black leather boots

john orwant: myname is john orwant. i'm with the google cambridgetea party republicans club. and it's a pleasure and an honorto introduce our guest today-- a man whose fame rises to alevel of the kind that renders the standard introductionpattern completely obsolete. i could tell youabout his 123 books. i counted. the seven bookshave been written about him, the 38 doctoral--honorary doctoral degrees--

that he's been granted. i could tell you aboutthe species of bee that has been named after him. instead, i'm actually going totalk about tenure, because it's actually the thingi think of first when i think aboutour guest today. we tend to think of tenuretoday as an entitlement. right? so, professors--they work really hard

for some amount of time. and then they're kind ofgranted this lifetime protection from being fired. and, the institution oftenure has been around for many decades. it really started to solidifyaround the time of the mccarthy era, where a lot ofprofessors in this country were being asked totake oaths of loyalty as part of theanti-communist fervor that

was sweeping the nation. and it wasn't that theuniversity administrations wanted them to take those oaths. they were worried. the universities were worriedabout pressure from government. they were worried aboutwealthy donors saying, i'll give you this checkfor a million dollars, but you have to fire thatprofessor over there. and so that's whyuniversities kind of lept

into this institutionwith gusto. and yet, when youlook at professors today, they very rarelytake advantage of tenure to speak on popular views. but of course, ourguest today, i think, is the world's bestexample of doing that. and i think that gettingtenure perhaps today should come witha mild obligation to speak truth to power.

so anyway, with that,ladies and gentlemen, i want to introduce a man who isto the left of julian assange, but with a less restrictive--but with fewer travel restrictions-- noam chomsky. [applause] interviewer: well we'revery glad to have you back. you were here in 2008. and now, google'sgrown considerably. you have aconsiderable audience.

and as was mentionedearlier, the questions i'm about to pose toyou are from googlers. so you guys went onlineand you posted questions, and you voted on them. all right-- so the first one. your early view ofthe potential abuse of the internet as a politicalmedium seem to convey a wait and see attitude. how has your viewevolved, and where do you

think the balanceof power is headed? noam chomsky: well, theinternet is obviously a tremendous research tool. we use it all the time. i assume by internet, you meanmore generally-- the whole kind of it system that's developed. and, it's certainly usefulfor activists and organizers. almost all activistefforts and enterprises involve intercommunicationthrough the internet.

on the other hand, we don'thave to talk about the fact that it's a tremendoustool for power systems to control and dominatein all sorts of ways. i by now, hardly have tomention the nsa revelations, edward snowden's revelations. commercial institutions,like google, for example, use it to undermineprivacy and independence in all kinds of ways. so the balance of power is whereit always was, and expending.

any technology that'saround is going to be used by systemsof concentrated power to dominate and control. and you can't opena newspaper now without new things appearing. take this morning. if you happened to look atthis morning's newspaper, there was an associated pressreport on some revelations that they've dug outrecently about efforts

to develop by the us governmentthrough usaid, us aid, which is supposed to bea aid organization to carry forward the intensiveus efforts to undermine and overthrow thegovernment of cuba. read the report. it's interesting for what itsays and what it doesn't say. what it says is that thegovernment through us aid has set up-- tried to setup-- a kind of social media inside cuba that could beused to organize the crowds

to protest with thepeople, not really knowing who they're workingfor what they're doing. and the original apreport, most of which didn't get printed, atleast from what i saw, says that this hasalready been used in many other places--philippines, ukraine, and so on-- to try to organizeanti-government protests, which raises quite a fewquestions about what's going on around the world.

well this is one ofthe techniques that's being used for subversion,domination, control. this is an obamaprogram, incidentally. not bush. and what's said is interesting. what isn't said is interesting. and here, the powerof the internet looms in the background. you can quickly find out whatisn't said on the internet

if you look for it. what isn't said is thatthis program-- of course, it's not called subversion. it's called bringingdemocracy and so on. but this program of trying tosubvert the cuban government is part of a longstandingwar that the us has been conductingagainst cuba. longstanding. you look at the historyof the us and cuba--

it starts in the 1820s. cuba was regarded bythe founding fathers as the next conquestthat we have to make. cuba was waiting there. we had to take it for ourselvesas we expand and become the greatest empirein the world. well we couldn't do it in 1823. there was a deterrent--the british. they were too powerful.

the british were the mainenemy through the 19th most of the 19th centurybut the big thinkers, like john quincy adams--great grand strategist-- he recognized and said, whilewe can acquire cuba now, it will fall intoour hands by the laws of political gravitation,just as an apple falls from the tree. meaning, over time, the uswill become more powerful. britain's power will decline,and we'll be able to take cuba.

and in fact, that'swhat happened. in 1898, cuba was liberatingitself from spain, and the us intervened in what'scalled here liberation of cuba, but in fact, was the preventionof the liberation of cuba by cubans. the us took over theisland-- one of several. puerto rico, hawaii wasstolen from its inhabitants the same year, and cuba becamea colony-- a virtual colony. well, somethingquite interesting

happened that'shighly relevant today. highly relevant. but never mentioned, but youcan find it on the internet if you like. at gun point, theus imposed a treaty on cuba, plattammendment, it's called, in which cuba grantedthe united states control over eastern cuba-- sowhat we call guantanamo. happens to includecuba's major port-- it's

only port orientedtowards europe, which is where itsmain trade would be. of course, the cubanshad no voice in this. we just took it over. and we've had it for 110 years. cuba's been trying to getit back, but we refuse. the purpose has nostrategic interest for us. it's used forstorage of refugees, like if haitians flee frommonstrous dictatorships

that we support in haiti,we're supposed to accept them under internationallaw's refugees. but instead, you send themoff cuba-- to guantanamo-- as a storage place, of course,used as a torture chamber. the cubans want it back. we won't give it to them. does this remindyou of something that's happening inworld affairs right now? yeah.

russia took over crimea. just as we've taken over easterncuba for 110 years at gun point. we don't formally annexit, but we dominate it. russia has a much stronger casethan the united states does. crimea is primarily russian. its population overwhelminglysupports russia. it's got majorstrategic significance. it's russia's onlywarm water port.

it's the base for their fleet. it's right on theborder of russia. russia's surrounded by hostilemilitary alliance-- nato. and for them, it's of greatstrategic significance. cuba for us is nothing. guantanamo. it's just a means oftrying to undermine cuba-- preventcuban development. and the unitedstates, of course,

has been at war withcuba since 1959, when cuba finallydid liberate itself. immediately, the us began anattack on cuba under kennedy. a massive terroristoperation was organized "to bring theterrors of the earth to cuba," was arthur schlesinger'sphrase describing it in his biography ofrobert kennedy, who was in charge of it. it almost destroyed the world.

it was a major factor thatled to the missile crisis. and it's gone on. it went on afterwards. the terror based in florida hasgone on almost without a stop. on top of that, there'san economic embargo to strangle the country,opposed by the entire world. take a look at the votes--annual votes in the general assembly, which don'tget reported here. it's 180 to two-- usand israel sometimes.

the marshall islandsor something. well, all of this is part ofthe background to the ap story about today's effort tosubvert the government of cuba. well, coming back to theinternet, what's interesting is what is available, andwhat isn't readily available, because people don't see it. like, you won't finda word about anything i said in the press, or incommentary, or discussion, although it's allextremely timely.

very timely. not arcane scholarship. but it's right in front ofour eyes, but not there. and when you come back tothe power of the internet, i think it comes back to us. we don't use it. we don't use the resource forthe purposes for which it could be used-- to break throughthe silence, oppression, domination, terror,violence, and bring

the reality of theworld to people. so the internet, potentially,is a wonderful tool, but only if youdecide to use it. if you decide to leave it inthe hands of private power, of power systems whetherstate or private, sure-- it'll be used as away to oppress, undermine and dominate. but that's a choice. don't have to.

interviewer: well,on that note, we will be posting this on youtube. noam chomsky: what? interviewer: we're going to beposting this talk on youtube, so your comments willbe on the internet. happy to say. noam chomsky:internet-- but they won't be in the new york times. well our channel is gettingmore and more popular,

so hopefully peoplewill find this. switching gears alittle bit, what is the most interesting insightthe science of linguistics has revealed, but thatthe public at large seems to not knowabout or appreciate? well, there are a number ofdogmas about language, which i think are beingsystematically refuted. and they're held bylinguists, too, i should say. not just in the general public,which are probably false,

which i think are beingundermined by current research. this is a minority view. i'm not speakingfor the profession. the introductorycomments said that i'm supposed to be a contrarian,so i try to keep to that. but for example, onegeneral assumption about language-- almosta dogma in philosophy. common understanding, thelinguistics of psychology, is that language is primarilya means of communication,

and that it evolved as ameans of communication. probably, that's totally false. it seems that language isevolved and is designed as a mode of creatingand interpreting thought. it's a system ofthought, basically. it can be used to communicate. everything people do canbe used to communicate. you can communicateby your hairstyle, style of walk, everything.

and yes, language canbe used to communicate, but it doesn't seem tobe part of its design. it's design seems tobe radically different, and in fact, even seems toundermine communication. if you look carefully atthe structure of language, you find case after case, rightat the core of language design, where there areconflicts between what would be efficientfor communication, and what is efficient for thespecific biological design

of language. and in every case that'sknown, communicative efficiency is sacrificed. it just isn't a consideration. i think that's aconclusion that has very widespread significance. in order to establish it, youhave to look at technical work. it's not the kindof thing you can explain in twominutes of exposition.

but it's not profound. it's not quantum physics. a half an hour wouldcertainly suffice. suppliers and i thinkit's a pretty far-reaching consequence. another generalbelief about language, again, almost a dogma in all therelevant fields-- philosophy, linguistics, and so on--is that the meaningful, the minimal meaningfulelements in language,

sort of word-likethings, pick out entities in theextra-mental world. so the word, say, riverpicks out the charles river, and so on-- something thata physicist could identify. that turns out to betrue for animal systems-- animal communication systems. the symbols that appear-- theactions that are carried out-- do apparently have aone to one correlation with mind independent events.

so some particularcall of a monkey will be related toleaves fluttering, predators coming, sort of-- i'mhungry, some hormonal change. it's just not true of language. linguistic elements donot have that property. actually, this wasunderstood by aristotle. it was understood in the17th and 18th centuries. interesting work on it. the entities that we constructin our communiques, discourse,

expression, interpretation--are largely mental-- partially, mental object. there are ways inwhich they are-- modes in which weinterpret phenomena. but they don't pick outentities in the world that a naturalscientist could identify without looking into our minds. that tells us a lot aboutthe nature of language, and about our own nature.

language is thecore human property. and this wasunderstood by darwin, by a long tradition before him. and it's very different fromthe way it's usually conceived. i think those are amongreally conclusions that have pretty widespreadsignificance. let me stress again,a very minority view. very few linguistswould agree with this. but i think, over time, isuspect it will become clear.

ok. in hopes and prospects, youmentioned your colleague kenneth hale and his workwith native americans. in your opinion, howimportant is the problem of language extinction? that is, how importantis it for humanity to preserve the current levelof linguistic diversity? well, ken hale, who was afriend of anne's as well. the teacher was a fantasticlinguist and person, also.

he worked extensivelywith indigenous languages all over the world. australia-- he wasone of the founders of australianlinguistics-- worked with native americanlanguages, central american, african, and so on. and he did really amazing work,but this particular aspect of his work was somethingthat greatly concerned and interested him--trying to protect.

and as he pointedout, correctly, when a languagedisappears, a lot is lost. a language is a repositoryof cultural wealth. it's a way-- thisactually relates to what i was sayingbefore-- each language is a way of understanding andinterpreting the world. it carries thewealth of tradition in history, oral history,which can be extremely rich. take the bible, for example.

for years, thatwas oral history, before anythingwas written down. homer is oral history. and that's all over the world. and we're losing thosetreasures every time a language disappears. and for the people themselves,they're losing their identity. if english disappeared, we wouldlose our cultural identity, and the same is true if it'sa small group somewhere.

well, one of ken'sachievements in this regard, which was quite spectacular,was to take the language, which was one of the majorlanguages spoken right here beforethe colonists came. remember, theunited states is not an ordinary form of imperialism. the united states is asecular colonial society. in fact, that's trueof the whole-- what's called the anglo sphere,the countries that grew out

of britain'simperial domination. the united states, canada,australia, mostly new zealand-- these are countries wherethe settlers who came in didn't just run the country theway the british did in india. british in indiaprovided the bureaucrats, you know, the officercorps, and so on. but indians ran thecountry under british rule. secular colonial societiesare different, like ours. if you go back to the foundersof the country-- like,

say george washington. he understood very well thatwe have to, as he put it, extirpate the iroquois. they're in our way. we have to wipe them out. they're and advancedcivilization. they, in fact, werethe basis for much of the americanconstitutional system. but we had to extirpate them.

they were in our way. thomas jefferson said,we have to exterminate the native populationsbecause they're attacking us. and why are they attacking us? well, because we're takingeverything away from them. he didn't say that. but in general, thesettler colonial societies have to pretty much exterminatethe indigenous populations, or else marginalize them.

