Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Larry Brilliant

I am going to borrow this mike until my mine comes on and first of all why don't you join me thanking Larry and Sergey for welcoming us here on Google. As you know Google has identified three very large problems. Global poverty, global public health and climate crisis and they are approaching these three problems with a strategy that combines innovation, policy advocacy, and investment. So it's a three pronged strategy and the use of capturing of information technology and search to educate public. And I think that publicly one could argue that greatest strength comes from the capacity to harness the talents Google Earth, harness the tools that Google got, to inform and engage the public and I say that only because they use this to identify and that their solutions are going to be largely the aggregate effect of millions of individual choices as well as the decisions the governments make. And so informing those choices will be all important. So what we are going to do is talk a little about the values that guide Google, that guide dot org as well as their views of how to conceptualize these issues and how to apply information technology and other means to addressing them. And I am just hoping that this mike is now working, it is. Thank you Sergey, Sergey I am going to open with you and just ask you about the genesis at first of "Do No Evil". Is that the way to say this, "Do No Evil"? "Do No Evil", a lot of people misinterpret that. They miss the first and second person subject because the first is not the we are not towards you, don't be evil. We are speaking to the rest of you. Well to enforce this concept we now have Larry tell them about the laser. No I am joking. I know you are all worried. Don't be evil was originally written down, I believe by our employee Amit Patel and it was at the time when we first hired business people at Google. I have hired a about a dozen employees or so. And he was concerned. He was one of our early engineers. But it serves now as a reminder to all of our employees, that's actually the you or the subject of the sentence is and to consider the consequences of the actions. But after all I realized that it was wrong, it was a mistake. It should really say, not "don't be evil", but "be good" because you know, we can be very careful about the of the small consequences of everything we do and trying to make sure that you know there are not evil but ultimately we are in a position where we do have a lot of resources, a lot of unique opportunities and it wouldn't be stepping even beyond that to say well, not should you not be evil but you should really take advantage of the opportunity, you have to do good. And that's basically the genesis of google.org and that's what we are tying to learn from all of you, how we can best achieve that goal. Well, if your core mission Larry Page is to provide usable information and you are translating that information into the languages of the developing world, what is the potential economic development impact? What is the impact in potentially combating poverty, simply in that core mission? Well, I think one of the things we have been really excited about is Automatic Transmission Technology and we have a team now that's doing translation of the best, for example Arabic to English translation, in the world. It's done by machine not by people. And you can use that now. And I think we think that those kinds of things can have a really big impact because for people you know, who only speak Arabic or something like that, their view of world is quite different may be than our view of the world. And having that translation can really help about; and you know being able to search other information and get access to wider ideas, things, and I think that's true for very many of the places that are developing, I mean they have very small amounts of information, very small amounts of books and so on. And for them to get access to sort of all the information the world even if someone imperfectly translated is still a huge, huge boon. And I think we can really start to do that. They 2003, I think it was was when the Arab Development Report was released and one of the findings of it - Arabic speaking world was truly isolated because of the lack of translations of scientific texts, of great classics, of a variety of works. Larry Brilliant, how important is this to reversing that trend? Well, first of all I am sorry that we have two Larrys because I know it makes it harder for you to -. There is nothing I could possibly say that wouldn't get me into trouble. So well I really don't know the answer of that question. I know that in the past few weeks we have been fortunate to meet with a lot of the politicians from Rwanda, Tanzania the Presidents of both those countries and Larry and I were just talking that it is remarkable that when you speak to them the first thing they say is they want jobs. It isn't that they want more information, its not that they want hand outs, it not that they want more foreign aid, they don't want model millennium villages, they don't want demonstration projects, they don't want foundation money they want jobs. And that is a clear cut message I think for all of us as we look through the world around us. And you just look at the trajectory of growth and the trajectory of change and you can use words like democratization and but really what makes the country better is a more fair distribution of resources, a chance for people to get out of the cycle of the poverty and that translates into jobs. Yeah. Can I add something about too, actually I was really amazed on I had this simple goal for Google, you know we have about 10,000 employees now and more than that. And I said, well it seems like we should have one in every country. You know 10,000 peoples is lot of people, you know and Google is available in over a hundred languages and we are used in every country in the world. May be there are a few exceptions. And where they don't have an internet at all but I think that's pretty simple goal and I set out to do it and you know sort of six months later, our lawyers come back and they say, well we can't actually do that because of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, they are going to have huge risks to the company even if you have one employee there. And and so on and you know I think; you know after a year or so, people worked truly hard on it and we have actually got people, may be in 20 or 30 weird countries. And those countries are expanding and they have been tremendously useful. I mean you can imagine a company with our footprints you know places, you know like Egypt or something like that which might not be on the list of hi-tech companies where they would have offices, you know there is a lot of people is growing on Egypt and you know, they want to talk to the press, wants to talk to us and you know things need to happen. And it was really a wakeup call for me about how hard it is for multinationals, which have been very successful in doing a lot of business in the world, to really do business in some places where you wouldn't normally go; Ghana or the Republic of Georgia, place