Transcripts For KRCB Charlie Rose 20130816

Have . I dont well, i think some people whoist withfully look back to the blue blazers and the brass buttons and the cute little ties with, you know, theyll miss the traditions of the americas cup which goes back to 1851. Its the oldest trowny sports. Rose Larry Ellison for the hour, next. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. Rose Larry Ellison is the founder and c. E. O. Of oracle, the thirdrichest man of the United States said to be worth 43 billion. Hes also the sponsor and manager of oracle team u. S. A. , the american sailing name the 2013 americas cup competition. Next month in San Francisco oracle team u. S. A. Will defend the trophy at it wop in 2010. Thanks to new rules ellison pioneered this years boats will be faster and more expensive than any craft in the races 162yearold history. Last week on assignment for cbs this morning i spoke with ellison at his home south of San Francisco. We talked about his team, his philosophy and his friendship with the late steve jobs. Here is that conversation. I ought to say as we begin, for inviting us to this remarkable place. Welcome back, charlie, its great to see you again. Rose someone said to me i asked them to describe you and they said larry likes to win. I think i do. I do like to win. Let me say i like to compete. And i like to discover my own limits. I like to test my own limits. Sometimes i like to test the limits of technology. But i enjoy the competition. I enjoy, if you will, the fight. And if you enjoy the fight and Work National guard the fight youll win a fair share of the fights. Rose so what is winning the americas cup mean . Well, im not going to answer that we question because someone asked me what does it mean is it worth 100 million to win the americas cup and i said i dont know, ive never won. Then in 2010 we built this amaze magazine, this trimaran with the 23 story tall wing mast and we won the americas cup. Team u. S. A. Won the americas cup for the first time. And it was the end of a very long quest that had become a bit of an obsession. Rose why . Its an interesting question. I thought i i thought that i could put a Team Together its a combination of technology and athletes. Its the blending of Great Technology and great athletes and i thought i could do this as well as anybody. Ive been very successful as a sailor myself. Ive been very successful as an amateur sailor. Very successful as a professional sailor and the next step, the next natural step in the evolution of competition and sailing is the americas cup. Rose so this is more than some very wealthy billionaire saying im going to go out and buy the best boat and the best talent and then ill win for myself and americas cup . Well, the first americas cup we did in new zealand i ended up driving the boat a lot of the time and well, we lost. laughs i shared the driving with Peter Holmberg and we werent doing very well and i pulled myself off the boat, brought back, peter did all the driving, we brought back a tactician, its long story. But we ended up losing in the final of the Louis Vuitton cup this team from switzerland skippered by the worlds greatest sailor, russell coates. And i just should have known better. Rose so youll pull Larry Ellison off the boat if it means winning the americas cup for Larry Ellison . Absolutely. I want to be part of a winning team and if it helps a team for win to me to get off the boat i want to get off the boat. Rose these new boats, is theyre not without criticism. Why is it necessary . Some people say its not the americas cup. Weve gone too far. People critized professional athletes going into the olympics. People dont like change. There was the corinthian spirit of athletics where professionals were looked down upon, only amateurs were allowed to compete. Professional tennis players were banned from wimbledon. A lot of people didnt like the new metal racket where you can hit the ball harder. A bunch of people dont like the olympics now because weve added skateboarding and rose well, its different. This is not a modification, this is a draw dramatic change. Well, i would say that snowboarding is a dramatic change in addition to the olympics. Were modernizing the sport. So it used to be i sailed a boat called sayonara that i raced around the world that could have killed the americas cup champion. The americas cup they werent racing the fastest boats. And we decided that the americas cup to capture the imagination of the modern world and children who can watch all these other sports, we had to modernize it, we had to make it extreme. Rose is there a cost of that . I dont well, i think some people whoist withfully look back to the blue blazers and the brass buttons and the cut little ties with the flags on it, theyll miss the traditions of the americas cup which goes back to 1851. Its the oldest trophy in sports. Rose what do you say the new tradition of the americas cup is . Fastest boats, the best sailors. So we have the best professional sailors who are incredibly fit driving these unbelievably fast boats to their limits. So its the limit to what Technology Allows in 21st century sailing. Rose let me go back to the original question. You have won the americas cup. You dont need to win it twice. laughs rose laughs so what is it within Larry Ellison who said man, i won it once, i want the fastest boat, the best sailors and i want to win it again and