Michael Bloomberg | Talks at Google

Good.

Good morning, Good afternoon. Hello Googlers around the world watching this. I'm Alan Davidson, senior policy counsel for the company, your man in Washington where I head up the Washington public policy operation for the company. And I'm delighted to be here today to introduce our guest today. Thank you for all for joining us. And just for the record, this is not another installment of the Candidates at Google Forum, although if our guests would like to make some news today, we'd be delighted to hear it. In the meantime, I think we can just content ourselves with having one of the country's leaders in industry, technology and public policy and politics here with us today. So I'm honored to introduce the the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who as many of you know, is not only one of our country's political leaders but also an industry leader. He is, before entering his claim to fame, I should say here at Google actually comes from probably his work before entering politics. Before becoming Mayor, he in 1981 started Bloomberg LP from scratch. He and it has become one of the most successful media companies on the planet. The company has grown to be an essential information resource for anyone involved in the financial sector. What many of you may not know is that Mayor Bloomberg is also what some have described as a geek at heart. He has a degree in electrical engineering from Johns Hopkins and confessed in the prep room to actually have a having assembled one of those little like crystal radio sets when he was a child. So he's got some geek street cred. He is renowned I think as mayor for having applied his technology know how and his entrepreneurship and industry background to try to transform the public sector. As mayor under his leadership, New York City has revolutionized its public school system. I think it's safe to say it's created a climate, an economic climate where companies like Google thrive and we have of course a huge presence in New York for the company. And the mayor has boldly pushed one of our nation's largest cities to go green. This is actually very interesting. He has mandated new emission and mileage standards for all 13,000 New York City taxicabs. Actually just as an example of one of these kinds of things where the city is going to have a fully hybrid fleet by 2012. I think probably the first city to do something, certainly the first city of that size to do anything with that kind of fleet. So quite interesting. I'm sure he'll be happy to answer questions about all of this. I'd also note that the mere possibility of his candidacy for president has electrified pollsters and people in Washington D.C. and many in the public. The mayor will be talking today with Sheryl Sandberg, our intrepid vice president of global online sales, who needs no introduction in this community. But I'll just say as an editorial note, it's rare that we here get somebody to speak who's so experienced and accomplished in the worlds of both business and industry, as well as technology and politics and public policy. So please join me in welcoming Mayor Bloomberg to Google.

Thank you. Thank you.

Well, thanks, everyone, for being with us this morning and this afternoon all over. And once again, a Google welcome for Mayor Bloomberg. Excited to have him.

Thank you.

So this is our chance to get to know you both as an individual. What motivates you, what inspires you? So if it's okay, we're going to start at the beginning.

Sure.

You grew up in Medford, Massachusetts, and you have publicly said that the lessons early on of hard work were very important. Interestingly, worked through Hopkins as a parking attendant. How would you say your upbringing or those early lessons have helped shape your life?

Well, I think you look at your parents and most of us are lucky enough to. To have parents. Not everybody does. And one of our problems in New York City is we have a lot of kids we have to help who aren't so lucky. They are raised by grandparents or aunts or just friends. But I had two loving parents. My mother is still alive, 98 years old, lives in the house that I grew up in. Flew down this weekend to New York, went back, I hope that I've inherited her genes. But my father was a bookkeeper for a little dairy company, and he went to work some seven days a week, right up until he checked himself into the hospital to die. And I think you can't help but be formed by your parents, their work ethic. We talked about charity and social obligations. One of the things my parents did, which I had wanted to do with my daughters but didn't quite get accomplished, but I would urge all of you, if you have kids, and do it. My mother made sure my sister and I waited at home for my father to come for dinner. We always ate together as a family. We set the table together. There was never a pot in the history of our family that came to the table. We served everything much more formally. And we went around the table and talked about what we did that day. And so I remember discussing charity. We'd collect for some cause in the neighborhood. I was a boy Scout and sold Christmas wreaths to raise money for a few things. And my sister did the same kinds of things. But if you look back and say, who was the most influential in setting your life on the right course? It was clearly, in my case, my parents, a lot of other people that had something to do with it. But the great challenge we have in our society is we live in a world where parents aren't spending the time with their children. I went to visit a charter school two weeks ago where they have kindergarten and first grade. Next year they'll have K1 and 2, and then they'll build up to K through 5. But they insist that the parents read half a dozen books to the children every single week. They ask the children to write a sentence or two about each of the books. They call the parents every single week and say, did you read? And if the parents didn't have time, they say, well, you're going to have to remove your kid from school unless you start doing it. But how we get in this society we live in, where everybody's got so many things to do and families are much more fluid than they've ever been before, how we get to have the parents really spend time one on one with their children is one of our great challenges. And I think that's the challenge in our school system as well. We talk about numbers, we talk about methods of teaching. In the end, education, particularly at the lower level, is a teacher looking a single student in the eye, dialoguing, understanding what that student needs, answering questions. And there's just too little of that in our competitive fund society.

So with your parents and the upbringing you had, probably your first setback, which you write about in your book, as I read, was at Salman after Salman was bought.

Well, I got fired after 15 years.

I'll let him say that.

Yes. People always are afraid to say that.

I don't know I was going to get.

I can just tell you it should happen to every one of you. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. And of all the people on the executive committee that fired me, sadly, one is no longer alive. He died in an airplane crash. But the other six are all paying customers. So in the end. Thank you very much. No, I was at.

Larry, don't fire any of us. Right then he'll have to.

I was at Solomon Brothers for 15, 16 years. It was a phenomenal experience. I looked forward to going in every day. I've always looked forward to going in every day. Even the day there. I knew I was going to get fired. But I've looked forward to going into my company for 20 years. City hall now for the last five and a half years, I've always believed that tomorrow is going to be even better than today. And as long as you and your family get up in the morning, how can it be a bad day? But at Solomon Brothers, they gave me a chance to grow. I had setbacks, I had successes. And when we sold the company, it was time for me to leave anyways. I thought they were changing the company in ways that I didn't think was the best ways to do it. I did express myself. I don't think they needed me around. I talked about leaving a year before they said, oh, stick around for another year. And when we sold the company and I sat down with the head of the company, it was time I said to go. And they said, yes, time to go. And we didn't have severance in those days. That was a more modern day concept. But I did have my share of the value of the company, which we were selling at the time. And that was the nest egg that I used to start my company. And I was with that for 20 years. And it was time to fire myself. And the ways to do that was run for mayor. So why I did it.

So Bloomberg, the company you started that bears your name is about information. The early vision was providing information to people and that's obviously something very close to our hearts at Google. And as you said, as we were walking around with our founders, these are the days before the Internet.

It was before the Internet and It was before PCs. If you wanted to get online and share data digitally, you actually shared it in an analog sense because the computers were 300 baud acoustically coupled computers. You plug the phone set in and maybe after half an hour you could get a couple of pages of information out. So I hired an engineer guy from Dartmouth, where my girlfriend went, Ron Harris, and we designed our own PC and we built the keyboard or had a company in Coeur d', Alene, Idaho, I think built it. All the keyboard manufacturers used to be in one place. We made the PC boards, I helped solder occasionally. We bought chassis and monitors. And then when it came to installation, I would go down at night or on weekends and we'd crawl under desks installing the cabling. I'm glad Local 3 didn't catch us in those days or the fire department, but then. And the Internet, as you pointed out, didn't exist then. So what we did is we rented high speed lines, which I think were 9,600 baud lines in those days, out to the major cities and then rented some space in each city where we had lines going out at 4800 baud to the customer sites. And then of course later on along came the Internet so we could get rid of all of that. Along came the PC and we converted over to that and we basically got out of the hardware and telecommunications business. And that let us focus on what was unique about the company. People always called us a technology company and I never thought that was really a good description. It was gathering information and categorizing the information and giving people software that they could turn that information into useful tools in their decision making. So analytics as well as search and that kind of stuff. But that was what was unique about Bloomberg. But people always talked about it in context of hardware and communications.

It's an incredible story and it's been an incredible business. So Google, we give our information for free, but Bloomberg does not. Bloomberg is expensive.

It's something like Bloomberg is very inexpensive given the value added. Thank you very much.

Well, I'm getting there. No, but something like, what's more, my.

Daughters have to eat.

So something like $1,500 per person per month. And in a famous story, head of well known money management firm offered his employees $15,000 cash if they'd give up their Bloombergs. And 11 of the 12 said no right away and the 12th I think said no like a week later. Which is the best test you could have of the value of that information. What do you think makes that information so valuable to your customers? And why do you think that has continued through what is, you know, a 20 plus year rise of a company?

Well, it's all public information or it's proprietary to the company that they share within their company. But we don't have any secrets. We don't know where stock prices are going to be next week. That's not what we're selling. We're selling information about companies or about historical prices of equities or debt securities. And the more complex the world gets in the financial world, the better our business will be because you really do need to have technology to or have software to analyze what things you own and what the risks are. I think that what we've done that's unique is we collect it. We have people all over the world collecting at local sites because it's just too hard to collect information from 5,000 miles away, particularly if it's in another language with customs and conventions and terminology that is unique to that place. We categorize the information. One of the big problems is that earnings for example has very Many different definitions around the world. And if you want to compare a company, let's say that is based in the UK versus one that's based in the US versus one that's based in Sri Lanka, earnings means three different things, and you have to be able to have ways to put them on a comparable basis. So it's that kind of stuff. There's a quality control that I think others find very difficult to do. We focus on checking data again and again and again so that you can be reasonably sure. I can't guarantee you with the, you know, trillions of pieces of information we have that everything is exactly accurate, but clearly we would have an error rate much lower than anybody else has. That's why people are willing to depend on the data. They have to depend on something, and they'll go to the place that's most reliable. And in terms of the cost, you know, if you make people more efficient, then the cost can only be viewed in that context. So we once had a customer who wanted a volume discount. And I explained to the customer that the largest collector of revenue in the world has a volume premium and that they were lucky I didn't institute that. That happens to be the irs. For those that didn't figure it out.

So a lot's been written about the culture of Bloomberg. And as I've walked around the New York office, your headquarters looks a little like Google, or maybe we look a little like you do since we came later. But open office space, which I know you've brought to the City hall and your mayor's work, lots of free food. We didn't invent it, but we have it too. What do you think has mattered about the culture of Bloomberg? And what lessons do you think a company like this should learn?

I think it's not just the companies. I think it's the governments and everybody else. People want recognition and respect. And whether you do it by giving them free food and nice offices, whether you do it by always giving them the credit. When somebody says, why does it go along? I always make a point. When I walk into a building, I shake the hands of the security people at the door. If it wasn't for them, the rest of us wouldn't be able to go in and conduct our business. They're just as important as the head of the company. I think we have too many distinctions between people and the egalitarian concept that America was built around. I think really works. And it's at Bloomberg, I abolished all titles. There's no titles in the company on my Card. It never said anything. It just said Michael Bloomberg and address and phone number. And in those days, you didn't even have email addresses. Today, they continue with that process. Everybody knows who they work for. There is a hierarchy, actually, you have to have a hierarchy. You have to have structure. But that doesn't mean that we should have every time we introduce somebody, something that distinguishes and says that one person is more important than the other. In city government, you can't quite do that because the built into the structure is different and the requirements that use titles is different. But in the private sector, to the extent that you can include everybody in this room and around the world that works for Google, I would argue it. That's what we do at Bloomberg. To the extent that you can make people be happy and to come to work and want to be there, in the end, luck plays a very important part in how successful you are. But the harder you work and the longer you work, the luckier you're going to be. So you want people to want to come in early in the morning and want to stay late. You want people that if they want to take some time off for family obligations, that's fine, but you want them to want to come back. And I think if you take a look, you're never going to please everybody. Bloomberg has about 9,500 employees, maybe 120 offices around the world. And there'll always be somebody that isn't happy. But fundamentally, we have a very low turnover rate. And I think whenever you have intellectual content as the basis of your business, and certainly Google does, and certainly Bloomberg does, the most important asset you have are the people that leave at night and come in in the morning. And so that's where your focus should be.

That's great advice. So we're going to turn to politics. So for those of you watching from the New York office, the mayor is planning a visit to our New York headquarters.

And we love you and we want you to pay taxes in New York.

In fact, didn't you invite Sergey Brin to become a taxpayer in New York? Just a few moments?

Certainly. I certainly did. And he could. His taxes would probably help us with our budget.

He noted that his wife likes New York, but it's expensive to pay taxes in New York. But he's happy to visit and use your services for free. So in New York, you ran for mayor, 2001 widely contested election, and then you were reelected in 2005, which by all accounts was the broadest and most diverse alliance behind one person that a city like New York or any city had ever seen, obviously huge success business practices. Brought to City hall the 311 number, which I'm hoping you'll talk about and why that's worked, as I think you're about to take your 50 millionth call. How do you explain what you've done in New York and the impact it's had for the citizens of that city?

Well, I have 927 days left to go, but who's counting? I'm term limited out, so I'm not going to serve longer than that. But I do plan to serve all of those 927 days. And then when I leave, it'll be like a good vacation where somebody once said, you loved every minute of it, but you're glad to get home. And I will have had eight years of public service. I can look my daughters in the eye and say, your father devoted some of his life to making this world a better world. And my next career will be in philanthropy. I done the business thing, I've done the government thing, and I'm looking forward to spending some time focusing on public health issues and education and government policy. Those are the kinds of things, the arts a little bit. Those are the things that I want to support. I think in government. The reason our administration has been successful first and foremost is I did something that unfortunately probably is, if not unique, is rare, and that is looking at picking the best people for the job, regardless of what party affiliation they have, regardless of whether they supported me when I was running for reelection or not, regardless of one woman I remember applied for a job. She didn't get it, but not because of this. She was very proud. She was a member of the Communist Party. And I thought it would be great to have her in the administration and give the press something to write about. But she, she didn't make the cut for a variety of other reasons. But we have gone as a guy, Nat Leventhal, who had been a deputy mayor during one of my predecessor's administrations, Ed Koch's, and he ran the group that interviewed people and came up with suggestions. And I would be with a small group interview, let's say, the last three contestants for any one job. But if our administration is a success, Nat Leventhal really deserves his much credit as anybody else because we put together a team that I think, safe to say is better than any other administration has ever had. We've had virtually no scandals, we've had virtually no turnover, and it's hard to find fault with any of the agencies In New York City, you got to understand the city is a big business. It has 300,000 employees. It has a $59 billion budget. It has 8.2 million customers. We deal with life and death issues as well as things that will have impact on society going way down the road. So there's a real responsibility there. And the seven deputy mayors I have and roughly 40 commissioners, really, in every single case, I think most people would agree with me. There's never been a better. There may have been one that's as good, but there's never been a better person in that job in modern history. And I'm a big delegator in terms of a management style. If you're going to run a 247 organization, you have to do that. Anybody that tries to centralize everything through themselves or through their staff really is making a terrible mistake. But that's why lots of businesses don't work and that's why lots of governments don't work, because they do exactly that. I set the ethics. I focus on making sure that the agencies work together, focus on allocation of resources to each one. But when it comes down to the day in and day out, nuts and bolts of the organization, I want them to keep the City hall and the deputy mayors posted as to what they're going to do. If, if there's going to be something controversial, they certainly should notify them in advance so we don't get blindsided. But fundamentally, it's not going to keep them from being able to do it. My basic management philosophy is that I will ride with a manager as long as I think that manager is competent and hardworking and is making reasonable decisions based on the information they have. Doesn't mean they're the decisions that I would make, but that doesn't mean my decisions would be any better. So if you do that, I think that you will be able to do a good job, whether it's in a company or in a government. In this government in New York City, the public has recognized it and I think basically does think that we are doing a good job. When I first came into office in 2002, the city had a budget deficit partially because of 9 11, partially because of a downturn in Wall street and the economy. After the end of the Internet bubble, it really started to decline. The economy and our tax base in the middle of 2000 and long before 911 and the city got in trouble, its revenues were less than its expenses by 4, 5, 6, $6 billion depending on which year. You talked about the city's finances are expenses that you have little control over. At least unless the world comes to an end, you have little control over them. They're pretty fixed with some inflation built in. And the revenues are very variable now. No company would run its business that way. In a company, you'd try to match your revenues to expenses in government. It doesn't work that way. You can't go out of product lines in government. And in fact, the very time your revenues start to decline, the demands to provide services go up. So it exacerbates the problem that you have. When I had to make the tough choices of stopping hiring and even laying off a handful of people, of telling every agency they had to do more with less, something that is never done in government. When I had to go before the taxpayers and say, look, we're raising taxes, plain and simple. We can't have it both ways. We can't have police that are going to bring crime down and teachers that are going to improve education and firefighters, they're going to show up when you have an emergency if we don't pay them. And the mistake that the city made back in the 70s was they cut back services. Well, if we want to keep people and tax base in the city, we've got to make it a more attractive place to live and work and go to school and get medical care than anyplace else. So at that time, my popularity went from, I guess just over 50% when I got elected down to 25, 30% in one year. I closed a bunch of firehouses that we didn't need. I didn't cut back the number of firefighters, quite the contrary, I increased the number of firefighters because we'd lost a lot of 343 firefighters, but also a lot of experience on 9 11. And I had to keep the city safe. So I authorized that one agency to even get bigger. But it was not popular closing firehouses. I raised the property taxes, as I said. And in the same year, I put a smoking ban in. And I always joke, if you can do a parade going by a bunch of bars on Staten island after that, you can do anything. Anything. Today when I do a parade on Staten island going by a bar, even the people are still smoking outside. They wave the cigarettes. Yeah, I know I shouldn't. I know you should. We love you. But I've always been a believer that the public is much smarter than anybody gives them credit for. They get conflicting views. So it takes them a little while to make judgments as to who they trust and who they don't sometimes they do things based on instinct, but their instinct after a while becomes a very good instinct. And over the years the public has come to think that it's not me, it's the administration. But you know, Today you have 75, 80% depending on which group you measure at approval. And that will last only until my next smoking van, maybe. No, I think that from now on the administration will stay popular because people, even when they didn't like what we were doing, even when our approvals were down, the question is the mayor honest and does he care? Always got 75 odd percent approval rating. And if you have that, the other just will come and go with the issue or with the temper of the times. But that's the most important thing. And the city that, that I'm lucky enough to be working with because of the 300,000 people that work there and all of the management really has, I think, a bright future. We have problems, we have risks, so does everybody else. But it's a great place to live. Our population's at an all time high. We've added more people in the last half a dozen years than live in Pittsburgh. We're building public affordable housing for more people that live in Atlanta. We have more kids in our public school system than people that live in Detroit. You know, the numbers for New York are so big and so staggering. That's one of the reasons I've always thought I have the greatest job in the world. Because not only can you do something in the city, the city is a bellwether for what happens around the world, it really is a leader. If you can get things done there, then other cities try to follow and even states and countries, as they did with the smoking ban.

So it's a nice segue. One of the areas you've really led, which certainly fits your description of an area where Americans have conflicting view, is gun control. Emotions run very strongly on both sides. And you've really stepped up as a leader, not just as a mayor of New York, but nationally. Can you talk a little bit about what your views are on the Second Amendment and what you think is important for the United States going forward in this area?

