EP #8 Eric Schmidt's AMA: AI, National Security, and Cyborgs

In this "Ask Me Anything" session, Eric answers questions ranging from the future of advertising in Web 3 and how technology will affect emerging markets like Africa to leadership lessons learned at Google and the morality of AI Consciousness. You will learn about: 04:12 | Lessons learned working at Google 16:11 | How Google sculpted the ideal team 22:53 | Can we transcend our human nature with AI technology? 35:28 | Applying Web 3 models to today's advertising targeting Eric Schmidt is best known as the CEO of Google from 2001-2011, including Executive Chairman of Google, Alphabet, and later on their Technical Advisor until 2020. He was also on the board of directors at Apple during 2006-2009 and is currently the Chairman of the board of directors at the Broad Institute. From 2019 to 2021, Eric chaired the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence. __________________________ Resources Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter Consider a journey to optimize your body with LifeForce. Learn more about Abundance360. What Eric's reading: The Genesis Machine by Amy Webb + Andrew Hessel Eric's foundation, Schmidt Futures Listen to other episodes of Moonshots & Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Given that governments seem to be distracted by other less important things, in my opinion, it's the rule for the philanthropists among us, including myself, to give as much. So we collectively agreed the vast majority of the money that I was fortunate enough to make at Google will go to science and science-related things, climate change, those sorts of things that you care. Going back to the tagline of the smartest people working on the hardest problems is what sort of science really is.

• 0:29Peter Diamandis?

  And a massive transform to purpose is what you're telling the world. It's like, this is who I am, this is what I'm going to do, this is the dent I'm going to make in the universe.

• 0:41Peter Diamandis?

  We have time for a few questions. We've got a mic here. Dina, I'm going to start with you, and then pass the mic. You choose the next person. We'll do it that way.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Okay. Hi, Eric. I'm Dina. I'm a co-founder and CEO of a biotech company. We use cell therapeutics to make drugs for diseases affecting the female reproductive system.

• 1:03Peter Diamandis?

  Wonderful.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  So my question is regarding some of your work in synthetic bio recently. So we're, for example, backed by some of the world's best investors in deep tech and biotech. And just before this event, I was in Miami as part of the Miami Tech Week, and Jack Hider was there as well. He was talking about quantum sensing and drug discovery. And then there were a few really large biotech funds from the East Coast, multi-billion dollar, and some of them were saying, well, oh, I'm so fed up with this deep tech, West Coast investors investing in biotech. They think this like piles up as transistors and software is going to eat the world and encode biology, but this is not how biotech works, and it's a lot more complex.

• 1:45Speaker 02

  So after studying it for a little bit, my question for you is, what do you think are going to be the actual technologies impacting patient care and seeing clinical impact in the next five years, taking into account the regulatory aspect as well?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  So first place, when you add regulatory, you add a decade anyway, because that's how and and and two and two billion dollars to do the human trials. I've been working with some people to try to get that cost down. So I think because it's drugs in humans, it's it should have a lag. I'm actually much more interested in the non-drug side of this, because I think that you can move very quickly. I'll give you an example. I'm going to use incorrect terms, so the biologist can can correct me later. I like to think of what what what synthetic biologists do is basically like a brewery. And what they're doing is they're taking essentially critters and they're growing stuff inside of these critters. Okay, not using correct terms.

• 2:44Speaker 00

  And if you look at the problems that they have, they have problems where they can build it in a small vat, but they can't build a big one. If this works, you'll you'll have a built, a grown environment that is larger than a built environment. That means literally bricks grown, airport runways grown, all that kind of stuff. Why is this so important? It solves a number of problems. If you think about biomass, which we have, which you need as the feedstock into these breweries, the biomass is spread across our country, in a lot of the rural states. So not only is this technologically interesting and very, very powerful, and a lot of money's