maybe again . Well its funny, because i realized after losing the americas cup twice i was just my personality didnt allow me to quit while im losing. And after winning the americas cup i discovered my personality doesnt want me to quit while im winning laughs rose laughs so im kind of trapped i just cant quit. I dont know. I guess other people have that trouble with cigarettes. I dont smoke but i do sail. Rose but if you win this time will that be enough . Well, its not a matter of person satisfaction right now. Its a matter of we represent our country, this is team u. S. A. Were going to be competing defending the americas cup in the United States and we have a bunch of guys who committed the last several years of their lives to designing these boats, building these boats, making these boats sail as fast as they possibly can and i certainly owe it to them to give it 100 effort, to do whatever i can to help the people win. Rose why do you think San Francisco is such a great place for racing . Its just so beautiful. Rose that it . The beauty rather than the winds . We do have consistent winds. We have wonderful consistent winds. You can rely on the wind coming in about 1 00 every afternoon and getting good breeze and having sailboat races. One of the problems with sailing and televising sailing by the way, this is the other thing. We have to make the sport spectacular, we have to make it spectacular on t. V. Because theres only so much so many people that will watch this race. More people will watch this americas cup race than all of the americas cup races in history because all the americas cup races in history have been offshore. This one is in a harbor. So we have people from Office Buildings and their homes from the shore watching the race as it goes on. So its accessible. But even more important its accessible on t. V. Because its now spectacular graphics that help nonsailors understand whats going out on the water. Rose theres this some people say you want to make it nascar on water. laughs rose and people go to nascar to see the crashes. They do. Im going to get in trouble. Im not a nascar fan or a formula 1 fan. I think this is better. And we dont want to see anybody get hurt. It is certainly true that when russell coots flipped the a. C. 45 a couple of years ago no one would talk to us until then. None of the networks would talk to us until there was this fabulous Youtube Video of the a. C. 45 and russell coots our c. E. O. And the worlds most decorated sailor falling through the wing and fortunately he was not hurt. But all of a sudden all of the networks wanted to broadcast. Rose so you were saying once it became this fast with this boat it became dangerous and that made it more attractive . I think we like the illusion of danger, not real danger. Rose its not illusion, though. Well, these boats theyve in portsmouth we had six or seven of them flip over and we had no nobody seriously hurt ever in the 45s. The accident that we had on the swedish boat was a freak accident. There was a structural failure on the boat. The two holes are held together by cross beams and where the cross beam attached to the hull, those bolts sheared and the boat went from a rectangular boat and to a triangular boat and bart simpson was trapped between the two hulls and we couldnt find him for seven minutes so we had divers in the water 30 seconds after that boat flipped over. Im told the death of simpson really had an impact on you. Oh, yeah. We decided to make this an extreme sport, to make it exciting. We certainly never intended anyone to be hurt. The Sailing Community is a very small community. Its a small world. There arent that many people that do this. Like professional tennis, Everybody Knows anybody and when you lose one of your in, its you know, its something you never, ever forget. Rose did you for a moment say weve gone too far . I thought about it. I thought about it. But no, i think weve made the right decision. I think to make this sport an economically viable sport we have to have fast, modern boats. It has to be a popular t. V. Sport. It has to be attractive to kids. Rose and it has to be risky . It has to look a bit risky. It has to be a little risky. This is extreme sailing and these are highly skilled professionals who are superb athletes. We had all the guys carry oxygen. Rose since simpsons death . They carried oxygen before simpsons death. We carry knives. We wear helmets, we wear body armor so we can cut ourself free if were trapped below. Weve taken we think, every precaution, this was just absolutely a freak accident that caused the loss of bart simpson and none of us will forget it. Rose you have faced death before. That day, on that boat you thought you survived but there were moments in which you didnt think you were going to survive. Or not . Well, i wouldnt say i didnt think i was going to survive. I certainly thought we might die and i said what the a stupid way to die. Who in their right mind flies to australia for a race on december 26 when their family is in the caribbean on the beach . Im on a sailboat sailing south. Rose in a storm. In a hurricane. And i ended up spending two days in a hurricane. Rose what was that like . Well, we had a couple of guys on the boat who had been in vietnam and they said one guy turned to me and said you want to know what combat is like . This is what combat is like. Can you taste the adrenaline in your mouth in . Do