YouSaid · the spoken record

Brad Smith

lines on the record: 91
first: 2019-09-09
most recent: 2019-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think we are going to need and we are going to see new laws that will address the risk of bias and discrimination. And I think there's particular steps that a good regulation can take to do that. I think we are going to see laws that address commercial privacy. In other words, if we go into a shopping mall and our face is being identified and our images are being captured, I think we're going to see laws that give us as consumers some control over that kind of data. And I think perhaps most importantly, we need and will see laws that address the use of facial recognition by public authorities, especially law enforcement.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having been in this industry for a quarter of a century, I think the facial recognition issue is one of the most unusual issues we have ever seen. We at Microsoft literally just 16 months ago put out a blog that said, this is technology that is subject to abuse, it's going to need to be regulated. And there were people in Silicon Valley who looked at us and said, what are you talking about? Why are you saying this? And here we are, and it is exploding around the world. We're sitting here today in a city, San Francisco, that has banned its use for the public. And the issue is changing on almost a monthly basis.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the real question we should ask is, what are the problems that laws and regulations need to help us solve? It won't be, in my view, one regulation that is so sweeping that it covers every issue. So what we really strive to do in the book, you see it in the table of contents, is let's look at the different problems and let's talk about some potential solutions.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one should hesitate to use the word problem. I would wholeheartedly agree that it is going to be a principal phenomenon. And I think this is a challenge for the industry. It is an opportunity.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, Microsoft's looking to our 50th anniversary in just a few years But you have other companies, obviously, that are both extremely successful and much younger. I think the real message for all of us is, you know what, you have to grow up faster than maybe you used to.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that's a fair comment. It's an accurate observation. And I think it is a reflection of our need to build a more civic spirit across the industry. It's also a reflection of the need for companies perhaps especially large companies to develop the capacity to make decisions. Because whenever you get into these questions of should we or should we not do this, you really set the stage for what can be endless debates. And unless you have the capacity to be decisive, you just have endless debates, which results in inaction and in effect the answer is no whether people intended it to be or not. And I think there's a muscle that the industry needs to develop as well as a culture”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, why isn't it there? And then I want to get into the individual problems from inequality to social media to disinformation in a second. But how do you get that to happen? How do you get, because my experience with tech is they can't decide online, essentially. There's a lot of issues that they come together every now and again, but it's rather rare. And I know it's onerous from what I can hear from people dealing with it, like having agreement on anything.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The company we should applaud is Amazon. Because Jeff Bezos took the call, Amazon decided to get involved. They could have said, you know what? We didn't contribute to this problem. Our services weren't used. We're not going to show up. We're not going to help. We at Microsoft obviously were involved from the very first day. But we need a bit more of that kind of civic spirit. And I'd love to see more companies doing that.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a mistake. I think one of the most interesting examples of, in my view, a company doing the right thing, as we describe in this book, was in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attack. Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand Got on the phone, made calls. I had one of the first, well, actually the first meeting with her because I coincidentally was in New Zealand's capital shortly after the attack. But she asked people to help. Google, Facebook, Twitter all said yes. I think they felt understandably, logically, that they needed to be involved given that their platforms were used by the Christchurch terrorists.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there is an attitude in tech sometimes that people say, you know what, I don't want to go work on that because I don't want to stand up next to that other company. They're in the firing line. They've got a virus, so to speak, politically. If I stand next to them, I'm going to do something worse than catch a cold.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That said, I mean, I can't imagine if a newspaper was doing a crappy job, I wouldn't be like those people are ruining it for the rest of us kind of thing. Is that an attitude that you think is pervasive around tech?”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really think about two things. The first is there's definitely differences between companies. Some have more data and some have more consumer data than others. Some have business models that really encourage more use of that data for monetization and advertising and others less so. But there's a big but. I like to remind people when the United States Congress passed banking laws in the 1930s to regulate the nation's banks, they did not create an exception for the banks they liked. They applied to all the banks. And I think that We across the tech sector actually would serve ourselves well to focus on how we can solve problems even if we don't feel we helped cause them.