cancelled because IT became unproductive .

is more complicated than that. So their instruction started. T, G, I, F, uh, which I have A C participated and we had fun. Uh, there was a sense of humor. IT was all off the record.

Um a famous example is the V P of sales because there was a need 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 switch and things like that um at at some size you don't have that level of intimacy and you don't have a level of privacy. And what happened was there were leaks are eventually there was a presentation. I don't remember the specifics where the presentation was ongoing and someone was leaking the presentation live to a reporter and somebody came on stage said, we have to stop now. I think that was the moment where the company got of too big.

I heard about a story that um because from what I D understand this might be totally wrong. But it's just things that google employees have told me was that there wasn't many sacks ings firings of google s wasn't many layoff, wasn't really a culture of. And I guess, I guess in part that because the company was so successful that I didn't have to make those extremely, extremely tough decisions that wasting a lot of companies make.

Today, I reflect on e land's running of twitter. When he take took over twitter, the of the same, the threat, the story goes, that he went the top floor and basically said, anyone who's willing to work hard is committed to these value. Please, please come to the top floor, everyone else, you're fired. This of extreme culture of calling and people being sort of activists at work. Um I don't want to if there any .

truth in this some um in in google case. We had a position of why lay people off, just don't hire them in the first place is much, much easier. And so in my tenure, the only layoff we did was uh two hundred people in the sale structures right after the two thousand epidemic.

And I remember red is 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 automatically off.

What would happen is there was a belief at the time that every six months or nine months you should take the bottom five percent of your people and lay them off. Problem with that, as you are assuming the five percent correctly identified. And furthermore, even the lowest performers have knowledge and value to the corporate that we can take up.

So we took a very much more positive view of our employees. We in the employees like that, and we obviously ID them very well and so 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 um because of the free willing nature nature of the company, they were an offset of internal distribution onions, which had nothing to do with the company. What does that mean? They were distribution less on topics of war, peace, politics so forth with the .

distribution list.

a distribution like an email. Think of a message board, roughly speaking, thing of his messed boards for employees. And I remember that one point, somebody to discover that there were one hundred thousand such message words.

And the company ultimately clean that up because companies are not like universities, and that they are, in fact, all sorts of laws about what you can say and what you cannot say. And so 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 mod democrat to try to protect the small number of republicans, because I thought they had a right to be employees.

They have to be very careful in the CoOperation to establish what what does speech mean within the corporation. And what you what you are hearing as voguish is really can be undershot is what are the appropriate topics on working 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 screamer views talk everybody. I'm a strong believer in free speech, but within the corporation, let's just stick to the CoOperation in its calls.

Because here in these stories about, I think, in more recent times in the last year, two of people coming to work just for the free breakfast, protesting outside that morning.

coming back into the building for lunch. As best I can tell that all bin cleanup.

I did also hear that that I had been cleaned up because I think IT was addressed in a very high conviction way, which that IT IT was seen to. How did how do you think about competition for everyone that building something? How much should we be focusing on our competition?

I strongly recommend not forest on competition. And I said, fox, on building a product and you say, well, how can you do that without knowing the competition? If you started 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. Uh, running google, we seldom looked at what our competitors were doing. What we did, we start off lot of time is 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 principal of um OKR s 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 seventy percent of my numbers, that was good, and then we would grade based on our above the seventy percent, or you below the seventy percent. And IT was harsh.

And he works. You, you have to measure to get things done. Big CoOperation.

He was, everyone kind of looks good, makes all sorts of claims, feels good about themselves. But IT does not have an impact. What about .

business plans? Should we be writing business plans .

and found this? Google rode a business plan, was run by a family solar. And I saw years later, and he was actually correct, and I told solar that the this is probably the only business plan ever written for a CoOperation that was actually correct in hindi.

So what I prefer to do, and this is how I teach her 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, listen to consumer business, is if you can get an audience of ten or a hundred billion people, you can make a lots of money, right?