well that's happened here. so where we'resitting was a place where the indigenouspopulation was close to exterminated--pretty close to it. there are survivors. one of the major languagesspoken was one wampanoag. it hadn't beenspoken for a century. the last speakerwas a century ago. ken, and some students, and awoman from the wampanoag tribe,

which still exists,jessie little doe, managed to reconstructthe language using comparative evidencefrom other languages, and missionary texts thatwere taken and preserved. and from this, theywere able to reconstruct what the languagemust have been. and it now has its first nativespeaker-- jessie little doe's daughter, who's a nativespeaker of wampanoag. this has revitalized the tribe.

they're now studying it. they're reconstructingtheir history. they're reviving. it's a prettyamazing achievement. jessie got her ph.d. withus, with ken, her department, it's the first time thishas ever happened, i think. now there are efforts todo it in other places. but if you canrevive-- right now, there's enormousdestruction going on.

species destruction,for example, is taking place at alevel that hasn't happened for 65 million years,literally-- the time when an asteroid hitthe earth, apparently, and wiped out the dinosaurs, andthe majority of living species were destroyed. mammals survived. that's why we're around. but, right now, thesame thing's happening.

species destruction ishappening, about at that level. and now, we're theasteroid, of course. we're destroying thespecies at a massive rate. language destructionis kind of a little like that at a culturaland human level. you're destroying therichness of human civilization and understanding of the world. it's disappearing fast. it's disappearingin europe-- not just

in indigenous cultures. so if you go to,say, italy, there are people allover the place who can't talk totheir grandmothers. the grandmothers speaka different language. they're called dialects,but they're actually different languages. the number oflanguages in europe has contracted radicallyover recent years

through the policiesof state formation. when states are formed,the formation of states is an extremely violent process. it imposes a rigidform on societies, bringing togetherpeople who have nothing to do with eachother, and separating people who have everythingto do with each other. that's why europe wasthe most savage place in the world for centuries whilethe process of state formation

was taking place. you look around the worldtoday, and just about every major conflict is basedon the imperial borders. borders were imposedby the imperial powers for their own interests,forming states which have no significancefor most of the people. so take, say, pakistanand afghanistan. we talk about terroristscrossing pakistan to afghanistan.

they are, many of them,are just pashtun-- moving from one partof pashtun territory to another part ofpashtun territory, which is separated by a line--that the british imposed-- the durand line-- which theafghans have never accepted and the pashtunhave never accepted. now that happens everywhere. president obama, oneof his achievements has been to break allrecords in deporting

undocumented immigrants--almost two million. they're crossing a border--the mexico us border-- which, like stateborders generally, was established by brutalviolence and aggression. the us conquered half of mexico. president grant describedit as, who fought in it, described it as the mostwicked war in history. well, ok, thatestablished the border. it was a pretty open border.

the same kind of peopleliving on both sides until pretty recently. it's been heavilymilitarized now. primarily since nafta. when nafta, the northamerican free trade agreement, was instituted, presidentclinton, his advisers, understood verywell that this is going to devastate mexican--the mexican economy. and it's going to destroymexican agriculture.

it's going to underminesmall business, and so on. mexican compacinos canbe quite efficient, but they can't competewith highly subsidized u.s. agro-business. so there's going to bea flow of immigrants. so we've got to militarizethe border to prevent them. send them back. right now, to this day,right here near boston-- right around us--there are people

fleeing from theguatemalan highlands. mayan indians, fleeing fromthe guatemalan highlands. their languages arealso being destroyed. why are they fleeing fromthe guatemalan highlands? well, under ronaldreagan, the us supported a genocidal attackson the highlands, and the mayan indians by themilitary dictatorship we were backing in guatemala. and the devastationwas so extreme

that they're still fleeing. well, they're fleeing. we deport them. they're comingacross from mexico. that's a state border. that's the way borders work. all over the world,that's the way it works. take a look at the horrorstories all of the world. almost entirely, the resultof the imposition of state

borders, which alsohas the consequence of wiping out lots of languages. when you impose a stateborder, it constitutes, say, france, or italy, orgermany, or guatemala, or whatever it may be, or theunited states for that matter, you're wiping out hugenumbers of languages which are internal to them. well, this is a kind of--it's not species destruction, but it's kind ofanalogous to it.

and it's going on all the time. and the effort to save species,cultures, societies, languages is a major effort. happening in europe, too. so right nowthere's a referendum coming up in catalonia. another one in scotlandasking about autonomy, or independence. that's dissolving the europeanstate system, something

which has beengoing on for awhile, and reconstructingthe languages. actually, i visitedbarcelona in the late '70s. you couldn't heara word of catalan. it was spoken, but secret,because under the dictatorship, which the us backed,it was barred. 10 years later, ifyou go to catalonia, all you hear is catalan. it revived.

the basque languages revived. other regionallanguages are reviving. if you walk around wales,kids walking out of school are talking welsh. things like this are happening. ken's achievementwas unique, but it's a kind of a natural development. i think it should bestimulated myself. but we shouldrecognize that there's

enormous loss when the culturalwealth of a society disappears. that's encapsulatedcrucially in its language. interviewer: all right. so i'm going to changegears a little bit again. can you comment onthe contribution of research and statisticalnatural language processing to linguistics? and that's a yes/no question,i realize, but-- ok. [laughter]

noam chomsky: one of theearly proponents of it, maybe the earliestin 1955, when i was working onlinguistic theory, it seemed to me theonly possible way in which a, let's say, achild, could identify words in continuous text-- you know,you're not hearing single words when you live in the world. you're hearing continuous text. it seemed to me the onlyway that is could be done

was by detecting transitionalprobabilities of sounds or syllables. if you get to a wordboundary, the predictability of the next sound is lowerthan if you're inside a word. for obvious reasons. so if you check thesetransitional probabilities, it looked as if you oughtto be able to detect words. that's probablythe first proposal. maybe the firstproposal of literature.

it turns out not to be accurate. just in the lastcouple of years, there's been somereally careful work on statisticalanalysis of texts. charles yang, who gothis ph.d. at mit-- he's now at penn, a computationallinguist cognitive scientist-- he showedthat if you actually use this technique on connectedtext, that what you get is syllables, not words.

so that doesn't work. he also pointed out that ifyou add a linguistic principle, you do get a betterapproximation to words. linguistic principle is thata word-- well, real words, tend to have stresspeak within them-- stress pitch peek inside them. so if you add thatprinciple, and then you do the statistical analysis,you get a better approximation. there's subsequent work by anumber of cognitive scientists

which has shownthat if you add what are called the prosodicstructure-- the whole pitch stress structure of asentence-- it goes up and down, but really reflectingphrases pretty much, if you look at thepitch structure. if you add all ofthat, and then you do the statisticalanalysis, you get and even better approximation. now this is one of the veryfew cases where there's

any results fromstatistical analysis. there has been-- there'sa kind of a industry in computational cognitivescience and computer science trying toshow that you can get significantknowledge of a language by statistical analysis of text. antecedently, that'sextremely unlikely to succeed. you do not get discoveriesin the sciences by taking huge amounts of data,throwing them into a computer,

and doing statisticalanalysis of them. try to think it through inthe history of the sciences. it just doesn't happen. that's not the wayyou understand things. you have to havetheoretical insights. you have to know whatkind of experiments to carry out-- what kind ofdata are worth looking at, which kind of throwaway, and so on. that's the way the scienceshave always worked.

if you wanted to, say,study the laws of motion, you could take a hugenumber of videotapes of what's happeningoutside the window, and subject them tostatistical analysis. you could get apretty good prediction of the next thing that's goingto happen outside the window-- actually, a betterprediction than what the physics department can give. but it's not science.

it's a way of matching data, andmaybe predicting some new data. but that's not whatunderstanding is. and it's very unlikely towork for language, either. and i think the record showsthat it really fails totally. i could run through examples. but every example that'sbeen carefully studied, it simply doesn't work,for pretty much the reasons that charles yang and hissuccessors discovered. you have to have the-- have tounderstand the principles that

determine whatunderlies the system. and then if you look aroundthe edges of those principles, you can find some sometimesuseful statistical data. i think that's probably theway it's going to continue, but certainly is theway it has so far. interviewer: we're goingto change gears again. what, in your opinion, arethe most effective strategies for building a more andjust peace-- i'm sorry, start over again-- for buildinga more just and peaceful world,

and in your view, what are thebest-- the most significant takeaways-- fromoccupy the arabs bring, and the ukrainianeuromaiden uprising. noam chomsky: well, those areall quite different events, and i don't think youcan consolidate them. over time, there has--you know, history doesn't just go ina straight line. there's progress,there's regression. and they're often in parallel.

so say, take the last say, 50,60 years in the united states. there's beensignificant progress in developing a more peacefuland just and equitable society. probably the most dramaticexample is women's rights. totally different from whatit was 50 or 60 years ago. it may be kind ofhard to remember, but if you look at ushistory, at the time of the american revolution,the women were not people. they were property.

the united states tookover british common law. and under britishcommon law, a woman is the property ofher father, and it's transferred to her husband. so for example, one of thearguments against giving women votes was that it would beunfair to unmarried men, because a married man wouldhave two votes, since obviously the property votes theway the owner votes. that was us law.

if you look at thechipping away of this, it literally was not until1975 that this principle was abandoned. in 1975, the supreme courtruled that women have the right to serve as peersin federal jury. peer means a personjust like you. ok, that goes back to the magnacarta in the 13th century. women were accepted aspeers legally in 1975. now that was part ofa major change that's

taken place in americanculture since the 1960s-- one of the main outgrowthsof '60s activism. and there are plenty ofother things like it. so opposition to, say,violent aggression is far above what itwas 50 or 60 years ago. take, say, kennedy'sinvasion of south vietnam. it's a phrase you'venever heard, i suppose, because it isn'tin consciousness. it happened in the world,but it wasn't reported

and it isn't partof american history. in the 1962, kennedy sentthe american air force to start bombing south vietnam. authorized chemicalwarfare to destroy crops, so to drive the peopleout of the countryside. began big programs toconcentrate people, and put them out at theconcentration camps, to prevent them from supportingthe guerrilla movement, which was overthrowing the usinstalled government.

that's an invasion. it happened, but notin our consciousness. the reason it's notin our consciousness is there was no opposition. it was recorded. it was kind of known. you know, like it wasn't atotal secret, but nobody cared. you couldn't get peopleto talk about it. i mean, literallyi remember trying

to give talks in the early'60s in people's living rooms. you could get more peoplethan that together. well that was the early '60s. in 2003, the unitedstates invaded iraq. it's the first time in thehistory of the imperial world that there have been massiveprotests prior to the invasion, prior to the invasion-- hugeprotests all of the world. here, too. my classes were called offbecause the students wanted

to call them off to godown to the demonstration. that was 2003. well, it didn't end thewar, but it limited it. it's often believedthat the demonstrations didn't do anything. that's a mistake. the united states could notbegin to carry out the policies that kennedy andjohnson could carry out without a second thought.

it was bad enough, butit wasn't b52 bombing of heavily populatedurban centers. it wasn't chemicalwarfare destroying crops. many of the atrocitiesof the vietnam war simply couldn't be contemplated. horrible enough, but not that. ok, all of that is progress. there's also a regression. there's been a bigbacklash from power centers

against the civilizingeffect of the '60s. now, that's theneoliberal attack on the population which hasbeen going on for a generation. that's why, say,real wages, real, for male workers-- real wagestoday are at the level of 1968 for the general public. and real wages are aboutthe level of 30 years ago. there's been somestagnation or decline for the majorityof the population.

tremendous concentrationof wealth in tiny number of-- tiny sectorof the population. mostly a fraction of 1%,which feeds politics. political powerreflects economic power. the supreme court just yesterdayjust struck another blow against democracy andits committed effort to try to underminethe functioning of a democratic systemby placing power in the hands of thosewho are super rich.

ok, that's going on. that's the mccutcheoncase a couple days ago. well, that's regression. and they're goingon in parallel. that's the way history works. so what's the way to go forward? well, you know, asmartin luther king put it-- shiftthe arc of history by your own efforts in activism.

that's the only wayit's ever worked. the arc of history bends theway we decide to bend it. interviewer: in"hopes and prospects" you compare obama and bush ii. that's four years ago. what would you say today? noam chomsky: likewhat i just said about the arc of history--both better in some ways, worse in others.

so, for example, imentioned guantanamo. guantanamo is amajor torture center. ok, today, probablytorture isn't taking place in guantanamo--at least what we call torture. remember, the united states hasa special definition of torture which is different fromthe world's definition. so for example, in theworld, a solitary confinement is considered torture. you take a look at thetorture convention--

internationaltorture convention. solitary confinementis regarded-- and other forms ofmental torture-- are regarded as torture. and they are. you try to lock yourself up ina room for a couple of days, and you'll see what happens. so it's kind of torture. in the united states, it'ssurely going on in guantanamo.

but it's also a routine. it goes on in theprisons all the time. you go to the maximumsecurity prisons, they are torture chambers. people are confined 23hours a day in a small room. it drives you insane. so torture-- whatwe call torture isn't going on in guantanamo. what is torture isgoing on, but it's

going on in the incarcerationsystem generally. and that system is a realinternational scandal on scale [inaudible]. so that's an improvement. no magnificent,but an improvement. on the other hand, there'sthe surveillance programs, which are-- i don't haveto talk to you about them. you know about them. they're mostly obama.

