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

Eric Schmidt (0:00)

Someone was leaking information on Google, and this stuff is incredibly secret.

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

So what are the secrets?

SPEAKER_3 (0:06)

Well, the first is, Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google, who grew the company from $100 million to $180 billion. And this is how.

Steven Bartlett (0:15)

As someone who's led one of the world's biggest tech companies, what are those first principles for leadership business and doing something great?

Eric Schmidt (0:21)

Well, the first is risk taking is key. If you look at Elon, he's an incredible entrepreneur because he has this brilliance where he can take huge risks and fail fast. And fast failure is important because if you build the right product, your customers will come. But it's a race to get there as fast as you can because you want to be first, because that's where you make the most amount of money.

Steven Bartlett (0:41)

So what are the other principles that I need to be thinking about?

Eric Schmidt (0:43)

So here's a really big one. At Google, we had this 70-20-10 rule that generated 10, 20, 30, 40 billion dollars of extra profits over a decade. And everyone could go do this.

Steven Bartlett (0:53)

So the first thing is, what about AI?

Eric Schmidt (0:55)

I can tell you that if you're not using AI, at every aspect of your business, you're not going to make it.

Steven Bartlett (1:00)

But you've been in the tech industry for a long time, and you've said the advent of artificial intelligence is a question of human survival.

Eric Schmidt (1:08)

AI is going to move very quickly. And you will not notice how much of your world has been co-opted by these technologies because they will produce greater delight. But the questions are, what are the dangers? Are we advancing with it, and do we have control over it?

Steven Bartlett (1:20)

What is your biggest fear about AI?

Eric Schmidt (1:22)

My actual fear is different from what you might imagine. My actual fear is...

That's a good time to pull the plug.

Steven Bartlett (1:35)

Eric, I've read about your career, and you've had an extensive, a varied, a fascinating career, a completely unique career. And that leads me to believe that you could have written about anything. You've got some incredible books, all of which I've been through over the last couple of weeks here in front of me.

Eric Schmidt (1:52)

I apologize.

Steven Bartlett (1:53)

No, no, but these are subjects that I'm just obsessed with. But this book in particular, of all the things you could have written about, with the world we find ourselves in, why this? Why Genesis?

Eric Schmidt (2:06)

Well, first, thank you for, I wanted to be on the show for a long time, so I'm really happy to be able to be here in person in London. Henry Kissinger, Dr. Kissinger, ended up being one of my greatest and closest friends. And 10 years ago, he and I were at a conference where he heard Demis Hassibus speak about AI. And Henry would tell the story that he was about to go catch up on his jet lag. But instead, I said, go do this. And he listened to it, and all of a sudden, he understood that we were playing with fire, that we were doing something that we did not understand it would have the impact on, and that Henry had been working on this since he was 22 coming out of the army after World War II, and his thesis about Kant and so forth as an undergraduate at Harvard. So all of a sudden, I found myself in a whole group of people who were trying to understand, what does it mean to be human in an age of AI? When this stuff starts showing up, how does our life change? How do our thoughts change? Humans have never had an intellectual challenger of our own ability or better or worse. It just never happened in history. The arrival of AI is a huge moment in history.

Steven Bartlett (3:21)

For anyone that doesn't know your story, or maybe just knows your story from Google onwards, can you tell me the inspiration points, the education, the experiences that you're drawing on when you talk about these subjects?

Eric Schmidt (3:34)

Well, like many of the people you meet, as a teenager, I was interested in science, I played with model rockets, model trains, the usual things for a boy in my generation. I was too young to be a video game addict, but I'm sure I would be today if I were that age. I went to college and I was very interested in computers and they were relatively slow then, but to me they were fascinating. To give you an example, the computer that I used in college is 100 million times slower, 100 million times slower than the phone you have in your pocket. And by the way, that was a computer for the entire university.