How To Create Amazing Ideas Like Google | Eric Schmidt Ep. 201

You and I were in North Korea at the same time, and North Korea is the last really closed society on earth. We don't really know what goes on. Very few people have met the president of North Korea. Now President Trump and the Secretary of State have, but at the time you and I were there, no one had met them. In fact, Dennis Rodman came right after we had. So it's strange to go to a country where they're cut off. How do they operate? How do they do things? And our goal was to try to get North Korea more into the internet, and we made a little bit of progress and then we fell back a little bit.

When I was a boy, my father was an international economics professor and took the family to Italy for two years. This seems very pedestrian today, but at the time it was incredibly exotic for Americans to travel to Italy. This was at a time when the U.S. dollar was incredibly strong, so a poor professor could live like a king in Europe. Now of course it's very different, but we traveled all around and it started my love of international matters. I don't know how you would be a global citizen without actually doing the global part. If you look at an awful lot of people have opinions about places they've never been to, why don't you go? You can get to most countries, there's a few that are iffy.

With the right security arrangements, yes I would.

Well, the funny thing is, Werner Richardson had organized the trip and he had pretty good relations with both sides. And I knew when the White House condemned our trip that it would be safe because the North Koreans would never give the White House a win.

Well indeed, I took my daughter.

Yes, don't you have to actually wear something here at work? It's a good policy so far.

This might be a little strange, but I trust companies in a way to act a little bit more responsibly with my data because I know that they want to make money with it. Fine, their cards are on the table. With the government or other bodies like that, it gets a little cloudy and you're not sure what their intent might be. One of the things I've learned over the years at Google is that every country and every culture has a different view of privacy. So I'll give you an example: what's true about Britain that's the inverse in Germany? Britain really believes in the power of the state and the power of the state to search into people's private lives. They trust their government, as they should. The Germans, based on that horrific experience they had with the Nazis, think the opposite. Their sensibility is different. Both vibrant democracies, both smart and mature cultures. So the culture you're in, I think, largely determines your view on privacy. Americans are split. If you take a position that the government should have some level of surveillance capabilities, a whole bunch of people don't trust the government at all, but a whole bunch of people also think that that surveillance could be used, for example, to fight terrorism, which people are worried about. And you see this exemplified in the fight over the iPhone and the San Bernardino killers. It's a hard call. I worry that as more and more information becomes available, the government will misuse that information and violate people's rights. That's my personal view.

With respect to AI, people conflate AI with many new technologies. AI is a form of analysis and reasoning over data that you could do in traditional ways, so the privacy issues are not so serious. Where they are serious, there are serious privacy issues with everything. I would frame that as: where will the new technologies go? And I'll give you an example. China is exporting Huawei's technology for its network to the Belt and Road Initiative countries, and as part of that, there's all sorts of monitoring and tracking ability within the network. Now, people in America, and certainly you and me, think that's not a good idea, but the Chinese think that's fine. So where does that end up? Does the U.S. model, which says there's a boundary in terms of surveillance, versus the Chinese model where there isn't, which one comes to dominate?

I hope that scenario that you named is not going to happen. Today what happens is that the Chinese internet infrastructure, the apps people experience, they grew up without any historic infrastructure, so they just sort of were built. And they have the best financial tech, FinTech as we call it, apps. When you walk around, you can buy everything on your phone. It's no big deal, it's all very automatic. And as you mentioned, people stay within WeChat to run everything. To me, the question is: why has that model not been successful outside of China? It might be a little bit successful in Southeast Asia, and they're trying in India. Is there something about China which makes it a different kind of ecosystem than the rest? I hope that we'll see lots of experimentation, lots of competition, but I know that as successful as the Chinese companies are, they've not been successful in the West.

