sunday, and 12 a.m. on monday. you can also watch afterwards online, go to booktv.org and click on "after words" in the book tv series and topics list on the upper right side of the page. .. >> 15 years ago a couple of grad

students at stanford set up shop in a dorm room, and set something up they called page rank, and one of them was called larry page, pun intended, i believe, and the other one was sergei brin, and their story is now the stuff of legend. they pretty much upended their portal. they showed the world that search was something important. and they had this dream of making all the world's information accessible, and they are continuing on that path, and the path that you have laid out in an incredibly well documented book has at times been a tough one. and gets tougher. as their dreams sort of hit against i think some of the realities of the world. >> the company's, not the book. >> the book is actually -- it's one of these things where i'm so interested in it, it's hard for

me to tell for sure if everyone would be. i thought it a great, fascinating read and learned some things about the company. you have been covering the valley and technology for a while. why did you pick google as the focus of your book? >> i came across google when it was early in it's history and just starting to get noticed around the world, really, as a much more effective way to find things though internet. people thought the search was pure, and it was as good as it was going to get. then google came along and it was something to good that is was different, and it was transformative. not only could you find what you wanted, but it opened up new frontiers so peoplening -- people can start things knowing they could be found, and i was excited about it, and just --

when new things start out, i want to know, is this going to be something which is a nice development or something where i really have to know, do people behind this company -- they're going to matter, they're going to make a difference in our lives. so, i went down to the googleplex, as it was then, which was the first bigger building they moved into. i knew the public relations person. she was from apple computer. i said, cindy, i want to meet these guys. it was october of 1999. and as it happens, it was google's celebration of halloween, and larry was dress like a viking in a big fur vest, and had a hat with big horns coming out of it, and sir sergei

was dress like a cow. and there was something about them which was compelling, and i thought, it grew to an important company, and then had its ipo, and turned out to be an incredibly successful business. i thought this could be worth a book. at that time there were a couple books going, and i let them go and i went to something else. but i felt there was something about this company which was not only different in what it gave us but different on its own terms. it really hit home for me. in the summer of 2007, when i was invited to go along with some young google managers -- they have a problem for associate product manage managers, who are the future leaders of google.

and every summer marissa mayer takes these young leaders, these product managers, to visit google offices around the world, and i was invited to go along on the triple literally went around to world to tokyo, beijing, and tel aviv i spent 24-7 with those people, and inside the company it was much more interesting thon i thought. it was not just all those things i said before. there was a cultural movement going on there these people were steeped in the future in a way that the predecessors in the business hadn't been, and i got a sense of what their values were, and i learned they were really directly channeled from sergei, and larry page, and i thought wouldn't it be amazing to tell the story of google from

the inside to get that experience i had with this group of 18 engineers with the company of 20,000 people as it was then. and i thought, if i could write that book, that could be something. >> host: well, you certainly did get inside, and i wondered a couple of things. and we're going to get on to what you saw inside. how long did it take you to do this, and how much access were you given to going until the process? >> guest: i started the book as a pretty intense matter in june 2008. so almost three years. and i asked for a lot of access. basically most important thing was to be able to talk to anyone i wanted to talk to. and i wanted to sit in on a number of meetings. a lot of things go on there but it was talking and talking

again. i wanted to talk to the people at google. not injures larry and sergei. there were a number of people that were influential in the company, and sometimes they were just wonderfully change, and these were the people i wanted to spend time with and not just once but sometimes multiple times, and time of "wired," the same month i began serious work on this book, i began working at "wired." i left ""newsweek"" and shifted to "wired." and it was a terrific experience at the same time was able to sometimes spin off articles with googles permission, because basically everything i did inside of google was for the book unless we had mutual

consent otherwise. and that would help. >> host: can i just interrupt. didn't they ask you, why not release little chapters at a time. >> guest: it's a company that takes books very seriously as a corpus of information, but the two founders aren't really book people, in terms of their own preferences there, and from sergei said has to me, i thought, doesn't have the same seriousness. and sometimes working on a "wired" article we would respond more time with me at ""newsweek"" he was more accessible. google would come out with a new product, and sergei would be on the fine to talk to you about

it. and in later years, we talk about that. larry and serge gay sergi. >> host: a couple of years they gave you access to all kinds of people. you didn't feel like they were really guarding access to you? seems like the things you talk about in the book, they do feel like you really are talking about things in a very factual way. moments, scary moments, whatever, they really gave you access. >> guest: an interesting thing health one thing didn't mention before, i had access to a number of projects at going -- at google that were not public. well in advance. one thing on the trip, they went to every office and they would explain the engineers in the

office. here's what we're up to not mountain view. and the engineers in the office, whether it was in tokyo would say, here's what we're doing here. and one of the things the engineers at mountain view talk about was this product called chrome. and that was a year away. so, they knew they could trust me to keep my mouth shut and not preannounce products there. but knowing about a lot of things that were going on at google that weren't public opened up a level of trust. people could talk to me about something which wasn't public. i think they came to feel that they could unburden and other things, and i also have to give google a lot of credit. a lot of time i would begin an interview and there would be a communications person in the room, more often than not, and sometimes they would look over at the person, you know, at karen, who is in the audience, can we say this?

and she said, be frank. be frank. go ahead. and they did. and after a certain amount of time -- i was talking to eric once, and he was asking me how it was going, before we went into our interview. and i said, it's funny. learning to play guitar. at certain point you stop looking down at where you're fingers are and you just play the music. that's the way i felt at a certain point when i was at google. i felt very much at home there. and the people i think picked up on that. when i interviewed them. and within a few minutes we were talking not so much of the distance of a journalist and a source but almost as if in some sense we were collaborators or colleagues. >> host: my experience there has largely been they have been relatively open, especially compared to apple. that's a different story. >> guest: that's a different story. >> host: let's go to sort of where the book -- the early parts of the book. one of the things you actually

make quite a point of saying is that both these guys went to montesorri schools. and that actually understanding that is key to understanding this company in terms of how they think. you have some really interesting thoughts about the kind of freedom they experienced in school. >> guest: actually, read montesorri's books to better understand them. it talked about the balance of what freedom and discipline, and it really seemed to map out a lot of the perceived philosophy of larry and sergei and what employees should be able to do. almost a liberating thing not to have to answer to authority and say what you do next. so maybe the famous 20% projects at google --

