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Sebastian Mallaby

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2026-06-16
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2026-06-16
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  1. “He's tugged me on that one. I've enjoyed the conversation. I'm happy to leave it there. Thank you for doing it, Tim. It's been great.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “So there was a story precisely like that from an economist writer who's very funny and also does podcasts. And he ran that experiment and it was just as you said, you know, his friends who were professional economist journalists couldn't tell which was the witty column that he'd written versus the equally witty ones which the LLM had generated and he was very pissed off with this. I take your point. I mean for now I can be all complacent and say, yeah, it only works for 800 words. It doesn't work for a whole chapter which is 20 pages long. But no doubt it'll get better and better. But I still think I'm going to cling on to the thing that makes me.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “Thinking process, I think through my writing, I come to understand what I understand and think what I think and believe what I believe through writing. And I'm not going to give that up.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “With a person you saw two weeks ago is this and this and this. You know, you learn a lot from the system, like really bootstraps you to learn faster. So that's helping me to think more, not to think less. It's cutting out the time it would take me to go find all the papers by myself and then labour through them. It's cutting to the chase and nourishing me intellectually. And by the way, I'm not worried about hallucination because I'm going to interview the human scientist anyway. So I get to cross-check it all. What I would never do is get the AI to write because frankly it's not very good at long form. In fact, it really sucks. It's fine for writing an email, although I don't do that either because I like writing. But it really is, I've tried it once. It's terrible for anything longer than about 800 words. But even if it could do it, I don't think I would ever outsource that because that's me. This is what I do.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “First thing, I think, is the Google Maps analogy is the wrong one in the sense that it's fine to offload a very specific mental task, which to most people is a pain in the neck and let the machine do that for you. It's not fine to offload all thinking. The point of offloading something should be you get to focus your mental energy more on the other stuff that you really get satisfaction and meaning from. And so for me, what that means is that I'm very happy to use large language models to learn about the scientific output of somebody I'm going to interview next week. All of these AI papers are on archive and the model has ingested all of them. And the model is extremely good at telling me, okay, the scientists you're seeing next week has these three papers and the progression between the three papers is this and this and this and the comparison.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “That the Seattle Seahawks were going to make, and they knew that given a certain formation, when the bull was snapped back, there was a certain pass that was coming. So the guy just takes off and he runs right into where the bull comes and he catches it and intercepts and New England wins. And so that's a prepared mind in sports. And the other reason, last thing why I would put on the billboard, prepare your mind is that for the age of artificial intelligence, this is what we need to hear. And this is a serious point. The risk with large language models is that we just get lazy and whenever we need to know something, we just get it to tell us what to think. That is not the route to happiness or satisfaction or anything. We need to continue to do the hard work of preparing our minds because that's what makes us people. I think therefore I am. And so I think prepare your mind is entering a time when it comes to...”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Yeah, this vision of the kind of overcaffeinated charismatic seizing on the engineer and saying, drop it, whatever you're doing. And in his answer was prepared mind that he'd been thinking about how you model sequential data ever since his PhD in Canada. And when he saw the solution, this was what he'd been waiting for for like a decade. And so he could jump on it. And then when you start thinking about prepared mind, you would probably remember this better than I do. Wasn't there a Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl final against the New England Patriots where the New England quarterback does an interception in the last second of play and clinches the victory? How did you know to make that run? How did you know where the quarterback was going to throw the ball? The answer was prepared mind, basically you didn't use that phrase, but in training, they had studied the”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Entrepreneur is going to fit this opportunity. What should we be expecting so that when the person walks into the office, into the conference room and pitches to us, we already know ninety percent of what he says because we've prepared our minds, and that way we can make a good judgment on a fast judgment if it's a competitive situation. So I kind of wrote about the prepared mind in the context of venture capital, and then I'm doing the infinity machine and I'm interviewing Ilya Satska from OpenAI and I'm asking him, why was it you who understood the significance of the transformer architecture when it came out immediately, like on the day it was up on the website, you read it, you ran down the corridor, you went to see your collaborator, Alec Radford, and you said, we're going to build a language model on top of this architecture. How did you see it so quickly?”