where we talked to the the government there. And those places just simply don't have any jobs at all. And they would have a lot more jobs if it were easier for companies to go in. And there is not lack of smart people in a lot of these places. So that was I just think of interesting sort of structural issue I wasn't really aware of. You know, and I am not saying it's bad, they were trying to reduce corruption and that's obviously huge issue. But I think that that has had unintended consequences and a lot of business people you know, aren't willing to take the risks that are necessary to operate in some of these places. And I think that's a loss for those places. Yeah. We were actually talking of it at the dinner table about the way businesses have in fact contributed to transparency and and coping with the corruption problem in part because the extractive industries got together, Shell, BP and and others and led an effort that involved posting publicly any any transfer of funds to any government official so that bribery couldn't happen or if it did it was known to the public. And so there is a very positive role that can be played if you are already there. And your problem is just in getting there. Larry Brilliant, if you are talking about generating jobs, a big part of this three days is going to be focused on the whole question of building what's called the SME sector, the Small and Medium Enterprise sector. Everything from mom and pop stores to factories, to larger businesses how important is that as a strategy and is this the kind of investment strategy that makes sense for - philanthropically? Its huge, it's absolutely huge. You know we are doing a number of things, some are small pilot projects, others are kind of learning initiatives and some are big dreams as you might imagine. Let me just ask the question, how many people here are working in Africa or India at all if you would raise your hands? Of those how many are working in or interested in working in job creation? It's almost I don't know if its 80 percent, but it's a high percentage. And it's almost a synonym of economic development and economic job creation. I must say, we worked with TechnoServe and I think Bruce is here some place, are you here Bruce? I mean Bruce is they are in the back, with TechnoServe in Ghana and with Rachel Paine if Rachel's here who did just a wonderful job. They created a business planning contest. And I was skeptical at first. I mean there are so many business planning contest at Stanford and we are all asked to come and judge them and you know, they become really a kind of an academic exercise and no body is going to take that plan and other than may be use it to get the next job. But in Ghana it wasn't like that at all. What Bruce and his team did was they spent almost a year planning for it. They went every corner of Ghana. They dealt with every religious community, every language community, every geographic area, especially with women and in the end I think there were seven hundred plans, business plans that they got, out of which they found 10 winners, three different categories, the top three categories winners will be and no surprise to anybody here, were all women and each of these entrepreneurs received a $25,000 prize and on top of that they received may be $100,000 worth of mentoring and goods and services. The top winner is coming to Tanzania, the Ted Global award. This was an amazing event and why I say it was a transformative event because how can $10,000-$25,000 grants be transformative for a country, it can't be. But one of the investment bankers in Ghana who had trained with Morgan Stanley in New York came back to Ghana, he saw that emerging talent that was invisible to him before and he started a bank and he has put $2 million now into venture only to be used for the people who have participated or won that business planning contest. Now I may have my facts wrong on that, but there is no he said, I don't have facts wrong on that, thank you very much. So the net result was a weird idea of a business planning contest that was executed properly, evoked a feeling of hope in an entire country and now there is capital chasing deals, which is what you want. Capital chasing deals is better for a country than deals chasing capital. And so it's a really great success. So that's one a SME answer. I know Alan Patricof is here with a really great idea in SME fund and there is a lot of people here who are thinking about it, Tim Wirth is here, there is a great number of ideas in this space right now and I I really encourage people who are interested to find each other, talk about it and compare notes because this is one of the most important things we can do together as a community. Actually can I ask a question, how many people here have been to Africa? Very good. That wouldn't happen in typical meeting in America but that wouldn't happen in Congress. But let me say what impart the way I think Larry page asked that question because since you have been here, you have been using your vacation time I love the concept that you have to do it, apply to Sergey for vacation time and if Sergey then applies to you, but in any case you use your time all to go to the developing world, that's... On my long vacations, it takes a while to get there, so. Yeah, now that's true and I was asking because I mean, I have been pretty amazed, I just went to Ghana recently for example I was pretty and I saw one of the business plan winners, but I was pretty surprised at the level of developments in some of these places and for me you know, I asked people even before I go, some of our people have been there and I just can't get any idea of one of these places until I go. And I mean you know, I didn't expect Ghana to have really nice Yellow Pages and I actually brought it back and I showed it to our business people, you know they have these Yellow Pages just like ours, you know its not such a weird place you know. And and are you going to be encouraging Googlers because I know that you are you know encouraging Googlers to volunteer their time. Are you going to be encouraging them to be traveling overseas as well and have that kind of first first hand experience? I will take that. We are creating and hear you heard the name Google Core, it actually we had the name before we heard it on stage today, and we have been working on two part plan, you know Jane very well one part of it which is an 18 month course, six sort of a graduate school level course on economic development, global health and climate change and then for graduates of that course the idea that they could go in - - and is Marty Krasny, Marty, raise your hand, are you here, Mardy Krasny had been working on that, there is back there. I think he started it, he is really sneaky. But the idea is that there is that people come to Google - - applications are open. So the idea the idea would be that people who get trained in economic development will make better volunteers, whether you are going to work with Wangari Mathai or you are going to be work with the Arabian obviously the HR functions will have to be you have been here for X amount of time, you get this amount of leave, you have got to cumulate