• 3:27Speaker 00

  going to go into it, and there'll be lots of spinoffs that will affect you, but it also solves a political problem, because it creates jobs in the heartland. And when I say jobs, I mean millions of jobs that are essentially traditional blue collar manufacturing jobs, but in this new area. So we may with with the bioeconomy, and particularly if it's a circular bioeconomy where everything gets recycled, we may end up with an almost perfect in American system solution where the Democrats and the Republicans will both agree unanimously that this is good for America. It's good for climate, it's good for jobs, it's good for innovation, it's good for wealth, it's good for venture capitalists, so forth. So I've decided to work on this for a while. I think it's it's like it's a very powerful time to unify these concepts.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  What's up, Eric? I'm Julian, I'm a new CEO. I started a company named Mindflow three and a half months ago. We're building a learning platform that rewards people with crypto for integrating personal development knowledge into their own lives.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Which crypto?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  We're creating our own token.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Your own token? Are you a pure Web 3 company?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  No, not necessarily. The Web 2 element is the learning, make learning fun, exciting, valuable. And the Web 3 element is the learn to earn component.

• 4:39Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 4:40Speaker 03

  So, my question is, I'd love if you could reflect on your time as the CEO at Google. Like, what do you think you did that led to your success? What do you think were some of your shortcomings? And maybe an interesting angle to think about this from is, what have you learned since you're no longer the CEO at Google that if you knew now, it could have empowered you to be a better leader then?

• 5:04Speaker 00

  I think it's always the case when you're in the middle of something, you don't realize you're making history, good or bad. And in my case, I liked Larry and Sergey a lot. We're really close. And I was fortunate that I had their vision to adopt. It was their vision to found the company. It was their vision to do the ads model. It was their vision to do search. What I did is I essentially implemented it at scale. And the rest is sort of computer science history. So, the things that I learned are mostly the same things I already knew, which is, the scaling of these systems is so fast that you have a week or a day to make a decision and you have to get it right. Google Video, we launched. Two months later, YouTube came out. YouTube blew past us. We shut down Google Video. We bought YouTube.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  Best decision. Similarly, with Facebook competition, they blew past us. We couldn't catch up. Over and over again, because the scaling is so quickly, time is everything. And had I understood that, and we were working hard, I would have worked even harder and even with greater of a hammer of, we've got to make this decision now. We've got to make this decision now. I have been looking and investing in Web 2, Web 3 stuff. For the audience who may not be familiar with the terms, Web 1 is read. Web 2 is read-write. And Web 3 is read-write-own. And the theory of Web 3 is that you'll have essentially a digital identity, which will

• 6:30Speaker 00

  be cross-chain, and that you can actually have that manipulate the world that you care about, that you can own the assets and content and so on.

• 6:37Peter Diamandis?

  We had a great presentation by Eric Poirier earlier.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  And he's very good. So, in that structure, the issues with Web 3 are all about, is it ready for scale? And the simplest example I would offer you is that in a centralized system, when you get efficiency and increased use, the transaction cost should go down. If you look at gas and Ethereum, as demand goes up, the price of gas goes up. And it goes up fundamentally because the network is spending 90% of its time trying to make sure the Sybil effect doesn't happen. That problem's got to get fixed. There are plenty of people working on it. But from your perspective, you're going to have a scale success when the system underneath you can scale.

• 7:21Speaker 04

  Hi, Eric. Nice to meet you. My name is Maya. I've been building technology ecosystems in Nigeria for the past decade.

• 7:27Speaker 00

  Excellent.

• 7:27Speaker 04

  I run a $10 million Fund One, $50 million Fund Two, and a nonprofit that actually Google backed that trains about 100,000 people a year in technical skills.

• 7:35Speaker 00

  Fantastic.

• 7:36Speaker 04

  African youth. So I'm sure you know, I mean, obviously, Sundar last year announced a billion dollars of investment capital into Africa. And over the last, since 2016, there's been about a two X every year in the growth of venture capital dollars coming into the African technology ecosystem. 2016, it was 129 million, 2017, it was 560, and so on. And, you know, just recently, Google and Andreessen Horowitz backed our, one of our portfolio companies, CarryFirst, and Stripe's acquired one of our assets. And it's all good and well. But what do you think is the role of big tech in Africa and other emerging markets? And then specifically, what are you most interested in, whether that be sector or

• 8:20Speaker 04

  just general themes in Africa specifically? And for those others working in emerging markets, emerging markets more broadly?

