https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWCY5_ArJO0 Aleks: When I tell people what I did, they sometimes take a selfie with me. We were not trying to make money; we made sure anyone could use it without restrictions. When the company began to take shape, they asked me to leave university and move to Finland. I declined, so they bought my stake. Gregor: What about Nvidia? Aleks: The current government's victory in the Slovenian election required thousands of deaths. If we treat Slovenian politics as a contest between tribes, we will lose. A truly talented team is radically different from an average one. Selling a company is not necessarily a victory; it can be a small entrepreneurial defeat. Gregor: Welcome to a new SBC podcast. This time our guest is an exceptional... thinker? Entrepreneur? Slovenian? We could attach several other titles to him. You may well not know him, and almost certainly do not. But that is part of the appeal of podcasts, and of Slovenia: we have many people who know and do a great deal, yet remain under the radar. Podcasts give us a chance to meet them and hear views different from those that dominate social networks and mainstream media. Aleks Jakulin is with us. Welcome. Aleks: Hello. Gregor: First, we should add "Doctor," shouldn't we? Aleks: If you like. Gregor: One thing that stood out while I was preparing is that you received the award for the best doctoral dissertation in Europe. Shall we start there? What did you write about, and how is such a thing evaluated? Aleks: I worked with my adviser, Ivan Bratko. He is the father of artificial intelligence in Slovenia. He gave me a problem whose difficulty I did not appreciate at the time: how can a computer create new concepts? Not how it can learn an existing concept, but how it can create new ones. I threw myself into it, and after a few years I had a working prototype. People seemed to like it, and I received the award. What was even more interesting was that I was later invited to present the research at University College London. Geoffrey Hinton attended that presentation. He received the Nobel Prize last year, essentially for work in which, a few months later, he applied my algorithm in his first paper on deep neural networks. Gregor: If I understand correctly, you can almost claim a share of the Nobel Prize, or at least say that part of its foundation and design originated in your head. Aleks: The question is whether it really originated in my head. It was a very old problem and many people had worked on it. I may have been only one link in the chain. Gregor: Modesty is a fine virtue. I said at the beginning that people probably do not know or mention you very often. Why is that? Aleks: You can accomplish much more under the radar. Gregor: Another thing fascinated me. You are no longer a boy, of course, but one could say you were a wunderkind. At seventeen, you were already part of the team that developed and established something everyone knows. Aleks: Yes. We created the PNG format, the three letters at the end when you save a PNG image. We put that together when I was seventeen or eighteen. Gregor: Let's pause there. We will return to your doctorate, artificial intelligence, and staying under the radar. Seventeen years ago Slovenia was not very digitally developed, was it? We were nowhere near today's level or comparable with Europe or America. How did you, at seventeen, end up helping to solve this problem? Aleks: Slovenia has always been relatively strong digitally, going back to Iskra Delta. Generations of high-quality information technology and computing work have been done here. I could almost say I had the privilege of growing up in Slovenia. We had computer competitions, computer-science classes, and so on, and I am very grateful for that. The harder part was growing up in Sežana, relatively far from the information and communities where you could learn these things. I read every computer book in the Sežana library and still felt I knew very little compared with the peers I met at competitions. Then I received my first modem, a gift from Tomaž Gornik of Marand, and an entirely new world opened up. It was not yet the real internet. There were BBSs, bulletin-board systems you reached by calling a telephone number. Through them, a new world opened up and I sensed its magic. Everything was very optimistic and positive then. A generation later, we are starting to recognize the problems, because communication and internet technologies were built on many overly optimistic assumptions about human nature. The technology can be wonderful for good people, but perhaps even more useful to bad ones. Gregor: You are already setting up many questions for later. We will come back to that. When you say the modem opened a new world, I remember having to ask my father for permission to go online because nobody would be able to call for two hours. Your internet world was completely different from today's, where everything is available on a phone. Since you helped develop JPEG, did that make you a