[MUSIC] >> We have a chance tonight to talk about,
an extraordinary book, The New Digital Age, which you two
of you collaborated in. I'm gonna start with the obvious question. You've said that this is a book, about
technology, but more importantly it's a book about
human beings. What prompted you to write this book, and
what prompted the two of you to write this book
together? >> Well, so Eric and I met in Baghdad in,
2000 2009. He he wanted to see what it was like
travelling into a war zone and whether technology was
relevant at all. And so we show up there and our security is waiting for us, but Eric's not moving,
because he's wearing a flak jacket and, before he
does anything, he wants a full history of flak
jackets. [LAUGH] How they've adapted, why they
work, how they've sort of changed since the
beginning of time. But after the trip to Iraq we traveled to
more than 40 countries. Looking at the ways in which technology is
disrupting autocracies. Ways that it's changing the nature of
violence on the ground. And what we realized is, there's an
inherent connection between the Silicon Valley world and the
geo-political world that's really missing. >> First I, thank you very much Dr. Rice,
Condi for, for doing this with us. It's a great privilege to be here. I do have one request which is I want
everyone to turn on their phones. We're in the phone business. We want you using your phone. We make money when you're doing that. [LAUGH] The what happened with Iraq was
that my daughter Sophie who's a student here at GSP and I've showed up in Iraq and
of course we, we put the flack jackets on and we meet this guy
Jared, and she was videotaping the trip for various reasons and we played
them back all we heard was Jared's voice. To fast forward, Sophie ultimately took
the book that Jared and I wrote and she's heavily credited with
writing it into it's current style. So thank you Sophie for doing that. I'd like you to think about a Secretary of
State. Imagine if you'd had a technology arm that
could implement technology that would actually fix a problem that was
bedeviling you. Censorship, communications, empowering
citizens, empowering women. Something that was on your mind, and yet all you had were the tools of foreign
policy. It just seems like in our industry we should define ourselves with a somewhat
higher purpose. Why don't our industry, the tech industry,
figure out a way to solve these problems. I knew very little about foreign policy
until I met Jerald, right? And thank you for hiring him, I'm sure you
sort of beat him into submission at some basic
level here. So now he can sort of talk to me and say,
look, these are the problems. I was struck by the horrific situation
that most people are in the world, which is of governance, the horrific way in which
women are treated, the corruption at every level
of government. The majority of people, humans like us,
don't have any of the benefits of any person here in the room, and yet our industry spends all most time talking
about that. So the real genesis of the book was, why
did we not only identify what's gonna happen to them,
but also what the bridges are? After two years of going through this, we
ultimately come out in the book, I would claim, with a pretty
optimistic message. The world for the well to do world, us, is
going to be fantastic in terms of fiber optics,
computations and so forth, we'll talk about that. But for the developing world where you
have no connectivity at all, the arrival of the smartphone is a
life changing event. Because from this single device you solve illiteracy, you solve empowerment, you get
better governance. And these are folks who don't even have
electric power and running water. You solve their business problem, their
health problem, all of their needs can be met. And over the next five years, another
three or four billion people will join us. The rough number now is roughly 2.4
billion people on the internet. Roughly 3.7 people using, humans using,
using phones. Those numbers will go to 5 to 6 billion in the next five
years. This transition, transformation is life
changing for half of the world's population, right in front
of us. >> And Derek, let me ask you because Eric Wrightly said you've spent time in
the state department and so you know not just
foreign policy, but the business of carrying out
foreign policy. What Eric has described, is that going to
happen in spite of governments? In spite of our government? Or is there a chance that governments
could actually help to promote this more
optimistic world? And what are the impediments to, to what's
being done? >> Well I think it, it depends on which
type of government. So, of the the 5 billion people who are
coming online, most of them live in countries
that are autocratic. And so there's a race between, you know,
countries like the United States and those in Western Europe who wanna see
a global connected citizen re-based on principles of the free flow of
information, and countries like China and Iran and North-Korea and others that wanna see the world's technological infrastructure build
with trap doors. They wanna see decadence, you know, have
at least surveilled and censored. And there really is an open question of,
of who is gonna win. Right? So, you know, technology, it's inevitable
that all these people will be connected, but there is a
very important need for a human intervention to ensure
that the con activity that they're getting, lends
itself towards more democratic principles. >> Let me throw out a few country names
and tell me how you think technology will impact those countries and the problems
that they present for foreign policy. And I'm going to take foreign policy, in this sense, not just American foreign
policy, but let's just say countries that are more
interested in an open, more liberal, more democratic
world. So, not just the United States but the countries that would be in that that
category. You went to one of the, maybe the hardest
case that I can think of, North Korea. What in the world were you doing in North
Korea? Did you see Dennis Rodman? [LAUGH]. >> He, he, he came afterwards. >> Yeah. What, what was it like? >> Yeah, but, but, but let's, let's just
establish cause. >> Yeah. >> Causality here. >> Yeah. Yeah, yeah. All right. >> This was Jared's idea. [LAUGH] And I discovered, you know? I have spent a lot of time with Jared. I've discovered he's never been to South
Korea. Can you imagine going to North Korea and
never having been to South Korea? So once again Jared and I my daughter
Sophie we decide in our little merry band to go to
North Korea. And my impression was, there's gotta be
something that we can do. They have millions a million cell phones
22 million people. That's a very poor country with horrific,
horrific governance obviously and, maybe if we
could just get to turn on a little bit about that internet, we could begin to open up the
country. The interesting thing is, and we met and they treated us well especially given it's
a repressive state but, most importantly they let us
out and, it's a country where there's only one
decision maker. And the only way that country will open up without a revolution, which is difficult,
is id the leader decides that the country needs the
information, more than it needs the conflict, that new ideas
will bring. I think, what we concluded was that all
you have to do is to insert doubt. North Korea is a true autocratic state,
true essentially. It's the last one. They really do believe from birth that
their leader is god, king, religion, and so
forth. All we have to do is get a little bit of
doubt in, and that country will fall over. >> Also to, to, to add to this-. >> Actually you need to, need to tell them
about the, the weird stuff we saw like the, the,
the trophies. [CROSSTALK]. >> So we, so this is, this is a-. >> Typical of Jared, so we go in right? [LAUGH] Hang on, hang on all right I have
to set it up then you can describe it. So we go into this mausoleum, right? Where they've got this guy embalmed,
right? It's like a really big deal and they take
us to this trophy case and he's got all these
awards. >> Right but from your laundry list of really problematic countries like
Equatorial Guinea. >> I didn't know that-. >> Central Africa Republic. >> I didn't know that they were really bad
countries. >> So you go to there and they have this
big trophy case that they want to draw your attention to, and it's they have
