I think it's so important to start with what's the state of the world today and can we fix it and make sure we're focusing on what's the upside because it's so easy to be scared about change. I think that it's exciting to see the art of the possible.
Ruth Porat and I have shared some fantastic times together over the years. In December, when I told Ruth I was coming to San Francisco, she said, 'Ruthie, I'm going to give you the ride of your life.' It turned out to be in the back of a Waymo, the revolutionary driverless car, a project she's been deeply involved with as president and chief investment officer of Google and Alphabet. Her extraordinary schedule has often kept us thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of miles apart as she moves across continents, connecting people, connecting ideas, and connecting communities. Being here today with Ruth is really special to me. A Ruth and a Ruthie back together at last. What could be better?
Thank you so much. That was so beautiful. We have not done a podcast on a Sunday morning at 8:30 in six years.
Thank you. It was the way to finally get our... this morning as I was getting dressed feeling quite hung over from Saturday Night Live, I thought maybe this is not a good thing to do. Having done it, I think it's a great idea. We are now team four. We are doing... sorry team four. We have discovered the Sunday morning podcast. I think it's really nice because the recipe is really nice. I was so interested that you chose the recipe that I love most in the summer. Well, particularly in the summer. Do you love this recipe?
Yeah. Pappa Pomodoro. Yeah. Do you want to read it and then we'll discuss why.
Pappa al Pomodoro. Four kilograms of ripe sweet plum tomatoes peeled and chopped. Four garlic cloves chopped. 175 milliliters of olive oil. I did have to Google all of this to get that converted for Americans, but that's okay.
Okay. Took it from the... But that's good. I like it. I like... No, Google works. It converts. One stale sourdough loaf, crust cut into large chunks. Two bunches basil leaves torn into pieces. Fry the garlic in olive oil and cook gently until soft. Just before the garlic turns brown. Then add the tomatoes. Simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. Season. Add 600 ml water. Bring it to the boil. Put the bread into the tomato mixture and stir until the bread absorbs the liquid, adding more boiling water if the soup is too thick. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly. Stir the basil into the soup with 120 to 175 ml of extra virgin olive oil. Then let sit to allow the bread to absorb the flavor of the basil and oil. Drizzle with olive oil and serve and enjoy. Of all the River Cafe recipes you could have chosen, what made you choose this recipe?
Well, it's just lovely. It's one of... I think a soup, a beautiful simple soup is just soothing.
And I was so intrigued picking it, learning that it's what actually convinced you to cook only Italian. Like the beauty and simplicity of it to me is just wonderful. And as somebody who doesn't really know how to cook, I can actually do this.
It can. It's very simple. It's very... I think it's four ingredients. As you were reading it, I remembered that I was staying in Italy with Richard and his cousins. And it was my first trip to Italy and I didn't understand Italian very well. I didn't know the family. And I woke up and I heard this argument going on in the kitchen downstairs. These two sisters were fighting and there was quite a heated argument and I thought, are they discussing feminism, Mussolini, you know, where they were going to go the next day? And the argument when I came in the kitchen, one of them was almost in tears where they were making pappa pomodoro and one having added the bread and the tomato together. One wanted to pour in water and the other one didn't want to add any water and this was a family crisis of crises. And I thought that told you a lot about family food and maybe sisters. You know, with Google it's not just something we feed the people who work here. It's a very definite policy. It's a very definite value that you have. And I think that if we're talking about... I want to talk more about the values of the work that you're doing, there is also a value in the way we approach food.
I think Google really pioneered a lot of the notion of food within the office the way we do it. And for Google, it's a really important part of the culture. Our view is that bringing people together builds community and it's also if we're an innovation company serendipity is really valuable and so having people come for meals is one way you get people from all around the company working on different things all of a sudden comparing ideas. We then created something that we call MKS or micro kitchens so our view at Google is you shouldn't have to walk very far before you can have a place to come together where there will be snacks and drinks and other things. And there was a term for a long time people would talk about casual collisions. So at a micro kitchen, what you would want is somebody working on search and somebody working on Chrome just happen to be coming to get a snack at one time and then strike up a conversation and it sparks ideas. So it's a notion of community but also serendipity and innovation. And so it's very very core to who we are.