• 8:27Speaker 00

  So I spent a fair amount of time in Africa as CEO and then as chairman. And 10 years, sorry, when I was CEO, so this would have been 15 years ago, I announced that I would give $100 million, which was a lot of money at the time, to anyone within Google who could spend it legally in Africa. And we couldn't find the targets.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  That's right. Well, this was a while ago. And today, we see incredible leadership from Sundar to do the same thing at a much larger number, but the targets are better. So the history in Africa, which you well know, is the development of, basically, the mobile phones, and MTN in particular created that platform. I spent a fair amount of time with African governments trying to convince them of the simple model, fiber to the city, fiber to the towers, and then basically get your populations online. And with some success and some failure, because a lot of the governments are kleptocratic in one way or the other. And one of the worst-performing sectors in Africa is the telco, the traditional government telcos.

• 9:34Speaker 00

  So a simple rule is that, in Africa, the first money will be made in communications and on web services that are on phones. So that's why Google did the Cheap Phone initiatives and so forth and so on. So I think it's fantastic what's happening now. One of the things that I would do, in hindsight, is I would say, we have all of the shantytowns, right? Each of them has a different name. They're among the densest places on earth. That is a great place for cell towers.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  And furthermore, the people who are very poor will guard the cell towers because they're so important for economics, and that's how I would grow. That, plus, of course, the other issue in Africa is language. And at the time I was looking at this, there wasn't enough either Swahili or other language models, which, again, these universal translations can fix. So I think we're at a point now where you can have all the world's information in every African student's phone. That's a real step forward. The governments are still going to be a problem. You know, from the history of the 35 or 36 countries that are in Africa, some of them are doing great, some of them are still doing poorly. We have to fix that problem.

• 10:44Peter Diamandis?

  One more question up front, then we're moving the mic.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  One more comment about Nigeria. I hope everyone knows the numbers. By the year 2100, the expectation is that Africa will be 41% of the world's population, and that Nigeria will have 950 million people, is roughly speaking. Yeah, when I was in Lagos, that was enough people already.

• 11:01Speaker 05

  Hi, I'm Yali. I'm from Israel. I want to ask about, you know, basic science research. I have the notion that we don't invest as a civilization in this. And I think it's going to come and bite us back.

• 11:22Peter Diamandis?

  You're hitting a really sweet point for Eric here.

• 11:25Speaker 05

  So I think this is one thing that I would like to hear what you think. The other thing is that there is a huge gap. We are here very fortunate. We know about technology. Most of the world doesn't know. I'm extremely concerned about this. So I would like to hear what you think about it.

• 11:41Speaker 00

  Thank you. We looked, I worked for the Obama administration as one of the science advisers, and we looked very carefully at this question of science funding. And today, the science funding as a percentage of GDP is as low as it was before Sputnik as a percentage. Where is the money going? It's going elsewhere. Why should the government fund basic science? Because there's not an economic justification, except for extremely wealthy countries, companies, excuse me, to fund purely, the pure joy of research. I am here today because of Van Evar Bush, who I never met. Van Evar Bush set up the National Science Foundation. And what happened was in 1949, they had all this extra money around, and I guess at the time, they didn't know what to do with it.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  And so they created these funding mechanisms, which are the things that got me into undergraduate programs and graduate programs and funded me, along with ARPA and DARPA work. So I'm incredibly grateful to the government funding of basic research. Given that governments seem to be distracted by other less important things, in my opinion, it's the rule for the philanthropists among us, including myself, to give as much. So we collectively agreed that the vast majority of the money that I was fortunate enough to make at Google will go to science and science-related things, climate change, those sorts of things that you care, going back to the tagline of the smartest people working on the hardest problems, which is what sort of science really is.