>> host: you have 20% of your time work on something you're just excited about. right? >> guest: right. sometimes people call it the 120% because they had to do all their work any and then 20% of things they want to do by themselves but that seems very much in keeping with a montesorri philosophy, and they pursue this in google, and i think it's very important for them to be free radicals inside the google system. they don't want to be pinned down to much. to me point at one time they dismissed their assistants. they had a group of young woman who were assistants. people -- they were called l. s.a., larry and sergei assistants, and larry didn't like the idea somebody could say yes to a meeting for him, and so

they dismissed them. and they were free to roam and it was some interesting effects on how google employees would have to find them. >> host: i hope that lsa as had stock. >> guest: i think they within to other places. >> host: the other thing that struck me was the development of the core ideas behind google, their ability to think out of the box, which is sort of a cliche term at this point. their ability to constantly ask, why should it be that way? for example, advertising. on every level, something at their core is saying, why it should have to be that way? >> guest: the advertising system was the first product. and it is the signal product of

the internet age in terms of making money. there's no product in the internet which has done as well as google ad words put it's even better than that. it is an advertising product that people want to see. how do we know? google tests everyone, and they find out they want to see it. they give a certain percentage -- and they do this regularly. sometimes you might go to the google search engine and see no ads. and you're part of a a test -- everytime you you google you are part of a test, which blew my mind. in this case, people search for when there's ads. therefore they're happier and they want the ads. the reason the ad are successful, even though it's an auction system, the highest bidder doesn't win. it's the bid is modulated by how useful the ad is. how much people want to see it. so they build the ad quality into the system to make it

useful to the advertiser. and that's an ideal they they managed to meet. >> host: at one point you talked about google thinks of things -- it's not just the advertiser and google. it's the person seeing the ads and this is kind of different from the way people thought.advertising before. so google wants the ads to be useful to you, and this was -- didn't it upset a lot of anymore the traditional advertising community some. >> guest: very much so. largely what upset them was the idea wasn't measurable. you have to measure it to know how useful the ads are, and as a result the science in googles ad system is just as sophisticated in the google search engine and

that's why they have so many statisticians and economists working on the ad site as working on the search lab. >> host: it's the death of madmen, the sort of mystery -- is my mic working? okay. it's sort of the death of mystery as you say in advertising because you can really know -- and they figured it out mathematically, you can really know whether or not an ad is useful to somebody. >> guest: i had a lot of fun talking to some of the people on the ad site. usually when you read an argue about google, you don't see anything about sales people. but to me what's fascinating, how the sales people google, and google still does need sales people, even though larry asked why do we have these people? they change their role from sitting down over dinner and negotiating something and

convincing a client to take an ad out or an agency to get a client to take an ad out, to almost being your guide into saying how how you buy these key words. went from how many people saw it to how many people clicked on it. it was all taken care of and all measurable. so, it changed that role dramatically, and some people in the ad department thought, where are we going here? we're no longer saying, we're definitely going to get this money. we have pretty good thing going here. goggle is making nice money before they switched to that system. but google took a deep breath and implemented this system and it turned out to be way more successful than anything we had seen before. >> host: didn't they gene -- is it gm who threw some of their ad people out? what's wrong with you guys?

>> guest: people thought, even before that, just the ad of seeing this these search ads, people thought, this is ridiculous. can't get involved in this. this isn't real advertising, and google had a difficult time convincing people that buying key word were appropriate advertising vehicles for a big corporation. but when they started to point out that some huge number -- 90% or some something -- of people who boy a car go online to research their purchase, then even general motors figured out, this is something we should get involved in. >> host: so these guys come in and they're very unconventional. you told a story, and they were talking about how to do transsalks in countries that didn't have credit cards, and larry page said we could take got to -- goats, and they said,

we want a grownup to come in, and this is when eric schmidt comes into the company, and he, for many years, i guess ten, was the quote -- unquote grownup in the company. how did they pick eric? >> guest: well, as you mentioned, the venture capitalists put $25 million into google in 1999, did it with the expectation that these two young men from stanford, with no experience in managing a giant company, would get what's called in the valley adult supervision, and hire an experienced manager to be the ceo. >> host: that's because you dress like a cow. >> guest: there's some interesting april fool's videos of eric. he mad fun, too. a few months after they got the

money, they called john and said we changed our mind. we think we can run this company ourselves. and john -- his first instinct was to say, i'm out of her. but he held back and said, wait a minute. just go and talk to a number of ceos. some of the companies in the valley that you respect. and i'll set up tours. they went on what i call the magical mystery tour of the best ceos, which were the jeff baezo and steve jobs and all the greats. so they came back from the tour and they said to john, you know, you're right, we like having a ceo and we know just the person who could be our ceo, steve jobs. [laughter] >> host: who was otherwise engaged. >> guest: he was a little busy. i don't know if he was going to do that. but john finally got them to look at eric. and there was a number of robes why they respected eric.

he had written a prom -- program they liked. eric also was smart enough to know that he couldn't go in there and say, i'm the adult. i'm going to run the thing. step aside. and let me make the decisions. instead, he adopted a very conscious, it seemed to me, stance of at eave point just talk about how brilliant and larry and serge gay were, and he would talk about how much he learned from larry and sergee, and eric would do the things at google that helped make it an effective corporation, but he yielded some of his autonomy. there was this troika system where on some important matters, two out of three vote, and you could say in certain respects, larry and sergii were a bloc.

eric was successful in sometimes slowing down some thing that larry and serdy i wanted to do right away. for instance, the browser. eric was very concerned about microsoft noticing how well google was doing, noticing was a good deal search was and he didn't want to moon the giant, as he said. and eric's history, microsoft was a big scary company. didn't want to take them on. he lived through the browsers world and it didn't end too well for netscape, on whose side he was rooting. larry and sergei don't worry about who is in a space that is interesting to go. they just go. they just dive in. so it was an interesting dynamic that eric was sometimes able to stave off their impulses and sometimes not.

sometimes he would say, i thought we shouldn't do that and i was wrong. a number of things like going in and bidding a lot of money to get the aol business which is important for google. >> host: seems like for many years he was able to navigate that, and perhaps in confronting microsoft, they may have been a wise decision. i wanted to ask about something in the book i did know -- not know, is that google is one of the largest computer manufacturers in the world. and when you explain i would, i'm like, of course. explain why it is google is one of the largest computer makers in the world. >> guest: i wanted to talk about the data centers at google and that's one of the biggest secrets there i was looking at a

couple ways in learning about it. one was they were getting a little more open than they used to be. not open enough to say, steve, dom a data center and explore it. but as it turned out, doing an early story for news week, i went to a data center not from from here. but there was some ex-employees who were a little more verbose about the data centers, and there were some scientifics publication that google had. so you could piece together something there, and people talk about how many computers google harks how many servers they have, and they build them themselves, and no one really knows the number. at a certain point they stop telling you. ask then they admitted 100,000. and said you can say that. probably much more. then the number stop at a

million, but google is much bigger, so no one knows how much it is. but a million is the baseline there. there's many, many -- >> host: i guess the question is, why are they building their open? why did they build their own rather than buy them from, say, dell? >> guest: it's cheap. it's cheap is the reason, and frugality is part of googles success. when you talk about millions of computers, cost is a big problem. they do an interesting thing with those computers there other companies might think, you know what? we're going to not be penny wise and pound foolish. we're going to buy the equipment that doesn't break down. google says we're going to buy the crapest and tweak it and it's built to failure.

it's easy to deal with when one of the servers goes down, we can swap it out quickly, and they found out that stands them better. and google is the most successful failure system. they built in a redundancy in their software system and it's built to handle failure successfully. and you can argue they'll way they roll out products, it's the same. their system is built to happen failure in products. if you're not failing, you're not trying hard enough. >> host: for example, gmail was in beta for five years, and it was only in beta -- >> guest: i think goingle destroyed the term beta, made it meaningless. >> host: i think it's like spider-man in new york city being in previews forever. they keep doing that. >> guest: talk about failure.

yeah. >> host: exactly. artificial intelligence is also -- i think as the company got bigger and moved along, they started to realize increase leg more and more they had to be involved in artificial intelligence. in the book you mentioned something about how larry said, well, we just like to install little search engines in everyone's brain. they haven't quite done that. >> guest: it was kind of funny. every year google has these elaborate april fool's jokes, and the subject of their jokes are something they really want to make happen. they talk about these artificial intelligences and we'll do this for you and do that for you, and maybe a self-driving car would have been an appropriate april fool's joke early in googles history and now they're building them. so, you say an increasing reliance on artificial

intelligence. it was always there i went back to some of my very early interviews and they were going on at helping about artificial intelligence very, very early in their history, and as it turns out, as the search engine evolved, artificial intelligence learning became more and more a factor in that. everyone knows about page writer -- not everyone but people who associate google, they learned about the earlier days and said the search engine is fantastic because it relies on the democracy of the web. and that was a huge breakthrough and helped google rise above the crowd. as google search engine evolved, it learns from the data that people give it when they react to the search engine. so all those clicks you do when you go to a seven engine, you choose a result or you say this doesn't work, i'm going to put

in another term, this is information google uses to find out if you're happy, and google learns about the world from that. if you swap in one word for another word in your search query, google things maybe those words are similar. let me look at behavior of other people. so google learns synonyms, and google learns languages, but having a corpus of documents they have with translated text from one to another. it can learn how language works and that's how google translates works. ...

you know, the culture of what google had four long time this experimental sense and still has it, so in the years you've been covering it my question is as it has grown there are 24,000 people now. do you still feel that when you go there do you still feel some sense of this is an expert on rental place where you can see a guy dressed as a -- >> we take for granted a lot of these things and me mabey apr

fools is going to start as far as you can take it now and there's an infrastructure that google that's designed people worked for months that these things, so you can say it's clever and part of the culture but it's not so spontaneous anymore. and there's a lot of things, these become institutionalized and people get used to them it's still rather remarkable. you don't see it adopted a set of silicon valley a lot. incite silicon valley you will see even quarter in the very early days they have listed a lot of the amenities that google has even in a small start up, so in some defense is people think it's a good idea to feed your employees. they don't leave the campus during the day, and they are happy and have the employees army be less likely to be resentful employees.

>> guest: a lot of companies don't think that we but google always has. i want to switch to the culture of innovation. they bought youtube because they could not themselves -- the new video was going to be important to the web, they saw that coming but they couldn't, when they started the video they couldn't quite get on the formula and was outside the company that happened. so i guess a couple things. what is you think the was a good acquisition, number two, do you think is a sign that the company was perhaps less innovative than it had been? >> i think it is definitely a sign that google is a bigger company can operate as nimble and freely as it could when it was small, and you can see that and actually the youtube thing is a good example of that because as it turns out there is an amazing method by which you can compare the way google video

product was developed and the way youtube was developed because there was a lawsuit that came with viacom filed against google and youtube where the e-mails from both sides cannot and you can see from google's site there were all these e-mails basically what the managers of the google video spent a lot of their time doing was preparing presentations to their bosses and talking to lawyers to make sure they were going to do something to get them in trouble for the infringing continent in on the other side here were these very few people at youtube and the e-mail said who cares what's just put this stuff out. let's just go for it. and youtube became much more successful than the much better supported and certainly resource heavy and google realized this

to its credit and overpaid committee admitted the overpaid for you to become a bit at this point i think it looks like a pretty darn good purchase. youtube and i think is the premiere video franchise of the web. google doesn't say whether it is profitable, but clearly they have said that it's making sizable revenue and its players to make more. they have a very ambitious plans for it, they could have a much better impact on our lives that even the considerable impact. >> i guess the question is yes, when will let me get profit. there's more and more competition from things like , there's far more competition this far more to advantage. you mentioned this data centers

>> building those data centersrs like3 >> building those data centers like that google gets a huge savings advantage. the redesign the way the data center's work. they own a the fiber in the ground. they're probably the biggest owner of the fiber optic cables in the world, so what costs less for google to do these things than other companies and when some say they must have to spend $800 million a year just on the end with, that was wrong. google people didn't tell me exactly how much they did pay it was clear that those estimates were over the top. >> so i want to get to where a few things about where google is now, and i want to talk about china, where you bring up in the book, and china is an interesting >> we haven't yet said don't be evil witch's google's unofficial corporate model that they came up with their earlier i guess in the sort of little session the

needed to kind of come up with a model to the tuck motto. estimate he was sitting in a meeting kind of about all you as the human relations people were saying be kind and help customers and things like that why don't we just don't people and get it over with. and the person running the meeting started to say it seems sort of negative. maybe we can spin out more positively. but another engineer, almost like to tell right when he was riding of google and it caught on and it turned out to be a sort of useful way to establish in a sense of what is the right thing not only for customers, but for us here at google and for the oral of large, and they always said they wanted google to be good for the will of large

and they said sometimes we are even going to sacrifice profit to do the right thing for humanity. what a thing to say what you're asking people to invest in your company to make money on their investment. >> of course one of the early people always was like do you really want to say that because it is a difficult of all you to uphold for any profit-making enterprise ultimately you are going to run up against those conflicts. >> you hear this statement don't be evil and you watch in horror as it moves is sort of secret handshake inside of the company to something that gets out you can see that it's going to be used against the company later on. but i was surprised a lot of people even though it is a knee-jerk way to get at the google don't be evil and to point out do this and do that and they say people use it against -- >> such a profit.

>> the people i talk to even though they may not say a lot, they insisted has been a useful phrase and standard and way of thinking for them. they don't regret. >> are now china it created cuts within the company and among of the ruling where i think he wasn't so sure who came from the soviet union she's all that kind of regime was light as a child was on comfortable going into china, and they had to waive this and it sounds like what from use rather this was difficult to read everything they did from the ghetto was a difficult decision. >> i spent a lot of time on this and that china issue and went to china a couple of times. and i was fascinated to see -- i was covering that at newsweek and actually attended the famous hearing in congress where the

only holocaust survivor to serve in congress made eliot schrag representing google they asked them are you ashamed because you are going in and censoring, but they actually did a very careful analysis, and it's tough to say how much they were aware of the implications when they made the decision the constructed the sort of moral spreadsheet and in the spreadsheet there's all these numbers there and some of them were numbers that were in the red that we have to sensor but then there were numbers for more information in china. we are going to open china and the long run this compromise that we make will be overrated, overwhelmed by the good that we bring and on balance when you crank up all of the seals sheets we are in the black doing more good than harm. that's the figure would happen but it wasn't that easy.

>> i will say i was in china interviewing somebody that ended up a dissident who ended up in prison, and he actually said to me personally he was happy the american companies were there so it definitely is the issue whether to be in china or not. i don't think it is a straightforward issue but ultimately they have pretty much pulled back. what was it -- i gather there was a big breach -- what was it of the security breach that occurred that made them finally say forget it we're just going to be in hong kong we are not playing the game anymore. >> to understand what happened in the security breach you have to look back at all the things that happened before. as it turned out, the experience of google and china have been sufficiently troublesome. they had a lot of people who signed onto the spreadsheet idea that it's going to do more good than harm and had come to the conclusion that it isn't working and we should think about

changing our mind on this, and there was a significant number of people in the executive suites of google i guess they aren't executive suites but cubicle, what ever you want to call them, who were in a low-key way sort of arguing with we should rethink this and it wasn't just him it was some other really keep people and things weren't working and there were a number of tensions from the china site there were a lot of people that were very unhappy with the support they felt they were getting from mountain view. the biggest issue and china a week interviewing people in beijing that the biggest problem along the chinese engineer had nothing to do with censorship it was that they would not allow access to the code base in order to work on the products and improve them just like the engineers in the united states and every other international office.

they couldn't get access to those, and they felt google didn't trust them and i talked to the one executive and he said that's the case. because we don't want to put them into the position where their families might be at risk for there could be some of the communist party. we don't know. and that's the way that we are going to play. and i -- i ron ackley it turned out that a security violation was what many described to me the straw that broke the camel's back. >> it was pretty bad. the access to code, and what was it about that that kept them over the edge, i'm sure there were still people that were saying stay, you are doing more good by bringing your technology here and some of the people who work with them felt that way. they felt abandoned. within china itself the public in general would say you weren't doing that well anyway so i say if you have what, 20, 25% of the

chinese search markets that huge. >> they did that overcoming a lot of obstacles there. but i did what happened was from his point of view of much worse than the very serious theft of some of google's best intellectual property, and i don't know whether google really is exactly what it is, but we know that it was pretty important was the idea that whoever broke in there and you would have to think it was the chinese government or someone supported by the government whoever broken there was targeting the e-mails on the accounts of the dissidents', chinese dissidents who were using gmail which was offshore to talk and organize protests or post on them or just to their personal business and by all accounts infuriated sergey and

his sister history surfaced and the was a terrible thing for him and for google. there was one person whose account was compromised at stanford, and google wanted to get a lot of right away to see how this thing worked and they sent the security over to pick up a lot of, but the break-in was so sophisticated that it evaporated like mission impossible, the self destruct and was gone by the time the laptop. >> there's a lot of cynicism about google's pulled within china and what it was about, and among some in the press, and i actually had discussions with many people who feel it was an economic decision and that's when google pulled of and they were looking for an excuse. >> i don't think that at all. they were making and arrangements economically. there were people who came to

believe that there was a ceiling that how successful they could be that as you say, 40% of the market is pretty good, and the other thing i think that the real loss economically for google is while the android phone system is doing well making inroads in china of the value to google is much lower because google gives the system away with the system works well with the products and the search engines, so if you are using an android phone in china and your search engine is bing that's not as good as google. >> certainly not. >> the other thing i noticed now, i'm going to be quite cynical about it although i am inclined to believe that he had strong feelings in the company had strong feelings about it but i notice i saw an article about facebook doing explorations and talking to the chinese coming in shortly thereafter i saw i intuitively get a feeling it was

going to happen to somebody from google saying we were out of china, and -- >> dear very emphatic say they are not out. they are still engineers, some of their products like mabus are still doing okay. but i think to be the search is part of google. and huge obstacles. >> to the impression i wanted to ask now as we move forward the company is facing increasing competition is from facebook, and it's had -- this is where the beauty of google has been in this extraordinary engineering and intelligence, and facebook comes along which is much more -- it's about engineering and intelligence but it's much more social and much more jird towards things i don't -- i wonder are sergey and very good at this. the had the opportunity early on to really get into the social

space or they really didn't take it. is that saying something going forward about a real trouble area for the company moving forward? can larry now taking charges he's really grown up, can he really do it? can he move them through this period and compete with facebook? >> it's interesting. people talk about this thing as if the people in facebook our touchy-feely kind of people. the engineers to back. >> they seem to have a -- it's sort of like -- >> there might be a generational thing because certainly you think about it mark zuckerburg it's a full generation younker. they talk as young men that they are men in their late 30s now or getting towards 40 and they are not there yet and there certainly of ceo age, larry is,

but i think the question is really, you know, whether google can successfully integrate those and into its core. i think they understand how important it is and in their previous earlier efforts like orchid they didn't treat that with the same priority certainly as we are treating it now, but you saw as facebook became more and more successful, facebook i guess the joint, now deutsch will house its attention focused very keenly on this area. and google has assets to bring to bear. they know a lot about the people who use it. they know a lot about your context. we saw a product called plus one that's going to try to figure out who you know that will search for something and you will see one of the folks in

your social circle likes one of the results that came up in the search page. so there's things to bear. so i think google is committed now and leary is committed to this project here. so, -- >> i think the other company that in some ways to be a threat to them is apple which is of any company the smartness about how users use things to do i went to a party one time trying and iphone for the android and somebody looked at me and said it's kind of like bringing someone from google and someone from apple to a party. the iphone is better at parties. it's kind of this much more user-friendly device and so this is android however is doing incredibly well. i wonder will that change now that you can get a verizon iphone and how well they are equipped to kind of move forward and be a little bit more savvy about how they deal with the public. they've never been good for a sample when you rolled up in

excess and nobody can call up and say my phone isn't working and larry was a little like well let them eat cake. >> of their view of customer support has always been people can to give it out on their own, and actually at one point i tell a story where we were figuring out how many more people in customer support they should ask larry for. why do we need it at all? they figured out the store these forums where people can help each other. it's almost like leading on desert island. the figure out how to make your own house. the manual list somewhere in the mainland. the consumer product that doesn't work so well but social status the internet. google knows the internet. facebook is so well and so entrenched that they are not going away. they are not going to give up and do my space and ignore what

google does the way my space really was oblivious to how well facebook was doing. so i think at best where google will succeed is if facebook says you know what what google is doing is so important we have to sit down with them and share some information what really drives google crazy but facebook is that you have got hundreds of millions of people. sooner or later it is going to be a billion people creating information that is important to them that google can't put in the index. google can't get its customers when they say find the point. >> facebook is sort of bringing back the display advertising because they have so much information about you that they can actually target a display ad. >> that's what facebook doesn't have. facebook doesn't have that magical combination that we talked about earlier. and in their advertising. i think people would be happier

if there was no advertising on facebook. mark zuckerburg, i went to the famous session where he talked about how advertisers he said what we are going to give you is a chance to put yourself in the conversation between the users. and between friends. when i talk to my friends i don't want pepsi-cola in the conversation. [laughter] >> i think you're right. it's going to be interesting to see how all of this plays out. there is one thing before i get to the questions from the audience though that does strike me about leery as he takes the helm. he can be little arrogant perhaps. you quoted someone in the book from simon and schuster over the whole google books deal innocent arrogance, and larry said i'm trying to do good, trying to digitize the world's book. this is good, and yet i wonder if that's going to get him into

the trouble, this mission to do good without also realizing that you are going to hit up again industries that are -- it's not necessarily -- people write books and they are as valuable and as you said they don't really get it, the people have worked hard on books come in your book for example from and juneau, did you sense that about him or that it came through in the book that's what you are sensing about it. >> when you write about people like larry pages steve jobs there's a lot of writing on steve jobs and there is the good steve and that steve and there is only one steve and you can't tease them out. the aspect of the personality that may not be the greatest are probably some of the reasons why he's the greatest of the ceo and i think the same with larry. some of the -- i would say less arrogance and blinders to the effect of what he does

shortfall. so he knows it is a value to the world to have this information anyone can search and that's important and so he's so focused on that the media and the evil action since he can get the concerns of authors but when he sees them going up there and come planning and that sort of the way he sees it he doesn't have much patience for it and when he talks about the people who talk about privacy, google was very concerned about privacy, but a lot of people what google don't think much of privacy advocates. and they think that those people are out playing some angle or something like that and that enables google to charge forward and get things done, but it's not going to help them to act much when they are fighting antitrust charges were justifying what they do in a regulatory or a legal sense. >> that's what -- as we move

forward there is going to be more of that as they get bigger and bigger so let's take some questions. the first one certainly a good question here, how will google change after eric leaves. basically this week's -- >> larry sorted besio not on april 4th which is the date january 20 of which is announced immediately after that. i think larry sort of jumped in and started rethinking the way google's is managed and stepped things up in certain areas and started rethinking how google can reclaim its nimble and we think periodically people do that. but in another sense, i think that things won't change so much and that larry's values are always the values that drove google and his love of speed and

skill and ambition and artificial intelligence, so in that sense i think maybe google would be more of what it is commendable and down on google. >> i did read this memo that he sent out he talked about when people are in meetings they shouldn't be tied into their computers or anything and it reminded me that early on the famous story about barry diller coming to see larry page and the entire time he was on his blackberry like this. >> i thought there was interesting. because at one place they felt -- >> that was one of the glories of the google meetings is the idea that people could -- do their work and attend the meetings and focus on just the right time and so now and answer the e-mail that everyone has to deal with. >> comment on eric schmidt's position on apple board in conflict with android development. a lot to comment on that one. estimate it was interesting.

