Schmidt sees capital and immigration as keys to U.S. resilience

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 17:36

   meaning you have this view on AI, there's all this stuff you're doing now in drones and warfare, in rocketry. It all converges, quite honestly, because in the next 5 or 10 years, these things will all come to pass. What is the, like, how do you view the world? Like, what is the role of America? What is your role as a capitalist, as a technologist, as, like, a statesman? I want America to win. Right.

2. 18:08

   I am here because the American dream, the people who invested in me, in my case, Berkeley, and so forth, people took a chance on me. I want the next generation to have that. I also want you all to remember, I was just in, as part of the World War II surrender ceremony in Honolulu, and they talked about fighting tyranny, right? We forget that our ancestors or great-grandparents or whatever fought the Great War to keep liberalism and democracy alive.

3. 18:37

   I want us to do that. How do we do that as Americans? We use our strengths. What are our strengths? We're chaotic, confusing, loud, you know, but we're clever. We allocate capital smartly. We have very deep financial markets. We have this enormous industrial base of universities and entrepreneurs, which are represented here. We should celebrate this. We should stoke it. We should make it go faster and faster. I spent lots of time in Europe because of the Ukraine stuff.

4. 19:06

   They are so envious of us. When you're in Asia, they are envious of us. Don't screw it up, guys. that's what I want to work on. Eric can I can I just ask you outside of this external conflict we had a conversation with Alex Karp today and we actually had Tucker Carlson here yesterday and some of the dialogue was around the I don't know if the right term is the erosion of the West that there may be social issues that are brewing in the West that may be hurting us from the inside how much do you observe or spend time on these issues and the metric that often is cited now is declining birth rates in the west and that our population and we're going to talk with elon in a few minutes about this um oh sorry oh you just ruined surprise oops sorry there's your surprise Yes, sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry slip, but

5. 20:01

   um Elon is a good friend and he's addressing this issue of population directly himself problem solved for it good for Elon is it is it a reflection of something going on there's a rise of Momdani getting elected in New York some of the historic values of the West seem to be on you know kind of under a state of transformation right now one metric of the success of a society is it's ability to reproduce. And so I think this is a legitimate concern of the West. It's much worse in Asia. The Chinese number is about 1.0 for two parents. In Korea, it's now down to 0.78 for two.

6. 20:43

   So it's really important to recognize that we as humans are collectively choosing to depopulate and the numbers are staggering, right? And imagine a situation where instead of having growth, you have shrinkage and furthermore they're getting older and so as a business all of a sudden your revenue is declining and there's nothing you can do because you can't innovate with fewer and fewer customers so if you just put it in a business context ignoring the moral issues which are all very real it's just bad right so we have to solve that problem I happen to be in favor broadly of immigration because I think immigration helps us solve that problem but as a global mechanism we have to address that in any case from my perspective, you're going to have these issues, but America is organized around the concept of

7. 21:33

   American exceptionalism. And as long as we understand that the way we make progress is we invest in the right people, in the right businesses, we have a strong capital market, we invest in the infrastructure that they need, we'll be fine. That is my actual opinion.