Well, you were here with your son. I was here last night which I saw some people who had seen the television show about the River Cafe sitting, you know, all the way down there and so I just moved their table so that they could sit closer to the kitchen because they were so interested and they were sitting beside behind somebody they'd seen on an airplane, you know, and they were here and the interaction and as you say the collisions, you know, sometimes it's a bit hard for a waiter to get through or to bring food to a table, but I think that does happen in a restaurant.
I think that more than anything what we're seeing is people want human connection. They want to be around the energy of people. We're, you know, it's humanity. It's the liveliness of it. What is your food day before we get to the food at Google? So, you wake up in the morning, what do you have for breakfast?
I'm a pretty regimented person. I'll have coffee when I get up in the morning, but when I get to Google, I'll have plain yogurt and berries.
And we'll be in your office or we would collide into somebody else having yogurt.
Well, I usually will collide into somebody when I'm picking something up and then we all have these wonderful baristas which is lovely because then you're waiting for the cappuccino or whatever to be made and then there are more casual collisions.
So, it's fun running into the interesting point that you actually... I like that idea that next time we keep somebody waiting for their coffee, we can say we did it on purpose so you could have a collision.
Exactly. It's... we didn't wait for your coffee. You created an opportunity to have serendipity and innovation. Do you realize what kind of you're going to create?
Oh, yeah. You think this is just a slow coffee maker?
Exactly. No, it's very deliberate. We like to pretend it's deliberate. And then at lunch, same thing. I'll go back and...
To the same micro kitchen or do you step further?
The micro kitchens are for snacks. We want to make sure that we're being as smart as possible. And it sounds like you have a very similar system here actually where every day after lunch they'll see what was left over in particular vegetables and grains and then they'll create a bit of a friendly competition amongst the chefs in the various restaurants to come up with some way to reuse that but it has to be a completely new dish so it's not a reheating. It's how can you do something super creative and we've meaningfully reduced food waste as a result. I think the best ideas come when you have people around a table and so we very very much to this day it's about let's get people around a table and then you kind of build on one another and it's different when you're together.
When you're talking to the chefs here about how Google and the work you're doing in AI is going to make more communication, I think that people fear with technology is it will take us away and I think that what you were talking about was how it can bring us together and I'd like to know because I know so that food and AI and restaurants, we're all going to be working together and without the fear and with the idea of how we can do it. So I think that technology has to be a tool that benefits us. Like for me the way I use it in my daily life is I use AI to help ingest content and respond to things I need to send out. That's not the magic of it. The magic of it is that it then gives me time to spend where I want to spend time.
Yeah. Exactly. And so, you know, when I think about it, about half of small businesses are using AI now. And the ones that are using it are seeing an uplift in revenues and profitability because it's letting them do things that they need to have done like reaching customers or planning what's in their inventory in ways that help the business. So to me the most interesting part about technology is to try and understand what are pain points that I have in my life or in my business or in anything and using it to be an assist partner to getting it done faster. It's sort of like, this is a simplistic way of stating it, but my dad actually used a slide rule and then we used a calculator. Like just the ease of it still requires me to do the thinking that I need to do, but it's an assist to what I'm doing. So small businesses are seeing a lot of different ways of using it whether it's creating the marketing materials or reaching customers or as I said some of the operational elements of it so that you can then spend time where you want to spend time.
The most relevant fact about what we're all doing in food is how to feed people. How to feed people through food banks, how to feed people through technology. What do you feel about the responsibility of corporations or people who have the knowledge and the technical ability to feed people who have no food?
You know, I think you're making a really important point. It's so often and I'm thinking of it in the context of what's the role of technology and I think there is a role of technology and I think too often when people are assessing technology in particular today they're focusing on what are some of the downside risks they're not starting with the realization that things aren't as good as they should be in society. And I'm going to answer your question on food. But you're hitting something that's really important to me and broadening it out. You know, today the disparities depending on what your postal code are, I think are unconscionable when we can address it and you're getting at that with food. But an area that I'm focused on quite a bit is how can technology help address health issues. And what I find to be really distressing is there are treatable cancers and the survival rate depending on your postal code can be 50% lower than what you or I would have. In America more than half of the adults don't read at the sixth grade level.
Your point about... did you say half?
