Google ceo eric schmidt. He was recently asked to join a committee to restart new york city. Cuomo has been doing a great job as a governor, especially compared to other governors. He has created a reimagined new York State Task force. The idea initially is to focus on three areas of issues. Telehealth basically, how do you deal with the medical system . Broadband, how do you participate in all of this if you dont have access to broadband . The third one is reimagining how we are going to work. How do people feel about going to those skyscrapers and taking the subway to do so. All of that will be addressed by our commission. David you expect to complete that work in a year or so . Eric we expect to have initial results in 36 months. The state needs help, as do all the states. This pandemic will go on for quite a long time. We had better get used to dealing with it, making adjustments. David youre also chairing a commission for the pentagon on artificial intelligence. You have managed to work with democrats and republicans, it seems. What is that commission doing . Eric there is a pentagon commission called the Defense Innovation board and then a commission called the National Security commission on ei on ai does thepentagon, how government use technology . It comes down to the fact that they are not very good at software, certainly not very good at ai. We have gotten a lot of good results. The second one, the ai commission, came out of legislation a year ago in the ndaa, to see how we will keep up with other countries and make sure the ai is a strength of ours. Now we have the new york state condition. Many people are in trouble, different kinds of trouble. There is no single story. How do we make sure we get a diverse solution that will work for the whole state as well as the city. The city of new york is an incredible economic engine. I am concerned that without the graphic and changes, people will not be able to work efficiently, will not be able to go back to work, to school. We have to find ways to get through the covid crisis until a vaccine is available. David youre a native of virginia. He went to princeton, got your phd at berkeley, you were for 10 years the ceo of google, then executive chair for seven years, now you are independent but youre obviously involved in a lot of philanthropy, a lot of advice. First, the technology world, it was thought before covid19 that may be First Technology companies were becoming too big, too too powerful. Do you think that maybe the effort indiminish the our economy will continue, or do you think that Technology Companies have proven themselves so valuable that they will continue to be very strong . Eric whether it is from developers, intrinsic clinical interests, the press, i understand that. I want to thank amazon for hiring another hundred thousand my packages to my home. A lot of us should be grateful that these Tech Companies are working so hard. I imagine the pandemic without facebook,ogle, apple, etc. How would you be spending your time without netflix or youtube . 1918. K to you would be operating under great fear. It is interesting reading the books about 1918. We only had three tools at the time. ,ear a mask, social distancing and trying to remember the third one. Anyway, we have exactly the same tools now. Have infinite information that you did not before. David lets talk about Technology Companies and help solve the crisis in terms of coming up with a vaccine perhaps. Does ai help technology what mightigure out work. Hey nontechnical about what we do, they have a series of proteins, they mix it in the lab, at. Ight, they have a new idea they are trying to find out what combination of proteins and antigens. You can systematize that with ai. Ai systemve an predict what his or her intuition is, then get orders of magnitude faster scenarios. That is part of the key to why we have made so much progress in the biology of the disease. When the chinese outbreak occurred, the chinese published basically a map of the virus. Very quickly in america, people were able to identify where the receptors were. With that information, you can then go find a combination of the proteins that will basically stop and start this process. That forms the basis of the mod erna vaccine, in phase one trials, and is some of the basis of phase two trials in china. Congress, last year, did well in creating something called barda, an advanced Research Agency for this sort of thing. Philanthropy groups like bill gates have done prebuying to get ready for this vaccine. With vaccines, you have to make sure they dont hurt the host, second, you have to make sure and third, youg, have to make sure they have an impact. It normally takes five or 10 years to produce a vaccine. We are trying to do it in 1218 months. Come if someone were to up with a vaccine, do we have enough manufacturing capability . Eric most people who have looked at this conclude that eventually, yes, but not in the short term. There is universal agreement that the vaccine should first be available to healthcare workers, people who are most at risk, and people like those in Nursing Homes, people working in meatpacking facilities where there is a high probability of transmission. My guess is that there will be a vaccine within 12 months or so, then there will be a big fight over who gets it. I have funded ideas and projects to try to think about how to do that ethically. Right now, we need to work on the vaccine. David many of the companies stocks have gone up. Will the u. S. Government own it or will the world own it . Eric i think most people believe that the Companies Run nonprofit for the first period. I think the government could actually pass a law to force the intellectual property to be published. Notuse it is likely it will go away, it makes sense to allow these firms to own the government property. It is not obvious to me that the government should just take the vaccine from the inventor in some sort of root way. In some sort of brute way. The scenario you are describing is more than 12 months, maybe 18 months away. If we cant get things restarted, there is an enormous amount of pain. Bankruptcies, job