millionaire? Did it make you famous, at least among people in the field? Or is it simply one piece of a mosaic that now seems completely ordinary? Aleks: When I tell people what I did, they sometimes take a selfie with me. We built it entirely as volunteers, for the good of the internet, and ensured anyone could use it without restrictions. Freedom to develop was the guiding principle, not profit. We were building a technological cathedral; the satisfaction came from creating it, not charging admission. Gregor: Today feels different. It seems that anything successful enough to shape the web would become a billion-dollar company. Aleks: Many things require large investments. You cannot build infrastructure without a business model behind it. Some things can be done by volunteers, but much else needs a business model and investment. Institutions are built through that process, and those institutions can act well or badly. When a field first opens, there are many opportunities for unpaid volunteers to create things. As the field matures, a more conventional approach involving public or private investment can carry it into the next stage. Gregor: Let's stay with seventeen-year-old Aleks. What kind of boy were you, and what was that newly opened world like? Aleks: At seventeen I finished secondary school in Italy at the United World College in Duino. It was an international school with two hundred students from roughly seventy countries. I was deciding whether to study abroad or return to Slovenia. At the time, Slovenia seemed full of possibility, an excellent country where we could create a great deal, so I chose to return. Gregor: Was that the right decision? Aleks: You can make such a decision, but never know what would have happened had you chosen differently. I have been disappointed by what has happened in Slovenia over the past twenty years. Slovenia worked well through the 1990s, but has since lost its direction. Gregor: I will ask more about that, particularly because in recent years you have divided your life between two continents and two countries, the United States and Slovenia. But I cannot move past the beginning yet. It will help later to understand who was on the JPEG team, where they went, and what doors opened for an idealistic and knowledgeable young man with revolutionary ideas. Aleks: It began with my interest in data compression, which is almost magical. You can take a film and compress it into what may amount to a few pages of code. I began studying how that worked and came to understand it while still in secondary school. Then, as a prize in a Slovenian computing competition, I received a two-year unpaid internship in California, which seemed utterly fantastic. Rudi Bric organized it with Zvonko Fazarinc, director of a Hewlett-Packard laboratory. Hewlett-Packard and its laboratory were among Silicon Valley's starting points; Steve Jobs worked there as a teenager before founding Apple. It felt incredibly magical to me. When we arrived, they asked what I wanted to work on. I said data compression. I knew something about it and was already somewhat prepared. They introduced me to the person leading compression research there, the Israeli professor Abraham Lempel, who had developed the algorithm everyone used at the time. It was like meeting God, or at least a demigod. I joined his group, received an assignment, and did it rather well. There I learned more advanced compression, which enabled me to volunteer with the team that created PNG. Hewlett-Packard then invited me back. At eighteen I was in California on a work visa, with a company car and a salary larger than my parents' combined income. They would not tell me what I would work on until I arrived. We developed Hewlett-Packard's proposal to the JPEG organization, and our proposal succeeded. That is how we created another JPEG standard. Gregor: Now you see why it is worth asking about ages seventeen and eighteen. You had that salary and a car in Silicon Valley, where all these breakthroughs were happening. Looking back, we understand that this was where everything exploded. Did you miss out on anything? Did you forget to go to parties in the evening, or do people like you think only about numbers and cocaine? Aleks: There are no parties in Silicon Valley. Gregor: Exactly. Aleks: People work there. Gregor: Are the relationships from that period still alive today? Do they last for years, or even a lifetime? Aleks: Quite a few acquaintances and friendships remain. What is interesting is that when you create a standard like that, you close a field for a generation. A good standard is finished. Standards generally do not change or continue developing. PNG and Lossless JPEG were made well enough that they are still used and nothing has changed since. Gregor: Please compare those two standards in language my mother could understand. My mother is a wonderful woman and I am very proud of her, but she knows little about computers. Her generation encountered them only at work, in her case as a nurse, and I am sure some viewers