whatever it's going to be, because until people do work based on and actually are face to face with the countries that they are interested in working on, until they really learn what the economic determinants are of these disparities. The idea is the first ideas that we suggest and how to eradicate malaria, how to stop poverty, how to stop climate change, they are frequently not the right ideas. It takes a long time to deal deeply in these areas and we are fortunate in Google that we have a group of employees and family members who deeply care about that so, yes, the answer is it's a big deal for us. Sergey your own experience in living in a country that that experienced in recent years the rapid impoverishment of many after having a strong middle class, did that at all shaped your concern about social change, about social benefit? How did it how did it lead you to where you are today? I think probably for for my experience it wasn't as much growing up in Russia as the coming to the United States and recognize the tremendous opportunities that I had as a result of my parents and myself immigrating when I was six years old. I think seeing that, I it makes see how -. Probably sure. Well I might have won the visa lottery. I get those emails, so if I require time. The lawyer that e-mailed me assured me that. Any how, I think that I would like to see everyone have that kinds of opportunities that I had and you know we were very poor even when we came to the US and yet the country makes it so accessible. So you try to do the best you can, to get through school, try to get an education, be entrepreneurial and that just doesn't exist in other countries. And and everybody has just the same capacity to develop and be successful. It's just that they don't have a chance. When you think about the issues that you have identified is priority issues, all of them are responsive to science and technology kinds of solution. Science and technology has got a huge role to play in all of them. How important is it that that we provide a welcoming atmosphere and welcoming environment for people from brighter students from around the world to come to our universities, to study science and math and engineering and or or other topics. And then bring those skills back home, lead their countries, build their economies, build businesses or stay here and start companies here. How important is that to us and to your objectives? I think it's increasingly less important to them, believe it or not, because I actually see lot of those opportunities emerging in these other countries in terms of the schools, the caliber of the employees and what not that we can hire in our India, China offices and what no they are very, very talented people. And they have been now well educated and they have entrepreneurship there, they have businesses in a lot of these places, not all the world, you know the parts of the world I was referring to before, people don't have opportunity, but now there are number of places outside the US where they do have opportunity. And and really I feel that we are shortchanging ourselves. It really hurts our companies when we can't hire the best and the brightest here and we have to go abroad. And in fact disproportionately it hurts smaller companies because we now have offices in all these places, so we can hire them. But when we were just a few years ago, we couldn't and and you know, we didn't have access to that fantastic talent. And it's just silly. At the graduate level there is a huge opportunity in India with the IITs - at the graduate level there are huge opportunities here, but Larry Page, do we give enough attention to science and math education at early ages both here and in the developing world, and is that an area for investment? Yeah yeah, I think you must have seen my talk I gave recently. I gave a talk at the AAS, the sort of scientific society. And I had sent it out some people inside the company, it was basically about science and technology and how it really is what is sort of the main leverage point in the world. And we have we have this guy Hal Varian, he is a famous economist of Berkeley and he had seen the talk before I gave it and he said, we need this one slide, and basically the slide you know, it shows the GDP our side and sort of earning per capita and it sort of bubbles around for a long time and then it hits the industrial revolution and it just goes straight up. And it keeps going by the way, it doesn't stop. It's still going straight up. And he said, the only real explanation economists have for that is technology. You know this mass production of things, there was you know, technology for farming and all those kind of things, so it wasn't that we were suddenly so much smarter at that point in time, right. It's that we actually had we had developed technology and we had replicated and we could do things without using as many people. And I feel like we have lost that intuition, it's not it's not the case that not stops somehow, right. You know when we had started Google, you know if we hadn't had computers that were as fast [0:23:53] suited to built it. You know computers somehow you know, they have been getting twice as fast every year basically for a long time. And then all of a sudden you can have something like Google. You can search all the world's information and that can be free, right, that ad supported. And you know that actually helps people's productivity and it helps the world and so on. So I think somehow as a world we have lost sight of that. You know people don't think about it that way. And there is still huge opportunity there. And I figured I did some estimates, the number of people who graduate for example in the US, you know it's like a small percent and it was like three percent or something that really graduate in areas that have high leverage, areas where people develop technology that could really change the slope of that curve that's going up. And I figured if we you know, modestly multiplied it by 10, say 30 percent, which shouldn't be that big a percentage you know we would probably have 10 times the rates of development that we have now of those technologies which really do affect things. So I guess I am very optimistic about this because I see that you know a few more people and all of a sudden we could have much greater development than we have now. And I also think some of the things that people have been talking about here are like the global warming issues, you know I am optimistic we can get one cent per kilowatt-hour, solar thermal. And I just look at that and go well if we can do that; we could replace all the coal fire plants really quickly and you know, nobody really needs to do anything else. And somebody can do that in a garage, right. And it's not impossible for a couple of really smart technology people to figure out how to do that. And I guess I am very optimistic about these things. But I would like to have many more people trying to do those things, trying to use technology to do things that are very impactful. Okay, how important is it to have political leaders that are science literate? Well I was I guess in the talk I gave, I gave the example that, for example the Prime Minister or President of India is a Rocket Scientist. And we actually met with him you know, and he asked us about the encodings, language encodings, that we use in the Google and all the different languages in India, it's not really what you expect, the conversation you expect to have with you know, somebody who heads the country, right. It doesn't happen in most countries. And you know you cannot give [0:26:17] about causality in India but it's not an accident that they have you know, tremendous information technology and all this economic growth and all that. May be that caused him to be President, may be it also he caused that in some sense. So I think I do think it's for Taiwan has also had like an engineer leader for a while who was also very high technology placed. So I think it is correlated, I don't know about the causation. And China has has often had in leadership positions, electrical engineers and you know, engineers in general, I would say. You moved us though into into the investment the sort of supply side of the energy problem, the question of alternative fuels. Where where do you think John Doerr has referred to this as the mother of the markets. And then I think he is sort of thinks he ought to temper a little bit, but I am not so sure. Is this the mother of all markets and where are the real opportunities? I want to give a quick start. You know Steve Chu; the Nobel Prize winner has a great stat today. I think Americans have about a 1000 energy helpers, so if you take the number of calories you just takes for dinner and multiply it you know, by other meals, you know you take a couple of 1000 calories a day. And then you take the energy use of the US divided by all the people there is a thousand people helping you. So there is 1000 people pushing your car, pumping the water in your toilet and all those things, you know, those things like water, we take for granted you know, transporting this water bottle on a truck and all that 1000 people for each one of you. And you know that's a lot of people. China I guess has about a 100 people per person, that will save a significant amount of energy, I am sure the developing countries have much, much less than that. And so we can't take that for granted, but there is a huge amount of energy that's used for good purposes. I mean it's great to have clean water and flushing toilets and all these things we take for granted. But you know I think that I would turn the stuff around and say you know, if we can make energy cheaper, like say using solar technology, you know everybody in the world can have 10,000 energy helpers. And you know it won't have that much effect in the world and the world will be pretty happy will be happier than we are now, hopefully. And and are you attracted, Sergey, to wind, to solar or are there more revolutionary technologies that you think are around the bend? I think in the near term that wind is a really good bet because it's already cost competitive, and certainly longer term solar and also of course on the transportation side, the fuels, the ethanols and I know these are very conventional answers, but I think that people are overly conservative when they estimate where these are going to end up. And it's easy to see the cost and what not today which by the way are already in many places competitive, but just extrapolating some of these curves 10 years down toward and of course somebody has to do the work, by the way, and hopefully accelerate beyond some rate of cost to the client but I think we could see really cheap clean energy in the not too distant future. And and I should know that Google has made a very large solar commitment in terms of your own facility; you ought to say a word about that? I wouldn't call it very large. It's a sort of large by corporate campus scales but . We claim it's large, but it's not really . It's not large on the global scale. Its not I guess it is visible from space but you know. But so are many other things assuming we have a good enough lens. Anyhow we have about a third of our campus in Paris which that we are going to run on solar and much of it has already been installed, the remainder I don't know if any of you have the challenges with parking, that's because we are finishing of the solar car ports and what not. And essentially you know, it's just not all that expensive. It's somewhat more expensive but not by a lot. And in fact the companies that we are working with you know, they all have and others that we talk to, they have better products coming down the pipe and so next year, we will be able to cheaper, more efficient in the year after that, but are still I mean we are looking at others areas to deploy, so. This is not a question of you know, if it's a question of when, people get confused about it, but there is a curve, a cost curve for solar and it has been you know, changing for a long, long time and it's relatively predictable. I think we have about a seven year pay back, but have some subsidies in place, but you know, that was pretty soon that will be a seven year pay back with no subsidy and in that case you would be stupid not to do if you own the building, right. So and I don't think this is not a question of if; it's a question of when. Yeah, most of the cost I should add, today is not the solar panels. That's you know the installation ,you have to get permits and you have to have, you know union labor that installs it and there is I mean there is there are a whole bunch of hurdles. And I think that those can be overtime, as it becomes much regular a thing to just cover it with solar and what not, all those things become too Actually one other point I have to make about the wind was that there are pretty amazing studies that show if you had a good electricity grid wind will be hugely cost competitive now. So there is studies that says, probably you could generate 80 percent of your total electricity used in Europe if you simply had an electric grid that connect to Northern Africa, say Egypt, all the way to Scandinavia. And that's actually a technically feasible thing to do. Now my guess is, on our current path it will take us you know, thirty years to do that because all the governments have to talk to each other. But, may be a good project for some of the people on the room to try to really figure out that's worthwhile. Wind costs about 3 cents kilowatt-hour now which is the same as coal. The catch is it's not windy all the time. And so the real cost of the wind is about 9 cents, kilowatt-hour. And because its this variability, but, and you got to take all of that variability for 80 percent of your total power if you just interconnect those areas because it's always windy somewhere. And you can make up your 20 percent in many reasonable ways, using peak power generators. So that I mean that wouldn't get rid of your you know that would be much cheaper than the way they produce it now, and it would be you know, I think a very good thing to do. But I think some of these things are going to take large scale coordination and some good engineering and technology, people thinking about how to do it. Now as you think about investments as a strategy in order to not much estimate money but as a strategy