you notice youre not blinks . Do you notice you never get tired . Notice how everything slows down . Notice how if youre hurt you dont care or even notice . It is youre in an altered state. Theres no fear. Theres i wouldnt call it calmness. Theres an intense focus on doing your job. Rose and how much did you like this . I didnt like it at all. I didnt dislike it. I didnt have any theres no kind of all i did was when i was driving. When i was on deck and when i was driving all i did was focus on my job. When i went below to try to rest and thought thought about it i thought boy, this is a stupid way to spend your christmas new years holiday. Sailing in a hurricane is not something i ever want to do again. Rose why are there only four boats entered here . I think a couple things. The boats are brand new. In the mooup a lot of the teams are on strict budgets and what they do is buy used boats from the previous americas cup campaign. So there was no inexpensive way to get into the this americas cup. So these boats are more expensive than we realized when we designed the class rule, these 72 footers. Theyre pretty expensive to build and transport around the world. The World Economy when we started the americas cup was really in the tank so the combination of these boats are, i think, too expensive and the fact that the World Economy is just coming rose did that do some damage to the sport . Its gotten to the point where only a very few people can compete . Well, i think were going to look at a it next time around and make sure that two things will be true next time around. One, there will be used boats on the market if we go back to 72s, or we might conduct the next americas cup in 45foot catamarans. Also very extreme foiling, fly cat ma rance. We think it would be a spectacular event in 45s and i think its very important to have more countries participating. We want the chinese. We want the japanese. We want the french and the germans. We want the brits. We want the south africans. Rose what do you have to do to get them . We have to control the budget. We have to make it economically rose so you cant by your way to the americas cup . So theres no big economic barrier to keep other countries out. Rose so should you change the side size of the boat . Were looking of going to 45s. Rose do you believe thats the way to go . Im leaning that way and so is russell coots. Rose why are both of you leaning that way . Because we want more countries to participate and lower the economic barriers. Rose is it safer or less safe . I think the 45s are considerably safer. Rose exactly. That may be a factor, too. Its all factors. We flip the 45s a lot. The 45 is an extreme sport. People arent going to get killed on those things. The 72s, theres much more potential for someone being hurt. Rose whats the difference between running oracle and running an americas cup challenge . I think theyre kind of 2 t same thing different skill. Rose skills are the same . Hire great people, you have to hire great engineers, because the design of the boat can make all the difference. These boats are not identical so you can get significant advantages in the race by designing a lighter faster boat, a foiling boat with more lift and less drag. So you have to have great engineers, you have to have great athletes, you have to have great managers, leaders, great marketing. You have to design the boat, make it beautiful. In this case we had i tone company that has done all of the technology for the t. V. Broadcasts. Rose back to racing, grant dell on the said this is yachting, not formula one, and with all of the will of oracle, he said, it is not nascar. Well, it interesting that he said this is yachting not formula 1. I dont even know what that means. Yachting. What is yachting . This is professional racing. We have sponsors, the sponsors want as many people to see these boats in action as possible. Were competing with other sports to get kids attention and we want weve got to make our sport exciting and weve got to modernize it. It cant be unchanged since 85 rose what is it about Larry Ellison that made oracle what it is . I think the thing that caused problemings for me in school are the same things that help med succeed in the world. I always question conventional wisdom. So just because someone says its so doesnt mean its so. They have to explain why its so. Mark twain has a great line. Whats an expert . Just some guy from out of town. Rose laughs so people said he doesnt respect authority. I respect ideas and arguments and reasoning and facts. But just because someone says, you know, this is true doesnt mean its true. You have to be able to explain it. So when i started so i would question teachers in school. I just didnt shut up and do what youre told. I wasnt very good at shutting up and doing what youre told. And i think that creates problems in Grammar School and high school. However, in the Technology World if you can find errors in conventional wisdom, if you can if everyone says this is true that relational databases can never run as fast as come vengs commercial databases, thats what the conventional wisdom and i studied the papers from i. B. M. And others and studied relational calculus and relational algebra and decided conventional wisdom was wrong, you could build a system that rabb at least as fast as the current commercial systems from i. B. M. And we went out and built it and it did run as fast