Reviving Europe: The Battle for Innovation and Sovereignty. Gerd Leonhard & Jo Caudron Conversation

Greetings, I'm Gert Leonhard. Welcome to Gert Talks. Today I am with Joe Caudron. He is from Belgium. >> Thank you, Gert. Thanks for having me. Who am I? I'm in the digital / innovation / disruption business for over 30 years now. I had the advantage or how should I call it, to be the very first to create a web agency in Belgium 32 years ago. So, I had the opportunity to follow most of the innovations in that area. So, first websites and then mobile and social and all of these kind of things. And with different companies, I think I founded about 25 of them. I always spearheaded uncharted territory for most people. And for the last 15 years I decided, actually 17 years today, uh to no longer offer services like build things for customers, but to think about what did it all means. And there I made this migration from tech is a disruptor to so many other things are disruptors. So, what is this doing to companies and the economy, but most of all to society. I have written seven books. The first four about tech and the last three about tech and society and the last one actually just about society. >> I think we have so many parallels is kind of scary actually. You're 58, I'm 65. I've been reading your latest book called Fuck the System. I don't think it's spelled out in such a way. F s t a r s e k I think if you if you just look for Joe j o Caudron c a u d r o n, you'll find him everywhere. So, I've been reading the book, I've been making notes in as I was reading the book, I was thinking like, man, there's so many parallels between our messages, not just about Europe and technology, but in general. And then we were chatting before we we did this we're doing this podcast today. We were chatting about what we should talk about and you mentioned that you also have this shift towards this big question as to what we do ourselves and that did remind me of Rifka Brandman. So, all of a sudden our own job description has changed so much because it used to be about transformation and business and to improving things and learning things and that was like table stakes. Our future between what the machine can do and what we should do and how we respond and now it's about politics. It's about policy. It's about our approach to life and in many ways I think you have the same experience as me is that we're challenged by this shift from this discussion, you know, speaking about these fairly straightforward topics to now it's about philosophy and the future of survival and that struck me as a very interesting parallel. >> Yeah, absolutely. I think I've learned this before I started really focusing on society. We did a digital transformation exercise, a big one that took about a year for BNP Paribas, well-known bank. So the concept I've always been working with was that you have digital disruptions. They disrupt the status quo of an industry or company and that digital transformation which is actually in the essence a business transformation. So you have a disruption creating a business transformation. But while doing the exercise, we saw it's only digital. So what about an aging population? As a bank, this is important. What about living affordability of houses? As a bank, this is important. What about of course climate change? Insurability of things. So slowly we said the pattern of a disruption changing the status or challenging the status quo and coming up with a strategy which is a business transformation strategy, it's the same methodology. So that is when we started applying more angles that just digital. And then I think for the last three or four years I said digital is no longer even the most important one. Let's face it. There are so many other societal drivers of transformation. But of course with AI, digital is of taking a very prominent place in how it's disrupting technologies, businesses, economy and of course society. >> This is such a big challenge I think for us as speakers that rather than just making a living with what we're doing, we want to make a difference. We want to We want to talk about what really matters. And what really matters usually isn't about money or business transformation, but about whether we can thrive in the future. And I think this is just like you may have the same experience. It's a bit of a threat to the business model of speaking because I find that in much of my work, when I get too close to the things that really matter, it's much more difficult for the audience and the client. And it's much more personal and rocking the boat too much. And that has become a major shift just this year. I decided I'm going to drop all that other stuff because now I only need to speak about what really matters and it isn't going to be about how to use AI to make more sales. >> Yeah, but that's that's the luxury we both have. So, imagine we were 20 years younger and we still had to pay off houses and whatever and family young kids. We can afford to say screw it. It's part of our business value, but we have a voice that we can use. Everyone, I think, that has been active in this domain for the last 20 25 years, they have to see what we see, but not everyone can afford to say let's act upon that. Let's behave like that. And even if that destroys economic value on my side. But what I also have noticed, and this is interesting, that is that these people in boards and these CEOs, they feel the same. They think alike, but they can't translate it into their businesses. So, if you talk to them one-on-one, if you even if you do those If I do these exercises, I still do with them. They agree on everything we say on geopolitics and on Trump and on climate and all of and the threat of AI. They agree, they see the danger, but they can't translate it into the core of the strategy of their company because indeed there are different stakeholders that do not allow that. So, on a personal people level, we are not alone. There are a lot of us, but we can afford to act upon it. >> I think we're very lucky that we are able to do this and I'm committed to making that shift away from what does not matter to what really matters. But to go closer to the things that matter personally and on a larger scale, they're inherently social, political policy issues and belief issues and they rock the boat and they follow the party in many ways to ask a big question like, what do we want with AI and what do we want with Europe and what are we willing to give up? And those are very personal questions and I think that has been a change for my business model, but I'm fine with that and you probably notice the same thing, but it's it is definitely