• 13:06Speaker 06

  Eric, thank you so much for all that you've done. You brought up a lot of national security things. My name's Michael Bloxton. I have a company called Nebula. We're putting data centers in space, going on the outside of the ISS this year. Thinking about national security and speaking with generals, being pulled into DoD conversations, looking at getting inside of the Oodaloop, you know, observer-oriented side act of our unfriendly adversaries, what keeps you up at night that you don't think enough smart people are thinking about?

• 13:38Speaker 00

  So I spent five years working for the Secretary of Defense in the US and with all the clearances and traveling around and doing this, and I came away with a great deal of respect for the leaders and the people who are in our national security apparatus, including the intelligence communities. These are people who serve our nation, keep us protected, and they care, and they're great human beings. I also developed a great disgust for the systems that they have inside because the systems were designed for a bad 1980s corporation. And I can give you, you know, embarrassing story after embarrassing story about how they don't have enough email storage to store their emails.

• 14:22Speaker 00

  The networks go down, just stuff like that. And I can give you more concerning things about cost overruns and bad design. So in our most recent set of recommendations, we came back with lots of statements about talent, that the way you're going to solve this problem is by getting a new generation of talent that is more technically trained, basically, frankly, this group and your friends who want to help the nation's national security.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  The things that are, there's a lot of scary things when you're in these meetings. And I think that the easiest thing to explain is let's ignore nuclear, which is in itself so scary, I was like shaking after visiting Stratcom. For conventional stuff, the improvement in the speed of weapons and the targeting of weapons compared to the defense systems is a real gap. So every war game that we did and every conflict management, if you make an assumption that the opponent has the fastest missiles and the best targeted missiles, our systems don't defend. So if I could, and I don't know how to do this, I would create a company that built

• 15:34Speaker 00

  purely defensive systems. Think of this, Iron Dome. Iron Dome done 20 years later. Because I think that without that, it's going to be really hard to have any kind of military doctrine. Give you another example. In this horrific Russian attack on Ukraine, let's do a thought experiment. Let's imagine that we had a suitcase that you could, a Ukrainian citizen could put near a building that would somehow protect that building. Right? That would change the war in a really fundamental way, purely defensive. So I want people to think about this kind of stuff. I saw that in Star Trek. Yeah. It's going to happen.

• 16:10Speaker 07

  Hi Eric. I'm Dave Asprey, the Bulletproof Guy and a former 3com guy from back in the day.

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Yes, we remember it well.

• 16:17Speaker 07

  How do you spot narcissists when you're hiring and managing leader teams? Because the scale of people at Google was much harder, I think, than scaling the tech. What was your trick?

• 16:28Speaker 00

  We distinguished between divas and knaves. And we wrote a book about this called How Google Works. This came from Bill Campbell, who we also wrote a book about and has unfortunately since died from cancer. And a diva is somebody who...

• 16:47Speaker 00

  They may be difficult, the person you were talking about. But they're committed to a principle and they may be hard to work with. But they're on it and they're devoted to it and their principles are right. And they may be difficult to talk to, they may have trouble explaining themselves, they may be rude or whatever, but they're driven by principle. Whereas a knave is somebody with the same kind of appearance, but is self-optimizing. Right? It's all about himself or herself. The divas in a big company get thrown out. And they get thrown out because they don't like the HR rules, they don't really like the HR people, they're sort of hard to manage, they cause all sorts of press problems. You know, they're just difficult. Right?

• 17:32Speaker 00

  There's an old saying from IBM, that you have to find the wild duck, the one that doesn't fly with the other ducks and protect them. That's the point. As an executive, it was pretty clear when somebody was in one camp versus the other. And Bill Campbell said, "The moment you identify that, fire them and fire them brutally." Right? Which is the other thing the HR and legal won't let you do. Because it sends a signal that there's a line you can't cross. That model worked for us. And I think what happened was, once we got that principle set down in practice, it produced

• 18:15Speaker 00

  hundreds and hundreds of these very, very talented people. And the other thing is true, this is just from an age point, the next generation of executives behind me were so much better at doing what I did. Right? We used to spend years at Sun trying to figure out how to get products released and test them and so forth. These people, they knew exactly what to do. They had the tools, they had the culture and so forth. Everything happened faster. So my guess is that the next generation, you know, the Web 3 generation in your case, will operate even more quickly. You'll still have the knaves versus diva problem. But it's a clear separation.