If you give me any business that has no revenue and one hundred million people, I can find a way to to monetize that with advertising and sponsorships and donations and sofa and so on. Focus on getting the user right. And everything else will follow the google phrase focused on the user, and everything else is handled.

So jin, Larry. You work with them for twenty years, many decades. You're two decades. What made them special?

Frankly, raw. I Q. They were just smarter than everybody, really.

yeah. And a circus case. His father was a very brilliant russian mathematician.

His mother was also highly technical. His families are all very technical. And he was clever and clever mathematics. Uh, Larry, a different personality, but similar.

So an example would be that there and I in his office and we're writing on the White board the long list about what we're going to do. And he says, we're going to do this and this. And I said, okay, agree with you.

I don't agree with you. We make this very long less. And sergey is out playing volleyball until he runs in his little volleyball shorts and little shirt, all sweating.

He looked at our list, so this is the stupid thing i've ever heard. And then he suggest five things, and he was exactly right. So we arrested the light board d and he, of course, went back to play volya all.

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 that we've drove IT. Can you teach that? I don't know.

I think you can teach listening. And 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 A I A long time.

I'm still surprised at the rate my favorite current products, notebook L M. And for the listeners, no book. L M is an experimental product out of google deep mind the basically um it's based on the german I back and and IT was trained with high quality podcast voices terrifying .

and you .

basically give IT a so what i'll do is um i'll write something that again I don't write very well and i'll ask german I to rewrite IT to be more beautiful. Okay, i'll take that text and i'll put IT in no book alarm. And IT produces this interview between a man and a woman 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 this out now.

So this is the big thing that everyone's make a big fast about. You can go and load this conversation now. It's going to go out and creative conversation that's in a podcast style where there's a male voice and a female voice and they're analyzing the content and coming up with their own kind of just creative content. So you can go .

with player right here we are back thursday. Get ready for a week.

Three, the injury report this week. What's a duy? It's a long one. yeah. IT is and IT has the potential to .

really shake things up. So for that to me, just, uh, no book. K L, M is my ChatGPT moment of this year. IT was mine as well.

And it's much of the reason that I was deeply confused because as a pod caster who's building a media company, we have an office down the road, twenty five thousand square fy. We have studios in. 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 mediocre.

So first, you what's really going on as you're moving from scarcity ity to ubiquity, you're moving from scarcity to abundance. So one way to understand the world I live in as it's scale computing generates abundance and abundance allows new strategies. In your case, it's obviously you should do.

You're a really famous podcasts. Ter, and you have lots of interesting guests. Simply have this fake set of podcast criticize you and your guests, right? You're essentially just amplifying your reach.

They're not going to a substitute for your honest brilliance and Christmas here, but they're going to accentuate that. They will they will be entertaining. They will summarize IT.

And so for IT amplifies your reach. If you go back to my basic argument that A, I will double the productivity of everybody, or more so in your case, you'll have twice many protests. What I do for examples, I write something and i'll say, have IT respond.

And then the gamine, i'll say, make IT longer. And he adds more stuff and got, I do this in like thirty seconds. Then how powerful, in your case, take one of these uh, lengthy interviews you do ask the system to annotation to amplify IT and then feed that into fake pod casters and see what they say.

You have a whole new stead 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 pocket that are loaded to R S, S. Fees all around the world and it's all gonna to chip away you know the the motes .

that I so so many people have believed that but I think the evidence is is not true um when I started at google there was this notion that celebrity would go away and there will be this very long tale of mico markets know specialist, because finally you could hear the voices of everyone.

And we're all very democratic and liberal in our view that 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 lots of money and lots of players. So you, as a, uh, 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 technology, you will become more famous, not less famous.

Genesis is I i've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about the subject of A I. And when I read your book and I what you do, 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, is on page five. The advent of artificial intelligence is, in all you a question of human survival.

Yes, that is our view.

So why is the question of human survival?

AI is going to move very quickly. It's moving so much more quickly. I ve ever seen the one of money than over people.