a challenge. >> This when I did these kind of presentations and workshops a year and a half ago, just after the inauguration between the election and the inauguration, a lot of people had no attention. They didn't want to listen to that. In the last year, most people are growing this awareness. They are also convinced that it is no longer normal what is currently happening in the world. So, it's less less difficult for me to convince them there's a broader story. It's not just about your business and tech, it is a broader story. And that changed completely in less than 18 months. And that is for me it is a good sign. That's at least well a little bit of a silver lining there. >> Yeah, the other thing is that I wrote about this the other day in my blog is that I feel like a forecast, a prediction and analytics is done is what AI does pretty well now. There's actually a new website called Future Search that does that. And if you want to forecast and ask questions like, what is the outcome of the election and the arrival of AGI or whatever, those kind of things you can actually ask the AI. So, I feel like a lot of clients are doing that today and they're coming to me and actually giving me a script from the AI for my job and I'm like, I'm not doing that, sorry. But my direction now is I have a new headline for the human future and it's not for the human business. And the so I'm moving away from being the service provider that does interesting speeches, hopefully, or nice looking speeches to like the advocate. Being an advocate is so important today because in the end, what do we want is the key question rather than what we can have. This is the key question for Europe, is not what we can have. And all the great stuff that we can do with American tech, but what do we actually want? What is the destination? The tell us, yeah, the purpose. >> Yeah. >> So, let's talk a little bit about your book and tell people about how we got here. I found a couple of interesting quotes I'll throw in. For example, the world shark, that's a really interesting term and I love that term because it's it's so fitting. Tell us a little bit about the book. >> Yeah. So, first of all, I have to correct the title because a lot of people say fuck the system, but that's not the entire title. The entire title is fuck the system and all the bad ideas for the future. So, I decided for myself to write the book. I was in Amsterdam with a friend having some drinks and food and on the election evening in the in US. And I have stayed up late to just follow the first exit polls and I said, "Oh my god, this is not going to happen, right?" Uh so, in the the days after I said, "Why?" It's actually the beginning of most of my books. There's this fear, there's this not understanding why things happen the way they happen. I want to try to understand for myself what are the mechanisms behind this. What is the risk? Who are the people behind Trump? All of these kind of things. So, while researching, I find these patterns and I write the book and I get hope. And this is not the first time. It's the fourth, fifth time that I write a book where I start in a very pessimistic way and I end very optimistically saying there is indeed a solution. So, the the origin of the book was the election of Trump. So, I still wasn't really convinced I had to do it and then we got the inauguration of Trump and then I started writing. I have I called my my publisher and I said, "I have a book, guys." And I know the title is going to be fuck the system and all the bad ideas because Dodge was happening and Musk was doing crazy things. I said, "This is no longer normal. This is accelerating and someone has to tell the story, which is no longer a tech story, although AI is part of it." So, I did. So, I wrote the book between I think February and somewhere in the middle of July. All of the research and the writing of the book, which was difficult because every day I got like 200 pages of stuff happening that I could just have AI summarize you what's happening. I could in real time write a book as as it was materializing in the US. And the aim of the book was to actually answer a couple of questions. First of all, what's happening in the world and is when Trump is going away, is it going to go away? And the answer is no, it's not. It's it's definitely not going to go away because we have Vans and we have Teal and we have Dark Enlightenment and we have all of these things that are behind the scenes shaping what Trump is doing. Second question I want I wanted to answer is how weak is Europe or maybe are we stronger than we think? What is the problem with Europe? And the third topic I wanted to address was how can we actually start thinking in Europe with a new kind of innovation paradigm to tackle the things that we are currently weak in because there are issues in Europe. Definitely. So, how should we tackle them? Just by competing in the traditional way as with Qatar or whoever? And the answer is no. So, these three parts, first the world, then shape of Europe and then the future of Europe. I think I succeeded in at least bringing that message across. >> Mhm. >> I think the first part is pretty clear. We don't have to talk about that very much as to what is happening, what is wrong. We've both spoken and written about this a lot, so it's quite clear it's a disaster of Western of Western norms and diplomacy and even if Trump does go away, which is quite likely, I think some maybe even sometime this year, but sooner or later, then this does not end. So, I always say that America and Europe are getting divorced and this could be an ugly divorce, it could be a good divorce, we could get back together, who knows, but now we're cutting, we're leaving. This is I think it's a very good picture for what's happening. We're getting divorced. It's ugly, we're screaming, fighting and all these things. The second part is like how bad are things in Europe and what is the actual problem? We should talk about that and then follow up with the third part as to what is the reasonable action. I saw in some of the quotes I have that you say that we're searching for a European self-confidence. >> Mhm. >> I think this is so true. We're both kind of more European, I think, than most other people in the sense that you live in Belgium, which is, by definition, the epicenter. I live in Switzerland, but I'm German. So, here in Switzerland, Europe is looked at in a kind of weird light, even though we are de facto part of it. So, let's talk about what is the situation, Europe? How bad is it? How good is it? And what is the real analysis of this? >> Yeah. The short answer is it's much better than most people think. So, we