#200 - Sebastian Thrun - The Singularity Is Here & We Are Completely Unprepared

Summary

The Peter McCormack Show – Episode #200

Guest: Sebastian Thrun

Title: The Singularity Is Here & We Are Completely Unprepared

Date: August 11, 2026

Episode Overview

In this milestone 200th episode, Peter McCormack sits down with Sebastian Thrun—computer scientist, entrepreneur, and founder of pioneering projects like Waymo and Udacity—to explore the accelerating intersection of AI, automation, Bitcoin, and social change. They navigate the exponential pace of technological progress, examine how societies can adapt, and discuss why optimism and personal agency matter more than ever in an unpredictable future. The conversation ranges widely from the nuts and bolts of autonomous vehicles to reflections on history, economics, education, and personal growth.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The State and Impact of Autonomous Vehicles

• Waymo’s Advancement: Thrun and McCormack discuss how Waymo has become a tangible sign of rapid tech progress in cities like San Francisco, describing recent personal experiences riding in Waymo cars.

  • “For a couple of minutes it felt insane and then it just felt normal.” (Peter, 01:50)
  • “It's amazing how quickly we trust AI.” (Thrun, 01:55)

• Safety Statistics: Thrun notes that Waymo is approximately 100 times safer than a human driver in terms of serious accident rates.

  • “A Waymo is roughly 100 times safer than human driver when you judge it by the type accidents that cause bodily harm.” (Thrun, 10:04, 02:22)

• Regulatory Nuance: Autonomous car adoption depends on regulatory culture. US innovation has thrived under "permissionless" environments, whereas Europe’s precautionary regulation stifles progress.

• Learning at Scale: Autonomous cars share learnings instantly, outperforming the slow, individual learning process of human drivers.

  • “One car makes a mistake ... then it learns from it, but so do all the other cars, including all the unborn future cars.” (Thrun, 09:13)

• Human vs AI Decision-making: Challenging traffic scenarios force engineers to encode flexible rules. Example: How AVs handle unexpected obstacles compared to humans.

  • “If you drive on a normal street and there's a delivery truck parked in your lane ... technically you're now in violation of a traffic rule. And that is a bit of a grazon.” (Thrun, 06:48)

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Timestamps for this segment: 00:00–19:30

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2. Silicon Valley vs Europe: Culture and Progress

• Culture of Invention: Thrun attributes Silicon Valley’s output to risk-taking, regulatory distance from government, and a focus on what’s possible over what could go wrong.

  • “It's mostly just crazy people go here—like the rebels, the people who don't take no for an answer.” (Thrun, 12:27)
  • “In Germany it's usually about complaining ... Here it's about invention. What could you invent?” (Thrun, 12:56)

• European Paralysis: He laments Europe’s caution and regulation, explaining why Waymo couldn’t have started there.

  • “Europe is so focused on the worst outcome ... that they throttle the ability to create the best outcome by ... aggressive regulations.” (Thrun, 47:45)

• Global Markets and Fragmentation: Europe’s lack of scale and unified regulation dooms startups, as contrasted with China’s successful tech giants.

  • “Europe would be the second biggest economy on the planet if unified ... The last big technology company in Germany was built in 1972, SAP.” (Thrun, 49:27)

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Timestamps: 12:12–19:30, 47:45–54:03

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3. Exponential Change, The Singularity & AI Acceleration

• Understanding the Singularity: Thrun defines the singularity as a compounding, exponential change now so rapid that even near-future predictions are impossible.

  • “You can't say where it's going ... To predict the future, say five years from now, is completely impossible.” (Thrun, 02:22/32:32)
  • “Whatever happened in the last 10 years will now happen in two years. What then happened in two years will now happen in four months ...” (Thrun, 33:24)

• AI as a Universal Accelerant: Large language models (LLMs) and foundational models are displacing high-value professions at light speed—software engineers as the canary in the coal mine.

  • “I go to Claude and say, write me my own software and within like three minutes it writes better code than I can produce.” (Thrun, 26:25)

• Startup Landscape Shift: Existing vertical SaaS moats are evaporating; giants in AI can consume entire business categories, making entrepreneurship radically harder.

  • “Where's the moat? ... If you have it, even established ones like Salesforce and others—what is your defensible moat?” (Thrun, 30:29)

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Timestamps: 25:18–34:27

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4. Economic, Social, and Personal Adaptation

• Wealth, Labour, and the Welfare State: Explores the inevitable shift toward universal basic income or similar redistributive systems as AI erodes “labour for money” paradigms.

  • “If you could leapfrog 20, 50 years ... and we end up in a place where we don't need to sell our labor because our labor is unrequired, we would have to have some form of socialism in society.” (Peter, 36:56)

• Learning From History: Thrun contextualizes our fears and progress in the last 150 years—arguing that, despite anxiety, advances have always translated into higher living standards and freedom.

  • “If you look back, we're actually on the right track. ... The world has become a middle class world, not a poor world.” (Thrun, 39:59)

• Distribution vs. Production: The “problem” of today is not resource scarcity, but distribution and harnessing of productivity.

  • “We are producing more today than ever before. We have more food ... bigger problem with obesity than with malnutrition ...” (Thrun, 40:09)

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Timestamps: 34:27–40:58

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5. Fear, Opportunity, and Bringing People Along

• How to Adapt: Thrun advocates action, agency, and trying new tech as essential responses to change.

  • “Try it out ... Build yourself an app ... Before you realize, for the one road that closes, five other roads might open up.” (Thrun, 62:51)

• Dealing With Fear: Proposes “No Fear Tuesday” and “No Complaint Thursday” to add structure to optimism and adaptation.

  • “If there's any way to switch off the fear ... maybe you make a 'No Fear Tuesday'" (Thrun, 63:57)
  • “Make a non complaining Thursday. ... Just try it out for one day.” (Thrun, 83:39)

• Trust and Education: Building public trust is essential—change must bring people along, not leave them behind.

  • “You cannot succeed without bringing people along and you should not succeed.” (Thrun, 60:54)

• Embracing Lifelong Learning & Grit: For emerging generations, resilience, curiosity, and empathy matter more than rote knowledge.

  • “The three things that ... are most important: Number one is grit ... number two is curiosity ... number three is empathy.” (Thrun, 74:43)

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Timestamps: 60:54–75:13, 83:39–85:13

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6. Personal Lessons, Optimism & Mistakes

• The Wisdom of Mistakes: The “Waymo trick”: learn relentlessly, never make the same mistake twice, and hire people who reflect honestly on their errors.

  • “We are allowed to make every mistake and we should ... But the most important thing is you should never make the same mistake twice.” (Thrun, 85:39)
  • “The ones that complain, deflect, blame, have a tendency to do less of that.” (Thrun, 87:55)

• Optimism as a Winning Strategy: Pessimism is self-defeating; historic progress has exceeded any reasonable prediction, and meaningful impact requires belief.

  • “If you're a pessimist, you're ... not going to have an impact on the world. ... As an optimist, you see the potential ...” (Thrun, 80:54)

• Winning Defined: True success is measured by empowering others and collective progress, not wealth.

  • “The best thing you can do in life is to make other people's life amazing and empower other people.” (Thrun, 88:21)

• Notable Quotes on Optimism and Blame:

  • “Blaming is just an easy way to deflect from the real question you should be asking.” (Thrun, 57:13)
  • “If I'm really upset about you and I blame you, I can't change you. I can only change myself.” (Thrun, 57:13)
  • “Optimism is a very important trait to have.” (Peter, 79:10)
  • “I just want to take some optimism back to the UK and try and influence the different dynamics ... which is dragging us down.” (Peter, 93:56)

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Timestamps: 79:10–94:14

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• On learning from failure:

  • “We call it learning. ... You try something, it doesn't work and doesn't get hit the news because only the positive examples ... But when it succeeds, it is so incredibly powerful.” (Thrun, 14:06)

• On society being unprepared:

  • “It is a singularity. It is an exponential expansion of what's happening with AI and other technologies ... you can't say where it's going.” (Thrun, 32:32)

• On redistribution and resistance to change:

  • “[Teachers unions said:] 'If you can make education 90% cheaper ... our people will not keep their jobs ... We have to destroy you.' So that's the ambivalence between education as an institution ... and education as a way of life.” (Thrun, 68:27)

• On optimism as practical necessity:

  • “If you're a pessimist, you're ... destroying your own ability to bring good to the world.” (Thrun, 80:54)

• On empowering others:

  • “Winning, for me, is ... to make other people's life amazing and empower other people. It's the biggest gift.” (Thrun, 88:21)

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Useful Timestamps

• 00:00–19:30 – Autonomous vehicles, safety, regulation, Waymo feature discussions
• 25:18–34:27 – The singularity, AI as an accelerant, impact on jobs and startups
• 47:45–54:03 – Europe vs Silicon Valley, regulation, global markets
• 60:54–75:13 – Trust, fear, adaptation, optimism, education for the next generation
• 79:10–94:14 – Optimism, blame, learning from mistakes, empowering others

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Takeaways for the Listener

• The singularity isn’t just coming—Thrun and McCormack argue it’s here, changing every aspect of how we live, work, and relate to each other.
• The best response is to cultivate optimism, try new things, embrace risk and learning, and focus on how to collectively harness technology’s bounty.
• The societal challenges aren’t about scarcity—they're about distributing and adapting to abundance, which will require social innovation as much as technical.
• Personal agency—curiosity, grit, empathy, optimism, and the willingness to learn from mistakes—remains essential, even (especially) as technology does more for us.
• Empowering others, not just oneself, is the highest form of impact as we race into an uncertain future.

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Episode Tone

The exchange is candid, insightful, and at times philosophical, balanced between awe at technological progress and sober assessment of the adaptation it demands. Thrun’s optimism is infectious, and both he and McCormack advocate for agency, learning, and the need to bring society along—without false comfort or naivety about the scale of change ahead.

Transcript

[A]

We have flying cars en masse in Ukraine right now on the front line and Russia. They are unmanned and they deliver from explosives all the way to little water bottles to the troops hanging out in the trenches on the front line. And it's moving really fast.

[B]

How far away do you think we are from potentially even driving being considered illegal because it's dangerous?

[A]

I would guess right now a waymo is roughly 100 times safer than human driver when you judge it by the type. Accidents that cause bodily harm, airbag deployment all the way to death. And it is a singularity. It is an exponential expansion of what's happening with AI and other technologies, Bitcoin and blockchain included and robotics. And the weird thing about a singularity is you can't say where it's going. It's an exponential expansion. You don't know where it's going to go. So for me to predict the future, say five years from now, is. Is completely impossible.

