President & Chief Investment Officer, Alphabet Inc. (Class A)
Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer at Alphabet and Google | Ruthie's Table 4
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Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer at Alphabet and Google | Ruthie's Table 4
Ruth Porat is the President and Chief Investment Officer of Google and Alphabet. She is also my friend.
Her extraordinary schedule has often kept us thousands of miles apart as she moves across continents, connecting people, ideas, and communities.
But today, we’re together at last - a Ruth and a Ruthie - to talk about the importance of food at Google, her scientific childhood, how her father survived the Holocaust to rebuild his family, and how...
About Ruth Porat
Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer at Alphabet and Google, has recently discussed the economic and societal potential of artificial intelligence, as well as the energy infrastructure required to support it. In a CNBC-hosted forum with IBM Chairman Arvind Krishna, Porat said she believes AI could add approximately $4 trillion to U.S. GDP over several years and cited data that 80% of small businesses using AI report an uplift in revenue and profitability. She described AI as a tool that will reshape tasks rather than eliminate careers, and emphasized the need for job skilling efforts to ease workforce transitions. Porat also highlighted AI’s role in advancing science, pointing to Google’s AlphaFold as an example of open-sourced research used by 3.5 million scientists across 190 countries. On energy, Porat stated that data centers currently use about 4% of the U.S. grid, with projections rising to roughly 12%, but argued they are not the primary driver of rising electricity prices. She cited a Lawrence Berkeley National Labs study indicating that electricity prices have grown more slowly in states with data centers. Porat noted that China has built 80 times more transmission capacity than the United States in the last decade, and said that without sufficient energy infrastructure, the U.S. risks falling behind in delivering AI’s benefits. In other appearances, Porat discussed Google’s use of office food and “casual collisions” to foster innovation, and shared personal stories about her father’s background as a Holocaust survivor and physicist. She also addressed health disparities, stating that treatable cancer survival rates can be 50% lower depending on a patient’s postal code, and described Google’s work using AI to screen for diabetic retinopathy in the global south.
Transcript (101 segments)
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Ruth Porat0:00
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.
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Ruthie Rogers0:20
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?
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Ruth Porat1:09
Thank you so much. That was so beautiful. We have not done a podcast on a Sunday morning at 8:30 in six years.
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Ruthie Rogers1:16
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?
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Ruth Porat1:50
I do love this recipe.
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Ruthie Rogers1:51
Yeah. Pappa Pomodoro. Yeah. Do you want to read it and then we'll discuss why.
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Ruth Porat1:56
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.
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Ruthie Rogers2:12
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?
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Ruth Porat3:08
Well, it's just lovely. It's one of... I think a soup, a beautiful simple soup is just soothing.
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Ruthie Rogers3:16
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.
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Ruth Porat3:31
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.
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Ruthie Rogers4:44
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.
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Ruth Porat5:58
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.
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Ruthie Rogers6:30
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?
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Ruth Porat6:50
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.
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Ruthie Rogers6:58
And we'll be in your office or we would collide into somebody else having yogurt.
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Ruth Porat7:02
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.
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Ruthie Rogers7:13
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.
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Ruth Porat7:22
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?
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Ruthie Rogers7:32
Oh, yeah. You think this is just a slow coffee maker?
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Ruth Porat7:34
Exactly. No, it's very deliberate. We like to pretend it's deliberate. And then at lunch, same thing. I'll go back and...
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Ruthie Rogers7:43
To the same micro kitchen or do you step further?
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Ruth Porat7:46
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.
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Ruthie Rogers8:32
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.
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Ruth Porat9:26
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.
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Ruthie Rogers10:42
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?
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Ruth Porat11:01
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.
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Ruthie Rogers12:23
Your point about... did you say half?
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Ruth Porat12:26
More than half.
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Ruthie Rogers12:27
50% of adults?
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Ruth Porat12:28
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?
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Ruthie Rogers13:17
Farmers? Yeah.
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Ruth Porat13:18
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.