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has yet to have a very big privacy scandal yet. But pending, like with all of them. People think when you think of the tech loss that it's one tech industry, but it's just not. And there's different levels of tech and who's involved and who's responsible. But you all get glommed together. So how do you organize an industry where certain players are causing most of the mess and the others have to live with it?”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, one of the things that I think a lot of people have been talking about is the focus had been on Facebook and Google essentially, which are two companies that have most of the data. Microsoft doesn't traffic in as much data for sure, and neither does Apple, and neither do lots of companies. I mean, they use data, and it's certainly important, but it was focused on just two companies who did this. When you're thinking about these things, what do you think, because you're all up in Seattle, Amazon's in Seattle, Amazon has a lot of information on people.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All kinds of things. It's a pretty scandal. Yeah, no, it's a pretty powerful stew if you think about it that way. And so at one level, one can debate forever what impact did it actually have on anything. The reality is it doesn't necessarily matter because what does matter is how people thought about it. It was as if... Light bulb had been turned on and people looked around and they saw the room and they said wow look at all this data look at how it can be used we should be paying more attention to what this means for our privacy”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a great question, When I try to think about it Everything in life Big deal and not a big deal at the same time, and certain things take off. And when they do, you look back and you ask, why is that the thing that took off? I think the reason that Cambridge Analytica took off is because fundamentally it was about the use of people's data in a political campaign. To support a candidate for president Donald Trump, whom many people were not prepared to support. And so when they learned that information that they were sharing, including about their friends and the like, was being used for a political campaign in this way, they got upset. And because it was about politics, Congress got upset. And so you had this making for a bit of a tinderbox on a particular privacy issue that was different from what we had seen in the past.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if you want to broaden it a little bit, I do think it's fair to say that there have been many times in many parts of our industry where disruption has been considered an end in and of itself. And I personally think that one should step back and even think about that a little more broadly. Certainly if there is a single vision or principle that Satya has articulated at Microsoft since his first year as CEO, it's that there are certain values that are timeless. There are actually certain values that are more important than the development of technology. And we need technology to serve these values. We shouldn't think that disrupting everything is actually. A good goal in and of itself”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's been important to move fast, and we should celebrate the spirit of innovation that enabled the industry to move fast, but there comes a time when you realize, you know what? We shouldn't go faster than the speed of thought. We need to think about what is happening. And that's part of the message in this book. Let's look around and see what's happening.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think one of the lessons that one learns we learned it at Microsoft, I think perhaps we're learning it as an industry. Whenever things are going well, it's pretty easy to think that they will always keep going well. And let's face it, our industry prospered and did great things for the world, often with the explicit slogan that the best way to develop technology was to move fast and break things. Well, once”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Why do you imagine it took so long? Why do you think these incidents? Because these are all major incidents. I mean, I wrote about all of them. And people seem concerned, but also that's the price of technology. And the tech industry seemed relatively unconcerned, I would say.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I could bring a company to its knees through a cyber attack. 2017 showed that WannaCry and not Petya that foreign governments could attack the world, could attack a country like Ukraine. We had these mounting concerns around issues like privacy. We saw it flaring up between the European Union and the United States. And ultimately, we reached, I think, a tipping point where the concerns that people are asking finally reached a point where somebody gave it a name. The economists called it tech lash. And that's what we've been talking about ever since.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There had been a number of incursions. The Sony, I would think the Sony, the North Korea hacking into Sony, there was all kinds of different things. Well, that brought into mind hacking versus privacy. But the fact that so much data was available, people's emails, things like that, and then the same was the case of the hacking of Hillary Clinton's emails.