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Billboard which lots of people are going to see, I would put prepare your mind. And this is a saying which is originally Louis Pasteur, I think the scientist, who said chance favors the prepared mind. If you're ready for things, you can make the most of the opportunity that comes your way. The amazing thing about this saying is that it's come up randomly in different contexts in different books I've done. So when I was writing about venture capital, Excel capital and one of the founders, Arthur Patterson, used this phrase as a description of how he wanted Excel to invest, that they would run these kind of scenario exercises where they would think, okay, there's a new technology coming down the pike. What kind of company needs to be built to make the most of that new platform?”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Then it goes multimodal, so it can do video and audio. And in the meantime, it's got a very long context window. So you can plug in an entire Tolstoy novel and ask questions about it. Then it starts to do the reasoning stuff and can do logic and math. Then it becomes a gentic. Then it's like coding for you. And all of these changes are packed into three and a half years. And I agree with you. I think the next three and a half years are going to be even more wild. So I think there's a big gap between the inside and the outside view of this.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Agree with you. I think one experience from writing the book is simply that when you're close to the people inside the labs, and I wasn't just Demist, I interviewed 100 of these AI insiders, you realize that the stuff in the pipeline is enormous. And you also, I think there's a kind of popular misconception, which is there is this thing called AI, and it kind of happened when ChatGPT came out. So now we've got it, and we're kind of getting used to it, and that's in the rearview mirror. No, no, no, no, no. This thing is changing the whole time as anybody who looks closely knows. And if you think back, the progression is wild. You know, you get this system in end of 2022 which hallucinates non-stop. kind of six months later whatever it was and the hallucination radically reduced”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “The record, I think that it is much bigger than mobile, much bigger than internet. This is so general. Cognitive capability which can span any human task. I think the niggle is simply, how long does diffusion take?”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Well, I guess Dario. I think even if you left Sam on the table, it would be Dario. I mean, I think he's just a fascinating, fascinating figure as well as being the current leader for the reasons I was saying earlier.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I have to admit, I was told by Demists that this meant a huge amount to him, that he'd read it in his late teens, and that was when he really became convinced that he could build AI because the argument in the book is that whatever the human brain can do, computers will be able to do one day, that the human brain operates on ones and zeros. And therefore, if you could build big enough compute, you should be able to replicate the intelligence of human brains. And that was the sort of insight that got him hooked on the idea. So I went off and I tried to read it. I would say I got like 150 pages in and got bogged down. I mean, it is a difficult, challenging read, but at least I kind of extracted the essence that meant something to my subject, to Demis.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Absolutely, this image of this kid who sacrifices everything to dedicate himself to the craft of fighting the aliens and withstands ridicule and bullying from his peers and fights back. It's an appealing image and that's what hooked Demis. But to answer your question of earlier, you know, he would have done AI anyway because he read Ender's game actually when he was already kind of around 30. And he'd had, unbelievably, the determination to build superintelligence from when he was about seventeen. I mean, that is wild as well. I mean, the only conviction is just extraordinary.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “Yeah, I mean, reading it, I must say as a mature adult, I thought it was not that well written. But the idea of it is good.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Wouldn't expose themselves in that way Is Demis ready thinking this? So then I go to have the dinner. And he says, I hope you read Endus game because that's really how I see myself. And I gave the book to my wife so she could read it so she could understand me better because I really identify with Ender.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “I read Endus Game as a result and I hadn't read it before. And as I was reading it, I was thinking to myself, okay, so this is a story about a sort of boy hero who saves the entirety of humanity from an invasion of the planet by the space aliens. Is Demi's telling me that that's how he sees himself, that he's like saving all of humanity with AI? Because it'd be a bit much to believe that, but it would be even more to have the temerity to tell the guy who's writing a book about you. That's how you see yourself. Like most people.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “So, right at the beginning of my interviewing of Demists, we were having the second meeting, which was a dinner, and he told me to read a couple of books before we had the dinner. And one of them was Ender's game.