Real Alpha
Watch modeSubscribed

Inside Blackstone · 2 min · Sep 29, 2026

Schmidt says to take more risks as you get older

Eric Schmidt argues that age can lower the downside of trying difficult things. He says impact and personal values should guide which risks are worth taking.

Eric Schmidt

Eric Schmidt is CEO and chair of Relativity Space, former Google CEO.

Scaled Google as CEO through 2011, now runs rocket maker Relativity Space and co-founded Schmidt Sciences.

About this segment

Eric Schmidt argues that age can lower the downside of trying difficult things. He says impact and personal values should guide which risks are worth taking.

From “Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt: The Road to Superintelligence”, Sep 29, 2026. Watch the full episode

“as you get older, you should take on more risk because you have less to lose”
Eric Schmidtat 6:28 · Inside Blackstone6:28

Takeaways

  1. He sees age as a reason to take on more risk, not less.
  2. Failure is acceptable if you made an attempt.
  3. He is motivated by impact, democracy and freedom.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 11:59AI self-improvement raises an alignment problem4:50
  2. 16:38Long reasoning is advancing, but original discovery remains hard4:08
  3. 24:38AI data centers are changing software economics and operations2:57

  4. 6:15Schmidt says to take more risks as you get older2:02

  5. 9:57Technology adoption takes longer when it needs capital2:13Up next
  6. 22:25AI shifts programmers from writing code to architecting it2:24
  7. 27:47Schmidt says students should study deep reasoning2:04

Transcript

From the transcript Inside Blackstone publishes with the episode.

  1. 6:22

    When most people achieve the kind of success you have, or not even close, they spend the rest of their life sort of talking about it and what they accomplished. You keep reinventing yourself. I can't seem to stop. My own view is as you get older, you should take on more risk because you have less to lose, right? Right. And so, you might as well try the things that you thought were impossible. And if you fail, well, it's okay.

  2. 6:47

    You know, you tried. And as long as you're trying in service of the ethics and the world that you care about. I care about democracy and I care about freedom, that's what I wanna work on. At this point in my own life, I'm interested in impact. Most of the problems in the world could be solved in Eric's little brain with an improvement or an adjustment in technology. If you look at sort of improvement in our lives, improvement in our health and so forth, it's all been related to technological progress.

  3. 7:15

    Starting with the invention of fire, which was extremely useful, right, way back when. But also dangerous, right? Of course, and everything is dual use and everything has to be managed. But just look at the dollar value of labor over 1,000 years, or 500 years, or 100 years, right? Human output, human hours in terms of productivity, are vastly improved. And because we've somehow collectively decided to have fewer children, not a good thing.

  4. 7:44

    I have four. Congratulations. Doing my part. Have as many as possible. More children are good and more grandchildren are good and so forth. We're going to have to automate. And so human wealth, human health, human wellbeing, one of the major determinants will be over the next 100 years, can we continue to accelerate progress in this? I profoundly believe we can. And I profoundly believe that long after I'm gone, humans will be much better.