a honorary doctorate from an American
university called Kensington University. They didn't let us have any connectivity
when we were there so we didn't wanna be intellectual snobby and
say we've never heard of it. So we sort of take their word for it. >> What were the other countries? >> It was, it was Pakistan, Venezuela,
Cuba, Iran. Like some real winners. [LAUGH]. >> And so-. >> And medals, plaques, gold-. >> But this American, this, this Kensington
University, we sort of took their word for it. And then we left North Korea and went to
China, which we all know is a bastion of democracy
relative to North Korea. And what's the first thing that we do? We do a little Google search of Kensington
University, which was founded by a law partner at a
boutique law firm in Texas, who figured out that he
could launder money by selling honorary
doctorates to third world dictators. [LAUGH] Now somehow this guy graduated
from law school passed the bar, but wasn't the brightest person in
the world because when the FBI found out about this, he fled Texas
thinking he was leaving the country only to be arrested by
the FBI in Hawaii. [LAUGH] But back to your serious question
about. >> No, no, no just finish the story. So we then said, what do we do with this
information? And we realized that if we, had told them,
they would of, ignore it. That was the most bizarre thing about
North Korea. >> But, there was also, there, there's an
even more serious part of this, which is before we went to North
Korea we met with a number of defectors and the defectors told us
that the penalty for being caught with a smuggled smartphone in North Korea, can
in some cases be the death penalty. And then they persecute three generations
of your family, and people take that risk and then take it again to get a signal
from across the Chinese border. So people like Eric and me, and really all
of us in this room, we have no frame of reference for wanting access and
connectivity so badly that we're willing to risk being shot for
it. And so we wanted to go to the country that
is so extreme that these are the consequences,
and understand what it looks like. And the conclusion, as Eric mentioned, is
if you think back to the days of the Cold War, there were totalitarian societies, cults of
personality, et cetera. In the future you're still gonna have
autocracies. You're still gonna have horrible
societies. But the one silver lining in of all this is, the totalitarian societies, the true
cults of personality have literally been eliminated by the internet
in the same way that scientists were able to get rid of
small pox. Once North Korea changes, you'll never see
a culted personality again because the ability to create a society without
doubt will no longer be possible. >> Mm-hm. So, there are societies in which you wish
to instill doubt, like North Korea. By the way, my favorite story about North
Korea is that some of you may know that I've taken up golf, and
I really love it. Kim Jong Un will shot 39. >> Right, that's very impressive. >> Period. >> Not on the front 39. And apparently it was so easy, the game,
that he gave it up. So that tells you something about about
this regime. But, so you've got the regimes like North
Korea. You also have regimes that are more
integrated into the international system, but are doing
terrible things to their people. Is there anything that you see,
technologically, technology playing a role in alleviating, for instance, let's take
the suffering in Syria, at this point. Where people, you talk about connectivity,
but one problem is if you are a Syrian refugee, you have left
everything behind that mattered to you. Is there anything that technology can do
for the Syrian refugee for instance? >> I was, I was just on the, the Syrian
border about three weeks ago and I went to a number of
refugee camps in, in northeastern, northeastern Lebanon and
turns out the big, one of the biggest problems that the refugees have among many is dealing with the refugee organization
bureaucracy. It's so bad and so difficult to get papers
that refugees are literally going back to Syria
to get documentation. So you think about, you think about the
risk. But the, the, the problem that you have in
Syria is the Syria context, you know basically
creates a bug in our technological optimism because you have
literally thousands of videos that are coming out of Syria, each one more
horrific than, than the next. And it's doing nothing to increase
political will on the part of states to intervene. At the end of the day, without a state led
intervention of some kind, you know, the horror is not
gonna stop. I heard some horrible stories from Syrian
friends of mine that I hadn't seen since I was living there in 2004 and
2005 about government checkpoints in Damascus, Holmes and Aleppo, where they
stop you and ask for your phone, they hold a gun to your head and ask for
your log in information. They then look at what's been posted on
your wall by you or somebody else. My friend's brother told me that when they
did my friend told me that when their brother
did this they saw someone had posted a page
sympathetic to the revolution on one of his social
networking platforms. And a signal came from the checkpoint to
the top of a building where they then shot him in
the head. You know, technology can't fix that
problem. This is a brutal regime doing terrible
things and I think it's important that we understand, cuz we're far away from it
out here, that there are limits. It's a part of the solution, but at the
end of the day, states are still the dominant unit in the international system,
and they're the ones that have to take charge of the
situation. >> It's [COUGH] it's, so we've been
debating, we've been debating this for a while because, you just hate it when you
find a bug in your model, right? And we all start from the premises, that
you empower individuals and the thing that's new here, is this, is the empower
of citizens around the world, right? We've never had a situation where people
were so empowered, there's also some good and mostly good, but some
bad things as well. So where does it breakdown? Well the first place in these countries
they shut down the internet, because they're in
a war. And so that's always a bad, bad deal. But ultimately, knowledge and awareness is
not the same thing as shooting guns, right. So, if you're going to know everything,
which is a reasonable presumption of the future,
we're gonna know every massacre. We're gonna know the horrors. You're gonna have to still have to have
some way of using, of stopping it. Right? Now you can do it with an international
car. In the book we write that you could in
fact begin the criminal trial of the criminal, the war criminals during the time they're doing the war, the, the
criminals. Right? And there's evidence that this kind of
awareness is reducing the number of people being
killed. So a cynical of talking about the U,
Ukraine is to say that only 78 people were killed in the square,
and they got a new government. And obviously every death is bad, but you
could imagine had that been 10,000 or 20,000 or
30,000. So awareness and knowledge probably
reduces the number of deaths and probably
constrains the misbehavior of these deaths that's
within reason, but it doesn't stop the killing. That's the question I have to you guys,
or, or to foreign policy. Is there any solution to that problem
aside from the traditional foreign policy? >> Well the problem then is that it
presents governments that wish to show that they are on the side of
international law and will not. That there will be serious consequences
for that kind of behavior. You're still confronted with the question
of what will those consequences be? So technology has in some sense put more
pressure on governments to actually act in circumstances in which
they actually have very few levers to pull, and I think we're seeing
that in Ukraine today. Probably because you see on television
people tweet you, they send out Facebook posts, they are showing What is happening
in that square. When Czechoslovakia was invaded in 1968 by
the Soviet Union we didn't know what was going on on the ground, the
television cameras couldn't get in, I was a little girl in Birmingham,
Alabama, I remember it pretty well but you couldn't really
tell what was going on. Now you know exactly what's going on. But you still have to act. There's more pressure because you know and
