Sebastian Mallaby
speaker
195 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 3 Apr
Sebastian Mallaby’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I mean, I think maybe the spiritual underpinning for his scientific curiosity was interesting.
You know, there was one time when we were sitting in this London park and talking for a couple of hours, and he suddenly started saying, you know, when I'm up at two in the morning at my desk by myself, thinking about science, thinking about computer science, I feel reality is screaming at me, staring me in the face, waiting for me to explain it.
And he calls it the God of Spinoza, that this is the 17th century philosopher Spinoza who said that to understand nature is getting closer to God's creation.
And that resonates with Demis.
Maybe that's something people don't know.
That's interesting.
No, I mean, to the contrary.
I think this idea that Demis is a, quote, evil genius, which is the one that's the phrase that Elon used to use, came from the fact that in his video game production days, Demis had created a game called Evil Genius.
And so maybe it was a joke at first, but
You know, really, I got to know Demis extremely well.
I spent more than 30 hours with him.
You stress test people quite deeply, as you know, Kevin, when you're writing about them, and then you might get pushback and legal threats and all that stuff.
And he did make me talk to his lawyer once, and it wasn't totally easy the whole time, but he was reasonable in the end.
He was very mad at the fact that I unearthed the whole story about DeepMind trying to spin out of Google between 2016 and 2019.
And, you know, they retained a whole bunch of advisors, lawyers, bankers, etc.
They got Reid Hoffman to pledge a billion dollars to finance the spin-out.
They went to see Joe Tsai in Hong Kong, the Alibaba co-founder.
Anyway, so the lawyer was not amused that I had all these internal concerns.
documents from Inside DeepMind which had been leaked to me, the board presentation that DeepMind gave to Google, and so forth.
And he said, you're not supposed to be writing about this.
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