i was interviewing him right around that period at a time when google was developing android the representative would have to leave the room and the board meeting when that happened , and i explore the relationship to some degree because something went terribly wrong that steve jobs came to feel she had been betrayed that android was and what he thought it was going to be and what he envisioned it once as a great pair marching off to rule the digital world because he felt the companies were in title the complimentary wasn't to be and he even said to his employees at one point he said we aren't doing a search engine why are they doing the phone, and eric

would always tell me we have it all figured out. i leave the room and we are competitors in some ways frenemies is the dillinger loverly it happens all the time, but clearly there was more bling on beneath the surface. to the point where that relationship could fracture and. >> i mean, you know, steve jobs was actually kind of mentoring them when they were young girl and they wanted him as ceo. >> he would walz with sergey and steve jobs' is respected super highly at google. some of their -- the younger managers and project managers to the keynote to learn how it's done. so despite all this, you know, you won't find anyone who doesn't have my ear steve jobs

and a lot of people wish that some of that could find its way to google. >> was shot to the most about google if anything? did anything shocking? >> one thing is we talked about the free management style. i was not shocked bit surprised that a number of internal systems and they have whereby people have to report their goal on a quarterly basis and there is a big product, so for the company which cherishes a bottom-up style, there's a lot of paperwork that they have to do and it's funny that the google style but i find that kind of interesting the biggest one is that it's called okr that john door introduced its originally thought of bye india

intel but takes it beyond the way it ever was anywhere else and everyone has these which are these goals they have for the next quarter, for the next year, some decisions of the goals, the whole company and everyone shares those. you can go on the internal web site and see everyone else and they give you a number and leader you will report how well you did, what percentage you did, what number, and out of ten if you do ten that's not too great because it shows you were not ambitious enough. ..

>> well, we touch on a couple of them. i think that myopia in terms of their effect on the world there are i think is definitely something that does not serve google well. i think just its size. google likes to think of itself is as david but there is a lot of goliath with the company. >> and i think, and made the rumor is that there might be a justice department investigation into it, to which i should add and you mentioned this in the book, that steve ballmer the ceo of microsoft hates google and has done everything in his power to sort of put out there that it

is a monopoly. >> i find it so ironic. [laughter] [applause] >> i covered microsoft with bill gates, and i had some amazing conversations with bill gates, and i would say at that point i would have said, this is something to bill gates would not wish on his worst enemy. i take that back. [laughter] >> but i think it was deemed omar was the one coming over couple reported scenes in there. >> we can't repeat what happened. >> yeah, on tv but i do know when i was at microsoft several years ago, and i saw steve ballmer and this was before google had gotten really big. he said google is an iso- company. i'm like, what you mean? we used to be a nice little company and suddenly we were monopoly. this is what he said to me so

clearly i would remember that because as i watch them move forward. how do you see google's recent multi-million dollar pass to retain employees affecting morale? >> that is a great question. there have been reports to keep some of its key talent, google is giving remarkably huge sums of money. certainly, there is a huge competition now for the most talented people. google has very talented people and they turn out to be good employees for other companies. and i think it could be a big problem. people come into google, especially the past two years, they don't get their financial gain that there early google ears had. you are at google and in the earlier days, especially couple

of years before that, you were at a given financial level than even someone who got a very nice package coming in a couple of years ago. and google is doing its best to try to retain people but the big difficulty really is and how much money you can give to someone. it really is a challenge. google selects people who are likely to get fed up with the bureaucracy, so the people, the exact kinds of people they look for are the kinds of people who when a company gets too big or a great opportunity to starting a start a new company comes up, says i am out of here. i can tell you how many people who leave google say it is a great company. has been a great experience. i love the company. see you later. >> and in the book you talk about a few key people who left who went on to found double foursquare because they couldn't get things done within the

bureaucracy of google and that being a problem that doesn't affect how people are feeling there? to people still feel like hey i met google? >> i think people, the employees most of them really like being there. there are some, a lot of people i talk to, some people who came in a couple of years ago, young engineer who would come in and find himself or herself working at some ad product. it may not be the most innovative thing they're they are doing and google has to do this. i talked to one of the top executives in june in a -- engineering and he said this is a very difficult thing for us. we have to have people manning these portals. these people have to do these things to keep the core of google going and i have to help -- tell people you are doing this but you would rather be you know programming a self driving car or something like that. >> yes, the self driving car. as i said earlier i wished i was

on the road with self driving cars tonight because traffic was so terrible getting here but as they move forward that is sort of the interest is to do the self driving car and probably a place where you know the innovation does continue with projects like that. >> i found it very encouraging the projects like that. a lot of people say still driving a car? what does that have to do with a search? they think it is an example of crazy google. i actually think the eponymous car is well in keeping with what google is. it is an information processing device. it gathers information about the world around it. it draws information, as google index card knows google maps all of these things, right? and its artificial intelligence and very much in keeping with a lot of google there are so i think more and more google

interprets its mission very very broadly but those core elements are very much in keeping. >> what is google's biggest threat? >> well, in the short-term i would say it is the social thing and facebook. in the long-term really it is, it's how much success is great success in this area of search and ads stops it from dominating the next thing, the innovator's dilemma. you could say they had many leaps to overcome that in the mobile room. that could've been a huge, huge problem for google and at a certain point in the not terribly distant future there will be more searches made on mobile devices then there will be on laptops or desktops. if google wasn't place very well in the mobile world that would have been a giant problem for them. they managed to get over that

little shift their. it was a pretty big shift but not as big as some other ships that are yet to come. like chris said it is very difficult for a company that is invested in one area to dominate in the next revolution. essence that is what is happening with facebook but i think down the road there are going to be bigger revolutions that google will be even more challenged to succeed in. >> as we watch what is happening with microsoft, they have had a harder time as the world change. in the book i think you say at one point that's bill gates really didn't even see the value of search and a lot of the cloud stuff. he really missed that. >> i tell the story, at one point not long after gmail came out bill gates visited my "newsweek" office. >> a great story. >> yeah, his subject that he wanted to talk about was the 2004 was how -- he is not

example he -- exactly. [inaudible] [laughter] we were sitting in my editor's office and we were just talking about the products we use before he was going on to his next interview and he saw he had gmail. he asked me about gmail and i mentioned i am two-thirds built by quota of gmail, gigabyte to gigabyte and he was stunned. how can that happen? they must be doing something wrong in how they calculated. what is your e-mail, movies? he was very upset at this and the way google was doing it and thinks like that and i think that navy he was just focusing on the technical issues and how e-mails were stored but in the larger sense the way he saw e-mail was basically there is a limited amount of storage. i'm sure bill gates intellectually understands how the storage is gone down but he hadn't really internalized it

anyway where he totally understood down to his bones that storage is free now and you can do something like gmail ad in not great cost to your public. >> and i mean there could be that moment in the future for google where they just, they don't see it. does anyone objectively compare the quality of google's search results today versus a few years ago? >> google. [laughter] and they tell me it that are. [laughter] >> they must know what they're talking about. this is actually a great question. please comment on the role of speed, latency and google success. larry page is obsessed with this. >> i think you are going to ask me to read something at the end. that is what i was going to choose to do. i think i will save up for later but it is very important for

google. speed is a feature and a very important one. >> this is a curious question because i figured it was all a secret. to what extent is google's formula still a -- success still a secret? >> we say it is a formula of success. they are not sharing the algorithms. >> how do they get them to. >> but i think the formula, well you can read the book. [laughter] it is discoverable. google is to some degree opaque to the outside. i compare it to internally everyone shares everything but there is a hardshell. in other respects they are pretty open. i think in the last couple of years they have been more open. things that used to be called lack boxes they have made an effort to be more communicative about. they make little videos to talk about how the app system works and if you go to the papers you can understand things about how

the search engine works and there are even some papers and thinks about a couple of things at the data centers. so i think you've you reverse engineer google you can learn a lot, as i did, about how they have achieved success. duplicating is another matter. >> well yeah, this person gave me a tripleheader because the next one was what about their formula that other companies can't emulate? >> some of the things they can and some i can't. you can't build a data, a structured data center. it cost billions of dollars when there are a lot of innovations they are not sharing with us. and they have -- and these other thing so there's an infrastructure can't easily match if you want to be the next google. >> the third question i really like and you are going to like this one too. home would you pick to play larry and sarah j. and egg film about google? [laughter] >> wow, i'm going to have to

rely on my encyclopedia. jake gyllenhaal comes to mind. >> i think jake gyllenhaal. i'm trying to think like who else really. jake would be good at larry but sergei ivanov no. i don't know. >> michel sarah. >> what was the purpose of hiring serve from mci. he hasn't done much clinically. is that an internet figurehead role or what is the internal thinking they're? >> i think when you have a chance to hire a company you have a chance to hire the father of the internet you take actually, i think people rely on him for his wisdom and i think he is a powerful force.

he is based in the d.c. area, to talk to policymakers and people who watch google in that sense, people who listen to him. so i think it is a bit higher. >> you know actually bringing that up, we didn't talk about the whole verizon situation and actually that is a moment where i didn't hear him because he been previously a huge net neutrality advocate and i think that is one of these places where i think a lot of people who sort of believed in the don't be evil certainly got turned around which is the issue of network neutrality that one web site shouldn't be favored over another. and all of a sudden google had this turnaround. >> i remember, he finally did weigh in on the side of his employer and people were wondering was this man going to sit this one out? this was the question from net neutrality, basically google and verizon together reach the idea

that it will have net neutrality but maybe not so quickly in the mobile cents. they won't be -- we won't enforce it so strongly with mobile but -- which became what the fcc eventually adopted in december where they adopted rules about ned chalabi because they were currently being litigated by verizon. and, that troubled a lot of people. you have to see it to some degree is a basic decision. verizon is a very powerful market for android. >> going back to this, can this company continued to grow and really to know, not be evil? a lot of people felt that this was in fact exactly that. it was a business decision. it wasn't a decision that in the end, that many consumer advocates felt was going to benefit the consumer. it was a good decision for google though.

>> by setting its standards so high, people criticized it for making this business decision, right? it might be good for google but now people expect it to sacrifice profits for humanity? i don't know. >> no, i think it is complex as you get bigger. it is a company now that is huge. google's original mission was to organize the world information and useful and accessible ways. how strong is that mission inside the company? >> i think it is pretty strong. a lot of people invoke it. they say, they are explaining this product for that product and they say our mission is to organize or gather and organize information and make it accessible. why does this product makes sense? then they will apply to that.

that is pretty much ingrained at google. it is a useful mission. it is a focus for them and one which i think its employees are. >> yeah. it accessing information is a good mission. it is a useful mission. it served them well. now here's a question, you know, you've gone from writing about one kind of rock star to another kind of rock star. kind of writing -- how did writing for "rolling stone" affect your work on this book? we were talking earlier about how he interviewed bruce springsteen. how did she go from bruce delare? >> well, one of the greatest interviews i ever did was when jerry garcia told me technology is the new drug. [laughter] and i think that the excitement, you know, when i was a teenager

the music i listened to us this great knees ache of the late 60s and it was you know inspiring and lots of ways. i think technology now, to me and this is why i am so lucky to be writing about it and have been writing about it for these past couple of decades. it has the same kind of excitement. it is transformative and it can do a lot of good. it has got a dark side as the music did, but it is an amazingly richfield to look at and the people are more like rock stars. >> some of them. [laughter] sometimes they are not so good at it. >> actually i love talking to them. a lot of times i will be about to go into a meeting with an engineer and someone will say pretty much an engineer, you know. but i like talking to the

people. and i think i have had success in learning from them. >> i want to let you take a moment to read a little section of your book and just have you do with the question about speed and how important it is. >> right. it is about larry and -- speed has been an obsession is this labor larry page who is almost substantial graham. is always measuring everything. is corps escort he cares about latencies. more accurately he is always trying to remove it like lady macbeth watching thrill from rants. he suddenly dragged her into a random internet café with three machines. mainly he began finding how long the web pages -- whether due to pathological impatience or conviction speed quantitatively underestimated factor of his

vessel product pages been insisting on faster delivery for everything google from the beginning. the mentalism of google's homepage allowing for lightning quick learning was the best example but early google innovated by storing couch versions of webpages on its own servers a redundancy and speed. engineers working for page learn quickly enough his priority. and people do demos and they are slow i know they count sometimes, 11,000, to 1000. it does get people's attention. actually if your product is measured in seconds you would already have failed. paul buckeye when he what he was doing a gmail demo, paige made a face and told him was way too slow. paige reiterated his complaint charging the reload took at least 600 milliseconds, 6/10 of a second. but i thought you can know that but me got back to his own office he checked the server box, 600 milliseconds. [laughter] e-mail that says buckeye so i tried to test it myself. i could estimate times.

i could tell if it was a 300 milliseconds or 700 whatever and that happened throughout the company. >> well, steven levy, there is probably a million more questions i have from the audience then i have but the people with those questions will have to read the book. which was a great read. >> thank you very much. it was great. [applause] >> for more on steven levy in his work, visit steven levy.com. >> what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know. >> michael moore what is on your summer reading list? >> i have heard there is a new book out by chris hedges, "new

york times" reporter, excellent writer. he cuts right to the core. i just heard about it and i want to get it for this summer. he is a wonderful writer and writes very passionately about the times in which we live. there is also a book i just saw called the good jesus and the scoundrel christ's. cries. it is a dark satire and imagine mary had twins on christmas day. we never heard about the bad twin. we only know about the good twin so this imagines the story of what the other guy did, so that sounds you know, right up my alley as a recovering catholic. i'm looking forward to reading that. >> tell us what you are reading

this summer. send us a tweeted booktv. >> c-span's local content beagles partnered with bright house networks in tampa st. petersburg fortitude check out the local literary scene. here's a short video from that's trip. >> tell me about teddy roosevelt as a third-party candidate. >> okay, what teddy roosevelt was warned in new york city in 1859. his father was a wealthy businessman in the roosevelt family. there were two branches to the family. the other branches where franklin roosevelt came from. and he is also a philanthropist. he was interested in helping the poor. he was a contributor to the causes for the poor. his mother interestingly is a southern belle from the plantation the aristocracy. there's a big lactation coble a

call. that is where she was born and that is where they were married. she is supposedly a model to scarlett o'hara in gone with the wind. martha her name was. back in those days, upper-class people did not get into politics. what was considered kind of dirty and disreputable but teddy roosevelt developed an interest in the political system. he runs in the tecumseh state legislature in new york state. heap goes to washington becomes assistant secretary to the navy during the spanish-american war. it organizes a regiment and he becomes a national hero who charges up san juan hill. he comes back and he is approached by boss platt of new york state to run for governor. they figure they have a high candidate in new york but of course they want him to tow the line. these people are in bed with big

corporations and they want teddy roosevelt to do what they want. he lets them think he is going to do what they want, because he wants the nomination. he is politically ambitious but once he gets in office he does what he wants. which is infuriating the corporate powers in new york state and they threaten threatened to cut off contributions to the politicians so platt wants to get rid of teddy roosevelt, so he approaches in the election of 1900 around the corner, and he approaches mckinley who is running on the republican ticket and wants to take teddy roosevelt on the ticket, take him off his hands. now, mckinley is wary that he realizes that there is a progressive movement that is coming up and many republicans are progressive. he is more of a conservative but he deals with teddy roosevelt on the ticket as a progressive that

would give good balance to the ticket. so he accepts roosevelt onto the ticket and that in 1901, at a exposition in buffalo, mckinley a shot and teddy roosevelt becomes president of the united states. now, he finishes at the first-term, the mckinley term we will call it, and he decides to run on its own in 1904 and it makes a promise that he will not run again. he would just be a two-term president and this was in keeping with the traditions set by george washington. no president up until then had run for more than two terms. so almost immediately when he makes that commitment, he is kind of sorry but he finishes out his term in 1908 and he hand picks william howard to be his successor. but he and taft art different personalities. tapped as taft is a conservative. roosevelt as a progressive.

their temperaments are different. taft really didn't want to be president and his wife pushed him. he would rather be a judge. teddy roosevelt love to be on the political light and the bully pulpit. so roosevelt and taft have a falling out during taft's presidency. roosevelt goes to africa, big game hunting and people are writing to him. you have got to come back. the republican party is coming apart at the seams. taft is doing things you want like. he is backtracking on the environment. teddy roosevelt was a big environmentalist. so teddy roosevelt comes back. he decides to run against taft in the primaries but the primaries are not binding in 1912. and so, taft gets the nomination

in 1912 and people of roach teddy roosevelt about running on a third party ticket. he says i will do it, but if you can raise money. to big-money men come along. he raises several million dollars and he kicks off his campaign by using the expression, my hat is in the ring, coined by teddy roosevelt and he runs as a bull moose progressive. now, he ends up -- he gets a high percent of the vote than any other third-party candidate. he gets close to 20% of the vote. taft is 22% and because of the split in the republican party, woodrow wilson becomes president with 43% of the vote. so one of the ironies of roosevelt is that one of the things he objects to about taft, he can't hold the party together but at the same time by roosevelt running he splits