the subversion of cubathat i mentioned-- that's a new obama program. the worst global terrorismcampaign under way right now is obama's globalassassination campaign. the drone campaign. notice that there's adebate in the united states when he decides tomurder americans. like, [inaudible]. you know, is thatlegitimate or not?

and what about the other people? the people that are beingmurdered are suspects. go back 800 yearsagain to magna carta. we're going to commemorateits 800th anniversary next year-- probablymorn its disappearance. the core conceptdeveloped in magna carta was what we callpresumption of innocence. what it stated is that afree man cannot be subjected to state punishmentwithout due process--

without trial bya jury of peers. ok? now, free man was a very limitedconcept in the 13th century. of course, it excluded women. it excluded people whoweren't free and so on. it gradually expandedover the centuries. so it's embeddedin the constitution also with limits-- the 14thamendment, other limits. but now it's being contracted.

the drone campaign eliminatespresumption of innocence. the way it works is,obama and his advisers get together tuesdaymorning and decide who they're goingto kill that day. the concept guilty meansobama decided to murder you. that's the meaning ofthe concept guilty today. that's a regression thatgoes back 800 years. that's pretty serious. and what's even more seriousis, it's not discussed.

the only thing that is discussedis the killing of americans. are americans different species? who says you cankill other suspects? there's some talk aboutcollateral damage. what about the people who arejust standing around and get killed? well, yeah-- that's bad. but what about thepeople you're aiming at? they are suspects.

you haven't shown a proofof anything about them. just somebody thegovernment wants to kill. that's true ofdomestic law, too. actually, i'm one ofthe plaintiffs in a suit that i'm not entirely happyabout for this reason. it's a suit about the ndaabrought by chris hedges. a couple of otherpeople are plaintiffs. the ndaa legislationunder obama-- he says he doesn't likeit, but he signed it.

it permits indefinite detention. it extends the principleof indefinite detention for suspects who are, underthis relatively new legislation under obama. in includes-- it iswritten in such a way that it could includeamerican citizens. it's not explicit. that's what the suit is about. but the concept is-- it permitsindefinite detention of people

charged with providing supportfor enemies of the united states. what's support? well, like saying maybe they gota case, or something like that. is that support? it's not a joke, incidentally. the narrow case--the very narrow case is against one part--the fact that is might apply toamerican citizens.

i think it's way too narrow. it shouldn't apply to anybody. there should neverbe such a thing as independentindefinite detention. it's criminal. and the idea ofsupporting enemies is so meaningless, that such aconcept shouldn't exist as law. but it's a narrowcase about americans. and that's the frameworkof discourse here.

you shouldn't acceptit, i don't think. in fact, take anotherobama case-- one of obama's major attackson civil liberties. it's a case that probably mostof you haven't heard about, but i'd look itup if i were you. it's a nice thingabout the internet. holder v. humanitarianlaw project-- case brought by the government to thesupreme court government one. holder is the attorney general.

humanitarian lawproject was a group that was giving legaladvice-- legal advice-- to a group that's onthe us terrorist list. the group happened to bethe pkk-- kurdish group. the us government callsit a terrorist group, so it's on the terrorist list. humanitarian law project wasgiving legal advice to them. obama's justicedepartment decided to condemn that as materialassistance to terrorism.

material assistanceof terrorism used to mean giving a gun tosomebody in al qaeda. but this extends itto giving legal advice to someone on thegovernment's terrorist list. and if you look at thecourt discussion colloquy, it could maybe applyto somebody who has an interview withnasrallah, you know, the head of hezbollah. or just talks to,maybe advises, a group

to turn to non-violence. that could be regardedas material assistance that's a tremendous attackon the freedom of speech, and just ordinateelementary justice-- passed almost without comment. now we might askourselves-- why should we even takes theterrorist list seriously? what's the terrorist list? the executive branchof the government

simply determinesyou're a terrorist. i put you on the list. no review. no judicial review. no defense. it's just an executive actof an authoritarian state. and if you look at thehistory of the terrorist list, it's mind-boggling. like, nelsonmandela, for example,

was on the terrorist listbecause reagan administration condemned them as-- his group,the african national congress, as one of the more notoriousterrorist groups in the world because they wereopposing apartheid, which reagan supported. ok, so that's theterrorist list. and mandela was on untilabout four years ago, when it took a specialact of congress to get him off theterrorist list.

on the other hand, take,say, saddam hussein. he was taken off theterrorist list in 1982, because the reaganadministration wanted to provide arms to iraq,so in order to be legal, he had to be offthe terrorist list. actually, that left a gapin the terrorist list, so they put cuba in. why? because cuba has been the targetof more terrorism than the rest

of the world combinedin the years before it, mostly based in florida. that's the terrorist list. so apart from being kindof ludicrous in the way it actually works, the veryconcept is an abomination. why should thestate have the right to determine unilaterallywho's a terrorist? do they have that right? no, they don't.

do they have theright to murder people who they put onthe terrorist list? no they don't. do they have the right tocharge people with material assistance to terrorism ifthey give legal aid to somebody that they've designatedas a terrorist? this gets more and moreextreme as you go on. these are obama innovations. well, history doesn'tgo straight line.

and i think, myself,bush would've been worse, but not that there's much tocheer about in this regard. audience: with cultures thatdidn't have a written language until another culturecame in that did, and they adoptedtheir writing system. is there any systematiceffect on languages that adopted someoneelse's writing system? noam chomsky: there is asystematic effect of literacy. it's not so much adoptingthe writing system

as using it for reading. so if we actually want,there's a-- ken hale, same guy we talkedabout before-- he did a very important study inthe 1970s in which he showed that-- an article that appearedon what's called cultural gaps. he studied the languages thathe worked on, mostly australian, and found that many ofthem had all kind of what looked like gaps. like, they didn'thave number words.

they didn't have color words. or they didn't haverelative clauses. a lot of other thingsthey didn't have. and what he showedwas that all of this was just totally superficial. the people had all the concept. they had no problem withdealing with any of them. they used them all the time,but just in more indirect ways. so if they didn'thave number words,

they would still beable to say five, ten. they had no problem dealingwith market societies. they may not havehad the color red, but they could say blood-like. and the same was trueeven of structural things, like embedded relative clauses. well, that was animportant study. ignored, like mostimportant studies. but, shortly after it, somebodyelse in our department, wayne

o'neil, another friendof anne's and mine, who studies thehistory of english, he did a study ofmiddle english. and he investigated, and ifhe was looking for something similar, he discovered that theuse of complex constructions, which had embeddedelements in them, increased as literacy increased. there's a naturalreason for that. when you speak,you're constrained

by short term memory,which is pretty small. short term memory is aroundseven or something like that. the same for humansand other organisms. and that meansyou can't do much. so ordinary speech tends tobe what's called para-tactic. you just kind of tack thingson one after the other, because you can't embed. on the other hand, onceyou move to literacy, you begin to use capacities thatyou always had but never used.

it's like, whenthe people learn. you go to school and, yousay, first grade or something, and they teach youhow to multiply. you begin to use a capacitywhich you always had. it's not taught. it's part of yourintrinsic capacities that you have thecapacity for number. every society has it. every human being has it.

it's kind of a mystery thatbothered darwin and wallace-- the founders ofevolutionary theory. they asked, how could itevolve since it's never used? but it's true thateveryone has it. but you can't doit in your head. like, you can't multiplybig numbers in your head. you'd collapse aftera very short period. but you can multiply themonce you learn the technique, because you'vegot the knowledge.

you just have to exhibit it. and the same thinghappens with literacy. once literacy spreads,you get much more complex linguistic usage, even inspeech, because it carries over from writing to speech. so that effect i thinkis real and documented. but the effect of just using. if you just use the lettersto say, write things, but you never read,i'd doubt if it

would have much of an effect. audience: i'm curious as toyour thoughts, because i'm standing now, asto your thoughts on-- i guess somepeople have said that the effect of technologyon certain languages has made us dumber. so like, texting,lol, or hash tags. and if that's actuallytrue, or if it's just the same asany appendians, like

new words beingadded to languages. noam chomsky: i thinkthe real question about the, what might bethe cognitive effect-- the current kind of teenagetechnology-- it does have a very superficialaspect to it. so, that's true, forexample, of facebook. people think theyhave lots of-- i mean i know ofcases, teenagers, who think they have lots offriends, hundreds of friends.

because if they write,i've got an exam tomorrow, they'll get 100 letters saying,i hope you do well, and so on. and the communicationis very restricted. a simple formula isthings like that. so does it have adumbing down effect? i kind of doubt it, frankly. but, you know, it is atopic that could be studied. it is being studied, in fact. but as far as i know,there are no real results,

and i think itwould be surprising, because it's allkind of superficial. it does add a kindof superficiality to life, which maynot be a good thing. i think it's probablyharmful in the long run. but to try to-- i feel like i'mbringing coals to newcastle. you people know alot more about this than i do, because i don'tuse any of this stuff, except with my grandchildren,when i have to.

is there one last question? we have time fora quick question. there. is the-- so the diversityof languages and cultures is wonderful, but if there ison the other side, if you would say anything, if youwould, sort of allow that having a unifiedlanguage and common culture helps communication andmay advance world peace? well i don't ifit advances peace.

in fact, it seems to havethe opposite, because you're forcing people intosituations of conflict. and the one languagethat dominates is just the most powerfulstate in the world. but there's an advantage,to having, say, a single language for science. ok, so by now, english is prettymuch the language of science. when i got to mit60 years ago, i was teaching scientific frenchand scientific german-- all

graduate studentsin every field had to pass an exam infrench and german. it was a complete fake,but that was kind of like a residue of thepre-second world war period. but it was true. you go back 70 years,a civil engineer had to know french or german. ok now, that's all gone. all around most of the world,the language of science

is english. that's helpful. on the other hand,exactly as you say, there's also-- if thatextend from just some mode of communication to theactual languages of life, it would be a real loss. we would lose cultural wealth. actually, if you livein the united states, and you travel abroad,you see it very quickly.

the united states is anextremely insular society. people don't know anythingabout the outside world. students in colleges don'tknow where france is. it's just-- theydon't know anything. it's remarkably different fromeurope and other countries. and part of thereason is that, you can go 3,000 milesin the united states, and it looks exactlylike where you came from. go to boston to los angeles, theweather's a little different,

but everything else is the same. the accent isslightly different. you go 100 miles in europe, andyou're in a different society. so you just kindof automatically gain comprehension of therichness and complexity of life that's missing whensocieties are homogeneous. of course american societyisn't literally homogeneous. but, comparativelyspeaking, it is. and i think that'sthe kind of loss

you would get if,in fact, you moved towards a universal language. also, i just don't thinkthere's any possibility that's happening. as i said, ineurope, there's now actually a reaction againstthe unifying tendencies of the european union--more regionalization, regional languages, cultures. it's not justlanguages, incidentally.

so take catalonia,which i mentioned. under the franco dictatorship,catalonian language and culture were totally suppressed. they could not beexhibited in public. but, if you go tobarcelona today, let's say, you canon sunday morning, if you're downtown in barcelona,take a look at the cathedral. there's people swarming towardsthe cathedral-- folk singers, folk dances, catalancultures being revived.

it's a rich culturebeing revived. it was kind ofthere, underground. now it's open. and i think that'sjust healthy for life.

black boots women

presenter: pleasewelcome allie brosh. [applause] allie brosh: ok, soi'm going to read you the first story in the book. so if you haven'tread the book yet, you're getting a head start. let me make sure myclicker's working. when i was 10 years old, iwrote a letter to my future self and buried it in my backyard.