[B]

This show is brought to you by my lead sponsor, Ayron. The AI Cloud for the next big thing. Aaron builds and operates next generation data centers and delivers cutting edge GPU infrastructure, all powered by renewable energy. Now, if you need access to scalable GPU clusters or are simply curious about who is powering the future of AI, check out iron.com to learn more, which is Irena. Well, I don't need to learn it now because I have endless technology.

[A]

That's true.

[B]

Which you've been involved in. That lens. I had a first two days ago I got to LA and I met up with my buddy, the guy whose house I started my podcast in, a guy called Justin. And we were in Santa Monica and we were going down to Venice and I went to book an Uber. He said, dude, you've been in a Waymo. I was like, no. And he booked us a Waymo. I had my first Waymo experience.

[A]

How did it feel like?

[B]

For a couple of minutes it felt insane and then it just felt normal.

[A]

It's amazing how quickly we trust AI.

[B]

This is your invention.

[A]

It's your life in the hands of an AI.

[B]

Do you know what it just drives? It's like the calmest driver in the world. It drives like my dad. My dad has never had a speeding ticket in his life.

[A]

Oh my God.

[B]

He never breaks the speed limit. He doesn't accelerate fast. He doesn't brake sharp. He is the calmest driver in the world. It's almost like you modeled Waymo on my father.

[A]

Waymo is not getting tickets, actually making mistakes.

[B]

He was saying Waymo can't go onto the freeway yet.

[A]

We have been. Waymo has been for a while and even offered services on freeways and then got pulled back because I don't know the exact details. But I think the, the fundamental challenge on freeways is this is very rare moments when you have a cow or a bicycle or a pedestrian, the freeway.

[B]

Okay.

[A]

And then the speed becomes an issue. Right. Because now you're in a dynamically fast thing that can kill people.

[B]

I was listening to one of your interviews and he said this profound thing that firstly, is it 1.2 million people die on the rose.

[A]

It's crazy. I mean we can't fix all of this, but that's what the reality is today.

[B]

But you're going to save so these cars. This invention is going to save so many people's lives without them ever knowing their lives were saved.

[A]

That's true for so many amazing invention.

[B]

Yeah. Incredible. When you first start. Sorry, I've got so many questions. When you first started on it, did everyone think you were insane?

[A]

I wasn't being taken seriously by most people. It sounded like science fiction. Yes. One of the few people who took us seriously was Elon Musk. He stopped by very, very early.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And he gave us $10,000 as an initial grant to Stanford University, which I almost didn't follow up on because I didn't believe he was serious. But most people did not. Most people thought it was science fiction. They couldn't understand. And I would count myself among the disbelievers. I couldn't quite believe that, to be honest. Sounds strange, but it was hard for me to see the future.

[B]

But you knew you had to pursue this.

[A]

Yeah. It felt like a good thing to do. I had lost a good friend in childhood to a traffic accident. It was very painful. It looked ridiculously unnecessary. I was a computer scientist. I liked the challenge. There was a challenge in 2005 called DARPA Grand Challenge where the US government sponsored a race for self driving cars. I generally love to compete, so that was part of it. But there were many, many speed bumps.

[B]

But was that the driving force?

[A]

The.

[B]

The a trauma of your friend?

[A]

Did.

[B]

Were you just looking at this as a safety issue? There's a, there's, you know, human, Human errors lead to death and you can stop it.

[A]

Look, if you had an open grave with a friend and a funeral and then he realized there was a split second bad decision that killed him and his friend, then. Yeah. You start thinking how can. How you spend your life as a technologist trying to avoid this in the future. And we take this for granted. We have so many traffic deaths every day around the world that never make the media. If an airplane crashes and like 200 people die, that's big news. If 200 people died between 9 o' clock this morning and 9:15 this morning, no one talks about it. And they're all people who are born or people in families, loved ones, fathers, mothers, children that then suddenly die.

[B]

Entirely preventable.

[A]

Entirely preventable. Now, now we know it.

[B]

I mean you can probably real off the statistics for me, some rough statistics on the safety.

[A]

I mean globally it's more than a million a year, 5.2 million. We can't prevent all of them. I mean many of them are in developing countries with very poor traffic habits and so on. The western developed world just tends to be safer. But we also see a massive increase in traffic in places like China, who is now becoming a very developed country where this kind of technology would massively help.

[B]

Have there been any Waymo crashes?

[A]

Yes, there have.

[B]

At fault of the Waymo.

[A]

So there's crashes, Frank. Waymo publishes the statistics regularly. As to all the other self driving car companies here in North America, most of them are caused not by Waymo, but by people often behind a Waymo when a Waymo stops for a red light because it was similar. But there's been one famous Fender. Waymo's crashes are mostly fender benders. They're mostly like tiny little things. There's nothing serious yet lucky to us. But one very famous one where actually hit a Waymo. This actually has happened and it made the news. You can see the two cars touching with scratching like touching each other.

[B]

I did see a video, I remember a while back on Twitter where there was like a Waymo gridlock. Yeah, Was that, was that here?

[A]

There's a number of those and I want to say very clearly I'm not part of anymore right now I'm a spokesperson and so on. This is all after my time in Vemo. But there's a number of those where Vemos, for example, were ordered into a small little street and too many showed up and they had a hard time getting out. Complicated traffic situations that require effectively bending of the rules to even resolve a situation, they're still dicey because at some point you want these cars to follow the rules. On the other hand, just following the rules sometimes actually does get you stuck. Like for example, if you drive on a normal street and there's a delivery truck parked in your lane and it has a double yellow line, what do you do When I went, we called up the chp, the California Highway Police and asked what's the right answer? And they said, of course, you drive around this truck, you break the rule. Right? But technically you're now in violation of a traffic rule. And that kind of is a bit of a grazon.

[B]

We had it. So we picked, we picked up down the back of the Regency in Santa Monica and it came round up one of those kind of like LA side streets. And on the left hand side there was a car and somebody was sat in the back seat with their door open. I don't know what they were doing, maybe changing their shoes. Now if I was driving, I could have got through. It was tight and you'd probably get a bit closer and then you maybe undo your window and say, yeah, push it in. And the Waymosh sat there for a while and didn't know what to do. But then it started to edge forward as if it realized it could just have a go. That was the first interesting thing. And the second one is, I got it. To drop us off at Washington, we're going to this bar, Hanano. And what an Uber driver would normally do is just drive down Washington, which is a dead end, drop you off, then back up and go off. What the Waymo did is it went down one more block, took a right and came down the side street and dropped us off in the side street almost. So it didn't have to deal with the dead end.

[A]

Yeah. So the drop off point selection is still challenged to the present day. And it's getting much, much better because there's always this possibility that you inhibit traffic behind you, that you put yourself in a situation that requires backing up, which is a bit more involved than just driving by. And the policy, as far as I can tell, is right now to be willing to drop you off a block away just to keep the vehicle safe and keep it moving.

[B]

Yes, it blew my mind, really. It's still a bit freaky.

[A]

Yeah, look, I mean, this is ongoing technology. The nice thing about Waymo in general is it's a different type of intelligence than human intelligence. Human intelligence, you might make a driving mistake, I made a mistake. And you have learned from it. But nobody else in the world. In Waymo's case, the one thing they have going from themselves is like one car makes a mistake ever, let's say. And in the early days it would mean the safety driver would just take over. Then it learns from it, but so do all the other cars, including all the unborn future cars. And that puts Waymo on a learning curve that exceeds human collective driver learning. And that just means you have to wait. It's going to be better than everything we do in driving in a very short amount of time, including picking the right pickup spot.

[B]

How far away do you think we are from potentially even driving being considered illegal because it's dangerous? You'd have to go to a track.

[A]

That is a societal question, not a technology question. I would guess right now a is roughly 100 times safer than human driver when you judge it by the type accidents that cause bodily harm, airbag deployment all the way to death. That's an estimate and that's an independent estimate that insurance company came up with. Now they're also greener, right, because they're being used all the time. A typical human owned car is used about 4% of its lifetime and parked 96%. Waymos might have a cycle of like 30, 40% per day, so maybe 10 times as much. And they will soon be more affordable than car ownership. That's not yet the case. But what scale that's going to happen. And Tesla is obviously competing for the same thing and so are about four or five amazing Chinese companies, I should say. When that happens, what I would expect is that certain cities will just regulate and say, look, if you want to drive your own car and park in the city, it's going to be really, really expensive. And some cities, London, including Stockholm, have given ordinances to make city driving more expensive. We then give a free car to wemos. Then you could change the culture of people using a car on demand. And the car on demand has many advantages. Safer, it lets you sleep or do work or watch a movie while having not to focus on driving. That's a big deal because it could be in America. North America is about 52 minutes a day that people waste. And driving cars on average, it will make the road greener. It could drop you off straight to go, as opposed to having to find parking, all that stuff and pay for parking. It's in many ways universally better than owning a car from a practical standpoint. But we are not inhabited yet.

[B]

So if I text you, Sebastian, I was like, sebastian, let's go for a beer. Would you prefer me, you'd prefer us to go in a Waymo than me to pick you up?

[A]

Absolutely, yes. Especially on the way back after we had a beer.

[B]

That solves another problem though.

[A]

Yeah, you can be drunk driving is not an issue and Waymo is near in taxis and so on. Right.

[B]

But honestly, it's kind of blown My mind and it blows my mind coming here because I don't know if you've noticed the UK is in the best shape at the moment.

[A]

I know you have a lot of change.

[B]

You've got a lot of change. Yeah, we've been focused on bottle lids

[A]

and change is good.

[B]

But I've come out here to San Francisco and I've just realized how this place is designed for progress.

[A]

It's. It's hard to describe because I get this question asked all the time, how to replicate Silicon Valley around the world. I'd say it's mostly just crazy people go here like the rebels, the people who don't take no for an answer. And we are geographically like thousands of miles away from Washington D.C. and they largely leave us alone and let us do whatever we want. I mean you've obviously made a career in bitcoin. You know that bitcoin regulations that were non existent for the first decade.

[B]

It was great for us.

[A]

Yeah. And it was amazing. You could just build a business and users needs as opposed to a regul regulatory oversight. And on top of it we have this big advantage as the US market is gargantuous. It's the biggest consumer market in the world. So somehow the right people come together here. And then I come back to my home country town, Germany and I look at what do I do? What's my dinner conversation? In Germany it's usually about complaining. It's usually politics sucks, economy sucks and this and what have you. People don't complain. Here it's about invention. Like what could you invent? Like let's. I know, how do we get to space in one second? How? I don't know. Could we have a brain implant to speak all languages? Right. We just talked about you not having to learn German anymore. What are the things we can do? And there's so much critical mass people often overlook. Like 99 out of 100 startups fail. Right. Including modern companies fail.