have an incredible infrastructure for innovation and change, but we have made, I think the the biggest two mistakes we have made is the fact that over the last 20 years, we have taken the path of least resistance in manufacturing and production that was towards the East and China, because that was the best way, cheapest way to produce things that became more and more expensive here. I think the biggest mistake was the fact that we also followed the path of least resistance to get our innovations from lab side to bed side. So, lab side, you invent something, bed side, it ends up at the side of your bed. Something in your house in your home. There was a time, Gert, and you're older than I am. If you look at video recorders, Philips had system 2000. We had so many inventions. We had Nokia. We had Ericsson. We had all of these things. We had social media in Europe. We had them. And about 20 years ago, they slowly started to fade away. And every great idea in Europe actually followed the path of the money towards US, because if you can front yourself in US, that was one market. And from that, that was the one step towards the global market. So, I've done this several times. So, I had 25 companies. I did a lot of funding. It was a logical way to say, "Where are the Americans?" And maybe can I exit on the Americans, because that's better for So, this is what we did. But the thing is that everything underneath, the underlying building blocks of our academics and the level of, for instance, AI graduates that we have, we had great talent. We had the technology. We had, of course, ASML, but we have many other things in Europe, too. But, we have forgotten we have actually outsourced both the production side and the go-to-market side. Now, the essence of our talent and our brightness is still in Europe. We still have it. Now, combined with what happened last 18 months and what you have described is the divorce between Europe and US. Many people now, both on a political level in Europe, the EU Commission, and many others, on a local political political level, like in the Netherlands, there's so much debate about sovereign technology. We can no longer trust Microsoft or Google or AWS. We have to rebuild this ourselves. But, the thing is we do have it. We don't have to rebuild. We have Nextcloud, we have Proton, we have so many things that we good technology that we don't use. So, the analysis is that most of the components that we need, both on the talent level, academic level, invention and innovation level, we have it. But, >> Yeah, my analysis is very similar to what you're saying is I think we we have a lot of things that we need here, but it's a mindset. There's a mindset problem. There's a cultural problem. There's an attitude problem. And there's a certain amount of saturation. I lived in America for 17 years. It's very Darwinistic. It's very like doggy dog, you could say. Especially now, it's very pressured and all that stuff. But, even the culture is just completely different. So, the fact is here in Europe, for example, in Switzerland, if we have ETH and ETH, the the biggest tech school in in all of Europe, really, and EPFL and many others, and we have great people, we have great adventures that all move to China, maybe Saudi and Dubai, and of course, the US. So, we have all these things here, but we don't have the guts. We don't have the termination that we can fail. We don't have the risk-taking. And frankly, in many ways, I feel we're lazy. We're intellectually lazy and we're lazy in the sense of we're not going to do the extra work. It takes a little bit. How do we change the culture? And I think the culture can only change when we come through a painful moment. It's like again, when you get a divorce or you go into therapy before the divorce, then you realize, "Oh shit, if I only did this one thing, I could save this thing." And but when therapy will say like, "Oh no, it's not my fault, it's their fault." I get very upset with the real reason behind the misery also in Germany, the economic misery, is not that we're stupid, it's not that we don't want to, it's not that we don't have it. It's our attitude. >> So, I think people that are lazy here will fail over there, too. But still, many people in Europe go to the US because they're not lazy. They have the same entrepreneurial spirit, but again, the route towards the market that way was easy. The second thing, the second remark I have is you're completely right. We have this cultural Euro bashing thing, 27 countries not aligned, it's complicated, and the administration and the burden and so on and so on. So, this is a cultural thing, but it is slowly, actually quite rapidly, with last year and a half, it is changing. Every time Trump says, "Maybe Greenland should be ours," you get this whoa, whoa, this happened. So, this is what Trump is doing for the almost like this Euro nationalistic feeling both in economy, but also broader in society, that it is creating a change. We are aware of the divorce, so that's a good thing, actually. >> You could say the collapse of this world order, the American world order and this sort of the way that things are done is forcing us to take action. And that has been a good thing. So, inadvertently, Trump is also with the Iran war, of course, causing us to rethink fossil fuels, which of course the last thing he wants is for that to be resolved. But this is what's happening now. So, in a way, you could say this relationship has been secure for a long time. Now, it's time to get real. And I think there's a painful moment, especially again in Germany, super painful moment now, the collapse of the German car industry, and so on. But also the general moment where we have to create a fertile ground. And how do we create a fertile ground? Not with more rules, but rules are sometimes also good, but a fertile ground needs a mindset, a future mindset that says, "First we innovate, we kick ass, and then we think about protecting ourselves and the It goes together. It's not like an either/or thing. I'm very much for the protection of human values, obviously, but I think it has to go hand in hand with saying we're going to get very serious about innovating, right? I think you said in your in your book, you said something really interesting, that you don't want to think of Europe as the sick man of the world, a sick old man, but as a teenager. >> Yeah. >> Can Can you elaborate? >> Yeah, it's even in the book I admit it's a bad metaphor, but I have a daughter of 20 and a son of 16, so I'm really in in it. So, these kind of situations, "Dad, you have some more money. Dad, my computer's work. Can you help me with this? Can you be a taxi