Well, there are many theories. My Chinese friends explain that they just are so busy in China they haven't had time to come visit, and that seems incredible. But it's so competitive in China that every waking breath is staying ahead of their local competitors. It's the most dynamic part of the internet right now in terms of startups, evaluation, and so forth in Beijing. Maybe that's true. Another possibility is that Chinese culturally don't get the way we use apps in the same sense that most American companies have trouble doing the same thing in China. Maybe there's a cultural and language framework, the way people use them. Another possibility is that since China has blocked many American companies entering China, perhaps U.S. people don't want to have Chinese products which may have, we don't know, but may have some of these surveillance components. I don't know, it's perhaps a combination of those.

A few years ago, I was in a meeting with President Xi and his deputies, and one of the deputies who was in charge of the internet got up and said that it is a great feature of the Chinese model that they have control, and that without control you don't get freedom. And this was an approved text. So the government has a completely different notion of how freedom works, and we'll see.

Well, every country operates things differently. China's rise is fantastic. China's rise since 1979 and the Deng Xiaoping reforms has brought a country where the average salary was three hundred dollars a year to something like ten thousand dollars. It's an enormous success on an economic basis without a concomitant increase in personal freedom. It is amazing in almost every sense of the word. I'm fascinated with China.

I hope so. One of the interesting things about AI is that today the systems are trained from data, so you have to train the system. It doesn't intrinsically know anything. It takes a large amount of data and it figures stuff out, and so it can answer questions: what is this, what is that, classification, those sorts of things, relatively straightforward things. Well, what happens when the training data has biases? Well, of course the AI has a bias too. Now, people have been working on this very hard, and it turns out almost every human system has various kinds of biases. The biases can be because of omission. So for example, for a long time most of the research on healthcare was done on men, not on the 50% of humans that are women. It's insane. Also differences in race and economic background were reflected in that data. So if you were to take all that data, munge it for a while, and say this is a representative human, you would be missing out because of that omission bias. There are other much more pernicious biases where you see discrimination that's not overt, that information is suppressed or not available, or so forth, that people don't even know it. So this problem of bias is a really hard problem in AI research. There are many people working on this problem of bias. Can you take a trained system that has intrinsic bias in it and can you fix it? Then there's another group of people who are wondering if you take a system that has bias in it and you replace it by one which does not have such a bias, will humans accept it? And that's an area of great research right now.

You have been watching too many movies. Let me describe the way these movies always work: inevitably there's a killer robot, inevitably the killer robot is made by a crazy, crazy male engineer, and eventually a woman kills the robot. Right? That's the plot. And it's a great movie. So we're not to the point where we can even come up with a system that behaves like a one-year-old, let alone a two-year-old or a 20-year-old. We are so far from the ability to have systems that have intent, that can discover. These are great movies, these are great fiction. Right now what we're learning about AI is the ability to play games, which are closed systems, which we're quite good at, and also look at historical data and come up with new insights that are hard to see. My favorite example is last week we announced that there's a theory in medicine about CT scans that low levels of CT scans for people who are subject to cancer risk will do early detection of cancer better than anything else. And so they built a system here at Google in our research group, and that system has shown that this is true. The way the system worked: it had three different networks. One which would take your CT scan data and figure out where the body cavity of your test is, your lungs literally. A second one that would classify the things within the lung. And the third which would then look at each one and say, 'I'll give it a cancer risk score.' Now this system is as good as the best humans, but as it sees more and more training data, it will get better and better and better than humans. That's a great use of AI. That's where we are today.

Well, it's a wonderful thing to talk about science fiction, sure. But we don't know how intelligence can be defined. We know that these systems have human-like capabilities, but they are savants. So let's use the CT scan system. Here's a system that's going to become impossibly better than human beings at doing exactly one thing, and that's a huge improvement. And I think most of the benefits that we're gonna see in AI, you will see as a human from its application in medicine. One way to think about it is that for you, there's 999 people who are genetically and biologically highly similar to you whom you've not met. And so if we can collect all the data about them, with their permission and all that kind of stuff, we can begin to say, 'Well, he has this problem and she had that problem, and therefore he's likely to have this problem too.' This ability to do these correlations will really give you a head start on what's gonna happen to you, for better, for worse I suppose.