• 18:53Speaker 08

  Eric, when you consider food production around the planet, what are the things that you see as opportunities and challenges for food production? Where are you putting your money in ESG and food production?

• 19:07Speaker 00

  I'm a big investor in Plenti, which is one of the companies.

• 19:12Speaker 08

  Vertical Farm Company.

• 19:13Speaker 00

  Vertical Farming. One of the things to understand in history is almost all of the land in our history that was available was used for food production. And so the fact that you could free up land using these new techniques is in and of itself very interesting to me, plus the fact that these foods are unlikely to have pesticides on them and unlikely to have foreign invaders. Part of the problem we have is that the word GMO has taken on this sort of negative meaning. But in fact, and you would certainly know this, pretty much all farming is now done using various GMO techniques to make the plants stronger and so forth and so on.

• 19:57Speaker 00

  So I think we need to come up with a new name. I don't know, if you remember that NMR, Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, was the original name for what NMRI is, and they took the nuclear out because it had this negative stigma. So I think there's a renaming problem.

• 20:14Speaker 08

  Superfoods.

• 20:15Speaker 09

  Hi, Eric. My name is Yash. I'm a venture capitalist back from India. I just wanted to get your sense on how do you look at the opportunity in India? How do you see technologies rolling out to solve for the problems of India?

• 20:29Speaker 00

  On India, I was just there two weeks ago and spent quite a bit of time with the technical people that I knew. India's growth rate is slowing down. It's a very difficult democracy for the reasons that you understand and the languages and the different things. But the underlying investments that were done, the 4G networks and so forth, are really powerful now. So I have every reason to believe that you can create the same wave of companies that then emerged in China now in India. So literally, as a venture capitalist from India, what I would do is list every company in China, there was a copycat of every company in the US, and I would copy every one of them in India. And I'm not just talking about fast food delivery. There's lots of things.

• 21:11Speaker 09

  And what is the right way to create the infrastructure to do this? So that is one. And the second thing is because time is so important to you. It would be lovely to understand how do you spend your time? And how do you create exponentiality through your time?

• 21:25Speaker 00

  On the time question, it helps to be a person who's a workaholic. And I am not a person who believes in balance.

• 21:38Speaker 00

  And so I think everybody here resembles that remark. Yeah, I mean, you know, like, life is short and then you're dead, right? So. Life is short until you're extended. Okay, thank you, Peter. Where have you been?

• 21:55Speaker 00

  But there's an old rule. If you want something done, give it to somebody who's busy. Yes, it's true. And what I learned, and again, this is maybe just the luck of me. But I was a pretty slow-moving intellectual type. But the pressures of these tech companies make you learn to move quickly. So there's a set of techniques. It's simple, for example. If I have a meeting, I immediately follow up at the end of the meeting because I know I'll forget by the next meeting. Watch politicians, how they operate with time. For example, I've been invited to have meetings in the hallway with a politician because the only thing they really had to do is say they had a meeting with me and I said something to them and they said no, right?

• 22:40Speaker 00

  It was completely efficient. It was efficient on my time and on theirs. I accepted the meeting. So there's a bunch of techniques about that. And when you look at these very, very high-performing people, they've all developed those techniques.

• 22:53Speaker 10

  Hi, Eric. Really enjoyed the discussion. So my name's Ekram and I run a neural technology company, a biotechnology company, developing neural interfaces to eventually connect the human mind, biological mind, to artificial intelligence with a long-term view for us to transcend our limitations. So my question, a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I'm curious, is, first of all, would you be connecting your mind to AI and becoming a cyborg in the future? And then the more serious question is, you spoke about something that seems to be imbued in our evolutionary heritage, predator-prey relationships or a competitive arms race back from the pre-Cambrian era, hundreds of millions of years ago.