again?" So, well, Europe has been doing this on the levels we just described for decades already. The last even the most. And now indeed, not just parents divorcing, but parents saying to their kids, "We cut off this lifeline." And but the the the strange thing is, they don't really say it. Actually, they say, "We have changed our culture in the US, and Europe follows the old cultural line, and we want to be more conservative, so it becomes a culture war." So, it's that is the dangerous thing. If US would just say, "Europe, we abandon you. Do whatever you like." But they don't want us to do whatever we like. They want us to step in their footsteps, to follow in their footsteps with becoming more right-wing and conservative movement that is going on. The The national security strategy they published end of November, beginning December, explicitly says this. So, any other place in the world can do what they like, US is not going to intervene, but Europe, no, no, they're going to intervene. So, it's not It's not a good metaphor, but it is the metaphor of suddenly, after years of study or not really studying, you'd say to your 24, 25-year-old kids, "Dear son, dear daughter, you're on your own now." And then suddenly, they see they have a talent. They see they can actually pay the gas bills. They know how to do it. If they have to, they know how to do it. And they know that they have to rent for themselves this time. So, they they have to mature overnight. And this is what Europe also has to do. And this is something I really want to bring in this podcast or video recording or whatever, Gert. People say Europe is not aligned, is not organized like US, is not as efficient as US. We have 27 states and so on, but we should not forget the US has been working on this for 250 years. The US is more fragmented than we are. Neighbor laws, fiscal laws, but they have some laws, federal on top of that. They have been engineering for over 100 years to rule this economy. So, we started doing this in January last year. >> And I think you also mentioned in the book that that Europe used to be a market project, you know, about about joint markets, and now it has to become a United States of Europe project, a state project, a country project, right? >> Power project. >> Yeah, and that's completely different. So, it's no longer just about markets, it's about becoming united. And I think ultimately it's not that we're going to give up our individual sovereignty. We're going to pool our sovereignties. I think this is the important part. So, if we're pooling in Germany, Austria, France, Portugal together, then we can be stronger, we can be better. I live in Switzerland, where we have a direct democracy. And we have a federation that could very much be a blueprint for Europe. Because we have the cantons where they have their own parliaments, they have their own laws, and they have their own votes, and we vote every 3 months on something, right? It's laborious, complicated, and a little bit confusing to our people, but it's working really well, and that the cantons keep their own way of how they want to do things. But there's a federal level, you pay a federal tax, you pay a canton tax, and our defense budget in Switzerland is 0.88% of GDP. It's not much. Switzerland has a very, very interesting way that I think Europe could say, "Okay, maybe we can become a federation like this." And we talked more about that in the second half. I want to go back to the market project versus the state project. So, I think this is the key moment where we have to realize if it's going to be a market project, it just won't be enough. And now Trump is kicking at us and not just Trump, but Russia, of course, also and China. And now we have to get together and make it a union of a sort. I think it's great that everybody's talking about it and calling for this. And for example, we need to have a minister of the future for Europe. There's a great book by Kim Stanley Robinson called The Ministry for the Future, which outlines exactly this kind of project. And it so happens that his Ministry for the Future is based in Zurich. But we need to have this urgently so that we can move forward and change our mindset and change our speech. Yes. So, I think your book points out a lot of really great stuff in there that I like. So, >> One of the things that I tried to describe in the last three books, actually, it's a call to action for everyone that has the voice, everyone that is in in in the seat of policy making. We need this future vision of Europe. We don't have do have experts everywhere and these experts really know what's going on in all of these domains in Europe, but we don't have this story we can tell, this simple, almost populist story we can tell to people saying, "Imagine Europe in 2050 where indeed the car industry collapsed where in 2026, 2027, 2028, but something else came out of that and how we live and how we produce our energy and food and all of these things and how we defend ourselves and how Europe is governed. No one is telling that story. We don't have it. And for me, it's a bit the sign of signic style why we don't answer. So, we know what Europe is and how we do things in Europe, but we don't know why we ask the change of people. And if people do not know the outcome of the change we ask from them, nor the companies, nor citizens, they will be resistant to change. But if we could shape this Why not a 13-episode European streaming series that actually in a kind of in a kind of sci-fi scenario tells us a very realistic scenario about migration and energy and food and living and mobility. >> You know, I always wondered why don't we have pan-European thought leaders, public intellectuals. We have local people like Jacques Attali in France, who's also like Noam Chomsky kind of age now pretty much, or John in Switzerland that just died. And of course we have a lot of old people there, but do we have pan-European intellectuals? And you know, we need the council of people like that here in Europe, not just a political council, but people who are talking about in the US. I can list like a hundred people from Ray Kurzweil to Douglas Rushkoff to people who are influencing thinking in the US. Of course it's the birthplace of a lot of these things. So when you go to the Bay Area, you can go to Fort Mason and you meet a hundred of those people all the same time. And here we all speak different languages, we're in different places. People know me, they know you, but they may not know you in Bulgaria and so on. So we have this huge challenge. How do we create thought leadership and public thinking with people who are like household names. We have very few of them in Europe