The impact, the need, what happens when the A I systems are really running key parts of our world? What happens when A I is making the decision? My simple example, you have a car which is AI controlled and you have a emergency or uh a ladies about to give birth through something like that, and they get in the car and there's no override switch because the system is optimized around the hall as opposed to his or her emergency.

We as humans accept various forms of efficiency, including urgent ones for A A 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 that mean.

So my favor one is all this misinformation um democracy is pretty important. Democracy is by far the best way to to live in Operate societies. Look at there are plenty of examples of this.

None of us want to work in essentially an authoritarian and to tata ship. So you Better figure out away where the misinformation components do not screw up. Proper political examples.

No example is this question about teenagers and the developmental development and growing up into the societies. I don't want them to be constantly depressed. There's a lot of evidence that dates around twenty fifteen when all the social media algorithms changed from linear feeds to targeted fees.

Otherness they went from time to this is what you want. This is what you want. That hyper focus has ultimately narrows people's um political views as as we discuss. 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 that was an algorithmic change. And remember that these systems, they're not just collections of content.

They are algorithms ally 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? There are so many examples where you could imagine an an eye system could do something and more efficiently, but at what cost right? Um I should mention that there is this discussion about something called artificial general intelligence, and there is this discussion in the press among many people that I occurs on a particular day, right? And this is sort of a popular concept at on us pretty for a day five years from now or ten years from now, this thing will occur.

And all of sun, we're gone 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 psychologist, Better writers. You see this with ChatGPT already Better scientists is the notion of an A I scientist is working with the A I real scientist to accelerate the development of more A I 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, as I and others have worked hard to get the government to understand this is very strange. My entire career was one for you fifty 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 technical dusty, in this case, the people who invented IT collectively came to the same view that there need to be guard rails 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. Is literally will answer the question when you .

play this forward in your brain, you're you've been in the tech industry for a long time. And from looking at your work, you feels like you're describing this is the most of transformative, potentially harmful technology that humans are really ever seen. May be alongside the nuclear bomb, guess, but some would say even potentially worse because of the nature of the intelligence in this autonomy.

You must have moments where you you think for into the future and your thoughts about that future aren't so rosy. Have this moment? yes.

But but let's let's let's answer the question. I said to think five years, in five years, she'll have two or three more terms of the crank of these large models. These large models are scaling with ability that is unprecedented, is no evidence that the scaling has laws.

As the cold have begun 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 three, factor of four of capability.

So let just say turning the crank, all of these systems get h fifty times, one hundred times more powerful in in of itself. That's a very big deal because those systems will be capable of physics and math. You see this with old one in an OpenAI.

All the other things that are occurring now, what are the dangers? Well, is the most obviously to there's evidence that the raw model sees the ones that have not been released can do Better called day zero attacks as well, or Better than humans. A day zero attack is an attacks unknown.

They can discover something new and how do they do IT? They just keep trying because they are computers and they have 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 so cyber is is an example where everybody he's concerned. Another one is biology. Viruses are relatively easy to make, and you could imagine coming up with really bad viruses.

There's a whole team and part of a commission. We're looking at this to try to make sure that doesn't happen. I already mention this information.

Another probably negative, but we'll see, is the development of new forms of warfare. I've written extensively on how more is changing. And the way to understand historic war is that is the state, typically the the soldier with the gun now on one side.

And so for world war trenches, you see this, by the way, in you, in the ukraine fight today, where the ukraine are holding on violently against the russian ansel, but he sort of you mono, a mono man against man. So of all of the steroid pes 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 commands 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 change in the logic of war and is applicable to both sides. I don't think anyone quite understands how war will change, but I will tell you that in you 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. Five thousand or drone can kill a five million or tank um so it's called the kill ratio to basically it's drone and drone. And so now people are trying to fear 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 mention role models. This is a concept that I don't think people understand exists. The idea that there's some other model, that 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 the way these algorithms work is they have complicated a training things where they suck all the information and and they uh, when we currently believe we've sort of suck all of the written word is available, doesn't there is more. But we have we've literally done such a good job of sucking everything that humans i've 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 mine barone. Uh and of course, there's this company called in video, which makes the chips, which is now one of the most valuable companies in the world, surprisingly so incredibly successful because there's so central to this revolution and good for jenson in his team.