and listeners are similar. What could you compare the standards to? I liked your point that once you close the work, it is done. Could you translate that into my language? Aleks: A standard is like an electrical socket. You want standardized sockets so the plug you carry can fit into any of them. It is similar with images: a standard determines how you plug an image into another computer, or move it from one program to another. Gregor: That is what I needed. I have computers and phones, but when we discuss important and unfamiliar things, it helps to explain them plainly to ordinary people. Moving on, how long did you stay in Silicon Valley? Aleks: It was a summer internship. Three months, and then I returned to university. Gregor: Were you a star when you returned? Aleks: I do not think people even understood what I had done. Gregor: That is why I asked you to explain it. How often did you have to describe what you had done and how different things were on the other side of the Atlantic? Aleks: The problem was that even when I explained it, people did not believe me. Gregor: Really? Aleks: Yes. Gregor: Perhaps because the internet did not yet exist for people to verify everything so quickly? Aleks: Perhaps. Gregor: Still, you had unusual insight. Today, when you lecture or visit MIT as a guest professor, people understand who you are. Surely it matters who is teaching them. How much does a past achievement count when you pass that knowledge on today? Aleks: Knowledge is always developing. Gregor: When you teach a student at MIT, they may listen to what you achieved, but they will really be trying to extract something from what you teach now. Attention is not automatic. They listen if they believe they will gain something. Aleks: It is the same in Slovenia, isn't it? There is probably no difference. You always have to prove yourself from zero. Gregor: Which university was most interesting to teach at, or where were the differences greatest? In Slovenia we often discuss our own experiences, but being a guest or regular lecturer in Britain or America, particularly in your field, is quite different. Aleks: I am not a professional lecturer. I am occasionally invited to speak on a topic. It is difficult to compare institutions themselves; it is easier to compare the people who gather in them. MIT, for example, has a very different culture from the University of Ljubljana. Observing those cultures, how people think, and what motivates them is interesting. Ultimately, a lecture succeeds when information is transferred, when the lecturer communicates appropriately with a particular audience. That does not always happen. It is a bit of a roll of the dice. Gregor: Are you often invited to lecture at home? Aleks: Not very often. Gregor: Is that because people do not know what you achieved, or because Slovenians do not listen to and discover one another well enough? Aleks: I think I have already said enough in Slovenia. I do not know. Gregor: But new generations keep arriving. Do you not think so? Aleks: I do not know. When someone invites me, I often say yes. Gregor: I can confirm that: I sent an email and you came. You have seen the people who move between different places, and you corrected me earlier by saying Slovenians have been very enterprising in computing and digital technology. Are Slovenia and Europe still keeping pace with what is happening globally? China, India, and America seem to be moving extraordinarily fast, while Europe may spend too much time on less important things. Aleks: Europe is beginning to realize that it has lost the advantage it once had. It is an interesting moment because entrepreneurship, particularly Slovenian entrepreneurship, has served as a cash cow for much of Slovenian politics for a generation. It kept producing, and the proceeds were spent on political projects that did little for the Slovenian people or economy. We have now reached a point where we are losing relevance, power, and people. Gregor: And the lead you mentioned. Europe has no chips, no real cloud platforms, and no high-technology companies. People cross the Atlantic because good jobs are available and needed there. How did America, and now China, overtake us so dramatically? Aleks: The problem is not that we must duplicate what America or China has. The deeper problem is that neither Slovenia nor the European Union has created successful new companies for a generation. In a global economy, every continent contributes what it has. America contributed internet technologies. China contributed highly scalable industrial production of technological goods. What does Europe contribute? Primarily political ideas and regulation, which do not count for very much in the global economy. Gregor: We are now touching the practical world and entrepreneurship. At the beginning I said that you might be called a scientist. Is that an accurate definition? Aleks: Being a scientist is an important part of my identity. Gregor: But you are also an entrepreneur. Let us turn to that part of your life, and then to