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Out of universities. In the US, there's the Bidale Act. There are these very sophisticated tech transfer offices which are generous to the entrepreneur in terms of not demanding too much flesh as somebody exits. And that's essential for making the startup work. And in Europe, the attitude is we're the university. We deserve a lot of skin in the game here. We want 50% of the upside. Well, in that case, the startup will never happen. And I say to these Europeans, go visit Stanford. They're very generous to their entrepreneurs. They seem to be okay financially. Because if you help the entrepreneur, you know, you'll get the donations later, it's all good. And so I think those are just two things.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “People and ideas, and you circulate those and you combine them in different ways. And each time you combine them, that's a new company. And each has a shot on goal. And most of them fail, but all of a sudden, if you circulate these components fast enough, you do get product market fit. And then you get these 10x plus returns. Now, in Britain, when you raise a new round, a series B say, and you've got nine months of runway to build to the next stage from your company and you identify the three key talent that you're going to bring into the company and make it happen. And then they turn around to you and say, well, I can come in six months. That's a death sentence. That's horrible. We call it gardening leave in Britain. That is an appalling idea. We've got to get rid of those gardens and we've got to let people move fast. Another thing is tech transfer.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “Why? Because it was considered treachery at the time to leave one company and go to another company. There was no entrepreneurial culture in the 1950s on the West Coast in the US. The classic business book of the time was Organization Man, about people who joined one company and stayed in it for their whole life and retired with a gold watch on their 60th birthday. So you can create an entrepreneurial culture and that is happening bit by bit in Britain and certainly in Israel and it's happened in China and it's not some magic which is confined to Silicon Valley. It's worth making that point as the first thing. Now there are specific policy shifts that you need to do to make an ecosystem work and I think you put your finger on one which is the mobility of talent is super important. You can think of a startup ecosystem as something which circulates three elements money.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Couple of things. I mean, I think the mistake that people in Europe make and Britain as part of this is to believe that there's some kind of cultural magic about Silicon Valley where whatever it is that they're drinking in the water out there makes them think that failure is a learning experience which is kind of weird and the Europeans say well we're never going to be like that and it's impossible for us to become as entrepreneurial as Silicon Valley and I remind people that when Fairchild Semiconductor was founded in 1957 the eight scientists who left the Shockley lab were called get this the traitorous eight”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “King's Cross, which is this sort of cool center for tech in London, where you can get the train in one direction and be in Cambridge, which has quite a lot of good startups in one hour, or you can get the train in the other direction and be in Paris where there's Mr. Allen and so forth. And it's kind of very wired into different bits of Europe. So how long does it take to get from San Francisco to Mountain View, depending on the traffic? It can be well over an hour. So I think there is a technology ecosystem which is by no means the equivalent of Silicon Valley yet, but it's certainly unrecognizably better than it was 10 or 20 years ago.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Yeah, I mean, I often have this debate with people in London where they say exactly as you put it, this was a tragedy for UK tech, our great champion of deep tech is bought out cheaply by Google. They say, listen, it wasn't cheap. The acquisition price might have been $650 million, which was a bit cheap. But you know how much they put in in terms of research and development funds over the next 10 years? It was approaching $10 billion, almost a billion a year. So this was not selling cheap to the Americans. This was a cunning British trick to get a billion dollars of American R&D money into London per year for the next decade. Terrific win. And by the way, today, there are spinouts from DeepMind in London because the talent stayed in London. And these spinouts are raising billions of dollars to do new AI companies. So it's terrific for the London ecosystem around”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “Remained enthusiastic and committed about Demis, partly because he was the guy who would go to London and meet with him and sit in the board meetings and he would get several thousand volts of Demis enthusiasm injected into his spine at every meeting and he would come back buzzing with excitement. And the other Founders Fund partners who didn't have that benefit were skeptical. And so Luke would often come to Demis and say, we got your back, we got your back. We're going to do the next round. We're going to lead the next round. And then actually in Series C, founders found at the last minute pulled out and they put money in, but they did not lead. And so the answer to your question is there was a lot of argument within Founders Fund as the check size grew, it was harder to have that double down on your winners kind of attitude.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Internally Founders Fund was very torn about the deep mind investment. And I described some of this in the book where they do the first deal and that's fine. It's $2 million. But then you get to Series B and Series C and the check size gets bigger. And so the other partners are asking tougher questions and they're saying, well, wait, is there going to be a product? And Demis said to me that his attitude was, what do you mean? Is there a product? I'm talking about artificial general intelligence. It's going to make all products revolutionized or obsolete or whatever. And you want to ask me what the widget is? Give me a break. No, it's all of the widgets. They're all going to be changed. And if you're asking me this question, you don't get what AGI means. And so Demis was very frustrated by the other partners at Founders Fund. And I think internal within Founders Fund, there was a lot of fighting between Luke and”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “And as John Durr likes to say, the great thing about venture capital is you can only lose one times your money. So it's not like a short position for a hedge fund trader where you could lose a lot, right?”