Well, I've deliberately tried to pick a course where I think we can make some progress and not address issues away from that. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights gives you the right to bear arms. And if you ask me, should we have a Constitutional Convention to change any part of the Constitution, I would argue no, because you couldn't control what things we change. And I'd Rather live with a document that we have that's basically stood us in good stead rather than go and open it up where I think, unfortunately, a lot of things that protect us might be taken away. So I've not addressed the Second Amendment right to bear arms. And also we have in this country a system where every state can set their own gun laws. In New York state, I'm happy to say, say, and our administration had a little bit of say in it. The state legislature passed the toughest gun control law in the country, and it has to do with people who carry illegal or carry guns illegally. And if you get convicted of carrying a gun that you don't have a permit for, you automatically go to the slammer for three and a half to five years. You got to be careful and make sure that the district attorneys don't accept a plea for something different. A lot of these laws that get passed don't really work out the ways you would think they would. But our hope is that we will enforce this law and that that will give a disincentive to people to carry guns. The issue that I've tried to address is that there's a federal law that says you can't sell a gun to a criminal. Criminal. Somebody with a criminal record. And the NRA always says, we don't need more laws. Just enforce the ones that you have on the books, pointing to New York, and I say, I'm 100% in agreement with you. We should enforce the laws, but we have to enforce the federal laws as well as the state laws. In New York City, we've brought down the number of guns. We brought down crime rate. Murder rate is down again this year. Year, it's going up, sadly in the rest of the country, but we'll have a record year. I think, in terms of record low. If you take a look at the FBI statistics, every six months they put out a list of all cities with 100,000 population or more. This past year, 2H06, there were 244 cities in population 100,000 or more. We were the 50s, safest city out of the 214th per capita. And the 14 cities that were safer, there were a handful whose names I didn't even recognize, much less know where they were. So New York really is dramatically safer than virtually any other place. And you can see that in record tourism and in record number of kids from getting out of schools around the country, wanting to come and teach in our public school system and that sort of thing. But at the federal Level. There is this law that says gun dealers can't sell to known criminals. And yet when we arrest somebody for committing a crime, invariably they have a gun that they possess illegally. And if you trace where that gun came from, remember there's a serial number on the gun, you can trace it back, you find that 1% of the gun dealers in this country sell something like 65% of the illegal guns. And in fact In New York, 80 odd percent of the guns that we recover when we arrest somebody come from out of state. So it's a federal issue, it's directed at a very small number of gun dealers. It does not address states rights to have permits or not have permits or let you carry a gun, whatever. I did get a little bit of trouble. I thought the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my whole life. There was an editorial written in a paper which said Virginia Tech could have been prevented if they'd armed all the students. You know, you wonder who, what was going, I don't know what they were smoking when they wrote that, but it certainly wasn't, it certainly wasn't a Marlborough. What we did is we put together a coalition of 225 mayors from the east coast, the west coast, north, South, Republican, Democrat, independents, big city, small city. And with the one objective of getting together to change a law in Congress which for the last three years has prevented gun police from sharing data about this trace data as where guns came from, who sold them. It's an outrage. It protects criminals. It doesn't hurt anybody's right to bear arms or become a hunter or whatever else you want to do. This just plain and simple in a post 911 world is a law that says police officers can't share information. And the NRA says oh that's not true. They can under this circumstances, that circumstance. But the bottom line is I'm right. They can't share information in a usable sense. And my hope is that we can convince Congress to not include this as a rider on the appropriation bill. See, it's something that would never stand the light of day in Congress. Nobody would ever vote for it. It's so clearly pro criminal. But as a rider on appropriation bill, what Congress says is, oh, I didn't know, I didn't vote for that. I voted for monies for your schools, monies for the elderly, monies for anything that tears your heart, pulls your heartstrings. And it just so happens that that was there and I couldn't keep it from being part of it. Well, I've said to the leadership, this is not a Republican or Democratic issue. It's not a Senate or House thing. It's both, both. And you've got to keep this amendment off the appropriations bill this year. I've lobbied Nancy Pelosi, who comes from San Francisco and very powerful on the House side. Barbara Mikulski, the senator from Maryland, where I went to school, and somebody that I've supported over the years. She happens to head a subcommittee that could keep it off the Senate version. But Congress works in strange ways. Neither bill can have it on it and they can go into conference and out it comes with that there. So that's what we've got to protect. And we've not been reticent about expressing our views. We've given speeches, we've had conferences. We even made a TV ad where the chief of police of a small town in Minnesota talks about how it has inhibited his ability to do his job. And we ran it in the districts of, on television of a couple of the people who support this amendment. That was fascinating. The guy who's the author of the amendment called me up screaming, you know, how dare you. And what would you do if they ran ads against you on television in New York? I pointed out to him, I have the police, the fire, the teachers, all do the same thing against me. So why not? Welcome to the real world. But anyways, it really is a very big thing. I do not happen to personally think that you should be allowed to get carry even legal guns in big cities like New York City. I guess I don't have a problem if you carry them in an urban area. Although crime is a problem for not just cities. It's a crime for suburban and urban areas throughout this country. There are roughly the same number of people that get murdered with illegal guns every day in our country as were killed at Virginia Tech. And if you think about the press and the focus on the tragedy of Virginia Tech, and you say, wait a second, there's one every day in America. And Virginia Tech got the publicity, but nothing else does. There are also, if I remember the numbers, a couple of people that get killed accidentally with guns every day in this country. And there are about 46 people, I think it is, that commit suicide with guns every day. So about 80 people, people that die from a gun, not all illegal guns, but 80 people that die from guns every day. That's a 9, 11amonth. And nobody seems to try to want to do anything about it.

So I'm going to ask you one Last question and then open it up to questions from our audience. So I'm not going to ask you if you're running for president. You just clearly said you're going to stay through the end of New York. You're on the COVID of Time this morning. So if you were going to announce it, you might have done it. But I'll ask you this instead. If someone like you.

And you promise you won't tell anybody.

Exactly. Tell me. I won't tell you. Let's say someone like you were to enter the 2008 race, someone who would likely run as an independent, had the ability to self finance. Have you made their records?

Have you been talking to Nancy Reagan?

Or if someone like you were to enter. I think we're all curious. When do you think that decision would be made? What do you think that person might learn from the Perot candidacy and what kind of impact do you, you think it would have on the 2008 race, our hypothetical candidate, not you, who was Ross Perot again? Exactly.

Look, I'm not a candidate for president. We have 10 Republicans and 10 Democrats. Last time they had these debates, which I find fascinating because they have absolutely nothing to do with the job and the qualifications. And they don't tell you anything about whether or not any of those candidates would be good or bad presidents. What they really spend, say is did they memorize their notes of what to say if and whether their staff was able to anticipate. And you know, it's, it is sad if you look at both. In both debates, they pandered what I would argue the same ways. But let me talk about the country because it's whoever out of those 20 becomes president of the United States has to do something about a country that I think is really in trouble. We are in trouble. Overseas there's obviously unpopular war, but a war that has no easy answers. The people at Sale it just automatically pull troops out. I don't think have really looked at the consequences of destabilizing the world and the genocide that may or may not occur, depending on who you believe. We ask our young men and women overseas while we're sitting here, here they are fighting and dying for us. I'll tell you a great story. I gave a commencement speech at Bard College in upstate New York, which is a very, very liberal college. They think Trotsky was a capitalist. And about a third of them had signs on the back of their gowns troops out of Iraq. And during my commencement speech, I said it was Memorial Day weekend. I said, you know, I'm not unmindful of seeing the signs, but just remember that young men and women are overseas fighting and dying and have been for 235 years. So that you have the right to protest, which you don't have in many other places anyways. There's the war, there is our relationships around the world. Our reputation has been hurt very badly in the last few years. We've had a go it alone mentality in a world where. Where because of communications and transportation you should be going exactly in the other direction. There's no one country that can stand on its own anymore. We're so interconnected through trade and everything else the country. I don't know that we've fulfilled our responsibilities to stop genocide and protect freedom elsewheres around the world. We have an immigration policy at the border, just people coming in here which dissuades people from coming here. And there's an outgrowth of 9, 11. We aren't trying to get, attract and keep the people that we really need to take this country forward. We have an anti immigration policy that is a disgrace. This country needs half a million immigrants every year if we're going to have a future. We need doctors and lawyers and Indian chiefs. We need people who are going to contribute sweat capital and intellectual capital. We need people from every country around the world. That's always been the great strength of America and we need to do that and we need to recognize that we're not going to deport 12 million people who are already here. Let's get serious. We don't have an army big enough to do that. It would be devastating to our economy. It would be the biggest mass deportation of people in the history of the world and something America should not even joke about, much less seriously contemplate. Hopefully Congress will do something about that. We have domestic problems. Who's going to pay for your Social Security? Who's going to pay for health care? I'm giving a speech tomorrow on paralysis in Washington brought about bipartisanship. And one of the things I point out, we all talk about health care and it's one of these issues that I'm sure the debates, which I haven't seen either Republican or Democratic debates. But healthcare has got to be one of the issues. Everybody is in favor of healthcare. Nobody wants to address the fact that we spend 50% more on healthcare in this country than they do in Western Europe, yet our life expectancy is about four years lower. Nobody wants to address the fact that there are 16% of our population that doesn't have Health care doesn't have insurance, but some of them do get health care, particularly in New York, where our public hospitals will treat anybody. In our public hospitals in New York City, we've sunk an enormous amount of money in, in the last five years. And they get rated, they get accredited at the same level that our great teaching hospitals do. So you really do get great care in New York City. The people, interestingly enough, who don't have insurance seem to have a life expectancy of no worse than the people that do have insurance. So maybe we're not looking at the right thing. Maybe we're not looking at the quality of healthcare. One of the mistakes we make is we don't focus on preventive healthcare. We focus on reactive kinds of healthcare. After you get sick, then we're willing to do something and we have the best technology and the best healthcare in the world after you get sick. In Europe, you could die before you get your open heart spread surgery if you need it. But the likelihood of you needing open heart surgery is a lot less in Europe because they work on preventive things, trying to focus on smoking and diet and exercise and regular checkups and those kinds of things. So, you know, you can go down public education. You want to fix the societal problems that we have by doing one thing, improve public education. That, that will go more towards ameliorating or eliminating most of our problems. And yet I don't hear anybody standing up at a national level. In all fairness to Bush, no Child Left behind starts to try to do it. It's not the perfect law and it can be improved, but at least you've got to give the President credit for trying to focus on that. But nevertheless, I don't see anybody being willing to stand up and say we have to put accountability into schools and we have to pay our teachers a fair rate. But we also have to demand that they do teach and that the students learn or that they suffer the consequences that you would suffer in the private sector if you didn't do the job that you were hired to do. We have crime, street crime. As I said before, it's going down in New York, but it's going up in the rest of the country. You have a much greater chance of being killed on the streets of our city than from street street crime than you do from terrorism. And yet every press conference is, they all beat their chests and say, I can protect this country better from terrorists. Well, what about protecting them out in the streets every day there is, it's scary in this country. It's probably because of our bad education system. But the percentage of people that believe in creationalism is really scary for. For a country that's going to have to compete in a world where science and medicine require a better understanding. And you as a citizen are going to have to make more informed choices. You're going to have more choice, and the consequences of those choices are going to be better. So I think the country is in trouble. I think it's there. I don't think you can blame either party. I don't think you can blame 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue or Congress. Congress. I think they've all done this together. There is a partisanship that friends of mine who have been in government for a long time say is much worse than it used to be. I'm not sure that my mother always says the good old days weren't the good old days. But there is some evidence that because you have a roughly even divide in this country, both parties are unwilling to run any risks and to provide leadership. Now, I've always been a believer the reason our administration has been successful is we've been willing to take on some of those controversial issues. To me, leadership is leading from the front, not the back. The way I think government works is people elect the executive to do what they think is right. And you don't have a litmus test of where you stand on this, that or the other issue. You want somebody that's smart and hardworking and honest and creative and can be a leader. And if we don't do that, then we're in trouble. You know, America has come up with great leaders over throughout history. Sometimes it's taken a crisis to get there. My only focus is for the next 927 days to make sure that New York has it. And I'll do the best I can. I won't make all the right decisions. I'm trying to institute a whole series. We have 127 ideas on how to improve the environment that we live in.

It does.

We'll do our part for stopping global warming or at least slowing it down. But the main thing I've got to worry about is the air that our children are breathing today. We have places in our city where kids go to the hospital with asthma attacks at four times the national average. I've got to do something to get the trucks that drive through their neighborhoods off the streets. So we have a variety of schemes. One is to barge our solid waste out of the city or take it on a rail rather than truck. One is to which we're fighting a battle. Hopefully I can get the state legislature to go along with charging a fee. A congestion pricing fee is what it's called. And they do it in London and Singapore to encourage or dissuade people from bringing their cars into Manhattan where the density is so high, and at the same time use the fees to improve mass transit. I tried to take the subway every day to work, partially to set an example for people, but also it happens to be the best way to get to work. So do you take your subway here?

We have Google shuttles, buses you can.

Wireless, and one of your founders bicycled here today deserves a lot of credit. Absolutely.

So we've got to keep the mayor on time, but we'll take just a couple of questions from the audience. So the first couple people who can get to the mics will take your questions. Probably just probably two or three. So go ahead. You're first.

Hi, thanks for joining us here in Mountain View.

Thank you for having me.

I'm actually a recent transplant from NE York, and before I joined Google, I was working at the New York City Department of Education with Joel Klein. And when I started, you had just taken control of the department and gone through the process of sort of dismantling the existing school structure from districts into regions. And now there is this plan to break out the regions into a different formation. And one of the tensions that was always sort of felt at the Department of Ed is this question of stabilizing such a large school school system and pushing it forward. I suspect that's something that you encounter not just in education, but anything else. So could you comment on how you see the tensions between, you know, really pushing for big changes on the scale that's necessary for a department like New City and sort of stabilizing a million school children and all the different groups that have interests.

Let me jump to the end the results because then you can question whether we could have done it better, but at least you know whether we did it okay. Our graduation rates for high school students in four years is up roughly 20% in the last four years. The math scores and reading scores are up roughly the same amount. The gap between how black and Latino kids test and white and Asian kids test has started to close, closed quite dramatically. As a matter of fact, the math scores that just came out last week or the week before showed black and Latino kids improving at double the rate of white and Asian kids. And we've always had this two tiered system which is intolerable in our country. And if you want to fix society, you've got to focus on that. So I think the crime is down in the schools. We had 70,000 applicants for 5,000 teaching jobs last year. When I came into office, we couldn't fill the 12,000 people that were leaving positions every year. So we're probably doing okay. When I came in, you had this enormous bureaucracy that didn't exist for the kids. The whole system was focused on. They used the kids as a prop. You'd never do a press conference without having your obligatory kid brought in from central casting. And as a matter of fact, if they're young, you can hold. But what I had to do is the headquarters of the Department of Education Board of Education was across the river in Brooklyn, a building infamously known as 110 Livingston street through Joel Klein, our chancellor, we called up, we took the 32 managers, told them they each could bring a couple of people. We brought them across the river and then sold the building. And so, you know, you may try to put it back after I go, but that building is not apartments or being converted into apartments. And I put them into a building that's right next to City hall and did the same thing, open plan, including the chancellor, who sits at a cubicle just like I do. And I think that has encouraged more communications and more teamwork and less fighting. Why at the beginning, go and get rid of some of the bureaucracy and then you can argue putting it back? I don't think we've done that. I think what we've done is we've gotten rid of that bureaucracy. We put a few hundred million dollars more into the classroom by having a lot fewer bureaucrats. And the school system today is fundamentally different than it was when we took it over through the leadership academy. We've probably replaced half of the principals, so you have much better management. And it would be great if you had a system, principals and teachers at every school where they could tailor the educational process to. To the constituency that they have to work with to their students. Some places that's not possible. You don't have the management of the teachers. Some places just such a challenge that nobody can do it yet. Maybe someday we'll get there. But we've tried to address issues. This year, coming September, for the first time, all schools will get roughly the same amount per capita in their budgets. We always had the wealthy schools kept getting wealthier because they got more money per capita than the poor schools. Why? Because in the wealthy neighborhoods, they know how to address the government and demand something and hold the elected officials feet to the fire and say, if you don't give it to us, we're not going to support you. Poor communities don't know how to do that. So, you know, we always are. Moving government is different than business. In government, you move resources from things that work to things that don't. In business, you move them to things that don't touch things that do. And it's because of exactly that phenomenon. So we're going in the direction of letting the principal and teachers run their own school with their own budget. The principal can decide do I want more teachers or more test tubes and books or whatever and try to get at that level. Not every teacher, not every principal, because not all of them are capable of doing it. And as I say, there are some schools that have small special needs and the kids that, you know, we have a system that's so big that every problem imaginable in the world. The parents of our school children speak 170 different languages. And while no Child Left behind requires you to have books in every one of those languages, some of those languages don't have a written language. So what you do, I don't know. But it is going in the right direction. And I think if we can keep that going for the next two, two or three years until I'm out of office, hopefully the public will say, I like good schools. And the mayor has shown that you can do it. And I hope my successor will be a better mayor than I am and take things to an even greater level. That would be the most, the greatest compliment that we could have. And I'm going to live in the city for the rest of my life. So I want that to happen. Thank you.

Next question.

You've made affordable housing a priority for.

Your administration, but most of your initiatives.

Have been for outside of Manhattan housing outside Manhattan.

And do you think that middle and.

Lower income New Yorkers should be able.

To live in Manhattan? And if so, why haven't you supported programs in the legislature like Mitchell AMA Bills?

Let me come back to Michellama because it's a separate thing. But keep in mind, we have done a lot in Manhattan. It's just Manhattan doesn't have the open land. If you're going to build new sports spaces, you've got to find land. And one of the things in our environmental plan is to clean up brownfields. New York is fundamentally different than other cities. There's no vacant land, there are no abandoned buildings. So you have to be really creative in finding where to do it. So if you want to go and Take down some buildings and build a skyscraper. We'll give you the zoning permission to do it, but you've got to agree to include some low income and affordable housing and a whole balance, a whole smorgasbord of different alternatives for people to live together. And one of the things that's different about New York City than other cities is you can in one block see all different kinds of housing for all different economic levels. It's not structured the way other cities are where there's this kind of neighborhood and that kind of neighborhood. Even ethnicities mix much more than you would have thought or that they used to in New York City. In terms of Michelle Lama, that's a housing program where developers were given a program where they got, they got a tax break in return for freezing rents or agreeing to a moderate increase in rents for the next 30 years. The 30 years has come up and we made a deal. So we're going to have to live with that deal. But we have a follow on program which is encouraging a lot of them and I think most will take a similar deal going forward. Remember, the tenants in Michelama want to buy their apartments. They're fundamentally not on the side you would think they are. It's. Some activists are. But the people that live in Mitchell Lama houses, they would make a fortune on buying their apartment in a day and age where we don't have enough housing. So it's a balance. We want to make sure there's housing for people that built the city. We also want to make sure there's money for, for Google millionaires who are going to pay a lot of taxes. That's our tax base. That's where the money comes from. So it's that balancing act. And you'd be shocked if you'd come back to New York now. Neighborhoods that you'd never heard of or would never think of living today are hot neighborhoods. My Spanish instructor, who I take a lesson from every day, I'll never learn to speak Spanish, but I'm working at it. He moved from Astoria into the Upper east east side because he couldn't afford the rents in Astoria anymore. I live in the low rent district. Yes, sir.

You mentioned the problems of polarization in Washington. I was curious what your thoughts were on the Unity 08 movement which looks to bring back the moderate voice and constructive political dialogue back to America.

Well, I'm not going to get involved in analyzing the political landscape, but let me just say this. I think it's an interesting idea and I think it exists because there are People that are not satisfied with the way the two party system is facing the country's issues. Whether people really want a third party or another alternative. You know, somebody else is much better qualified than I to gameplay that. But I think that is just a symbol of frustration that they, a lot of people think the country is not going in the right direction. Let me also caution you that there are no simple problems, simple answers to complex problems. If they were, we probably would have solved them. And what you think is right, somebody else thinks is wrong. So in a democracy, achieving unanimity is not exactly doing what you think should be done. Quite the contrary. You won't get 100% of what you want if it's a real democracy, unless you happen to be that one person at the top of the bell cur curve. So.

Yes, sir, so sorry, with apologies, we're getting the big we must end note. We're going to give you the honor of the last question, so make it a good one.

All right, thank you very much. So I'm a member of the Google Earth team, and as such, we often find ourselves engaged in the debate about public access to information. And I noticed that you recently weighed in against Assemblyman Gianarris. I was just wondering if you could expand a little bit on your thoughts about, about the balance between public access to information and the government's need to at times limit access to information.

Well, Ginoris, I had a discussion with about Con Ed, not about anything else, but let me just say this. I think those people that say that our right to privacy is being eroded happen to be right. But that's the price you pay for the advantage of having access to information you really can't have. We can structure some things to have it both ways. We can put limitations, but we live in a world where we want the great benefits of technology and free information flow. And that is something different than what we had before. And so, you know, I think society votes with its feet every day to go in the direction of having more information available to more people. I don't think the government should be in your bedroom or in your bathroom. On the other hand, we do have a legitimate interest in making sure that we can stop terrorism in this country. And that's a very fine line. We want our police to both protect us, protect our civil rights, but also keep crime down and find out where the bad guys are. We have a law that says your cell phone is going to constantly report where you are. Most people don't understand that. But if you get sick and we have to call 91 1. We want to know where to send the ambulance. Society has made that decision. And the legislatures have voted to take away your right to privacy, arguably of not having anybody know where you are in return for. We have security cameras in every store, every office building, every apartment building. The traffic departments have them so that they can tell you where the traffic is. The police have them so they can. In some cities, they have cameras that are activated by the noise of gunfire. I mean, we're using technology to try to make our lives better and safer. But at the same time, there's no question that more people can see what you're doing. And that's a struggle that I think is a very healthy one. It should be fought out in the courts. It should be fought out in the public arena. But the basic direction that we're going in is clearly more information available to more people, because we like the benefits of having that available. And if you look from Google at my backyard and see me sunning myself, you know, never occurred to me you might be looking, but I guess I've got to get used to that. You know, Schwarzenegger without a top on would probably be more interesting. But nevertheless, anyways, that's. You know, this is clearly a societal problem. You're in the information business, my company's in the information business. But we shouldn't forget that our right to privacy is one of the fundamental rights that we have in this country. And how we protect that at the same time, doing the others is something we should do with great care. Thank you.

So thanks to everyone for joining us today. And please join me in thanking the mayor for his time with us.

Thank you.

That was fantastic.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you, everybody.

I think you have an availability for the press for a few minutes, and then we're going to do a little demo.

Sam.