the business worlds of Europe, America, and beyond. How did your entrepreneurial life begin? Aleks: When I was a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University in New York, I saw the internet moving in a suboptimal direction. It seemed that even if I did everything I could as an academic, the problems would remain. At the same time, I saw entrepreneurial opportunities to solve important problems and create value, so I shifted my focus. Gregor: Was that small shift successful? Aleks: Yes. Large projects take time. The question is how long an investment takes to pay back and how many times it can multiply. I take a longer view and aim for a much larger return than the broader environment tends to expect. Solving problems worth several billion does not happen overnight. Gregor: Then you can also aim for several billion? Aleks: I have always aimed for several billion. Gregor: What are you working on? Aleks: The internet is changing. The internet we have today was made for people. For about fifteen years, it has contained more and more robots and artificial intelligences. Since then, it has stopped working well. Problems already existed, but now they are dramatically exposed. I work on designing internet technologies suited to both people and robots. Gregor: Can one person do that, or do you have a team? Aleks: Complex projects often begin with one person thinking them through. A team forms once there are resources for focused work. Some ideas emerge from teams, but others may occupy one person for ten or twenty years before becoming feasible. We are entering a period when many of them can finally be built. Gregor: I will again ask as a complete novice. Besides a team and knowledge, what do you need to solve such complex problems and find solutions? Aleks: You need faith: a form of trust beyond ordinary self-confidence that allows you to take on very large problems. Gregor: Is that also why you divide your time between America and Slovenia? Do you need America to solve these problems? Aleks: America has a business environment capable of generating multibillion-dollar companies. Europe has not developed one. Early innovations appear in Europe, America, and China, but Europe cannot turn them into companies. That is partly because it is so easy for Europeans to move to America, and partly because Europe neither understands nor cultivates an ecosystem that invests in new projects. Its regulations do not nurture and protect young companies or give them a market in which they can grow competitively and quickly. Gregor: So Americans understand that it is wise to buy a good idea quickly and develop it themselves? Aleks: Americans understand that when you have a good idea, most people will think it is a bad one, but they will still provide enough money to develop it properly. In Europe, the environment forces you to try to earn money from an idea before it has been fully developed. As a result, it never becomes complete and remains incremental. America, by contrast, produces a succession of transformative ideas. Gregor: You have presumably had to ask someone to invest in your company, or perhaps someone already believes in it? Aleks: If you have to beg for investment, I think you have already lost. Gregor: So they found you? Aleks: The search works in both directions. If you want to solve an important problem, the investor is your partner. You approach that partner with a proposal that will inspire them. Arriving simply to ask for money is not how successful companies are built. Gregor: That is why I asked earlier whether people know who you are and how important that is. When you built those relationships, what carried more weight: what you had created in companies and universities before, or what your company is doing today? Or both? Aleks: The past may open a door, but it does not close the deal. The future closes the deal: whether the partners bringing capital, knowledge, and ideas can build it together. Gregor: Can you say what scale of capital we are discussing? Since you mentioned aiming for billions, I want to open up that mindset. What figures are involved in solving this problem or building your business? Aleks: There are now companies worth trillions, not merely billions. A billion is the new million. Gregor: Nvidia is the obvious place to begin, since for the moment we cannot go much higher. It used to be difficult to imagine a billion-dollar company; today's valuations are almost incomprehensible. How far can this go? Aleks: It is funny that you mention Nvidia, because Nvidia acquired a company where I was one of the founding engineers. Gregor: That is why I mentioned it. I wanted you to bring something to the story. Aleks: Nvidia was founded around 1995. It pursued some interesting ideas in computer graphics, many of which were quite poor, yet it still received funding. When you have a good team willing to tackle interesting problems, you understand that the team will learn a great deal over time. Nvidia was among the less successful companies at the beginning, but it