[B]

Right.

[A]

There's a lot of. You try something, it doesn't work and doesn't get hit the news because only the positive examples like the Googles and the Amazons and the Openais hit the news. But when it succeeds, it is so incredibly powerful.

[B]

But that failure is important as well.

[A]

We call it learning. We call it learning.

[B]

It is, it's important you learn from the Waymo. That's the example you just gave. The cars collectively learn from their mistakes. Yeah, but it just, it's really interesting actually because there's almost like a culture of breaking the rules here.

[A]

Yeah. Oh yeah.

[B]

To make, to make everything better and safer.

[A]

Think about the history of United States. It's a relatively young country. We just turned 250.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And it broke away from the European world, mostly prosecuted people and people who took a big risk and then it took over, occupied a country previously owned by the native people here in small communities that had to elect their own sheriff and make their own rules. And we still live in a culture of small groups of people empowering themselves and the people around them. It's very different from the more government focused culture in Europe where the government is like the panacea and the solution for everything. And that means you make your own rules. And we can, in technology land, there's just no rules. Like for example when we started way more, we checked, there was just no rule saying a car needs a driver inside.

[B]

There's no rule.

[A]

So we are perfectly legal to have a car zip around without a driver inside.

[B]

You don't go and ask them, you don't go and say to them, hey, there's no rule here. Is that okay? You just get on with it.

[A]

You get on and look, I mean my personal attitude is that politicians, regulators and so on, they're actually your friends, they're not your enemies. All regulators I worked with, from car, NHTSA to flyht, FAA to medical, FDA and had very deep collaborations. They in some sense want the same thing, right? We want two things. We want to be safe. Safety is important for Waymo, it's important for the regulator. We completely agree with this. And they want innovation. They want to make the world a better place. There's no regulator in the world that says I hate innovation. They want to be part of it. They just have different means. They don't have technology means, they have verbal means, they have community means, they have democratic means. And these means are important because in the end we represent society, we represent the people. We don't build technology in a vacuum. So we get together with them and say, look, we have a self driving car. We want to make sure there's trust in this technology. Can you help us create trust? What can we do with your help and ourselves? And in the states the regulators basically said, look a, you got to be safe. And safety for us is a statistical thing. It's like prove statistically historically that you've been safe. It's not an analytical thing. Like you have to have 14 or 5 million lines of code over here and this over here. And then the second thing is, look, you want to make sure that there's basics like for example, there's a certification for you, there's insurance for you. If something goes wrong. We have to show that you have enough insurance money to pay for damages. You can just bankrupt when something goes wrong. And then there was a whole bunch of little steps that we negotiated with them, say these are reasonable steps for anybody to document. They're not just high school students who build a self driving car in the middle of the night and the next day offer the services and kill people. And those make sense. And then they become the standard in that game of negotiating. I mean, there's many things at stake. If the rules are too arduous, you actually make it harder for newcomers to enter the market field. Right. You cement your leadership position. So in some extent, having really high hurdles, good for the incumbents, but it's bad for innovation. So you balance all this in some way that it makes sense. In the United States, what's good for us is that most regulations are post effect. They're typically after something bad happens, they're not in advance. In Europe they're more like, okay, what could possibly happen can be regulated really, really fast. In America it's more like, let's see what happens. And bitcoin is a good example, right? Yeah, Cryptocurrency. What can possibly go wrong? What can possibly go wrong is that someone steals a billion dollars. Yeah, that's bad. Okay, let's figure out how to make sure that doesn't happen.

[B]

Yeah, we're still trying to fix money. We can come back to that.

[A]

It's very healthy. I think the discussion is healthy. The new instruments are healthy. The regulators are taking a very healthy position in my books and it's a very good collaboration.

[B]

It's very different in Europe though. It's very stifling. There feels like a lack of, like, if I had a great idea, Sebastian, I'd call you up and go, I'm going to come to San Francisco and do this and who do I need to talk to? Because in Europe we seem to be kind of squeezing the entrepreneur, squeezing the spirit. So I'd much rather come out here. But back to the Waymo. What were the big kind of moments? What were the big things you had to solve?

[A]

I mean, if you go up 10,000ft in the air and look what's happening. Waymo is synonymous with safety. Right. We all in the last three years had no dinner conversation without talking about AI. And by that we usually mean large language models, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, all these wonderful things, Claude. And they are impressive, incredibly Impressive, but they make mistakes. And when a chatgpt hallucinates about some historical fact that didn't exist, we shrug and say that's wrong, but no one dies. Just put the same logic into a self driving car to a way more that hallucinates a green light and there's actually a red light.

[B]

We don't want that.

[A]

That could kill somebody. That level of safety in a physical system that is just orders of magnitude higher than in a virtual system. And as a result, the time it took to get that level of safety was just much, much, much, much longer. So I remember when I still ran it, we had an incident where the car on a highway with the safety driver, I should say, engaged in extreme braking, like emergency braking, and it was nothing. And then we looked at the data and found, oh, there was a plastic bag that flew through the wind and was like sizable. And of course a human driver would never pay attention to this, but to the car, it looked like a flying rock, like a meteoroid coming from outer space. And the guy scared, right? And then. And stopped. And if you do this on the highway, you're becoming a risk to the people behind you, obviously, right? You're actually not just breaking the law, you become an actual risk. So we had to kind of train the robot to say, look, when there's a plastic bag flying in the sky, don't break. No driving manual ever says this. You can be the world's best driver in the world. No one ever taught you not to break for a plastic bag. But that's the kind of stuff that we encountered that really made a difference.

[B]

All right, let's talk to you about my sponsor, Leden. Now, if you're borrowing against your Bitcoin, there's one thing that matters more than anything else. Is it actually safe? Well, Leden have just dropped their lowest rates ever. But more importantly, they haven't changed the thing that matters most. Your Bitcoin is never lent out, so they're not chasing yield. There's no hidden risk and there's no rehypothecation. Just collateralized loans done properly. Now they've done over $10 billion in loans and, and they've done this through bull markets, through bear markets and everything in between. And they've done it without ever losing any client assets. So now you get lower rates, which means the bigger the loan, the lower the rate and full transparency before you apply. There's no monthly payments or early repayment penalties. And they give you tools to stay in control. From auto top ups to ltv alerts. So you're not choosing between a good rate and safety anymore, because with Ledden, you get both. Now you can check out your rate using the calculator at Ledon IO. Peter, what happened then with the flying car? Because what an ambition. And man, all my wounds.

[A]

Lick my wounds here.

[B]

Yeah, but we're going to get them at some point, right?

[A]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. I mean, if you square one thing, I love to always. Here in Silicon Valley is kind of nonlinear thinking. So we have flying cars in mass in Ukraine right now on the front line, and Russia. They're unmanned and they deliver from explosives all the way to little water bottles to the troops hanging out in the trenches on the front line. And it's moving really fast in that sense. There's also now commercial services for passenger transport in China, which has leapfrogged the United States in flying cars. It's generally a good idea. I can give you the beginning story,

[B]

how it started, and I'm sorry, because you've probably been asked this a thousand times, but I want to hear it.

[A]

Okay, so let me first tell a listener what a flying car actually is. It's not a car, okay? It's not a car with wheels. It's more like a drone, or a mixture between drone and an aircraft. It takes off vertically, like a drone, typically with multiple propellers, which is easier than a single, like a helicopter. But then to be efficient in forward flight, it tends to have a wing, so wings, like every normal airplane has. Wings give you another lift when you move towards the air, and that saves you a lot of energy, a lot of power, and that makes it possible to cover reasonable ranges. So we built carbon fiber or whatever, vehicles that look a bit like a plane with, like up to eight or 15 different rotors. They would fly on a single battery charge, maybe 100 miles, give and take.

[B]

Decent.

[A]

So in theory, you could picture the situation. Let's go to London. I don't know. Heathrow and Gatwick are about an hour and a half away by bus. You will get into this thing on one side and it lifts itself up maybe 500 meters in the air, and then you cross the city and within like six or seven minutes, you land where you want to go. Perfect. And it comes down again. And because you're in the sky, the sky is bigger than the surface. Like the surface is. You have these little roads that go between houses and so on, and it's basically one or two dimensional, depending how you count. The sky is three dimensional, so you have an Exponential increase of space. So in the sky, if like two vehicles were on a collision course, one would just go 10 meters higher and the collision would be avoided. So that capacity means that even if you take all of London traffic into the air, you could always go in a straight line, effectively.

[B]

Wow.

[A]

But the challenge challenges regulatory safety, finance, the one that we ended up selling a good chunk of the company to Boeing, and it exists as risk, they are making very good progress. Our ambition was not just to build a vertical vehicle that can take off in your front yard, but do it without a pilot in sight. So we took this Waymo heritage and said this thing has to be self flown. And I'm a deep believer that especially for flying, that computers are better than people. I'm a pilot myself, I can attest to this. But from a regular perspective, getting the public trust to get an aircraft without a pilot inside is a long stretch of imagination right now especially, I mean our technology was built while Boeing had these MCAS hiccups. Disastrous. Where the public's perception became negative on the FAA and aviation. The ability to be crazy innovative and allow an aircraft without a pilot is just not in the books right now. I believe in the next decade or so it's happening for drones. Right. So for things without people inside, we are accepting it. And when you go to a situation like a war zone, the regulatory framework is much different. Right. You just fly stuff.

[B]

Yeah, we're in a war.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

It's really interesting. Yesterday I had Aubrey De Grey in here and he's an interesting character. He believes that within our lifetime we should be able to get to exponential life extension. I'm not sure, but we're at a time where we're at looking that we may get abundant cheap energy. We've got AI, we've got driverless cars. Everything that was in the films that we were promised about the future seems to be converging right now. It's kind of a wild time to be alive. What excites you most?

[A]

I mean, first of all, let's talk about exponentials. I think we've been exponential for a long time already. Yes, this is hard to spot. Let's say life extension, right? I mean, 150, 200 years ago, you'd be delighted to be 35 years old, especially as a woman after giving birth to 15 children. That has radically changed. And it's in plain sight. I mean, we have extended human life quite a bit. We have not yet broken the barrier. There's age of like about 120 years. We can Break through somehow.

[B]

I think we've taken it for granted.