and turned out that was worth a lot of money. Rose your father was a conformist. He conformed. My father was an immigrant from russia and was so intensely grateful that to be here, and certainly understandable, that he thought that whatever the government said you should do because the government just knew things we didnt. Rose you have said before about your father that he thought me what he was was what i did not want to be. Um yeah, i believe you should think before you believe. And believing before you think is a very is not a it might be fine for some things, to do what youre told. In the military, i mean, thats you have to do that, i think, to some degree. So there are some institutions where they really drill that into you. Rose you cant have 100 people doing what they think. No. Rose i think you said once ive had all the disadvantages required for success. I stole that from tim rice. It comes from evita. She had all the disadvantages she needed to succeed. I love tim rice, i think hell brilliant. But, yeah, no, i have another line if it doesnt kill you, it makes you stronger. So i think i was told so often i wouldnt amount to anything that i was very determined to rose amount to something. To amount to something. Exactly. laughs or die trying. Rose have you mellowed at all . Some say you have. Some say hes not as angry, not as yeah, i think thats right. I think the rough edges have come off. So i joke about it. My nature much more and i take myself less seriously. Again, im not angry. But i think im as competitive as i ever was. I think its just a you know, a nice laughs rose laughs a certain veneer of charm in front of the same intensity. laughs rose a veneer of charm is hard . A veneer of charm took a long time rose you believe the cloud is what do you believe, is the question . Well, im i was very critical of the term cloud when it first showed up and then suddenly something mark at salesforce. Com and net suite had been doing for 11 years was brand new. It was like how can this be . In fact, the first modern Cloud Company was invented by guess who . Me . Net suite was the first modern Cloud Company. It was the year before salesforce. Com. But we didnt call it cloud, we called it software as a service and mark called it software as a service and then later on ten years later, five years ago, lets say, five years ago this new term, this new thing came out and called the e. C. 2. Amazon elastic compute cloud. And the word cloud is just a cool term. And all of a sudden this very charismatic term cloud which is applied to amazon, mark said ahha us, too were also clouds. And net suite said were cloud. Now each is going to all those bornagain cloud companies. Rose its a big element of the future . Theres no doubt that, you know, the Business Model of rather than you buying a computer and you buying software instead you rent you buy a service on the internet is kind of a utility model of computing. Thats how you buy electricity. You dont have your own generator. You dont put gas into a gasoline engine and generate your own electricity in your house. You plug into a network. A utility model and you get a monthly bill. So Cloud Computing is really using the internet to deliver services as a utility model and suddenly basically computing is adopting the same model as all other networks. So we buy water from the Water Utility and we pay based on how much we use. We buy electricity based on electricity utility. And now theres this extraordinary new idea called the cloud we buy computing and output software and hardware and you pay based on how much you use. Its basically the same its really computing catching up to the same exact model as every other network. But everyone said oh, my god, its the cloud. Great, you want to use that term for utility computing im all for it. If thats what you insist on doing. But to claim its this incredibly new thing and youre either cloud or not cloud, the hype around it just drove me crazy. Rose what have you missd . Did you miss could you have been a bigger force in other aspects if you had spoken beyond and focused on things beyond the obvious growth of oracle . Well, i think i know people have said god, Larry Ellison missed the cloud. Rose exactly. I can pretty persuasively tell you that i invented the cloud. I invented the network computer. Steve jobs made it popular. Well, at least i popularize it had idea, we never came up with a good product. But certainly the first modern Cloud Company i started and its called net suite. Oracle started moving all of its applications to the cloud over eight years ago and this is a project called fusion applications. So not only did we not miss the cloud, ever since the internetanyahu big we us to we have focused all ofous technology onen the internet and our slogan used to be the internet changes everything. And we talked about the utility model for a long time. Now, because i ridiculed the use of the term cloud people have jumped on to that and said gee, Larry Ellison, hes an idiot. He doesnt get the cloud. Rose when they talk now, they talk about the big race out here is between the four horsemen, they say google, amazon, apple, facebook. Do you think thats accurate . Well, these are all consumer oriented companies. So were thrilled to not be in any of those businesses. So we dont compete with any of those guys. So the consumer the consumer guys sell web Services Google maps, they sell cool