survived and made several very good decisions, such as supporting open standards in computer graphics. By supporting those standards, it established itself as the defining computer-graphics company. Roughly ten years later, people began to realize that the processors developed for graphics could be useful for other things. Gregor: Today, practically everything. Aleks: Today they power the processes required by large language models, which sit at the heart of ChatGPT and similar tools. Gregor: Since you finally mentioned it yourself, which company did Nvidia acquire? How did you become involved, what were you doing, and what kind of deal was it? Aleks: It was a Finnish company called Hybrid. We were developing a 3D engine, a computer-graphics engine used mainly for games. We met on the internet through IRC, Internet Relay Chat, which consisted of online chat rooms. Gregor: That one I know. Aleks: There was a small group of engineers there, mostly Finnish, plus me. Gregor: Is the company still part of Nvidia? Aleks: It is. Nvidia's laboratories in Finland grew out of our project, when there were three of us in Helsinki. Two worked while one slept on the table. When he woke up, someone else left the computer and took his turn sleeping. Gregor: You worked in a single room? Aleks: One office, yes. We carried our computers as hand luggage. Instead of a suitcase, you took a computer, without a monitor or keyboard. You could find those wherever you went. Gregor: But the computer traveled with you. Aleks: Yes, you carried the computer. Gregor: That is fascinating. Did Nvidia come to Finland to meet the three young men before completing the deal? Aleks: By the time Nvidia acquired the company, I was already elsewhere. I was involved only at the beginning. When the company started taking shape, they said, "Aleks, leave university and come to Finland." I said, "Maybe not." They bought me out, so I received cash and they received my stake. Gregor: A stake in Nvidia? Aleks: The others were able to retire in their late twenties because they received enough money. Gregor: Earlier I asked whether staying in Slovenia was the right decision. Was taking the buyout then the right decision? Aleks: As I said, we cannot think about things that way. Every decision comes with advantages and disadvantages. Why feel good or bad about any of it? Gregor: What did you learn from that story? Aleks: That working with good people is extremely important. A genuinely talented team is radically different from an average one: people who think long-term, set high goals, and are not afraid of hard work. I learned how important that is, because everything else can eventually be assembled. Bringing together a few talented people who want to move in the same direction may be the hardest and rarest thing. Gregor: Have you managed to do that again during your entrepreneurial career? Aleks: To some extent. Gregor: How many other sales have you completed, participated in, or at least witnessed? Aleks: We had another sale of intellectual property relatively early, and later a merger into a larger company where I remained a director for some time. I have seen several such transactions, and each is a little different. Gregor: What has been hardest for you during this entrepreneurial journey? We will return to academia and the rest of your life afterward. Aleks: The hardest moments are when teams fall apart: when the leadership team loses alignment, when trust disappears, or when difficult problems cannot be bridged. Those situations create the greatest risk. Gregor: When we discuss your businesses, I hear Americans, Finns, Taiwanese, and others. In this kind of work, does nationality mean nothing while knowledge means everything? Aleks: To solve truly large problems, people must collaborate across nations and cultures. Gregor: Let us bring this into the present. Europeans seem trapped in time. Americans have long been our allies, while China is presented to us as a threat. How much of each year do you spend in America? Aleks: At least eleven months. Gregor: In which city or state? Aleks: I left New York in 2020. Until then I lived there. Since then I have been near Boston, but in New Hampshire. Gregor: How do the people you speak, socialize, and work with there view the state of the world? Aleks: The world is vast and complex, and people see it in many different ways. We may need to take particular issues one at a time. Gregor: Slovenians and Europeans often reduce America to Donald Trump, although I am generalizing. I have spent only three weeks there and know too little to say anything profound. But America is not simply Donald Trump. Perhaps you can explain that. Aleks: America is extremely complex and contains many subcultures. People are relatively politically active and engaged. There are committed Democrats and committed Republicans. As a Slovenian, I may have what Americans would call a superpower: I can communicate with different subcultures and ideologies without treating them as enemies. When you grow up five minutes from