still the tools are not there. >> The question I keep asking is that,
sort of what's new? Right? We've always had disputes, we've always
had bad people, we've always had good people, we've always
had governments. Jared taught me about this Treaty of
Westphalia. >> Yeah, yeah created the states. And all, all that kinda stuff. >> Stuff that you all, stuff that you all
know. I, I did engineering. >> Yeah. [LAUGH]. By the way, the people who created the,
the Westphalian system did engineering, too,
of a different sort. >> Excellent. >> the, so we believe as a group, I think
naively, that if you just empower the people with these tools, democracy
flourishes. And in the book, we take you through what
happens when you empower people. When we were in Myanmar, Burma, we're in
this place called Inlay Lake and it's beyond
beautiful and some number of kilometers north of us,
there is a terrible fight between the Buddhists and
the Muslims. And they have a lot of race religious
tensions in the country, which I was not aware of. And some a whole bunch of houses are, are
burned people are killed. And I naively assumed that the internet
had been used a calming mechanism. They had just gotten the internet, people
could talk to each other. They could see that there's bad you know,
they'd help stop it. In fact it was the inverse. That the internet was used to inflame
tensions, it was used to on both sides, right? To get them, they did this they did that,
and so forth. Not unlike the radio stuff that occurred
in Rwanda, which we also visited. It looks like technology can be used for
both good and bad. And, and Jerry made the point that, if
you're an early state society, you may not be able
to really critically think about these new, information that
you're, so I call this a danger zone, and in the book we talked
about this. That in these emerging countries, what
happens is, all of the sudden, all this connectivity
happens, everyone's empowered. And God knows what's gonna happening. Because they've not grown up with doubt,
with choices, with different voices, and with any ability to choose among those
with some critical [UNKNOWN]. >> And they've not grown up with
institutions that can mediate between differing opinions,
which leads me to. Probably the biggest question out there in
terms of the international system. And the role of technology and
democratization and the like, China. Now Eric, you have some special knowledge
and experience with this. Talk a little bit about China. Because everyone says China may be sui
generis. It may be the one that doesn't respond to
the trends that you are describing. >> Well, Jared and I were in, in November, in a weekend meeting with the President
and the Prime Minister of China with all the mayors
talking about their accomplishments and we were among the
Americans that were visiting. I think it was remarkable to see the way
they present themselves. It's a country of leaders who are
engineers, analytic, numerical. They all had their objectives, you know, this growth rate, we'll solve this
problem. And they spoke with enormous pride of the
lifting of people out of abject poverty to what we think of as
lower middle class. They understand the middle income trap. They're growing at 7.5% and so forth. It's a perfect image that they portray
and, and good for them. They really have accomplished some amazing
things. These are the same people who criminalized
speech above 5,000 people by a blogger, that if you activate more than 5,000 people in
some way, you could literally be arrested and
shot. And of course, in China, everyone has
5,000 followers. [LAUGH] So it's, just cuz of the scale. So it, so it really is a chilling effect. How do you rationalize those two? Well, one is that American firms are not
welcome, unless they're useful to China. Right, so many of the social networks are
blocked, YouTube's blocked, Google, after censorship that we thought was inappropriate has largely moved to Hong
Kong. But they're two things that are interesting about China that have emerged
recently. Weibo, which is essentially a Twitterish
replacement. And WeChat, which today you'd know as
essentially a WhatsApp replacement. But what's interesting about these is that they're much more than what I've
described. They are the ways in which people
communicate online. And they are heavily censored. Under these very very arbitrary censorship
laws. People are in them all the time. But I came away with the sense that the Chinese government has finally met its
match. That if you over here, start talking
through WeChat, which is a way of talking to your friends. But they're linked together and then
eventually it spreads to you all, and then it spreads to you all, and then it spreads to you all, and it eventually gets to 10 million people a
new idea. There's not enough prisons and jails to
arrest all those people. So we conclude and it was very clear in
talking to the Chinese government that they are, they're at least
aware of this possibility in the internet. And they're worried about the internet
being used to sort of disturb the social order. [CROSSTALK]. >> We'll see if this, this works. I personally believe that as long as they
can grow at 7.5%, they can sort of do this. At some point, growth slows and then all
of this stuff comes to fore. >> Eric, you remember on, on a trip we
took to Beijing, before the last one, we talked to a group of, of
business people, journalists, activists. And they were very clear about one thing that, that, that guides Chinese society
which is people don't expect their government to be
honest, but they do expect their economy to grow. And the moment the economy stops growing
is the moment that the lack of honesty, the corruption the censorship, all these things start to
matter. >> Another example in that same meeting we
were, I, I was confused because the data that was
presented was that there was a very large environmental activist movement
using the internet with actual physical
demonstrations against projects and there were a series of such
projects that had been cancelled. Right, you, genuine outpourings of civil unrest in China which is generally
illegal. The answer, and I said to them, this is a country that spies on its citizens, they
know your IP address, they know who you are, they take
photographs of you, they can arbitrarily arrest you, why would a
person take that risk? And the answer came back to me. They looked me straight in the eye and they said, because you're killing my
child. There is a limit, there is an absolute
limit, to what you can do to a Chinese family in a one
child policy. It's interesting that the same principle
did not apply to North Korea. That's the difference between having the
internet and not. >> Yeah. And the Chinese are an example of
legitimacy based on prosperity. Right? And the question with prosperity is you
keep chasing it. It gets harder and harder because people's
expectations keep going up. But I wonder about the role of the of
technology, the internet, information. Just information. So, for example, pollution in China,
environmental degradation is a hot political topic in China and people
can walk outside of their apartments or
wherever and they know they can't breathe in Shanghai or
Chengdu or wherever. And for a long time the government was
giving a pollution index number that clearly didn't
bear any resemblance to reality. The US Embassy started publishing a number
or putting a number up but there's also now apparently an app that you can buy
that will measure the pollutants. So just the provision of information
challenges the monopoly on information that an authoritarian government depends
on for control and acquiescence. Do you agree with that? >> And in China this is going to be a
particular challenge. So lots of people like to make the
argument that China has a very sophisticated censorship
apparatus, but in reality it, China's about to go through an experiment that no
other country in history will ever grow through and it'll
happen just one time. Which is a billion people are gonna come
online in one country in the span of a decade. And you have to ask yourself the question,
who are they? They are largely rural. Often in the Western province, they have
no visibility into what's going on in the various urban
environments in China. And so, the reason this is game-changing
is the grievance of one city has the potential to scale to a