54% of adults in America read at sixth grade level or below. When you talk about food, when you talk about there are floods and fires and why aren't we getting people out of harm's way faster? Why don't we give them days notice, not minutes notice? These are all problems that exist and these are problems that can be addressed with technology and are being addressed with technology. And I think it's so important to start with what's the state of the world today and can we fix it and make sure we're focusing on what's the upside because it's so easy to be scared about change. And that's what I get excited about. So you and I have talked about this. I was in Asia and a prime minister said to me, how can technology help with the lowest economic strata in my country with farmers? Can it help farmers?
And the answer is yes. And in fact, it was a joy last year. I was with Ajay Banga, the head of the World Bank during World Bank Week, and we announced a platform that farmers can use that enables them on their Android phone, which is more ubiquitous in developing markets, to get pre-crop information. So, how can you see when you have an infestation risk? You can use your phone and you can get information like AI can help you see when there's a problem to intervene and all the way through to the back end. How can you understand post-crop issues? What about markets? Where should you send it so that you don't see actually this diminution of the ability to sell it all profitably? We can help farmers and we've done a pilot with thousands of farmers in India and you see an uplift in their earnings because they're having access to information that can make a difference in their life. So I get excited when you say in health we've got to close that gap in early detection of disease is what's going to make a difference in food scarcity, food security we've got to do better and if you can use information to actually increase crop yields and increase the ability to get to market we should be doing it. Those are areas where I think that it's exciting to see the art of the possible.
What did you have growing up? Tell me about the family.
So I was born in England. I was born in the north of England right outside of Manchester and Sale. And the way we arrived to England is my father had grown up in Vienna and his father was taken on Kristallnacht and that's when they realized he needed to get out of Austria.
He was 15 and so he was able to escape on a youth boat. The rest of his family could not get out. They all perished in the camps. And as soon as he was of age, he enlisted in the British army. He ended up fighting in the two battles of El Alamein. His high school had been closed down in Vienna. So he never completed high school. And as he was fighting in the British army, he concluded that if he were to survive, education would be his passport to freedom. That was the phrase I heard over and over again as a child. And so he actually started to teach himself engineering while fighting in the north of Africa. And he used to tell us that his fellow soldiers would tease him that he would die before he could ever use this education. And his answer was, I would rather die an educated man. And he survived and then went to what was then Palestine, fought in the war of independence and eventually was invited to Manchester to the University of Manchester to get a master's in physics. So then I was born there and he eventually was invited to first Harvard and then Stanford where he designed the atom smasher. But he always taught us education is the passport to freedom.
Do you have memories of the houses and what they looked like where your kitchen was?
So I've gone back to my home in Sale. And my best memory from Sale is whenever it was a rainy, misty day, my father would say, 'Let's go run in the rugby field.' We lived in a tiny little apartment building and we'd run in the rugby field. I went back there recently and saw that rugby field. It was beautiful. And then I lived in a little home in Palo Alto.
My mother was a psychologist, an extraordinary psychologist and entrepreneur. She ended up creating something called the Center for Creativity and Growth in Palo Alto when I was a kid. She was a complete free spirit. She was an artist and a dancer. Just as regimented as my father was as an engineer and physicist, creative in his own way, my mother was an artist and painter and psychologist. She was amazing.
I have a younger sister and an older brother. He was really active in the Vietnam War movement. Moved out when I was five. And my little sister and I, she was a year and a half younger. Called ourselves co-conspirators. My best friends.
Yeah. So you would have your meals, but how did your parents both working? How would they have organized that?
My parents both worked. My mother was actually a truly horrendous cook and would just whip something together for dinner. So we would always come to dinner. That was the lovely part. Her food was not what you would want to eat. My father used to always joke that the food was better in the British army than it was at home. It was pretty bad. I actually was reminiscing about that as I was coming over here and I realized that not until my 20s did I realize that a beautiful piece of salmon shouldn't taste like a hockey puck because she just put everything in the oven and cooked it and cooked it. She was a wonderful mom but not dinner.
It was quite an academic world.
What was your father's theory about the quark?
You and I have talked about the quark test. So my father was at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and a physicist and when I was pretty young he said to me, you know, if someone in my lab can't define a quark in less than 30 seconds, they don't know what they're talking about.