one national border, half an hour from another, and an hour from a fourth country, you learn more than languages. You learn to adapt to slightly different views of the world and life, and still find the humanity in the person across from you, even if you approach from opposite directions. Slovenians understand and know how to do this. It has helped me move among groups that may not like one another very much. Gregor: Do Americans truly dislike one another that much? Has the division become so great in recent decades? Aleks: The division has been large for quite some time. Something like this seems to recur every hundred years, when people forget how to build a shared country and ideologies arise that fight one another through a process resembling a cold civil war. Unfortunately, Slovenia is also suffering from such a cold civil war. Gregor: Is it better to live in America or Slovenia? Aleks: It depends greatly on what you do, where you are, and who surrounds you. The two are very difficult to compare. Two generations ago, our grandparents had a particular idea of "America." That is no longer accurate. Quality of life in America is broadly comparable to quality of life here. You may have somewhat more money on paper, but far weaker public support. You must pay for a good school and a good doctor, while in Slovenia those things are still largely shared and remain at a relatively good level. Unfortunately, that is deteriorating for other reasons. I would not say someone will benefit enormously simply by moving there, or to another country. The best investment anyone in Slovenia can make is to become engaged in building a better Slovenia. Gregor: Are you doing that? Aleks: I am trying. Until now I have tried to remain outside politics and work through community-building and projects such as Sledilnik. But our political environment has reached a point where more of us must become engaged, take ownership of it, and stop treating politics as something other people do. Gregor: You have already mentioned the COVID tracker, Sledilnik, which I planned to raise later. Can we spend some time on it? That was an extraordinary period for Slovenia, Europe, and the world. Your team showed again how much voluntary engagement can accomplish. How did it begin, what was it like, and what problems followed? It was neither a political nor a financial project. You will probably tell us how much you earned from it. I am joking, but still. Aleks: I still pay my membership dues to the Sledilnik association, as do others who worked on it. It began when, early in 2020, I was watching a Chinese site showing the number of patients and deaths in Wuhan. The numbers frightened me. A third of everyone admitted to hospital was dying. It was a massacre. I tried to buy a protective mask because it was already understood that masks reduced transmission and infection. Good studies in Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere had demonstrated the approach, yet I could not obtain masks. I spoke with colleagues responsible for infectious disease in New York City, but they did not listen. I said this would become very ugly. I moved out of my apartment, put my belongings into storage, and went closer to family. I left New York and tried to warn people in Slovenia: this is coming, it is dangerous, and we must prepare. Aleks: Then the prime minister resigned, expecting to win more votes in the next election. I thought, "This will be a catastrophe; we must organize." Sledilnik was one result. My central role may have been inviting everyone I noticed on social networks and elsewhere into the project. I was probably Sledilnik's main recruiter, trying to unite everybody who understood something and was working on the problem. Luka Renko looked after the product and community organizationally. I was also running a company and had less time than I would have liked. We built a tool used by a substantial share of Slovenia. It became the country's number-one internet search term; weather was number two. People are amazed when I tell them that. During the first wave, Slovenia acted like a united country. There were no major political divisions; everyone tried to help, and Slovenia achieved exceptionally good results. Aleks: I think that worried the opposition at the time: they could not allow the government to appear successful, so protests began. We entered a cold civil war that contributed to weekly deaths rising from roughly four hundred to eight hundred. The current government's election victory required thousands of deaths. Trying to reach power in that way is, in my view, fundamentally unacceptable. Gregor: I was a presenter and field reporter during that period. My second daughter had just been born, and that afternoon I was already reporting from Republic Square. The second wave was brutal in both the numbers and the resistance. The subject still divides people. Some believe half the figures you cite are false and the whole thing was a conspiracy. A new anti-vaccine rebellion emerged, often framed as, "We are not