devices, iphones by the way, i would say much bigger in devices, you left out the most forbidable of all companies, samsung. Samsung is an Extraordinary Company and to be reckoned with. Rose clearly to be reckoned with when you look at the record and the amount of revenue that theyre churning. Its maybe the Number One Technology company in the world. Rose do you admire them for their tactics . Rose these guys . Rose yeah. Well, google took the job of programming language and put it into the android phone. They cloned basically they cloned it. Which we think which we sued them for. And the jury actually found they did infringe on our copyrights and the judge said that that doesnt matter because youre not allowed to copyright that stuff. Now its going up to appeal. So, no, i think what google did was unethical and actually dangerous to take our intellectual property java and make a copy of it and put in the their phone. Rose has anything samsung done been unethical in your judgment . No. Rose so theyre a good citizen . The only people i have trouble with are the google guys. Rose really . Larry and sergei you have trouble with . I larry specifically. Rose larry per say in yeah, larry per se. Rose why . Because he runs that company. No one else runs that company. And they decided let me be very clear. When you program, when you write a program for the android phone, you write it, you use the oracle java tools for everything. Rose so you think theyre evil . I think what they did was absolutely rose and you blame larry snaij 100 larry paige. Rose so what they did is evil that makes larry paige evil . It makes what he did evil which is quite different. And i know his slogan is dont be evil. Rose exactly, and thats what im talking about. He slipped up this one time. Rose h add a good guy except when he i this really bothers me. I dont see how he thinks you can just copy someone elses stuff. It really bothers me. Rose lets talk about steve jobs. Yeah, my best friend for 25 years. Rose you talk about in the book the billionaire and the mechanic and also you were there. I mean, steve obviously knew he was dying and he knew who he wanted to speak and he thought about dying. Johnny spoke, family spoke, and you spoke. Am i missing somebody . No. Rose and what did you want to say about your friend . Well, i wanted to i want to talk about my friendship with steve, what it was like and a little bit about what steve was really like because i think i think the biographys that have been written, they dont really capture what drove him. Rose including Walter Isaacsons . Especially Walter Isaacson. I think Walter Isaacson didnt like steve and just had a problem admitting to his essential genius and giving him credit for doing what he did. He didnt like what steve gave up in order to do what he did. Steve gave up steve was so single mindedly focused on apple and building things. Building extraordinary thing that he neglected other aspects of his life. But we all benefited. Rose like what . Oh, i was his best friend. He didnt have lots of friends. He didnt have a very active social life. He adored his family. But there was his family, his children and his wife lorraine and then there was apple which is the which was his big family. And he was completely committed to making apple the most Successful Company on the planet earth. Rose and he did. And he sure did. And he was interested in taking a lever and moving the world. And he did. Rose so tell me about it. What is it about him . We recognize the fact that he loved apple, he wanted to make apple great and he did. But what was it about him that enabled them to do it other than he worked hard . He was brilliant. He was our edison. He was our picasso. He was incredible inventor. He could take other peoples idea henry ford didnt invent the car but henry ford with the model t made the first affordable car that everyone loved. And everyone lots of people bought. He really revolutionized the industry. Rose you could have it in any color you like as long as it was black. As long as it was black. And he was obsessed in the same sense that ford with the model he was obsessed about making an mp3 player easy to use and affordable and the first product rose something you should have thought sony would do. Absolutely. But it was the Software Component of the mp3 player that apple and the beautiful design that they did. So the first ipods came not from sony but from apple. Steve also decided, rather brilliantly, why should i compete with microsoft and bang my head against the wall when i can compete with sony instead . Wed go on these long walks and hed say who do you want to compete with . Microsoft or sony . Ill take sony every day of the week because im a Software Company and sony was not. Sony was a Hardware Company. You can kill a Hardware Company because most hardware products like an ipod, certainly an iphone are 95 software. Rose but bill gates believed the same thing. Rose steve had a wonderful aesthetic sense he was a rare person. He was a brilliant design engineer. He was obsessive about every little detail of the product. He was absolutely obsessed. I can recall oracle did Checkout Software in the apple stores and we would go to he and i would go up there every weekend. It drove me nuts. Rose this is when he was developing the apple stores. And everyone said stores were ridiculous, dell was the hot company. Everyone knew you sold on the internet, bricks