• 23:36Speaker 10

  Today, we see it collectively as a social species manifesting in. Abstract concepts that we collectively share in our consciousness such as nation-states, capital. These are abstract concepts that animals don't necessarily understand, but we share them. Do you see then that if we upgrade our consciousness by connecting to AI, which is a different type of intelligence, we would also transcend beyond those abstract concepts that as hominids we currently hold? Or do you see those armed races continuing?

• 24:06Peter Diamandis?

  Those outdated operating systems.

• 24:08Speaker 10

  Exactly.

• 24:09Speaker 00

  I wish I could be as optimistic as the tone of your question. And this, of course, is something that each of us, each of us should debate. But I think that the, the way in which humans react, especially under stress, is pretty well biologically determined. And I think you see this in the Russia-Ukraine situation, which we haven't seen, thank goodness, in a very long time. And I think we need to take note of that. I am an optimist about the impact of the technology, but I think that, that humans will continue to make a mess of it for the reasons. And the answer to you is yes. I am very happy to be one of your subjects. The thought experiment is, let's imagine I've got, you know, your computer here and my head here.

• 24:53Speaker 00

  So how does it actually work? So here I am thinking, and then I say, let me ask the AI accelerator. And then I ask it, and then I wait. And then the insight comes back. Well, how long is that latency in your system? Well, what happens if I get bored, or then I start thinking about something else? And then the answer comes back, and I go like, what are you answering? Because I forgot what you were talking about. So there's all sorts of problems of consciousness. Remember, we can't define consciousness, and yet we all understand that we're conscious. Now, what you're adding to my brain is presumably not conscious, but is going to affect my consciousness.

• 25:29Speaker 10

  Right. So Eric, in response to that, I think what you, what you said is very, very interesting. In, in terms of the evolutionary hierarchy of the brain, right? Which you have your limbic system, and then you've got the neocortex, the latest part of our brain that allows us to communicate with language, something unique to the human species. If you've ever meditated, a lot of people, when they first start meditating, they actually have a moment where they're like, do I have a mental illness here? I have a million voices chattering in my head. So I'm imagining when you add another digital cortex, and what you've just said in that scenario, is that you potentially would have a similar phenomenon of intercommunication.

• 26:09Speaker 00

  You might want to try psilocybin instead.

• 26:20Speaker 10

  Eric.

• 26:21Speaker 00

  I cannot wait to use your device.

• 26:25Speaker 10

  Eric, very, very last point. I said this over lunch to Peter. The concept for this company actually came to me on a psilocybin.

• 26:34Speaker 00

  Even better. I didn't know. Congratulations.

• 26:38Speaker 10

  Thank you very much.

• 26:39Peter Diamandis?

  While we're waiting, Eric, what book are you reading now? What's your favorite book that you're reading?

• 26:44Speaker 00

  I'm just reading Amy Webb's book on, she is fantastic. It's on the biological revolution. It's probably the best.

• 26:51Peter Diamandis?

  I'm sorry, The Witcher?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Amy Webb. It's, what's the title? The Genesis Machine? Yeah, it's very, very good. And it just came out.

• 26:59Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome.

• 27:00Speaker 11

  Hi, Eric. I have to say this as a Cal engineer, go Bears.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 27:05Speaker 11

  And my name's Annie. I am a co-founder of Unity. We are working as an ecosystem to help mindful innovators create triple bottom line companies where we're benefiting people, planet, and profit. So we have a group of really creative, crazy people. Some work for Paul Allen at Vulcan. Some work as music strategists, gamers, you name it. And we have had a lot of ethical questions about AI. We're working on a number of projects, including with the great Dr. Ben Gertzel, where we're looking at AGI. And a number of us come from the early side of blockchain and DeFi and crypto.

• 27:48Speaker 11

  And so my question to you is... What is your perspective on human in the loop design? We have a number of really amazing Gen Z people that are working for us that have a lot of questions and concerns about where AI is going and where AGI may be going.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  And the reason I gave you those examples earlier is to make this point, that this technology is very, very powerful. It will clearly exceed some people's ability to understand what it's doing. It may exceed everyone's ability to understand it, and it may not be able to explain it. On the bias question and the sort of bad outcomes behavior, there are techniques where you can take the data that you have and you can basically do a synthetic GAN, where you basically fit the data you have with what you understand the distribution into the normal distribution of the actual people. And then you can discover the bias and then attempt to handle it algorithmically. So people are working hard on these questions.