Yeah, that's what I'm looking forward to. I suppose when people say this generation might live to 120 or 100, or my child might live to 150, I assume that's what they're talking about with these kind of advances. Well, your child today has a good chance of living to a hundred. Life extension has been going on at a rate of one or two years per decade, and I think the good news is that children today are highly likely to live to their natural end of their lives, and that's largely because of a lack of war and because the benefits of globalization and all this. So we should be really excited about the children that are being brought into the world today. I don't know if they'll get to 150. There are theories about natural lifespans and there's theories that there's a real limit to cellular biology. There is a group that Google, Alphabet, have called Calico which is working very hard on the core processes of aging, literally the processes that occur within the cells of your body, to see if they can counteract them using various techniques.

One way to view the question of the big egos is sometimes that conflict is good, right? And with Larry and Sergey and myself working as a team, there was never a moment where I thought we were fighting for anything other than the success of the company. But boy did we have good arguments. But I knew that they were fighting for the same principle I was, but we would disagree over some tactic. That's very unifying. So as long as the system is organized around what winning looks like—building a great corporation, shareholder value, more end-users, greater quality, whatever it is—you'll be fine. It's when the system's goals become diffuse and people start to operate and try to optimize their own goals that you get in trouble. Indeed, the lesson of Trillion Dollar Coach is you need a coach to coach all of the people, not just you. And I'll simply say it is that at any given time one of the team members is playing for their own team as opposed to the total team. And what Bill would do is he would go over to that person, sometimes it might be suggested and sometimes on its own, sometimes it was me, and he'd say, 'Look, let's get you back on the team.' That function is critical. Alan Eagle, one of our co-authors, said, 'You know, I used to think that as you went up in the company you've got people who were more self-actualized, more secure, more intelligent, more capable, more calm, and the inverse is true. They're wackier and they're crazier and they're more driven and they're more conflicted.' That's why you need a coach.

Now what's interesting is that my friend John Doerr, we were at a political event at John Chambers' house, and John Doerr said, 'You should take a look at Google.' And I was busy selling and merging Novell into another company at the time, and I said, 'You know, I heard about a search engine. Search engines don't matter too much, but fine, you know, it's always try to say yes.' I didn't think much of it. So I walked into a building down the street, and here's Larry and Sergey in an office—and we still have this building by the way—where they have a sofa and they have food on the table and they have my bio projected on the wall, and they proceed to grill me on what I'm doing at Novell. It's something called proxy caches, which they thought were a terrible idea. And I remember as I left that I hadn't had that good an argument in years, and that's the thing that started the process.

It felt like a great graduate school. And indeed, when I started at Google, it felt like grad school. All the offices had three or four graduate students or employees in them. The conversations at the table were very interesting, but there really wasn't a lot of structure. And everybody was working on something, and people had five projects, which today are five different businesses, for a single individual. And I knew I was in the right place because the potential was enormous. And my friend Wayne, who had helped recruit me, said, 'It moves naturally, it just happens.' And I said, 'Well, aren't there any schedules?' I was used to schedules. 'No, it just sort of happens.'

Well, what's interesting is my actual first day, of course they didn't have any room, so they put me in a five-person room on a desk that was shared with somebody else, and it was in a corner. And I thought, 'I guess this is what they think of the CEO.' So I managed to get the staff meeting, I managed to say, 'I think I really should have my own office,' and everybody said, 'Okay, we didn't really think of that.' So somebody had moved out into a different place, so I took over a small eight-by-twelve office. So a few months later I come in and there's an office mate. His name is Amit. I said, 'Who are you?' He said, 'My name is Amit.' And I said, 'What are you doing here?' He said, 'Your office was empty all the time, you're never here, and my office was very crowded, so I moved in.' And I thought, 'What to do in this situation?' Now normally what you would do is you would start screaming, like Cher, 'Get out of my office!' or something like that, but that would have been culturally inappropriate. So I said, 'Well, did you ask for permission?' And he said, 'Sure.' 'Who did you ask?' 'I asked Wayne.' And then I realized they were playing a practical joke on me. So this person can't stay very long. So I thought, 'Okay, I'll get along with the jokes.' I sit down next to him, but then I realized it really is a joke on me because he's not moving out. And so he would have his headphones on and I would be working as CEO, and we continued this until the company went public.