and mortar was stupid. That was 20th century, this was 21st century, steves dead. So steves Building Stores and he wanted to make the store the experience in the store very very different. The checkout experience, how you pay for things, bought things, what the store looked like. And he was involved in every excruciating detail of the entire store experience with the store. Looked like and how you pay for it. He was involved in every design detail. Johnny odd is a great designer but steve edited rose but they were spiritual brothers. Johnny will tell you, steve edited those designs and just like a good writer needs a good editor, johnny i. V. Is locked as editor. Rose but steve would be the first to say just like you say he hired really great people. Johnny ive being one of them. Rose he cant do it without steve. Apple rose wait, wait, wait. What happens to apple without steve . Well, we already know. Rose what . We saw we conducted this experiment and its been done. We saw apple with steve jobs, we saw apple without steve jobs. We saw apple with steve jobs. Now were going to see apple without steve jobs. Rose so youre shorting apple . Im not shorting apple. I like tim cook, there are a lot of talented people. Rose you just said apple is going down without steve jobs. Thats exactly what you said. Apple is going down without steve jobs. Okay, ill say it publicly. Hes irreplaceable. I dont see how they can they will not be nearly so successful because hes gone. You can already feel it, he made all the decisions. He ran everything. He made every single decision. I know he loved to share the credit and thats fine, but im telling you, he made every single decision. I was there, i watched it. For 25 years. He made every he decided how you how you paid how you checked out of the apple store. He decided where things were in the apple store. He picked the colors of the original imacs. Sorry no beige was his. A thousand songs in your pocket was his. Rose laughs i hear you. The name ipad, i tunes, iphone were his. Rose remember when you when he was in at apple and then he was out at apple and you wanted to finance him to return to apple and he said no. Yup. Rose and we were at Castle Rock State Park which is just kind of over by the coast, about a 40minute drive from here and we used to go for these long walks in castle rock and i was telling steve that id raise the money it cost 5 billion to buy apple and it was run by the a fellow by the name of gill amelio. Rose you could have bought it . I was going to buy it. Rose you had 5 billion . I was going to raise it. A combination of my own cash and raising some doing boor roing. And i was going to give him 25 of the company and wed take it private and steve would run it and steve said, you know, larry, the ihink i figured out how i can get control of apple without you having to buy it. Rose did he do that for you or for him . Because he did not want he wanted the independence of not having you there . Well, not exactly. Let me be precise because ill never forget this conversation as long as i live. I said i think i can get them to by next computer and ill go on the board and i think board will realize im a better c. E. O. Than gill amelio and ill become c. E. O. I said okay, but steve, if we dont buy apple how do we make any money with you running it . And this is when steve turned and looked at me and he placed his left hand on my right shoulder and his right hand on my Left Shoulder and got very close to me and he said larry, this is why its so important that im your friend. You dont need any more money. laughter rose sounds like something david geffen would say. He says that all the time. And i started to wine. I said i know i dont need anymore money but why should ned johnson at fidelity get it . Why shouldnt we get it . We dont have to keep it we could give it away. We could give it to whoever you want. We could do good things with this money. He said no, no, larry, i dont want you to buy the company. He said im not doing this for money. I think if i go back to apple i think its a very important i have the moral high ground moral high ground . Thats the most expensive real estate on the face of the earth youre going to go back and make ned johnson richer laughs rose laughs for people who dont know, ned johnson owns fidelity. Theres still some money on the east coast. Im literally wining. Im wining. And finally, were walking, i finally start laughing, its so ridiculous, the whole thing. What a strange life. Weve come a long way and here we are these two adopted kids lower middleclass families Walking Around deciding whether we should buy apple or laughs the whole thing is crazy. And finally i said steve, ill do whatever you want know do. And i went on the board. Rose did you watch him die . Close. Close. Was i think at the last rose no, but you watched him go through i saw you know, id go over there all the time the walks we always go for walks. Wed always go for walks and the walks just kept getting shorter until near the end wed kind of walk around the block or maybe four blocks, Something Like that and you just watched him getting weaker. This was the strongest guy i knew. This was absolutely the strongest most willful person i have ever met. And after seven years the cancer even wore him out. And that was what it was. He was just tired of fighting. And he decided shocked lorraine, shocked everybody that the medication was going