Landing Moonshots with Google's Innovation Ch...

As businesses race toward faster systems, smarter tools, and total automation, something critical is getting lost: human connection. And ironically, the rise of AI is making that gap impossible to ignore. In this episode, I sit down with returning guest and close friend Will Guid ...  Show more

Team Simon here! While A Bit of Optimism is on a short break, we’re revisiting a few episodes you helped make some of our favorites. We’ll be back with brand-new conversations next week, on March 24th, 2026. In the meantime, we’re bringing back an episode that explores a word mos ...  Show more

How do you guide a team working on innovative projects—when there is no existing playbook? Astro Teller says he uses a vetted approach to decision-making for the innovative projects that he and his teams undertake at X, Alphabet’s R&D engine. Teller is the Captain of Moonshots at ...  Show more

The use of artificial intelligence—specifically generative AI—is growing rapidly, and tech giants like Google have an important role to play in how that technology gets adopted and developed. Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google as well as its parent company Alphabet, which he’s le ...  Show more

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). They employed nearly all the top AI talent: Ilya Sutskever, Geoff Hinton, Demis H ...  Show more

He scaled Google from startup to $2 trillion success, can Eric Schmidt now help save humanity from the dangers of AI?  Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google and co-founder of Schmidt Sciences. He is also the author of bestselling books such as, ‘The New Digital Age’ and ‘Gene ...  Show more