grievance across all cities. It's that sort of visibility into other Chinese communities' problems and
challenges and grievances. And so, the challenge of these complaints
and these frustrations scaling. Even the Chinese themselves have no idea
what that, that looks like. It's, it's a huge wild card for them. The other thing that they're doing, just
to do everything they can to hedge their monopoly on
information, is they're literally. Trying to build spheres of cyber-influence
by building out the technological
infrastructure of other countries. Because they have a blurry line between
public and private sector. It's their own form of foreign assistance
that no other country seems to be able to compete
with. >> One of the things that we have talked about internally and I think it's fair to
say. Is that there are solutions to his level of censorship, a combination of public key
cryptography and a whole bunch of new inventions which
we can talk about if you're interested in. Make it possible to imagine that in five
years maybe a decade, it will be impossible for countries like
China to keep their citizens in the dark. They would have to rely on other means of
oppression. But the traditional blocking the
information through a firewall or restricting access looks to us like we can
stop that. >> I'm going to ask that we get ready now for the audience participation part of the
discussion, but I wanna close with one last question which
brings us back from China, North Korea and soon to the
United States. One of the most controversial issues that
we face here here in the United States where we do have strong
democratic institutions and the like. It's been the question about privacy,
technology, security. The fight against terrorism and the like. That has been the subject of discussion
about the role of surveillance, the role of NSA. the, the Snowdens, the Bradley Mannings of
the world. How do we think about the impact of those
events on how governments may view technology how citizens may view it, and
the relationship between the two. >> Well let's, let's distinguish between
governments and companies, and let's talk about
governments. I worry about governments collecting large
amounts of data on their citizens. And not for the reasons that all the nice
civil libertarians in the room think. I worry because those large databases will
be leaked. Because one of the other things that's
new, is the ability to do this large scale bulk
data leaking. It used to be if you looked at the
previous leaks they were essentially limited by the rate at which you could
make Xerox copies, you know, of things. This is sort of a physical component. But it appears now that it's possible to
steal 1.5 plus or minus million documents with a little bit of work from Hawaii, and
then put that around the world. This is really a new problem. And governments naturally collect data on
their citizens. Current ver, curr, the, current that
every, your phone knows exactly where you are because the E911 services are
required, by law, to record where you are. Now thank goodness that information has
not been leaked, but the fact of the matter is, the
databases exist. I'm not particularly sure I think, we want
that stuff leaked, generally available and so forth, let alone
subpoenaed, used in courts and so forth. Now, in the, we debated the Snowden case
at some length, traditional foreign policy people, and people, especially in the East
Coast, are very, very negative on Sonwden. The West Coast tends to be more. More shall we say positive and the view of student appears to have changed over
the year. To be somewhat more positive from an
initial very negative view. But the fact of the matter is, I just
don't think we want to encourage vault data leaking, even
if it had a good purpose. Who appointed Mr. Assange or Mr. Snowden
be the person who made that decision. It's not a good way to run your society. So in the book we basically say there's
gotta be some other way to deal with government
misbehavior and so forth. But the other thing we say very clearly
and indeed in the current issues around the
NSA surveillance. I'm happy that we know that the government
was doing this. I think in democracy you should roughly
know what the government was doing. It's not really a good idea for them to be
collecting all this information, because somebody else
will leak some other part of it. >> And, and just to add to that, there's a
few other dimensions to this. Eric and I, when the, in research for the
hardcover version of the book, we spent five and a half
hours interviewing. Julian Assange well, he was under house
arrest in, in, in the UK. Trying to understand technologically what
he was trying to build and what he thinks he might be able to build
in ten years. And we came to the conclusion that Eric
mentioned, which is-. You know the problem is who are, who are
these people to determine that they're the ones anointed to make a decision about
what should be public and what shouldn't? But it's actually even more complicated
than that with vault leaking, because there's nobody,
there's no way any individual can read all of these documents and even
make an informed judgement about what kind of harm
they're gonna cause. >> So we actually wrote our position in
the book, and you can, you'll read it. And from the safety of his new residence
in London, Mr. Sanj wrote a scathing critique of us
and our view. Saying that we were puppet masters for the
tech elite. >> And of course he leaked our interview. >> And he leaked our interview. So, which you can also read online. >> What, what did you expect? [LAUGH] yeah. >> So, so, my, my point here is I think
this information is being gathered, maybe for
good purposes or maybe for not. But if you're going to gather that
information, you better have a really good idea of how it's not gonna
get stolen. It's not gonna get [INAUDIBLE] leaked. And it's gonna be protected, or maybe you
shouldn't do it at all. And I think that's ultimately, I think
[INAUDIBLE]. >> Let me just, but, but of course, it's
not just the problem with government. Lots of people collect data on you. As a matter of fact, I would dare say,
Amazon probably knows more about you than the US
government and they care more. All right? Because the NSA actually doesn't care what
you said to your grandmother. Amazon does, [LAUGH] because you might buy something that you discussed with your
grandmother. So, sometimes I think we have to recognize
that one of the problems of your point about fault data
leaking is an important one. But democracy is always right at the edge
of chaos. And it's a disruptive system where people
can say anything. It's a disruptive system where we're always over throwing governments
peacefully. And we depend on institutions to moderate
and mediate those disruptions. And if individual citizens are deciding, rather than the institutions of
government, in the case of the United States there're three separate co-equal branches
of government. Then you've got a chaotic environment and
I think that is part of the problem with the, the
Snowden. >> Well also, and then you add the
celebrity factor to this, right? >> Yes. >> I mean, and, and that to me, if you
look at the progression of leakers in the past and then Manning and then Snowden, these people are becoming
more famous over the time, over time, and as we talked about backstage, it lends itself
towards copycatting and I think your point about this not just being a government issue is also
important. What happens the day that somebody at a
major law firm in the United States decides to bulk leak
a bunch of information? What, what are the, what are the
consequences of that? And then there's another issue about what
all of this means for the future of the
intelligence community. One of my, my mentors is, is, is Frank
Carluci, who used to be deputy director of the CIA
among other things. And he said to me in what must have been
10 years ago that the challenge the CIA has is it's becoming
increasingly difficult to keep a secret. And that was decade ago. So the intelligence community has a real
challenge that it has to overcome, which is how it, how
it continues to do its good work in an era
where more and more there's a risk of things
getting leaked. And, I, I don't know the answer to that
question. >> All right. We're now gonna go to the audience
participation. >> You talked about that you were worried