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always thought that privacy would be quiet until the day it became loud, that there would become a day when in effect we might face what I've referred to, what we talk about in the book as the equivalent of Three Mile Island. Right. Three Mile Island changed the face of the nuclear power sector in a day in 1979 and I think Cambridge Analytica. Did the same thing. It took until 2018, but I frankly always thought that they was going to come.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that was a prevailing view in the industry that privacy was dead, get over it. But to me, one of the interesting stories we share in the book is the White House meeting in December of 2013. Number of tech leaders were there. We were pushing the Obama White House. We were pushing President Obama to do more to put checks and balances on the NSA. And there was a point in this meeting when he looked at us and said, I have a suspicion the guns will turn. Your companies collectively have far more information about people than the government itself.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first thing I would say is it is actually unnatural. To have an extraordinarily close relationship that is entirely friendly between any, yeah, yeah, but between any major industry. And a government in a democratic country. There is usually a healthy tension that involves the government's interest in wanting the industry to succeed, but also wanting the industry to succeed in a way that ensures that, in effect, no industry or technology is above the law. Just as no person is supposed to be above the law Why did it take so long for regulators, leaders, the public to start asking questions about things like privacy? Because I think those were predictable.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The tech sector and the government, including the Obama White House, with whom the tech sector had a very friendly relationship. But interestingly enough, what we also saw was this continuing collection of more and more data. And then I think we hit the next real inflection point in 2018, and it was Cambridge Analytica. And in effect, the questions that had been asked about the government five years earlier were now being put forward against tech companies themselves. And we're now grappling with this wide array of issues and the halo is gone.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think of the 2000s as sort of this transition to the Internet era. That's when we saw search explode. It's when we saw the advent of touch-based computing and mobile explode. That is what further enabled social media to explode. And I think especially mobile basically was a huge step in making computing ubiquitous in all of our lives. Now let's look at this decade. I think the first transition point this decade was 2013 because that's the year when Edward Snowden shared a number of series with the world. And it did a number of things. I mean, first it opened people's eyes to how much data there was about themselves and how that could be accessed and used by governments. It created a bit of a split between”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think about digital technology, it's an incredible tool. I mean, I like to say it will help the world cure cancer. We need it to help address our environmental challenges. But it has been weaponized. It has been weaponized by other governments. We see cyber attacks. We see disinformation campaigns. We see issues around privacy. We see the potentially unintended consequences as we move quickly to artificial intelligence. Think about technologies like facial recognition. Think about just the gaps that are created when some people have access to broadband and skills and other people do not. So in short, we're at a critical inflection point, as we argue in the book, where technology is creating both opportunity and huge challenges. And as an industry, we need to acknowledge these challenges. We need to help address them just as Microsoft had to go through a cultural change as a company 20 years ago. We believe the tech sector needs to go through a cultural change over the next decade to find a way to keep moving fast, to innovate, but to”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Truly changed the world powerful and being a powerful industry because if you think about it, Wall Street, everything has a regulation. Almost every manufacturing, they all have some level of regulation. So let's set the table right now for where we are from your perspective. What would prompt you to write the book itself? It's called Tools and Weapons, the Promise and Peril of a Digital Age. Explain that headline for people who have not read it yet.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Regular laws. I mean, you certainly have issues of spectrum and the like that impact our industry, but One of the interesting things about digital technology is arguably the technology that has gone the longest period of time without regulation. In the history of almost any technology that has truly changed the world”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a really interesting point. There absolutely was a time in the late 90s when, as you point out, people looked at Microsoft, is Microsoft going to be a bank? Is Microsoft going to be a cable company? And you could just go on and on and on. And we did eventually learn that it's really hard to do the big things well if you're trying to do everything at the same time. We're still a diversified tech company, I would hasten to point out. But I think people rightly think of us as being more enterprise focused as well as consumer, but more enterprise.