that that you qualify. Yeah, now we're picking Yeah, yeah, that's good. That's that's an interesting point. And he's coming forward with the universal basic capital idea. So we do have some people, but they're either British and they do their own thing, and they're French, which they totally do their own thing, or German, which in this case they are completely different track. So why don't we have that in Why don't we put our effort into creating this that we can have European thought leadership? >> The theory is that we in Europe are stubborn. And we have those 27 countries with more cultures in those countries than we have countries. Um we don't just follow one leader. I think that's a good idea. So that's it's it's it's an asset. We don't follow the next We will never have a European Trump. It's impossible in Europe. You can have Le Pen and you can have Farage in the UK and you Wilders in the Netherlands. So we have them and they could play a certain role, but it will never have the traction in Europe to have this strong, in this case, bad leadership. The problem is if you are looking for that in good leadership, it's the same challenge. What is What are Italians going to listen to? Of course, if you're an intellectual and you follow economy, you you know Piketty, of course. And and you maybe you subscribe to the ideas he's creating, but still it's not on a populist level. We don't have an Elon Musk because I think in Europe most people would never trust someone like Elon Musk >> And they shouldn't. >> So, we have to find another way. We have to But you we should have way to bring across the message. Actually, what we need is like or show on the lane, if you listen, if you see this, but create a GG imagination or something like that. >> Maybe the Pope is stepping up to that position now because of encyclical, which is really interesting. It's like I'm not a Catholic, but what he's doing is really like, "Okay." One thing I wrote about just a couple weeks ago is that I anticipate ever since I wrote my last book in 2016, 500 years ago, when I wrote this book, Technology vs. Humanity, I said that the coming clash between humans and machines. And that was 10 years ago. And I think we're heading to this foreign where clearly there's going to be a hell of a fight between the transhumanists, the singularian, the techno-optimists, the the all of that stuff that's coming from the US and backed up, of course, by the government. Now, and what Europe is wanting to have, which is a human future. And this is a fight. We have to be totally certain about this. We need to not pick a fight, but we need to stand our ground. And we don't want this brand of transhumanism just because it's more efficient. And this fight is coming. So, no matter what how Trump will last or stay or not or whatever, this is what's happening. We're clashing in civilizations here. This is why we have this debate. We don't want AI to be God or to be even a person for that matter. We want it to be maybe an agent, maybe a tool. Yeah, maybe something, but not a digital entity, for crying out loud. It's like that's but that's ridiculous. That concept of course is totally Silicon Valley, but anyway, so I think there is a coming clash and I think we need to somehow figure out how we can negotiate between those poles because it's Europe, US, and then China of course, which is the embodiment of the state in that case. >> I think the solution is not in it's a battle between good or evil or east or west or like Europe and west more west US. It's a transversal battle. It's about people that want this and people that do not want this. And even in the US and I think definitely also in the US most people if you would just go to the mega the maggots the that line of followers of Trump they don't want this task creole because all of these the acronym and all of these crazy folks in in in Silicon Valley with their crazy ideas. They don't want none of that. They don't want transhumanism. They don't want to have civilizations on other planets or our civilization on other planets. They don't want that. They have a different more conservative worldview. Actually it's I don't think it's a coincidence that the first protests against data centers and AI and the first Molotov cocktails towards houses of AI CEOs it's in US. So the people that want this do not represent the people of the US. The people that want that that acceleration They don't this is a very small group of people. So they don't represent their population. >> I think that's true. At the same time you can say that the promise of the AI gold rush and of military and business dominance with AI is leading a lot of people to support this development and setting forth with AI we're getting into the power position in economic terms and social terms and in military terms. And when we have the power everybody will have to be on this agenda. And then is only a short step from AGI to transhumanism. I was just listening to Ray Kurzweil again yesterday and he says, "We have to merge with the machines." What he always says. He's a brilliant guy, but this is totally worrisome. And I think this is like piggybacking on this ultra capitalism and what America is pushing out into the world, 98% of all of that comes from there or from China, then we'll end up having a choice of going with the state capitalist or going with the techno-optimists. That that strikes me as a lousy choice for Europe. >> Yeah, and I think there's a middle way. I'm sure there is because we should as you as Europe, we should get out of the AI race. I say this very clearly because the AI race, it's the wrong race. There's a different race we have to run. The AI race as the first economy that has this wins every over every other economy, this is not how the global economy works, first of all. Second, the first army that has all of these autonomous drones and killer machines and whatever, it's like an atom bomb. So, what do we want to Do we in Europe also have the atom bomb so that we can have mutual short destruction as an ideology? Or we could say they will never use as Americans their weapons, physical weapons, to destroy Europe. And if they do, there's nothing we can do against it. So, that should not even be part of the way we think about our future. Defending ourselves against the weapon we will never use. Of course, there's the cyber threat and that's something else and we will have to defend ourselves, of course. But in this weapon race, it's irrelevant for me. The same with China. Imagine China has these stealth whatever autonomous You know, killer machines. What are they going to do? Destroy Europe? They're never going to do that. And if they do it, why