So the important thing is when you do this training, IT comes out with a rama, right? IT takes six months and you know you wait twenty for us a day. You can watch IT you get close to there's a measured that they use called the loss function.

When he 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 he knows.

So they have a stead of test. And of course, IT knows also is a bad things, which they immediately then tell you not to answer. To me, the most interesting question is, in over five year period, these 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 fitted, literally fiddle with the networks and say, i'm going, i'm going to see if he knows this. I'll see if I can do this and then they make a list and they say, that's good.

That's not so good, right? To all of these transformations. So for example, you can show IT a picture of a website that they can generate the code, generate a website. All of those were not expected. They just happened to called emergent behavior.

Scary.

scary but exciting. And so far um the systems have held the governments have worked well. Um these trust and safety groups are working here in the U K.

Um one year ago was the first trust and safety conference. Um the government had a fantastic job. The team that was assembled was the best of all the country teams here in the U. K. Um now what's happening as these are happening around the world, the next one is in france in early february, and I expect a simply good result.

Do you think we're going to have to? God, I mean, talk about this, but do you think we're going to have to. Got these role models with with guns and tanks and rhino and stuff.

I worked for the secret of thanks for a while in mine in google. You could spend twenty percent your time, one of the things. So I worked for the security defense to try to understand the U.

S. military. And um one of things that we did is we have visited to potassium um 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 it's so secure.

So the the metaphor is, do you fundamental believe that the computers that i'm talking about will be of such value in such danger? 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 bones and problem uh and program.

An alternative model is to say that this technology will spread pretty broadly. They'll be many such places if it's a small number groups, the governments will figure a way to do deterrence and they'll figure out a way to do non clifton ation. So i'll make something up.

I'll say there is a couple in china. There's a few in the us. One in in britain, of course, were all tied together between the U.

S. In 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 comply that IT spreads globally and it's successful to, for example, terrorists. Then you have a very serious proliferation problem, which is not yet soft. This is against 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 are eventually going to get to the point where they have these large language models with these eyes that can do these days zero attacks on our nation. And they don't have the same in like sort of social incentive structure for the communist country to protect into um god against these things. You know worried about what china is going to do.

I am worried and i'm worried because you're going into a space of great power without fully defined boundaries is what kissing. And we talk about this in the work. The genetics book is fundamental about what happens to society with the arrival of this new intelligence.

And the first book we did, A G. A. I was right before ChatGPT. So everybody kind of understands how powerfully these things are. We talked about now you understand IT.

So once these things show up, who's gona run them? Who's gonna in charge? How will they be used? So for 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 citizens or not, they choose non freedom. And I know this because I spent through all the, I spent all the time dealing. So IT sure looks to lighten me like the chinese A I solution will be different from the west because of that fundament bias against freedom of speech. Because these things are easy, they make a lot of .

noise that they'll probably still .

make A I weapons. So well, on the weapons side, you have to assume that every new technology is ultimately strengthened in a war. Um the tank was invented.

Where were one 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 there's a book called freedoms forge about the american push um 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 us all the time if everyone is 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 tesler announcement of the robot taxi, whether it's accountants, lawyers and everyone in between that's joo pow casters are we going to have jobs .

left but um this question has been asked for two hundred years um there there were the blood eyes here in britain way back down. And inevitably, when these technologies come along, there's all these fears about them indeed with a lot as there were riots and people 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 demographer problem in the world, especially the developed, developed world where we're not having enough children. That's well understood. Uh furthermore, we have a lot of older people and and the Younger people have to care of the older people and they have to be more productive.

If you have Young people who needs 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 C N sea 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 center piece of manufacturing, they have all the cheap labor, but it's not so cheap anymore. So you know what they did, they added robotic assembly loans.

