“If you didn’t understand evolution, and somebody explains it to you, you have to take your ego down a notch. You have to say: “Wait a minute. So humanity is not the endpoint of purposeful design? Wait – we’re just kind of an accident?!””

This is the Global Estonians Podcast, and I’m your host Rainer Sternfeld, where my goal is to create a cross-section of the most remarkable people in the Estonian diaspora, thus celebrating our centenary a little less than a year from now.

This is the 20th episode! As you know, every tenth episode we make is a special where I talk to someone who is of Estonian descent yet doesn’t speak the seemingly unintelligible language, or is a big friend of Estonia who is contributing to the success of Estonia.

We’re recording this on March 24 2017, and my guest today is a polymath, a world renowned venture capitalist and the country’s first e-resident outside Europe – Steve Jurvetson. In his day job, he invests in bold human endeavors in quantum computing, deep learning, electric cars, rockets, synthetic biology, genomics, robotics, and other areas.

In this podcast you’ll hear us cover a wide variety of brain-stimulating topics:

• His technology-infused, Estonian-subtext upbringing in Arizona
• How chip design and computing is undergoing a fundamental shift using biomimicry?
• Why learning 9 programming languages is not as hard as 9 human languages, and what advice does he give to young people starting out in technology?
• How does he think about the future of humanity in the light of accelerating rich-poor gap, automation, and why will robots be the slaves, not humans?
• and his thoughts on why Estonia is competitive on the world stage.

Fasten your seatbelts!

Music by: Sander Mölder (www.soundcloud.com/sander). All rights reserved.