for social change, what is your sweet spot? Are you looking for those sort game changing kind of investments that are that are high enough risks so that they would not you know, they would not attract traditional equity, you know they wouldn't attract venture capital, they wouldn't attract project finance, are you willing to lose money on this? I don't think it's that issue so much. I think there is lot of money, I mean we have been doing some small investments but there is a lot of money available for these things. The issue is there are very few people who are doing them. I mean I got interested in this thing, I mean I don't know, we could figure out how many people are really working on improving the electric grid in Europe, but I am sure it's a small number, right, who are thinking about it strategically. And it will make sense for somebody to fund somebody to do that. And there is plenty of money available to do this; it's just that there aren't people doing these things. And I think in any of these areas if we look at novel kinds of solar or whatever, there is you know, there is a lot of money available but very, very few people. What about on the demand side of the equation, the whole question of conservation technologies, is that is it an area you think the markets will push the process and just the fact, you know the cost of energy as it currently exist? My personal opinion is that conservation is poorly marketed; in a sense consider light bulbs. So you could take out the 100 watt incandescent light bulb in your house and replace it with like a 20 watt compact fluorescent. And in the old days, it would be kind of well, the too high temperature, it will look blue and you would you know, may be not turn on quickly. Now they are better and what not, but its still they are probably over marketed a little bit; really it will be more like 80 or 90 Watts incandescent. But I feel a strong approach you should tell a person to get a 50 Watt Compact Fluorescent to take out the 100 Watt Incandescent and then they will get a much brighter bulb but also save half the energy. Actually Sergey has been ordering these and they are ridiculously bright, like the I put one in and it like blinded me. I have been buying - they are actually hard to get, like the normal hardware doesn't tend to carry them. But they look really great, I like I would have more light and they are still less power than the conventional ones. But I think you know you need to use I mean, I don't think people you know, people like to do charitable things, things good for the world kind, because it feels rewarding what not, but you know there are sort of a limit to how rewarding oh, I just saved you know three watts for the world, you know, like this isn't like not that exciting. Although, I mean, its you know, it's so wonderful for me having great engineers to talk to because they they really deeply understand this stuff. But I heard [0:36:29] our magazine here this morning and I thought he did a really good job. And what he was saying was that there are places that 35 percent of all the energy is just wasted. That is the definition of low hanging fruit. And I heard Amery Lovins say and it's such a compelling image. He says, "Half of the wealth that China is creating is running out of its single pane glass windows everyday". And I think those are compelling images that need to be looked at as low hanging fruit. I definitely agree with that. But I just think it's causes an the problem. I mean I think that I mean I think we should do all the conservation things, but I also think that if you had one cent per kilowatt-hour, you know solar energy would have lots of you know swimming pools with no covers everywhere and you wouldn't care that much. Yeah, I think its both end rather than either or and it's a timing issue too because there are some things you can do right now and it feels kind of profligate you know, not to do right now and so we tried to invest, I think simultaneously in both of those. We have recently had Dan Reicher join us, who was the Assistant Secretary of Energy in Clinton administration; one of our Clintonistas [0:37:41] ____ on board and he has been doing a lot of testimony at the Senate, talking a lot about conservation. But at the same time we are trying to run an investment portfolio doing exactly what Larry and Sergey was talking about, so I don't find a contradiction. By the way I think all the nuclear plants in the US were the energy saved by the Energy Star Refrigerator Policies was roughly equal to that. Or actually, I think it was essentially more for the refrigerators. The energy was saved by just doing a minor change to the refrigerators which had almost no manufacturing cost in it. Oh I will throw out another example, just if you look at single pane windows issue or what not; I think you can give people more clear benefit, like here at the office we should really fix those. But if I get up in the morning and its nice and hot out, like I would say 75 or 80 degrees out and actually I bike tour pretty often but because you know, that's good to exercise what not - thank you. I mean you know, I am trying to avoid emitting fuels but you know realistically you know, I probably care more about my health. This is a practical matter rather than the tiny matter of gas taking to drive. But, you know I put on something commensurate with the weather so like you know, may be it will be T- shirt, if it's hot out and then I get here to the office and I am freezing because it's a a constant temperature that they keep this, you know where they try, probably about 70 degrees and so its very uncomfortable and then I have to find some thing to put on. And . Then later at night like if you if it's cold outside and you walk out and you know you are all kind of recently just inside but it's freezing outside, you just mismatched. So instead what you could do is you should drop the temperature in the building, fluctuate a bit and you know, when it's hot out you make it a little bit hotter and when it's cold out you make it a little cooler, I think people will be more comfortable that way because it's irritating to have the sudden change when you go in and out anyway. We don't have to you know, I don't think you have to phrase that as a savings for the environment. You just say it's more comfortable. They put on ties during dinner just out of respect for the for the Pengia folks from the International Finance Corporation who have made those brought those ties to us from Cambodia. But I could not persuade them to wear ties all the way up to stage, that was that was too long for these these two guys to be wearing ties. Let me let me go back at Larry Brilliant, to your your point. You noted that Dan Reicher was testifying on the Hill with regard to energy policy and there is some movement on energy policy on Capitol Hill which [0:40:48] ____ Chairing the Committee in the Senate. How important is it for the philanthropic community to be playing a significant policy role and trying to shape the policy environment in which these decisions are taken? I love these rhetorical questions. I mean how could anything be more important in a way, I mean I don't know how many of you worked on AB 32, let's take a State issue first of all. I think Google is really proud of the fact that we supported and lobbied for AB 32. And there was a moment in time when if it hadn't been for the support of the companies and support of It's a California Legislation that requires the State of California to meet global warming gas emission standards. And it has become a catalyst by rolling thunder all over the country. There are now seven other states that are using model legislation like that. And in fact part of the testimony that Dan was doing at the Federal level was to see if there were ways that this piece of legislation could become part of federal legislation. And and it was a near thing. It was one or two votes from not being passed. And there are people in the room here with phone calls and with friends and would support that could influence one or two votes. And almost any issue like that, so so it's really critically important because sometimes I think people, it's like not going to vote in election, you think your vote doesn't matter. Here it is clearly a vote with fewer voters and it matters a lot more. So I think it's terrifically important. And and on different issues it it matters even more. We we have a moment in time now where I think that the State and Federal legislation is favorably disposed to making changes that will help our kids and our grandchildren live in a better world as far as climate change. We should not take it for granted that we are always going to have that favorable climate. Things change very quickly, we should act now. And how important was it to is this the is this a large reason for the decision to make dot org activities being largely treated as not tax examined activities. Was this so that you could be more active on the policy sphere? No I think the basically it's because of all view or many view that we spoke to in the process of settling up dot org and even prior to that. And many of the organizations that we met with that had regretted perhaps their choice of structure and what not. You know a lot of organizations felt they would rather have more flexibility. And we were pretty far down the path, in fact we did create Google Foundation which was on 501(c)(3) but that's now just a portion of google.org. And we just found a lot of the peers who were present here and elsewhere who really told us gave us really, I think great advice before you finalized setting things up that we want the flexibility and we have been enjoying it, because we we can do things like that. Which sets too are pretty profitable so the tax difference is not as significant for us either. I wanted to just turn to because we we began by our conversation about how you leverage, Information Technology; how you leverage search in order to engage the public, educate the public, put them in a position to be taking smart decisions that they want to take. Say something about that sort of the conscious application of of searching the case of of Google Earth, Larry Brilliant. Actually before we do that you know because I want to ask you about INSTEDD also. Okay. So remind me when we get to that question. So you are talking about INSTEDD now? Oh, he doesn't want to do the question. Okay, let me just say that, instead, what we are doing is now we are shifting to the topic of the public health. And the ways, in which you can use Information Technology for early detection and response, so tell us about INSTEDD? So, Bill Fagey who is in the audience hiding is was my mentor in the smallpox eradication program and he created a novel way of dealing with disease control programs and in this case eradication, which was to find every single case of smallpox on the planet earth at the same moment and time and then respond to it by putting vaccine, vaccinating people or quarantining them and put a circle of immunity around every case. So search, surveillance and then containment which lead to eradication of smallpox, and it's a similar strategy to that which is being used by the Carter Center in getting warm and is by being used by WHO in polio eradication. And when I watched what happened with SARS, I with that background in mind of find every case and then respond to it; as opposed to try to vaccinate everybody in the world. In the case of smallpox, if there was an epidemic of smallpox in Tokyo god forbid, you would not have to vaccinate in New York. You have to put your vaccine where the disease is. So in the case of SARS it took us an awful long time for there to be a recognition of a new and novel, communicable disease, or Coronavirus in this case. A virus which happens to have its real home in bats. And then got to civet cats and people ate those civet cats. So it seem like a really long time and it gets very disquieting when it takes one, two, three, four, five epidemiological generations to find the disease which rose logarithmically. It's a good thing to get there quickly and - exponentially, that's what I said, exponentially. So good you should come to our Board meetings, it's just terrible. I said exponentially, it's on the tape. So what we watched for SARS was was it took almost nine months for the Government of China to announce that it had a case of SARS. But there was a web crawler in Ottawa that had detected SARS six months earlier than the Chinese Government had actually announced it. And that was because there were trolling a very small number of websites 20,000 it turned out, and a very small number of languages. And they found all this chatter about this new disease. And, anyway it's a long story. The same website called the Gethin was able to locate bird flu in humans in Iran six months before the Government of Iran notified it. So that lead to the idea that the tremendous investment that Google has made in search technology could be used for finding novel diseases and in fact pandemics or almost pandemics or new epidemics or even any other kind of an imminent disaster earlier than before and then use the other technology that Google has, Google Earth to visualize the disaster area, to be able to use some of the tools for collaboration and communication, to do an almost event management system. So we have been doing that and working really hard with a group of non-profit that we started and that Judith Rodin, the co-founder of that from Rockefeller and many of the other people here in this room have been tremendously supportive of that. We have about 30 disaster response organizations that are working on that or partners in that and half a dozen or eight different technology organizations working on it. And our hope is to take this technology and all the technology I guess that Silicon Valley has produced, put it together and make it as a gift to the disaster response community so that we can deal better with disaster. Actually you should know that Tim Wirth when he was Undersecretary of the State for Global Affairs lead and an inter agency process to try to develop an emergency surveillance and response network much like this. This has been something that has been on the minds of political leaders for a long time and it's a question of capturing what the private sector has to offer you. Well, what's interesting