about the country stealing your data and more worried about
you stealing my data. And the point is that the government shuts
down for 7 days nobody cares, Google goes down for 5
minutes the world stops. >> [LAUGH]. >> And so the thing which I would like to
ask you is, I control my government. I know that I am electing this president. I don't control the Google CEO chairman. Should there be elections for people who
steal, who, control our data? [LAUGH] And how do you bring
accountability [INAUDIBLE]? Thank you. >> Very good for you. [UNKNOWN]. >> I was care, I was careful with my
answer to say that you wanna distinguish between
governments and corporations. Governments have a monopoly on the, the
use of force. They can actually send the police, they
can shoot you, they can put in jail. None of those tools are available to
corporations. And indeed, companies are subject to
numerous laws, regulations, and so forth. Not just in the US, but everywhere else. But the ultimate reason for you not to be
too worried about us, is that we depend on, at some lev,
basic level, your trust. And if there were a data breach at Google, involving anyone, it would
immediately become front page news all around the world and millions of
people would say, screw that, we're gonna go use
Bing. >> [LAUGH] Right. Seriously. So, which is, is clearly not a good thing. [LAUGH] So, so ultimately, the answer to your question is in a competitive market,
right? The competition, plus the regulations,
plus the fear of regulations, plus the, the serious
threat of civil and criminal penalties, which are in fact,
often applied to CEO's and chairmen are your
best defense. [BLANK_AUDIO] >> [LAUGH] Okay, all right. Hi, my name is Malin, I'm a senior at
Stanford. I think there's sort of a large current of dissatisfaction with the government
here in Silicon Valley, and you also spoke about
technology sort of as a way around traditional foreign
policy mechanisms. But in the end, Google is part of America,
Google's part of a democracy. So how do you view Google's civic
responsibility both here and, and abroad? >> You know, I had a very interesting mind
shift that I had to experience when I went from the state department to Google,
because I was used to talking about our foreign
policy. And I got to Google and everybody told me
there was no Google foreign policy. It's a global company that's defined by a
mission and a set of values. and, and, that's a really different way of thinking about things than, than when
you're in government. So, when you part of the reason, at, at
Google we've taken on this mission of, of, of free expression, is it's
something that makes sense for us as a company, and it's an issue that we can get
behind that might sort of inch right up to the line of being political without favoring, say, one
specific government, right? And Google as a company, we stand by the
free flow of information and we should stand by that everywhere
from the United States to Pyongyang. But it's, you know, there is this miss,
you know, just because Google is headquartered in the US doesn't mean that
it is exclusively a, a, a US company. >> Goo, Google's basic answer is we are in
favor of an open and free internet for every human
being on the planet. And remember that that strategy's also
self serving to our shareholders because eventually
they will become Google users and eventually they'll have
monetization and eventually they'll have credit cards and eventually
they'll have advertising. And because we have the benefit of time,
we're willing to wait for the 20 years or 30 years for those consumers
to become rabid Google advertising fans. So it's in our self interest, but it's
also the right thing to do morally. [BLANK_AUDIO] So my name is [UNKNOWN] actually maybe,
one of the victims of the technology was involved in
the Egyptian Revolution. And it's amazing what you said you know,
it's just you said, what's on my, what I wanted to say is there's a lot
of responsibility to technology. You know, I mean the revolution happened
we didn't expect. You know, the regime is going to change it's been 3 years what happened is the
aftermath. I feel there is a lot of responsibility on
us to to actually have this work. And there's responsibility maybe on you,
to help us make this work. And so and, I, I started an NGO, I moved
to one of the largest slum areas in Egypt. I actually had a visit from one of their
VPs, Mohammed Godet, what an amazing guy. And I felt that why not recreate a, a
successful model? Right? Of revolution or revolutions that are
happening, or technology that makes a big change and is sustainable and,
and continues. So it's not a matter of maybe okay you
[INAUDIBLE] you travel around the world, but why don't we know
keep on and following up, I mean if you were left out, I mean
most of the evolutionaries now are in jail or
[LAUGH] they're outside of the country. But why, I mean why some, Google that was
so interested and the whole world was like with us and now they're like you know,
just, just let's look to another part of the
world. Although, there's still much that can be
done, you know, to follow up on this and actually make this
a, a successful story that can be replicated, you know, in
other, other youth who are going to take the lead and change
their countries. Thanks. >> Arthur? >> Yeah, I mean, our, our belief and we
write this in the book technology has an
empowerment by us. Right? It obviously you know, empowers people to
do extraordinary things, but when I look at the situation in Egypt, you,
you, you see two challenges. A lack of institutions that can function
and deliver basic goods and social services to the population and two, you
know, it's very important if you start a revolution to make sure that that
revolution produces new leaders with new last names who can deliver better than
the autocrat that you overthrew. And it takes time, right? So one of the challenges, you talked about
expectations, you know, technology does raise expectations and
it's very easy for people to galvanize around the lowest common denominator which
is, we don't like an autocrat that shut down our networks,
let's get him out of power. But that's basically the only thing that
anybody agrees on. And so the [CROSSTALK] go ahead Erick. >> In the book we actually tell the story of Vodaphone, and as you know, to hear a
square, they actually shut down the internet for 4
and a half years, 4 and a half days, excuse
me. And they sent out fake SMS messages which
were so stupid, everyone figured out that they were coming from the
Ministry of Propaganda, under Mubarak. When they shut down the internet, the
average person in, in the, in Egypt all of a sudden got a, a definitive message
that the government was terrified. And people's opinion shifted in favor of
the protests. So the internet was a, a key component of the, of the first part of the revolution,
but it provided very little help in the second
part, which was identifying real leaders doing the
political negotiation, building the teams. I think it's fair to say that Ukraine
which has many problems unrelated to the internet,
has the same problem. Right? The, the, the guy that they didn't like
has now fled the country, they can't agree on a
new leader. But now you've got all of these people who
are very sophisticated, very internet connected, saying, where's my
government and why haven't you fixed everything right
now? So pity the revolutionary leader, who
takes this emotionally charged thing and has no time
to operate. And that's the fault of the internet. [BLANK_AUDIO] Okay? >> Yes, if, if I could just on, on this
point though, it, it's also the case that these things
really do take time. No revolution on the day after is actually
successful. That's the thing to remember. From the French Revolution, the American
Revolution, no revolution is successful the next day. Because technology I think is an
accelerant of underlying trends. It actually is neither a cause of what
happens after, nor is it a solution to what happens after
it. And so, the question is can it be part of
a solution going forward? And I think that's really the interesting
question for those who, who promote the optimistic
technological future. Let's see. Where is the next question? Okay, yes. >> Hi, my name is Tim I'm an undergrad as
well. My question has to do with the ways we can
use technology to change institutions in the western world are