• 28:49Speaker 00

  The hardest questions are the ones that you just posed, which is what happens when the decision-making time is too quick? What happens when there isn't agreement on what the outcome should be? What happens when we can't have it explain how it made the decision? What do you think will happen? Do you think it's going to end up being the plutonium place with all the guns? Or do you think it'll be banned by law? Do you think it'll be regulated? I think it's obvious these things will be regulated in some way. I also think you're going to have regulation that's different by country. I also think that one of the greatest things in our lives has been the creation of the internet, thanks to Bob Kahn and Vince Serf and all the people who made that happen. There's going to be enormous pressure on decoupling these countries from things because of the potential danger and harm from these things.

• 29:34Speaker 00

  So we've got a lot ahead of us over the next 20 years.

• 29:36Speaker 12

  So thank you for giving me the opportunity to ask this question. Alex Javankov, I was born in Latvia and I'm Canadian, just to justify the name. Nowadays, you have to do that. But I spend a lot of time in China. And I'm in drug discovery. Our job is to accelerate drug discovery in every way possible.

• 29:55Peter Diamandis?

  Alex is the CEO of Insilco Medicine.

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Excellent.

• 29:59Speaker 12

  Yeah. And we've set several, you know, to my knowledge, world records in drug discovery. And one of the reasons why it was possible was China. So Chinese managed to synthesize tests and produce the molecules we managed to take into the clinic for novel targets. And I think that China is moving very, very rapidly in drug discovery, drug design, in biotechnology in general. You've mentioned them several times as a rival. Why? Why do we see China as maybe a negative force? Maybe we can collaborate with the Chinese and at least in life sciences to extend human

• 30:44Speaker 12

  life.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  So I agree with you, and I'm actually considered a pro-China person in the debates. Most of our government is proposing things which are generally known as decoupling, where we essentially stop the collaboration with China, which I think would be ruinous for America. We study this very carefully. For example, we benefit enormously by having Chinese students, graduate students in our research programs in America. We should give them PhD green cards, et cetera.

• 31:14Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, the comment made about we should staple a green card in the back of every PhD versus give someone a doctorate and send them out of the country is just so important.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Right. Of the many stupidities of American political system, this has got to be one of the worst, right? Educate these people to the teeth and then allow them to go to another country to compete with us either on a business or a national security basis. Like, duh, right? How stupid are you? But I digress. So I don't think the model of essentially integration is going to work because the two political systems are fundamentally at odds, and that drives them apart. I think you will be able to see some level of collaboration in biotech, such as the way you described it, but there are going to be concerns. If you look at the biobank, for example, that China is building, which is a national resource, what access will we have to the biobank?

• 32:09Speaker 00

  How will we participate in it? These are all sort of the really hard questions.

• 32:12Speaker 12

  But you can get access to that. You just have to collaborate with.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  And what I found in my negotiations, so I was the executive that was pro-staying in China. I lost that battle. I then negotiated for a decade to try to re-enter China under different terms and failed largely. And what I learned is that in China, the paranoia about the US starts at the very top. That it is essentially impossible for American companies to do partnerships with other Chinese companies without an agreement from a bureaucrat. The bureaucrats are unlikely to give it unless they get a signal from the very top. So unless something changes, and there's no evidence that it's changing. Trump tried to get a half a trillion dollars of tariffs out of China. Biden has not fundamentally changed that direction.

• 33:01Speaker 00

  Until that changes, I think we're on an oppositional path.

• 33:04Speaker 13

  My name is Alton and I grew up in Albania. I've been home for the last 25 years in New York. I have an easy question for you. I think it's Einstein that said imagination is more important than knowledge. If you were to give up one, which one would it be?