bother? So, that's irrelevant. And then what? The first who has AGI rules the world. If you imagine you have AGI {slash} ASI, I mean, the Chinese regime is They are scared shitless about that. Imagine an AI that decides that communism is a bad idea and destroys the regime. They're never going to allow that. So, that kind of a race for to become the superpower of the world because we have AI, it's an irrelevant race. Because it's a weapon you can't use. >> I agree, but what is the other race that we should run? >> But the race we have to run is what is the best way we use AI in every aspect of our society, in our economy to [clears throat] start from. So, instead of putting billions and billions, hundreds of billions in having a European frontier model that actually runs the race that is only 3 months behind and then 3 months ahead and then 3 months behind, like it is with Open AI and Anthropic. No, it's okay that Mistral has a year of lag. That we are a year behind because in the actual usage of these models, the scores are so close. So, if we use it in our economy, there's hardly any difference between how Mistral could be used in these processes in our industry as how you can use ChatGPT or Claude or anything else. There's hardly any real-world usage. There's a big frontier difference, but there's a very small real-world usage difference. So, if we start focusing on how to implement it, how to make sure that we have an AI acceleration in the economy because we have too many old people, not enough young people, our productivity has to go up, if we start focusing on that, if we start talking to unions, if we start talking to all of the companies that have to invest in integrating AI to make their output smarter, not to have the best AI. If we would do something like that, and the same with education, and the same with our military. We don't need all of the killer drones, we need a better control and command thing, and we use AI for that. And it doesn't have to be Palantir's for that matter. >> Yeah, I totally agree because it is a power tool can do so many things. We don't have to have AI as a god just because it may be possible. And I agree on this. I think ultimately that this has to be goal is to apply it to make our society better equipped for the future. And again, a difference between the tool and the tellers and the the and the people who decide in all this stuff. In your In your book you said we should focus on the transition sectors. >> the European economy. Can you elaborate on that too a little bit? >> Yeah. A lot of people say Europe can't compete with and then whatever the US, China, the Middle East. You name it. And in in some domains this is actually completely true. If we look at energy as how it's how the market works today, it's a product, you mine it, it gets out of the ground, you process it, it's a commodity, you trade it, you use it as a weapon. Energy that way we can never compete with. But if we take energy and we say actually energy is a technology. So if we take solar energy again or wind energy or this is the sea, any kind of energy we get out of the sea and so on. And we say let's put our best thinkers on optimizing how we create energy that way. And then we also build a technology, so from lab side to bed side, and we create our own energy, then energy becomes a technology and will follow follow something like Moore's law. Instead of having scarcity and the prices go up and this is geopolitical usage of energy, we just say every two years the price of energy goes down and the efficiency goes up. >> Mhm. >> And after maybe 15 or 20 or 25 years we are completely independent and this the biggest geopolitical weapon that people have against Europe is just simply gone. But the same is actually what I do in my keynotes. I ask people will the industry the food industry and farming in 15 years from now, will it resemble how we produce foods today or will it be different? Will we have had the protein transition? >> Mhm. >> Yes, we will have had that. Mobility, will we all buy a 70, 80,000 euros electric car each of us and own it and I mean let it stand still for 95% of the time because we don't drive it or will we use shared mobility, autonomous shared mobility? It will be the latter. So if you start thinking about how we live, how we eat, how we have mobility, our defense even. We don't need F-35 fighter planes. We need other things. This is all just imagine these industries in 10 years from now, they will be different. So, if we start investing today both in the talents and in the funding and then in putting it in the market in those transition thinking ways, we can of course the Chinese also do these thing that these transitions of course, but the US actually stepped out of that game. Can you imagine that the biggest market besides ours quits thinking about transitioning food and energy and all these kind of things. So, this is a huge asset for Europe to say for the next 10 years can compete in all those domains. We just have to follow the logical transition that normal Buffett nor weather is dictating us. It's just the planet dictating us. >> I think this is to come out of the conversation what the focus should be rather than competing with them on the old world. We need to compete on the new world, right? >> Absolutely. >> I think that this is the bottom line of all of these debates and that it's quite clear that the US going back to the past in in so many ways and not the future even though their tech companies have pointed towards the future. So, in a bizarre way they're going politically back to the past and then to the future in this AGI transhumanism singularity stuff that that's happening. So, you mentioned I think in one of your conversations about social media and the attempt to build European social media and it's so funny cuz I've talked about this a dozen times and I've actually tried also a dozen times in the last 20 years to create an alternative social media that would be essentially paid for directly rather than paid for by advertisers or by investors. And of course that this is a huge debate, but what is your project there? >> Yeah, it's still rather premature, but it has been described in the book, so I'm open about it. I'm taking I'm trying to take several steps because I think if and I had a conversation with the right people on European level, the highest people on the on that level good good and then some others and I I said if we look at European technological sovereignty, there are two dimensions and we only serve one, which is the platforms actually, which is data centers, clouds, it's AI of course. It's the hard B2B sides. What we do not address is the risk of