Latest Interviews
Showing 1–15 of 25 transcripts.
Clear all filters- Milken Institute39 min
International Security: Innovation, Investment, and Partnerships | Global Conference 2026
David Trulio, Christopher Coons, Eric Schmidt, Adam Smith, Chris Coons
Panelists including Eric Schmidt, Senator Chris Coons, and Representative Adam Smith argue that the war in Ukraine has exposed the critical need for the U.S. to replace expensive, traditional military assets with autonomous drones and AI-driven systems to secure a cost-effective deterrence against adversaries. To overcome entrenched bureaucratic inertia and fiscal constraints, the group advocates for bipartisan legislation like the SPEED Act, expanded co-production with international allies, and a workforce shift toward technical innovation over four-year degrees. These strategic adjustments aim to leverage the agility of private sector competitors against legacy defense primes while ensuring American technological leadership in an era of algorithmic warfare.
- Sequoia Capital1h 5m
Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora on the Virtues of Being an Outsider
Nikesh Arora, Masa, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, Masa-san, Lee Klyrich, Jesse Ralston, Jim Getz, Ashim Channa, Nir Zook, Mark McLaughlin, Bill McDermott, Mark Pennyhow, Ali Godsi, Sam Altman, Elon, Steve Jobs, Jerry Garcia, Leon
Palo Alto Networks executed a strategic transformation under CEO Nikesh Arora by integrating acquisitions like Talon to pivot from single-point firewalls into a comprehensive 11-subscription SASE platform. Arora's leadership emphasized rapid integration, founder retention incentives, and a disciplined 5% R&D allocation for long-term disruptive research to secure a $10 billion competitive moat. This approach allowed the company to bypass internal development lags, consolidate the cybersecurity market, and successfully evolve from a niche vendor into a dominant multi-platform entity.
- All-In Podcast29 min
Eric Schmidt on AI, the Battle with China, and the Future of America
Eric Schmidt, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt outlines a strategic framework where the immediate AI revolution remains underhyped and distinct from the imminent arrival of autonomous agents, while warning that Western nations must counter China's aggressive pivot toward open-weight models and advanced robotics. Schmidt anticipates a future military doctrine defined by millions of AI-driven drones that create high-deterrence stalemates rather than traditional combat, driven by the obsolescence of fixed military infrastructure. Simultaneously, he emphasizes that US geopolitical resilience depends on leveraging domestic capital markets and releasing smaller open-source models to maintain control over handheld device proliferation amidst global demographic declines.
- RAISE Summit27 min
Eric Schmidt & Andrew Feldman: The Race to SuperIntelligence
Cerebras Systems CEO Andrew Gerrandt asserts that the company's Wafer Scale Engine architecture delivers inference performance nearly two orders of magnitude faster than competitors, driving a market shift from training-dominant to inference-heavy workloads. This hardware acceleration, combined with strategic open-source adoption and co-designed software, has compressed industrialization timelines from decades to five years while exposing critical bottlenecks in global energy infrastructure and data sovereignty. As the industry navigates an uncharted S-curve of explosive growth, geopolitical competition and alignment risks now define the trajectory toward autonomous, on-device AI integration.
- RAISE Summit20 min
Eric Schmidt: AI and the Genesis of a New Epoch
Dr. Eric Schmidt characterizes the current technological landscape as a new epoch driven by the imminent arrival of reasoning-based AI, predicting that Artificial General Intelligence and superintelligence will emerge within four to six years. The discussion highlights a geopolitical divergence where the United States pursues capital-intensive closed-source models while China leverages open-weight systems, creating a strategic risk where global usage may outpace Western control. Schmidt concludes that massive infrastructure investment in compute capacity will outlast concerns of a market bubble, as autonomous systems will drive unprecedented growth in mathematics and software development independent of human data constraints.
- Milken Institute21 min
A Conversation with Eric Schmidt | Global Conference 2025
Eric Schmidt analyzes the evolving Ukraine conflict as a volatile stalemate driven by massive drone production, automated sensor-to-shooter loops, and the obsolescence of traditional armored platforms like tanks and aircraft carriers. He contrasts Ukraine's rapid, two-week innovation cycles against the Pentagon's sluggish 16-year procurement process, arguing that rigid bureaucratic structures prevent the U.S. from adopting necessary autonomous systems. Schmidt concludes that to counter modern hypersonic threats and future high-intensity warfare, the U.S. must pivot from expensive stationary assets to affordable, internet-prosecuted robotic forces integrated with its domestic startup ecosystem.
- Milken Institute1h 3m
eSports: The Bumpy Ride to ROI
Ben White, Sam Englebardt, Peter Levin, Kristen Salvatore, Ari Segal, David Rockefeller Jr., Emily Fortuna, Amanda Han, Eric Schmidt, Ari Schwartzmann, Sam Nelsons, Chai, Peter Barron, Peter Barry Kaufmann, Kevin, Carlos, Paul
Industry leaders highlight that gaming now surpasses film and television in scale, with a user base of 2.6 billion driving a strategic shift for traditional media and sports organizations to secure the Gen Z demographic. Investment activity is surging as entities like Immortals Gaming Club adopt holding company structures to capture high valuations and leverage the mobile boom, while platforms like Twitch demonstrate superior engagement metrics that attract non-endemic advertising. Amidst these rapid expansions, the sector faces evolving structural debates regarding player welfare, the rise of influencer-driven brands over traditional franchises, and the impending need for standardized unionization and global regulatory frameworks.