17 years later, iremembered that i was supposed to remember todig it up two years earlier. i looked forward togetting a nostalgic glimpse into my childhood. perhaps i would marvelat my own innocence, or see the first glimmerof my current aspirations. as it turns out, it just mademe feel real weird about myself. the letter was scrawledin green crayon on the back of the utility bill.

my 10-year-old selfhad obviously not spent much time planningout the presentation of it. most likely, i had simply beenwalking through the kitchen, and suddenly realizedit was entirely possible to write aletter to my future self. the overwhelming excitementof this realization probably cause me topanic and short circuit, making me unable to locateproper writing elements. there was no time forthat kind of thing.

i did, however, manage tofight through the haze of chaos and impulse long enough tofind a crayon stub and a paper surface to match it against. the letter begins thusly. "dear 25-year-old." note, not dear 25-year-oldme, or dear 25-year-old self. just dear 25-year-old. do you still like dogs? what is your favorite dog?

do you have a job training dogs? is murphy still alive? foreshadowing. what is your favorite food? are mom and dad still alive? i feel it's important to notethe order of those questions. obviously, dog-relatedsubjects were my chief concern. murphy was my family'sdog, followed closely by the need to know myfuture favorite food.

i feel that thedouble question marks speak to how importantthat question was. and you guys can'tsee that, but there were double questionmarks in there. only then did i pause towonder whether my parents had survived. [laughter] the letter continues with asection titled, "about me." my name is allie, andi am 10 years old.

i have blonde hairand blue eyes. my favorite dog isa german shepherd. my second favoritedog is a husky. my third favorite dogis a doberman pinscher. this is troubling for a numberof reasons, the first of which is that i apparently thoughtmy future self wouldn't be aware of myname or eye color. the second thing isthe fact that i just tacked on my favoritedog breeds at the end

there, like it was every bitas important to my identity as the other things, as ifmy past self had imagined my future self standing in theyard, above the upturned earth, clutching my letterand screaming, but what dogs did i like? how am i supposed to understandmy identity without knowing what dogs i liked when i was 10? i take a break fromwriting at that point to draw several pictures of whatappear to be german shepherds.

below the german shepherds, iwrote the three most disturbing words in the entire letter,three words that revealed more about my tenuousgrasp on reality than anything else i haveuncovered about my childhood. there at the bottomof the letter, i had taken mycrayon stub and used it to craft thefollowing sentence. "please write back." judging by the thick,purposeful lines in each letter,

i was applying a trulyimpressive amount of pressure to the crayon. the sincerity of therequest is unmistakable. when i asked my future selfwhat my favorite dog is, or whether my mom anddad were still alive, i actually expectedto get answers. and apparently, i stillexpected to be 10 years old when i got those answers. i imagine myself patientlystanding in the yard,

day after day,thinking, any time now. it's going to happen soon. i just know it. time travel is acomplex subject that i don't expect a 10-year-oldto fully understand. but this is more than justa basic misunderstanding of time travel. i'm almost definitelynot a time traveler. but in case i am, idecided to write back.

in fact, i decidedto write letters to several iterationsof my past self, because i felt there wereimportant things i could explain to myself or thingsi could warn myself about. allow me to begin with aletter to my two-year-old self. dear two-year-old, facecream is not edible. no matter how much itlooks like frosting, no matter how manytimes you try, it's always going to be facecream and never frosting.

i promise i wouldn'tlie to you about this. it's honestly nevergoing to be frosting. for the love offuck, please stop. i need those organsyou're ruining. dear four-year-old. allow me preface thisby saying that i don't know why you started eatingsalt in the first place. but regardless of theprecipitating circumstances, there you are.

as soon as you became awarethat eating huge amounts of salt is really, reallyuncomfortably salty, you should havestopped eating salt. that's the solution. the solution is notto begin eating pepper to cancel out the salt. you've found yourself in thispredicament several times now. and every time, you get trappedin this totally preventable cycle.

you've done more thanenough experimenting to come to the conclusionthat pepper is not the opposite of saltall by yourself. but somehow, you seem toremain stubbornly unaware of this fact. to reiterate, no matterhow much pepper you eat, it won't undo theludicrous amount of salt you ate before it. the only thing you'reaccomplishing by eating pepper

is making your mouth tastelike pepper and salt. similarly, switchingback to salt again won't cancelout the burning from the pepper you ate tocancel out the original salt. how is this sodifficult to understand? you can stop wheneveryou want to do. as a side note, youreally need to start learning from your mistakes. believe me, i knowwhat happens when

you discover electricfences next year. and you could do without thatseventh jolt of electricity. dear five-year-old. what the fuck is wrong with you? normal children don't havedead imaginary friends. normal children don'tpick open every single one of their chickenpox scabs and then stand naked and bleedingin the darkened doorway to their bedroom untilsomeone walks past and asks

what they are doing. furthermore, normal childrendon't respond by saying, i wanted to know what allmy blood would look like. normal children also don'twatch their parents sleep from the corner of their room. mom was really scarred by "theexorcist" when she was younger, and she doesn't know how tocope with your increasingly creepy behavior. please stop.

please, please stop. dear six-year-old. you're having an absurdlydifficult time learning the letter r. youpractice all the time, and you have mastered everyother letter in the alphabet, both uppercase and lowercase. but for reasons beyondmy comprehension, r just destroys you. look at this.

how does that happen? how do you messsomething up that badly? the first one is understandable. but what's going onwith that middle one? have did that extraprotrusion get there? and look at the tinyone on the right. that one has four protrusions. i'm not an experton protrusions, but that's way too many.

i think if you took sometime to relax and really look at the letter r, you'dsee that it's not nearly as complicated as you're making it. dear seven-year-old. look at the otherchildren around you. do you see how they'rewearing clothing? that's because they'reseven years old, and they've allrealized that it's no longer appropriate to taketheir clothes off in public.

but you haven'trealized that, have you? people have tried toexplain it to you. your teachers have tried. your parents have tried. even the other studentshave expressed discomfort with your persistent andinexplicable nakedness. but you just don't stop. why do you want tobe naked so badly? do you even know why?

are you overtaken byforces beyond your control that make you do this? regardless, clothingis a reality that you need to accept. there are no loopholes to this. you can't take yourclothes off and hide in the corner hopingno one notices. you can't trick theteachers into letting you be naked by buryingyourself in the sandbox.

your clothes are ina pile next to you. they know. dear 10-year-old. wow, you really like dogs. in fact, you like dogsso much, that i'm not even sure it'semotionally healthy. it might be normalto love dogs a lot, or to be reallyinterested in dogs. but you go way, way past that.

normal children don'twalk around pretending to be a dog nearly as muchas you do, for example. you're 10. it makes people wonder aboutyour developmental progress when you growl and bark at them. an even more concerningissue is the obstacle course. fine, you want to train yourdog to run through an obstacle course. that's pretty normal.

what isn't normal ismaking your mother time you as you crawl throughthe course on all fours over and over again. you're making mom thinkthat she did something wrong to make you this way. now that we've gottenthat out of the way, allow me answer your questions. yes, but not as much as you do. i've developed a healthyrelationship with dogs.

i don't know. this may cause asurprise to you, but knowing exactly whereeach dog breed ranks on my list of favoritesisn't the pressing issue that it used to be. no. i can't even train myown dogs, let alone the dogs of other people. of course not.

i don't knowwhether you're being optimistic are youactually don't understand that dogs won't live to be 25. but you really set yourselfup for a lot of disappointment there. nachos. which is fortunate,because in the future, you're dysfunctional and youdon't take care of yourself. so you end up eatinga whole lot of nachos.

actually, you turnout to be batman, so we had to have them putdown for storyline purposes. dear 13-year-old. i think everyone was relievedwhen you started to grow out of your unhealthyobsession with dogs. unfortunately, now youthink you're a wizard. i know this because i foundyour collection of spells. tell me, how does mixingdijon mustard with sand, and then eating it,makes someone love you?

first of all, i thoughtthat your extensive early experiences with ingestingnonfood substances would put you off ofattempting something like this. secondly, no one isgoing to love you until you stop doing things liketrying to make them love you by eating mustard sand. dear other iterationsof my past self. thank you for notbeing so goddamn weird that i felt i hadto address you personally

in a letter from the future. i commend you. the end. so, questions i guess, now? audience: hi. allie brosh: hi. audience: what's yourwriting process like? allie brosh: oh boy. ok.

so i start out with a reallyspecific but vague sense of what i want thepost to feel like and what i want it to read like. the problem withthat is that it's sort of likelooking at something out of your peripheral vision. you can't really focus on it. and so you have to juststeer closer to it. and you know whenit's really wrong.

you don't know when it's right. so most of thewriting a post process is just steeringit closer to what this arbitrary, weird mentalimage i have in my head is. i also have a foldersystem on my desktop. i have the idea farm. and that's where there's justlike one-word, random ideas. sometimes i don'teven remember what i was thinkingwhen i wrote them.

but i revisit thatfolder periodically and try to see if there'sany new perspective that i have on one of those things. and if there is anew perspective-- like maybe a new angle,something that can actually steer it toward being anactual story with structure-- i move it to anotherfolder, which is-- what's that one called. i think it's post-holding area.

and that's where i startactually working on it legitimately. and then once itstarts taking shape, to the point where ifeel like i can maybe start adding drawings,i move it to the folder called "look atthis, motherfucker." and that's to getme to look at it. because i won't otherwise. and then once it'sin that folder,

i know that it's serious and ineed to take it very seriously and start drawing pictures. does that answer your question? all right. as someone who hashad dead fish before, i can say that ireally appreciated that particular comic. and i think it waswidely recognized as something that was very humanand an interesting, different

perspective onthe subject than i think many other peoplehad ever seen before. and i think that was reallycourageous and great. allie brosh: thank you. audience: thank youfor writing that. and as a follow up question,what's your favorite dog? allie brosh: my favorite dog? oh boy. a wolf.

is there a technicalterm for the hair piece that your character wears? is it a ponytail? allie brosh: ok. that's-- i sort of have cometo think of it as a shark fin a little bit. it did start out as hair. and then i got sort of annoyeddrawing hair for myself, and so i just did thislittle triangle thing.

and now it's a shark fin. i just wanted tosay, first of all, that i don't know if it's thesame post that guy was talking about, but i really,really loved the post about allie trying to kill thefish, then she would spare it. yeah, that was my favorite. i was cracking up for ages. but anyways, i wantedto ask, you always seem to have this wealth ofideas that you write about.

and i was wondering howyou prevent yourself from hitting blogger's block? allie brosh: well, i feel like ithought that i was out of ideas pretty much like three weeksafter i started my blog. and i don't know. i just keep going backto it and keep trying. like i said, i write downin may ideas farm thing, i just will write down. even if i think something'sa horrible idea,

i'll write it downanyway if it's a word that maybe is intriguing. and i've had stuff where i comeback to it three years later. and it's like, finally. ok, now i can dosomething with this. whereas before, i maybehadn't had the experience yet that would allow me to turnthat actually into a story. there are some stories thatare you had to be there stories, until i figure outwhat the little ironies are,

what the little inconsistenciesare in the story to draw out to makeit actually funny and read like there'sa structure to it. audience: thank you. allie brosh: you're welcome. allie brosh: oh, hi. i like your cone. that's good. audience: so your drawings havethis amazing like-- they're

deformed in these weirdways that are also, they seem to get acrossthe emotion more than if it was just like anormal looking person. i'm wondering, doyou know beforehand how you're going to deforma face that it looks so proud and so twisted, or doyou try like a million times? allie brosh: i do haveto try a million times. like what i wassaying before, where i have this really vaguebut very specific thing.

if that makes sense. it's a specific sense. but the image inmy head is vague. and i have to do quite afew drafts of my drawings to get it to look somewhatclose to what i'm imagining. and so sometimes,it's actually good that i don't know whati'm doing, because i'll draw something andi'll be like, oh hey, i wouldn't havethought of drawing

that face if i didn'tjust take a stab at it. but yeah, it definitelytakes a really long time to get the face just right. sometimes the people,the eye, if you move it even likehalf a millimeter, it makes a huge differencein the facial expression. and you wouldn'tthink that something like that would makesuch a big difference. but i guess maybejust to me it does.

audience: well, they're awesome. thank you. audience: did you intentionallyhit on the artistic style and keep it consistentintentionally, or is this just thething that came out? allie brosh: this isthe thing that came out. it's been an evolution. when i first starteddrawing my character, it was just like a circle headwith a triangle body thing.

and since then, thereare things like edits i've made to it that have slowlymade it what it is today, which is sort of like thisfish-tadpole-bird thing, i don't know what. all the shapes that ifind funny, i guess. i think your work is reallyrelatable to a ton of people, because of how genuine it feels. you're part of a generationof authors like jenny lawson and matt [? eiman ?] thatyou just read their stuff

and you feel so muchlike this is something that could have happened to me. or i remember somethingthat happened me now that exactly is like that. i wonder though,since you're also a great comedian,how much of what you write over the lastfour or five years, do you feel detached from it? or do you truly feellike you're doing

something autobiographical? like, do look backat things you wrote and you're like, no, that'sexactly how i feel now. or do you feel like youiterate over, again and again, to make it more ofa polished product? allie brosh: i definitelyspend a lot of time polishing. i think that my job asa writer or a comedian is to take whateverthing is in my head and figure out howto translate it most

faithfully intoother people's hands. and so, that involves a lotof very specific word choices. so most of the editing processis just getting the word choices down exactlyright to-- it can be the subtleties and shadesthat i'm trying to get across. as far as how i feellooking back on stories, i think i do put myselfin my head-- like, say when i'm a kid-- i writefrom my perspective as a kid. so my mom is very much thevillain from my perspective.

clearly, from thereader's perspective, she's just being a good momand doing what she needs to do. but yeah, so from myperspective as a kid, she was being meanand evil, and i think that answers the question. i feel like i'm rambling. audience: no, that's great. thanks audience: so iimagine these days,

with the book coming out and allthat, you're on the road a lot and a lot of changes. how are simple dog and helperdog dealing with your absence? allie brosh: they're good. we have them stayingwith a vet tech at our veterinaryhospital, and she's great. she's been sending us picturesof them just to say, hey, they're doing good. but yeah, they'redoing very well.

they've adjustedto life in bend. the simple dog knows how togo up and down the stairs now. she still sort ofsidewinds though. like when she'sgoing down, she'll do like this weird thing. audience: so i think a lot ofpeople related to your comic about the alot. allie brosh: a lot of people. audience: i waswondering if-- i find

that i have certaintypographical mistakes that i make, especially when i'mtyping quickly, that bother me. and i was wonderingwhether a lot was a thing that you use to helpcorrect yourself, or whether there are othermistakes like that you're trying to fight? allie brosh: so a lot wasnever really a problem for me. the thing that i have problemswith are double letters. when spelling a word,i'm great at spelling,

except for if there's adouble letter in there. if there's two l's ortwo t's, i'm fucked. i don't know howto spell the word. so i've been tryingto memorize which ones have the double letters. audience: so, he beat meto it, but the alot post was really amazing. audience: but i waswondering if-- i don't know how to pronounce it--spaghatta nadle is coming back

at all? allie brosh: people reallylike that goddamn noodle. i think, eventually, hewill have to come back. enough people really like him. and if i get drunkor really tired, sometimes i'm just really inthe mood for spaghatta nadle. yeah. audience: so what madeyou start drawing this? did it start with the blog?