[A]

Yeah, but there's no reason, given the progress in medicine. I mean, the discovery of the double helix is less than 100 years old. It's like about 70 years old. Humanity is 300,000 years old. Just to talk about exponentials, if you draw the graph back from 300,000 years, when Homo sapiens sapiens first saw the daylight, to today, there's no doubt the last 150 years are already runaway exponential. And of course exponentials are funny because for the most time you just don't notice them at all. And all of a sudden they hit you. And we are being hit now with the higher part, the next phase of the expansion, in a way that we can't ignore it anymore. The progress has been so insanely amazing, as I'm sure everyone witnesses, that we stay puzzled and don't even understand what's going on. Obviously, one thing I'm super excited about is this wonderful innovation in the space of large language models. I spend a good amount of my time writing software. I always believed, I was very proud I was a good software engineer, that I was able to write good software. Now I go to Claude and say, write me my own software and within like three minutes it writes better code than I can produce. I've just given up. Software engineers in the Bay Area that make at least $200,000 a year as a starting capital, fresh out of college is a very well paying job. It's one of the best paying jobs you can get with relatively minimal education. In fact, software engineer has no certification. It's not like a medical doctor. So you can be a software engineer age 16 and make $150,000. And now with these new innovations, the speciality of the skill is kind of fading, right? Because a hundred dollar a month subscription at Claude gets you a better software engineer than $200,000 a year for a employee. And that's. The industry is feeling this very hard and in a bad way, in a good way, because now companies have become much more productive. We can write software much faster in a bad way. It's much harder for software engineers to find jobs. And that's just the beginning. So if you take this skill of making something, the skill of engineering, and think outside software engineering, say robotics or self driving cars, the next wave is going to be engineering for everything. Why wouldn't it take just one day to create a new Waymo as opposed to 15 years? There's no reason why it should take more than a week or a month to replicate Waymo today in terms of technology, why doesn't it take a week to design the next iPhone as opposed to was it maybe four years in total or counting or a year and a half depending on your count?

[B]

Well, we can all be software engineers.

[A]

Yeah. And we could obviously all be engineers.

[B]

It does make me wonder, I don't know how much you think about this is what will a company even look like in five years?

[A]

So one of the big success stories here in Silicon Valley are the foundation model companies and they're really rewriting the business book altogether. It used to be a good startup idea was to take a vertical like say Life Sports and then pitch an idea that you build a SAS company that provides all league owners, leagues and so on, brands, integrated software, for example, for ticketing. I always think of these foundation models like big amoebas that kind of eat more and more and become bigger and bigger. If Claude Anthropic would say now, if you're going to now move into that field and just take this over, that'd be game over. Because the foundation model companies, they have the power to just do it. And we saw it, for example, between Anthropic and Cursor, where Cursor used to be the place where you got AI for software engineering and then Anthropic did it itself. And probably now I think we'll move into fields like biology and drug design and similar fields. We don't quite know where yet. But if they were to take on, let's say the legal profession and say we're going to build a specialized version for lawyers, I think the vertical companies in that space would have a hard time surviving. And that's new, right? So maybe I don't quite know where these startup companies, to be honest, because it's hard to be a startup company today in that world.

[B]

Was the moat.

[A]

Yeah, where's the moat? Where's your mode? If you have become and even established ones like Salesforce and others, what is your defensible mode? And there's still, I mean this is going to be gradual, right? You have a, you have trust, you have business relationships. I mean that's not going to happen overnight, but especially small players, I think incentivized to just do it themselves.

[B]

Now is that a problem here in Silicon Valley in that some people don't know what to build now?

[A]

I mean investors have already pivoted strongly towards foundation model companies and possibly over indexed on that because they see this gargantuan successes. There's never been a trillion dollar Startup before, I mean there's been, until a few years there was never a trillion dollar company.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

And now we have trillion dollar startup companies. So it is shifting. It's a, it's a great time to be an investor because if you invest in the correct company, the multiples are insane. And that's new, right? I mean in the 60s 70s when venture capital first came along, the inside was already kind of this power law that Sebastian Malaby writes about that if you invest $1,000 and you lose it, you lose a thousand, but if you make it, you make a million. So it's maybe a factor of 100 to a thousand bigger. But now the fact that it's grown to like a million.

[B]

But I do wonder therefore what's happening in those pitch meetings Because I guess a new filter for the investor is, well, can AI Does AI destroy this business?

[A]

It is. And look, I mean everybody's learning. Investors downside is it takes a long time for them to find out. It's like a decade to find out. Some investors play this very, very smartly. They have like book increases of their portfolio that isn't quite real and so on. But overall the pie has become much bigger, right? So the returns have become much bigger, the addressable market has become bigger, the technology spreads much faster, the adoption cycles have become much shorter. So overall the value is winning.

[B]

But I guess the AI is an accelerant on everything.

[A]

Here's the thing with exponentials. I used to hate this guy Ray Kurzweil, sorry to say this Ray Coatsweil, who would give these talks about the singularities near. And what is really true is he saw something I didn't see. He saw the exponential like 30 years before I spotted it. And it's a bit embarrassing given that I think of myself as a technologist and visionary. But now that everybody sees it, I see it too. And it is a singularity. It is an exponential expansion of what's happening with AI and other technologies, Bitcoin and blockchain included and robotics. And the weird thing about a singularity is you can't say where it's going. It's an exponential expansion. You don't know where it's going to go. So for me to predict the future, say five years from now is completely impossible.

[B]

For somebody who hasn't heard of the singularity, explain what that actually means.

[A]

So the singularity's underpinning belief is that there's some sort of an exponential development that changes the world faster and faster and faster. So whatever happened in the last 10 years will now happen in two years. What then happened in two years will now happen in the span of like four months and so on. So you see a doubling of whatever you care about in a faster and faster time frame. An exponential function, right? And exponentials, I mean they start very slow and then they become faster and faster. It's like compounding interest. And then they become very, very, very fast. And we are now obviously in a phase that is so incredibly fast that people are all woken up and say, oh my God, what's happening?

[B]

Well, you feel it.

[A]

You feel it every day. Yeah, I mean you feel it when you build your Claude version for your ticketing and QR code and so on and database management.

[B]

Yeah, I feel it every. I feel it, I see it and I feel it. And I think a lot about what does it mean? It's like it's clearly a large civilizational change.

[A]

I mean there's two dominant reactions I see to it, right? One is extremely positive and one is extremely negative. Always though, and they're good, they're both legit and they're both correct. The extreme positive, which, count me, are one of those see the opportunity for humanity. We see the increase of wealth or opportunity of standard of living, of lifespan, of all the things and the increase of intellect of people that results from technology. We see the decline of war and military conflict, even though these days it feels differently. But historically it's been the case over the centuries. The fearful perspective is the inability to predict what are the implications to me personally, to me and my family, will I have a job? What's going to happen with the distribution of this wealth? Will it be in the hand of a few hyper rich trillionaires like Elon Musk? Or will it be given to all of us in some way? Will it create opportunity? Will it take away opportunity? Will it create safety? Will it take away safety? And that's a legit question and it's an open question. People are generally, when something moves fast, people are generally more on the fearful side than the optimistic side because we just generally don't like uncertainty. We love safety and safety is certainty. We don't feel safe when things are uncertain. But then people like myself come back and argue, look, historically, in the last whatever, 150 years, that's always been played to everyone's advantage, right? The extreme poverty is disappearing in the world. Everybody can read and write, every child is vaccinated practically like 95% or whatever. I mean we live in a much better world than now than two or three hundred years ago when at least where I used to live in Germany, everybody's effectively in slavery at the time and in extreme poverty. And that's an ongoing debate. And I think it's an important debate because it's partially also what we choose to do. Right. But we do politically, we do societally. We have a big wave right now in the United States tilting towards socialism. Right. Which is very unusual for us here because you're much of a liberal kind of country by.

[B]

We have it back home as well

[A]

and Europe has had it for a long time. Maybe that's a correct solution to just being a buyer system that forces distribution and takes away entrepreneurship. Or maybe not.

[B]

Well, I guess in some ways you're kind of right. Because if there is no. I mean, I think everything you said is right and probably it all happens. It's going to be kind of like a roller coaster of a journey as we navigate this. But if you could leapfrog 20, 50 years and we end up in a place where we don't need to sell our labor because our labor is unrequired, we would have to have some form of socialism in the society so people can live.

[A]

So I always like to get back to the past. Right. And I think everything we see right now is just a exponential extension of what happened in the last 150 years. 150 years ago, there was no childhood like when you were old enough to work in the fields. You worked in the fields. There was no weekend. A little shop in the corner of the street was open 24, seven over seven at least had to sleep. There was no vacationing except for rich people. You wouldn't go to Hawaii maladies to spend four weeks in the sun.

[B]

Or certainly you couldn't fly to Germany for 50 pound.

[A]

Yes, you could fly to Germany for 50 pounds. You would never go to Germany for Linden and so many other things that just didn't exist. We were working really hard. And you're very inefficient by today's standard. Like if you worked in farming two or three hundred years ago, you could make food for up to four people. If you work in farming today, you make food for 400 or more people in the UK. I think the people working in farming is less than 1% now. Used to be pretty much everybody in the early days before the Industrial Revolution and the Glorious Revolution, all these wonderful things that came along. So I think we are already in a path towards more freedom, more opportunity, more choice, more leisure time in a way that people don't quite see it this way because they don't have that kind of memory. But if you look back, we're actually on the right track. We also live in a world now where through democracies and similar, we really enshrined this idea of opportunity for everybody. And it's not entirely correct. Some have more and others have less. Where we mostly done away with dynasties, mostly offered a mandatory education to every child, mostly. When you enter society today, you have a chance. And we call this here the American dream. It is completely alive. It's the immigrant stream. I'm an immigrant for some of us, actually works out massively. I would count myself among the winners here. Lucky to me, with lots of luck. But it's true that today opportunity is better for everybody than it was three, 400 years ago when you were born into a specific family and this was your destiny about the feudal system and so on. It's not around the world there's exceptions, right? I mean, there's still forced labor today, there's still slavery today and so on, but it's roughly declining compared to even what it was, let's say 80 years ago or 90 or 100 years ago. So that's good. There'll always be a distribution issue. But my take is people over index. We are producing more today than ever before. We have more food than ever before. We have a bigger problem with obesity than with malnutrition. Food is effectively free.

[B]

Yes.

[A]

I mean, people might be upset that I say this because there's some people who have a hard time getting fed, but by and large, none of the people I ever run to worry about being hungry that day.

[B]

Well, no child dies of starvation really. In Europe. There is always some way somewhere of getting food.

[A]

There's pockets in Africa, but it's still the case. And there's pockets in Africa that feel like 150 years ago. But even those places, I mean, the world has become a middle class world, not a poor world. China's on the rise, India's on the rise. And these places where they're still miserable are mostly because of human conflict, like human induced misery, not technology induced misery. And again, extreme poverty will be gone in about 25 or so years, probably sooner. Probably sooner, Yeah.

