>>Nikesh Arora: Good morning, everybody. And thank you very much for joining us. I'm the
guy who gets to point out the fire exits, and I will start the program in a quick second.
I just wanted to welcome you here on behalf of all my colleagues at Google, the management
team and all the wonderful people who spent lots of hours tryin g to make this a wonderful
event. So I feel we got off to a good start last
night. For those of you that were there, what do you think?
[ Applause ] There we go. Take a guess -- For the people
who were there, you probably know. How many people do you think actually hiked up the
mountain this morning? We had 100 people signed up. I'm not quite sure how many quite made
it there. [ Laughter ]
I could see people struggling back to their rooms from the bars. So they weren't looking
pretty fit to get up the mountain. Hopefully, there is tomorrow morning and you can go back
and rejuvenate yourself and think through all this wonderful stuff and head up the mountain.
A lot of people have asked us, Why do we do Zeitgeist? We have 400 people in this room
representing 22 different countries as part of the Americas who are here to listen. And
our hope is rather than have a Google event where we get a lot of Google people who tell
you will all the wonderful things which we do, which I'm sure you already know about,
we thought we would get lots of interesting people in the room who would like to spend
two days with each other as well as hear from interesting people on stage and allow them
to recharge their batteries or think about what's going on in the world and how can we
do things differently. That's the entire purpose of this event.
We've done it now for the tenth time. We have done it five times in Europe, and this is
our fifth event in the U.S. And every time, hopefully, we learn from our previous event
and we hope you would give us lots of feedback so we can continue to make this better.
The whole idea is to get you away from your daily grind. For the first time, we have invited
spouses. We have over 100 spouses here who have joined their other halves. I shouldn't
say "better." I'm presuming the ones not in the room are the better halves, and we're
the other halves. They are also with us over here.
What's interesting is, for us, we are at a point where with over a billion and half people
connected on the Internet, it is no longer an activity on the side. It is now mainstream.
If you actually do the math, that probably represents 90-plus percent of the GDP of the
world, 1.7 billion people connected. It would now make the most populous nation in the world
where people have similar characteristics. When you say "similar characteristics," James
Fallows and I were talking yesterday about how in about a year and half we have been
tuned to carry 100-milliliter bottles of things. Do you realize that -- I didn't know you could
buy things at 100-milliliter bottles. But now my first instinct, because I travel so
much, I look for 100-milliliter things because I know at some airport I will have to throw
it away otherwise. So you get conditioned very quickly. We are all getting conditioned
very quickly with the Facebook, the Twitters, the Googles, the YouTubes of the world. That's
where we are. It is going to impact everything that we do,
whether it is business, whether it is politics, whether it is economics. Whatever you look
at, it is going to get impacted by this technology. And we have all seen the big shift. We have
seen the big shifts, the Android devices, the YouTubes, the iPads, the iPhones, it is
having an impact on the world. It is also having an impact at a very micro level around
the world. Actually, there is a very interesting company,
not too far from here, a few miles, called Local Motors. When you get a chance, you can
go back and Google it. These ten guys have decided to start a car company.
I went to their Web site last night. There are 5,000 volunteers who contribute designs,
who actually engage in crowdsourcing. And they are now selling their 110th car called
the Rally Fighter. You can actually buy for $50,000. The entire company is designed based
on crowdsourcing and people volunteer their efforts and to give out $5,000 to you as a
prize if you give a great design and upload it. And they have a whole bunch of people
in that community who review the design and tell you if it is going to work or not.
There is a hedge fund manager called Salmon Khan who decided his kids weren't getting
a good education. He set up a Web site where he teaches using YouTube. He has 70,000 kids
signed up, more students than Harvard, Princeton or Yale together and people pay to learn.
Forget that. There is a taxi driver in India whose friend uploaded a YouTube video for
him advertising his taxi services. Now he is getting a hundred emails a day from people
flying in from around the world wanting to hire him. He's walking around telling people,
"YouTube is cool." So it happens at a very micro level and it
happens at a very macro level. The whole intention of this event for us is to introduce people
to you on stage who are going to make you think differently, who are going to make you
challenge your current way of thinking. That's what "mind shift" is all about.
We are going to start this morning by hearing about what is the opportunity out there, what
can we think about. We will hear from global financial leaders and people who have been
in economics, people who have been in business followed by leaders of fortune 500 companies
are going to come and talk about how they have built great businesses. Somebody who
has built a $100 billion market cap in his term as CEO.
We will follow that up with entrepreneurs who are going to talk about with how do you
catalyze new thinking, how do you build new companies, how do you build new ideas, how
do you build new different things as we go along.
And to help us guide us through this, we are going to use lots of interesting people. The
first of who I'm going to introduce as a very dear friend and somebody who has been probably
to many Zeitgeists, as many as me almost. Where is she? There you are. My friend Chrystia
Freeland who is the global editor at-large at Reuters. She is going to host our first
session. Chrystia, welcome.