I'm Nicola Tangan, the CEO of the Norwegian SN wealth fund, and today I'm in really good company because I'm here with Ruth Porat, the president and chief investment officer of Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google.

Now, of course, Google needs no introduction, but Alphabet, in addition, also makes self-driving cars, AI chips, it owns YouTube, and many more things.

And we own 1.3% of the company, totaling roughly $30 billion.

So, big welcome, Ruth, it's great to be with you, thank you. Who is going to win the AI race?

Well, we feel we're in a really strong position for a number of reasons.

I think when you look at the history of Google focused on AI, we started many, many years ago, and at this point, we have a very differentiated approach, which starts with the extraordinary team we have.

led by Demis Hassabis, who obviously just won the Nobel Prize.

That goes to the strength of the models, you look at what we're doing on chips with our TPUs.

And then we're already really using it across our various platforms, so billions of people are benefiting from AI.

So this full-stack approach, we think, is an important element.

That being said, what's exciting to see is how much innovation there is broadly, and so what we're looking at is the opportunity, I think collectively globally, to have an unlock from the upside given the innovation that we're seeing, not just at Google, but at other places.

So is it now a matter of who's got the best people or the most money or the best data or the best chips, what is it, what is it about? Well, the reason I started with what we're really proud of, our full-stack approach from talent and models to the platforms and chips, is it really is taking this full-stack approach.

And I think very importantly, this intense focus on innovation and continuing to push forth.

You know, one of the things that really struck me when Demis was awarded the Nobel Prize this last fall, and he was asked what was it that really started him on this journey, and he said what motivates him is to take on the most intractable, what were thought to be the most intractable problems facing humanity.

And I think that ethos is another really important element of how one continues to drive forth and have the biggest impact with AI.

Do you think generative AI can be monetized the same way as search is? I think generative AI is continuing to enable us and others to expand kind of the quality of what is being delivered across a wide set of opportunities.

So just to give you two examples, you know, I'm often asked where do we, where are we investing extensively, and probably not surprisingly, you know this well, given how close you are to all that we've been doing, but search remains so core to who we are, and we've evolved search meaningfully over the years.

And we're continuing to apply generative AI to what is that experience that one has when you search, and what we're finding is that it opens the types of queries that are being explored, it goes for a deeper, richer engagement, so that's one area.

The other area that's really important is what we're seeing on the enterprise side, and the ability to help companies and the public sector transform their businesses and their approach, whether it's engaging with customers or on the efficiency side or on risk analytics or with constituents, each of those provides opportunity for monetization.

Some of your competitors say that you were a bit slow out of the box when it came to AI models, but your latest Gemini is phenomenal, so what happened here? Well, Google search for decades has really stood for extraordinary quality.

It's what everybody around the globe expects of us when you go to Google, quality answer very rapidly surfaced for you in the most potent way, and one of the very important questions for us, Sundar talked about this in the early days of generative AI, internally we were all talking about the risk of hallucination.

And that term now is very well known quite broadly, and one of the concerns is if you in the middle of the night wake up, your child is sick, you want to figure out how much Tylenol to give to a three-year-old, there can be no margin for error.

Yeah, that's what our brand stands for, and so it's very important to us to make sure that as we were evolving and applying generative AI, we did it in a way that was consistent with the quality that's expected appropriately from Google.

And I appreciate your question because what you've seen is the really ongoing momentum in models and introducing models more broadly externally, what we've done with, for example, AI Overviews, where when you search, you'll get this kind of an AI cockpit is the way I like to think about it.

You're seeing more and things like a model advancement that can be applied in other applications, and so we're excited about the momentum that people have seen through 2024 and what is ahead in 2025.

Talking a you told the late you call the latest model for um the model for the agentic area what what does that mean or what what do you put in that.

So that's one area that I know Sundar and Demis and the team are really excited about, which is how can AI actually be an agent working on our behalf, how can it help you do some of the administrative tasks that are going to make your life easier and actually free you up to do something else, book a reservation for you, research something for you, how can it even be applied, for example, in science to do some of the basic inquiries, so set it out to do something to work on your behalf.

I think one of the most important things for all of us is that AI can really be an assist, it can be operating leverage for every one of us, you when I started my career on Wall Street, how was it as you were moving from big computers to laptops to phone, this becomes operating leverage if appropriately applied, and so what one scientist once said to me that they view this as augmented intelligence, not artificial intelligence, and wish that had been the word that was used, that's what it is for each one of us.