- a16z44 min
a16z Podcast | What Makes the Valley Work
Don Faul, Marc Andreessen, Ben Silverman, Cheryl, John Scully, Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Eric Ries, Lars Dahlgaard, Chris Dixon, Matt, Tati
This Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, composed entirely of former founders and operators, invests in long-term founder-led companies by prioritizing the "idea maze" experience and deep founder-market fit over professional managerial transitions. Guided by the prediction that software will disrupt major sectors like healthcare and transportation through universal smartphone connectivity, the firm targets moonshot opportunities with a strategy that pairs product innovators with trusted COOs. Operating on a decade-long horizon with a maximum fund size, the organization leverages a unique operator-only culture and emerging big data sourcing tools to support the most committed entrepreneurs during critical growth phases.
- Lex Fridman33 min
Eric Schmidt: Google | Lex Fridman Podcast #8
Eric Schmidt reflects on his technical origins and strategic leadership during his tenure at Google, where he pioneered scalable platforms and restructured the company into Alphabet to isolate speculative long-term bets from core operations. He outlines a "path to generality" for technology ventures, utilizing a 10-20-70 budget rule and a bottoms-up innovation culture to drive progress in artificial intelligence and sustainability over five-decade horizons. Ultimately, Schmidt asserts that while high intelligence and rapid information processing unite diverse leaders, true success and happiness derive from solving universal problems rather than accumulating wealth, projecting a future where AI enhances human health and longevity by 2075.
- Goldman Sachs20 min
Peter Chernin: The Future of Digital Entertainment
Peter Chernin, John McCutchan, John McWhorter, Eric Schmidt, David Rockefeller Jr., Peter Singer
John McCutchan leveraged his experience founding Fox News to establish Otter Media, where he successfully built a 2.2 million subscriber operation free from legacy media constraints. He contrasts this agility with the stagnation of platforms like Hulu, which he argues was suppressed by parent companies prioritizing ad revenue over a potential $175 billion market opportunity. McCutchan and Eric Schmidt further warn that traditional media faces an imminent crisis as all major direct-to-consumer streaming services currently operate with significant losses, necessitating a fundamental shift from brand marketing to customer-centric problem solving.
- Milken Institute59 min
Hacked and Back: Cybersecurity Lessons From the C-suite
Dmitri Alperovitch, Sanford (Sandy) Climan, Christopher Krebs, Thomas Pritzker, Tom Pritzker, Sandy Kleiman, David Batts, Jr., Jeffrey Brown, David Brooks, Eric Schmidt, Alan Seales, Tom Ginsburg, Chris Collins, John McWhorter
This event analyzes the evolution of cyber threats from state-sponsored espionage to disruptive attacks like the 2017 NotPetya incident, highlighting the strategic responses of Hyatt and the Department of Homeland Security. Hyatt integrated cybersecurity into its core governance by allocating six percent of its IT budget and empowering its CISO to share threat intelligence with federal agencies within minutes of detection. The presentation further outlines critical lessons for the entertainment industry, emphasizing the need for robust data protection, cross-sector collaboration, and a culture that treats security as a continuous strategic imperative rather than a temporary IT function.
- Goldman Sachs26 min
Eric Schmidt: The Artificial Intelligence Revolution
Goldman Sachs accelerates its cloud migration to leverage superior cybersecurity and specialized hardware for AI workloads, while the broader industry shifts toward data-driven deep learning that prioritizes scale over algorithmic provability. This transition enables "savant systems" in fields like healthcare and finance to automate trial-and-error processes, supported by a global talent market increasingly dominated by computer science graduates. Although these technologies promise to democratize expert-level capabilities through on-device and cloud computing, their adoption faces monetization hurdles and ongoing geopolitical competition, particularly from China.
- Goldman Sachs11 min
Talks at GS – David Eagleman: The Neuroscience of Creativity
David Eagleman, David Rockefeller Jr., Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Levine Jr., Dan Coffey Jr., Dan Collins
This analysis redefines human creativity as an evolutionary advantage rooted in the prefrontal cortex's capacity for hypothesis testing rather than physical traits, identifying three universal cognitive operations—break, blend, and bend—as the fundamental drivers of innovation. By shifting educational and economic focus from rote memorization to cognitive flexibility, individuals and organizations can leverage the collective intelligence of 8 billion brains to navigate a transitioning creativity economy. Ultimately, success in this new era requires actively dismantling past successes and tolerating failure to generate novel solutions that artificial intelligence currently cannot replicate.
- Milken Institute59 min
Bridging the Gap Between the Military and Silicon Valley
David Sanger, Eric Schmidt, Norton Schwartz, Raj Shah
Led by Raj Shah, the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx) successfully integrated commercial startup technologies like MIT-developed LiDAR quadcopters into military operations to bypass traditional acquisition cycles. Despite facing cultural barriers regarding risk aversion and bureaucratic compliance, the initiative has attracted significant venture capital investment while prompting recommendations for embedding computer science as a core DoD competency. Current leadership continues to pursue these structural reforms through iterative procurement models and data-driven soft power applications to maintain a strategic edge over global adversaries.
- Milken Institute30 min
MIc'd Up | Part 2: Pedro Domingos in Conversation with Eric Schmidt
Led by industry leaders like Bill Gates and Pedro Domingos, the event examines how converging advances in algorithms, data, and computing are shifting machine learning from rule-based programming to generalized intelligence. The presentation details critical hurdles in generalization and the urgent global talent shortage, while outlining transformative economic shifts where traditional hardware models face commoditization and new crowdsourced learning ecosystems emerge. Looking five to ten years ahead, the discussion predicts a workforce evolution where humans act as strategic captains alongside AI systems, enabling universal programming capabilities that could unlock a $5 trillion new world economy.