did you just drawthings like this and tell stories aboutyourself in the past? allie brosh: yeah. i mean, i've alwayswritten stories just as a means to entertain myself. i used to try to writebooks when i was a kid. they were mostly about guysfighting things and just going on adventures wherethey fight more things. so yeah, i guess i wasprocrastinating when i actually

started my blog. i was supposed to bestudying for a physics final for college. and i eventuallydid study for it, but at this particularpoint, i didn't want to. and i started towrite stuff online. and i think themy style evolved-- i've been thinking alot about this lately, actually-- it's probablya result, sorry.

i got like 45 minutesof sleep last night, so i'm a littlescrambled in the brain. it's a result ofme subconsciously trying to reproduce the feelof stand up comedy on the page. i watch a lot ofstand up comedy. and when i firststarted just trying to write without thepictures, i was sort of bothered by the fact that thereweren't facial expressions, or weren't any ofthose non-verbal cues

that you can get fromwatching a stand up comedian. and so once i startedexperimenting with pictures, it felt really naturalto have this thing that you can interspersewith the text to give maybe like aword list interaction. or you could say1,000 things at once, which is really helpfulfor comedic timing. so that's how that happened. how do you remember, ormake up, all the details

about when you were a kid? allie brosh: my memorystarts pretty young. i have all right memoriesof most of the early stuff. so if i write stories ofwhen i'm like four and five, the memories area little spotty. i have to talk tomy mom about some of the more storylinerelevant details, about like, for example, in thepost about the cake, meeting the entire cake.

i remember everythingabout that, except for i don't actuallyknow how i got into the room with the cake. i remember eating it. i remember throwing itup all over the place. but i don't rememberhow i got in there. so with stuff like that, wherei really don't remember-- and it's not a majorlike, it's something like i got into theroom with the cake.

so i just need to find away to get to that point. and i figured the mostlogical explanation, knowing my grandparents'house, was the window. so there's a little bit of that. and sometimes i'll trim stuffdown for like streamlining it for storyline purposes,so it's not confusing. or, say like, oh,well i was here with this person, thisperson, and this person. i'll just like, i was here.

but yeah, they're-- you wereasking about my memories. i'm really sorry, you guys. i knew i was going tocrash at some point today. i woke up and i was sosurprised like, oh man, i don't feel like as bad asi thought i would feel. and now, it's all startingto come back to me. it's catching up. so yeah, hang in there with me. i'm sorry.

what would you saydistinguishes you from your characternamed allie, if anything? allie brosh: i think thatmy character is actually a more accuraterepresentation of me, like how i really, really am. it's like inside. inside that, that's what i am. i'm this weird, absurd thing. and yeah, like wheni talk to myself,

the voice inside my headis very much this thing. me, i'm just yeah. i relate more to the character. audience: thanks. allie brosh: ilove your costume. audience: what costume? allie brosh: oh. [laughter and applause] audience: thank you for coming.

i was hoping you couldtalk a little bit about how early you get feedback on posts,how polished you like things to be before you getit, who you go to. allie brosh: i pretty much justtalk to my husband about it. he's the only one in likethe inner, inner post circle. because i start todoubt myself when i'm hammering throughstuff that never sounds funny inthe very beginning. because i'm stumbling overit, and i'm like oh, well,

there's this part. and it'll be reallyfunny, you'll see. like, once i draw thepicture, once i draw the eyes, you'll see it'llbe really funny. but just imagine this. and you don't getthe whole picture. so i do just read it to duncan. i guess i share with my editorand my agent sometimes too. but most of it justgoes on in my own head.

i leave it for a few days ifi'm really stuck, and come back and read it and think like, hey. is this any betterthan i thought it was? or maybe i missed something? maybe i think it's horrible now? audience: do you evertalk to your husband to get ideas to get you unstuck? allie brosh: yeah, yeah. we'll go on walks, theselike long, nighttime walks,

and just like hammerout post ideas. and we'll pick a topic, likeidentity, and say like, well. what's importantfor your identity? and he'll say to me what'simportant for his identity, and then we'lljust talk about it. and it's good,because we just have an interesting conversation,and maybe an idea will spring from that. audience: thank you very much.

audience: we also have30% of our offices on a hangout view this. and so if anyone on the hangoutwants to ask a question, just unmute in betweenquestions, and ask away. and i think we have timefor five more minutes. i'd like to ask a question. allie brosh: where is it? audience: i'm thedisembodied voice. allie brosh: i can see me.

i can't see anybody-- audience: i, really, really,really love your blog. and thank god you'rewriting it to me. i used to have to pet rats. and i adored them. and i want to havethem again soon. but i'd like to know a bitmore about your pet rats. allie brosh: they're wonderful. i rescue them, actually.

we adopt themfrom-- so, you guys have maybe seen the "hoarders"episode with the rats. we adopted somefrom that situation. they took them outof the house and were trying to get them homes. so we have, i think, seven now. and our oldest two rats arejust the sweetest two rats in the world. there's pizzo, whois my favorite thing

in the entire universe. she's roughly potato-shapedand very soft. and she's very affectionate. and then there's charlie,who-- charlie's very special. she never really settled down. she's sort of twitchy andweird about everything. but i love her to death. and i could gothrough all of them, but i think that wouldn'tleave very much time

for other questions. audience: but how do theyget along with helper dog? allie brosh: the dogsleave them alone. they know that therat cage is special, and they shouldn't goover there and bug them. audience: i was going toask if you've ever done or wanted to do anyspoken forms of comedy, like improv, standup, et cetera? allie brosh: i actuallywould love to do stand up.

i don't know if i havethe stage presence for it. it terrifies me. but i love stand up comedy. and maybe one of these daysi'll take a crack at it. audience: you should. all kinds of people withterrible stage presence do it. audience: so whendid you first realize that some of your charactersand their expressions left your blog andwere used for memes

and other forms ofentertainment on the internet? and did that changeyour writing at all? allie brosh: it didn'tchange my writing. i noticed it when peoplelike my facebook friends would post it on my wall, andbe like, did you see this? no, i did not. i think one of thefirst ones i saw was somebody using iton a coffee shop sign, with the chalk drawings.

and that was pretty cool. and i see peoplewill make their own, and post alot memes to my wall. hey, i see it all the time. i'm always getting emailsfrom people being like, did you see thisone and this one? audience: as an artistand a copyright holder, how do you feel about that? allie brosh: i like that theinternet is having fun with it.

it's fine when people arejust using it as a meme. having fun with it, trying tobe funny, that's totally fine. it's less fine when they areusing it to sell something or to like support a reallyshitty point of view. so those times really bother me. but the other times, i'mtotally fine with it, when people are just havingfun and trying to be funny. presenter: i think that'sall we have time for. thank you so much.

allie is going to besigning books at the back. so if you want your book signed,please make an orderly line towards the back of the room. thank you so much for coming.

black boots

kai ryssdal: if you don't knowwho eric schmidt is, you're in the wrong room. this morning as i startedthinking about how to begin this, i of course wentto google, and i googled economic recovery. and i got 47, 500,000 answersin 48/100 of a second. and i said, well, that's aninteresting little statistic, but i'm going to have the manhimself here later on, so why don't i just ask him?

and i think that'swhat i'll do. in all seriousness, eric schmidtis the leader of arguably one of the mostpowerful and well-known companies on the planet. we all use his productsevery single day, multiple times a day. and as such, i think he'sprobably got something of a unique perspective on thiseconomy, how to steer a company through it, how to steerpolicy in that economy.

and that's what we'regoing to talk about. we'll go a little bit, eric andi, and then we are going to open it up for questions. a little bit of housekeeping,there are two microphones in the aisles. we're going to alternateback and forth. we need to be out of here, i'mtold, by 2:15, so we're going to keep it on time. so line yourselves up when weget there and we'll just go

back and forth. sound like a plan? obviously a lot to talk about ina short period of time, but i want to sort of lay a littlebit of a groundwork here and get a sense of where you werementally back in september, when ben bernanke and henrypaulson, the chairmen of the federal reserve, when upto capitol hill and said, this is it. we're done.

we need $700 billion dollars. ready, go. eric schmidt: well,i was scared. let me start by sayingcongratulations to walter and to david and the teams that haveput this amazing ideas festival together. it's really one of the greatevents in america, and i think you all should be proud to bepart of it [unintelligible]. [applause]

eric schmidt: in september,the worst day was the wednesday when the money marketfunds broke the buck, if you remember that day. and that night, tuesday nightovernight, the financial clearing system of the countryalmost failed. and the federal reserve had togo in and hand money to the clearinghouses to essentiallymake sure that the money, the dollar, if you will, that wasclearing overnight was cleared properly the next day.

and i said to myself,how did we get ourselves into this situation? and i still don't know theanswer to that question. kai ryssdal: assuming, though,that google keeps its cash in very safe banks-- eric schmidt: in fact, what wedid is we took it out of the banks, and we put it intosovereign denominated currencies, because we figuredthat the countries would not go bankrupt.

kai ryssdal: this country'scurrency too, yes? just checking. eric schmidt: we dida basket, yes. kai ryssdal: assumingall that's true-- eric schmidt: it is. trust me, it's true. i'm a ceo, i can't lie. it's like a real problem. kai ryssdal: it's my job.

i have to ask those questions. how are you feeling, then,about where we are in terms of fixing it? eric schmidt: well, again, withthe caveat that i don't understand how the learned andsmart people who were running all this could have gotten usinto the situation in the first place, with thatas a caveat, right? and i think we should have adiscussion as to how that happened and not just so muchfrom a regulatory perspective,

but what was the failure ininformation that got us to the point where we were in a reallygood bubble and having a good time and the currencyalmost failed. that's a serious error. it's not a small error. with that as a caveat, we'reroughly on schedule. if you look at the sequence ofevents, that once the crisis occurred everyone realizedthat asset values were too high.

you had first a real estatecrisis, and then you had a credit and finance bubble. the credit and finance bubblewas largely because of unregulated credit instrumentswhich were shut down. with the bankruptcy of lehman,everything sort of collapsed. and then we had october,november, december, where everyone's all panicked. the fed comes in with trillionsof dollars in guarantees.

people forget that there wereabout $2.5 trillion of additional guarantees of bondsand bond debts, most of which will not need to be deliveredon, by the way. the total indebtedness that wasguaranteed by the western world and the united stateswas on the order of $8 trillion to $9 trillion,if you add it all up. these are enormousamounts of money. remember, the us gdpis $14 trillion. so we created all of that.

then we had the stimuluspackage, which was designed as a short term, which i wasstrongly in favor of. and then you have the time thatit takes for the system to work, and we're inthat period now. market low, roughly,in the spring. business cycle low,roughly now. jobless high, roughlyearly 2010. we're on schedule. how do i know this?

because the people who got usinto this have told us that. [laughter] eric schmidt: what'sa better answer? what's a better-- sorry. if you look at the history, oneof the things to learn, as we manage young people, is toexplain to them that things have occurred inhistory before. and young people don't oftenknow that, or ignore it,

because they didn't takethose classes. and in our case, we're in aclassic deep recession, and recessions recover. and i've just outlaid theexact math around a traditional deep recession. kai ryssdal: but hold on asecond, because if you take all of the smarts of google'scomputers and pile it into one-- eric schmidt: we were notpart of that september--

kai ryssdal: no, you'renot, but let's take-- eric schmidt: we were not-- in fact, had we been doing it,we might have actually been measuring where allthe money was. kai ryssdal: you guys, as asymbol of all the world's knowledge, which are out thereto collate and make useful, if you take that and you combineit with these really smart people and rising asset values,how did so many smart people running the companiesand the economy do so many

stupid things? eric schmidt: well, partlybecause everybody, it was in their self-interestto believe it. people have studiedbubbles for years. remember, high tech, we alreadyhad our own bubble. you had a bigger bubble. we've already-- kai ryssdal: been there,done that? eric schmidt: we've been throughone bubble, which was

2000, the y2k phenomenon. and we had a great time. next time i'm going tosell at the peak. i mean, i'm just waiting forthe next one of these market-induced bubbles. i could have made a lotof money at the time. it's much better to sell atthe high in these bubbles. trust me. kai ryssdal: thereis, though--

yes, we should sellat the high. eric schmidt: thisis about ideas. there's an idea for you. sell at the top. kai ryssdal: so let's haveanother idea about how we can get ourselves outof this mess. do we just sit here and waitfor it to happen, or can companies and the economydo something smart? eric schmidt: in the firstplace, let's go back to what's

really going to happen. i think the us will recoverfirst. the european economy is slower to recover. the conventional wisdom issix months off-cycle. that's about right. the interesting insight aboutthe europeans is that their central bank, which is calledthe european central bank, has one mission, which isfighting inflation. and ours has two missions,fighting inflation and

promoting growth. and there's a technical namefor this among all the economists. but what's interesting about theeuropean central bank is that they have been givingenormously friendly loans to all of these countries to helpout, which looks awfully stimulative. so the european central bank,will within the charter that it has, is doing somethingsimilar to

what the us is doing. and i think europe willrecover as well. and they're not going to give uptheir vacations or anything like that in the meantime. kai ryssdal: heaven forbid. eric schmidt: so the fact of thematter is i think that's going to happen. in china, you had thestimulus package. and in china they had aninfrastructure stimulus

package, not unlikewhat we did. the difference is theyjust did it. they didn't debate it, somebenefits to a command and control economy or whateveryou want to call china. and it looks like the thirdworld, and in particular the smaller countries, are veryseverely hurt by what happened, because they were inan asset bubble in terms of minerals and so forth. and they also have hugetrade imbalances.

so we're going to go back to astructure where, if you will, the strongest, china, to somedegree india, the united states, and europe, will leadus through this over the next few years. kai ryssdal: why? why is the united states goingto get out first and not china drag us along? eric schmidt: well, i personallythink it has to do with our university systems.ultimately, the reason these

things occur in americahas a lot to do with the culture of america. and americans are optimists. americans believein innovation. 90%, 95% of the top universitiesin the world are in the united states. many people have tried toreplicate these systems. they're very hardto replicate. if you look at venture capital,which i've obviously

benefited from, the financialstructure combined with new young people trying to createnew jobs is phenomenal. we have the fastest growth cyclein terms of new jobs. a typical example is there's aclaim that 15% percent of the jobs every year eliminated andanother 15% percent of course are created. and that's no solace to you ifyou are working in an area where the only kinds of jobs,typical example being the traditional american automobileindustry, those are

the only kinds. the other ones aren'tbeing created. but if you look at the economyas an aggregate, there are other jobs being created. they're just not in your town. and that's difficult, but that'sultimately the genius of the american system. kai ryssdal: can you innovateyour way out of a recession, though?

google is a company that's madeits name with innovation. you give your engineerstime off to innovate, or on company time. eric schmidt: well, it turnsout recessions end on their own, and politicians love totake credit for the recovery. but one of the simplest rules isthe business cycle has not been eliminated, and there isevidence that the business cycle is going to get worse. and the reason it's going toget worse is things have

gotten more interlinked. so we're going to go uptogether more and down together faster. and by the way, in informationmarkets, the cycles are shorter. it's up, down, up, down, up,down, because there's more information. now it may be possible todampen some of these by conversations and regulations.

my favorite examplehere is iceland. and iceland, which has 300,000people and a lot of fish, at the height of the bubble, 3/4 ofits stock market value were the three banks that failed. kai ryssdal: bigger thanthe whole economy. eric schmidt: and they're notknown as a banking center. and of course what was happeningwas they were arbitraging their currencyagainst the euro. they were essentially lendingin one currency and taking

money in another. and there was clearlya regulatory failure at some point. i don't fully understand it. but at what point-- why didn'tsomebody raise their hand and say, by the way, it's an errorto have 3/4 of your entire market tied up in thesebanks, given that that's not your economy. and so, to me, what i hope willhappen as a result of

this terrible thing-- i'm not trying to minimize it,because a lot of people have been hurt by what i consider tobe the errors of the global elite, and hurt very severely. what i hope is people will say,hey, that doesn't make sense anymore. my house went up 20% ayear for 10 years. by the way, that'sa sell signal. it doesn't make any sense.

the math doesn't work. kai ryssdal: well, what kindsof companies then? wait a minute, let me back upand pick up on a thread you keep mentioning, regulatoryoversight. are you confident that thepresident's regulatory reform plan, that he announced a coupleof weeks ago, is going to go far enough, is going tocurb some of these excesses? eric schmidt: i don'tthink anybody knows. the regulations arelong and deep, and

there's a lot of anger. and one of the things to know,and our politicians will, at least privately, explain to you,they are inundated by the anger of the average americanat what they perceive as the bailout of the financial elite,the business elite, people like myself and so on. and that anger is palpable. so they're going to regulate. they're going toget regulated.

and you do not want the government to own your company. you could see this with generalmotors and so forth. the automobile industry globallyis largely now owned, large chunks of it areowned by governments. that's true in europe as wellas in the united states. that's always been true tosome degree in china. and so in many cases they'reultimately going to turn out to be jobs programs. thisis sort of a horrendous

structural issue that we face,because, frankly, the demand for cars is not as high as ourability to build them. kai ryssdal: with the banksgetting better, though, some showing profits, some sort ofbottoming signal out there, whether we're bumping alongthe muddy bottom or-- eric schmidt: those bankingprofits, guess where that money came from? kai ryssdal: yes. raise your hands.

there you go. how do you feel about thisproposition, that maybe what we've done in not steppingmore quickly into the regulatory realm iswasted a crisis. let the banks fester for awhile, given the money, and now they're goingto be through to the business as usual. eric schmidt: my personal viewwould have been to not allow the write-offs that occurredin the banks.

it was explained to me that theproblem with that is that the banks are actually adifferent kind of animal than other businesses. if you look at aig, for example,and again, how quickly we forget. remember it was $20 billion,then it was $40 billion, then it was $65 billion, then it was$85 billion, then it was $185 billion. these are large amountsof money.

how do you lose thatamount of money? if i lost that kind of money,i'd lose my job. i don't have that kind of moneyin my company to lose. kai ryssdal: which is sayingsomething, actually. eric schmidt: thank you. how do you make thatkind of mistake? and so my argument was that youshould allow all of these structures to fail, because thecollective memory, that is the structure, all those losseswill still be around to

remind them not to makethose mistakes again. the problem with that isit's not in fact-- i was just wrong. it's not how banks reallywork, because they lend against an asset base. and if you can't fix the assetbase, which is indeed what the fed in my view correctlydid, you don't get credit going again. and if you don't have credit,you don't have your economy,

because we americanslove credit. kai ryssdal: if it's not goingto be the banks that lead us out of the recovery, i meanthey're stabilizing, but they're not going tolead the way-- eric schmidt: it's theconsumers in america. it's always the consumers. kai ryssdal: my question,though, is what kind of company is going to do it. it won't be the financials.

it's not going to be manufacturing, look at detroit. what kind of company is goingto help us get going? eric schmidt: well, obviouslymy own bias would be to do whatever we can to get the nextgeneration of very smart companies in everyfield going. in the stimulus package therewas a lot of work done to make sure that there's a lotof money to create a green tech sector.

and many of us, the peoplehere in the room who are pioneers in this area, believethat the secret to american manufacturing success is theirability to take the knowledge that comes out of[unintelligible] so quickly and turn those into very highlyprofitable businesses, and move very quickly, theclassic example being the michigan-area manufacturingplant that can be converted to build automobile batteriesfor electric cars. there are example afterexample after example.

and i believe that. the reality is that the problemis so significant that you need to do more than that. you need to look at all thebarriers to business. so for example, people who arearguing against free trade, don't realize how many americanbusinesses are global in nature, and arguing againstfree trade hurts american businesses, thatkind of thing. kai ryssdal: let me askyou specifically

about google, then. i mean, you guysare everywhere. i think it is in your phrase-- eric schmidt: thatis our goal. kai ryssdal: that's right. and you're meeting it. it is, as you called it, theeconomics of ubiquity. how does that help this countryget going again? eric schmidt: well, we believethat information is power.

and because you wereasking about the financial things, i wonder-- i learned a little while agothat the right way to run human systems is transparency,and that almost all of the sort of structural mistakes thatwe're seeing have been caused by information hidingor by poorly integrated systems. and it's true at everylevel of politics and government and howsystems work. so from our perspective, moreinformation is power and that

the internet is this enormouslypowerful platform for very, very rapidinformation flow. you see this in the politicaldynamic, what's going on in iran, and that story is repeatedover and over again. we all understand thatintuitively. it's also true in business. it means that businessescan be more efficient. it means that startups canbe formed more quickly. one way to say it is that thebarrier to entry for a new

company has never been as low,because of the ability to get mass distribution, quick accessto new information, get your perfect out, get itdistributed and so forth. kai ryssdal: exceptfor the fact that nobody can get credit. nobody is hiring. eric schmidt: well, in fact,people are beginning to hire in certain sectors, startingwith the ones that are benefiting from thestimulus package.

so there's some of that. and as long as you have areasonable credit rating, the banks will hire you. the issue with credit in thelast six months is there were an awful lot of non-standardcredit. so think about all thesedevelopers that were busy building these hugeluxury resorts. they didn't use traditionalcredit mechanisms. they used complex credit equity swaps andother kinds of things that

i didn't fully understandthat essentially have all gone away. and their problem is theycan't refinance. one of the issues, by the way,is that there's a significant crisis in commercial creditcoming, because all those buildings were refinanced atvery high debt ratios. and those things roll over,because they don't work like mortgages like we havein our homes. and when they roll over, theywon't be able to refinance.

kai ryssdal: what about thething you were talking about a moment ago, the consumers? there are consumercredit problems coming and there's still-- i'd be curious to getyour take on this-- a trepidation on the part of theconsumer who still fears for his job. eric schmidt: in fact, in marchwe had net savings in this country.

it was historic. we should have had a party. and so what's interesting is,of course, we'll quickly go back to net credit, becausethat's how our economic structure is. kai ryssdal: but do you believe consumers are ready to-- eric schmidt: i do. kai ryssdal: really?

kai ryssdal: even in the faceof rising unemployment? eric schmidt: because what willhappen is, as we bottom through the recession-- we're in the bottomingprocess now. one of the signs of recoveryfrom recessions is that inventories get worked off. there's new demandsfor product. a typical example is cars. they did an analysis of thenumber of cars that you sell

per year, and the numberof cars that get older. and there's an unmet need fornew cars, because people have not been able to get thefinancing and so forth for new cars. well, as financing gets better,as consumer confidence grows, people willbuy those cars. and that's obviously good. kai ryssdal: start gettingyour questions ready. go ahead and line up atthose microphones.

we'll open it up herein just a second. what kinds of conversations,shall we say, have you had with members of theadministration about getting the government back outof the marketplace? eric schmidt: the answer thatthey give is that we're in and we'll get out. kai ryssdal: oh. eric schmidt: and when ilook at the criticism-- and i think it's known i wasa strong supporter of the

president and his program-- the one really legitimate, inmy view, criticism from the other side was that once thisspending and once these tentacles get in from thegovernment into the private sector, and in particular thespecial interests that depend on the temporary spending, itbecomes permanent spending. i think that's a very legitimatecriticism. and the administration has saidthat they're going to answer that question by verystrong steps in favor of

transparency. they're going to show wherethe money went, what it went for. they're using the web in cleverways, and they're good at this stuff. so i think that as citizens weshould hold them to that commitment. and we should see after thestimulus bill, more than $800 billion, let's make sure thatthat part ends and we get back

to our normal business, becausethat's ultimately the secret of america. kai ryssdal: do you thinkthey've met commitment to transparency yet or do theystill have a ways to go? eric schmidt: they have donetheir initial filings. kai ryssdal: so kind of? eric schmidt: well, no, but-- they're on schedule, but it'sa two year program. so so far they've doneit, but again you can

imagine they say it. they meant it. they did it the firsttime, and then they forget about it later. and that would not be ok. so we need to hold themaccountable for the commitments that they make aspart of taking our money, if you will, and make sure thatthey really follow through, using the tools that areavailable on the internet.

and what's great about it isthat, although most of us don't have time to study thesethings in detail, for every program in the government ifyou basically publish what they're up to, there are groupsthat will monitor. they will keep them honest.they will check their commitments and what they say. that's one of the great thingsabout governance in the internet age. kai ryssdal: again, microphonesright there for

those of you whohave questions. there was a panel here thismorning in this room, maria bartiromo, and douglasholtz-eakin from the mccain campaign, and austan goolsbeefrom the white house, and david wessel from thewall street journal. and one of the big themes intheir discussion was business investment. in an economy where consumersare afraid, how do you convince businesses that theyhave to step up and take a

leadership role? eric schmidt: well, businessesare run, american businesses are run pretty rationally. they look at demand andthey make their investments based on that. and the fact of the matteris most companies have-- many companies have actuallyfairly strong cash positions. kai ryssdal: most,in fact, right? i mean even today, most.

eric schmidt: surprisinglyso, and some of that is regulatory in nature. some of it is the way ouraccounting system works. but the fact of thematter is-- again, this is unsung. we always focus on thebusinesses that are credit-sensitive. many businesses, google beingone, have lots and lots of cash, many of the high techbusinesses and so forth so

we're waiting, if you will, forconfidence to come back, for the markets to come back. and we know that they will. kai ryssdal: you'rewaiting for us. we're waiting for you. eric schmidt: but that's whythese things take two years, rather than one week. that's why there isa business cycle. and the funny thing is i cantell you that we're in a

business cycle, and you'll say,no, we're not, because it's like all a disaster. but in fact, a month from now,things will be better. if you look at unemployment,for example, in the most recent report the loss of unemployment has gotten better. kai ryssdal: the rate at whichthe economy is losing jobs. eric schmidt: again, thesigns are there. kai ryssdal: yes, sir?

audience: hi. brian lehrer from wnycradio in new york. eric, i use google all day,every day, like a lot of people in this room, but isthere ever a point at which google becomes so big that it'skind of scary and needs to be regulated asa public utility? we kind of reached that withmicrosoft in the '90s, some of the same discussion. when you're aggregating all thecontents of books, when

google news is the place thatpeople go for news content, instead of the sites, new yorktimes and everything else that you're aggregating and you knowsome traditional media are upset with you for that,seriously, literally, is there a point where you need to beregulated as a public utility? and if you can, please addressthe news content question in particular. eric schmidt: you'llbe surprised that my answer is no.

and i would offer as a scenario,would you prefer to have the government runninginnovative companies, or would you rather have the privatesector running it? and there are models, and thereare countries, where, in fact, the government doestry to do that. and i think the americanmodel works better. audience: but eric, if i couldjump in, i would expect a more sophisticated answer from you,because as we saw with the banks, it's not a question ofsoviet-style communism or free

market capitalism. the banks needed smartregulation that they didn't have, as i think youwere just saying. is it possible that information is in the same boat? eric schmidt: well, again,my answer would be no. and perhaps i should expandon my answer. google plays an importantrole in information. and the reason you're askingthat question is because

information is importantto all of us. we run google based on a set ofvalues and principles, and we work very, very hardto make sure people know what they are. so for example, for you as anend user, if you become dissatisfied with google, we'llmake it easy for you to switch to a competitoror another choice. in fact, we have a group whichis called the data liberation front, which works forus, that actually--

sorry-- which basically works very hardto make sure that there are no ways in whichwe trap data. so there's a long listof things like that. and companies are defined bythe values that they were founded with and that theyoperate with today. and so if you're concerned aboutthe need for regulation of google's role, part of myanswer would be that the company is, independent of myleadership and the founders'

leadership and so forth,the company is formed in a certain way. a thing that you should beworried about is it that a combination of special interestplus unintended regulation could in fact preventthe kind of consumer benefits that we pushso very hard to do. and part of the other pushbacki would offer is that the things that we do areavailable to others. there's nothing particularlysecret, in the sense that

we've just invented stuff, butwe haven't largely prevented people from doingtheir own thing. it's pretty easy for peopleto try other things. i'd like to see some other folkstrying to lay out an agenda for innovation. with respect to the newsquestion, which i think is what you're reallytalking about, there's a couple of comments. the internet arrived, and asit arrives, it displaces

industries in reallyprofound ways. and it's not necessarilythe players' fault. it's really about how consumersbehave. in the case of news content, news readers,that is the customer, if you will, are busy readingnews online. and we have not yet figuredout the perfect ad model for that. but one of the things that ishappening is it's affecting, for example, the newspapereconomics, along with the loss

of classifieds, cost ofprint, et cetera. i don't know how to solve thegeneric newspaper problems. and we talked a lot about thisto them, because it's a shared interest. it's, from myperspective, a huge tragedy that we would lose investigativereporting in our country, which has driven somuch of what we really know and really driven transparencyin lots of fundamental ways, both in the us and globally. we're working on a whole bunchof products in that area, to

try to do it. there is a tension here, becausethe newspapers give us access to their content, andthen they complain that we don't pay them out of ourother businesses. when we tried that, there's notenough revenue that we can yet get from their content, andso we would essentially be subsidizing them. that's roughly the answer. kai ryssdal: this company's mostfamous value is don't be

evil, right? it became iconic when youguys went public. does don't be evil alsomean always be good? eric schmidt: i didn't majorin that philosophical question, so that's a reallyhard question. a simpler answer mightbe that don't be evil is a way of operating. unfortunately, if there werebook that said what's evil and what's not evil, then wecould just consult it.

what don't be evil says is whenyou face a question, ask the question. and it's almost like a ripcordwithin the company. and when i first ran thecompany, i thought, this is crap, right? this is young peoplehaving a good time. so i'm sitting in the room andwe're having a conversation about a particular ad product. and one of the engineers,whose name is ron, says,

that's evil. and it was like a bomb goingoff in the room, and i felt like hiding under the chair,because all of a sudden the whole conversation stopped. and there was this lengthyconversation as to whether the decision was based onour principles. and the principles of google arebasically about end users. so to answer the earlierfellow's question even more deeply, we try to makeour decisions

based on end user benefit. many industries, whether welike it or not, are not as organized around enduser benefit. they're often organized aroundthe supplier benefit or the shareholder benefit. we try to focus on end users. kai ryssdal: one more spin offof brian's question and then we'll get to this side ofthe room, i promise. a lot of your answer sounded alittle bit like what you said

in the beginning. how do we know that theeconomy's getting better? because the people who gotus here told us so. it was a little bitof, trust us. eric schmidt: well, what'syour alternative? don't trust us? kai ryssdal: not buy yourstock, i guess. i don't know. eric schmidt: but thegood news is--

kai ryssdal: i can't not useyour products, right? eric schmidt: sure you can. we have competitors. kai ryssdal: yes, but come on. i mean, i'm on reader. i'm on mail. i'm on this. i'm on docs. eric schmidt: i'm glad to haveyou, but every one of those

has an able competitor. they really do. kai ryssdal: yes, ma'am. audience: thank you. shelly porges fromwashington, dc. google has obviouslydone phenomenal-- has promoted the democratizationof information in a great way, and has, infact, promoted the development of a lot of innovation in smallbusinesses, or large

businesses, for that matter. what role can you play goingforward to help us get out of this, or do you envisionyourself playing an active role other than what younormally do as part of your day-to-day business,number one? eric schmidt: democratizationof the society or-- audience: no, democratizationof the information. i'm sorry. information distribution andaccess to information.

and then, related to that, thequestion before came up, where is the turnaround goingto come from? and one thing that has seemedto be not commented much, other than the broad topicof innovation, is small businesses. small businesses created halfa million more jobs in the last recession than they didin this recession, yet you hear all the talk going around,the stimulus package, big companies, big sectors,that sort of thing.

so how do you see google playinga role in all that. eric schmidt: for the secondpart, it's pretty easy. the internet is such a greatfriend of small businesses that much of our partnerships,much of our advertising revenue, is driven by smallbusinesses, because of our self-service advertising. and furthermore, our auction inour business is designed to not favor the big guys, whichis of constant annoyance to the big guys.

and the little people nevercomplain about this, because they know that in traditionalaccounting structures, they're the ones that are disfavored. so we think we make a goodstep forward on that. so with respect todemocratization of information, it first getsback to whether the information is publiclyavailable. and one of the things thatwe've learned is that governments are not asinterested in transparency as

you might think. if you're a governmentbureaucracy, if you're a government bureaucrat,then google shows up. and we're sort of a pain in theass, is a way to describe it, because all that canhappen is you can get embarrassed by access toall this information. it's oversight, andmany organizations don't really have that. so we've argued, for example,that all of the hearings that

happen in the government, in theus and elsewhere, should be webcast raw. and it's easy to do. it's inexpensive. many companies can do it. and that way, you couldliterally see what all the public meetings are doing, andnot have to attend them. audience: so like govtubeinstead of youtube. eric schmidt: yes.

so there's lots ofthings like that. and the technology is veryinexpensive to do this. it's not a big thing. and i think it would helpa lot with oversight. kai ryssdal: yes, over there. audience: eric, sam perryfrom menlo park. eric, you've shared with us inthe past-- one of the other previous panels in this tentthis morning was on energy policy in the future.

and you've been very open insharing what google has been doing the last couple ofyears in that area. to segue off of the lastquestion, what can google do and is it doing to help smallbusinesses, but also individuals-- i know some of the individualstuff is coming to the front now-- to conserve energy,that aspect of the next part of the agenda.

eric schmidt: so you'd have tobe living in a cave to not understand how serious theclimate change threat is at this point. and the people who spend theirtime saying it's not true must not notice the change inseasons, the fact that it gets warmer earlier, the increasedvariability of weather, the loss of biodiversity, the many,many things that are going on that everyone sees. so we're in a situation, as weknow, where climate change is,

with the possible exceptionof a true nuclear war, the greatest threat affectingmankind and our children and grandchildren and so forth. so from our perspective, ourcontribution is, first and foremost, to work on ourown use of energy. so we have the most efficientdata centers and so forth. we use a lot of power. but we've also decided to putour money where our mouth is and begin to invest inthe supply chain.

so we put together a seriesof-- we studied this for a while, and the most promisingthings are, for example, with wind technology, the solarthermal, solar photovoltaic, enhanced geothermal, thosesorts of things. we've been putting money intothose investments to try to build the demand structure,because we have good cash and we're obviously a good customerof this, and we know we're going to need it. we also authored a plan calledthe google energy 2030 plan,

and the thing that was botheringus was, why doesn't somebody just add all the moneyup and figure out how much it's going to costto fix this problem. this is a classic big scalesystems engineering problem. and we were shocked to discoverthat we made a trillion dollarsby doing this. and you sit there and you go,this guy must be mad. well, we work at google. it's sort of a crazy place.

but it turns out that if yousave the capital to build the excess plants, if you save allof the downstream expenses for these enormous capital expenses,and instead you take the equivalent amount of moneyand put it into renewable over, in our case, a22 year period, you actually make money. another example is that if youmove to higher efficiency cars through hybrids and betterefficiencies, better car designs, and get to the 50,60, 70 mile per hour car,

which is clearly technologicallyfeasible, you save so much money in terms ofliterally the gas prices, which drives everybody crazy,that you really can make a dent in this. so i would offer inthe climate change area a note of optimism. i don't know whether thecopenhagen protocols and that are going to be successful ornot, but i do know that in our own country we can, asindividual actors, take the

necessary steps to, by the way,do the most boring thing first, which is to insulateyour house and insulate your building. at google, we were having ameeting and i said, well, ok, how much is it going to cost? and he said, oh, a millionand a half. that's a lot of money. i thought, ok, what'sthe payback? and they said, oh,it's 18 months.

and i said, it's an 18 monthpayback for a million and a half, and you haven'talready done it? and he said, no oneasked us to do it. do it. all you have to do is do it. it's so obvious. kai ryssdal: do you ever getsick and tired of the, what can google do about thehigh cost of milk or health care or--

i mean, with this ubiquitycomes a certain responsibility, no? eric schmidt: in the audience wehave an author of a book on that subject. kai ryssdal: standing rightthere, in fact. eric schmidt: i guess we'llget to jeff shortly. if google is a metaphor forthinking differently about problems, then i'mhappy to be it. and it clearly helps us froma branding perspective.

there are limits to whatgoogle can do. we are a relatively simplecompany, built around information and serversand the web. many of the problems that peopletalk about are much more complicated. so as i've looked, for example,at the health care bill and so forth, thecomplexity of that system is well beyond what any companyor any architecture could really attack, i think,right now.

kai ryssdal: do you thinkconsumers really buy the fact that you guys are asimple company? eric schmidt: compared to theother companies, believe it or not, google's prettystraightforward. daniel casse. the first questioner asked youa question about microsoft. i wanted to follow up on that,since microsoft was the company that everyone used totalk about in technology, before you came along.

in five years, what businessdo you think microsoft will be in? what business would youadvise them to be in? and in what ways are you goingto compete with them? eric schmidt: sure. these are extraordinarilydangerous questions. we have trouble predicting thenext 12 months at google. you're asking me a fiveyear question in a different company?

kai ryssdal: butyou're google. eric schmidt: you setme up for this one. kai ryssdal: not a plant. eric schmidt: microsoft's corebusiness comes from two products, windows and office. they have very, veryhigh market share. they were found to be a monopolyin one of them. they are clearly a monopolyin the other. they're under variouslegal restraints by

virtue of that behavior. so the first and most obviousanswer is that they're going to continue focusingon those things. the issue that microsoft andmany other companies are facing is that there'sa shift to different architectural model. and sorry to be so technicalhere from a minute, but it's called cloud computing. and basically, it means thatthe network is now reliable

enough that you keep allyour information there. and the idea is that you pickup any kind of computing device and the information isthere, even if somebody just hands you a device. you just say who you areand off it goes. and this is a very, very bigdeal in the computer industry. and it's one which companieslike microsoft need to figure out a way to makethat transition. google is organized aroundmaking what's called cloud

computing a core part ofthe next generation of architecture. kai ryssdal: yes, sir. audience: thanks. my name is randall kempner. i run something called the aspennetwork of development entrepreneurs. it's a group that promotesentrepreneurship as a means to promote sustainable

development in emerging markets. so with that background, myquestion to you is how do you, or how does google, viewinformation technology as a weapon, as a mechanism tosupport sustainable development? and in particular, is googledoing anything to make sure that it's not doing evil inemerging markets like africa and latin america? eric schmidt: weare doing some.

and i would argue we arenot doing enough. africa is a very good example,because this is a continent of people largely trapped withoutvery much information. a curious statistic is that theinternet connections to africa cost more than they doin the united states, even though the country is infinitelypoorer, which has to do with a regulatory failure,a governance failure, and so forth and so on. so we've been working very, veryhard to build what are

called proxy caches, that youcan put in the countries, accelerate the local access. we're also doing things-- mostpeople who are in very, very poor situations have mobilephones, which is a great accomplishment. the rough number is somewherebetween three and three and a half billion mobile phonesin use today. by the time, maybe 10 yearsfrom now, it looks like 5 billion to 5 1/2 billion peoplewill have either a

mobile phone or access to one. and they can use those to dothings like sms texting, where they can get a lotof information. so with respect to sustainabledevelopment, there's this conflict between rapid evolutionof the economics and the sustainable development. we can help market it. my fear is that most of thesecountries, the fundamental problem is a corruption problem,that the industrial

structure and economic andpolitical structure are not mature enough that when you makethe investment that it goes to the right placeand achieves the right regulatory outcome. kai ryssdal: jeff. audience: i'm jeff jarvis. i wrote a book called whatwould google do? and i won't ask you. since doing that, a notionclarified in my mind that i

wanted to try out on you, isthat what we're going through right now is much more thana recession or a financial crisis, that it is a fundamentalrestructuring of the economy and society, goingpast the industrial age of mass production, distribution,marketing media, into something based on knowledge andabundance and the things that i did write thatyou're about. and when we see what's happeningto automotive, and banking, and newspapers andother parts of media, soon

probably advertising, bigswathes of retail, real estate, we're seeing a huge andfundamental restructuring that i don't think is going togo back, and that a lot of new companies, one hopes like yours,are going to start creating new versionsof these industries. am i going too far? eric schmidt: i think so. of course, you're good at it,because your book was about taking some ideas and reallytalking about them in a global

context, and very successful,i might add. i think the evidence right nowis that while i'd like what you said to be true, it'snot today yet true. i'd like us to make it true. and the reason is that almostall of the money, and almost all the people, and almost allof the capital is not going to where you described it. it's going into traditionalbusinesses and traditional industrial and serviceoperations.

i think one of the ideasaround the aspen ideas festival is to talk about newideas, like the one you proposed, is how could youaccelerate that transition. what happens is that you get ayoung entrepreneur in the kind of industries that are difficultto transform, and when you talk to them, they'vehit so many regulatory barriers, so many barriers toentry, so many other ways, that we need to find waysto make it easier. so as a young engineer, i wasvery interested in trying to

make the internet moresuccessful, and i ran into the regulatory structureof the telcos. so, for example, there wassomething called a t1 line, and what happened is everyonefigured out how to build a business beneath the regulatorypricing for a 1.5 megabit t1 line. so an artifact of regulationwas that a whole business was created. had the regulation not beenthere, we would have been five

years farther along. and i think if you look at everyone of these businesses, you'll discover that theincumbents, typically large companies working withregulators, have ended up making a cozy structurefor themselves. and when the truly discontinuousidea comes along, it's not in anyone'sinterest to take it on. and that's why the marketpressure is so fundamental. so getting back to our earlierconversation about the

government and its role,governments are not particularly good at dealingwith change. one executive told me that hightech works three times faster than traditional businessand government works three times slower thantraditional business. so that may be anextreme case. we designed our government notto change very quickly, and yet we are asking forvery rapid change. it has to occur fromthe private sector.

it has to occur from enlightenedleadership. and it has to occur in areaswhere money is being made. audience: so could google onlybe google because you were doing something new? eric schmidt: i would argue thatgoogle is as successful as it is primarily because ofthe openness of the internet, that had you had brilliantfounders such as larry and sergey in a difficult, regulatedindustry, the progress would havebeen much slower.

and people always give us somuch credit, but let's give credit to the people who foresawthe internet, opened it up, designed it in a waythat it did not have significant choke points, madeit be possible for random people, including 24 year oldsin a dorm to enter and create something new. that's a story of innovationthat's very, very precious. and we need to make sure thatwe preserve it for the next competitor, by theway, of google.

kai ryssdal: let mejust zero in for a second on that question. do you not then believe thatthis economy has been, through the past two years and thechanges we've seen, fundamentally reset, that we'rejust going to proceed from here apace? eric schmidt: well, i wouldlike it to be true. my question to you iswhere is the data? when i look at most of where themoney went in the economy,

when i look at all the politicsand all the bills and so forth-- and i've supportedmuch of this-- most of it's going to the incumbents. now, with a counterexample thatthere's now-- we doubled our national science foundationfunding from $3 billion to $6 billion, whichis a drop in the bucket. there's more money forappropriate medical research and those kinds of things, butfundamentally, if you look at it mathematically, the majorityof the power and

control is still not aroundreal innovation. and that needs to change. kai ryssdal: is googlestill a new company? well, hopefully. you guys have been aroundforever, it seems. right? our collective experience is,oh, yes, it's google. eric schmidt: well one of thethings to say about brands is that brands can be createdvery quickly. had anyone heard about twittertwo years ago?

and yet twitter is aphenomenally successful company and brand. who here knew about facebookthree or four years ago? phenomenally successful. so one of the things that's neatabout being in our world is that new companies and newbrands can come along. in google's case, we believethe way we run the company, which is rather unusual,keeps it sort of young. in particular, our engineers areencouraged to spend 20% of

their time working on whateverthey want to work on. and before you get too excited,these are engineers, so they don't move toofar from a field. but virtually everything we'vedone that has been creative has really, reallycome from that. and top down, centralizedcontrol from people like me is not going to drivethe creativity. i've read about google's, say,tracking epidemics by using search information.

and i'm wondering how else youplan on using the search information in the future. and if it will be regulated, ifyou think you'll be able to keep control of that kindof information. eric schmidt: a verygood question. so everybody knows we puttogether a flu trends program and we used anonymized data. that is, we took the searches,but we took away the information about the person.

and we discovered that becausewhen you get a symptom like a disease, the first thing youdo is you type the symptom into google, we could see monthsbefore the official reporting agencies could seethe emergence of a new horrific disease. and the estimates are thatthis will save tens of thousands of lives. that's a huge, huge thingfrom our perspective. we're very excited toparticipate in that.

we don't take that too far. and the reason is that thereis a very fine line between anonymizing information to makepeople healthier and then the sort of spookiness andprivacy issues that we're so concerned about. in the european commission,there are a series of laws, called the european data privacyinitiative, which regulate this to aboutan 18 month period. and so it looks like historicallogs, literally the

things that you've done fiveyears ago, will be deleted both by policy andalso by law. there's a very legitimatetension between the state interests in, for example,police action, and then your interest in privacy. and each country sorts thatout differently, and we're subject to all of those laws. my own guess is that we'll endup with about an 18 month period for search logs and we'llbe very careful about

using much of that beyondthings like flu trends. kai ryssdal: again though,it comes down to trust us with this data. eric schmidt: well, in thiscase, it's also trust the government. and depending on your point ofview of the patriot act, that's a good or a bad thing. so again, this tension-- we made a decision that we don'tknow how to make the

decision about that trade-off,that the political process, that the governments thatdebate this fundamental tension between civil liberty,state interests, safety, and so forth, is not one that weshould have an opinion about. and that was a difficulttransaction, but how could we decide whether it's 18 monthsor 12 months and so forth? kai ryssdal: just a coupleof more, i think. yes, over there. audience: yes.

hi. david [? kunin ?] from new york. can you elaborate-- it's a follow up to jeff'squestion about the old economy, new economy debate. can you expand on the-- so many of what you've donehas been so successful but froogle was a project thatreally wasn't that successful

and has to do-- eric schmidt: why do youhave to remind me? audience: well, can youelaborate a little bit on your view of what didn't happenthere, in terms of being able to use the power of informationon the internet to find low pricing, and to beable, in this economy, where you've got so many stores andtraditional retailers shutting down, what it is about-- so many of the models and somuch of this conversation has

been about advertising modelsor monetization using information, whereas retailabout pricing and the ability to really move the economyinto more of a different distribution model, can youtalk a little bit about pricing and distribution? kai ryssdal: remind us whatfroogle was, and then explain why it didn't work. eric schmidt: so frooglewas our first attempt at product search.

and it didn't work becauseit just didn't work. and we celebrate our failuresinside the company, because we want people to take risks. so we replaced froogle by whatis now google product search, which has been doingpretty well. and froogle was a destinationsite. it had the wronguser interface. it didn't have all theright products. it did not have enoughinventory, that kind of thing,

a long list of thingsthat we did wrong. so one way of stating yourquestion a little differently is to say, how will the commerceworld change now? i think that's roughlywhat you're asking. audience: yes, instead ofadvertising models, commerce. and you have product searchand so forth, and we're exploring that now. let me give you an exampleof a product that we've just released.

it's a product for your mobilephone, and you take a picture with your mobile phone of a upcbar code, and it tells you whether the productis cheaper online. ok, well you can imagine who'sin favor of this product. you can also imagine who'sopposed to this product. but that's an example. and one of the discussions foryou all to think about is what are things that are neat thatwe could do with the collective intelligenceof what people do.

people are smart. and within reason and respectingtheir privacy, could we in fact get betterbargains, better delivery, those sorts of things. and that's just anexample of it. we have, again, googleproduct search, which is doing very well. we have more and more peopleusing product purchasing. you can imagine things likesubscription businesses and so

forth eventually. if you look at the success ofamazon, amazon, i think, proves that this modelworks well. audience: but are you surprisedat how fast or how slow things are moving online,in terms of the growth of online commerce? eric schmidt: i'm prettyhappy with it. i think that most people nowknow that when you buy things for christmas, by far the bestway to do it is to do it

online and then just shipit to the person. and there was a point at whiche-commerce became reliable enough that you wouldn'tbe embarrassed at the christmas party. and so i think e-commerce is notonly here to stay, but now people are arguing over the taxexemption that it has for sales tax and thosesorts of things. so you know that you've arrivedwhen that's happening. kai ryssdal: how hard are youguys working at getting away

from ad revenue as-- eric schmidt: by the way,we love ad revenue. kai ryssdal: absolutely. eric schmidt: we love it. do you know what percentageof our revenue it is? kai ryssdal: over 90%. eric schmidt: 97%. or is it 98%. we love ad revenue.

kai ryssdal: doesn't that numberscare you, though? eric schmidt: no. the serious answer is weare diversified across advertising. we would like, our board memberscall it more legs of the stool, please. and we have a pretty successfulbusiness in the enterprise, which we think isgoing to be pretty exciting. and we've got a number of othersort of subscription,

non-advertising businessesunderway. this one is probably a softball,so it's more of an invitation for your perspectiveon i think what is a reasonably hot topic, andparticularly in your industry. so, talk about immigrationpolicy, outsourcing of jobs, h-1bs, the balance of humancapital trade, how many people are we sending overseas anddoing the same thing yet at the same time trying to shutdown the reciprocal. i'd just be curious aboutyour thoughts.

eric schmidt: again, i don'tknow if this is a softball, but it's like, ok, let'sgo through this. audience: i think i knowwhich direction you want on this one. eric schmidt: let's take thesmartest people the world. let's bring them tothe united states. let's educate them and give themthe top universities, and then let's kick themout of the country. now that makes a lot of sense.

furthermore, they can go tothe other country, create using all of our americanideas, take all of our intellectual property, andcreate businesses to compete with the american firmsand pay taxes to those governments. how am i doing so far? audience: it's a very big swing,so it suggests that-- eric schmidt: do i haveyour vote yet? audience: yes, exactly.

eric schmidt: i've been tryingto figure out what is the intellectual basis foropposing my argument? and there must be-- audience: well, you're engagedwith the administration. you are ubiquitous. so what is-- eric schmidt: i've giventhis speech. i've just been blunterthan i just was. and it seems to me that thereis an intellectually correct

view, which is that everyone isexactly the same and that there's no difference inintelligence or ability between every human being. and if you believe that, thenyou don't live in the same educational system that i do. i just don't understand. we have this amazing, amazingasset in america. the smartest people in theworld want to come to the united states, and thenwe kick them out.

kai ryssdal: do you get anytraction with this discussion in washington? eric schmidt: i justget louder. kai ryssdal: so how doyou really feel? howard, i think this is thelast one right over here. audience: ok. you haven't talked at allabout cyberterrorism, or cybercrime, or just manipulationof data, which is untraceable, and what dangerswe really have as consumers.

kai ryssdal: and it's worthpointing out that people were talking about you as the firstchief technology officer of the united states. eric schmidt: right. better to work for aprivate company. kai ryssdal: you keepsaying that. eric schmidt: we likeprivate companies. innovation is where it occurs. the internet is full--

it's shocking, butthere is actually criminals on the internet. and when i used to talk aboutthis 10 years ago, people would say, oh, howdo you know that? i said, because there are humanbeings on the internet, and not everyone is perfect. and so the internet has had justgeneration and generation of the kinds of attacks thatyou're talking about. a typical example is peoplewill find 5,000

computers that are idle. they'll exploit some bug,often in one of our competitors' products. and they will exploit thatbug, and they will do a systematic attack on a website,called a distributed denial of service attack. and the significant players thatare in the industry are all well insulated for that. so we face this all thetime at google.

so the kind of attacks that youworry about are the ones that are not like that. so you could imagine astate-sponsored attack where they used, for example, the nameservers to spoof you and say this isn't google, this issomebody else, which would require sort of an incorrectbehavior by a government. and we worry about that. we worry about the financialsystem, and in particular the money transfer systems, and thechecks and balances for

moving money around. and that's been a problem. i'm not as worried overall,because the problems that we face, we face not just fromcyberterrorism, if you will, from states and horrific peoplelike terrorists, we face them from 16 yearold idiots as well. and so we're sortof used to it. so i'm not as worriedabout it as others. i think we should-- it's a priceof being interconnected

that you're also interconnectedwith the people who are going to donasty things. and we need to make sure thatour systems are designed to prevent it. the internet grew out of thisnotion of communal sharing, and all of us who've been partof it have had a rude awakening when we discoveredthat the internet could be misused. and again, i think we'veaddressed it, largely.

kai ryssdal: and with that, ithink we are done for the day. eric schmidt: well, thankyou very much. kai ryssdal: thankyou for your--