[B]

I think it's easy to see the macro future being better. It's the individuals in that process. Because you as an individual still want the best for your life, your family. Like this morning I got Uber because I don't have way more.

[A]

You should get way more. Come on.

[B]

Well, we had so. But I wanted to get an Uber.

[A]

And then you split your coffee cup in yourself, right?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

Way more would not happen, I tell you. Just kidding.

[B]

No, we do need clear coffee. Remember that Tab Coke? That was clear. But no, I wanted to talk to an Uber driver. I was like, what do you think of Waymo? He was like, well, it's. You know, there's no future in this job for me. Like, he was pretty much admitting that. And so as a. I try not

[A]

to ask that question. By the way, when I. Manure.

[B]

Yeah. And don't say, by the way, it's my invention. They might throw you out. But you don't take an Uber. You take away.

[A]

I mostly take away my. But I take Uber to the airport.

[B]

You take an Uber to the airport

[A]

because you can't do that because Baymut is not permitted to go all the way to the gate right now. Man, this is a little mafia thing going on.

[B]

You got to fix that. Well, that's the protectionism. But. But no, but rightly so. That individual, or all those individual individuals who bought into the Uber world, we know at some point they won't exist. And I think that's the problem. It's the collective anger of individuals. A bit like Hollywood.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Hollywood will protest AI Films at some point.

[A]

Or they did and they've been using it for decades. Come on.

[B]

Yeah, I know.

[A]

Massively. Oh, my God.

[B]

There will be pockets of collective anger against this stuff. And it's how we navigate.

[A]

Yeah, there's clearly fear. I mean, there's the most visceral fear. Like, you have kids, you have pay for the schooling, you have a mortgage. Will I lose my income stream? And that is real.

[B]

What is happening?

[A]

That is real. Like if you lose your job to. Through innovation. And not just AI, I mean, it's everything that is real. And I don't. I can sympathize with those people, honestly, and. And I feel for them. At some point in my life, I decided to just build an education company that give free education to people and democratize education so that we can help people out of misery to education. Yeah.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

I do believe this is real and we should take it for real. And it's important for us to know. I think one of the great deals we have made with ourselves as humans is to protect ourselves. Like, if I murder somebody else, I go to jail. I can kill a dog. I'm not going to go to jail for this. But if I kill a person, I go to jail for a long time, and rightfully so. We've made A deal in the western world to democracies that every child should have an opportunity. It's not just your status and your parents wealth that dictates, even though it's a fact in it. By and large we build a system that is social and that we empowered people by giving them a chance to elect whoever they want to elect. And they do that especially in the United States where the electoral system is direct. We now directed President Trump, we elected Madame in New York. These are very different type characters, but these are the people that the people wanted. We give people that power and that balance of power is an amazing accomplishment. It's the core of innovation because it lets people like myself who come from a fairly poor family have a chance. Right? And some of us even use a chance for the betterment of humanity. I believe that's going to continue as you produce more. It's always going to be painful. But many of my hyper rich billionaire friends say I'm happy to pay taxes because it's the right thing to do. And even the ones that end up dying with lots and lots of wealth end up giving their money away for most parts. There's this pledge about where people like Bill Gates and others have committed in fact here during his lifetime already put all his wealth into things like education and health. Right. He's trying to eradicate malaria, which is a big deal in Africa. That to me is a version of socialism that people overlook is actually happening today. If I look at the collective first generation billionaires here in Silicon Valley, which there are like thousands, most of them are committed to give their money away. And yeah, people are. I didn't see that. The guy next to me is a billionaire and I might just lost my job and that's fair. But at some point it's actually a system is actually working quite well. It is working quite well. And it led to this beautiful thing we have in the world right now, all the way back to inexhaustible beginning point to me is like the French Revolution when we finally decided you can't just get the taxes from the poor people because you're rich and live of it. And we put this allergic to these principles like brotherhood and freedom and equality as principles of then the young and then very fragile French Republic. Same happened in England with the Glorious Revolution. And then you'd see how like all of a sudden sweeping through Europe and other places this idea of democracy and that the core of this really is redistribution of opportunity and power and the fact that you can be born and have a chance it's not perfect. Absolutely. I'm more on the liberal side myself. I believe in free markets. I think free markets are amazing. They're highly motivating. I grew up in Germany. We had. Half of Germany had free markets, other half had communism. Everybody is the same, no matter what you do. In fact, if you enrich yourself, you go to jail. Relatives who went to jail because he bought old cars, fixed them up, and sold them at a profit. That was illegal in East Germany. And then we looked at the productivity of East Germany. It was disastrous. East Germany's productivity was horrible. I remember numbers like when I was a child, that of their strawberry harvest, only 1% of strawberries made into the market, 99% rotted along the way because no one gave a shit. Because if you cared about your company working well, you made exactly the same money than if you did nothing.

[B]

Well, if you have to build a wall to keep people in, you constantly wrong.

[A]

You kept the wall. And of course you extracted lots of wealth from China and so on to make East Germany survive. But all that stuff, and we can debate it forever, this is a viewpoint perspective, but I think that this kind of idea that people who produce for society and contribute can also contribute for themselves and make their own lives better, I think is a good idea because it motivates people. And then I think in terms of redistribution, we're doing a pretty good job, honestly.

[B]

Yeah. It is fragile, though. I mean, I think we have to defend it, we have to protect it, and we do have to try and look after people. But I think in some ways they do it better here. I think the structure and the model here largely is better than in Europe. And I think we could learn a few things, even though this is our best invention.

[A]

I recently ran a commission for the German government looking into AI and advancement. And I think the findings are that Europe probably makes two basic mistakes. One is that there they're so focused on the worst outcome and not the best outcome, and they want to protect themselves from the worst outcome, that they throttle the ability to create the best outcome by, for example, overarching over the aggressive regulations. And I can give you an endless list of reasons why Waymo would never have worked in Germany. But the second thing, let's discuss this massive mistake is that Europe is more and more drifting apart. We live in an age of technology companies, and technology companies by nature want to be global. There's no such thing as a Californian Google or a Wyoming Facebook. Facebook has to be a global company because then it gets the benefits of the scale and the network effect and the learnings and can leverage this into a much bigger business. Same is true for Uber and other companies in Waymore. Europe would be the second biggest economy on the planet, bigger than China, if Europe was unified. If you create a tech company in Europe today, you create it in one country under that set of regulations. And if you want to even go to the adjacent neighboring country in a complete different set of regulations and different burdens. And for you to expand and even build a European company is basically impossible today unless you are incredibly government supported. The last big European company, I can't even remember when was it created.

[B]

I mean, Spotify is the one, the only one I ever tend to look at is a big European technology.

[A]

So Spotify comes out of Europe, but it's a global company. It found its footprint in the More, I would say in the American regulatory system anywhere else, and harvested that market. Right. There's a few of those. Skype was an early one. But if you look at Germany, the last big technology company was built in what, 1972 SAP. It's like 50 years ago. It's like insane. In that time span, like China built like 100 companies the same size. So, so China somehow has its own market and has understood that companies need at least some globality and, and Chinese market is, is there. It's a big market, it's a growing market, obviously. But even Chinese companies would love to have a more global footprint. We see this with companies like Bike Dance and others and ongoing discussion. But why on earth Europe doesn't create the United States of Europe behoves me. And the tendency right now exactly the opposite. We, we are pedaling from each, away from each other. We're destroying ourselves.

[B]

Yeah, I, I think there's more of a, a sovereign, you know, sovereign demand because of language and you know, like in the uk it's currency. And you know, I think, I think there is a, a fear of bringing it all together. We tried the EU and I just, I think, I think we culturally want to stay as independent countries. I don't know why. I mean, I see the arguments both sides, but what I, what I've seen most of all, and I fear is I think, I mean, Europe just is getting materially poorer. I remember when I first came out to the U.S. it was 2002 and it was about $2.05 to the pound. And I remember it clearly because there were certain things you would want to buy. You say, I'll go to America.

[A]

It's basically half price, levi's jeans. Yeah.

[B]

Levi's jeans, TENS records. Yeah. Everything was kind of like half price. And you would come here and I just, I went to New York and I filled my bags, I bought a lot of stuff. Now I don't do that because what is it one, like do I get $1.30 to the pound or something? Everything feels really expensive. I bought a coffee and a croissant in my hotel in LA the other day. It was 20 bucks for my coffee. This morning in my hotel.

[A]

Oh my God.

[B]

Was $8.59.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And I was like, this is insane. This is, this is, this is very, very expensive. And that is because our currencies are getting weaker because we're not, we're not building enough.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, if I had a magic wand, I really believe this original vision that came out.

[B]

Hold on, you have a magic wand? You've done magic?

[A]

I have a technology wand, but I have a societal wand, unfortunately. Thank you for. Peter, it's very generous of you to say this.

[B]

Well, isn't. Who was it who said advance enough technology is indistinguishable from magic? Who said that? There's that famous quote, can technology not solve these things?

[A]

We do, but we don't, man. These are societal issues, not technology issues. Like technology is not going to do away with relations in Europe and they're self imposed. And I mean we can, what we do do, I really believe we do in Silicon Valley really well, is we do democratize. And by democratization I mean we bring capabilities to everybody in the world, wherever you are. The iPhone is a good example. Right. Everyone has pretty much a smartphone now. On that smartphone you have access to the world's best database, the world's biggest library. You now have an AI they can talk to. You have a psychologist in your smartphone. You have a navigation system on your phone, you have a payment system on your smartphone. And that's universal now and it's without borders in many ways. In my own company, Udacity briefly mentioned that we brought tech education to the world so that people in the Middle east and Egypt and Palestine have a chance to make real money on the global tech market. That's democratization. So I think technology does want to democratize. It wants to make things available and it wants to be free. It wants to help people get something, be it information, education, be it health. We have lots of technologies that advance human health that are very accessible now. Be it security, there's safety, there's set of dimensions where we just make the world better. And lucky to me, if you bet your life on technology, you happen to be on the fast race, fast lane. It just happens to be this way.

[B]

So do you look at Europe with a bit of sadness then?

[A]

I think of Europe, and especially Germany, my own country, as this incredibly colossal, impactful center of modern culture. If you look at music, you look at poetry, look at philosophy, at sciences, at architecture, porters, and you go back, let's say a century, you find that Europe was the center of the world for more than a thousand years, taking over from the Middle east and the Asian world in many ways. And we've done a great job driving the world forward and giving the world the right values. And it pains me that this moment that is just not on people's minds in this moment, people are so obsessed with the negative outcomes. People, at least in Germany, I think they hate rich people, they hate success. Viscerally do this, there's a very deep zero sum thinking, like if you're rich you took it from somebody else, give it back to the person you stole it from your criminal. And out here it's more like, oh my God, the world is becoming richer every day. Everybody can be a winner.