So today, when you go to china, in particular, also to in japan, korea, the manufacture is largely done by robots. why? Because their demographics, they are terrible, and the cost of labor is too high.

So the future is not fewer jobs is actually a lot of jobs that are unfilled with people who may have a jobs skill mismatch, which is why education so important. Now, what are examples of jobs to go away? Automation has always got rid of jobs that are dangerous, physically dangerous, or ones which are essentially too repetitive and too boring for humans.

Or give an example, security guards. IT makes sense that security guards would become robotic because it's hard to be a security guard. You falsely, I don't know quite what IT.

And these systems can be smart enough to be very, very good security. 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 a hollywood, everyone's concern that A I is going to take over their jobs. All the evidence is the embers. And here's why um the star still get money. The producers still make money. They still with their movie, but their cost of making the movie is lower because they use more they use for examples, 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 seat and do the makeup are gonna have to go back into construction and personal care, by the way, in america, and I think is too here, there's an enormous shortage of people who can do high quality Christmas, right? Those people will have jobs. They are just different, and they may not be in los Angeles.

Am I gna have to interface with this technology? Am I going to have to get a new link in my brain? Because you, you, you go over the subject of their being, these of two species of humans, potentially ones that do have a way to incorporate themselves more with artificial intelligence, knows that don't. And if and if that is the case, what is the time horizon in your view of that happening?

I think neural link is much more speculative because you're dealing with direct brain connection and nobody y's going to drill on my brain until that needs to trust me. I suspect you feel the same. I I guess my my overall view is that.

You will not notice how much of your world has been corrected by these technologies, because they will produce greater delight. If you think about IT, a lot of life is inconvenient to fix this, call this, make this happen. A I system 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 is true of everyone.

Now what happens to your, to your profession? Well, as we said, no matter how good the computers are, people are gonna to care about other people. Another example, let's imagine you have formula one, and you have formula one with humans in IT.

And then you have a robot from another one, which, where the cars were driven by equivalent of a robot, is anyone gonna go to the robotic formula on? 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 onna have robots running with humans? Of course not right.

Of course, the robots can run faster than humans is not interesting. What is interesting is to see human achievement. So I think the commentators who say, oh, they were pretty 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 A detailed opinion about me having just met me, met me right now.

And I think we just naturally set up your face, your materials, and over we can describe IT. All right? The robot shows up was like, oh my god, another robot.

How boring. why? Some old man working on the founder of OpenAI, one cofounder, ers of open I working on universal basic income projects like world coin. Then.

well, worker is not the same thing as universal bitcoin, 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 gonna ate so much abundance that most people won't have to work, and they're be a small number groups that work with, typically, these people themselves.

And there be so much surplus, everyone can live like a million year, and everyone will be happy. I completely think this is false. I think none of what I just told you, but all of these U B, I ideas come from this notion that humans don't behave the way we actually do.

So I am a critic of this view. I believe that that we as humans, so an example is um we're onna make lego the legal profession much, much easier because we can automate much of technical work of lawyers. Does that mean we going to have fewer layers? No, the current lawyers will just do more laws.

They'll more they will add more complexity. The system doesn't get easier. The humans become more sophisticated in their application of the principles.

We are naturally we uh we have think called a placement uh, retrial altruism, that's part of us. But we also have our bad size as well. Those are not going away because of A I.

I think about A I, this is often think of same. My q, Steven body is a hundred, and there's this, A I, that SAT next to me, whose I Q is one thousand. What on earth would you want to give Stephen today?

Because that one thousand IQ would have really bad. And in a couple cases, because remembred that the A. I. Systems do not have human values unless IT added, right? I would much rather talk to you about something involving a immoral or human judgment ment, even with the thousand I wouldn't mind consulting in.

So tell me the the history, how is this resolved in the past? How IT is? But at the end of the day, in my view, the core aspects of humanity would have to do with morals and judgment and beliefs. And Christmas they're not going away.