• 33:19Speaker 00

  My imagination is not very good. I'm really focused on knowledge. I think the founders are the imaginative ones. I'm just the, I'm just the helper.

• 33:29Peter Diamandis?

  When I think about wisdom versus knowledge versus even intelligence, if I were to think of wis-- and I think of a wise person, that's someone who has heard a lot, seen a lot of experiences, gone through a lot of things in life, and therefore can give a considered answer. Is that a reasonable? So if I think an AI can run a million simulations or a billion simulations on a situation and sees a situation from all sides, can we imagine that AI will offer wisdom?

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Well, you can imagine intuition, because the AI does something that it can't explain. And that's what intuition is, based on its training. You can imagine the AI system can pattern match against the history, which can produce wisdom based on having seen the patterns in the past. As a, as an executive, I've, I've been a CEO for so long, there's nothing you can do to me that has not already been done to me. Right? Every crisis that you get in some office, including work from home crises, I've dealt with. Right? So that pattern matching really helps keep you calm, right? In the middle of all this stuff. And just in favor of people like me, and praise of people like me, you need people

• 34:44Speaker 00

  who can stick with the program even with all the incredible complaints and feedback and pressure on them now. It's so much harder today to do what I did 20 years ago. For all the reasons that we all know. So that means that the people that we have now in these jobs, sort of stereotypically thirty and forty year olds, they're going to develop wisdom even faster than I did because they see it faster. So if you go back to life is about compression of time, everything happens faster, right? You learn quicker, you achieve things quicker, you're over quicker, your wisdom occurs quicker, and so forth. And that favors the people who have symbolic reasoning, deep thinking, number two kind of thinking according to Kahneman, et cetera.

• 35:28Speaker 14

  Another Alex, this one is from Ukraine, actually.

• 35:30Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 35:31Speaker 14

  So Eric, huge honor to meet you. I'm actually a CEO, co-founder of one of Google Analytics partners.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  Excellent.

• 35:37Speaker 14

  One of the largest, we're one of the largest Google Analytics and Google Marketing platform partners in the country.

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Where are you from in Ukraine?

• 35:42Speaker 14

  Kharkov.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Kharkov, okay.

• 35:44Speaker 14

  And we're based in Cincinnati here. I've lived in the US for twenty-eight years.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  And what is going on with your hometown?

• 35:48Speaker 14

  Well, my parents were actually in Ukraine when the war started, and fortunately they were able to get out.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Thank God.

• 35:54Speaker 14

  But for three weeks, I basically, you know, couldn't live. So probably most difficult three weeks of my life.

• 36:01Speaker 00

  I can't imagine.

• 36:02Speaker 14

  Yeah. So my question is actually very professional, if you will. How do you see advertising and search engine marketing industry adopting Web three technologies and decentralizing some of the data?

• 36:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a very good question. So the the current advertising models, so-called Web two models, are very, very, very well understood. Right? So the targeting, we built a series of AI systems that developed the algorithms to do the targeting and so forth. So the ads that you get today are incredibly good. My favorite example of this is in my first few months, I was working with Larry and Sergey, and Larry printed out all the ads and said, these ads suck. And he wrote it on an office and on a Friday afternoon. And I thought, now that's a very interesting way to manage. Right? [laughter]

• 36:55Speaker 00

  So he printed it out, he wrote, "These ads suck." It was clearly his handwriting. And he posted it on the wall in the engineering room. And I thought, "Let's see what happens." So over the weekend, the engineers that were not in the ads team said, "We agree with Larry." So they built the first ad targeting system over the weekend. Right? So I learned something, which was that if you state a problem, you can really get, if you get the right people in the room, who turned out to not be the current ads engineers, they can really build something revolutionary. That "These ads suck" is now a $150 billion business. Wow. Right? So that gives you a sense of that, literally, piece of paper.

• 37:36Speaker 00

  My favorite ad, by the way, was, "Only one death this year: Atlanta Skydiving Center." (laughter) And I'm not making that up. Ladies and gentlemen, give it up for Eric Schmidt. Thank you. Okay, thank you very much. Peter, thank you so much. Thank you, buddy. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.