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Ruthie Rogers14:52
What did you have growing up? Tell me about the family.
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Ruth Porat14:54
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.
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Ruthie Rogers15:15
How old was he?
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Ruth Porat15:16
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.
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Ruthie Rogers16:37
Do you have memories of the houses and what they looked like where your kitchen was?
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Ruth Porat16:41
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.
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Ruthie Rogers17:07
What about your mother?
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Ruth Porat17:09
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.
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Ruthie Rogers17:36
You have a sister?
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Ruth Porat17:37
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.
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Ruthie Rogers17:50
Yeah. So you would have your meals, but how did your parents both working? How would they have organized that?
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Ruth Porat17:56
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.
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Ruthie Rogers18:37
It was quite an academic world.
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Ruth Porat18:39
It was very much.
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Ruthie Rogers18:41
What was your father's theory about the quark?
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Ruth Porat18:43
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.
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Ruthie Rogers19:00
Okay?
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Ruth Porat19:01
And later in life, I remembered that story because when I would be at work and I would ask somebody a question and they would give me some long rambling answer, I realized they would fail my dad's quark test. So, I've been using the quark test for a long time, which is if you can't tell me something in less than 30 seconds that's supposed to be in your technical domain, then you probably don't. You probably haven't really scrubbed what you're doing.
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Ruthie Rogers19:24
And then what do you do?
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Ruth Porat19:25
I make them go back to the drawing board.
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Ruthie Rogers19:27
Go back to the drawing board. Yeah.
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Ruth Porat19:28
Like either you understand it and you understand why it's important and you can therefore explain it or you have failed the quark test.
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Ruthie Rogers19:34
Somebody said that the other day. Scott Galloway said that if you ask somebody what they're doing in life and they can't describe it quite quickly, they don't really know, maybe a problem.
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Ruth Porat19:43
I saw that in my prior life at Morgan Stanley when somebody would come in with a trade that they said was a great trade and you'd ask them to explain why was it a great trade and the answer would fail my dad's quark test and I'm like okay I may not quite understand what you're doing but if you can't explain it to me you don't either.
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Ruthie Rogers19:59
Did you feel when you tasted that first piece of salmon? That was something amazing because you are a good eater. I've eaten with you in many places and I know how important food is to you. So, was there a kind of oh food could taste like this moment or do you think it was just...
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Ruth Porat20:15
Well, the salmon is a funny one because my mother cooked salmon all the time, but it really was a hockey puck. So, I thought I didn't like it and then when I finally had something that was properly cooked, you're right. It's like, oh, we can start expanding our horizon.
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Ruthie Rogers20:31
Yeah, that's what Paul McCartney said about wine because when he and John Lennon, it's a story I love. It says a lot. I think that when he and John Lennon went to Paris for the first time, John Lennon's aunt gave them £10 for a week. And so, which was okay those days, but they never could have anything but the cheapest wine. So, they thought that wine was just a horrible drink, right? Why would anybody like this until Brian Epstein took them out to a fancy restaurant and then they had a good glass of wine and then you know because... Yeah.
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Ruth Porat21:01
Well, I found that over the years now my favorite way to go out to a restaurant maybe to make up for all the last years is I don't actually just like to have my dish to myself. I would rather everybody orders and then you get to taste everything.
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Ruthie Rogers21:15
Share. Yeah. Much sharing is a big thing. You know, sharing we do it here. I mean obviously people order three or four pastas or three or four of that and then there are the people I again someone I talked to who said that they grew up with poverty and your plate was your plate. The idea of actually taking anything off your plate as a child to give to somebody else when you knew you weren't going to get any.
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Ruth Porat21:38
Well the joke in the family is my husband is... that's gold, I'm not going to share and then the kids and I are all ordering and sharing. It's just fun. Makes it fun. It's an adventure.
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Ruthie Rogers21:50
Or your time in Palo Alto growing up. Tell me about Palo Alto. I only know one other person who lives there.
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Ruth Porat21:56
So it was a wonderful, innovative, creative, academic environment. So my father designed the atom smasher. People around the table were physicists, went on to win Nobel prizes. My mother's psychologist created this center for creativity and growth and would bring in psychologists from around the country, around the world who would then speak at her center. So it was always stimulus. Like we would have our dinner around the dinner table and then we were expected to go into the living room together and we'd sit and we'd each read our books and I remember like lying on the floor reading the book and that's what you would do. It was a really sweet home. I do remember in high school years later one of my friends said you know we always thought you were sort of weird but we thought you would make it in life which to me is an important message for kids in high school. It's like what is... well if you know in high school if maybe I was a bit odd and academic that's fine and just be who you are and you got to follow that path.
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Ruthie Rogers23:06
Yeah. And your parents encouraged it so that also they weren't trying to make you into something else. Yeah. And did you travel? Did they... Did you go to Europe? Did you go back to Vienna?
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Ruth Porat23:16
We didn't go to Vienna until about 2000.
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Ruthie Rogers23:20
Was that hard for your father to go back?
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Ruth Porat23:22
Yeah. So, when we moved back to England in the 60s, it was the first time my father went back to Austria to try and find the records of his family. He didn't bring us as kids. And then in 2000, I was living in London. My husband actually said, 'You know, it's time to take the children on an oral history tour.' And so we brought my father over and said, 'Don't sugarcoat it. Take us through what it was like.' And he planned a bit of a trip. But as we went through Vienna, the doors just kept opening to more and more of that memory. And sort of on the last day, my middle son said, 'I want to stay with grandpa in his room.' And my father woke up in the middle of the night trembling. Everything came pouring back. But then he looked at his grandson and he said, 'We survived.' And for him it was realizing he had survived. He lost all of his family but now had this new family. The grandchildren, the children, the grandchildren. And he said it stabilized. He got a sense of calm and for us that image of being in Austria and reliving it with him. But then him celebrating that as he often said to us, you can take away my family. You can take away my state. You can't take away my mind and we can recreate it. And so his joy from the family.
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Ruthie Rogers24:58
I wish I had met him.
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Ruth Porat24:59
He was amazing. He was absolutely amazing.
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Ruthie Rogers25:02
Did you go to Israel?
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Ruth Porat25:04
Yes, my mother's family was in Israel.
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Ruthie Rogers25:07
So, it's your mother, you had an Israeli grandmother who cooked. Yes. But...
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Ruth Porat25:10
So my mother's parents escaped from Russia in the early 20s and then ended up spending their life there. My grandmother always thought she would end up back in Russia but stayed there.
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Ruthie Rogers25:24
And how was that? How was that experience for you?
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Ruth Porat25:28
She never came to the States. She lived in Israel. No, my grandfather ended up... he built the roads in what was then Palestine. And my grandmother was just this incredible loving grandmother who did know how to cook. I don't know why my mother didn't inherit any of the skills, but my grandmother was amazing.
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Ruthie Rogers25:49
Yeah. What do you remember what she cooked?
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Ruth Porat25:52
She cooked a lot of very traditional Russian dishes. And the main thing about my grandmother was that for her cooking was love. And she spoke Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew. I don't speak any of them. But the one word that was the word we shared that I did understand, there were a couple of them was 'ess'. And she would always cook for us and then say 'essen'. Essen. And the only way to express love to her was to eat. And I remember as a young kid, you get to the point where you were trying to... I was trying to express my love to her so much that it actually hurt that we ate so much. She was incredible. I mean, the most amazing story about her was actually her final day.
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Ruthie Rogers26:44
What was that?
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Ruth Porat26:47
And so she went to the green grocer, paid off her debts, and then she went home and spent the entire day cooking and filled the freezer with food, filled the fridge with food. She was cooking for my grandpa. And then she went to her bedroom and lay down and that was it.
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Ruthie Rogers27:13
Had she been ill? Did she have a sense of her... but did she have a sense?
