Eric Schmidt: Google | Lex Fridman Podcast #8

The following is a conversation with Eric Schmidt. He was the CEO of Google for 10 years and the chairman for six more, guiding the company through an incredible period of growth and a series of world-changing innovations. He is one of the most impactful leaders in the era of the internet and a powerful voice for the promise of technology in our society. It was truly an honor to speak with him as part of the MIT course on Artificial General Intelligence and the Artificial Intelligence Podcast. And now, here's my conversation with Eric Schmidt. What was the first moment when you fell in love with technology?

Um, I, I grew up in the 1960s as a boy where every boy wanted to be an astronaut and part of the space program. So like everyone else of my age, we would go out to the cow pasture behind my house, which was literally a cow pasture-

Mm-hmm.

... and we would shoot model rockets off.

(laughs)

And that, I think, is the beginning. Um, and of course, generationally, today, it would be video games and all the amazing things that you can do online, uh, with computers.

There's a transformative inspiring aspect of science and math that maybe rockets would bring, would instill in individuals. You've mentioned yesterday that 8th grade math is where the journey through mathematical universe diverges for many people. It's this, uh, fork in the roadway. There's a professor of math at Berkeley, Edward Franco. He, uh... I'm not sure if you're familiar with him.

I, I am.

He has, uh, written this amazing book I recommend to everybody called Love and Math, two of my favorite, uh, words. (laughs) Uh, h- he says that, uh, if, if painting was taught like math, then, uh, students would be asked to paint a fence, which is his analogy of essentially how math is taught, and so you never get a chance to discover the beauty of the art of painting or the beauty of the art of math. So h- how, when, and where did you discover that beauty?

I, I think what happens with people like myself is that you're math-enabled pretty early.

Mm-hmm.

And all of a sudden you discover that you can use that to discover new insights. The great scientists will all tell a story, the men and women who are fantastic today, that somewhere when they were in high school or in college they discovered that they could discover something themselves.

Mm-hmm.

And that sense of building something, of having an impact that you own, drives knowledge acquisition and learning. In my case it was programming and th- the notion that I could build things that had not existed that I had built, right? That had my name on it. And this was before open source, but you could think of it as open-source contributions. So today, if I were a 16 or 17-year-old boy, I'm sure that I would aspire as a computer scientist to make a contribution like the open-source heroes of the world today. That would be what would be driving me, and I'd be trying and learning and tr- making mistakes and so forth in the ways that it works. The repository that represent... that GitHub represents and that open-source libraries represent is an enormous bank of knowledge of all of the people who are doing that. And one of the lessons that I learned at Google was that the world is a very big place and there's an awful lot of smart people.