#570 - VO - Eric Schmidt - Google, Relativity Space - What will be the next chapter in human history ?

Matthieu Stefani (0:06)

People don't know you've been at the same time CEO at Google and at the board of Apple.

Eric Schmidt (0:11)

That was fun. What I learned over the years is you're better off making the wrong decision quickly and quickly reversing it than to be paralyzed by it. Every failure I've had was a failure that I didn't understand quickly enough and didn't terminate. Every success I've had could have been stronger if I had accelerated it. How do I grow faster than everyone else ? Literally scale. Traditional business logic is basically maximize your profits and so forth. Bad strategy. A much better strategy is to simply maximize the number of users you're having. So just get the users and then you can monetize it. I think one of the things that we should try to do in society is to get the joy of discovery, especially in the high school period where a lot of that happens, and get people to say, I'm good. Progress in society occurs through innovation. And we're at the beginning of an innovation revolution that is hard to describe in its scale. When I showed up at Google, I used to say to our employees, do you understand how big a megabyte is ? And they would say, what are you talking about ? Because I started where one megabyte was the size of the house we're in. So extraordinary progress that we've seen in my career, it's a gift. I'm just jealous of this next generation, of the power that they're going to have to do that. You are fantastic. I look forward to coming back.

Matthieu Stefani (1:29)

We are the average of the people we spend the most time with. My name is Mathieu Stéphanie and I invite entrepreneurs, athletes and artists to raise my average and yours. Just before we begin this episode, I'll switch to French for a brief moment to thank my sponsors.

So here we go, Eric Schmidt on the show. You know, I've been expecting this for a while. I'm very happy to have you here.

Eric Schmidt (1:51)

Very kind, I've wanted to visit for a long time. You guys are pretty famous.

Matthieu Stefani (1:56)

Oh, that's nice. Very nice of you. Eric, it's actually not a fun fact, a fact that you just told me. You just arrived from Ukraine, that's the reason you were in Europe for.

Can you explain me what happened ?

Eric Schmidt (2:12)

So I've been advising Ukraine for years on trying to modernize their military and so forth. They started off with just an army, no Navy, no Air Force.

It's hard to describe what modern war is like. We all have an idea of what war is, because we've all seen it in the movies. Real war is much, much, much worse. Here's a note from my friend, it's a woman who was on the train that I was not on yesterday, coming out of Ukraine, when the Russians hit them at the Polish border.

Matthieu Stefani (2:52)

That's the train from Kiev to Khem, right ?

Eric Schmidt (2:56)

So the way you get into Ukraine, and you guys took it as well, it's the standard route in. And the airspace over Ukraine is shut down for obvious reasons, so you cannot fly there, you have to take a train. The trains are lovely, and the people are great, and so forth.

This is their report. Feeling quite vulnerably after feeling first hand what modern warfare feels like. The experience that you, meaning me, Eric, had with ballistic missiles was horrible. But there's comfort in knowing the loud noise itself is scary, but that you're hearing it, you're not dead.

Seeing a first Garon drone flying and hitting was visually scary to us, but not new.

Running after it hit and being told to hide in the field and under a tree was something different. I was under a tree with a Ukrainian mother with her 10-year-old son. I cannot yet properly explain to you the fear of hearing the next set of shaheds buzzing overhead. The most comparable analogy I can make until I've processed is maybe how it would feel treading water in a dark ocean and you see shark fins circling. You just can't do much. You truly feel the thought that if you run, maybe they can see you. Crying as I write this to you. These are my friends. They hit the train and the train next to the group that I was part of a delegation to talk to Ukraine about how to help them. It's real war. People are really dying. It's really horrible. We need to figure out a way to stop the war.