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is such an adequate for people Yeah, and Satya became CEO in 2014. And in a very interesting way, I think Satya took the cultural evolution of the 2000s and said, let's sustain this level of responsibility. Let's be committed to trust with customers as a core principle for the company. But let's add to this what he describes as a growth mindset, a real focus on Learn it all rather than know it all culture at Microsoft, and let's use that to unleash innovation, especially with more employees and perhaps most importantly, younger employees.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think we've gone, I think every company goes through a series of cultural stages. You don't have one cultural evolution and stop. Was first a definite cultural evolution in the 2000s when Steve was the CEO. Bill Gates was the chairman. And it was called We have to learn to get along. We have to build some bridges. We have to make peace with governments. We're going to have to. Agree to some restraints, and that's going to require processes and controls. Then in some ways that set the foundation for what I think of as the cultural evolution of this decade led by Satya.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learned a lot of things, but there's one in particular that always stands out to me. To look at ourselves in the mirror and see not what we wanted to see, but what other people saw in us. We had to accept a higher level of responsibility. We had to appreciate the concerns that other people had. I think we had to instill in ourselves a commitment, as we say in this book, look, when you create technology that changes the world, you have to accept some responsibility to address the world you have created. Right. That is what we learned in part.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I want to get to is that what did you learn from that period? See, most of it was Microsoft versus all of tech. That was sort of the Microsoft, this big, powerful company teching Netscape, attacking various companies. And what happened in the wake of that was all the creation of all these companies, Google's, the Ubers, everybody came. It wasn't necessarily a direct line. You couldn't draw a direct line, but tech underwent another period of renovation. That time, and Microsoft was seen as a very powerful player, very frightened. People were very frightened of it, and then it wasn't. What did you all learn there to how to behave? Because a lot of people are worried about this current period of regulation, which we'll get into in a second.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that there was an evolution. A court of appeals decided that the company wouldn't necessarily be broken up, but the company was found to be liable. There was a consent decree that was issued. There were further cases in Europe. There were a number of regulatory rules in effect imposed on Microsoft. And the whole decade of the 2000s was really, in many ways, spent adjusting to all of that and then seeking to emerge. With what I'll say is a sense of responsibility, perhaps more maturity, but also the kind of innovative spirit that I think we really feel you can see at Microsoft today. Absolutely.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think that actually is a fair characterization. When I look back, it really was almost what I would describe the first collision between information technology and the world. It was a big international set of issues. Of course, it ended up exploding. It ended up with the Department of Justice and 20 states seeking and initially obtaining in order to break up the company from a district court. It led to antitrust cases in 26 other countries. We had to adjust. We had to learn. We had to go through a lot of what I think the tech sector as a whole is increasingly confronting today.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason I want to stress it is because what's happening today, Microsoft was the first there to deal with government interest in technology because there hadn't per se been much regulation of technology in any way whatsoever.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is some truth to that. I had done work as a lawyer, including in the antitrust field. And the company's first antitrust investigation actually started in 1990, and the first really big negotiation with governments was in 1994. So I'd only been at the company several months. And it was a joint negotiation between Microsoft and the Department of Justice and the European Commission. I was part of that process.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Put it in perspective when I joined Microsoft, the company had about 4,000 employees. Today it has 140,000 employees. Wanted to work for Microsoft in part because I was an avid user and fan of the company's products. I bought Microsoft Word version 1.0 the day it came out and I've been using versions of Word ever since. I could see what the operating system business was doing in terms of how it was changing the face of computing. I was impressed at the time because I felt Microsoft was a company with a long-term vision. And indeed, if you compare the Microsoft at the time to the other companies in the industry, Lotus, WordPerfect, Novell. There's a common theme. Microsoft is still here. Those were great companies as well, but it turned out Microsoft did have the right long-term right.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've been at Microsoft since 1993, as you said. 26 years. I was a lawyer with a law firm. I worked in London and DC before that. Really started my career representing the PC software industry as it was expanding into your Europe in the late 80s and early 90s and then made the jump across the English Channel.”
2019-09-09 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Microsoft President Brad Smith · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT