male speaker: now i have thereally great pleasure to begin the introduction of thisterrific piece that will end today. there are two importantspeakers who will be with us now. i will introduce the first andsince nobody sets up an interview better than charlierose, wisdom tells me that i will not introduce the second,which is eric schmidt. charlie rose.
born in north carolina, did hisundergraduate and his law degree at duke. he left a banking career to joinpublic television as part of the bill moyersjournal team. he then did a little bitof work with commercial television and found himselfback in the arms of public television. and in 1991, began locally alocal program called the charlie rose show.
well as you all know, withintwo years that show went nationally. it is recognized as the standardof late night tv and clearly is the most-- if not only-- but most intelligentconversation on television. [applause] very, very few people ofconsequence have not set across at that table fromcharlie rose, whether they are
in the arts, in sports, inentertainment, politics, you name it, if they are ofconsequence, one day they need to be sitting at that tableopposite charlie rose. tonight we will get to sit inon a classic charlie rose conversation. ladies and gentlemen, pleasejoin me in giving a warm welcome to emmy awardwinner charlie rose. charlie rose: he is a friendof mine, he is a remarkable executive talent.
we will say a littlebit of this. 1995, ninety a couple ofgraduate students at stanford university thought up thisidea for a search. about 2001, they decided,we need a partner. we need an executive. we need somebody that canhelp us organize. eric is the first to tell youthey didn't really need me, but he came in and it hasbeen an explosive growth since then.
they're into everything, whichwe will talk about, but eric also has, along with sergeiand along with larry, put together one of themost exciting companies in the world. and they continue to be that,they continue to grow. i mean, when the name of yourcompany becomes a verb, you know that you're doingsomething right. he is a pilot. last night, he flew hisown jet into new york.
he is a man of enormouscuriosity about everything and he is one of the people whois shaping our future. our economic future, because heis one of the people on the advisory council to presidentobama, but also he is helping shape technology which hasfueled the american economy over the last 10 years. he is a remarkable man. last friday, we satand had lunch. i have one suggestion for you.
if you are in silicon valleyand if you're near mountain view, i won't say calleric, but you ought to see this place. it's a campus. and they have themost interesting offices you've ever seen. there are people walk aroundwith computers all the time. they're having conferencesand they're thinking about the future.
and he is one of those peoplewho is shaping the future. please welcome eric schmidt. that was off the cuff. eric schmidt: that wasperfect, thank you very much, too nice. charlie rose: first of all, iwant to have eric say a bit about this briefly before westart the television show. i really am thrilled to be herebecause next week on our show, we are doing on monday thesecretary of energy who is
a nobel laureate,from washington. on tuesday, the secretary of thetreasury tim geithner on the economy. on wednesday, the secretary ofeducation, on thursday, the chairman of joint chiefs,on friday, nancy pelosi. that's our lineupfor next week. i've got that neil workingreally hard to book this show. but i mentioned that becauseof education and because of the commitment you have. andbecause of what this is about,
a celebration of teachingand learning. i'm simply going to say it hasdefined my life, not the teaching part, although we hopethat it has something to that teaching withfun in terms of what we do every night. but the idea of learning. i have to adjust my tie,they're telling me. what's wrong with my tie? [laughter]
is there anything wrongwith my tie? eric schmidt: let'shave a vote. charlie rose: alright. it's what? does that look better? is that better? is that all right? there you go. just for a moment, before wego into this, your own
involvement, commitment,google in education. eric schmidt: i'm the product ofthe american public schools system and when you look backat the success one has in life, you try to rememberwhat got you there. and a lot of things, but i'lltell you the teachers and the commitment that i had, that ilearned about education and learning really did makethe difference. so partly, i'm here to say thankyou and not for myself, but rather for the people thatyou are educating now who 30
years from now will say that youall made that difference. and as a person who believesin education, it's obvious that the people who are ineducation and both at the k through 12 area as well asuniversities, have not gotten both the credit, the attention,the funding and really the sort of understandingof the role that they play. so we have an opportunity now,in crisis, to understand what's really importantin life.
and i would argue that aneducated population is the only thing that's important. charlie rose: ok, so if theywill tell me that the technical stuff is working,we'll try to make the human stuff work here too. so are we set to go? welcome to the broadcast. we'rein new york with the ceo of google eric schmidt. you're piercing behindthe veil to see
what we do, all right? back to me. eric schmidt forthe hour, next. you have to be really smart todo this, i'm telling you. ok. right. eric schmidt, the ceo of googlejoins us now for a conversation about google, abouttechnology, about the future and about education.
i am pleased to have him here onthis stage as we celebrate learning and teaching. welcome. eric schmidt: thankyou, charlie. thanks for having me on again. charlie rose: all right, we werejust with each other last friday on the google campus. had many a conversation aboutsome of the things we'll talk about, but not all.
let's just go back and do aquick history of google. 1995, sergei and larry start it,and they create the search engine working at stanford. how did they get youinvolved in 2001? eric schmidt: well, larryand sergei invented the algorithms, the lessons if youwill, the way our search works today, when they were very youngand in graduate school. and they founded google andeventually needed some additional management help andthere was a search and
ultimately i got connected tothem through one of our board members, john doerr. from my perspective, most ofwhat you see at google today was invented at stanford bygraduate students and a lot of culture, the way weoperate is really derived from that culture. charlie rose: your background,though, was as a technologist. eric schmidt: that's correct. charlie rose: you'd been headof technology for sun
microsystems, you'vebeen a ceo. eric schmidt: yes, and isee myself mostly as a technologist who happensto run a business. charlie rose: what was theoriginal mission of google? eric schmidt: all the world'sinformation, universally accessible and useful. charlie rose: and how arewe doing on that? eric schmidt: well, we'vejust started. and i would tell you that whenyou're 23 years old and you
state that's your mission,you've got a lot of years ahead of you. and larry and sergei still havea long way to go in that. charlie rose: this is what i'vealways wanted to know. i'm told this is true. that in the beginning, whatyou're going to do was sell to people the search technology. sell this to you, thenyou can do search. eric schmidt: the first modelwas just, this is an amazing
new invention, this abilityto search information. and at the time, the webwas not so complicated. it wasn't as obvious that searchwould be needed because it wasn't that big. you could sort of lookand find things and you knew people. so larry and sergei went aroundto all of the then powerful internet companiesand every one of them turned them down.
charlie rose: saying what? eric schmidt: we havea better solution. we don't know how towork with you. you're too young, thatsort of thing. charlie rose: entrepreneurshave gone through this. there's not an entrepreneuralive who hasn't gone to somebody and say, goodluck, not for me. eric schmidt: there's a rule-- charlie rose: --includingbankers.
eric schmidt: that's right. there's a rule in siliconvalley that the great entrepreneurs break out early. and i think you see that and ithink part of the reason that occurs is because of theeducational system in america with graduate students and youngfaculty is very, very productive. so you get people right out ofcollege, you get them into a graduate program and they inventsomething and all the
worlds in front of themand they go for it. it's one of the greatestaspects of america. charlie rose: well who decided,what smart person decided that rather than sellingthe technology, we'll just sell advertising? eric schmidt: well the initialattempts didn't work because they heard no, no, no. meanwhile, the money is kindof running out and they're getting kind of nervous.
so they came up with a simpleadvertising model, which one of the engineers inventedthat worked pretty well. and the small team atthe time managed to get a couple of deals. when i showed up, that productwas fixed in price and google had invented a dynamic systemthat ultimately became our product called adwords. and i remember walking to thevery young program manager whose name was [? salwar ?]
who looked to me to beabout 21 years old. i had just joined and i said,promise me, our revenues are not going to go down by afactor of 10 when you brilliant new productcomes out. he said, it's going to goup by a factor of 10. i said no, you know. and indeed he was right. charlie rose: and advertisingis now, what 90% of the revenue?
eric schmidt: 98%. charlie rose: 98%. eric schmidt: butwho is counting. charlie rose: so advertisinghas been very, very, ver good to google. eric schmidt: we are anadvertising company. and you can think of googleas two parts of a company. you can think of it asa user phenomenon. our primary focus, by the way,is on end users and solving
their needs. and you can also think of it asa business, in which case it's an advertising business. charlie rose: since then,how many searches last year in 2008? do you know? eric schmidt: i don't know. but it's in the many,many billions. charlie rose: many, manybillion dollars.
and it's growing exponentiallyeach year, or has it plateaued? eric schmidt: well, searchesof users is growing quite nicely because the internetis growing. and one of the great stories,even as bad of an economic situation that we have now isthat the internet continues to solve people's needs. people really do useit every day, no matter what their state.
there was a survey recently thatsaid that your broadband connection was the last thingyou'd get rid of in all your financial problems. charlie rose: and today googledoes many things. i mean, searches is its primarything, but you created email, google news. eric schmidt: we started offwith search and the early founding team, larry and sergeiand the initial team, invented the advertising modelwhich has done so well for us.
on april 1st, 2004, weintroduced our first application which wascalled gmail. at the time, people thought itwas an april fool's joke. we sort of played withthat, but it was part of our character. and today, we say our strategyis search, ads and app.s charlie rose: search,ads and apps. eric schmidt: and applicationsthat make your life better. and we have the ability nowbecause we have so many people
using google to really changethe way they use computers in a way that's material. the term of art is now calledcloud computing and the idea is to let the computer takecare of all the details. all you do is just use it, it'salways there, google or someone else keepsthe information. we don't lose it, we don'tbreak it, it doesn't get viruses, that sort of thing. charlie rose: applications.
you have this thing at googlewhere you can take a day off of each week or 20%of your time-- out of 100% fivedays, one day-- and you can work on anythingyou want to. how much of that has led tointeresting, productive, profitable applications? eric schmidt: we think the 20%time is really the only way we've been able to maintainour innovation as we've gotten larger.
what normally happens withtechnology companies is the initial founding team getsolder, you're being in traditional management andalthough they becomes a better managed company, much of thecreativity and the flair and the joie de vivre getslost in the process. by establishing the principlethat engineers could spend 20% of their time working onwhatever they found interesting, we created aculture where there's this constant flow of innovation.
literally, every day there'sanother fun surprise. before we get too excitedabout the 20% time, these are engineers. they don't vary that far fromtheir area of interest. but it gives them an opportunity-- charlie rose: --they're notfinding a cure for cancer. they're looking at-- eric schmidt: --by the way,if the did, we'd be very excited about it.
but what they're really doing isthey're saying in my space, i see all of these newtechnologies and there's a new problem that i see that i wantto apply this stuff to and that's how the innovationworks. charlie rose: you also boughtyoutube, you have google news. we're at a time now and we'regoing to talk a lot about the economy in this conversationbecause of the roles you have, acquisitions come up. people are excited thesedays, the last several
months, about twitter. does google wantto buy twitter? eric schmidt: i shouldn't talkabout specific acquisitions. we're unlikely to buy anythingin the short term, partly because, i think, pricesare still high. and it's unfortunate,i think we're in the middle of a cycle. google is generating a lot ofcash and so we keep that cash in extremely secure banks.
and we'll wait that out. from our perspective, i thinkthe youtube acquisition and the doubleclick acquisition,which are the two large ones we did last year and the yearbefore, have been phenomenally successful. charlie rose: youtube is definedby an interesting idea which many people think has sortof been a breakthrough idea, which is it isuser generated. most of the videocomes from user.
now there are other people nowforming all kinds of video operations in which theinformation comes from programs like mine and nbc andcbs, pbs and the rest of them. but youtube has been fueled byuser generated, people did it with their cameras. how much of a phenomenonis that going to be in the future? eric schmidt: we think it willbe one of the most defining aspects of the internet.
because if you think aboutit, everybody has phones. and every phone has a stillcamera and every one of those phones is going to have a moviecamera pretty soon. and indeed, if you think aboutit, a lot of the news that you see, you'll see some phonecamera video of low quality. well, five years form now,those will be very high-quality videos as thetechnology gets better. and the joke is that the vastmajority of photographs now taken are kept in people'sphones because they can't get
them out of them. charlie rose: the can take thepicture, but they don't know what to do with it. eric schmidt: so we're workingto solve that problem. the important thing here isthat the phenomenon of user-generated generated contentof which you two as an example is i think the definingexpression of humanity over the next10 to 20 years. we had no idea that all thesethings were going on because
there was no way to see them. and now, if you have someonewho's being taken advantage of or abused or put in aninappropriate position or what have you, they cantake a picture. they can record what thepolice are doing in a dictatorship. charlie rose: and it haspolitical ramifications, too. eric schmidt: there's alot of implications. charlie rose: speak to that.
eric schmidt: well, the mostinteresting thing to me is that transparency is how youkeep societies honest. and we've now, because of theinternet and because of the digital revolution, given peoplethe ability to see everything. so you can now take photographs,take videos of everything you see in your worldand people discover it. and there are whole communitiesof people who are interested in these kinds ofaspects and they serve as a
form of check and balance onthe powerful, the rich, the people who mightexploit others. it doesn't necessarily mean fora different outcome, but it means that everybodycan't hide. they have to actuallytell the truth. and to me, that's a greatstep forward. charlie rose: and how wouldit affect politics? eric schmidt: well, thereare many ways. today, if you talk topoliticians, a simple story is
that in 2006, the house wentdemocratic, the senate went democratic because of a race invirginia which involve an unfortunate video on youtubeof a republican candidate losing to a democraticcandidate. charlie rose: george allen wasrunning for the senate as a republican. running for reelection and hewas campaigning and somebody in which he had a moment inwhich he reacted to somebody in the audience, and they allhad it on cell phone.
eric schmidt: and politicianshave learned from that lesson. so there's an example where thegovernment switched power, literally on the margin becauseof somebody's video and the ability touse youtube. charlie rose: and, where nationshave been trying to hide things in terms ofaccountability and said it may be spreading in acertain region. eric schmidt: and on thedemocratic side, there was another example.
there was a video of one ofthe congressional people involved in the abscam scandal,which many people have forgotten. and yet the video brought backthose memories and affected the outcome of thedemocratic race. it's an equal opportunitytechnology. the important point here isthat politicians are well aware of youtube andits phenomenon. and are more careful.
and being more careful isprobably good, because indeed, if they are going off andsaying things to small audiences and then going toanother audience and saying something very different, i wantto know that as a viewer. there are many things that youcan imagine in the future. the one i like the most is thepoliticians bs detector. where basically, google issitting there and the politician says something andyou can type it in or even maybe it listens and says well,that's true or false.
then you can decide if youwant to leave or cheer. charlie rose: well, it also hasthis ramification too, is people on the internet now whomay have information, if they know something is going onin an investigation by a journalistic organization, itcan hold them accountable too because somebody may haveinformation that some facts used in the journalist's reportwere not true because they have better informationor information that contradicts.
eric schmidt: what happensas a result is it's very difficult now to use completelyfalse statements to inflame the public. you can take the facts and youcan twist them in the way that you see fit, but your factshave to be right. and that's probably a bigimprovement in governance. charlie rose: it also is howthen-senator obama had a difficult moment during thepennsylvania primary when he went up to san francisco toraise some money, somebody was
in there with a phone andrecorded something. so mobile devices will playwhat role in the future evolution of technology? eric schmidt: they're probablythe most important of all. today, everyone here in theaudience has a mobile phone. it's the last thing youwould leave anywhere. that phone has a gps, itknows where it is. the powerful mobile phoneshave powerful browsers. they have cameras as wediscussed before.
you can do a lot with them. fast forward a few years fromnow with the content and the capability of that with a newgeneration of applications. we expect eventually that themajority of uses of the internet will be onmobile phones. mobile phone usage is growingfaster than personal computers, there are many moreof them on the order of four billion in the world. in our lifetime, the majorityof people, at least five
billion, maybe fiveand a half billion will have mobile phones. charlie rose: the exponentialgrowth in countries like china and india and emerging marketsas they're called, even though they pretty much emerged ratherwell is extraordinary. eric schmidt: in our lifetimes,we're going from almost no one being able tocommunicate to almost everyone being able to communicate. we're also going from almostno one having any kind of
information and access tolibraries to virtually everyone having accessto every piece of information in the world. that is an enormousaccomplishment for humanity. charlie rose: this brings meto some of the issues that might be relevant here. number one, in terms ofcopyright and all of that, you guys would like to have everyauthor of every book ever published made availablethrough google.
fair enough? eric schmidt: that's right, andfurthermore, we want them compensated. and we've entered into anagreement that we hope will be approved by a court of bookpublishers and authors where essentially rights holders willregister and they will get essentially a commission anda payment for the use of their work if it's printedon an electronic basis. we hope that in this model,people will be comfortable
that if people find the book,they'll buy it online either in text form or they'll go toamazon or something like and purchase the book in whichcase the author will also be happy. charlie rose: they'll put iton their kindle or their reader or something. eric schmidt: it's worth noting,by the way, that if you imagine the power of thesemobile devices over a five or ten year period, they shouldbe possible to do almost
everything that we do todaywith other means. it should be possible to readbooks very well on those devices, make it as fast asreading a magazine, it should be possible to watch televisionand watch your show routinely on these devicesat very high quality. the technology is just gettingthere and when that occurs, it's a different experiencebecause it's a personal experience. when i turn on the television,it shows the same shows that i
saw yesterday and i watched themand it doesn't know that i watched them yesterday. what a foolish television,why is it not smarter? charlie rose: what are yougoing to do about that? eric schmidt: well, in ourcase, we're building the platform that will allow thecontent people to do more targeted content. so you can imagine the mobiledevice will say, well eric, you watched this episode ofthis television show.
we'll offer you thisother one. or, didn't you forget that youalready watched that episode of charlie rose, you shouldwatch this other one because it's related to theone you liked. this personal viewing experienceis a fundamental thing that the internet cando and that companies like google can do. charlie rose: but it'salso the key to the advertising too.
in other words, that's whyyou guys got so rich. eric schmidt: of course. charlie rose: is that whenpeople, whatever they were searching for, gave a link towhat you're interested in and you could therefore pinpointproducts that might appeal to you. charlie rose: how much of itis text rather than video? eric schmidt: well today, thevast majority is text. charlie rose: 90%?
eric schmidt: 95%. those text ads that you see nearsearch results are very, very lucrative. it's a great business to be andyou'd probably say that's an understatement. charlie rose: yes, i do. eric schmidt: but the same modelworks for other things. so we're busy building, forexample, in the display ads, which are the picture and soforth, we're building much
more sophisticated and powerful ads that are immersive. you know, it's allabout narrative. when i look at your show and ilook at what you do, i see a narrative that is involved. charlie rose: i'm consciousof that every moment. eric schmidt: really? charlie rose: the story. eric schmidt: it's always abouta story and you know,
that's been true for5,000 years. it's not a new concept. charlie rose: it's a littlebit like people magazine. and henry luce once was beingcriticized because there was the people section of timemagazine was the most popular section, that's what theywent to, read more. so than they created peoplemagazine, which someone at the time said this is frivolousinformation about people and why are people so curiousabout other people?
and henry luce famously said,have you read the bible? it's all about storiesabout people. but go ahead, i interrupted. eric schmidt: i think theimportant point here is that we can get a personalexperience, it really does have a narrative and has anad associated with it. and that ad itself canhave a narrative. it can have a contest, it canhave user involvement. we believe that a highlypersonal ad has
value to the user. it makes no sense. if you show me an advertisementat home in a home that doesn't have a needfor baby products, diapers and so forth, why are youwasting your money? you should show me an ad that isrelevant to my demographic. we can do that now with thesedevices and we can do it to the person. charlie rose: sir martin sorrellis the head of the wpp
who sort of created throughacquisitions, i think made it the second largest advertisingin the world. he has a term for you guys. i think it's a combinationof a friend or enemy. frenemy. which he says, are theseguys our friends or are they our enemy? eric schmidt: when i talked tomartin, he's our friend. [laughter].
and we actually have a veryclose partnership with wpp which has worked really well. the advertising industry and theagencies are learning how to work with these new models. there's a great need forcreativity, because as part of advertising is about stories,advertising is about images, the narrative and thetools are coming. over the next few years, you'llsee very sophisticated visual advertisements.
think of them as youtube videosin one form or another that are immersive, theyget you excited about buying the product. and maybe at the end, you'll beso compelled, you will buy the product. we can sell those productsand make a lot of money. charlie rose: here is thequestion that everybody asks in technology today. not anybody at google, but ifyou do what i do and if you do
what people who have content doand if you do what youtube does, how do you monetize it? there's a huge problem. not a problem, challenge. as rahm emanuel says, wesee every crisis as an opportunity. there's a challenge to findways to monetize it. you produce content, if youmake it free, you don't generate a lot of revenue.
so what's the answer tomonetization, because it affects youtube, oneof your companies? eric schmidt: on user-generatedcontent, a lot of it is very hardto monetize. very hard to show an ad next tosome of this stuff and many advertisers would want tobe near that stuff. charlie rose: right, that'sa problem isn't it? that's a problem. eric schmidt: so there'sa total market
of monetizable things. here's a model for you. for things which are going tobe viewed by two billion people, you're going touse advertisements. and you'l use, in the case ofyoutube, you'll use videos around the side, you'lluse ads at the bottom. you'll do 15 second pre-roll orpost-roll and all of those experiments are beingtried at youtube. i would say youtube's
monetization of that is halfway. we're not where we need to be,but we're much farther along than we were last year. charlie rose: ok. take social networks likefacebook and myspace. they have the same problem. eric schmidt: absolutely. charlie rose: argument is madethat the people who are on facebook are interested in whattheir friends are doing,
they're not interested in adsbecause they're not searching for products or information. eric schmidt: but that deniesthe fundamental progress of innovation. there absolutely will besolutions for that, that we just haven't inventedthem yet. we're still waiting for the20% timers to come up with these insights. charlie rose: you've got somegoogle boys and girls out
there working on thisas we speak. eric schmidt: you can't sort oftell them, it has to occur naturally through thebottom up process. so we're waiting, but we knowit will come because the amount of time being spent onthat is so significant that we know we can use that time forsome form of entertainment, advertising, some kind ofimmersive experience. another way to thinkabout content. i said if your audience is twobillion, you don't use
advertising. charlie rose: mine's a littleless than that. eric schmidt: in a smalleraudience, say some number, 20 million kind of an audience, twomillion audience, you can imagine that you'll havemicropayments, not advertising, where you'llpay $0.01, $0.03, $0.05, for a view. those tools and techniques arebeing developed now in the industry and i think are likelyto be successful.
and then for highly, highly,specialized, that is knowledge workers who are highly paidand they have to have this very special report, they'll paybig bucks and they'll use the traditional subscriptionmethod. charlie rose: before we talkabout five years from now and then 25 years from now, let mejust raise a couple of points. one, google earth. how is it being used andare people that we don't like using it?
eric schmidt: well i'm surethere are people we don't like using it to the generalanswer-- charlie rose: because rememberthere was a famous incident of dick cheney sorted wanted itwiped off of because of the vice presidential residence. isn't that right? eric schmidt: mm hm. charlie rose: did you guysat google do something? eric schmidt: well in fact,our supplier did it.
but in any case, we havepictures back of where the residence is. charlie rose: youcouldn't see it. what did you get, a littleblank space? eric schmidt: it was alittle covered up. the problem i have with thesearguments is that everyone knows where the vice president'sresidence is. charlie rose: and if you don'tknow, you can find out. eric schmidt: it's on the mapswhen you buy them in
washington. vice president's residence,it's called the naval observatory. look it up. where is the cia? there's the addressin the phone book. charlie rose: it's in langley. yes. eric schmidt: langley,it's in the movies.
there's a nice pictureof driving into it. so the real question is, whatinformation is broadly available to evil people? and answer unfortunately, is,that virtually all of the information, any information wehave is already available to the evil people asbest we can tell. and we're obviously trying toencourage that, but the fact of the matter is that physicalmaps are available to evil people and so forth and so on.
so we try very hard not toshow stuff that's not generally available. charlie rose: ok, but speakingof stuff that's generally available-- eric schmidt: just on maps, ido want to emphasize that we've seen an explosion in theuse of google maps and google earth for education. the earth is a special place. it is our home and it's whywe're all here and the ability
to see what's really going onon the earth, both the good stuff and the bad stuff at thelevel that you can, it's phenomenal. not only do we have googleearth, we can see changes from climate change isthe obvious one. people are finding things likemeteorite impact craters and things like that. last year, we introducedsomething called google sky which will show from the pointyou are on google earth with
the sky looks like. it's a tremendousteaching tool. a few weeks, ago we announcedgoogle ocean, and you can actually start from any of thecoasts and go right under the water and see what the-- charlie rose: topography is? eric schmidt: it'sunbelievable. you need google earthversion five beta. charlie rose: can yousee the fish?
eric schmidt: yes, wehave fake fish. we've drawn them in. and in fact, you can findshipwrecks and so forth. and we got the information--this is an example-- where we got bathymetric informationfrom the us navy. they were happy to give it tohelp people understand the role of the oceans. charlie rose: is there a lot ofcooperation between google and the media--
i mean, not the media,the military. eric schmidt: there is. charlie rose: how are theyusing you or vice versa? eric schmidt: well theygive us stuff that's publicly available. we're careful not to doanything beyond that. but i think that many, many,people have had all of these databases of generallyinteresting information that we can now make availablethrough
things like google earth. charlie rose: just to backfor a moment, with respect to cell phone. i saw bin laden actually caughtup to the idea that they were tracing some stuffbecause his cell phone was on and then they announced it andthe administration at that time got very upset because theysaid by announcing it in a newspaper, you showed thatthey were doing that. and so all of a sudden,it went dark and you
couldn't trace it. in addition to that, a numberof the people, to read the stories of how they capturedsome of these al-qaeda operatives, it was becauseof cell phones. even though they were smartenough and knew enough and had enough information, only to turnthem on for a brief few seconds, they were ableto trace them down. now, i want to go to-- eric schmidt: i should saythat, remember that the
technology is neutral. technology can be usedfor good or evil. charlie rose: andeven atheistic. eric schmidt: yes, of course. and the important thing is thatthis new generation of technology-- charlie rose: theologyis what i mean. eric schmidt: it doesnot have a theology. so this new technology reallycan be used for good or evil
and in a situation where aterrorist or so forth is some of this technology, there areobvious things that the smartest people in the worldworking on the good side could do to find them, followit and so forth. so would not give up on yourfinding the cell phone sites. there are many other things thatwe could do to find them. charlie rose: now, speakto gps in terms of what is going on. and what you guys at googleare thinking about.
because there is this idea thatthey you want us to know where everybody isall the time. so you can, not you, butyou know what i mean. eric schmidt: the nextgeneration, i'm not sure about my generation, but the the nextgeneration is infinitely more social online. charlie rose: right. and infinitely less private. eric schmidt: yes,as evidenced by
their facebook pictures. eric schmidt: and [laughter]-- by the way, those pictures willbe around when they're running for president. charlie rose: yes, indeed. and we haven't quite settledwho owns them, either, have though facebook-- eric schmidt: it won't matterwho owns them, trust me. when they get out, it's goingto be a problem when they're
running for office. charlie rose: and not tospeak of your emails. and the fact of the matter isthat we've given up something in terms of privacy in returnfor these other things and i think that is societal of changethat we have to admit is occurring, at least amongyounger generations. charlie rose: any problemwith this? could it go too far? eric schmidt: of course itcould go too far, and the
trick is that people shouldhave control over what information they publish. as long as the answer is thati chose to make a mess of of myself with this picture,then it's fine. the issue is when somebodyelse does it. charlie rose: it stuns mewhat people will do for 15 minutes of fame. eric schmidt: well, but that'stheir choice and they have to live with the consequencesof it.
but the fact of the matter isthat it's now possible, for example, we have a productcalled google latitude which runs on any of your mobilebrowsers using gps which will essentially tell everyoneyou wish where you are. you can decide the level ofaccuracy and also broadly you publish it. so you can say only to threepeople and you can tell them accurately, you can also sayonly to these three people and you could tell them, ohi'm in the state of
new jersey or whatever. charlie rose: i get it. eric schmidt: and that notionof control is fundamental to the evolution of theseprivacy-based solutions. charlie rose: tease me aboutwhat's on the edge. what's exciting about wherewe're going in terms of what google and other technologycompanies will be able to do for us or enable us. eric schmidt: google is firstand foremost a search engine
and we like to think of theperson as the search. eric schmidt: so when somebodytypes something in today, they're really typing in thecontext of their history, their background, what theyknow, their belief systems and so forth. and if they give us permission,we can use some of that to give them moreaccurate information. so now let's imagine, forpurposes of argument, a situation where you're walkingdown the street and it's with
your mobile deviceand your gps. so why can't my phone generatethe searches that i should have been asking. it knows what i care about,i'm a fan of history. when i walk down the streetsof new york, why doesn't it tell me the history of everybuilding so that i don't have to bother to type, ican just see it. imagine the situation where theperson, the gps, the phone and this constant searchingcreates a narrative stream.
it's highly personal andhighly entertaining. entertain me. charlie rose: exactly, can youimagine circumstances in which i would somehow be able toconnect to the idea that i was going to be talking to ericschmidt and so they would provide me with lots ofinteresting questions. eric schmidt: well, yes. [laugter] in fact, that we can almostdo that today.
charlie rose: likewhere were you. eric schmidt: and wecan do that almost now with your calendar. because we know who you'remeeting and if your calendars is inside of google, it shouldeventually be possible for us to generate the questions foreach of your meetings. charlie rose: should beand will be, when? eric schmidt: should be. engineers are workingon it now.
charlie rose: but so gmail. suppose i use gmail. you guys can see allof my gmails. eric schmidt: but wedon't by practice. charlie rose: well, yeah, butyou know what the argument is about that. eric schmidt: we haverules charlie. charlie rose: supposeyou didn't like me. eric schmidt: even if wedon't like you, we
won't violate our rules. charlie rose: so what, soyou're saying trust us? trust us? eric schmidt: yes. charlie rose: that's it. we're not going tosneak a look. eric schmidt: we donot sneak a look. charlie rose: so when barackobama was running for president and he had gmailaccount, i don't know whether
he did or not, nobodywas saying, hm. eric schmidt: to our knowledge,no one did it and if they had they wouldhave been fired. charlie rose: immediately. eric schmidt: and it's alsopossible that they would have been guilty of federal laws,had they broken into that account using a falsepassword. charlie rose: really. eric schmidt: the laws arevery strict about this.
charlie rose: so if somebodygets into account without using the password, they maybe guilty of a crime. eric schmidt: they'relikely to guilty. charlie rose: before we leavethe notion of the time today, a contemporary time,the digital divide. where are we and whereshould we be and why aren't we there now? eric schmidt: the good news isthat we work in a technology where the pricesare improving.
it's a constant pricereduction business. i have no idea, by the way, howthese harvard companies make any money at all. prices are so low now. but the corollary benefit isthe explosion in digital devices where people who couldnever have imagined having access to these things10 or 20 years ago. the obvious example being in thegaming industry where the game devices are as powerful asa personal computers today.
the real story is going to beon the mobile phones to come back to that. because everyone getsa mobile phone. and even in the third world, andthat's the worst example of visual divide, you can buildnetworks where people used sms, where are theseshort messages, the 160-character messages, toactually do searches and queries and we do thatin those markets. and if you're a farmer whosedepending on the price, the
weather forecast, that query maydetermine whether you go bankrupt or not withyour farm. charlie rose: ok, butwhere is that? do they have access to that? eric schmidt: it is absolutelyworking today. charlie rose: if they have amobile phone and more people buy mobile forms and sotherefore, more farmers know when it's going to rain. eric schmidt: there are roughlya billion more mobile
phones coming online inthe next three to three and a half years. that extra billion voices arevoices we have never heard in languages we don't speak, wehave no idea what they're going to tell us, but they'regoing to be heard. i think it's great. charlie rose: ok, but thatraises the interesting question about whatlanguage we use. i mean, does it depend?
i mean, is englishthe standard? is chinese going to bethe standard in 2050. eric schmidt: well, englishappears to be the global language, certainly of commerceand intellectual. on the internet, chinese isgrowing more quickly as language than english. chinese and any mandarinspecifically, over english. charlie rose: why is that? just because there area lot of chinese?
eric schmidt: just becauseof the number. there are many chinesewith lots more to go. charlie rose: and increasingly,more middle class who has accessto technology. eric schmidt: they're on theorder of 250 million users in china of the internet, whichis more than the number of users we have united statestoday and that's an important milestone. they have many, many, hundredsof millions to go.
there about 500 million mobilephone users in china with again, many more chinesepeople to come. charlie rose: and the rate ofgrowth is extraordinary. charlie rose: in this audienceof people who are involved in the process in education andlearning, is technology doing all it can to help us? is technology on thecutting edge? is technology deliveringits promise? eric schmidt: let me giveyou the simple case.
charlie rose: and we want. eric schmidt: [applause] let me give you the simplecase and, i think, the challenging case. the simple case is that allthese new technologies allow you to organize your classroomaround community learning. so children can do this today,build up a small web site, we have a product called sitesthat does this, there are others where you basically builda knowledge domain and
everybody can contribute. you have a document, everyonecan collectively edit it and so forth, and you figure outwho did all the work. a lot of learning today andwatching teachers teach is they try to do it in groups. we don't really see it asindividuals anymore, and it starts literallyin first grade. so that's likely the majorityof use today is really community based, using images,searches and so forth.
all of which, we're happyto do at google. to me the real question is, howdoes the ability to have all the world's information infront of you all the time change education? when i was 13-- and i grew up in virginia-- i was required to memorize the52 cities that were the capital cities of each countyin the state of virginia, which i mastered aftera lot of work.
today, of course, there's anice table in google that tells me all that, and i don'tknow why i'd have to memorize all that. charlie rose: i could giveyou a test on this. eric schmidt: so why did i haveto memorize all that? instead, what they should havedone is they should have taught me how tosearch for it. i have a friend who is a venturecapitalist, bill joy, who described how he doesventure capital is he uses
google to search forall the new ideas. he reads the papers, so hefigures out what the search query is, he reads the paper andhe calls the people to say what's new, what's innovative. charlie rose: wait, thisis important to me. he looks at the papers, hegoes online and looks at newspapers or he reads them? eric schmidt: no, he startsoff with a search. i'm interested inhydrodynamics.
and he learns by digging, byrepetitive searching, until he finds the papers thatare authoritative. he looks for who the authorsare and he calls the author and these are people noone ever calls, so the return his call. and that's how he learns. so rather than having atextbook, he starts with a search on an idea. the combination of wikipedia,which is a remarkable
achievement for humanity, justphenomenal, and search engines like google, mean that you canliterally get it all if you're willing to be motivated. so my idea about school wouldbe that you would sit there with however many students youhave and you'd say, students, i'm going to give you aset of search terms to get started with. and we're going to see whichof you learn the most. and what would happen, ofcourse, is about a third--
the ones in the back rowthat are asleep-- are going to wait for theother two thirds. and out of the othertwo thirds, some of them will do it great. some will do it poorly. and then you'd havea conversation among all of them. it's a complete inversion ofthe textbook model and of course, you could supplementit with a textbook for the
people who are uncomfortableor not creative in that regard. charlie rose: what yousaid is you could. are these kinds of things beingtranslated to the people who are on the frontline of education? the teachers and the principalsand the schools. eric schmidt: i've met theeducators who are doing this. i was giving you theextreme example. the most importantaccomplishment i've seen in
education has been thedevelopment of these community sites around topic areas. so some of the best teachers inphysics and chemistry and so forth get together and theyput together lessons ostensibly as an online lessonplan, but it's really to get a compendium of information, wehave a lot of evidence that committed people, professionalslike people here in the audience, who workcollaboratively across all the united states, produced aenormously valuable product.
and that product can serveas the basis for the next revision of textbooks,the next revision of certification. and i think it's wonderful. charlie rose: let's lookfive years from now. all of the things we've beentalking about today are mostly here today. where's it all going? what's exciting aboutwhere we will be?
eric schmidt: let'sdo a little math. five years from now, moore'slaw, doubling every 18 months, means a factor of 10 ineverything you have today. charlie rose: you needto explain that a little bit more. gordon moore created thislaw which said-- eric schmidt: there's a lawcalled moore's law, which is true today. charlie rose: which hasbeen true since he
originated the idea. we thought a new calculationmight step forward, but it did not. eric schmidt: not today. it has to do with the physicsof transistors and semiconductors and basically,moore's law says that you can double the density or the numberof things that are on a computer chip every 18 months. so a rough rule means that thecomputer either gets twice as
fast or half the price overan 18 month period. usually the vendors prefer theyget twice as fast and not fall half the price becauseof the revenue implications of that. but that's why these phonesthat you have had more computer power than the entirenasa space program used in launching us to the moon. all of the computersthat they had. it's a phenomenal, phenomenal,achievement.
it's not slowing down. all of the evidence aboutmoore's law says that will go on for another 10 to 15 years. eventually, we run into problemswith photolithography and literally thespeed of light. but we're not quite there yet. so for the next 10 or 15 years,you'll see this kind of compound benefit. i like to think ofit this way.
if you figure that out, thatmeans that in five years it will be 10 times cheaperor faster. in 10 years, by the way, that's100 times cheaper or faster and in 15 years,it's a thousand times cheaper or faster. so unless something changes,in 15 years, i have a grandson, he'll be18 in 15 years. he will have all of the world'sinformation, every video, every movie and so forthon a single hard drive.
if he started watchingit, he cannot finish watching it in 85 years. he'll always be frustrated. charlie rose: it's amazing. what else is happeningin five years? this is has to do with thatfield that you're really in, which is all the world'sinformation. eric schmidt: there are manythings that we can do with the corpus of information that'sbeing gathered.
we were talking about latitudeand privacy and so forth, but there are many positivethings that we can do. the most interesting one thatwe've recently done is called flu trends. charlie rose: flu trendsin terms of worldwide flu, influenza. eric schmidt: there's a lot ofevidence and concern about a pandemic that might occur,similar to the 1918 bird flu epidemic that killed--
charlie rose: 50 million-- eric schmidt: a proportionatelyhuge number if it were today. and because people, when theyhave a problem, search for something, we can detectuncommon searches as a blip. and we can note that. in our case, we built a systemwhich took anonymized searches, so you couldn't figureout exactly who it was, and that's important.
and we could get six monthsahead of the other reporting mechanisms, and we couldidentify the outbreak. many people believe that thisdevice can save 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 lives every yearjust because the health care providers can get earlierand contain the outbreak. it's an example of collectiveintelligence, of which there are many, many more. charlie rose: well, justthink about this. mapping the human genome.
they sort of got mostly there byi think it was right around 2000, 2001, it mayhave been 19. clinton had it at the whitehouse and he left in 2000, so it may have been in 1999. right around there. and they're just beginningto have it pay off. because they've been mapping it,but that was done because technology enabled them tocompress the amount of time to do it and now they're doingremarkable stuff in terms of
technology. and companies can personalizeit, so rather than paying, it's been compressed so you canpay $1,000 soon and know everything you may want to knowand may not want to know. but if you want to know it, itwill inform you about those diseases that you have a geneticpredisposition to and maybe there are things thatyou can do even though you have a predisposition that willeither make your life longer or not.
other people say, i worry aboutthat, because in the hands of the insurancecompanies, that might not be so fine. eric schmidt: but everyone isworried about everything. why don't we get optimisticfor change? eric schmidt: let's try tofigure out a way to use this to solve some problem. let me give you an example. the wikipedia model hasbeen so successful.
why don't we have all thesmartest doctors organize a corpus, a public corpus ofmedical information that combines everything everybodyknows about medical practice in one place? a place where you can--again this would have to be a public database-- where you'd keep pouringexperiential data and then you could build computer systems. charlie rose: so you havehave all your cases,
everything you ever need. eric schmidt: again,anonymized so it's appropriately legaland all of that. and get it in one placeso that people can begin to mine the data. they can actually begin tofigure out what the disease trends are. what are the realhealth trends? and this is not a knock onexisting providers that do it,
they just don't havethe scale. we are strong when we havethousands of people working in parallel to solve a reallyimportant problem. i would tell you, by the way,that if you look at the problems that the society hashit over the last thousand years, start with the plague,all of the things that nearly destroyed society, we overcamethem through technology and people figured out new ways,whether it was medicine, governance, to overcome them.
so let's be positive about it. we can work those issues. there's always a wayto handle the objections if it's important. do we need anything in termsof presidential initiative, presidential leadership, a czaror anything in order that we get on with it? eric schmidt: well, we neededthe stimulus package. because the stimulus packagehad, among other things, $20
dollars of science funding,science and education funding to essentially to movethe ball forward. one of the things abouteconomics is everyone assumes that economics are static. real wealth is created bybusinesses, not by financial engineering and by businessesthat build new products that solve new problems. in american jobs, and this isprimarily in an american stimulus package, you need tobe high paying for a reason.
we're losing out to low costmanufacturing economies. but we have the best scientists,the best innovators, the best educationalsystem and it should pay off. and what it pays offis innovation, new products that pay well. charlie rose: how is allthis changing us? i moderated a seminar orpanel at the world science summit last year.
the topic was, what itmeans to be human. some say that the human genomehas made us understand what it means to be human. and it's also made us understandthat in terms of so many things that people mighthave cited as differences, that our genetic code wasessentially the same. but we're always in questof what it is that means to be human. how is all of this helpingus understand that?
eric schmidt: it certainly mademe understand why life is so precious. computers and the things thatwe do do not replicate the feelings, the emotions, theexcitement, the images, the smell of bread on a parismorning sort of thing. all of those thingsare uniquely human and uniquely special. the technology has madeus closer together. it has also made usmore stressed.
if you look at the history oftechnology over a couple hundred years, it's all abouttime compression and making the globe smaller. it's had positive effects, allthe ones that we know. we're much less likely to havethe kind of terrible misunderstandings that led toworld war i, for example. think about it in the cubanmissile crisis. there was literally a redphone that they actually installed over miscommunicationover a
nuclear weapon and there wasone submarine in the cuban missile crisis that theycouldn't find and they were worried was about to launcha nuclear weapon. think about the damagethat that would have done to humanity. today that's not going to happenbecause of, among other things, cell phones. so we benefit from thisinterconnectedness. we have to learn as a societywhat it means to be
interconnected all the time. it means, for example, that noteverything is as important as everything else. since i have access to everycrisis in the world, because it's always blaring at me oncable television, that doesn't mean i have to worry about everyone of them this is also known as knowing wherethe off button is. charlie rose: you know wherethe off button is? eric schmidt: you have to.
charlie rose: do you have anyadvice for us in parenting? eric schmidt: children aredifferent from adults in a lot of ways, and the most importantthing i worry about today about children-- and we all know how much morequickly they grow up-- is that as young minds-- charlie rose: and how quicklythey adjust to technology. eric schmidt: adjustto technology. i worry that the level ofinterrupt, the sort of
overwhelming repetitiveinformation, and especially stressful information, is, infact, affecting cognition. it is, in fact, affectingdeeper thinking. i still believe that sittingdown and reading a book is the best way to reallylearn something. i worry that we're losing that,and i think that with an educator audience, it'simportant that we start with reading. if you look at all of the iqtesting, all of the tracking
testing, its early reading withyoung parents literally with small children that reallymake the difference. charlie rose: ok, but iwould add to that also the ability to write. has technology made us read lessbut write more because of emails and all thatkind of stuff? eric schmidt: remember, there's quality versus quantity. the good news is that all theevidence is that the symbolic
reasoning that comes fromplaying computer games, the kind of navigational queries,the example i used where go search for something, reallydoes develop the cognitive capability. literally the ability to thinkin more abstract terms, and that's going to be moreimportant as the world gets more complicated. think about the challengesthat someone being born today will face.
literally, their birthdayis this calendar year. think about the kind of issuesthey'll face in a world which is a thousand times faster,a thousand times more interconnected when they're15, 20 years from now. charlie rose: that that makesme leap to this thing. i'm fascinated by what theworld look like in 2025. it's one quarter of this centurythat we're in now. if you go to the cia website,the cia, they do two things. one, they spy on people and theycollect data, sometimes
in the same time. but that's what they do. that's the businessthey're in. and sometimes theyget it right, sometimes they get it wrong. but they on their web site, youcan get the whole series and talk about it in televisioninterviews with people like me in terms oflooking forward, and they say a whole lot of interestingthings.
they they say, for example, itis more likely in the next 25 years, in the next 16 years,that we'll have some kind of nuclear exchange. it is more likely that therewill be a water shortage, a water scarcity, that will causeterritorial battles. it is more likely that therewill be a food scarcity. these are all things that we'renot even talking about in the budget. eric schmidt: that's becausethe budget was organized
around the next two years,not is the next 20 years. but if you look at the threatsto humanity, the two significant threats-- charlie rose: i didn't evenmention nuclear proliferation. eric schmidt: what are thethings that could kill a million people, 10 millionpeople, 100 million people, well the nuclear issues, someform of nuclear conflict, a nuclear accident is one. and the other one isclimate change.
and climate change, of course,is many things including rising sea levels. the shift in where rain fallsand the associated water sheds, the loss of the himalayanglacier and so forth, all affect a number ofpeople that is staggering. as a person involved ininformation, what can we do to help? we can get this message out. we can get the human societyto understand
how serious the threat. when you fly over thoseglaciers, remember someone drinks that water. if they don't get it, they willriot or they will die or there will be a war. and similarly, for theirpredecessors who worked so hard for nuclearproliferation. and i would think twice wheni hear somebody in this testosterone rage saying,i'm going to do this,
i'm going to do that. let's have some nuance here. it's possible to really destroythe great things that we've built here on earthrelatively quickly in these two areas. that's the bad news, the goodnews is there are so many other areas where thingswill be so much better. in medicine, the deploymentsthat they've made of artificial limbs and eventually,naturally grown
through stem cells and others,replacement parts will allow a much better life or at least acertain a longer life compared to what we have today. in terms of knowledge, as i saidbefore, we'll have every piece of information in front ofyou and by the way, it will be in every language because inthat time period we'll have automatic translation. it'll be possible for you totext to your friend and not be able to speak to them in personbecause we'll be able
to automatically translate thetext from your language to their language. we'll be able to take all ofyour shows and automatically translate them. plus, they'll all be searchable,so we can do it in historical time as well. google recently brought out botha history search and also on google earth, a view ofhistory so you can go back to your favorite placesand watch the
pictures of how they evolved. it's amazing what we cando with all of this new information. charlie rose: so here'sthe question. many people write books now inwhich they talk about with the economic crisis, the changingworld order, a flat world, that america will not havethe same place it did in the 20th century. a, you got a degree atprinceton, went out to
berkeley and got a phdin computer sciences. i think. it's mathematics or something. that that we are not necessarilygoing to lead the revolution that will deliverthese things, is that of concern to you or do youaccept the premise? eric schmidt: if you're a personwho believes it america is the only country and americais always right, i have news for you, it's notgoing to be true in the future
because the chinese and theindians and the sum of the europeans will have their ownstate of what's right and what they think the future is. charlie rose: we're lookingto a shared world. eric schmidt: we're moving intoa world where you have to actually talk to them and inthe case of [applause] a sole superpower model, it'seasy to say american values, we're right, you're wrongand take over other people's culture.
that's not goingto be possible. where america will be strongest,and where i think we should be, we will be, andit matters the most, will be in innovation. charlie rose: how doyou know that? eric schmidt: i know thatbecause i talk to the people who are running ouruniversities. i talk to the students. we hire the best students.
they are going to go off and dothese amazing things that you and i are talking about. charlie rose: why do you assumethat the best students are going to be american orwhy do you assume that the chinese or the indians orrussians, or wherever they come from, are necessarily goingto want to come here? eric schmidt: because theychoose to come here right now. charlie rose: ah, justto accept it-- eric schmidt: they're votingwith their feet.
charlie rose: ah, but,no, no, no, no, wait. because of immigration policiesand other things, they're all not a, beingallowed to stay here. eric schmidt: well, that'sa brilliant strategy. take the best people, hire themin american universities and kick them outof our country. charlie rose: it happens. eric schmidt: it's shocking. eric schmidt: i know.
we're fighting against it. charlie rose: butit's an issue in congress now as a priority. but my point is that we can'tassume, or can we, that we have some luck on this part? eric schmidt: it turns out,it's harder to think to replicate the americaneducational system. charlie rose: ah, that'swhere i'm going. eric schmidt: the model thatwe have about faculty,
graduate students, innovation,all the things we talked about, many countriesare trying. it takes 50 years toreplicate that, and maybe a different culture. so we remain, we america, remainby far the place of choice for education,particularly higher education. charlie rose: so you'reoptimistic about it. and we should give some credit,not just to the educators and the students, butalso the government, who
has a historic role. maybe a third of the fundingfor american universities comes from one form or anotherof federal and state grants. we also have the history ofstate colleges, state universities and so forthand so on, which is very, very powerful. charlie rose: as i said earlierin introducing you, you're on an economic advisory,whatever it is down there, council, bunch ofbusinessmen and other people
and women in finance or advisingthe president, right? what is it you do? what's your advice? eric schmidt: this president is,and i'm a public supporter of president obama, asyou know, is very, very good at listening. he organizes groups, he sort ofgets everybody to talk, he synthesizes very,very, quickly. so i and others have campaignedhard for quick
action to deal with the economiccrisis with a bias in favor of renewable energy,technology innovation, investing in the infrastructureof america, which is largely dependenton focus and of course on education. charlie rose: healthcare, too. eric schmidt: healthcare,of course. i'm pleased to say that thestimulus package had about two thirds of the money in thepackage went for those kinds
of areas, along with the statesand local governments which were in terriblesituations and one third to tax cuts, which was aboutthe right balance. so we're now runningthat experiment. that's in place, and we needconfidence quickly. i would tell you that thebusiness situation in america right now is reallyquite dire. you see increasing bad news,even today, bad news, there's no end in sight.
charlie rose: employmentis up. eric schmidt: unemployment'sup. we're not at the bottom hereand the quicker we can get through this, the quicker wecan get to the other side. i do believe that the recovery,when it occurs, will be led by the kind of businessesthat we're highlighting now. the ones that solvea new problem. i, for example, believe thatgreen energy, sort of
rebuilding the energyinfrastructure of america is a great project. it's a great project for thispresident, who can then use that to reduce our dependenceupon foreign oil, increase american jobs, right? and build a whole set ofexport-oriented industries and oh, by the way, help materiallysolve the climate change issue whichis very serious. charlie rose: so, we'llcome through this?
eric schmidt: oh, absolutely. one of the things is if you havea choice between being in america and being in the othercountries in a global slowdown, you'd muchrather be here. although it's more painful,you'll get out faster. charlie rose: i havea question. it is this notion, i was justthinking about this. are people in technologydifferent? charlie rose: theyare, what is it?
eric schmidt: technologists,as a group tend to be more analytical, more data driven,more personally liberal, more willing to tolerate thedifferences among people, more global in their focus and ithink that's across all political parties. people in technology believethat you can create whole new businesses. in my dealings with otherbusinesses, they often seem to be locked in a paradigm thatwas given to them by their
grandfather. this is the economic structure,this is the industrial structure, this ishow it's always been done. technologists as a group believethat you can literally change the world fromtechnology. charlie rose: it's a pleasure tohave you here in new york. thank you very much. eric schmidt: thank youvery much charlie. charlie rose: eric schmidt,the ceo of google.
eric schmidt: thank you. charlie rose: for those of youat home, thank you for joining us this evening. this hour, our conversationwith eric schmidt. thank you very muchand good night.
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