[B]

How do I do it?

[A]

Yeah. And literally everybody can be a winner. Like you look at the SpaceX IPO, how many millionaires it minted, right? Everybody who joined SpaceX the right time is a winner and stayed there. And joining SpaceX now is easier than ever before because everybody can have an education, everybody can be a tech expert if you want to be.

[B]

Okay? So you guys know that I'm not just an equities guy, I'm a bitcoin guy too. And for people like me, just holding bitcoin has been the winning strategy. But for others, they like a little diversification. Whatever the strategy, each cycle I'm always like, I wish I knew how to trade this. I just never try because I'm not a trader and I don't know what the hell I'm doing. So this is where Arch Public comes in. They can help you implement a custom strategy that works for you. Because if you've held Bitcoin or Salesforce stock over the last year, man, you have taken every drawdown on the chin. But you can make that volatility work for you. They built a platform that automates layer trading strategies across stocks, ETFs, Bitcoin and commodities handling, buying, selling, profit taking and accumulation all directly in your own exchange account. So when they asked to sponsor the pod, I said, I have to see this first. And they introduced Me to their marketway product where you can customize buyers and sells based on the triggers, risk profile and timescales that work for you. And that is what I've done. Now listen, I'm not telling you to go and blindly ape in, but if you're looking to protect your downside and make volatility work for you, give them a call, ask to see every trade and make them prove the math. So if you're trying to accumulate smarter, take profits, use volatility or tax loss harvests alongside your cpa. Take a look at Arch Public by heading over to archpublic.com Peter that's archpublic.com Peter. Do you think people understand economics better here then? Because I think one. I mean, like you say, we have the same attitudes towards rich people in the uk. There's a negativity. Yeah, but I also don't think people understand money. I don't think they understand economics. I think they understand productivity. What productivity is why it's important.

[A]

Look, I have these kind of bizarre rules in my life. One is I try to minimize the amount of blame I give to other people, okay? And I'm more like the Michael Jackson man in the mirror kind of philosophy. Something goes wrong, I look at myself and I beat myself up. And that has worked well because first of all, it's usually my own fault. Whatever happens, blaming is just an easy way to deflect from the real question they should be asking. But also, I mean, if I'm really upset about you and I blame you, I can't change you. I can only change myself. You can influence people very minimally. Oh my God. Someone who comes to complain to me how bad I am, it's not going to influence me. Sorry, I'm just going to turn around and go walk away.

[B]

It's funny you should say that because one of the things I've been wrestling with recently is the YouTube algorithm rewards a negative title.

[A]

Yes, it does.

[B]

I can make a show with you.

[A]

Facebook everywhere. Yeah, same in New York Times and Wall Street Journal and Fox News.

[B]

I mean, I want to, when I release this show, have technology is amazing or Technology improves everything. But if the title is AI is going to kill us all, the show's going to do really well. But I've been really wrestling with that as a person, like the authenticity behind it. Am I contributing to a worse outcome? And I've been thinking about that and also just generally thinking about the uk because you have a couple of choices right now. It's what can I Do in the UK to make it better and help improve things or should I leave? And those are two genuine choices. Genuine choice for me, the family and I wrestle with both. I think patriotically, I want to stay and help make things better. I just don't even know where to start.

[A]

Well, first of all, you're making things better, Peter.

[B]

I don't know where to start. You're one of the, I don't know,

[A]

driving people, making things better. You bring technology to people in a way that's accessible, that's unbalanced. You give people a voice. You ask thorny questions. Thorny questions you do in a very polite way.

[B]

It's the accent, the British accent.

[A]

No, I think that's one of your character hallmarks of your show is able to question the person you're talking to and elicit deeper insights. And you give people a balance to you and the people listening to you, I'm sure, appreciate that. And that's an important contribution. Don't underestimate how important that is. Thank you. In terms of news, it's been always been true for the entire history of humanity that negative news carries the day, not positive news. And every outlet grapples with this. There's other versions of it. I think the most New York Times article is not about Churchill or the World War II ending or whatever it is. It's about 21 questions to fall in love with. Or if it article like 8 Ways to make your dog happy, you get a massive readership. There's an imbalance between what we should be reading, what we are drawn into. But I think with all that, I take this concern about AI very seriously. And I want to connect with people who are scared of it. And I want to see what can I learn from them. Because they probably have some kernel of truth in their belief, or it could be that it's a reflection of something else, like their gender, discomfort with uncertainty. And then also, as I know this, what can I do in my daily life to prevent those things and to bring people along? I don't succeed in this if I don't bring people along. An example is Waymo. Waymo is a box with four wheels that can kill a person inside. Right. Technically. Now, none of the people I ever met after the first five minutes of Waymo Drive feel this way. Quickly gain trust and the trust. But the trust is a complicated story for wemo. It's not just for the person inside the car. So the people outside the car have to be trusting it. Right. And then the municipalities that deploy way More have to be trusting it and the people have to trust it. And there is a general bias against innovation when it comes to new things because of the inherent risks that you don't understand. So how do you communicate? This is a pretty much risk free to or low risk technology. You cannot succeed without bringing people along and you should not succeed. So I think this dialogue is really, really important and the fear that people have is real. It's absolutely real.

[B]

So how do we bring people on? How do we do this? Because like I say, in the uk there are, you could be, I don't know, a married couple, two young kids. One of them might be working as a Lawyer, I know £150,000 a year and the other one might be a copywriter in an advertising agency earning £100,000 a year. And within, I mean, at the moment their jobs could be going and the next two to three years they could be wiped out and their net income, which was maybe 250,000 pound a year, goes to zero. Goes to zero. And what is it replaced by? They can't go and work an Uber because what like is it? How do we navigate that? Because I think, I think if we can navigate that, we can bring people along and we get all the other benefits.

[A]

So I think, Peter, you are a wonderful example of what to do and you gave me two examples today. Right, so the first one is of course using Claude to build your own ticketing system. I would think you don't sit here being scared that your job might go away because you, you, you master this new technology in such an amazing way that you, you could easily find something to do if like NotebookLM whether to replace you.

[B]

But I'm of that character. Not everyone is right.

[A]

So I think people should try to be of their character and play. The second example you gave me is way more right. I mean, you said after three minutes of being slightly scared, you just flipped over and now you trusted it. I recommend everybody just try it out. Go do the Waymo thing, Get yourself into Waymo and ask yourself after the first way more, are you still scared of it or are you now excited because it gives you something new in life that you didn't have before? Go and play with Claude, go and play with Codex and all these things and just in the evening, in the weekend, find an hour and build yourself an app that you want to build on your phone and just try it out and get sucked into this and become a builder. And before you realize for the one road that closes, five other roads might open Up. And that's been the story of my life. It's been the story of many people's lives. It does require curiosity. Yes, I do believe when people are scared, they made bad decisions universally. So if there's any way to switch off the fear in your brain, maybe you make a no fear Tuesday. So you can be fearful every single day of the week except for Tuesdays and Tuesdays you just. No fear, okay?

[B]

No fear.

[A]

So in Tuesdays you're going to do whatever you want to do. It's like Halloween, right? You can dress up any character you want without any repercussions. And Tuesday you can be an optimist, okay? And then you try these things out on Tuesday evening, don't drink your glass of wine. Instead go and start playing with codex and so on and build yourself something interesting. And before you realize that Tuesday will extend to Wednesday and Thursday, if you really become an optimist, which I really would love every person to be because it's the factory correct thing to do, then you'll find that with these closing of old doors, new doors open up. With the closing of like historically of farming as your family's job that used to be, for hundreds of years you had new jobs like, I don't know, podcaster, airline pilot, software engineer, massage therapist, even non technical workers. And there's a huge number, huge labor shortage in the world today. Like I'll give you one example that Jeff Bezos talks about, which is teaching, right? So we know for kids, human contact is absolutely important in the educational journey. We know that a ratio of teachers to students of 1 to 6 is roughly the best. We still have a ratio of 1 to 30. So we could have five times as many teachers and we have the money to pay for it. It sounds a bit arrogant, but we do as a society.

[B]

Do we?

[A]

Oh my God.

[B]

I mean, is it because of how we're spending money at the moment?

[A]

I mean, if, if you look at, let's say you take all the, let's class legal assistants that do all the legal research and drafting and say this is now being taken away by AI because now you can draft using AI or do research using AI. It's a big profession. All of a sudden you have this productivity that's set free. So you have a productivity gain. You can, as society put the productivity wherever you want, right? You can incentivize and say now that legal services aren't worth a thousand bucks now anymore, whatever it is, let's take that productivity and shift it somewhere else. It does require A societal consensus. But I would bet if you went to the side and said, look, we want more, better education for our kids, you have consensus.

[B]

I think you would. I think one of the problems, like when I look back at the UK is I think we spend about 86 billion a year on education. It's around that. We actually spend about 120 billion a year on debt interest. We spend about 400 billion a year on welfare. And without knowing the facts, my guess is the ratios of the debt interest and the welfare has increased and education's maybe stagnant, maybe gone up a little bit. This is where I think government's inefficient at how it collects. It's good at collecting, but how it chooses how to redistribute.

[A]

So I have my own open wounds on education based on my own work where I encountered education as an institution, as opposed to education as a way of life. We all agree on education as a way of life. It's important. It's the most important thing that exists. Uh, like you, you, you give a. Give a man a fish. This is Chinese proverb, and there's enough for a night, and you teach him how to fish dinner for the rest of your life. When I started Udacity, which is a. A tech company that's, that's globally teaching people, millions of people, my very first idea was to help in California, and I, with the then governor of California and the California State University system, we came up with this idea to digitize university classes and bring them to high schools that did not have these classes right now. They could normally call it AP Advanced Placement classes. Which high schools have that the kids get a leg up and get faster to high school. You go to inner city high schools, kids don't go to college, sorry, to college because they don't have access to this advanced educational material. So you digitize psychology and statistics and remedial math. And one of my desires was to bring it to these schools in an affordable way. We did two things. One is we raised money from Bill Miller, Gates and others to pay for those classes. But we also said it's digital. We're going to basically offer it for 10% the cost of the same classes on campus. So if you took a stat class in the summer on CSU campus, you paid 1,500 bucks, a lot of money. If you took the same class online with the same certificate, you paid 150 bucks. The next thing that happened is that the California Factor association, the biggest teacher union for csu, called me up and said, sebastian, don't take it personal, but you're the Antichrist. We're going to destroy your business.

[B]

What?