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “So he was the unbridled enthusiast who got founders found across the line. And the rest is history. They put the Series A money in. Unbelievably it was $2 million at a $4 million valuation. So they got half the company for $2 million. Not bad.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “Commitment that venture capitalists often look for because a missionary will never quit, no matter how hard it is, they will keep working. So Luke, Nozek, and Peter Thiel jointly recognize this. Peter is contrarian, cynical, aloof, and so is kind of into it, but at the same time arm's length. Luke is like got both his arms around Demis is giving him this bear hug and will not let go. And Demis says, I'm not going to move to California. I'm going to do this company in London. And Peter and the other Founders Fund partners are like, London, where is that? It's kind of like Somalia or something. I mean, that's just off the map. And Luke says, no, no, no, no, we have to do this. We have to do this. I will fly to London for the board meetings. We've just got to do this deep mind investment.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Junior chess champion, second best player in the world, but also five times wins the mind games Olympiad where you have to run between boards playing Backgammon, chess, Go and a couple of other games kind of almost simultaneously. I mean just kind of crazy crazy smart. Obsessency was 17 with the idea of building powerful AI. So Peter Thiel said to me about Demis, I think individuals tend to have one company inside them if they're missionary entrepreneurs they've got one thing they need to do and for Demis it was to build AGI like that was what he was fixated by and the company was downstream of his desire to build AGI if he could have done that at a university he would have been happy to do that but he couldn't do it at university so he had to found a company to do it and that's the kind of missionary”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “More, more, more, more, more, more capital in there. And of course, that paid off massively. And off the back of that roll forward to 2010, he's trying to look for the next Elon Musk. And he does a few kind of frontier bets. And then along comes Demisis Abis, who is out on the West Coast from London, raising capital for this idea of an AI company, which is going to call DeepMind. And most people think that's nuts. There's AI, remember in 2010, cannot even recognize a photo of a cat. It can't do anything. We're in deep, deep AI winter. Who would back a company like that? The answer is Luke Nozak. He falls in love with Demis, you know, who is a very winsome character, super articulate, super relatable, and a genius has all the kind of outlier characteristics he wanted an entrepreneur, you know, the sort of”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Luke Nozick is this tremendously puppyish enthusiast. He was an early, early part of the PayPal team with Max Levchin and Peter Thiel. He went through that journey and then Peter exited PayPal, set up founders fund, and this is now, I think, 2005. And Luke Nozak becomes one of the first partners. And pretty early on, he makes the right judgment on Elon and SpaceX. And Lucas' the kind of guy who is just all in. When he falls in love with an idea and a founder, there is no curbing his enthusiasm. And so he's like, all in, all in, all in on SpaceX. And I think he persuaded Founders Fund to raise a new fund, put extra money in like more.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “Is this kind of Shakespearean tragedy in the latter part of the story where the growth investors come in, he gets diluted, he no longer has influence, his key card to get into the building, he's deactivated, and he's basically stiffed and he watches Uber kind of go off the rails. And then finally comes the denouement where he rounds up the dissident investors and they have this coup against Travis and that sets the company on the path to where they hide Darrow and do the IPO. I just think that's the ultimate venture capital story and Bill is the ultimate venture capitalist.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Point number two, he went to see various entrepreneurs who were in this space, and he checked them out, and he had the discipline not to invest in them. Because although they were kind of going at the right thing, there was some hair on the deal, some wrinkle, some way they were approaching it that just felt like it wasn't going to be quite right. So he resisted. Uber came to him before Travis was the CEO. Bill said, I'm not doing that because he didn't think the CEO at the time had what it took. And then there was an internal switch at Uber. Travis became the leader. Bill meets him. And like, bang, he immediately invests. Because he's been waiting and waiting, waiting for the idea to be paired, as you were saying earlier. You have to have the market to be paired with the right person. And he saw it. And then he invested and he was a great board member. And it all went perfectly right.