to stop. He just pulled off the meds i think on a saturday or a sunday and by the following wednesday he was gone. Rose i want to talk about a political issue here. Where do you come down on what n. S. A. Is doing . Well, the grehing is we live a democracy. If we dont like what n. S. A. Is doing we can get rid of the government and put in a different government. I think actually weve been collecting this information for so long, and long before n. S. A. Was collecting it. Let me tell you who was collecting it american express, visa, all of your credit card data we have all of your financial records. This whole issue of privacy is utterly fascinating to me. For example, we could do a much better job in the whole new area of privacy which is medical records. Rose right. If we could take our medical records and put them in a database we could then figure out what drugs worked for what people. So we take all the medical records then all the gino mick data about the people and we put in the a database and figure out what therapies theyre getting, what therapies work and dont work because theres this big database where you should take lipitor, you should take crestor. It could be very scientific. We could do a draw dramatically better job of treating people. Wed save money, reduce suffering. Do we do that . No. Everyones scared to death about privacy. So were not doing that. People are very concerned. So we just set that aside. People are very concerned that the n. S. A. Gathering all this information about people and misusing it. Theyre supposed to be looking for terrorists. Everyone once in a while it is true they probably hand off information to the d. E. A. To go after a drug kingpin. They do do that. How terrible is that . So whos ever heard of more information being misused by the government . In what way . What example in court . Whos gone to court and said well, i was arrested or they got me because the n. S. A. The n. S. A. Somehow has misused this data. Rose youre saying whatever the n. S. A. Doing is okay with me with . I think its great. What is the problem with that. Were finding murderers, the number of assaults are down, rapes are down, crimes are being solved at a much higher rate. Were giving up privacy. Let me tell you where americans voluntarily gave up all their privacy. They gave up all of their privacy im going to tell you how much i make, where i bought my car, ill tell you what hotels i stay in, what airlines i ride, how much is my checking account, should have in my banking account, how many overdrafts. Ill give you all that information about me in exchange for a visa card. America has given up essentially all of their not all of their privacy, not their medical records, but a huge amount of privacy in exchange to make shopping more convenient. So here are the hierarchy. Im willing to give up huge amounts of privacy in order to get a credit card to make shopping more convenient. Well, how much privacy are you willing to give up to save a million lives through Better Health care . How much privacy are you willing to give up to save a million lives or a hundred thousand lives or a thousand lives by sbe interdicting terrorism . I know of no case recently under the obama administration, under the bush administration, under the Clinton Administration where the n. S. A. s databases have been abused and anyones liberties have been curtailed. I cant name a single case. Nor can the new york times. Now this is a funny confluence where we have libertarians in government on the republican side of the aisle and progressives on the democratic side of the aisle kind of coming together to protect our liberties. But i cant think of where our liberties have been infridged, i cant think of one example. Rose so the way can t system is working just fine with you. I wish the system was working better. I wish we had caught the guys in boston and we are making the systems better and better and better. But thank god that snowden has gone to russia, a country known for its high standards of the rule of law and human rights. So im sure hes very comfortable with his rose do you think he damaged our National Security by what he did . I think no. I think rose do you think hes a traitor . I think lets talk about Bradley Manning. All those wikileaks exposed the names of dissidents in countries where it was very dangerous to be a dissent. So willynilly, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning as a pair caused a lot of people just to disappear, a lot of dissidents to disappear from the streets by releasing their names. Did it hurt our so people willing to cooperate with the United States, if our stuff gets published like this, people willing to cooperate with us in the dissidents in iran, dissidents in ecuador, you name it, people who cooperate with us will think twice before they work of us before they think their name will suddenly show up on the internet because this data comes out. It makes it much harder for us to rose at what point would it be alarming for you in terms of government surveillance . At what point would your red line be crossed . If the government used it to do political targeting. If the democrats used it to go after republicans. If the republicans used it to go after democrats. In other words, if it became a if we stoppeded looking for terrorists and we started looking for people with on the other side of the aisle. So the second the republicans use this information to pursue their political enemies, thats a huge problem. But i know of no case of that. Democrats using this information to pursue rose that raises the other question. The chinese are hacking us like crazy. Yes . Yes, they are. Rose probably the red army . P. L. A. , yes. No question. Rose and the government knows, that, obviously. Yes. Rose some private and they know that, too. Yup. Rose the object is both private company as well as the pentagon. Absolutely. So theres no doubt that my that disco had a lot of its secrets stolen so theres a lot of by the way, it happens in france. I remember when i used to travel to france, the French Intelligence Services would search rose bug the hotel room. Bug the hotel room, take my computers. Ive offended people but i dont think it happens anymore but it used to. When i used to go to france they would search everything. So a lot of the Intelligence Services have been enlisted to do industrial espionage. I guess its kind of no conventional words, just business words. Rose you seem like a man who has a good time with life. This isnt practice. laughs up with of your original partners, robert minor, died at age 52. Right. Rose cancer . Yes. Rose did that have an impact on you . It did. My mother died of cancer. A lot of my family have died of cancer, a lot of my friends is v died of cancer. It particularly bothered me with bob because bob was so slow to get proper medical care so he chose not to seek specialists and that really bothered me. Rose some say steve did the same thing. Steve ran his own agenda to a large degree. When youre a control freak, youre a control freak. Rose is this assumption that you are in search of the youll fund every Research Project that you can find thats meritorious that will help us understand aging and help us live a longer fuller life. Is that true . No. Rose is it a myth, then, that Larry Ellison is obsessed by the fountain of youth and somehow hell pay any amount of money to find the keys to immortality . You can know exactly how much i spend. I have a medical foundation that spends money on diseases of age so i do a lot of investigations on diseases of cancer, for example. Rose diabetes is a degenerative disease. Heart disease. Exactly. There are lots of them. So were clearly more vulnerable to different diseases as we get older and its amazing how little we know about the fundmental mechanisms of aging. So i have a medical foundation that does fundamental research, whether its teal owe mears getting shorter. Rose it has to do with cell structure, right sngt aging, it turns out, is a very complicated thing. Rose are we understanding more and finding more about it and if we are what result will it lead to . Well, i think it will lead to therapies for specific kinds of diseases. I doubt if were going to be turning the clock back any time soon. That would be a great Science Fiction novel, though. Can you imagine if people stopped dying . But, you know, in the foreseeable future, certainly the bad news is its not going to help you or i, charlie. laughs rose laughs maybe at some point well figure this out to the point where we can actually reverse aging. But thats many, many you know, thats a few generations away. But what we can do and what we have done started a lot of that research and we have made useful progress and better understanding a lot of these diseases. Rose we havent focused much on oracle. Oracle is doing okay . I think oracle is doing very well. Rose you have a great successor over there . You seem to be able to develop a successor. I think there are a lot of people that can run oracle. I think mark hurd could do it. Rose you have just today me that steve jobs was such a genius and so driven and so talented that he was irreplaceable and that when that company lost him it lost part of its future. Yeah. Rose is that true with Larry Ellison . I think were a very different kind of company than apple. Our stock has a much longer life cycle than apple. The problem with consumer products, again, these the consumer companies, youre a little bit like a rock band. Okay, this cool telephone and then, you know, six months later someone got the cooler telephone and everyone starts buying that. Someone has a better movie. Our database has been around now for 25 years and has become the standard for 25 years in more and more of the world as information is going to into our database. So its a so the Technology Cycle, very, very fast for telephones. The Technology Cycle if the, if you will, the back office, much slower. So i think we have a wealth of talent and we have a couple of engineers, specifically one of the engineers could run the company. Saffir could run the company. So i think we have three able people that could take over from what im doing. Rose thank you for doing this. Pleasure to see you again in such extraordinary surroundings. Great to see you. Thanks, charlie. Captioning sponsored by Rose Communications captioned by Media Access Group at wgbh access. Wgbh. Org 08 15 13 08 15 13 [captioning made possible by democracy now ] from pacifica, this is democracy now we are facing a massacre, or even a war of genocide. This is unprecedented even in conventional wars. Been least 525 people have killed as Egyptian Security forces cracked down onto to protest camps filled with supporters of ousted president mohamed morsi. The Muslim Brotherhood says the actual death toll tops 2000