So what happens is I get this phone call one day, and it's from Omid who's running sales, and we're having a conversation about revenue. And the revenue he's projecting, the revenue is about a hundred and eighteen million dollars for the year, which is a pretty good number at the time. Today it's a hundred billion. And I'm saying, 'I mean, there's got to be more, there's got to be more over here, there's got to be over there.' And Omid says, 'No, no, no,' and so forth and so on. And so I hang up the phone kind of annoyed, and Amit takes his headphones off and says, 'I heard that. I think that the revenue—I know the revenue.' I said, 'What? I knew you were listening to my phone calls.' And so it turns out that he had been listening to my phone calls. And of course we became very good friends as a result. But more importantly, he was busy building the software modeling for revenue for the company. So he said, 'The revenue number will be a hundred and forty-two.' Wow. So I called back up and I said, 'Omid, you're the sandbagger of the country.' Sandbag is a term in sales. And so we said, 'That's not true.' So we had a sandbag brought in and we made Omid present his sales report on top of a sandbag to the company as a result. So I learned: if you're gonna have, if you're CEO and you're going to have an office mate, have the person who's doing revenue data analytics in your office at all times. Have them at least be useful to you.

Really, even allowed to have... what's the violation? Because under securities law there's insider information, and I couldn't take a risk of exposing him to the insider information.

Well, it starts with hiring. Sure. And Larry and Sergey had established a very tough regime on hiring. They hired super capable people, and they always wanted people who did something interesting. So if you were a salesperson, it was really good if you were also an Olympian, and they argued that they didn't really understand sales, but they knew what it took to be an Olympian. We hired a couple rocket scientists because we thought that was interesting. Now we weren't doing rocketry, you get the idea. We had a series of medical doctors who were just—we were just impressed with, even though they weren't doing medicine. So part of it starts with the hiring process. And the second thing is building a culture which is bottoms-up in its ideas and encouraging systematic innovation. You cannot plan innovation, but you can systematize it. You can basically get the best shot ever. And one day I remember when the company was small, thinking, 'I have no idea what to do about this competitive issue. I honestly have no idea whatsoever. But I know I have the team that's working the hardest on the problem.' And one of Bill's rules was: in companies you tend to think of the CEO and the vice-president of A or B, and Bill's rule was find the people who are the smartest in the world in your company on this and have them work on it and have them tell you the answer. It's a good rule.

I'm not that sympathetic to that argument. My experience is most companies are not well managed with respect to listening to their people and being creative. In little companies, because you work together all day, you know what everybody thinks. But in a couple-hundred person organization, there's lots of people who have ideas how to improve things every day, and by definition you're not listening to them every day because you're busy doing something else. So I think it's a solvable problem for a few hundred person company, and the answer is sit down and say to your employees, 'I want to see every conceivable idea. I want them to be sorted. I want you all to come back with a prioritized list. I want to do the simple stuff immediately, and I want to debate the hard stuff, and I'm open to anything.' And you have to be sincere. In most companies, the inverse is true. In most companies, the smart person is the CEO, everyone else is doing what he or she says. There's very little flexibility or creativity, and no one feels permission to be different, to be aberrant if you will. In larger companies, it's much harder because that middle management sort of is a lock on what can be done, and there are stovepipes and so forth and so on. So as an executive, you've got to come up with some way to break that. What I always tell executives is: why don't you have a meeting where you ask people to tell you something that you don't know? And by the way, you know a lot. Introduce me to some ideas and products that I don't know about. Show me something new in every business unit you are. And then by the way, if it's pretty good, be ruthless in evaluating it. In the military, one day I do some military work, the military decided to show us—and this was not classified—they had been working in a particular building on some interesting drone work and some autonomy drone. And I looked at it and I thought, 'Haven't I seen this?' And indeed, they were two or three years behind the best work that was being done at MIT. So I said, 'Good job, you showed me something that I didn't know, but you showed it to me three years late. Why don't you go and look at this MIT work and then invite me back?' So the ability to do innovation also includes a requirement to be good at it. And of course they address this, but don't accept being three years behind. Say, 'Look, if you're going to do something new, it has to be new, it has to be state-of-the-art.' Let's pick in the car industry, the Teslas, they have this beautiful screen. Why do the other cars not have that? I mean, I can go on and on.