loss, the damage done to our job to our travel industry and airlines is horrendous. It will take a decade to recover if we dont do this carefully. David do you fault the chinese in anything related to the technology, when they discovered they had this problem, should they have done anything differently . Eric as i understand it, there is a lot of false going around everywhere. The chinese should a lot of fault going around everywhere. The chinese should have alerted people more quickly. Let me explain it this way. If something is doubling every three days, how do you get ahead of it . If you look at the countries that have done well compared to the countries that are in trouble, which would include the United States, they all acted very quickly once that wave was coming. America did not. A delay butafter that the layered. Lets look at new york shutting down restaurants and so on. If you delay a week, that is a factor of four more times infections. Nowadays, it is in much better shape. In some scenarios, it is doubling every 24 days. Attack,ave an acute like in january and february, i think there is plenty of blame to go around. David you said the other day on an interview that i read about that you were saying it was important not to rush people back to work who do not want to go back to work. At google and other Tech Companies, people are working remotely. Do you think that people want to come back generally to their employer . And do you think we should force them back in some way or let it the decision of the employee . Eric because we fail to have a universal testing machine and do not have good Monitoring Systems , the core problem we have now is we have trained all our citizens that they cant be sure if they meet someone on the street that they are not infected. Because on the order of half of transmissions are not asymptomatic, that person you may know vaguely may give you the disease anyway that you do not expect. Thatd, there is evidence you are most contagious right at the beginning of the disease come around day five or six, and there is lots of viral shedding. You have to think about, how do we deal with the legitimate and illegitimate fear that people will have. My guess is you will see people organize themselves into roughly three buckets. A set of people who cant go to work because their kids are home and they have to take care of the kids because the schools are open. That has to get fixed or we have a national tragedy. You have people who have a low tolerance of getting this disease, because they are a cancer survivor, immuno depressed, they have to stay home. Then you have people like myself who are dying to go to the office. For example, if i am working in of us willoup, some be at the office, some at home, some in a satellite office. For whitecollar workers, you will see the organization where some people will be in headquarters, some in satellites, some at home. The harder part will be people who have to be physically present to work. It will have to increase physical distancing, people will have to wear masks, and people will have to be careful. David lets talk about testing. Are you surprised that we have not been able to get everyone in the United States a test, and do you think it is essential for everyone to get want to feel safe when they go back to work . Eric lets go back to what the government should have done. One of the first things the government should have done is get people masks and get them to wear it. I am shocked that it is not a requirement by the government that you fly with a mask on, get in Public Transportation with a mask on. Wearing a mask is the easiest way to say, i care about humans. The mask, although it may not protect you, it certainly protects others. You can imagine relatively simple things like that that can materially improve confidence and so forth. I think some combination like that is what we will have to do. I wish we had a better answer. I also believe that you dont have to test everyone. You have to test a statistically significant amount of people. If you had to test 1 of the population and in a statistically correct way, you would get enough information that you could build a sentinel system that could alert you to outbreaks. It appears now that the majority occurringnsmission is from particular kinds of groups. I have also mentioned nursing choirs,eatpacking, things like that. There is a great deal of exhala tion, literally volume in the air. It appears that infection is largely related to the quantity and amount you are exposed to. If that is true, you should be able to detect outbreaks statistically and do outbreaks tracing without having to imprison everybody or leave everybody to their own devices. I am trying to figure out a way to build such a system. There are components of this being built now. I think a combination on the order of 1 testing every day which is sort of achievable, we can probably do this. In thet the moment United States, the disease the contagion, if you will, is flat to slightly negative. It is crucial that we get it down in the summer because people are outside. One estimate from japan was that being outdoors was 19 times safer than being indoors. If i was in charge, i would tell people, wear a mask, spend your time outdoors. For example, outdoor restaurants, construction sites, and so forth. David tell us what you are doing to stay healthy. Are you wearing a mask to go out, are you traveling as much or not traveling . Eric like most people, traveling has pretty much stops. That handshakes are over, and we will learn to bow like testing japanese pick to bow like fantastic japanese people. As i mentioned earlier, these are the same tools we had in 1918 and they did work. 1918 you mentioned the influenza, that i think in this country killed 700,000 people. For we still dont have a vaccine for that virus after all these years. Why are you convinced we will get a vaccine for this particular virus . Eric there are several reasons, starting with need, funding. Again, i am not an epidemiologist. They also cant tell you how long the vaccine will go for. I prefer not to focus on vaccine. I think we need