Demis Hassabis

I'm not going to sit around wondering what might have been.

You only get one life, he said.

That part reminded me that Steve Jobs' mentor, who's the founder of Atari, observed that Steve Jobs only had one speed, that a young Steve Jobs only had one speed, and that speed was go.

Demis is the same way.

And so he's going to start his first company.

This is where his charisma, his persuasion, his ability to articulate his ideas, his passion all come into play.

His powers of persuasion were uncanny.

Demis had what we called a Jedi mind trick.

He would kind of be like, you will believe the things I'm going to say, and then people did believe them.

And so his first idea is to start this gaming company called Elixir.

Like he said before, games were his path into AI.

He has all kinds of trouble now and later with venture capitalists.

At this point, they said they'll give him some money, but you have to give up more than half the equity of the company.

And the reason I bring this out to you is because I think this is one of the most pronounced

aspects of his personality, says if there was one thing that Demis hated, it was to be controlled by anyone.

And this is what he said.

They wanted our souls in exchange for the money.

Again, this is very fascinating.

We'll get to this later.

But one reason that Demis sells DeepMind to Google was to avoid having to be what I think he calls it like the hamster wheel of raising money from investors.