about this problem is it's a kind of a focus on the user and the rest will follow problem and that is that those who know about the disease will some times not be a doctor or someone in a local clinic, it may be a school teacher who sees the patient present or the student present, it may a Ship's Captain, it may be the Pilot on an Airline because the disease may manifest itself after the person has boarded. So this is an opportunity to feed the information. Well, what's happening as a result of all these community based information services, Google is one, eBay is another, there is a lot out there now is that it is becoming much more reliable and much more, almost expected that citizens will have the ability to report things they see you all do. You are driving on a highway, you see an accident, the first thing you do is to reach for your phone, you call 911. You say, I don't even bother you but I just saw this. It's almost becoming a reflex now. 20 years ago that wouldn't have happened. You know so what we have seen I think is a change in the way that the official reporting network's view, what used to be unofficial information. Before SARS, a 100 percent a 100 percent of all of the disease reports that reached the United Nations, World Health Organization came from governments. That was the law. There are a 193 governments that are members of WHO, the same thing true for all the other UN agencies, where the information that they received about the disaster had to come from the government. When this Gethin was able to detect SARS and then bird flue earlier and it reached a point that 70 percent of all of the outbreak information that was reaching WHO came not from the governments but came from the individuals that were reporting through these technology, these trolling services. So that had the WHO, for one, to change the World Health Regulations. So the beginning in June, for the first time legally, WHO will now be allowed to receive information about new outbreaks, potential pandemics and other catastrophes from individuals. So the technology is changing the way in which the traditional system works. And I think that's an amazing, almost bottom up revolutionary change in way we process information. They had to change a lot to do that. They actually had to change the World Health Regulations which are codified every May when all the Health Ministers of the countries that prompt and some purposes with the share holders and Board members of WHO -. But so as long as we wait until June, we will be fine. Let me because you are ready to deal with your last question, before you that do that, I want to ask Larry and Sergey about Google Earth and about what you think its impact is? And first describe it very quickly, I think most people in this room know about Google Earth but -. One person has not used Google two people have not used Google Earth. But what's interesting is how it can be used for environmental purposes, like to understand environmental impact of actions. Do are we tracking that, do we have a sense of how it's been used? Well, Google Earth can be used for environmental issues, for social, political, it's just incredible and that's why I fell in love with it prior to Google Earth buying it was the keyhole before and they had those, the company was called Earth Viewer, but its just incredible how much more information you can get now don't forget, there had been satellites and things imaging the earth for a long time the aero planes and what not. The problem is that that imagery was not connected to all of the people who could make use of it. And that's where you have a tremendous inefficiency because you have all this incredible amount of oh that's me, I was hoping Google Earth was back there. Any how you have a tremendous amount of information - much more information than that. But you have to sign up, before you had to you know, contact this agency and that you know, cost you like $100 to get one view or you know, it was very expensive. And so may be large companies and government agencies would occasionally do it and would be really a waste. And now so many people can use that for so many different things, on whether its humanitarian crisis like the earthquake that we had near India and Pakistan a little while back or Katrina or any number of things, environmental issues. People use it by real state. Or which actually and you need to consider those aspects too. I mean, if you can now look at other parts of the world and anybody can look at them decide now to help create a better market for say, real estate or for the vacations there are or for any number of things. I think, I am marking that information. I was very excited that the keyhole focus to that, and we we required them and helped formed them to do that even more broadly. And and I just wanted to ask you too before Larry gets to gets to talk about his dreams for .org. In the beginning you said you hoped that it's impact would ultimately eclipse Google itself. Now Google itself keeps raising the bar. Making it hard to eclipse Google itself. But do you see that day? Yeah I think so, you know, today almost all were proud of it, it's not quite all but a vast majority only touched people who have internet access. And we have a number of things that, you know, work over SMS and mobile and so that touch a somewhat broader community but it's a reduced functionality. But unless we are unless all and by the way it's not just Google.org. Unless Google.org together with all view can really make internet information access universal, our products aren't really going to be able to touch those people that effectively and that's why it's so important and I am very optimistic about it. I was going to say, I mean, I think it's really daunting to be in this room because sort of by definition you know, all view have been working you know, for a long time longer than us probably mostly and sort of intractable problems. By definition the intractable problems because those are the really important ones, that haven't been solved yet right. And they are important enough that they would have been solved if it was easy to solve them. And so I, you know, I am I am a little bit daunted by that. I think the good thing about what we are trying to do is that at least we will be, I guess, in this small room we have here, we will be a part of that group that's trying to do things that could be impactful. And, I think, that you know, once you are starting to once your goal is to be very impactful, like I mentioned about the solar. There just aren't that many people doing that. So if your goal is really to change the world, you have already you know, you don't have that much competition in that and so I think, in that way I am very helpful but I am also, I guess, realistic you know, that these things are very, very difficult problems that this community has all worked on. You know, it can be I think it can take long time to make traction, but maybe over a long period of time we could do something really significant. Larry. When you got the TED Prize you were given a wish to change the world. Is your wish being fulfilled? In India they have several different tenses that we don't have. In Hindi my favorite tense is not the past present, it's not the future perfect, it's not the present. It's the continuous present. So in India if you ask somebody if your tea or your food is ready they will always say just now coming. I guess, I feel that way about my wish which is at one level on because I am a geek at heart and like a kid in a candy store here. And I have got some phenomenal people to work with. So I am I have all these tools that I never dreamed that I would be able to use for the TED wish. It's a very different kind of place and this is a very different kind of product. It's very difficult as Google likes to launch early and often and as Larry was saying when you are dealing with some of these humanitarian issues you can't really launch early and often, it's a different process. So I think the convergence of these complicated intractable problems with the minds and the energy and the tools at Google has given me a chance to see far beyond my original wish. And I love it, I absolutely love it. I am going to ask you. I am going to ask you to show us one of the tools because we have the the last day and for two days ahead been focused heavily on market solutions to these large problems. But in fact some of the problems we face are not responsive to market solutions, problems such as genocide and Darfur. And I wanted you to just show us how Google Earth is used to advance, understanding that issue in particular and with that it's closed for the night? Let me invite Megan to come up and tell you. Megan Goddard who is from Google Earth and some of you have seen on news recently Google Earth Product that's been used to help visualize Darfur and the tragedy there. And I think under the overall guideline which is that bad things happen in places that have no light and in the middle of the night, in dark places and the more light you can shine on something the more antiseptic it is. Megan can you tell them what you've been doing? I am just waiting for this to come up. Here we go. My name is Megan Goddard and I am a member of the Earth Google Earth Team. I have the honor of working with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. We've been working with them for about a year and a half and it was actually a 20 percent project from Andria McCool. So, we've been working with them to try to describe what's going on in Darfur. So, here you see United States, I am going to go through show you exactly where you are. How many people have actually used Google Earth? You know, I am going to flip the question here. Okay, good. Now keep you hands raised. How many people have used Google Earth for more than going to your own house. Okay. Good so we have some people who have used it for more of that. Most of the time the hands are still raised. So, here we are at Google. These layers were released yesterday. And actually I am a little bit jet lagged right now because I was at a press conference yesterday in Washington DC for this. And I am going to zoom you, here. Has anybody seen this yet? Google? So the nice thing about the great thing about this is that these layers are considered to be on by default. So, if a person is flying around earth they will see this and wonder what this is and want to look at it. So this is very that's a great impact. So I am going to step you through this and this is pretty much going to tell us some story. So you see here is the Darfur region. A lot of people before this project was released, I asked a lot of friends and family do do you know about Darfur? Some of them had heard about it, some of them not. A lot of people really don't know where Sudan is. So number one is it's showing everybody where this is. I am going to zoom here. And what you see is a collection of icons. We worked with the Museum to pick out a selection sort of a preview set to get people's attention so that they will go and explore more through some [audio break] through this. So you start off here with this icon and this is an actual photo of two people in a refugee camp in Chad. When you click on this, this was a design from the museum. They give you an introduction, so that people can read about what they are looking at. And you see this collection of icons here. The orange ones represent damaged villages and the red ones represents villages that have been completely destroyed. This data was collected from the U.S. Government and there are 1600 points. So this in combination with high resolution imagery will really start to tell a story. So I am going to take you to one of the villages. This was a village. There is no name available. You [audio break] to have 870 structures and it's considered destroyed. Its kind of hard to tell what this is. I am going to zoom into this a little bit more. Each one of these circles represents somebody's house. This is a mud and grass hut. So, when you start zooming around, you can see all these different icons and how many of them are. To me this really is very, makes a very big impact on me to really see the devastation. The other thing that's included with this are a collection of photos. And I have to say nothing tells a story like a photo or a picture. So here is a picture of a girl collecting wood outside of a refugee camp. A lot of people are attacked outside of these camps. Each one of these pop-ups includes a little link here, where you can download additional information. So if you click on this you get another layer here that gives you even more information. So I am to going to turn this on, we have a legend here. This shows testimonies from Amnesty International, more photos, videos. This shows all the refugee camps, which are these different colored blue icons. The light blue are in Chad and the dark blue are in - within Darfur. This layer is actually directly downloaded from the Holocaust Museum's website. So we are hoping that people see this and they want to take action. So if you want to learn more about it, we have this link here. This brings you to a website that describes the projects or you can just download more information and more importantly what you can do to take action. There is also a link here that says learn more. When you click on this there is also a link here called "How can I help?" When you click on this it brings you to a website called "What can I do?" This was all again developed by the museum and it gives you a list of action items that anybody can go and do. I want to emphasize that this was all information that was curated by the museums. They worked with many different organizations, photographers such as Mia Farrow, the US State Department to get the locations of the maps. So there is little collaboration from many different places and we are fortunate enough to be able to help them to be able to put this in, so that people see it when they are playing around learning about our Earth. So to me this is how we can leverage information and technology to promote awareness and inspire action for social change. Thank you. I think the lesson of this gathering is often that we have the conscience, we have the values, we have the resources. Sometimes all we need is simple access to information so that we can act collectively for the public good. So thank you all.