Is there a chance that this is the end of humanity?

no. Um the way humanity dies is much is much harder to limit all of humanity than you think. All the people I have looked with on these biological attacks, say IT IT takes more than one horrific and demise and over a tulipa humanity and and the the pain can be very, very high in these moments.

Look at the war one, war two, the hole Moore in, uh, ukraine in nineteen thirties, the notes. And these are horrifically painful things, but we survived, right? 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 air will turn and theyll be a agents, and you'll able to speak to each .

other and we'll be able to go I A specific um there are points where humans should desert control and i've been trying to think about where are they. I'll give you an example. There's something called recurs to 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.

but we log sure you can.

There's a power plug g and there's a circuit break. Er go and turn the circle breaker off example um there is a there is a scenario theoretical where the system is so powerful IT can produce a new model faster than the previous model was checked OK that's another innoventions point.

So in each of these cases, um if the if agents and the technical terms called agents, what they really are, large language models with memory and you can begin to can catch ate them. You can say this model is this and fees into this and you build very powerful decision systems. We believe this is the the the thing that 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 are not human, but they are communicating what they're doing.

English, english, english as long is and is just not to be english, but as long as they are human, understandable, but lets. So the thought experiment is, one of the agents says, I have a Better idea. I went 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 bug. What is your biggest fear by A I.

my actual fear is .

different from you, my image. My, my actual fears. We're gonna adopt IT fast enough to solve the problem 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 A I we have all these other interesting things.

Why do we have a um a teacher that is an A I teacher that works with existing teachers in the language of the kid, in the culture of the kid, to get the kid as sort as they possible can. Why do we have a doctor? A doctor is assistant really, that enables a human doctor to always know every possible best treatment.

And then based on their current situation, what the inventory is, which country is the insurance work, what is the best way to treat that patient? There's y're relatively achievable solutions. Why do we have them? If you just did education and health care globally, the impact returns. A lifting human potential up would be so great, right, that he would change everything, he wouldn't solve the various other things, would be complained about, about this celebrity, or this misbehavior, or this conflict, or even this war. But I would establish a level playing field of knowledge and opportunity at a global level that has been the dream for decades and decades and decades.

Chuck me that perfect. One of the things that I think about all the time, because my life is quite hectic and busy, is how to manage my energy loading. As a podcast, you could have to manage energy in such a way that you can have.

These are particular conversations, experts and subjects you don't understand. And this is why perfect tellis becomes so important in my life. Because previously, when I came to energy products, I had to make a trade off that I wasn't happy with.

Typically, if I wanted the energy, I had to deal with high sugar. I had to deal with jitters and crashes that come along with lot of the mainstream energy products. And I also just had to tolerate the fact that if I want energy, I have to put up with a lot of artificial ingredients, which my body didn't like.

And that's why I invested in perfect said, and why there one of the sponsors of this podcast, IT, is changed not just my life, but my entire teams s life, and for me, is drastically improved my cognitive performance, but also my physical performance. So if you haven't tried perfect ted year, you must have been living under a rock. Now is the time you can find perfect ted at tesco's way tros or online, where you can enjoy four percent off with code diary.

Forty checked has a perfect ted dot come throughout the pandemic. I've been a big supporter. IT was a contrarian view, but I think it's now less of a contrarian view that companies and ceos need to be clearing their convictions around how they work.

And one of the things that i've been criticize lot for us, that I am for having people in a room together. So my companies, we were not remote. We work together in an office as I set down the road from here.

And I believe in that because I think of community and engagement in synchronous work, and I think that work now has a responsibility to be more than just a set tasks you do in a world where we're lonely than ever before. There's more disconnection and especially for Young people, you don't have families and so on. Having them work alone in a small White box in the big city like london on new york is robbing them of something which I think is important.

This was a bad. This was a control. It's become less control as the big tech companies in amErica have started to roll back some of their initial eja reactions to the pandemic 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 you that I want people in an office. He doesn't have to be all one office, but I want them in an office and parties for their own benefit.

If you're in your twice 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 of the watercooler going to meetings, hang ging out, begin the howe. Had I been at home, I wouldn't have any of that knowledge, which ultimately was central.