generally you could call a good governments, right? And the question is that historically we
relied on a very strong signal about public opinion every 4 years,
or whatever the election cycle is. We can imagine technologies nowadays
allowing decision-makers to get a very strong signal about what its populace
wants quite immediately. How do you think governments can harness that technology in their
decision-making process and how should we change institutions
given that we have this technology for
government? >> Well, I think, I mean, the, the natural
thing that technology does to politics, say right here in the United States, is it makes it all more
transparent. Now, that also comes at, at a cost. It generates a lot more, a lot, lot more
noise. I mean I, I think, you know, this isn't a,
a, an answer to your specific question, but I think
there, there's a fundamental problem in the American system that you can relate to
technology, which is, it's scaring all the young people and future leaders
from ever wanting to go into government. Because everybody posted stupid things
online, at an age before they were aware of the long term
consequences. And so, there is a risk, you know, we, we're here at Stanford, smartest people in
the world. I'm not just saying that 'cuz I went
there. [LAUGH] Speaking as a Stanford graduate. [LAUGH] You know, I, I, it's. >> [LAUGH] I knew we'd get back at Cal
sooner or later during this conversation. >> [CROSSTALK] But there is, there is a
responsibility that all the students here has, have as people
who are gonna graduate and go on to, to lead the world
is there's a responsibility to make sure it's not led
by the leftovers. And that means that there do, there do
have to be a set of brave young people who decide, you know what, maybe I, you know, maybe there's a risk associated
with a life filled with transparency, but you
know, we're gonna be a part of the few brave souls that get out there and decide that, despite the consequences of that we
wanna lead. >> [INAUDIBLE] could I, could I just, on
this point though, because I, I wanna make an
argument. A provocative argument, that actually,
this is a place that technology is partially to blame for the institutional
gridlock that we see, in Washington. And actually, it's true in lots of
democracies. But let me make the American case. I'm gonna date myself now. But when I was a kid, I grew up, watching the Huntley-Brinkley Report with
my parents every night. That's how we got our news. Some people watched Walter Cronkite. Some people watched Coward K. Smith. But that's how we got our news. Now, and so basically, we had the same
news source. Now I can go to my blog, my cable news
network, my aggregation sites, and I can never actually encounter the views and opinions of somebody who thinks
differently. Right? So we vulcanized information news in a way
that I only have to listen to people who think
like me. When you only listen to people who think
like you, you think people who don't think like you are
either venal or stupid. And that then gets reflected in the
polarization of politics in Washington. So, actually both the speed of technology,
and its balkanization has contributed to the
inability to govern. How do you react [CROSSTALK] to that? >> I think we would, we completely agree
with what you said, and I would in, to further support it, I, I'm good friends with a, a Republican Senator from the
South. And I'm visiting him, and he had just narrowly escaped a brush with the tea
party. And I said, how was the campaign? And he said that it got so bad that he, on
his mirror in the morning at home, he shaves,
and he wrote in, in lipstick or whatever you write on, on
mirrors [LAUGH] There are camera's everywhere, everyone is watching
you, you're always recorded, keep your mouth
shut. Okay. This is a senator. It's not some random person. And I worry that, it's, the way to answer your question is, what do we worry about
in democracy. And I worry that there's been a loss of
what I would call deliberation, in deliberative
thinking there are, there are some problems that cannot be solved in an hour or a day, they
require sophisticated political leadership lots of time investment, lots of
discussion sometimes behind closed doors. And we're losing that opportunity. Great leaders probably emerge from that
cauldron. How will the new great leaders emerge, I
don't know. >> Over here. >> Yes. Thank You. Yes. >> Andrew Groida. I'm a former colleague of Eric and Jared. >> Yes. Hi. Nice to see you. >> Thank you. Yeah. I wanted just to support the point there
is by Candoleeza Rice that there is, what you call in your
book confirmation bias. That people tend to absorb opinions
similar to their own. And we see to large extent that in Russia
those days, which is another contradiction over why our population that
still believes into what they see on television. Yeah, but I have a couple of different
questions. You write in your, your books that anonymity nowadays can translate to
something like irrelevance. Did your opinion evolve since then? I remember we had a lot of discussions at Google when we started Google Plus
whether people should use their real names, and how do
you see this in the current developments of
the internet? And second how does Google or other companies take advantage of the recent
technological progress in pictography for example, random number
generators that are working in quantum effects and quantum
computers. >> So let me answer, answer both of those
quickly. There is evidence that people online when
they are anonymous, say things that they would never say in front of a human
being or if the name was, was [INAUDIBLE]. So I think it's important to allow such
speech. Certainly you don't want to ban it. But you might want to favor identified
speech over unidentified speech. Because the consequence of liable and
lying and so forth, you're more likely to be truthful if you have a face and a name
and a responsible, roughly speaking. So ultimately since Google views
everything kind of as a ranking problem I think that's how I would rank
most of it. I think it's important to allow anonymous
speech, but it's also important to understand that
sometimes anonymous speech is not actually true because people would
just sort of make stuff up and so there's no
consequence online. On the question of cryptography. After the NSA revelations, one of the
things that the Stone documents showed, and we believe
are true, the GCHQ had put a pipe essentially between
our data centers and had undone what you know as the Stubby
protocol. And we view this as a significant
violation inside of the trust and innards of Google. So we used very complicated and very
powerful encryption now to essentially make it impossible to
do that. For the technical people in the room, it's
twenty forty eight bit, twenty forty eight bit keys with forward secrecy
we rotate the keys on every transaction. Because essentially, we believe,
impossible even with modern cryptographic tools to break
that. It's possible that the NSA has other
mechanisms inside but we certainly don't know of
them. And, we've certainly done everything we
can to, to prevent it. If the government wants information from
Google, the government should follow the law and
follow the FISA Court, which was set up under Patriot Act One and Patriot Act Two for these
purposes. right, I see. Oh yes, go ahead, yes. >> Hi there. My name is Dustin Boyer and I'm a former
Google employee, so it's actually nice to see
both of you again. I'm sort of fascinated that you guys seem
to be so against leaking, because it was the
Snowden documents that actually showed that there was this huge
issue with data centers, and that so much of Gmail had
been compromised. And that the NSA had then, in turn, gone
on to use that information to spy and
infiltrate activist groups. So, my question to you is, if not Snowden,
then who, because obviously the NSA has no incentive to
reveal this type of information. In the book we actually talk about this at
some length. So the problem here is if I say yes to the Snowden thing, what happens when
there's a copycat that isn't as judicious about the documents that got
leaked working with The Guardian and people start getting
killed and seriously made endanger. And it's not at all clear to me that you could read the million documents that
you're leaking. So to trust any individual with that kind
of empowerment, is of concern. So it was certainly helpful to know about
it. But it would be much better if we could
have known about it without the downside dangers of the
kind, that the leaking implies. >> My name's [UNKNOWN] I'm an MBA at the
GSB. We spoke extensively about sort of the
bottom up adoption of technology, and how that
affects revolution and, and democracy, but I was
addressing as perspective on sort of more dop down
adoptions. Countries like Singapore, which would be
fairly autocratic for a long time. But I think an excellent job in using technology to empower the citizens, create
better citizen services and create a more open society while sort of maintaining the benefits of having some
closed-door conversation. And all that's often laughed up is being
small, are those models, things that people look to
replicate, at other places. >> So we spent quite a bit of time with
the prime minister of Singapore and he's interviewed
for, is interviewed in the book. And tells the story, of how people react
to this social information in various examples what
happens between the apartment buildings in
Singapore. Singapore's done a fantastic job of building a knowledge society and connect
everything. And they have, for what is largely a one
party democracy, they have an unusually open
view of the internet. They only block, according to them, 100
sites. And they do that in order to point out to
you that they can block it. So it may be that culturally because it's
largely Mandarin and Chinese, it's a small country,and it'
s of course physically smaller, they get a different effect that
wouldn't necessarily scale to the hundreds of millions of people of
different religions and interactions. And I caution against generalizing from
the, the sort of wonderful stories of the Netherlands, and
Singapore and so forth. Which are homogeneous, small, ethnic and
largely well run countries. >> Eric, do you want to add anything? >> Yeah, Eric mentioned is also worth
noting that Singapore is one of only two countries in the world whose leader is a computer scientist, Estonia is the
other. But Eric mentioned a story that the prime
minister shared with us. It's actually a story about curry. And there, there's a message in the story
that I'll get to in a second. Basically, there was a dispute between two
people who shared a hallway, in an apartment complex over the smell of
curry in the, in the hallways. In typical Singaporean fashion they
brought a mediator in to negotiate and everybody was fine until the mediator
went public with her story and political opportunists, decided to
seize this as a chance to talk about how foreigners were coming in and
taking Singaporean jobs, go figure. A bunch of people got together online and
declared a national day of curry cooking. And the prime, and the prime minister, to his credit, acknowledged that this really
scared them. And he said that they started to see people, that he started to see descent
build online. And he acknowledged that they overreacted
to it and the overreaction to what was in fact a very small number of people really having
good fun with something, ended up putting people in
the streets. And the lesson from this is there's a
dilemma that autocratic leaders will face in the future which is having to distinguish between what's real and what's
noise. And many autocrats in the future, at some
point, they'll overreact to that noise and create a disturbance
that ultimately they can't control. >> I'm Theo Milonopoulos. I'm a Stanford alum and PhD student in
political science. Doctor Schmidt I wanted reinforce a point
that Doctor Rice made about the motivations that the NSA and companies like yours might have in collecting
metadata. It seems to me that the NSA, if it could
get out from the business of data collection it
would do it in a heartbeat. In the sense that the, the larger and larger amounts of information that it
collects makes it's job actually more difficult in the sense
that it becomes finding a needle in a much larger
haystack. So, it, it seems to me that, that the, the
NSA would love not to have to collect this data because,
but the terrorist threats keep coming. And that the day on September 12th, the
question won't be, why didn't the NSA do more to protect
my privacy. It will be why didn't it find the needle
in the haystack? >> My second point >> Can I actually, can I actually respond
to that? >> Sure. >> In the book we actually make your
argument in the following context. We say that in the fight between hawks,
and doves the hawks always win. Because the downside risk of a small
terrorist act, and the, and the if you will, the loss of diversity and fear and so forth
that comes with everyone being slightly worried
about being surveillance. There, there's no, the doves don't have a,
a standing. It ultimately is an asymmetric outcome. I disagree a little bit with the way you phrased that, just as a matter of computer
science. Modern algorithms are capable of doing extraordinarily subtle things with large
data collections. So, for example, the metadata that
consists of your the phone numbers you call, is highly, highly
interesting to a whole bunch of computer scientists who
want to figure out who you are, who you're associated with,
and so forth. So it's highly valuable to the NSA which
is why they did it. I'm on the task force for the White House
trying to figure out what to do with this data by the way, and the President has asked that
it not be stored by the NSA but be stored
somewhere else. Well, there is not agreement on where that
information should be stored for the reasons that I
outlined. Go ahead. >> Sure. >> And, and, and, and just because we
talked, touched on the, the question about how to get to a more elevated
political di, discussion on these issues. I don't believe like, the labels of hawks
and doves, because I don't necessarily think that that's the
right axis to think about it. I just think, you know, the question is
what level of risk are we willing to tolerate in
American society. And that's something that should be
debated, but I'm not entirely sure how that debate can
happen. We shouldn't have to, I think, rely, and I
think you would agree with me. That we shouldn't have to rely on the
compromising of our sources and methods, analysts out there that are trying to
defend the United States, in, in doing so. But let me get to my second. >> Let, Let's, we are going to have to have somebody else make a comment, so,
yeah right. Do you want to respond to the last point
at all? >> Well I, I mean I think we, we agree
that there's a need for, for a debate and, and we've said you know whether one you know regardless of one's
position is on Snowden it's useful to have this
conversation about transparency and until recently we
weren't able to talk about what percentage of the overall
requests we get from government are related to
national security. So, there actually has been progress on
this. >> An example would be that it was illegal
for us to say the number of national security
requests we got. The government just changed this rule so I
can now tell you that we get less than 10,000 per
year. Which given that we have a couple billion users is actually a calming number for
most people. So within, I disagree, I think I disagree with all of your points. So, in the spirit of [CROSSTALK] no, no,
no, but just to answer, I think that it's in a
democracy, we write this in the book, democracies
will have these debates, and they'll find the point,
right, between our different views. In autocracies there is no such debate. >> Yes, right here. >> Hi my name is Alex, I'm a third year PhD student in engineering here
at Stanford. I have a question about the potential for crowd, crowd-source funding to inflame
violent groups and I, I had, thinking specifically about an
article I read recently concerning Syria which you
brought up. Which were certain very radical groups
that are fighting Assad but the U.S. doesn't
want to gain power, and that are being funded through crowd-sourcing in Arab in other
Arab nations. Saudi Arabia was one of the ones that was
mentioned. And I think of the the Irish conflict with
the IRA, and how money came from America back then to support activities, some of which were terrorist
activities. But it was very hard to do that back then,
and now it's getting much easier for someone sitting in their house to support a radical