[A]

And they did it in multiple ways. They had a massive media campaign against me. It was in the front bedroom, New York Times, Sunday morning written off as a flop. But they also internally changed the approval process for courses and made it so that from now on every course that was substantially larger than on campus course had to be re approved. And obviously our economics only worked at scale. So our classes had like thousands of students at the same time, which didn't matter because it just meant thousands of students watched the same videos and took the same quizzes. We had scale back then. And after half a year we shut down and we shut down a program that had empowered lots of people in Oakland, very low end people of color, kids of color to go to college for the first time in their lives. It's horrible. And the argument was, look, the California Factors association at the time, roughly 44,000 members, and they said, look, if you can make education 90% cheaper than it is today, our people will not keep their jobs. That's our logic. We are hired, we are a union. We are hired to protect our members. Our members are currently all professors in the system. They make very little money, like 40, $50,000 a year. But out here is not that much. You are destroying the livelihood. We have to destroy you. So that's like the ambivalence between education as a institution, which of course would love to preserve and has existing business models and money flows and dedication as an idea, as a lifestyle.

[B]

I think a lot of this therefore is coming down to how do we harvest and redistribute productivity then in a way that people find it acceptable because that's holding back the macro net progress of everyone, but also the individual progress for people.

[A]

I think when you talked about Europe, if Europe understood this very, very deeply, that technology provides economic opportunity and growth and, and, and productivity and the goal is how to foster this and how to distribute it. 98% of European regulations will be different today.

[B]

That's what I'm going to take back to you.

[A]

Like what? Sovereignty like Vitamin is suffering. You're not sovereign anymore, right? All the stuff that you own is made in China already. Come on, let's be honest, right? We live in a global economy. And the global economy not only affords us better products and services, it also brings global peace. It really does. Okay, I understand that people might be very upset when I say this because we have two bad wars going on. Right now for the wrong reasons.

[B]

But you tend to not go to war with people you trade with.

[A]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean it really, I mean I, I believe that China and America, North America, America are the best friends to be honest, because we have so much interconnectivity. And we do well, both of us actually do very, very well. And we benefit from each other like crazy. China benefits from United States and we benefit from them. Absolutely. Yes, we should. Taking the red wig out. Technology is this incredible source that keeps on giving. We do create productivity measurably. My company Udacity has measurably moved the GDP of Egypt. It's our best example right now. I have a country that didn't have unions where they had a dealership, said yes, we want this. It's to going good. There was no entrenched group of people who would be disenfranchised if we made education affordable. So they, they, they took us and loved us and, and supported us and we, we, we, we, we love their people and created hundreds of thousands of no freelancers in this country that bring hard currency. So, so if, if people understood that this, this infinite, you know, holy grail that produces and produces productivity and your job is to embrace it, distribute it and yes, keep it fair and keep it unbiased and keep it fair to everybody, which is our interest too. Guess what? As technologists, we want it fair too and safe. Then the world would be different.

[B]

Is this for a temporary period though? So one of the questions in our house at the moment. My daughter's 16.

[A]

Oh, got a daughter, very young. Amazing.

[B]

Well, I have a 22 year old son as well.

[A]

That's called statutory rape, I think in the States.

[B]

No, we, we called it. He's the editor of this podcast so he'll be, he want to listen to this. We called it the happy accident. I was 25 and no, I was 24 and his mother's 22.

[A]

Okay.

[B]

Yeah. So we were young and I love it. It was great. It was the best thing having young kids.

[A]

Your son's your buddy?

[B]

He's my buddy, but he's, he's my colleague and what did he call me yesterday? He called me his. Because I was talking to him about politics and going into politics and he said I'll be your have to be

[A]

very patient for that.

[B]

You have to be very patient. But he, he is my kind of like. What's that word? You take the other side? Yes. No, no, no. Anyway, he's like the guy on my shoulder since when I Have an idea. He goes, yeah, but dad, this. And I usually dismiss him. Yeah, well, you don't know anything. I walk off and then come back. Go. Yeah, maybe you're right. But anyway, so he, he knows what he's doing. He works with me. He's great. He's.

[A]

I'm glad you're home.

[B]

Yeah, he's. And it's awesome. We get to work. He sometimes comes out with me. We'll come back one time, we'll do it with you, with him. Or if you come to Europe, you come to the studio. But my daughter's 16. It's really interesting because I've. I don't know what's the current AI year? About three years we've been reading. Three years.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So in another three years, two years, she's going to go to university. So where are we going to be with technology then? And if she goes to university, what will she study that would become potentially useless by the time she's finished it? So we're having these conversations. I think she's going to end up doing art and she wants to be a tattoo artist, which is a great job because it's defendable.

[A]

Tattoo artist will survive the AI wave. I don't think anytime soon you have a robot giving you a tattoo.

[B]

You will want to, because when you get a tattoo, it's also therapy at the same time. Yeah, you're having a, you know, a bit of therapy. But anyway, so we think about that. But I was also chatting to one of my buddies who's got like a six year old, like, how do you plan the education?

[A]

Okay, so let me give you my rundown here. First of all, let's be honest. Everything we learned at school is also irrelevant.

[B]

Oh yeah, totally.

[A]

I had to learn all the years when all big wars happened and big conquerors lived and all the different dinosaurs. And even in math, I had to like, I don't know, factor polynomials and never ever factor polynomial in my life. Your job didn't exist. My job didn't exist when you were at school. So that's already the case. And what the school gives you, apart from like daycare and getting a place to park your child when you as a parent want to go work, is a certain kind of maturity development. You're in an environment where you have to learn to deal with other people and deal with responsibility and deliver things. The three things that I believe are the most important ones for everybody is. Number one is grit. When you start something, finish it. That's really, really important. Number two is Curiosity. Just have an open mind, okay? And be willing to train yourself for the rest of your life. Because guess what? That's the only way to live life these days anyhow. And number three, and this is distance number three, it's empathy. Like find a way to deal with other people that they feel empowered by you and love you because then they give you more. Very selfish in some sense, but it's very helpful to be empathetic. That is true for every college education today. And then in that world, I mean, there's no time better right now than being a college student by now. Look, let me make the point. Let's say you were a college student a thousand years ago when colleges were first invented. You could be dead safe that the moment you die is exact. The world is the same. The moment you start living. Let's go back 100 years. Yeah, there was innovation. You were being trained to become a factory worker. You have been trained to be all be the same. Like uniformity is still a very high value in education today, weirdly that we all want to be the same. Our education still feels like 100 years old in that sense. But now you can be absolutely sure that the moment you leave college, everything you learn at the beginning of college is irrelevant already. Like the innovation is so fast. And that is an opportunity for you to become a driver in this new world. You'll be the fastest in your life when you're in college. The fastest in terms of ability to make things happen. It's been long known in mathematics that the feed medal winners are all in their 20s and not in their 30s. Because in their 30s you're dumb compared to your 20s. Inhale that wave. Use the freedom you have in college to play with these technologies and see how they change the world and bring them into every aspect of human life. This is a time where I think humanities should be absolutely into technology. Yeah. Humanities has always been a field that's been shaped by technology. Like writing, book, printing, press, arts, they're all technology driven. Technology enabled forms of expression and dissemination and communication. And technology plays a radical role in this. We now live in the most transformative moment of human communication era. And it's not just AI. Prior to AI, it's social networks where everybody has a megaphone. Now with AI, where we can reward, we take the collective of human sentences and reform them in a way that's useful for you at this very moment, which never happened before, we are transforming absolutely everything. So the wrong attitude is to say not here. If you as a humanities professor Say I don't want technology in my classroom. You're doing a disservice to your students. You should do the opposite. You should force them use AI to do your homework. Because that's the correct way to be these days. And then surprise me. A long time ago I taught a humanities class at Stanford where the idea was let's use technology. Back in the day was like mobile stuff like iPhone to make philosophy accessible to people. And the students, lucky to me at Stanford, were open minded. Even the humanities students are like, yeah, let's do it, it's a great idea. So one of the student teams built a tinder for philosophers where you go onto your phone and you'd saw Kant and you could left swipe and you get some more information or you could right swipe and then this guy would be gone. We created a wonderful debate like is this the right one thing to study? Immanuel Kant on a phone on one screen. And half the students were divided, interesting enough. The negative ones came from the technology side, computer science, and the positives by the humanities people who said no one's going to read Kant anymore to begin with and you don't have to read Kant too, but make technology part of that fabric because it's there for you and it's there to stay and it's transforming every aspect of society.

[B]

Do you want to take from this in view is that optimism is a very important trait to have?

[A]

No, I mean people consider me as the most optimistic person they've met. I don't know whether it's probably not a compliment.

[B]

It is definitely a compliment. No, because there are interviews I do that shift me. I'll have a conversation with somebody and I'll be thinking about a lot afterwards. Interesting. My son's just texting me now, must be hearing us. But I'll call him afterwards, I'll tell him all about this.

[A]

What does he text? I'm curious, are we right or wrong here? So an independent viewer, controversialistic.

[B]

Yeah. Oh, he's releasing the show. We did an interview with Brian Keating. Oh, nice. Yeah, Brian was great. And he's sending me the title of the show. Right, here we go. Time doesn't exist. What happened before the big bang? Oh yeah, Interesting. So, but I'll call him afterwards and I'll say because he knows I'm really wrestling with this. The algorithm.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Like part of me is like, I just don't want to do it. I just want to play this game.

[A]

Give you some reasons to be optimist. First, the factual reason if you actually look back in history, we've exceeded even the most optimistic people's predictions in the past for any point in time. The best book to read is Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now. Beautiful book that lays out Enlightenment Now. Let me get it now in excruciating detail, with real numbers and very objectively how the world has become better and safer through technology. And the second part is just a really practical thing to do. If you're a pessimist, you're not going to change the world.

[B]

Do you know what?

[A]

It's not going to have an impact on the world. You're going to have to have a negative impact on the world and yourself too. You're destroying your own ability to bring good to the world. As a pessimist, it doesn't mean I don't ridicule the fear. You heard me say you take this very, very seriously. It's an important thing to take very seriously. But as an optimist, you see this potential that exists and hasn't been harvested yet. And you can build these things like a global education company or a global safety car company that really make the world better and safer and more accessible to people. And you have to have that optimistic perspective, the can do perspective to even try.

[B]

I think it's the world maybe wants to make you a pessimist sometimes.

[A]

I think it's entirely yourself.

[B]

Yeah, but there's like, whoa, don't blame,

[A]

don't blame, don't blame anybody else. Sorry.

[B]

No, no. What I mean by that is you

[A]

are what you want to be. Sorry.

