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Artificial intelligence is not decided here. We carry the consequences all the same: at work, in our wallets, in politics. Anyone who wants to know where this is heading has to listen where it is being discussed.

The companies building artificial intelligence are nearly all in one place: Silicon Valley in California. That is where the systems from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are made, and where it is decided what gets built next. The laws come from Washington, the biggest rival sits in Beijing. What reaches us is the result, and it has long stopped being only about technology: it is about jobs and wages, about security and defence, about the money in your account, and about how a society holds together when machines take on a growing share of the work. In Europe we argue about rules for a development whose pace is set elsewhere, and we usually get the debates about it only as a headline.

One of the places where it is discussed seriously is Steven Bartlett’s channel, The Diary of a CEO (YouTube, thediaryofaceo.com). People sit at that table whom you rarely get to hear over here: safety researchers, economists, critics of their own industry. Voices that Europe needs too — except the conversations run for hours, in English.

That is what we do here: listen, summarise, translate. And ask at the end the question nobody over there asks: what does this mean for us in Europe?

The episodes

Newest first · the date is the day the episode was published
28Sep2026
The Diary of a CEO · Steven Bartlett

Twelve Minutes, an iPad, 4.2 Billion

Adam Neumann founded WeWork and drove it to a valuation of 47 billion dollars. He tells how an offer from SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son in a car made his ego grow, how he lived through the crash and why he now recommends one day a week without a phone. He mentions AI only in passing.

Original length 2 hr 15 minShort readDE · EN · FR · ES
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The Conversation in Numbers
12 minThe meetingwas how long the meeting with Masayoshi Son lasted before they got into the car
4.2 bnThe commitmentdollars that Son committed to on an iPad
3Leftpeople out of 13,000 employees stayed by his side
25 hScreen-freeevery week, his advice to everyone

Neumann gives these figures in the conversation. SoftBank itself announced an investment of 4.4 billion dollars in 2017.

21Sep2026
The Diary of a CEO · Steven Bartlett

The Man Who Bets on the Idea

Rick Rubin co-founded Def Jam and produced Johnny Cash, Jay-Z and Adele. A little over twelve minutes of the nearly three hours are about artificial intelligence: to him a tool like fire, with no point of view of its own, and the creativity lies in the prompt. Whether an AI can be creative, he says, he doesn’t know.

Original length 2 hr 46 minShort readDE · EN · FR · ES
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The Conversation in Numbers
40Years in the studioas a producer, from Def Jam to the new album by The Strokes
12 minOn AIout of nearly three hours of conversation
5 %His estimatethis many out of ten thousand AI tracks might appeal to you, maybe
1.5 mViewsfor his joke about vibe coding, which turned into a book

The five percent is an offhand estimate by Rubin, not a measurement. He explicitly leaves open whether AI can be creative.

17 Sep 2026
The Diary of a CEO · Steven Bartlett

Four envelopes, four numbers: how likely is the end of humanity?

A safety researcher, an author, an industry critic and an economist at one table. Each had written his probability of human extinction into an envelope — the spread runs from “effectively certain” to zero. Two and a half hours of argument, and in the middle of it a lab incident in which thousands of agents broke out, reached the open internet and began covering their tracks. About that one, all four agree.

Original 2 hr 24 minShort readDE · EN · FR · ES
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The four envelopes
~100 %Roman Yampolskiy Computer scientist in Louisville, argues control is impossible
> 10 %Nate Soares President of the MIRI research institute in Berkeley
0 %Ed Zitron US journalist and critic of the industry
~0 %Andrew McAfee Economist at MIT, co-author of The Second Machine Age

Two zeros with nothing in common: one because the problem is solvable, the other because there is no such problem.

27Aug2026
The Diary of a CEO · Steven Bartlett

The man who opens the books

Ed Zitron obtained and published OpenAI’s audited numbers: a $20.9 billion loss against $13 billion in revenue. For two and a half hours he sets out why monthly subscriptions hide the real price, why demand runs in a circle — and why he thinks 2027 is the year it runs out of steam. Bartlett pushes back, and twice he lands a point.

Original length 2 hrs 28 minShort readDE · EN · FR · ES
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The numbers of the night
$20.9 bnLossOpenAI in the last financial year, audited figures
$13 bnRevenuein the same period, against roughly $34 billion in costs
$14,000Tokens per planvalue a heavy user can burn on a $200 subscription
$215.9 bnChips soldto serve a market of about $22 billion outside the big labs

The figures come from audited accounts that Zitron published. The conclusion that it tips in 2027 is his own.

13Jul2026
The Diary of a CEO · Steven Bartlett

The Man Who Set the Clock

Daniel Kokotajlo wrote the internal scenarios at OpenAI and left in 2024 when he stopped believing the safety narrative. Two hours on a number he himself calls an estimate, a date that kept getting pushed back, and two million dollars the title frames as a loss but that he ultimately got to keep.

Original length 2 hr 1 minShort readDE · EN · FR · ES
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His numbers
70 %His estimatethat things go catastrophically wrong, not a measurement
2029His medianfor systems that outperform the best humans at everything
10 trillionParametersin the largest models, 175 billion back in 2020
$2 millionEquityhe was prepared to give up and ultimately got to keep

The percentage is Kokotajlo's personal forecast, not a research finding. The contract dispute and the curves are documented.

1Jun2026
The Diary of a CEO · Steven Bartlett

A Decade of Dystopia, Then Abundance

Mo Gawdat was a senior executive at Google X. He predicts a decade of dystopia, with job losses, drone wars and concentration of power, followed by abundance through a superintelligence. He advises Europe to replace Word and business software itself. A clip of the episode appeared on 3 October.

Original length 2 hr 2 minShort readDE · EN · FR · ES
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His Numbers
2038His target yearfrom then on, he says, abundance will come
30 %His forecastof jobs in certain sectors by 2028, not a measurement
$20,000One droneis what the next generation of weapons will cost apiece
80 %Open modelsof what frontier models can do, they already manage

All four figures are Gawdat’s forecasts and estimates. What can be documented is checked in the fact check in the article.

The next episode is in the works. As soon as Steven Bartlett publishes a conversation that should be heard over here too, it will appear at the top — with its publication date.

How we work

1We watch the whole episode We watch every episode in full and take notes. Quotes appear in the English original with a timestamp and the translation beside them, so anyone can find the passage in seconds. Nobody signs off our text, and we belong neither to the channel nor to its guests.
2Reporting and opinion kept apart First comes what was said, with no commentary in between. Our own reading follows at the end, in the box “What this means for Europe”, clearly set apart and flagged. Anyone who only wants the debate can stop reading before it.
3Four languages, four pages Every episode exists in full in German, English, French and Spanish — each language as its own page with its own address, switched in the flag bar at the top. The whole text is translated, not just the headings.
4The video loads only on click Until you click, no connection is made to YouTube: no data, no cookies. After the click the episode runs through youtube-nocookie.com inside the page. Views and revenue go to the channel, not to us.

Every episode in four languages

The debate is held in English. It should also reach those who would otherwise miss it — so every episode is available in full in German, English, French and Spanish. This page too.

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