Yeah, you can kind of tell, as most people in Silicon Valley... exactly. Yeah, there's the geek factor, and then also it's just a better car. But that's a little different podcast. But my point is that Tesla proves that in a big, stable, and important industry you can innovate at scale. And again, just think about that screen. Why does everybody not have that big screen with Google Maps in it? The idea has been around now for eight or nine years at least, because it came out before the iPad, I believe.

We were super focused on expanding the notion of coaching. When Bill Campbell showed up, we didn't really understand that his goal was to coach us as a team, all of us, especially myself. I thought he was my executive coach. After all, he was my best friend, he had great guidance and advice. But when people would make a mistake, he would go bring them back toward the goals of the team. That concept is a very powerful innovation out of Silicon Valley, and it's something that every business could use. Every traditional business could use a business coach, and by that I mean a coach of the top team, to keep everybody kind of in alignment. This is what the board wants, this is what the CEO wants, this is what your employees want, and helps make it work. Having good judgment and experience in that area, I think that these techniques can be taught. The purpose of the book is to help honor our coach, but also to talk about these techniques. And I promise you that if you're a manager, if you just adopt Bill's techniques, you'll just become so much of a better coach. It's not that hard.

Now it would be ludicrous. Yeah. And by the way, every one of those teams has a superstar. In football, there's the quarterback. Well, how important are the other team members? Super important. You have to have someone to throw the ball to, someone to give the ball to, someone to protect. It seems obvious when I say it. And yet why is this not a concept prevalent inside of the business world? Of course, also if the CEO leaves, you still have the value in the coaching for the rest of the team, and it probably gets easier if everyone else already has a culture of being coached. If someone new comes in, absolutely, they're much easier to coach. And the most interesting thing about the problem here with coaching is that the people who would benefit the most, who are typically the CEO, are the people who are most opposed to it.

And I offer myself as an example. When John Doerr called up and said, 'You're doing great, but you need a coach,' I said, 'No, no.' And he goes, 'What?' Well, I listed all the things, you know, I'd done this and that, I was very senior, very experienced, and I'm working with these young people, they need some help. I'm very good at this, I don't need a coach, I'll do fine. I have lots of relevant... I mean, I'm like a big cheese.' And he said, 'Well, new tennis players got coaches.' He got me there. And I said, 'Look, here's the problem: the tennis players by definition are better than the coaches, so the coaches can't be very good.' And he said, 'You dummy, coaching is different from playing.' Right? There's a difference. And he had me there. And so I met Bill, we began, of course it was a no-brainer from that point on. Everyone I can think of in my world, these people have enormous egos, they're enormously intelligent, enormous wealth, enormous accomplishment. Every one of them would benefit from coaching because a coach is different. By the way, Steve Jobs, arguably the most successful entrepreneur in history in terms of his creativity—and we miss him terribly—his best friend and most important person in his world besides his family was Bill Campbell. It's incredible.

And when we all went to Bill's funeral, we realized that there were a thousand people at the funeral, all of whom thought they were being coached by Bill. It's an extraordinary achievement. He was really the greatest coach, certainly the greatest executive coach that has ever lived. He also created more value than anyone else. That's why we call him the trillion-dollar coach. Apple and Google together are almost two trillion dollars of value.

What's interesting, we were really privileged to have him. When he showed up, I said, 'Well, Bill, how do I pay you?' He goes, 'I don't want any money.' And I said, 'What's wrong with you? Don't you want to be paid?' He said, 'No, no, I'm giving back.' And I said, 'Well, don't you want any stock?' He said, 'No, I'm giving back.' And I said, 'Okay, I know, I'll put you on our board, because we need you on our board to help out.' And he said, 'No.' And I said, 'You're not gonna be on our board?' He said, 'No, because that would prevent me from doing what I want to be able to do.' He had a model that he was an inside outsider. He was observing the board, observing me, and observing the management team, and coaching all of us. And his compensation, by the way, was our success. He derived enormous value from our success. And what I love about Bill was that he never wanted any press. He would have hated the book because he wouldn't want the attention. His entire goal was to make you successful. Imagine if you had a person who you genuinely believed to make you and your business incredibly successful, advised you, suggested things, was always there—you could call him 24 hours a day, he was always there—and you knew he had your back. And imagine if there were a thousand people doing that with him today. Imagine how much more successful each of you would be.

That's right. Now of course he used much more colorful language. He was a salty character and of the generation that was pretty rough with language.

What's interesting is that it never occurred to us to do this until Bill suggested it. But if you think about it, it makes perfect sense. You've got a team, you've got a problem, it does cross the boundaries, have two people work on it, get them to know each other. If they disagree, even better, and force them to argue it out. Now if they cannot agree, then you have to, if you will, split the time, make the decision, and you need to do so in a timely fashion. Well, the interesting thing about this, in all my previous jobs, executives, we spent all day battling over resources. They would never give a team to another. Whereas at Google, people would say, 'Oh, here's that, you can have all of this, I don't want it.' It's like a thousand people, enormous budget, because one, they were used to working collectively, and they understood that the goal was to maximize the benefit of the team. And I didn't have to do anything.

Now, also, let's say if you and I had a coach who was individually coaching us on the goals of a corporation and was repeating the company's goals—the company's goal is the company's goals—and furthermore this coach had a pretty big say in your compensation, at the end of the day you would think very differently than if you thought you were sort of fighting on your own. So I suspect what happened was people's self-interest was kept in alignment by Bill because they knew that he was watching. And if somebody came back and said, 'I'm not gonna do that because I really want to, in some indirect way, I want to own this team and I want to manage it myself,' and so forth, they knew that they would be judged by Bill because he had said you can't do that, and that there would be a negative penalty for that behavior. So it's not as kumbaya as it sounds. It sounds like one of the things the coach does is that he makes sure that there's a negative for bad behavior as well as a positive for good behavior. If you think about it, what does a coach do? If the player doesn't show up for practice, they get disciplined. If the player doesn't sleep at night and is out partying all night, the coach says, 'What's wrong with you? That's your first shot, you don't get a second one.' And he means it. Coaching is not the same thing as mentoring. The coach is actively involved in this, and the coach has power in a way that your mentor does not. And the coaching metaphor—now Bill was a football coach, and a pretty bad one as best we can tell, he didn't win that many games. But he was at Columbia, but he had enormous pride and enormous leadership skills at the time, which he then honed in his work at Apple and others. John Doerr recalls, and we had a big dinner last night about this, that Bill in that period before he became a coach had enormous energy. He had had some bicycling accident and he had this pattern where he would go to Japan for a day or for an hour or two meeting and come right back. He broke a whole bunch of ribs, he goes to the hospital, they diagnose the ribs broken, he gets on an airplane, does a double redeye to Japan for a meeting, and comes back.

Yeah.