organization. What do you think about this? >> That's a really excellent question and
we, we touch on this in, in the book. And I think I, I go back to, to Syria as
an important context. So, it's not just about crowd-sourcing
money for groups engaged in hostile activities, it's also
about crowd-sourcing people. So Syria, in addition to fighting a
physical civil war, it's also fighting a cyber war which is being led by
the Syrian electronic army. What the Syrian electronic army has started doing is crowd-sourcing foreign
fighters, not with guns, but from the former Soviet
Union to come fight the cyber war. And it's interesting, there's about 15
thousand foreign fighters physically fighting in Syria, about a
third of them come from Europe, and about a third of those
from Europe are converts, which is sort of an
interesting data point. But, it's a totally, the serious, the
first example I can think of where you have software
engineers that are sort of added to the equation, fighting a
totally different type of war on top of the one that we're
familiar with. And if you think about Iraq for instance,
you know, obviously we're familiar with, ya know, sectarian violence that's
played out there and played out in Syria. When you think about sectarian violence
and then you think about something we're all familiar with, which is
cyber-bullying it's really the sort of the next stage of this, when cyber-bullying becomes better organized,
better funded, and in some cases state sponsored, which
gets to, to your point. You know, if one demographic or one
sector, one group is disproportionately able to
garner resources to terrorize a rival population both in
the physical world and also online, it's
doubly as damaging. I'm gonna we are gonna run out of time
very quickly here, but I, I wanna close the conversation by posing a
question that was actually flashed at me from the
audience, a very interesting question, and then to
just give you each a chance to say a few words that you'd most like us to remember
about this evening and about your book. But, someone asked me, do you have a view on bitcoin, [LAUGH] and bitcoin
[INAUDIBLE]. >> Jerry, and so what happened to those
bitcoins you were buying? [LAUGH]
>> Yeah. >> I think this was your idea. >> [LAUGH]. So how about regulation? I mean we, we talk about a free and open Internet, but there are certain things
that are going to have to be regulated, and if ever there
was something that we expect governments and central
banks to control it's currency. So how about this impact of this new idea? Think a lot of people are obviously
talking about Bitcoin right now and it is right to talk about it as
cryptocurrency because Bitcoin is just one example of this and while the
focus is on cryptocurrency, it's important we talk
about the digital wallets in all of this. Because even, let, let's say even if you have a regulated cryptocurrency, or an
unregulated one, without a digital wallet, it's ultimately
a flawed ecosystem and this is what happened in
Canada. The Canadians tried to create their own
regulated cryptocurrency called Mintchip, which was pegged to the
Canadian dollar. But then all the wallets started getting
hacked and people's money got stolen. So they, ultimately, decided to, to sunset
it. But I think the challenge is, there's
certain, the, the, there's a small number of people that wanna engage
in an unregulated, economic system. And there's a, there's no shortage of
examples of people that have been trying to use BitCoins for money
laundering, for fraud. And ultimately, without regulation, a lot
of this is kept in check. But the inevitability of cryptocurrency,
is something that I think we should all agree, is likely. But whether BitCoin is the model, is a
different question. >> I should say that the architecture that BitCoin represents is of enormous computer
science interest. they, the, the gentleman who invented it,
who is now thought to be somebody who lives in Europe and he never really
identified himself came up with a way to make digital copies of
things that cannot be further copied. And that is useful in many, many areas of
the future. So even if Bitcoins become very
controversial for the reasons that you're identifying, the underlying accomplishment
is a new, is a very interesting new thing. And you'll encounter it. It's essentially a way that. That, that copies are regulated and new copies are not allowed that's pretty
interesting. >> Alright as a closing point, what would
you like us most to remember about this evening and
also about your book. What should we take from this
conversation? Do you want to start? >> Sure. And, and, before I say I would like to
just you know personally thank you again as well and it really is amazing
to be back here at Standford. It's also very it's a unique situation to
sit in between my former boss and my current
boss [LAUGH]. It feels like a lot of accountability and
[LAUGH] l almost feel like I am going to get graded or you know hopefully compensated [LAUGH] or
something. Something at some point. But the, you know, I, I spent, you know,
in my, I still consider myself a, a young
person but I've spent, you know, my short
professional life working really hard at figuring out what we do about
repressive regime. And in the short time that I've been doing
this over the past decade, it's become increasingly possible for all
of us to play a role in this. And so the old model, is the government
was autocratic and repressive and we basically had to rely entirely on states
to, to, to change to change the systems. And the reality is because of computer
science, because 5 billion new people are gonna be connected and
because it really is still a wild card as to whether or not the
repression that exists in the physical world will spill
over into the online world. It, it, it's, it's optimism but with a
caveat that it's a challenge to all of us and I look out at this audience and it's the first
generation that is gonna be you know, going into leadership roles understanding both technology and
geopolitics. And so, not only is there, sort of, this
short window of time to figure out how we end
repressive censorship and repressive talk recede, but
the timing coincides with probably the people who are best
positioned to deal with this. I think, I think it's a great honor for
both of us to be on the same stage with you. And with as sort of you as the exemplar of service to our, to our country and to our
world. But I also want to thank you for taking young Jarred and turning him into my
partner here. We've learned a lot together, and in
putting the book together, what we try to do is to layout what'll happen over not just 1
year but over a 5 or 10 year period. And so far, in the last year, pretty much
everything we talked about has occurred in one form or another,
although not necessarily by name. So, what I conclude is, we have roughly
the right architecture, but we now don't know exactly who the
players will be. And that will be a lot up to the people
who discuss this, the people who decide, who debate it, and
who understand the consequences of it. The issues around empowerment, both
leaking encryption, state actors, government and
so on and so forth, they're not going to go
away, these are new problems. And I would argue that and, and what's
nice about sort of finishing the book tour more or less here in California over the last year we're sort of this segment of
work. You guys can read and see what you think. Is that the people who grapple with these
issues it's now your turn. Government leaders, student leaders,
business leaders and so forth. To figure out what you're going to do into
this new digital age, right. And there will be huge wins. Huge empowerment, huge improvements ahead
of us if we do the right things. I still come back to my core bias which is
that I'm an optimist about people. And I think the empowerment bias that
Jarred described, it's such a great story. And I would never want society to somehow
stop that or slow it down. I think both of us have decided to spend
our lives working on this problem. And we're glad that you have because you
are both exemplars of trying to put ideas into action and I want to thank you very much for a wonderful conversation
this evening. And I want to encourage all of you, if you
have not, to buy the New Digital Age Reshaping the
Future of People Stations and Business. [NOISE] [MUSIC]