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “I mean, I'd say that Bill Gurley from Benchmark is right up there. I always think of the investment he did in Uber. As the absolute quintessential perfect venture investment in the sense that he had done the open table investment and of course Open Table is a two-sided marketplace where you have lots of consumers that are looking for restaurants, lots of restaurants, you put tech in between which creates information and then the person looking for the place to eat can precisely say I would like Thai food at this price range in this area for three people at this time ding what used to take you a lot of searching around bang it's done and so Bill having done that was thinking well what's another two-sided marketplace and he thought well there are lots of cars and lots of people who need a ride and you put information in the middle in the same way there ought to be something which is like an app for ride sharing and so he imagined Uber way before Uber existed that was point number one”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “And then as you're walking around the building, they're saying, okay, well, we can go through the atrium now because the toddlers have gone because, you know, the creche for the kids or the employees finishes at 5 p.m. And so then there are all these two-year-olds running around and it's a bit of a zoo. So if it was five, we wouldn't go through there. But now it's 6 p.m. So we can. And you'll think, whoa, okay, so they've got the interests of their employees at heart. They're building this anti-pollution technology. It's great. And then you realize they're under US sanctions and considered to be a threat to the US. So it's quite interesting to process all that.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Think that's a great idea, by the way. I mean, I think what I found was the cognitive dissonance of visiting a company like Hike Vision, which is under US sanctions, and walking around their premises, which kind of feel very American. It feels like a cool tech company doing cool stuff, building cool gadgets. You know, they have a display of, they build this AI-enabled camera technology or sensor technology. And so one application might be you can point this camera at water and judge the pollution level. And because of this, you can have an internal market in pollution control. So the downstream city, which is receiving water from the upstream city, pays the upstream city to keep the water clean. And that market can exist because you can precisely measure the pollution level thanks to this AI sensor, which Hike Vision is building. So you're thinking, whoa, this is...”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “Get our hooks into their systems. And so now we can disable them if they start a war in Taiwan. Now we can cripple their communication system if we need to. So that offensive use of the very frontier model might negate my point about waiting for diffusion to happen. But of course, nobody in the debate is saying that. Nobody is saying, oh, we're racing to the front because then we're going to use it offensively. They don't admit that.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “At Frontier Lab XYZ. But it's not helping productivity across your economy. It's not helping your military industrial complex until you deploy it into those guys' systems. And that deployment and diffusion is going to take some time. And by the way, you're going to have to build on not a compute. You're going to have to build a lot of energy. These things also take time. So it's not like you cross some Rubicon and then it's all over. Now, the one way in which I might be wrong about what I just said is if you use the Frontier Superintelligence offensively, you say, okay, we've got one super powerful model, the US government, who we're talking to about this is going to use it, and they are going to comprehensively penetrate everything about Chinese cyberspace and insert various trapdoors, Trojan horses.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “I have had a conversation with the leader of one of the labs that I shouldn't name, but I had this debate and he said, look, the chip export controls are going to leak. They're not going to last in some period of time. Huawei will figure out how to make good AI chips. And that's inevitable. But that's okay because we only need to be ahead for the next couple of years. Because by 2028, we will get to recursive self-improvement where the frontier model codes by itself, the next frontier model, and progress just goes vertical. And at that point with recursive self-improvement, we're done. The racist over, whoever comes first at that point, that's it. So I think there's a couple things to say about that. First of all, that's not it in terms of deploying the model, right? You could have an incredibly powerful model in your server.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “My response says yes, but don't you think there is the same thing in the US? There are people who want to just race, there are people who care about safety. We have a pluralistic society. There's difference of opinion. It's the same in China. But at least admit that there is a faction that would like to collaborate and go and try and work on it because the alternative to trying to work on this is that we carry on with China producing very powerful open weight models which basically allow anybody to do whatever they like with AI as it gets to the point of serious danger.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “Quite hawkish as well. And I don't mean to underestimate the sophistication of some of these people. I mean, of course, they speak Chinese. I don't speak Chinese. I defer to their expertise. And I think they probably know that there are builders of the technology, professors in the technology who talk the talk of safety, but they say, yeah, but that doesn't reflect what China's government would actually do.