Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt | Leadership Live with David Rubenstein

his leadership live I'm David Rubenstein coming to you from my home in Maryland and I'm very pleased today to have a special guest Eric Schmidt who's coming to you from a home in California Eric welcome and thank you very much for coming great to see you again David so Eric you are in great demand probably more in demand than any technology figure I can read about or know about everybody wants your advice um so I'm glad you're going to give us some insights today but let me talk about one thing that you have recently done you've agreed that share a commission that Governor Cuomo asked you to chair to help figure out how New York can benefit from your technology expertise and how it can become a better State in the future and how they can benefit from what happened in kovat 19 can you tell us a little bit about the Commission and when you expect to produce results so we've just gotten started you know Governor Cuomo is doing quite a good job as a governor and they certainly compared to the other governors and he has he's grappling with a lot of problems at the same time he's created a reimagine New York state task force for which I'm chair there'll be 15 members we're putting the people together this week and the idea initially is to focus on three areas of issues one is telehealth basically how do you deal with the medical system another one is broadband essentially how do you participate in all of this if you don't would have access to broadband and there plenty of people who are underserved who don't have that and then the third one is reimagining how we're going to work how do people feel about going to those tall skyscrapers and taking the subway to do so all of that is gonna get addressed by our commission and probably some other things as well and you expect to complete that work in a year or so we'd like to have initial results in three to six months and the reason is that this is not one of these think-tank approaches the state needs help as do all the states and this pandemic is gonna go on for pretty long time if we better get used to dealing with it making some adjustments etc etc so you're also chairing a commission for the Pentagon on artificial intelligence so you managed you managed to work with Democrats and Republicans it seems so what is that Commission doing for that effort well then that can so there's actually pentagons Commission called the defense innovation board and then there's a congressional Commission called the NASA Security Commission on AI so there's really three at the moment for me in the case of the Pentagon it's straightforward how does the military use technology to improve its performance its efficiency and so forth a lot of which comes down to the fact that they're not very good at software and they're certainly not very good at AI and people are working very hard to address that we've got a lot of good results there the second one which is the AI Commission came out of legislation a year ago in the NDAA to try to understand how we're going to keep up with the other countries and how we're going to make sure that a AI is both a strength of ours that it's used in our national security and now we have the New York State Commission which is really intending to deal with a diverse set of issues many people are in in trouble they're in different kinds of trouble there's no single story how do we make sure that we get a diverse solution that will really work for the whole state as well as the city the city the city of New York is an incredible economic engine in America I think as everybody knows it's important that it perform it as well best I'm concerned that without significant changes people are not going to be able to work efficiently they're not gonna be able to go back to work go to school that sort of thing we have to find ways of getting through the Cova crisis until a vaccine is available now you're a native of Virginia you went to Princeton and you got your PhD at Berkeley and then you were the CEO of Novell and then ultimately 10 years a CEO of Google and then the executive chair for seven years and now you are independent but you're obviously a person involved in a lot of philanthropy a lot of advice and so forth I'd like to hear your perspectives on first the technology world it was thought before koban 19 that maybe the technology companies were coming too big and too powerful and the largest technology companies were dominating our economy right now they become very important in this Cova 19 crisis you think that the effort to maybe diminish the impact of the technology companies that our economy will continue or do you think the technology companies have proven themselves so valuable that they will continue to be very strong well you know I think large companies always face opposition whether it's from their competitors or from intrinsic interests or political forces or the press or what have you and I understand that I for one want to thank Amazon for hiring another hundred thousand workers so they can get my packages to my home that much quicker and I think all of us should be grateful that these tech companies are working really hard to help right now I'm sure in the future there'll be lots of tensions over this but imagine the pandemic without Amazon without Google without Apple without Facebook etc etc without Microsoft the usual suspects how would you be spending your time without Netflix or YouTube or what have you you see my point you'd have go back to 1918 you'd be operating under great fear it's interesting when reading the books about 1918 we only had three tools at the time which were wear a mask social distancing and wear a mask social distancing and I'm trying to remember the third one anyway we have exactly the same same tools now and in a hundred years for what you could do but you have infinite information that you didn't before so let's talk about the technology companies in helping solve the crisis in terms of the coming up with a vaccine perhaps a I help technology companies figure out what might work and other biotech companies using AI to come up with a vaccine and what is your view on the likelihood of a vaccine so they are and there's lots of good news there so a non-technical description of what chemists do is they wake up in the morning and they have an idea about a combination of a series of proteins and then they mix it in the lab and they try it out and it fails and at night they go home eat dinner go to sleep wake up and they have a new idea and they try it again so what they're trying to do is they're trying to find in the space of infinite possibilities what combination of proteins and antigens and so forth and so on will actually stop something or start something you can systematize that with AI you can actually have an AI system predict what his or her intuition is and then do it as an assay in other words do thousands at the same time and get orders of magnitude four scenarios that is part of the key to why we've made so much progress in the biology of the disease when the Chinese outbreak occurred the Chinese published essentially a map of the virus very very quickly in America people like the broad institution of which I'm a board member were able to identify where the receptors were with that information you can now go find a combination of the proteins that will go and basically stop and start this process and that's we that formed the basis of the moderna vaccine which is in phase one trials and in fact is some of the basis of Phase two trials that are going on in China the government did one thing well last year which is it created something called Barda and Garda is a essentially a advanced research agency for this sort of thing and a set of philanthropist including Bill Gates have been working hard and doing pre-buying and generally getting things ready for a vaccine the problem with vaccines is you have to first test if they don't don't hurt the hosts second you have to see if they actually produce anything and the third is that you have to see if they actually have an impact you can speed that process up but you can't speed it up in decades it took normally takes five or ten years to produce the vaccine we're trying to do it in roughly 12 to 18 months if we did come up with a vaccine or someone came up with it first would we have enough manufacturing capability to produce enough vaccines for everybody is that realistic so so most people have looked at this have concluded that eventually yet but not in the short term short term being one or two years there is a universal agreement that the vaccine should first be available to healthcare workers the people who are most at risk and people like people who are in nursing homes the places that are worse people are working in meatpacking facilities where there's just a high probability of transmission and my guess is that what will happen is they'll there will be a vaccine within 12 months or so and then there will be a big fight over who gets it I have funded through various maneuvers ideas and projects to try to think about how to do that ethically but that's a problem we'll face when we get there right now we need to work on the vaccine hundred different vaccine candidates in various trials and so because vaccine doesn't mutate so that virus doesn't mutate very much there's a hope that the vaccine will actually work so many of the companies stocks have gone up which are thought to be producing a vaccine or potential vaccine but new will actually own the vaccine will it be the company we've got a lot of government money to help produce it or will the u.s. government owner will the world owners who own these vaccines I think most people believe that the companies will essentially run nonprofit for the first period that's the presumption I can imagine that the government could pass a law that under force majeure could actually force the electoral property be published because it's likely that this disease is not gonna go away it makes sense to allow these firms to own intellectual property because you're gonna want to be vaccinated in the future that vaccines are not forever that sort of thing so it's not obvious to me that the government should should just take the vaccine from the inventor in some sort of brute way it might be better to have a more clever strategy initially I think everybody's focused on the healthcare I wanted to emphasize that the scenario you're describing is more than 12 months maybe more than 18 months away and if we can't get things restarted there's an enormous amount of pain in our society bankruptcies job loss permanent closure of things like restaurants the damage that's been done to our travel industry into the airlines is horrendous it will take a decade to recover if we don't do this carefully now do you fault the Chinese and anything in relating the technology when they discover they had this problem should they have done something differently to deal with the problem or alert more people to it or you think the Chinese really did the most that they could do as I understand that there's a lot of fault going around everywhere the Chinese should have alerted people more quickly they eventually did but they but let me just explain it this way this is a simple test if something is doubling every three days how do you get ahead of it if you look at the countries that have that have done well compared to the countries that are in trouble which includes the United States they all had one point they all acted extremely quickly when they saw this wave coming America did not China did after a delay but that delay hurt let's imagine for example in New York as an example shutting down the restaurants and so forth and so on if you delay a week that's a factor of four more infections in this critical period the in critical infection rate of the disease was doubling every three days nowadays it's a much better shape in many scenarios it's doubling every 24 days every 30 days that gives you much more time but when you've got an acute attack like we saw in January and February I think there's plenty of blame to go around for all the governments around the world and you've said the other day on an interview that I read about that you were thinking it's important to not rush people back to work who don't want to go back to work so for example at your former company Google or other tech companies people are working remotely because they presumably can do that they're very technologically skilled but do you think that people will really want to come back generally to their employer and do you think we should force them back in some way or just let it be the decision of the employee because we fail to have a universal testing regime and because we don't have good sentinel and monitoring systems core problem we have now is we've trained all of our citizens that they can't be sure if they meet someone on the street that they're not infected that they won't get it and because on the order of half of the transmission is asymptomatic that person that person who you know or you know vaguely may give you the disease in a way that you don't that you don't even expect right they don't know that they're sick it's not their fault it was just happening indeed there's evidence that your your most your your most contagious right at the beginning of the disease around a five or six and there's lots of viral shedding and mid declines so you have to think about how do we deal with the legitimate and illegitimate fear that people are going to have so my guess is you're going to see more people organize themselves into roughly three buckets a set of people who can't go to work because their kids are at home and they have to be in charge of the kids and the schools aren't open that needs to get fixed otherwise we have a national tragedy you have a set of people who have extremely low tolerance for getting this disease because there are cancer survivor there immunosuppressed or what have you they really need to stay at home and you have people like myself we were just dying to go to the office that partitioning will be done in each company in different ways so for example if I'm working in a software group which is sort of what I like to do we will organize that some of us will be in the office some of us will be at home some of us will be in a satellite office but we know each other and we'll work together so for white collar workers you're going to see the organisation where some people will be in headquarters some people who in satellite some we've them homes that will be fine the harder problem is people who have to be physically present to work and that's gonna be very very difficult because you're gonna have to enforce social distancing for all the obvious reasons people gonna have to wear masks and people are gonna have to be careful now let's talk about testing for a moment are you surprised that we haven't been able to get everybody in the United States a test and do you think it's essential for everybody to be tested in order to make everybody safe and when they go back to work or feel safe well it as a matter of the population as a whole so let's let's go back to what the government should have done one of the first things the government should have done is get people masks and get them to wear it I'm shocked that it is not a requirement by the government that you fly with a mask on and that you get in a subway and public transportation with a mask on wearing a mask is the easiest way to say I care about humans because the masks although it may not protect you it certainly protects others there's lots of evidence that mask wearing this was also true a 1918 by the way so you can imagine relatively simple things like that that could materially improve confidence and and so forth and I think that that some combination like that is what we're going to have to do I wish we had a better answer I also believe that you don't have to test everyone you have to test a statistically significant number of people there are estimates that if you were able to test one percent of the population and you did it in a particularly statistically correct way you would get enough information that you could build a sentinel system is what it's called and what he would do is it would alert you to outbreak yet appears now we didn't know this two months ago that the majority of the transmission is occurring from particular kinds of groups I've already mentioned nursing homes meatpacking choirs things like that and they all have the property that there's a great deal of exhalation literally a lot of volume in it there so it appears that infection again this is what people say today is largely related to the quantity and the amount that you're exposed to if that's true then you should be able to detect outbreaks just statistically and then go and do contact tracing without having to either imprison everybody which is what some some countries are do or leave everyone on to their own devices which is also unsafe I'm trying to figure out a way to build such a system there is no such system that I'm aware of and there are components of this being built now so I think a combination of on the order of 1% kind of testing every day which is sort of achievable we can probably do this I think you also is that at the moment that the in the United States the disease is the contagion if you will of the disease is flat the slightly negative it's crucial that we get it down in the summer because people are outside and there's less transmission when you're outdoors one estimate from Japan by the way was that being outdoors was 19 times safer than being indoors so if I were in charge what I would tell people is wear a mask spend your time outdoors you can wear a mask and spend you're out of time whose time doors you're fine so for example outdoor restaurants outdoor construction sites and so forth now you also have to worry about the people in the kitchen but you get the point so tell us what you're doing to stay healthy you know are you wearing a mask when you go out are you traveling as much are you not traveling now no I think like most people traveling is pretty much stopped but the the important thing is wear a mask and I must say that handshakes are over and we're all learning how to bow like fantastic Japanese people so good to meet you David but the fact that matter is no touching no human transmission wash your hands a lot wear a mask social distancing and be outside is those are the tools we have today and as I mentioned earlier those are the same tools we had in and they do work now you've mentioned the 1918 influenza which killed I think in this country of almost 700,000 people maybe 50 million or more outside the United States but we still don't have a vaccine for that particular virus after all these years we don't have a vaccine for HIV so why are you confident that we will probably get a vaccine for this particular virus well there are many reasons starting with need financial investment financial incentives and the funding that governments around the world are providing and it's such a it's a global pandemic for the common goal that I think again I'm not an MD me ologist and I'm not a scientist in this area but the people who are experts have reasonable confidence that there will be one over they can't tell you where and remember they also can't tell you how long the vaccine will go for so I prefer not to focus on vaccine which is what everybody wants to talk about I think we need to focus on thriving in the co vedera in other words how do we get back to the greatness of America and this is a fantastic country I mean again think about what we had accomplished through February with the lowest unemployment in 50 years stock market was an all-time high business confidence was very strong people were getting hired left and right and so forth let's get back to that we have to get back to that with the presence of the virus at some low level so we need a monitoring system people need to change their behavior in routine ways and that we can get on I worry that for example industries like retail restaurants and so forth will be permanent at harm from this there's lots of evidence that the damage from pandemics is more than a year right that it's extremely difficult to restart these things and I worry a lot about that now can you explain to people who aren't as technologically savvy as you are why the epidemiologist seem to have various numbers about how many people are likely to die they changed almost daily and they confuse people about whether we're gonna have a lot more people die or not what would you say about their work I had the same reaction I looked into it so most of these models use extremely different parameters many of the models are proprietary and then don't even publish the way their models work so it's very hard to have an opinion about them the White House has historically chosen one which had very favorable numbers those numbers are not as favorable as they are now I think it's important to take an average of the models in order to get a better prediction but at the moment that the real answer is we know so little and I won't go through the math about it but we know so little about both the rate of transmission when you're most efficient how much meeting has to occur how much volume and exhalation has to occur we just don't know yet we will know the answers to these questions I hope we know it soon do you fault the infectious disease people who've been saying stay at home wear masks self isolate because there's been some criticism that they have effects shut beyond the economy where do you come out on that debate you have to solve both problems you have to solve a horrific health care problem and the health care workers in our country have done a fantastic job if you look at the priceless remember this all started because we were worried that the hospitals would be overloaded we were terrified that we would have people in a heart attack couldn't get to the hospital people dying from heart attacks we've managed to avoid that through an extraordinary work from many many people at the state federal and local level and in the hospital's so the second problem you have to is you have to come up with some economic solution the the level of unemployment that is now that we now have is on the order and approaching that of the depression we need that period to be as short as possible and the Treasury has generally done a good job of getting money into the system so we don't have a liquidity problem I'm worried we have a bankruptcy problem but eventually you can float the businesses long enough but basically if there is no demand they cannot stay in business and those are permanent job losses so when I look at the the actions of the people my primary criticism is the speed with which action occurred if you think about it much of the deaths could be a could have been avoided now had we acted a month earlier in every decision and that's the lesson from a pandemic you are a major philanthropist how have you changed if at all your philanthropy as a result of the Cova 19 crisis well what we did is we decided to work on this because once it became clear this was not a one or two month scenario we formed a special Kovac spores and we started looking for things that could could act very very quickly and we've sent we've now given tens of millions of dollars in that area with that number increasing over time the initial focus was on things that could happen very very quickly the most interesting one was ventilator training so it turns out that at the time when we thought we would need an infinite number of ventilators there were nobody knew how to operate them and so we funded a series of projects to train people on ventilators thank goodness we've not needed them as much as we want at ventilator and are not a good thing to be on so you've also been a venture investor after leaving Google you've stepped up your venture investing in many different areas national security being one of them what are you saying to somebody who might be a venture investor who wants to follow Eric Schmidt what are you investing in well you know venture is is a long game and it's all about basically these key entrepreneurs the men and women who have these ideas so venture can be understood as find the entrepreneur give them some money help them or recruit incredible talent and then hope and pray and help them and I don't think that's any different now than it was 30 or 40 years ago when I was in a small startup so when I was what I would say today is that and I've always believed that biology was going to be an enormous business and I think that the pandemic has emphasized the incredible scale of businesses that can be built now the most obvious ones being in telehealth rights just think about you've you've in in two months you've changed the economics of health care that was people were hoping to do in a decade or two in two months you have reimbursement for telehealth which allow you think about connected devices why are you not watching a smart walk wearing a smart health watch it is communicating to a system with your permission and under HIPAA laws which is helping monitor your health and it calls you and says you need to have a video conference with the doctor why is the system not essentially triaging patients in with videos checks first take a picture of me do an analysis again with my permission and then say Larrick looks pretty good and we'll ask him a few questions and then we'll decide what kind of health care he really needs to be routed to is it urgent or is it not that will make everything more efficient and frankly make my time more efficient as well we can do this now now you are a person who's lived much of your career in the Silicon Valley area how was Silicon Valley change as a result of this will it not just become bigger but will people change what they do and how they operate these technology companies you know it's interesting that in my career Silicon Valley has changed dramatically and the large tech companies are now like large companies everywhere they have whole institutions of governance they have embedded competitors they have opponents they have political strategies and so forth and so on and I don't think that's going to change they are clearly going to be bigger and certainly a big tech will be bigger and the simple answer there is because they're doing even more fundamental work these global platforms are of enormous value to our nation and as an example if you're confused by that point think about wha way and in its 5g leadership has turned out to be a 5g global platform that we don't control and we don't like that as a country so how do I think technology will will change I think that there's just going to be more investment more entrepreneurs the digital future that we've talked about for so long is arriving much quicker than I thought think about remote learning just imagine what the world we like you do you really need to go of another example for stores don't you think that online and offline are gonna get a lot more blended together makes sense to me so as you look at the future are you an optimist about the future of this country or are you more pessimistic now because we have this crisis and we have an economic recession or maybe worse than a recession well I am an insufferable optimist about America and our entrepreneurial capability if you look at the various policy failures governance presidents and so forth and so on the thing that has been extraordinary about America is our ability to innovate and invent our future and that is clearly ahead of us I am personally extremely frustrated right now that we can't seem to get our strategy straight in the short term I repeated mine right wash your hands wear a mask social distancing the outside right that would cut down other governors have done very smart things the governor of Florida for example banned nursing home visits very early Florida is full of older people and so that clearly affected it so there's a set of things in which I just give you my list if we could just agree on these basic rules like more testing is good more data is good building their surveillance systems we can get through this and we get through it a lot more quickly than people think we are so as we've gone through this crisis what have you learned about yourself on a personal basis I like many many people enjoy the sort of social social life of dinners and the working life of conferences I've spent a great deal of time of my life spending time in such settings and I really miss them and as successful as zoom and Google Mead and others are there's something about human presence and human touch that we're not going to get rid of in the digital world anytime soon can you explain to people who are not experts in technology what the Xoom had that nobody else really had in quite that way and zoom gonna be overtaken by others and zoom well known to you before this a crisis bazoom was well known to me because it was being used in universities my friend explained to me cuz I said I don't understand quite why they got so successful and he said the key thing they did is they made it easy to invite somebody to something so zoom zooms key idea was the big guys were doing things including by the way in my company that were that were very nice for various reasons they were secure that it was a little too hard to set things sue made it so easy that you could put these flash groups together by the way they made it so easy that they could also allow bad people to join because I didn't use encryption and so forth zoom has now fixed that but I think zoom in history will be seen as they got the end user adoption strategy correct early and then they filled in the gaps once they got users so today zoom is encrypted and so forth in ways that I would have told them they should have done five years ago and finally you've written a number of books on technology that have been bestsellers you have another book you're working on now I do I'm extremely interested in what happens to society and a a I I think we understand the path of AI in the next five to ten years and I begin to wonder what happens and I think this is relevant to the discussion about the rate of Technology change that the digital world used to be optional now it's fundamental at some point we don't know exactly when there will be AI software AI robots if you will that will be your partners how will those partners work and I'll give you an example you have a two-year-old than a three-year-old that has a bear that has an AI partner inside it and the button the child bonds for the bear well every year the child gets smarter but so does the bear because the software gets better and so as the child grows up he has a highly personal very good friend that can help them shape them and be bonded to them what does that do to society I think it's generally quite good but there's always concerns Eric I want to thank you for taking time to be with us today and I appreciate your insights and I look forward to seeing you in the future thank you very much you I'll see you very soon thank you again David [Music]

Channel: David Rubenstein

Views: 33,029

Keywords: Live, David Rubenstein, Eric Schmidt, Google, news, Business, ceo, virus, covid-19, vaccine, internet, coronavirus

Id: 4DMJkSVZ774

Length: 30min 36sec (1836 seconds)

Published: Thu May 14 2020