21. How Can You Identify Hidden Talent? With Eric Schmidt.
No Stupid Questions
Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher
4.6 • 3.7K Ratings
🗓️ 11 May 2025
⏱️ 35 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | After your third yacht, I mean, what are you going to buy? |
| 0:06.5 | A fourth yacht. |
| 0:08.3 | I'm Angela Duckworth. |
| 0:09.7 | I'm Stephen Dubner. |
| 0:10.7 | And you're listening to No Stupid Questions. |
| 0:13.8 | Today on the show, Angela asks former Google CEO Eric Schmidt about his quest to find the Einstein of the 21st century. |
| 0:22.4 | How can that possibly be something we shouldn't be pursuing? |
| 0:25.7 | Also, are billionaire philanthropists doing more harm than good? |
| 0:30.1 | I'm not going to go tutor anyone today because didn't I hear that Eric Schmidt is giving way his money to education? |
| 0:37.0 | All right, so let's get started. Eric, I'm so happy to be in conversation with you today. |
| 0:42.5 | Listeners, of course, may know you as the former CEO of Google. How would you like listeners |
| 0:47.8 | today in 2020 to identify you to know you? Well, I think of myself as a computer scientist |
| 0:53.4 | who is lucky enough to eventually run a number |
| 0:56.4 | of companies, and now I'm trying to apply the principles that I've always believed in to solve |
| 1:01.3 | some societal problems. |
| 1:03.0 | It's far better to take the spoils of success and use them to advance the next generation |
| 1:10.2 | than anything else I can imagine. |
| 1:12.6 | Because I did not understand, and now I understand very well, that I was standing on the |
| 1:19.3 | shoulder of giants and that the vast majority of my success was due to luck and not skill. |
| 1:24.9 | The work I know best is the work that I happen to be involved in, and that is |
| 1:29.8 | Schmidt-Rise. I'd love you to actually begin by just explaining what is Schmidt-Rise and how did it |
| 1:36.0 | come about? I decided after a while that the most important thing was talent. Talent is distributed |
... |
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