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Ruth Porat27:17
She must have. She must have. She knew. She didn't do that on every Tuesday. This was something... she went and paid her debt. So she must have known and she prepared my grandpa to be there without her.
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Ruthie Rogers27:28
Wow.
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Ruth Porat27:28
Yeah. So food was love.
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Ruthie Rogers27:33
I want to go back to your Waymo ride because you were... Well, it's relevant here. You were amazing. When I said let's do you want to go in a Waymo, you immediately like seriously? Absolutely. Yes. Seriously, of course. We must go in a Waymo.
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Ruth Porat27:46
And I've said, I'll go with you and trust me, after a minute, it's going to seem totally normal. And after probably 3 minutes, you might be a bit bored and you're going to start doing something else.
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Ruthie Rogers27:57
But it's that first jump that you're like, bring it on. But that first, which is what you're saying with technology more broadly, but that first jump for people.
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Ruth Porat28:07
Yeah. It is really helpful to go through a training program or have somebody by your side. And I would say even when I did it and I brought in some engineers and said, 'Okay, take me through everything.' All the magic's been done by the engineers. Then the question is, 'How do I want to use it for me?' Like you, you're in the driver's seat. How can it give me time back? Yes. But it's that first jump. And in fact, there's some research recently that I find very distressing that women are 20% less likely than men to engage and yet it's really easy to address when you do a kind of just start a training program. Then you see this 3x increase in utilization. So it's just that first step.
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Ruthie Rogers28:52
Yeah.
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Ruth Porat28:53
And I think then you play around with it and figure out what does it mean for you.
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Ruthie Rogers28:55
A conversation about women, you know, your life, the way you've worked, your father and encouraging you. I would have liked to have done a podcast with him. But there was something I read that he would take you into the garage after you did your homework to solder, make radios, and work with tools. And so what was that like? What did that teach you?
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Ruth Porat29:20
When I was quite young, I must have been 10, 11. He first taught me how to solder, you know, this super hot iron melting metal so that we could actually build things and built a radio. We built a binary adding machine. He would take me to the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center to do my homework. And so at the youngest age, he made it pretty clear, education's your passport to freedom for everyone and there's no limit to what you can do.
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Ruthie Rogers29:56
My very last question to you is if food is sharing as you do, you know, food is collision as you say it is in work. The food is your mother who didn't cook and your father who remembered the food. Your grandmother that was part of her identity. Eating here the other night with your son was food. All that is food that we share that we express love with, we work with, we connect with. But it also is comfort. There's sometimes and I think about maybe those people who had an argument in their office and then reach for those M&Ms, you know, lots of M&Ms. Well, look for the M&Ms that you know that we do very often. I certainly do. We'll reach for a piece of music to listen to if I need comfort or a type of bed linen I want. But it also could be food. And I was wondering Ruth Porat, as our last question of a very beautiful morning is to ask you if you need food for comfort what would that be?
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Ruth Porat31:03
So my mother I said was an awful cook except in one area. She made a wonderful baba ganoush, wonderful hummus and wonderful falafel. So I find whenever I'm traveling and I can order a mezze plate... I didn't know that word when I was growing up. I just knew baba ganoush and falafel. I will order it because that's mom.
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Ruthie Rogers31:28
That's mom.
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Ruth Porat31:29
And that is... it's the quintessential sharing plate. It's got everything on it and it's the best when shared with people. It was the only thing that she could actually cook well. And yeah. So mom has met the mezze plate.
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Ruthie Rogers31:46
I can see that for you. It also says more about you know that you are a person who shares. Yeah. I think that's your pleasure.
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Ruth Porat31:51
Well, that's the fun.
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Ruthie Rogers31:52
That's the fun. Thank you. Thank you.
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Narrator31:57
Ruthie's Table 4 was produced by Alex Bell, Robbie Hamilton, and Zad Rogers with Andrew Sang and Bella Selini. This has been an atomized production for iHeart Media.