That is just a speculation of sure, and of things that can happen. And we got some of the speculation right, and we missed some things. I think, for example, most of us were surprised at the extent to which there was nation-state surveillance and nation-state intervention in elections. That's something not something we anticipated. So what do I learn from this? That the success and security of the networks that people use is no longer optional. Your identity needs to be secure. It has to be possible to identify somebody to who they really are in order to get them what they want, and the systems have to be robust against that. Imagine if a terrorist somehow took the collection of digital identities of people across the internet and made it impossible for you to speak, made it impossible for you to transact commerce, made it impossible for you to communicate. That would be as big an impact as a kinetic or horrific terrorist attack in terms of the impact on people's lives, especially if it were broad scale. So the tech industry has a requirement that it go and work super hard to keep these things secure. And what you're going to see in the next 10 years is enormous internal checking networks. Google, for example, has a group of people which looks for global threats, and that global threat group is largely looking at attacks on YouTube and on Gmail, but they actually see when the Russians do something or the Chinese do something, they can see the activity.

They might even call it that. I feel like it. And of course the other side is constantly changing their techniques. And I think that this continual low-grade cyber war, in the sense that we're at peace with these countries, we're not having conflict, nobody, no guns are being loaded, the militaries are not fighting, I think a continuous low-grade cyber war of the kind that I'm describing, or cyber conflict, whether you want to call it, is probably true for a very long time.

This goes back to the general question of freedom. As Americans, we believe in individual freedom as a right. It's part of the way we were brought up and the way our country operates, and I think it's a fantastic aspect. I worry that the ability to track, survey, especially by the government, can impinge on that, sometimes for good reasons. I'll give you a thought experiment, and I'm not endorsing this: imagine if America had the same level of surveillance cameras that Britain has. Well, then many of the crimes that occur on the streets would be caught and prevented because they'd be on tape. But that would be a huge violation of our privacy rights, right? And search and seizure and so forth in our Constitution. So we've got to find a balance there. And I worry that it's so easy to say as a result of some horrific thing to take away the rights of many. I think that's probably true.

I'm worried about a slippery slope around speech and around individual freedom, and it often starts with very good goals. There is in fact bad speech on the internet. There's hate speech and there's forbidden speech, so the worst being like child pornography. So in an attempt to stop one bad thing, you can imagine more and more surveillance going into the activities of people. And I worry about that, not from companies, because I think companies are under the control of the governments, but I worry about governments' intentions doing that. If you look in Europe, because of some of the horrific things that have gone on in terrorist activities, they've been a continual series of laws introduced in European countries which will allow the government to go into the ISPs and really stop traffic on those ISPs. Now that makes sense if you're terrified, but it's a loss of freedom for many, many people.

Having been in Silicon Valley for a very long time and seeing the wealth cycle, the most interesting thing is that the most successful people in Silicon Valley did not have money as a goal. And so when Google went public, it was the same circus, same clown, just with more money. And in many cases these people didn't have houses and didn't have cars, so they bought houses and cars, and in some cases airplanes and boats, but their values didn't change. So one of the things I've observed is that the money that's circulating, the wealth in the Valley, allows people to do more of what they were already gonna do anyway. So the boat is bigger, the house is bigger, the car is bigger, but their values are the same. And in every case that I can think of, their values were built in some form of service—service to science, service to the community, service to business—and I don't think that's going to change.

Well, thank you. And I understand that you are one of the most influential video bloggers in the country, so congratulations.

And I think the other comment I'm going to make about podcasts is that this is my third book, and this is the book tour where the podcasts reign. And what seems to be true is that people who read books listen to podcasts, definitely. And I'm so glad people realize that. And I'm interested in why. And it turns out a set of tools have made it very easy for people to do their own podcast, like you do, and more importantly to consume them. And so two or three years ago even, it was pretty hard to organize that, but somehow now it's trivial to both make a podcast and make them super interesting and edit them, as well as listen to them. And that's a good example of technological diffusion, where this idea has been around for a very, very long time. Why did it take us so long to get to this point? And it's such a great idea.

Let's just say, let's just say I agree, more podcasts are good.