anti-vaccine, but we oppose vaccines that destroy our race." In America, the current president strongly opposed them, and the health secretary does not believe in such vaccines. Aleks: Trump was one of the people who invested billions to develop a vaccine as quickly as possible. Gregor: But he also said things entirely contradicted by science, including suggestions about drinking various substances to cure COVID. Aleks: Trump said many foolish things, but while he was in office his administration worked quite effectively toward a vaccine. Much more could have been done in prevention, including masks, which were rejected for various reasons. From the scientific perspective, the best outcome would have been not merely containing the virus but eradicating it. Unfortunately, the world did not coordinate and that did not happen. Aleks: The anti-vaccine story is interesting. Anti-vaccine activism had existed for some time. When mRNA vaccines appeared in Europe and America, Russia and China decided to undermine their perceived effectiveness and label them dangerous so they could sell their own vaccines more successfully. Russia had Sputnik and China had its own products. They used a powerful public-relations campaign to support anti-vaccine movements in the West and weaken perceptions of these vaccines' effectiveness and safety. Gregor: That takes us into important territory and the question of what the next decade may bring. We now have Russia's invasion of Ukraine, China's continuing pressure on Taiwan, and the war involving Israel. Let us focus on Europe and media. During the pandemic, traditional media lost further credibility as Facebook pages, TikTok, X, and others grew. At the beginning you said the internet was made for good people and good purposes, yet today it can be controlled by people with very different intentions. You understand internet code and inhabit that world. How much information warfare is really taking place, unseen, while decisively influencing choices and beliefs? Aleks: Unfortunately, much more than we think. During Sledilnik we fought anti-vaccine accounts. When Russian tanks crossed into Ukraine in 2022, many of the accounts that had attacked vaccines began attacking Ukraine. That gave me the impression their activity was highly coordinated. Even at RTV Slovenia, some journalists shifted from criticizing masks to criticizing Ukraine or praising Russia. A significant portion of both online voices and conventional journalists are, in some way, influenced by foreign interests. China may simply have an interest in praising itself. Russia's interest is different: to destroy other countries, making them weak, powerless, divided, and indecisive. In that sense, large parts of Europe and America have been attacked by Russia and its information units. Gregor: Looking to the other side, as a European I also feel attacked by Donald Trump and his administration. We were told, with some justification, that we spend too little on our defense. But there is also the Ukrainian minerals agreement, talks with Russia about ending the war over Europe's head, and defense financing that Europeans will pay to America. It seems Europe is alone again, with Russia pursuing its agenda on one side and America pursuing its own on the other. Aleks: The war in Ukraine is a war in Europe. Ukraine decided to turn toward Europe and America. It is not so much an American war as a European one. Europe has been deeply disappointing as an organizational and military power. Part of the American strategy, of course, was that Europe should not become too strong militarily and should rely on America. What may now be happening is that Trump is telling Europe to defend itself. I do not find that defensive position excessively problematic. Aleks: On the other hand, after Trump was expelled from Twitter, he created Truth Social. If you examine which website supplies the most posts there, it is Russia Today. At an organizational level, Trump has therefore been infiltrated by Russia in some sense. Rather than focusing on what America should or should not do, Europe must examine itself. Can it protect a pro-European nation with European values that is trying to survive? Gregor: Do you believe it can? This week China held a military parade attended by the Slovak and Serbian presidents, while Hungary's leader maintains very good relations with Putin. Europe can function only if it is united, and we clearly are not. Aleks: Unity is oppressive, and perhaps even undesirable, in peacetime. But I do not think this is peacetime. The attack on Ukraine was not only an attack on Ukraine; it was also an information attack on Europe. Europe cannot afford neutrality or disunity on such matters. At the same time, Europe has not experienced this before and must discover how to organize around it. Gregor: Have we organized ourselves? Are we doing so? Aleks: Not quite yet. Gregor: We have barely discussed artificial intelligence. Alongside COVID and one war after another, breakthroughs keep arriving. The automobile was once a great