To my subsequent promotions. So if you're in your twins, you want to be in an office because that's how you're onna 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 over the real issues.

The problem with our joint view is, is not supported by the data. The data indicates the productivity is actually slightly higher in, uh, work a 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. Is that true? IT is absolute true.

Why is facebook all these companies rolling back there and flight Snapchat t rolling back the remote king policies?

Not everyone is um and you most companies are doing verse forms of hybrids, where is 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 is evidence that allowing that flexibility for work from home increases productivity. I don't happen to like IT, but I want to acknowledge the sciences there.

What is the the advice that you wish you got in 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 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 their time limited.

I was fortunate that I got the call after a number of people had turned IT down to work for learning for and with learning ga at a google changed my life. But that was luck and timing. My one friend of 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, why said you said yes. So your philosophy and life should be to say yes to that opportunity.

And yes, it's painful. And yes, it's difficult. And yes, you have to do with your family. And yes, you have to travel to some foreign place. So get on the airplane and get IT done.

What's the hardest chAllenge you've dealt in your life?

Well on on the personal side, I had I had a set of person al personal problems and um like everyone does, I think on a business context um. There were moments of google where we had control over an industry that we didn't execute well. The most obvious one of social media uh at the time when facebook was found that we had a system which we called orkid um which is really, really interesting and somehow we did everything well but we miss that one right and I would have preferred and that i'll take responsibility for that we have a closing tradition.

this process where the last guest leaves a question, the next guest not knowing who they are going to be IT. And the question left for you is what is your non negotiable? Something you do that significant improves everyday life.

Well, what I try to do is I try to be online, and I also try to keep people honest every day. You keep, you hear all source of ideas and and so forth, half of which are right, half of mushroom. I try to make sure I know the truth as best we can determine. IT.

Eric, thank you so much. Thank you. It's such a loner. Your books are have shaped my thinking in so many, so many important ways. And I think your new book genesis is is the single best book i've i've read on the subject of A I because you take a very nuance approach to the subject matters.

And I think sometimes it's tempting to be binary in your way of thinking about this technology, the the post mccoys, but you're writing your videos, your work takes this really baLances but informed approach to IT. I have to say as an the trillion dollar coach book is well, I highly recommend everybody goes and reads because it's it's just a really great manual of being a leader in the world. Major entrepreneurship going to take all five of these books in the comments section below.

The new book genesis comes out in the U. S. I believe in the nineteen of november. I don't have the U. K. Day, but you'll find IT and I put IT in, but it's a book is is a critically important book that nobody should avoided. I've been searching for answers that I could contained in this book for a very, very long time. I've having very, a lot of conversations on this podcast in search of some of these answers, and I feel clearer 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. Or he finished the last chapter in his last week of life in his death.

But 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 good next fifty years. Having lived for so long and seen both good and evil, he wanted to make sure we continue the good progress for making as a society.

Is there anything he would want to say?

Any answer he gave would take five minutes.

A remarkable man. Thank you.

Very thank you.

I'm gona let you into a little bit of a secret and you're probably gona think a little bit way of for saying this. But our team are our team because we absolutely obsess about the smallest things even with this podcast. When we're recording this podcast, we measure the C O two levels in the studio, because if he gets above a thousand parts per million cognitive performance tips, this is the type of one percent improvement we make on our show.

And that is why the show is the way IT is by understanding the power of compounding one percent, you can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. IT isn't about take transformations or quick wins. It's about the small, consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes.

So two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary, and it's truly beautiful inside. There's lots of pitches, lots of inspiration and motivation as well, some interact developments. And the purpose of the star is to help you identify, stay focused on developed consistency with the one percent that will ultimately change your life.

We have a limited number of one percent dollars. If you want to do this with me, then join our waiting list. I can't guarantee all of you that during the waiting list will be able to get one, but if you join now, you have a higher chance the waiting list can be found at the dairy dot com. I'll link IT below, but that is the diary 点 com。