no longer controlling our traditional media because the the social media have positioned themselves as gatekeepers in between and they are actually writing the narrative in the minds of people. So, if we don't control that, whatever we own on on the more harder side of the business side of tech, it's not enough. It's not sufficient. We have to also have a direct connection again with people and tell honest stories and mean you still can have algorithms, but European algorithms. So, we need European social media. We need something like Europe online. Because the network effect of Facebook and TikTok and all the others, it sucks it sucked people in and you can't it's a black hole, you can't escape. You're on the horizon of the black You're past the horizon, you can't escape the black hole. And then I said, "Maybe there's one scenario where we can still make it work. There's one type of company that has the I would say the the purpose to do so. And this is media. In Europe, we have 450 million people. We have media companies. They could be biased and whatever it is, but they are still European media companies. Some of them are very good are European media companies and they reach every day hundreds of millions of people. So, in in the plan I'm trying to mount is what if some of these European companies create Europe online, working title. And they say, "It's a copy. We we just reverse engineer what people like use but are frustrated about because people are frustrated about the enshittification of Facebook and X and the other things. We are we are fed up with it, but there's no alternative." But imagine we just copy the key features. It's only like 50 things. I can post a video and a short and long text and then I can like and all of this >> Yeah, I know about Blue Sky, same thing. >> Same thing. But the thing is, the technology exists. Blue Sky is built on the AT protocol. This allows us to do this. If you were to do it in 6 months, we would have built this. Imagine we do that. Then still no one would use it because Blue Sky, sorry, 30 million users, this is great, but it's not enough. W Social, great initiative, I like the guys, but it's not enough. It will never break through the network effect. What we need is these media companies saying, "All our stories, all our videos, all our conversations, if you want our people talking to our journalists and our famous people on television and our celebrities and our artists and if you want to dive deeper in behind the scenes, it's not only and eventually it's no longer living on YouTube and the others, it's living on Europe online." Every day, every contact you have with a television program, in your newspaper, in your app, they could say, "Become a member. If you want to talk to your favorite whatever artist, it's live today. Become" So, we could have the biggest advertising campaign in human history if every European company would shout after every article and every every episode, "Just join us now on Europe online to continue the conversation." And then in just a year, we could break the network effect and build our own. >> I think it it follows up the discussion about public media rather than defunding public media like has been discussed in the UK and many countries, this could be a version of public media because the way I look at it it has to be without ads, it has to be without investors. It could possibly have premium and people would pay for it directly, but in the end, it's a public infrastructure and I think that needs to be part of public media and we have taxes and funding for public media and so this would I'm not sure that the EBU would be the right place to put this project, but I don't [laughter] think so. Or the ITU or any of these things, but okay, I think this is a great project. I would love to be involved and I think this makes so much sense is to create this European public social media outlet. Let's talk about the copyback strategy and the Eurostack. And the the copy back strategy essentially is saying that we take what already accessible, bring it back over here and make it ours again rather than the reverse. And how successful would that look like? >> It depends. When I just described the social media thing, that is indeed we had, I don't know what it was in Switzerland or Germany, but we had Netlog in Belgium 20 years ago, social network. These features were copied by the Americans or copied, they were similar features and we just let go. If you look at AI, I don't think we should be It's It would be dishonest to just distillates and do whatever we want to do with the American models because they stole our culture in the first place. They stole every book and every music musical piece that was made in the first place. So, if we need to reverse engineer because the idea is that we don't need to necessarily rebuild the entire legacy of something that we want ourselves that we have we no longer have in our own hands. Imagine again, imagine we would copy Facebook. You're not going to copy 20 years of bad Facebook code. You're just going to copy those 15 features that people use. You just copy the best practice. And the same with You now have both Tesla I I drive a Tesla still. You have full self-driving. It really works door-to-door. You have Xpeng, Chinese, does the same. So, they just started building this three four years ago. So, we just copy how it works. So, you have a brain, you have six cameras. It shouldn't be that difficult for AI specialists in Europe to train a model that does the same. You could say we don't have billions of kilometers driven. >> I ran a research on future search the other day essentially asking how likely is it that we can gain technological sovereignty by 2030 or something and the percentage was 1% or something. That's what the answer of the search was. And I think it would be more optimistic. I think we might get to 10 or 15% or so. But we need to find a really strong answer here. The European Union is rolling out of course the European cloud model and the AI act and all these things. And so, I think this is a really tough one because now I don't I know very few companies are like going to say instead of using Microsoft for our operating system we use something else or as much as I like ProtonMail and Proton hosting and the Proton people and stuff then I wonder if I was to use Proton for my Google Docs I would be in trouble. >> Or what does work use Nextcloud together with Proton? Together with Mailo which is like a photo app with machine learning tool identify objects and faces. So I did the transition this year complete transition away from Microsoft, away from Google, away from all of these tools just a plain