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “I think part of this is that if you were to think back 20 years to when China was relatively new in the WTO, Collaborating with them on that and hoping that over time China would become more friendly to the US. At that time, there would have been some China hawks who thought that a communist regime is not to be trusted. And then some sort of China optimist who hoped that it would become easier to work with over time. And part of the trouble today is that the China optimists feel burned. They feel like they made this bet that China would become friendlier and then Xi Jinping took power roughly a decade ago and the opposite happened. They became more aggressive and harder to work with. And also, of course, more technologically advanced and therefore more threatening. And so now you've got this world in which there are the natural hawks and then the former doves who have turned into kind of burned remorseful doves and therefore kind of with the zeal of the converted become”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “The model gets turned into an application, probably that gap shrinks, and it may even be non-existent. So however you slice that, the basic bottom line is we both have strong models. And the chip export controls have not delivered what I hoped would be the big advantage. And so I'm not against keeping the controls on if we think that maybe as the compute demands of bigger and bigger models byte, the chip controls will bite more. And maybe we get a bigger advantage next year or something. But I don't want the chip controls to get in the way of discussion with the Chinese about where we have a shared interest, which is in controlling open weight models and preventing the bad stuff falling into the hands of the bad guys. I would prioritize”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “When the chip export controls were announced, which was October of 2022 right before ChatGPT, I supported those controls quite loudly. I wrote a very long piece in the Washington Post saying that if we could stop China getting frontier models by depriving them of frontier ships, I was all in favor of that because of the strategic advantage for the US. I mean, I work at the Council on Foreign Relations. We do geopolitics and national security all day long. And I'm all in favor of US power. But I have to say that, you know, three and a half years later, we haven't actually achieved that enormous advantage over China in terms of the models based on the best studies. We're kind of eight months ahead in terms of where the frontier model is, like our frontier model versus their frontier model. And then if you adjust that for the speed with which”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Prevents war breaking out. But at the same time, we don't want open weight models that can be freely downloaded by anybody who wants to fall into the hands of criminals and terrorists who can then use it to hold us hostage. And we have a joint interest in that. And when my friends from the Biden team or even from the current administration say, well, you can't talk to China about safety, they don't care. I say that's not true. And they say, but it's really hard. They don't stick by their commitments. And I get, you think Nikita Khrushchev in the Soviet Union was easy to negotiate with. He was the guy who put missiles in Cuba and went to the UN and banged his foot, his shoe on the table and said, we will bury you. I mean, he was a tough guy to talk to, but we did talk to him and we got the non-proliferation treaty agreed. And I think we need to do the same thing again now.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “There's another kind of risk, which is that other random rogues, whether it's criminals, terrorists, rogue states, get the stuff, and they do bad stuff, and it's much harder to deter that because it's a multipolar game. And so deterrence doesn't work so elegantly. And so the way it was dealt with in the Cold War was that in 1956 there was the agreement on the International Atomic Energy Agency. And in 1968, the non-proliferation treaty kind of enforced compliance with the IAEA such that you could get civilian nuclear power if you were a non-nuclear state, but you had to submit to the rules and be inspected and show that you were not using the enriched nuclear material to build a weapon. And so I think the same analogy could be applied to AI. We're going to have parity roughly with China. We'll both have powerful AI, hopefully deterrence.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Internet. So we have a shared interest with the Chinese in preventing this proliferation risk from going nuts. And as I thought about it, the kind of Cold War analogy To see more and more opposite. So, if you look back at the story of nuclear weapons, there were two kinds of danger. First danger is you have a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States. But that was contained by balance. Two superpowers, they both have their weaponry, they have mutually assured destruction, so there's no war.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “And conversely, technology has been part of their amazing growth story in the last 25 years, which they are rightly proud of and delighted by. So they love technology. So when the Biden team tried to meet with the Chinese and talk about AI safety, they got nowhere and they decided it was impossible to even talk to them about some sort of non-proliferation treaty for AI. But when I went there, I found they did talk about safety kind of unprompted. And this led me down this track of arguing over the last couple of months that the door is actually open to a dialogue with China about preventing bad guys doing bad stuff with AI because they don't want the internet to be crashed by some cyber hacker who has the tool. They don't want bioweapons. They don't want chemical weapons. They want none of that. They love regulating these.”

    2026-06-16 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #870: Sebastian Mallaby, Biographer of Demis Hassabis — Lessons from 100+ AI Insiders on The Race to Superintelligence, The Religion of AI, and Spotting Breakthroughs Early · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT