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So it seems like every day there's another story about AI and about people freaking out about what it might mean for the future. In Congress, just had a series of hearings with Sam Altman from OpenAI to talk about how to regulate artificial intelligence. And if you missed Sam on this show, just scroll back in the queue to find that episode. Even the writers' strike in Hollywood is partially centered around whether tools like chat GBT might one day replace human screenwriters. Anyway, back in the spring of 2022, I spoke with Sundar Pachai, the CEO of Google, and he talked about how in the early days of the internet there wasn't enough thought put into its potential dangers, especially with things like social media. But he did say there has been a lot of proactive work around these issues when it comes to artificial intelligence. Since our conversation, Google has made giant leaps in AI development. Earlier this year, the company released its own chatbot called Bard, and while the technology is far from perfect, it does give us a sense of where AI is headed. And for better or worse, it will transform our lives. So with that said, I wanted to replay this conversation with Sundar from last year, because I think it's even more relevant today than when it first aired. Okay, here it is. Hello, and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross. So depending on the day, Google is either the third or fourth most valuable company in the world. Just to add some perspective, even with the recent slide in the stock market, if Google were a separate country, it would be among the 10 biggest economies in the world. Google's value is roughly similar to the economic output of countries like Brazil, Australia, or South Korea. So to call Google powerful, well, that's an understatement. Its products and services touch billions of humans on the planet. The email systems we use are cloud storage servers. Even the platform I'm typing this introduction on right now. It's a Google die. A part of me, and I hope a part of you is kind of terrified about that. And I believe that a part of Google is also terrified about that. Google's would start as a project, famously in a Palab Alto garage, is now one of the most dominant corporate forces in the world. And yet, it is led by an unlikely leader. Sooned up a chai, the company CEO, had never left India until age 21. In fact, he'd never flown on an airplane until 1993. The year he made the long journey from his home in Chennai, India to the Silicon Valley, to a 10 Stanford on a full scholarship. And even after a successful run as a product manager overseeing everything from Google Chrome to Google Drive, Sundar never saw himself as a future CEO of the company. He was happy digging into the hard technical problems he faced. But in 2015, he was appointed CEO. And today, it's not just technical challenges he faces, but the challenges of trying to lead one of the biggest, most visible brands on earth at a time of culture wars, employee revolts, and greater scrutiny of tech companies. A few weeks ago, Google held its annual Iow Conference where it unveils new products and technology. And one of the main topics this year, artificial intelligence. It is, according to Sundar Bichai, one of the single most important areas of focus for Google and its future. Sundar is here to talk about AI, the future of work, how to encourage innovation by allowing for failure, and how he's learning to lead at a very front moment in our history. Sundar Bichai, welcome to the show. Thanks so much. So Sundar, let's start with your life before Google before you came to the US. You grew up in mainly in what is now Chennai in India. And I know you were a student at the Indian Institute of Technology. And this was in the early days of what we now call Web 1.0, right? In the late 80s, early 90s, you were a promising engineering student. And I've read that already as a student, you were sort of focused on microchips and on how computers work. That's right. That's right. And literally fascinated by it. And I was fascinated by the PC revolution. I was studying material science, but I was interested in semiconductors as a material. So I was definitely interested in computers and how semiconductors make computers happen, chip technology, chip fabrication. And so those were my areas of interest. But I definitely didn't see working on consumer internet as where I would end up. You know, I had an envision. You could think of something like Intel as a moral lines of what I was thinking about. Was any part of you thinking my next step is coming to the United States? Was that even on your radar? It was. By the time I was in college, given where my interests were shaping up to be in my junior and senior year, I started doing some research on semiconductors. And so literally being in Silicon Valley, working on Silicon, wanting to come to Silicon Valley was something naturally I was fascinated about. And so it was definitely invited our by that time. Had you ever been to the United States before 1993? No. I mean, in fact, my first flight ever in my life was to come to the US. So no, I had never been on a plane before the first journey which took me to the US. I went to Pittsburgh first. Bear my uncle was and he was faculty at Carnegie Mellon. He was the first person in my family to kind of make it there. And so that played a part in me thinking about coming to the US and hearing from him about the opportunities, how well class the universities were. But I first came to Pittsburgh and I stayed there for two to three weeks before I headed down to California. Right to California to Stanford where you got a scholarship to study. That's right. I know that you did not have access to a computer growing up. So really your first exposure to a personal computer was not until you got to Stanford in 1993. In the Indian Institute of Technology IAT, as we call it, there was definitely a lab. I didn't have full access to it. But I maybe used it. I would say I can count the number of hours in one or two hands. So that's how much I'd seen it. I'd used it for a few hours. But only when I came to Stanford, there were these labs in which I could go and work and have unlimited access and program and so it was like an internew world open up for me. I was so enamored with it. I didn't quite realize at the time the internet was fully underway. I was just fascinated by just having access to so many computers. What was that? I mean, 1993 is like God, just seems like, you know, a million ago. It's just such a long time. I remember being overseas in the mid-90s and it was different, you know, calling my parents in Los Angeles, for example, was a big deal. You know, you quickly get on the phone, have a quick chat and maybe they would pick up and that was it. You read letters. This was your first time in the United States. You were away from your family in India. What do you remember about being in the United States at Stanford at the time? Was it lonely? Were you homesick? Yeah, I was definitely lonely. You know, my girlfriend was back in India and you mentioned, you know, what it is to communicate. And it was about in Stanford from within campus at that time to call back to India was around $2.50 approximately a minute. Wow. You know, and so within about a week of every month, I probably was broke, mostly calling my girlfriend at the time now my wife and a lot of letters, etc. But definitely it was tough to communicate what we take for granted. It's probably impossible to explain to the current generation, but communication was really hard. And so I definitely felt lonely, but it was an extraordinary place and I made a lot of friends and soon I settled in, but it was a definite transition coming in and settling down into the country. You would stay on for an MBA program at the University of Pennsylvania at Wharton. By the time you got here and started studying here, was it clear to you that you were going to make your future in the United States that this was where you were going to establish your life? Or did you think maybe you'd go back to India? I think for me academically coming to a place like Stanford and seeing the axis and I wanted to be cutting edge in terms of the research I wanted to pursue. So for me, there was naturally a part of me, which is like this was my dream and I wanted to continue doing it here. But I was hopefully sure as to where things would end up. So I didn't think too far ahead. When you started at Google, it's just 2004. Google was a completely different company. It was a fraction of what it is now. Obviously growing and becoming more influential but still tiny compared to what it is now. You were involved in some of the biggest product rollouts and Google Chrome, Google Drive, things that are now almost indispensable for so many people. How did you see your place in the company at that time? I mean, did it feel like you were a part of something really big? Was it hard to have that kind of perspective? What do you remember about that time? Definitely Google felt like a special place. I got exposure to the founders early on and very clearly talking to them. You add a sense. They were very, I would call, unique thinkers. As a pair of them, they would always come at problems at a very, very different viewpoint. And so it felt unique. They were very ambitious in everything they set out to do. And at Google at any given time, there were a lot of projects. Some of them were crazy. So you add a sense that this was different. But at the same time, I always sensed the power of the internet. That's why I came to Google. And so it realized for the first time you're going to have a technology which is really going to touch billions of people. And over time, can it really be accessible to more people than prior versions of computing and technology? So you had the sense that this was going to be something really big and you were part of, I'm talking about the internet now and you're part of a bigger movement too. So a combination of all that made it feel pretty unique. Did you see yourself at that time as a leader or did you, did you have ambitions to be a leader or were you more focused on being a product guy and focusing on the technical side and just sort of being a good employee? More of the latter for sure, I definitely was focused on rolling up my sleeves, building products and shipping them and just a thrill of trying to build something and put it out and see how users respond to it and do they adopt it. And so for me, a lot of it was about that craft, if you will. And so that's what I was focused on, love the company. People were incredibly optimistic. And so definitely nothing beyond that. We're going to take a quick break. But when we come back, Sundar shares how he eventually did start thinking about leadership and what he's focused on as the CEO of Google today. Stay tuned, you're listening to how I built this lab. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of Wondries Podcast American scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in US history. Residential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our newest series, we look at the Kids for Cash scandal, a story about corruption inside America's system of juvenile justice. In Northeastern Pennsylvania, residents had begun noticing an alarming trend. Children were being sent away to jail in high numbers and often for committing only minor offenses. The FBI began looking at two local judges. And when the full picture emerged, it made national headlines. The judges were earning a fortune carrying out a brazen criminal scheme, one that would shatter the lives of countless children and force a heated debate about punishment and America's criminal justice system. Follow American scandal wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad free on the Amazon Music or Wondry app. One more thing before we get back to the show, please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. It's usually just at the top of the app and it's totally free. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Ross and I'm talking with Sundar Pachai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. Sundar, at what point did you start to see yourself as somebody who could be the CEO of Google and Alphabet? I mean, based on your description of your early days, that would never have crossed your mind. But at some point, you must have at least mentally had to become prepared to do that. Do you remember what enabled you to prepare to actually see yourself in that role? I think, you know, there was some point at which Larry Page, who was the CEO at a time and one of our co-founders, asked me to manage our entire product portfolio so to be the head of products in the technology company, in the product-focused company like Google. It is the essence of the job and so in some ways, when I started working on it, I naturally felt the accountability for the company, if you will. So not that I thought of myself as a CEO, but the natural role demanded you end to end to think about everything and so I actually started working that way. So that's where it began. But you know, I never thought much about being a CEO as much as a given I loved building products, the chance to do it at scale and to build products for the entire company, because more than what I wanted and would have been happy doing that part, but I think that's probably was the beginning of the transition and then both Larry and I started thinking about it. When you joined Google in 2004, it was just a few years after Jack Welch retired from GE and he was like the sort of iconic CEO who sort of represented in the minds of people what a CEO should be, sort of fist pounding the table and that's been reassessed now and it's definitely not a model, I think a lot of CEOs would adopt, but you had and have a reputation for being a quiet leader. Before I get to that, I want to understand how you kind of learned to become a leader, because you are running a company that's much bigger than GE ever was today and much bigger than what Jack Welch had to do and you had to become that person over time. So tell me when you started to think of yourself as a leader? One of my mentors was someone called Bill Campbell, he was a football coach at Columbia and later, you know, mentored a lot of CEOs, he was a CEO himself and he had this famous saying, he called it wrongly now, but it's basically, you don't become a leader of people, it's your people who make your leader. I think for me that I always resonated, so I didn't focus much on how I'm going to be a leader as much as whatever I was doing, you know, was fully committed to making it successful, including the people who work for me. So always approach it as trying to help make what we are working on be more successful, including particularly the people I worked with. So being really vested in their success and their outcomes and going the distance to do that. And so I guess that's the process by which it unfolded. And so maybe somewhere along the line, I realized, I was making this transition, but it was more natural for me. And the second thing was, I realized being a leader also allowed you to scale and work on more than one problem at a time. And so that appealed a lot to me as well. So it's probably a combination of both of those things. I want to focus on what was kind of in your North Star, I guess, really a central focus of your ambitions for Google and that's artificial intelligence. I know we've been hearing about artificial intelligence for a long time. It goes back to Alan Turing or two and before. And even over the past 10 years, anybody who's seen TED Talks or you know, you hear about OST, AI is going to change medicine. AI is going to change the way we consume energy. And AI is going to solve climate change. It's going to make governments smarter, more efficient. That hasn't happened quite yet. And those things have happened. And I'm talking about things I heard eight, nine years ago. Tell me where you see now, glimmers of light coming through that are within grasp. Because Google is investing so much money into this technology and it encompasses so many different things. So give me sort of the 35,000 foot view of what AI will do. What's going to mean to us? Look, I always thought the company should be, and that's how the founders said it should be focused on deep computer science and technology to help solve problems. And AI just happens to be one of the most important technological advances. So hence the focus on AI. When I look at the journey, one of the great things about AI is, in some ways it's an abstract concept. And the more AI starts doing things, we kind of take it for granted. And so it kind of bakes into the system and the expectations keep shifting. And we recently had a event called Google IO where as a company we talk about all the things we do, leading up to the event I was reflecting on how AI is impacting all our products, right? Countless ways. And if you're in Gmail and you're typing something and we give all these suggestions for you to complete or to send quick replies back that actually works on machine learning and AI. We now translate across many, many languages and it is seamless. And in fact, now we are going deep and adding some of the rarer languages in the world, but very, very important for the people who speak it. And the fact now you can seamlessly translate it into hundreds of languages is an example of progress. If you use YouTube, you automatically generate chapters now based on a creator's video and also show transcripts of the video to people. So that's all AI kind of working and it's automatic and it just works. If you're a small medium business and you come to Google and say, look, I want to grow my business, but I only have a few hundred dollars to spend. You can go through the process and custom design and create everything or you can give you a budget and our AI systems can optimize and run a campaign for you. Yeah. We are mapping buildings in Africa and it's a hard to do and we're using AI to really scale up the number of buildings we are mapping. And we are sharing the data with the World Bank and United Nations to use for nonprofit purposes. You mentioned areas like health care, you know, it's obviously very regulated industry rightfully so and things take time. But just the fact that AI system will help triage images for radiologists to scan and maybe reprioritize them in the right order. I see companies beginning to do that and something we will take for granted ten years from now is how it will all work. And so you see the progress and it's baked into our products. So if you talk to Google and ask a question and we give you an answer back, there's a lot of AI underneath all those layers. And I think you'll see it more in the fabric of what we do every day in countless things. In the future do you see AI being a greater source of revenue for a company like Google over say advertising? You know, as I became CEO, I wanted the company to think of its technology approach as AI first is because I see that long term opportunity. And so when you look at our business, for example, like Google Cloud through which we are offering technology to other companies, we will give them AI capabilities as well. So I think that'll be a big business opportunity. But above all, I think AI is a foundational technology which equally will make search better to maybe one day make self-driving cars work safer and much better. And so it kind of cuts across everything we do. And so I think these are two different dimensions. How we make money over time will be different than the fact that AI will power a lot of what we do as a company. But it will help us both diversify and create new businesses and that's part of our long-term view on it, which is why I'm excited about both the amount of work we do there, but also the fact that we lead the way in many of the foundational areas there. You know, I wonder about the ethical side of this because the question is if you could take Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey, 15 years ago and say, this is one of the things could happen with this amazing thing that you're about to put into the world. What do you want to do now to prevent those things from happening? Now Google, the most powerful company in the world, or one of two or three, has that opportunity to ask those questions knowing what we know about the promise and peril of technology that we use today. So help me understand how you think about that and how you can preempt and anticipate the downsides, the sort of the darker parts of AI because it is also potentially an inevitable result. That's a great question and obviously technology always says do will use and a lot of journeys all about harnessing technology to benefit society. What gives me great comfort is if anything, I think for AI from very early days or at least for the past many years, people rightfully have worried about the consequences and so compared to many things you mentioned the internet earlier. I genuinely don't recall much conversations in the early days of the internet about some of the negative externalities that could come with it, right? It was much more of a positive view. I think internet has been an extraordinary force for good, but as you mentioned, we've all had to learn, process and work through some of the issues it creates as well. AI on the other hand, I think from its earliest days, I think people have recognized both how profound it can be as well as the fact that you have to work extra hard to harness it. Coming back to us, this is why very early, I think, compared to other areas of technology we have worked on, we both have articulated a clear set of AI principles publicly. We do a lot of our AI research. If you look at it, compared to other foundational technologies, there is a lot of research which also goes into looking at ethical pillars of AI and how to make progress there. More importantly, not just at Google, but I think there are many, many places around the world, universities, nonprofits, overtime, there needs to be laws and regulations. This is an area where I think we are, I'm optimistic that we are thinking about it earlier than we have typically done with other areas. And so I see that we are approaching it better overall, but there is a lot of work left ahead. And also, for better or worse, because Google is such a powerful company, such a powerful full global force, you can't help but not understand why people would hold you accountable to be responsible around this. Absolutely. It makes a lot of sense to me. I think we feel a deep sense of responsibility here, and I think it is perfectly correct and right that there is a lot of accountability. And we need to be accountable to society as well as we pursue this work. Yes, that makes sense to me. We're going to take a quick break. We're going to be back in a moment with more from Sundar Pachai of Google and Alphabet. Stay with us. How I built this lab. Hey, welcome back to How I Built this Lab. A guy who has a guest today is Sundar Pachai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. Sundar, I can only begin to imagine