breakthrough; now AI has appeared. Experts I have interviewed say this is only the beginning, that we are just taking off. Language models already amaze ordinary citizens. If we are truly flying, where are we going? Aleks: We will see. Flying means having a rocket strapped to your back. That can be wonderful if you steer well and an absolute catastrophe if you steer badly. We have acquired a new power, a new form of fire. What will we do with it? Will we burn in a fire we ignite ourselves, or master it and use it to create a better world? Gregor: Your mind works differently from mine and at a much higher level. AI brings many dangers. We once had a kind of safety line in the Turing test, or confidence that AI would not operate unmanned aircraft, which is now routine. Are we in danger? Aleks: Yes, particularly if we allow psychopathic fools into positions of power and decision-making. AI itself does not possess autonomy. The idea that an AI wants to do something or resembles a person does not describe what exists; no sensible person worked toward that. What we have are tools for obtaining information and tools for carrying out commands. All of them remain in our hands and those of various companies. Gregor: I do not know which frightens me more. You mentioned psychopaths, and we could name several who currently lead the world. You also mentioned companies. I will not necessarily say they are run by psychopaths, but I am not convinced their intentions are to build a better world for everyone. Aleks: People who expose themselves in public almost always have good intentions, perhaps toward only a subset of humanity. The true psychopaths tend to work under the radar and avoid public attention. In my view, those of us who appear publicly generally have better intentions than those who hide and try to steer events from behind the scenes. Gregor: Your company probably does not influence the world like the decision-makers who hold real power. A recent odd conversation between Xi and Putin concerned extending life, repeatedly transplanting organs to become younger, and living to 150. The joke is that, of all people, those two had to discuss it. The road to hell is paved with, as the saying goes... So once more: what will the world look like in five years with the rocket we now have? Aleks: It will be whatever we make it, depending on what we do in the coming days, weeks, and months. Gregor: You are Slovenian. You said at the beginning that you chose Slovenia, while your life and work now span the world. Slovenia is entering a period that is always familiar: the time before an election. We are never really after an election; we are already before the next one. What should Slovenians and Slovenia ask and resolve before voting if we want to live in a better world? Aleks: Slovenia still lacks an important understanding of democracy. Politics is viewed almost tribally: I belong to this tribe and must destroy the other. Democracy does not work that way. We agree to cast votes not for the candidate who will do the most for us personally, but for the one who will do the most for the country and the common good. When a candidate wins, you accept that person as your prime minister or president, as your own. Instead, an election is held, one tribe wins, the other refuses to recognize it, and we circle through national division. Those tribal perspectives also elevate candidates who are genuinely unsuitable. Gregor: Is there still time for tribal politics? Aleks: If we treat Slovenian politics as a contest between tribes over which one wins an election, we will lose. We must give politics the respect it deserves so that elected people can do high-quality work. Even more importantly, respecting the political sphere can encourage talented people to enter politics, which we urgently need. Gregor: We could discuss much more, but that is a good closing thought. Perhaps we need a contest of ideas and then an acceptance that it may carry us into the future. Will it be a beautiful future, or will you again say it depends on what we do tomorrow, next week, and next month? Aleks: The future depends entirely on us, and things usually get worse until they start getting better. Gregor: Where are we now? Aleks: I do not know yet. I hope we are near the bottom. Gregor: Thank you for a good conversation. I look forward to the next company sale, or to the solution you and your team are preparing. Slovenia still does not have a unicorn, does it? Aleks: Slovenia had a unicorn and sold it. Gregor: Yes. Aleks: Selling a company is not necessarily a victory. It can be a small entrepreneurial defeat because the company did not continue independently. Gregor: Then I will correct myself. I hope next time we discuss how your company continues to live. Aleks: Thank you. Gregor: Thank you for joining us. It is good to speak with people we may not know, discover how much they understand about the world around us, and hear them comment on it candidly. Until next time, this was an SBC interview, the podcast of the Slovenian Business Club.