[B]

No, no, no, I accept that like, it's my choice, but like, there is incentive structures. But I'm thinking of it also in terms of if you just flip the language to a. More like, you could be very critical of a government, say, these people are terrible, they're communists. You could say, oh, I believe we can have a better government that does this. Yeah, it's the same thing, but.

[A]

Or even better and better. I'm happy to contribute to a better government because it's my role in life.

[B]

Yeah, it's that.

[A]

And you can do it in many, many ways. It's. That's the right approach. If you don't like government, make it better. So complaining, this is my. I complain about complaining here. Don't complain. Okay, don't complain. And like, this is like, my dad taught me many lessons. One lesson he taught me, which I didn't realize how important it was, he said, look, every Christmas you got a carp, a living animal that we would bring in A bathtub and then kill and eat for Christmas dinner. And you would buy this at a fishery. And the fishery had the carp all year long in muddy water, but a week before the Christmas season, they would take the carp into fresh water so it tastes good. And the lesson was the carp tastes the way the surrounding water tastes and it takes that taste with it. So you have to put it into fresh water in a fishery. The same is true for people. If you're surrounded by negative people, you'll become a negative person because that's the convenience. If you, I mean, you, you inherit the habits of the people around you, it's really important. If people complain, you just walk away. Don't listen to them, don't talk to them. They're complainers in the world. They're, they're digging their own grave and they, they pull you unconsciously into the same mindset that that's what happens here in North America and in Silicon Valley, that we just don't complain. We do not complain. We try to fix things. We try to constructively think how can we make the world a better place? And we gorge in these successes that some of us have when something actually works and love it. I mean, why does everyone complain all the time? I don't understand, like, stop complaining.

[B]

Well, I'd.

[A]

Look, make a non complaining Thursday. Okay. A non fear Tuesday and a no complaint Thursday. Just try it out for one day and no complaints. See how much better your fear is.

[B]

Yeah, I think, look, I think everyone has different circumstances and sometimes, you know, I've had a fortunate career and I probably complain less because of the position I'm in in life. But I think if you've had a tough life and works tough, I can, I can see why people default.

[A]

I would say in your case, it's probably the opposite. You are successful because you complain less.

[B]

Well, I think I've been complaining a lot more recently and stop doing that. Yeah, I know. I think that I want to stop doing that. You know, this. I think more the problem about complaining is when you complain, if someone disagrees with you, you've created a rival and an enemy. Whereas I think we achieve more collectively when we can find a way of working together, even if we disagree.

[A]

Yeah, disagreement is great. I mean, disagreement is a beautiful source for enlightenment. Right? So if I disagree with you, let's sit together, look at the facts, and see what different fact sets we're operating in. And almost every single time, if we do this correctly, we're going to agree in the end. In my companies I call this agree and commit, and there's disagreement. I bring it out in the open, I address it very directly. And then we look at the fact set and ask ourselves, where do our assumptions and experiences differ and see if we can synchronize them somehow and then come up with a plan that we all believe in? And I agree. Disagreement is great. Complaining is different. Like, negativity is different.

[B]

I'm going to take that completely out of my life and my kids and take it out of all of our lives. We're going to be optimists from now. Okay, look, last question. Thank you so much for all your time. I've taken a lot of it, and I really do appreciate it. I was so excited to meet you and talk to you. What have you really. What's the biggest lesson that you've had outside of being an optimist? What's the biggest lesson you've had through all of this? You've had some one hell of a career.

[A]

That I'm an idiot.

[B]

Oh, come on.

[A]

In many ways, still learning. You. You get these moments when something opens up and you realize, oh, my God, that's correct. Over the years, there's people who influenced me massively, like my PhD adviser or Larry Page, who I worked with. I've come to conclude that we are allowed to make every mistake and we should make every mistake. But the most important thing is Vito should never make the same mistake twice. And I make mistakes. I make grave mistakes. I insult people. I do stuff I shouldn't be doing. And then I reflect on this and say, that was a mistake. And then my hope is, okay, let's not make this mistake again. And the people around me that are willing to reflect on themselves and learn from whatever they did, they're the ones that end up winning because they get better and better and better. They do the way more trick, right? They learn from their mistakes. The ones that complain, deflect, blame, have a tendency to do less of that. And I've taken this into my professional world. When I interview people, I often ask them, like, tell me something great about yourself. You did. You're really proud of. Because everyone is like, oh, my God, I can talk forever. And then tell me something. You fucked up. You screwed up really badly. And then, oh, and some people give me an honest answer and say, I screwed this up and I made a mistake. And I. If you do this with me, I hire you on a spot. The vast majority of people would say, oh, yeah, biggest mistake that I've made is that my boss hired this other person and the person didn't work out, and I had to fire this person was really hard. What exactly was the mistake that you made as opposed to your boss made? So there is a tendency, and I think I would love to tear this down, of people defending themselves. Maybe it's insecurity, where they are not willing to engage in this kind of look at yourself in the mirror and figure out what we're screwing up. Because I make a mistake every single day. I make a mistake for coming here today. I drove to work accidentally and didn't look at my calendar, and I had to drive back all the way to here. Stuff like this, small things like looking at your calendar in the morning, bigger things. I. I have mortally insulted people I love recently.

[B]

Like why?

[A]

It's usually emotions, insecurity, and sometimes anger, which is a bad emotion trying to get to be free of. But it happens. Yes, I make mistakes.

[B]

It was meant to be a last question, but I now have another one because you said these are the people. What is winning?

[A]

Winning means different things. Winning is not getting rich. That's not the idea.

[B]

It's a myth. Right?

[A]

It's not a factor. I mean, we want to have enough money to live safely. But winning, for me, is a very simple formula. I've come to conclude that the best thing you can do in life is to make other people's life amazing and empower other people. It's the biggest gift to empower somebody else. I think it's much, much bigger than empowering yourself. And in my world, I can measure that. I can say, how many lives are being saved based on Ramos? How many people are being educated based on Udacity. How many cancers are being found because of, like, work we did on cancer detection? And people survived. And none of these people ever thank me because all the people who didn't die because of way more don't even know it, as you pointed out, Peter. But I can still sit there and say, wow, I did that. I did that. And every so often, someone comes up to me and says, sebastian, I took classes at university. You changed my life. Happens probably once a month right now. And, oh, my God, that's amazing. That's the biggest gift ever. And I think people know this. People raise a family gift to their children, and they get usually nothing back for a long time.

[B]

Yeah. When's the payback?

[A]

Payback because it takes a long time because kids don't even understand how much sacrifice parents bring in workplaces. The best workers that get promoted the fastest are the ones that empower people around them without taking credit. I deeply believe this. If you empower people around you without taking credit, what's happening is that these people behind your back give you the credit and they'll trust you and you will get promoted. If you grab the credit, you take that power away.

[B]

It's interesting you say that, because I still get people who message me today and say, I, I discovered Bitcoin because of you, and it's changed my family's life. And thank you. And I'm like, I didn't do it. You did it.

[A]

You should be very proud of this.

[B]

You know, I am. But, like, I want to think forward. Okay, so if Sebastian interviews Sebastian, how would you answer those two questions?

[A]

The question of what your biggest success

[B]

you're proud of and your biggest mistake.

[A]

My biggest mistake? I screwed up Kitty Hawk. The company ended up going bankrupt. In the end, I. Oh, my God. Where can we start? I left Google X way too early. There was a mistake in every single dimension. Google X way too early in every dimension you can imagine. It also materially impacted the trajectory of my family because I walked away from lots of riches. I cut my salary in Google X by 97%. My monthly income. In my daily life, I make a constant. My company life, startup life. My belief is that about roughly 80% of the decisions you made are either bad decisions or recovering from bad decisions. And I take this out of the perspective, if you build a company and you look in hindsight, how much faster could it build it? Every entrepreneur will roughly tell you five times faster. So four out of five days in the week are kind of wasted. And I can give you a long litany of those successes are these little things. I actually really believe in the small successes over the big ones. The credit student at Stanford who gets a good job, it's be the. The person. The woman in a Waymo who doesn't get, like, molested by the Uber driver anymore. It's the person who's become an independent freelancer in Egypt or Saudi Arabia who previously would have not been able to do this. Or in your case, it's the person whose family was changed because you helped them discover bitcoin, an amazing contribution to society.

[B]

Yeah, I think. I think I was like, my biggest success is it's just going with my gut and changing my life. Just going. Right. I'm now going to start a podcast.

[A]

Why?

[B]

Why?

[A]

Gut is an amazingly good breakdown.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

When you and almost all decisions are gut decisions.

[B]

Yeah. If I'm no longer like, we made 860 shows about Bitcoin. And I knew I was done. I said, that's it. I'm done. And I just stopped.

[A]

You put it on the map.

[B]

But I. I cut off a very good revenue channel because I couldn't do it anymore. This is. I'm done. Biggest mistakes. I think most of my biggest mistakes are always people.

[A]

I would agree.

[B]

I think.

[A]

What's an example?

[B]

Expect, like, being annoyed when people don't think like me and expecting.

[A]

When's the last time that happened?

[B]

Probably every time I deal with my son, he's. He's. I always expect him to think like I do and work like I do. It's not him. And actually, I should celebrate what he is and the person he is, because he's actually a much nicer person.

[A]

And are you learning from that?

[B]

I learn a lot from him. It's really annoying because he's going to

[A]

be listening to this.

[B]

Yes, I am.

[A]

Going forward, we'll be less annoyed with him. Promise he's listening.

[B]

Yeah, I'll be more patient.

[A]

Come on.

[B]

Yeah, no, I will, I will, I will.

[A]

If it's truly a mistake, you should.

[B]

Yeah, no, it is. But at the same time, I also know where he. What he needs to focus on as well. But. Yeah, that's. That's some of it. You'll meet him. You're gonna have to meet him now.

[A]

I'm gonna hire you now.

[B]

You're gonna hire me now? What am I gonna do? I'm gonna be a head of podcasting.

[A]

Fun casting.

[B]

Sebastian. Amazing. I was. Honestly, I'm so. I was. I felt so lucky when Chelsea said you would do this and nobody's excited.

[A]

I've known about your shows for a long time.

[B]

Well, Amazing and I. Do you know what? Coming out, we've done two interviews here and they've both been great. And I did two in LA and they've both been great. I think this coast has been very good to me. I think we're gonna have to stock.

[A]

Whoa.

[B]

We'll see. I. Do you know what I want to do? I want to take some optimism back to the uk.

[A]

Good.

[B]

And try and see if we can influence the different dynamics in the uk, which is dragging us down. To not do that based on the opportunities that technology brings us.

[A]

It'd be wonderful. Be wonderful.

[B]

Thank you so much, man.

[A]

Peter.

[B]

Thank you, everyone, for listening. We will see you all soon.