how complex your world is. In part because you have to be careful about what you say because it can move a stock and you can set shareholders and you've got to do quarterly calls. All these parts of your job in addition to overseeing all the technologies and so on. But Google is seen as a leader and people look at Google for lots of different things. Let me ask you about one important one, which is the future of work. Tell me about how you're thinking about that because this is complicated. There are a lot of different views on what the future of work should look like. There are people who believe that you can only do innovative work in person. That people have to exchange ideas and be around each other. Others say, no, you can do it all remotely. But at the same time, the remote work environment over the past two years has also created a lot of strife because people are not around each other and there's been a lot of miscommunication and challenges. I wonder what you think in 10 years' time, will people be coming into the office every day or do you think that it's worked out permanently in a new kind of work environment, at least with technology work and the work that you guys do? I think the future of work will definitely be more flexible than what it's been in the past. I think that's here to stay and 10 years out from now, you will definitely see employees having a lot more flexibility. At least speaking for technology companies and companies like ours, we as a company have internalized that. I think we are embracing it as an opportunity to think about how that future looks. To be very clear, we see a lot of value in people coming together, fostering that community, a sense of a place where a creative environment so that people come together and can solve problems and build on each other. The way I think about the future is we will have purpose built times and spaces where people will be able to come together and do all that, but people will have a lot more agency and flexibility in their lives. Just like 20 years ago, I think Google challenged a lot of notions of what a workplace could be, the fact that you could mix fun and work together in the same space, the fact that you could have childcare close to campus and that would actually make everyone happier. You could have slides in the middle of the office that would make people any less productive. We challenged a lot of the notions and it worked out well. Similarly, I feel the same sense of excitement now and so challenging some of the past notions now allows us to think about how do we improve representation in the tech industry? Well we can now go to where people are and hire them, then still we don't need to be as sensitive to the location as before. So that to me is an opportunity. If you're a working mother and the transition back, which is an important time, if you have a newborn adding that flexibility, I think is a powerful tool to have. Everywhere I look at, I see opportunities and when I look at how painful commuters become for many, many people, and the fact a lot of our people were spending two hours each way sometimes, it gives us a chance to rethink all that. But what do you do with all that infrastructure? I mean, the slides and the huge spaces, and I've been to the Google campus, amazing public areas. I mean, there's a risk that parts of it become like an abandoned amusement park, you know, like I did amusement park that just shuttered, right? Because there's all of this infrastructure, but when it's not full of people, don't shift to kind of reevaluate how you think about real estate. You know, if I think about through this pandemic to particularly over the last 12 months, when the conditions have improved, in our urban offices like New York or London, very quickly we get back to 65, 70% occupancy right away. So it's a strong sense of people wanting to come in. So it depends on the space and place, I think. And you are right. We've left adapt and rethink. Today everything is designed around people being there all five days a week. And so in the future flexible world where people spend part of their time working from office, part of the time working from home, we need to reconfigure spaces. We need to evolve technology to because today it's very hard to participate in this hybrid setups. So all that are problems to be solved. You know, obviously if we create past empty buildings, then we are not achieving our goal of creating that sense of community and collaboration, right? So I think thinking about the future of work, both in the context of reimagining all the physical spaces, as well as reimagining the technology that allows people to connect and collaborate is going to be an integral part of what we need to do. And I'm excited because when we do it and solve it for us, we also provide these products to other companies as well. So it's actually makes a lot of business sense for us, not just to solve for us, but for others as well. So I'm excited about it. You know, Google, like other big companies, Disney and others are at the center of, you know, culture wars over corporate policies around issues that employees care about. Employees are demanding that companies take a stand on things, rovers as way to abortion rights, transgender rights, racial justice, foreign policies. It's a lot. And I'm not saying whether it's right or wrong, I just think it's so complicated to be a corporate leader today when your employees are saying, look, you've got to come out and speak about these things. I mean, I know you have in the past and you've addressed some of these things, but how do you know when to weigh in and when to say nothing? It's a good question. I think you're right in the sense that the job of a CEO today, I think, is gotten more complex and I think one of the reasons as you think about leadership, empathy and being able to lead with empathy, I think it's an increasingly important skill. I think people want to know you care and, you know, I think, you know, companies need to be values driven, but I think you need to be focused and you need to have a set of values you passionately care about and you're very clear in what those values are and you build a track record over time. So if you've done the hard work, I think no single moment becomes as magnified, but if you haven't done that, I think a single moment can play out in a much bigger way. So there's no easy answer as much as I think, you know, as a company, we deeply care about our employees. There are certain things we have, we deeply care about as a company as well. We create a making technology more accessible, you know, or sustainability, making sure we have a diverse and representative workforce. So you know, you have a set of values which you're very clear about and I think, I think, you know, supporting free speech around the world. So you know, you choose the issues which are more core to who you are as a company and what matters to your employees and with that framework, I think if you're purposeful, I think I think that's probably one way by which you can navigate through this. How do you manage stress? You know, look at the most basic level, you know, I genuinely feel it's a privilege to be doing what I do. I feel incredibly lucky and I've always wanted to work on cutting edge technology. So the fact that I can go talk to our quantum team in Santa Barbara and there are a hundred people working on literally some of the most state of the art technology that humanity has ever worked on. You know, I feel is a rare privilege and so that gives me a lot of perspective. The second thing is I'm very optimistic about the benefits the technology will bring. I feel it when I travel around the world and I meet people who are not yet part of the train and they are hungry for that opportunity and recalls back to my younger days and, you know, I realize how powerful that is and so that gives me a lot of excitement at what I do. So a combination of all that gives me a perspective and the third I would say is a lot of stress comes from you have to make a lot of decisions as a leader but over time you realize most of those decisions are not consequential and there are a few consequential decisions but most of the times it's more important to make a decision. You have really good people you're working with and so having faith in the system, the people and the processes around you I think it's actually a lot less stressful once you internalize it that way. Final question for you Sundar. I mean Google was started in a garage right? We know the story and this has been a famously innovative company but it's massive. You've got hundreds of thousands of employees around the world. How do you compete? Again, I mean you've got a lot of money right to finance projects and research but how do you make sure that people are doing radical things and really pushing the limit without being afraid to screw it up? One of the counterintuitive things is organizations typically tend to become more conservative when they get larger which is ironic because they're more resources than when they were a smaller company. Yeah. You have to fight that and the great thing about technology is this constantly new things coming around. So constantly wake up and there's a whole new app which I see people around me using which they weren't using last year. That's true every year and so you know things can come out of nowhere. So honestly if you sat in my leadership meetings on Monday you won't feel that we are a large company or you'd see us thinking hard about newer problems or worried about areas where we are and doing well or thinking hard about how we can innovate more in a new area. And so I think you have to have that and also to innovate well it has to be a priority as a company and it's easier said than done and to me a key point I would say is you have to reward efforts not always outcomes. I think most companies only reward successful outcomes which means everyone becomes more conservative in their attempts. And so at Google we've always had this feeling of setting ambitious goals and we do fail in our goals but you reward people for taking that moonshaw to feel well and aiming and you reward the effort and how they approach their work regardless of outcome and you know I personally have long held that belief and so I think that's an important process to make sure people feel supported to innovate and so you have to work hard at creating that culture. Sundar thanks so much for coming on show. Thanks so much it was a real pleasure. It's Sundar Pachai CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet. Hey thanks so much for listening to how I built this lab. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show and it's totally free. This episode was produced by Carla Estevez with editing by John Isabella. Our music was composed by Routine Arableuille. Our audio engineer was Neil Rauch. The production team at how I built this includes Alex Chung, Chris Messini, Casey Herman, Jayce Howard, Liz Metzger, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson and Elaine Coats. Neva Grant is our supervising editor, Beth Donovan is our executive producer. I'm Guy Raaz and you've been listening to how I built this. Hey prime members you can listen to how I built this early and ad free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today or you can listen early and ad free with Wondery Plus and Apple podcasts. If you want to show your support for our show be sure to get your how I built this merch and gear at Wonderyshop.com. Before you go tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com-survey.