European cloud. It does exist and it's powerful enough. There are some quirks no doubt. But I think we are on the path to I don't believe the 1% sorry that prediction I am convinced is wrong. I believe that as we now see governments are switching. When governments switch their employees are switching. The service providers for these governments that built the systems their people are using it so they have to also make this migration. So these people are switching. So I think in a decade from now 25% of people even more will be using European alternatives because an office version like OpenOffice it's free. You don't have to pay a license. It does the job. It is exactly the same as Microsoft Office. These cloud platforms they do exist. We just have to transition. But it's an effort. >> Yeah. >> I think that if you're looking at for example what's happening with Proton if we were to make more funding available and if we were to have legislation that supports their processes and their statues that have been discussing moving from Switzerland for this reason because the Swiss government wants to be able to go inside. If we could make that happen then companies like Proton could be the next Dropbox right? The next email provider. Their emails are actually pretty good. I use it quite a bit. And we have to make choices. And so anyways it's a really strange thing is like you don't want to be an anti-American because of course you're not everybody's the same boat. But so I understand I'm pro-European and I'm anti-American. It may sound like that to you when I talk about these sovereign issues and about what's happening, but I'm convinced that with a new government in the US, but there'll be a bit of a deterrent, but the problems are the same. And we really need to gear up because the natural process of how humans change is pain and love. We fall in love with something, we change, we get pain, we make a change. We need to have pain and love come up here, so we fall in love with this. Yes, we can totally do this. And we can have 800 million people in Europe, the United States of Europe, and be like in a federation where everybody's more or less happy, like they are more or less happy in Switzerland with the way that things are working. So, it's totally possible. I don't really wish that we could continue this conversation in a larger way and also to collect practical ideas. I'm sure there's lots of that already happening in Brussels. It's a critical moment. I just published a new topic this morning on my website, the intelligence revolution, and how we can navigate the intelligence revolution. And I think our answer here in Europe will form the future, how we respond to this intelligence revolution. And it's only the first of the iterations, when it's about robotics or synthetic biology or genomics, and we can take that as a blueprint to say, "This is how we navigate these revolutions." And I think that's going to be super important that we keep up the dialogue and put it out there but really loudly. >> I think the biggest problem with Europe is the communication of Europe. It looks like you're in this business for so many years. I am in this business. It looks like a website of 1999. Just because I see on the web, it's everything. We do not have a sexy story. We do not have a story that we can bring across. People are slowly, step by step, but because of what they see, what Trump does, and so people individually are building this image for themselves. But Europe, as a set of institutions, is able to define the architecture and find the funding and the legislation and so on. So, they are great at but they are they suck at storytelling. Like us need to tell the story. >> I was fantasizing about the story that I came up with two things which I've been working on for some time. One is called taking back tomorrow. And of course, I think there's already a film on that. But the idea of saying, "Okay, we need to own tomorrow here." And then I started this campaign about 2 years ago called I love the future. And to really make sure that this is a high priority that we are about the future. We're not about the past, even though we love our past and we enjoy our present. But to promote the future, that is very much an American idea. If we can bring that here, we say, "How do we love the future? How do we live positively with the future? What is the narrative, especially for younger people, that the millennials who are desperate and hopeless and say Europe has lost its core essence, we blah blah blah, and that's giving rise to populism as you have described in the book as well." Really bad. We need a better narrative. And I propose that we use the I love the future narrative to start a campaign. >> I support it fully. >> Absolutely. >> [laughter] >> It's funny many ways. I think we've learned over the years that the narrative is first and then is the reality. And the message and the possibility needs to be put out there. And I think then the reality can sync up to it. And the German way originally is to build everything properly first and then give it a narrative. Which will clearly not work here. We need to have the narrative to form how we're going to actually present the future. So, maybe there's some way we can look to collaborate also with the audience. So, if you're into I love the future, then just contact us. And lastly, let's talk about where people can find out more information about you and the book and your work. >> I think the easiest way is to go to my website, which is Jo Cudron. It's information about the book, it's about my my speeches. That's a good starting point. And then I would say if people watch this and they say, "We want to dive a little bit deeper." just reach out. It's a real conversation. It's always the best. >> Great. I personally changed my brand and my web address and now it's my name, gerdleonhard.com. It may be easier just to go to my TV platform which I just started 2 months ago called gerd, g e r d dot TV. Don't just look for gerd because it's gastrointestinal reflux disease that's more popular than me. It's another gerd that you don't want. But if you go to gerd.tv you find all my movies, all my new stuff. It's a free site. It's like YouTube but better. It's like my own Netflix and gerdleonhard.com for the web address and of course you probably know where to find me. Otherwise, I'm not that hard to find. So, it's been a great pleasure you cauldron. Thanks very much for being here and >> Thanks for having me. >> and I look forward to taking this further and to form the future, to love the future, to build the future and to help Europe be the future. I think that's a worth emission. Thanks very much.