to focus on thriving in the covid era. This is a fantastic entry. Again, think about what we had accomplished up to february. Business confidence was very strong, people getting hired left and right. Lets get back to that. We have to get back to that with the presence of the virus at a low level. We need a monitoring system, fully to change in routine ways, and we can move on. I worry that Industries Like retail, restaurants will be harmed from this. It is extremely difficult to restart these things and i worry a lot about that. Why the epidemiologists seem to have numbers about who will die. They have changed numbers about having a lot more people die or not. Use most of these models extremely different parameters. Many of the models are proprietary. It is hard to have an opinion about them. The white house chose one with very favorable numbers. I think it is important to take an average of the models to get a better prediction. At the moment, the real answer is that we know so little about both the rate of transition, when you are most how much meeting has to occur, how much volume has to occur. We just dont know yet. We will know the answers, we just i just hope we know it soon. David are you faulting the Infectious Disease people who say to stayathome, selfisolate, because there has been criticism that they have shut down the economy. Both you have to solve problems. You have to solve a horrific health care problem. Healthcare workers in our country have done a fantastic job. This all started because we were worried that the hospitals could be overloaded. People terrified that could not get to the hospitals with heart attacks. Someave to come up with economic system. The level of unemployment that we now have is on the order approaching the depression. A good joby has done getting money into the system. That we have a bankruptcy problem. When i look at the actions of the people, my primary criticism is the speed with which action occurred. Much of the deaths could have been avoided now had we acted a month earlier in every decision. Major you are a philanthropist. However you changed if at all your philanthropy as a result of the crisis . Eric we decided to work on this. Once it became clear this was not a one or two month scenario, we formed a task force and started to look at things that could act quickly. We have now given tens of millions of dollars in that area. The initial focus was on things that could happen very quickly. The most interesting one was ventilator training. At the time one without we would need an infinite amount of ventilators, nobody knew how to operate them. Thank goodness we have not needed them as much. Ventilators are not a good thing to be on david be on. David you have also been a venture investor. What are you saying to somebody who might be a venture investor and wants to follow eric schmidt . What are you investing in . Eric venture is a long game and it is really about these key entrepreneurs who have these ideas. Find the entrepreneur, give them some money, help them recruit talent, and hope and pray, and help them. I dont think that is any different than when i was in a small startup. I have always believed biology business. N enormous i think the pandemic has emphasized the enormous scale. Telehealth, in two months, you have changed the economics of health care. You now have reimbursements for telehealth. Devices. Ut connected why are you not wearing a smart healthwatch which is communicating to a system with your permission and under hipaa ,aws, that calls you and says you need to have a video appointment with the doctor. Do an analysis with my permission and say, eric looks pretty good, ask questions, then we will decide what kind of health care he needs to be routed to. We can do this now. How will Silicon Valley this . As a result of will people change what they do and how they operate these companies . Eric in my career, Silicon Valley has changed dramatically. Large Tech Companies have whole institutions of governments that have embedded competitors, opponents, political strategies. Certainly, big tech will be bigger. They are doing more fundamental work. Platforms. Think about a while way think wei, the 5g platform has turned out to something that we cant control, and we dont like that as a country. The Digital Future that we have has arrived much quicker than i thought. Promote learning, dont you think that online and offline will get a lot more blended together . Makes sense to me. You an optimist about the future of this country, or are you more pessimistic now that we have an economic crisis and a recession or maybe worse than a recession . Various you look at the policy failures, governance, so on, the thing that has been extraordinary about america has been the ability to innovate. That is ahead of us. I am personally frustrated right now that we cannot seem to get our strategy straight in the short term. I repeated mine. Wash your hands, wear a mask, social distancing, be outside. Other governors have done different things. The governor of florida banned Nursing Homes very early. There is a set of things. If we could just agree on these basic rules, or testing is good, more data is good, building the surveillance systems, we can get through this more quickly than we think we are. Through this crisis, what have you learned about yourself . Eric on a personal basis, i, like people, enjoy the social life of dinners scarlet you have been watching leadership live with David Rubenstein and his guest, eric schmidt. This is bloomberg. Romaine welcome back you are watching whatd you miss . Lets get you a quick check of the latest business flash headlines. We will start with mastercard, which is starting to see signs of improvement in u. S. Consumer spending. From a year ago. In the first week of april, those payments were down about 22 . American airline bonds have fallen to new lows, following reports that demand for air travel will fall behind forecasts. They seest says americans as a potential candidate for bankruptcy. An automaker dropping dividends they promised to pay as part of their merger. Throughysler burned 5. 5 billion in the first