And I think what's really important is to understand that in fact it's not that we will be replaced by AI in our roles, but we can be replaced by someone who's using AI, who's getting that operating leverage if we're not.

And so it's so important for people to just start experimenting, just start playing so that you're on that learning journey.

Now you make your own AI chips, the TPUs, why could you explain just how they are different from other chips and why why you do this? Well, we work very closely with Nvidia, they're a strong partner of ours, so we use both GPUs and TPUs.

And many years ago, the team started on this journey of developing our own chips, TPUs, to address some of the specific requirements that we felt we needed, and what we found is that we continue to have the type of performance that we're looking for in particular in training.

And as we've advanced the TPUs, what we're seeing is we're continuing to drive greater efficiency in all elements of energy requirements with TPUs, so they there's a cost benefit for us and and impact benefit, and so we're using both in the fleet.

Talking about various versions of things, so now we've had deep seek um being launched which is uh an open-source model uh now just how do you look at open versus closed-source models now? So open source has been core to Google really for since inception, if you think about something like Android, which is such an important operating system globally, it reflects who we are when you think about the Transformer paper, which has been so critical for anybody who's thinking about how do you build in this AI world, like what's the next step to the next iteration.

So open source has been important to us.

At the same time, this is a really powerful technology, and so what we're looking at is how does one maximize upside, but have the appropriate guard rails and controls over certain elements of it to ensure that you're protecting how it's used and where it's used, and getting that balance right will continue to be very important for all of us.

What are you personally most excited about in terms of usage? I mean, you you talked about um um medicine, Alpha fold and so on, you you personally what do you what do you feel more strongly about? Oh, I so when we look at at AI, I think there are four primary areas that are really exciting.

Um, first is the economic upside, you know, it globally the estimates are there can be 20 trillion added to GDP in the next decade, again, if appropriately executed, if adopted across industry, when you think about the benefit to society, if in fact we have anything close to that economic uplift, I get excited about it.

Very excited about the breakthroughs in science, what Demis Hassabis and John Jumper awarded the Nobel this past fall, you know, that was for something called AlphaFold, which you're familiar with, which has been described as the greatest contribution to drug discovery that is exciting.

Then just even sitting here today, the practical applications of AI in health care, in education are really exciting, um, so I would put those at the top of the list.

I am completely in awe of what we're able to do with healthcare, and you because you had you had breast cancer, right? Exactly, had breast cancer twice actually.

And Google, the amazing engineers, identified the opportunity to diagnose early-stage metastatic breast cancer.

And what's extraordinary is in the testing of it, they found that relative to the 80,000 sample set, they found 20% more cases, more incidences of cancer, and no false positives.

And as we all know, the difference between survival or not, or a really difficult course of treatment at stage four versus two is really meaningful.

And so the ability, I still have a wow moment with that, that we with AI and with breakthroughs like that can give people the opportunity for the early diagnosis that's needed, and what's really important in discussing this with my oncologist, he said what it does is it enables any doctor anywhere across the US, around the globe, to be operating at the highest level because they have this this assist, this augmented intelligence, to me that becomes an extraordinary wow moment when you think about what we can do.

And we're doing it not just in breast cancer, there's early diagnosis in lung cancer, in something called diabetic retinopathy, which is blindness from diabetes, and in that instance, early detection leads to early intervention that's manageable.

Now talking about something uh um slightly different, you uh before the holiday season sent shocks waves through the world with your Willow Quantum chip, so why why is that such a leap forward? So we've been working on Quantum AI, Quantum Computing for quite some time, uh well over I think a decade at this point, uh and what's really exciting is the computational capabilities with Quantum.

So the Willow chip is able to um to handle a computation in less than 5 minutes that previously on the best supercomputers on the planet today would take 10 septillion years, which even I had to Google, it's it's 24 zeros on the back of it.

So what that means in terms of the ability to see and analyze more, whether it's in biology or other areas, is exciting and profound, and so we see this as another path that we will continue to execute against.

When do you think this will be commercial? Yeah, that's a great question, not surprisingly, I ask that question all the time as well, and have been for some time, you know, I think it's there's still a number of years ahead, it's starting to to point to different applications that we're excited about, but whether we're three years, five years, you know, hard to say, uh, but it's it's getting closer since I started asking that question.

And other things where you are where you are strong is a self uh self-driving taxi company, now I'm not sure what the latest number is in terms of rides per week, where where are you now? It's uh 200,000 rides paid rides.

Well, I think if I just step back and talk a bit about Waymo, because we are very excited about it, you know, we started on that journey more than a decade ago as well, and the original thesis is that more than a million people die on the road every year in accidents, and if AI can help improve the safety of driving because our Waymo self-driver, the AI, does not get tired, it does not get distracted, it you know, it stays focused on the road, you've got camera sensors everywhere, we can improve safety, we can help save lives, and that was a really exciting motivator for the team.

We've been rolling it out, it's been extraordinary to see the takeup, it's now one of the top attractions in San Francisco if anyone's out this way, but we're also in LA, in Phoenix, and Austin, and expanding, and we're going to continue to expand because you see both the um the reaction to it when people get in, some people are anxious about it at first, and then within literally under a minute, they see they they just go right into to whatever it is they wanted to be doing, there's a safety element around it, uh, so we think it'll continue to be rolled out, uh, we're doing a pilot in Japan right now, and there's an opportunity we think to help save lives, and are excited about doing that.

So 10 years from now, who is going to own a car? You know, I think it's too early to call.

The other is that Waymo is primarily now focused on what are these Robo-taxis, as you described it, but it's it's reasonable to assume that this capability, this extraordinary technology, can also be an assist with um with cars that are owned, and so there are a lot of execution paths which enable you, me, others to decide how they actually want to get around.

Now you're also the chief investment officer, and you are uh in a very fortunate position in that you are sitting on roughly hundred billion dollars, and you have all these interesting areas just how do you allocate capital between them?

So capital allocation, like I think one of the core elements in capital allocation is that you need to ensure that you're continuing to invest aggressively for the long run, um, if you don't invest for the long run, you're sewing the seeds of your own destruction, and that's a lesson I've seen throughout my career over and over.

And so very important, it's been core to the ethos obviously of this company since inception.

The early days there was a a a kind of a mantra which is 70 in your core, 20% adjacent, 10% moonshots, and that's evolved over time, but this core sense of you've got to continue to invest aggressively for the long run remains core to who we are.

And we're at such an exciting time in history given the opportunity with AI, you know, both on the consumer side, on the enterprise side, so we're certainly making investments there.

I end up spending a lot of my time globally because what is really key is every head of state is saying the same type of thing, which is I want to be a part of this digital transformation, it is key for all the reasons that we've already talked about, and so what we spend time looking at is as we're continuing to invest in our technical infrastructure globally, in other words, data centers, subsea cables, how do we link up the world, the the the opportunity is how do we engage more deeply, how what work are we doing on their behalf to help accelerate their digital transformation, how do we engage on the public side, and so there's a really global view to this.

Now you you have this moonshot Factory in house, what are the type of things you're working on there? So the moonshot factory as it was lovingly named years ago, um uh is the core one of the core areas within other bets, it's called X.

And out of X came for example, Waymo, it was incubated in X and then got moved out to become an independent company.

They've also worked on for example, Wing or incubated Wing, which is our drone business, excited about Wing, they're doing work as an example with Walmart, and we're seeing uh really exciting results there and see the upside.

They're also incub they've been incubating and you'll hear more about a company called Intrinsic, which is a robotics um operating system.

I think one of the very important elements there is that when um they are approaching any incubation, their mindset is obviously you can't incubate everything and have it work well, and so kill things fast in order to move into the areas that are the most promising.

Now you mentioned um uh sub cables, the fact that you also do subsy cables and so on, does it make you more resilient you think as a tech company? I think there are a lot of elements that build resilience, and one of the are one of the important areas is continuing to invest in subsea cables, but it's also the what we call technical infrastructure more broadly, so it's data center resilience, data center redundancy so that you can actually be positioned to serve customers when and where needed, and in the event of something that happens, and things unfortunately always seem to happen around the world, you've got the resilience needed to continue to operate at a high level.

It's our cybersecurity defenses, one of the things I've learned in my career is is much easier to prevent than to fix a problem, and so building in this strength upfront is key, and it's technical infrastructure, I can I'm happy to talk more about cables because really proud of the network we have globally, but it's the other elements like a zero-trust approach on cybersecurity so that you're fortifying defenses in a world that is continuing to become ever more challenging.

One of the things I've learned in my career is is much easier to prevent than to fix a problem, and so building in this strength upfront is key.

And how do you look at these additional challenges? I mean, we are seeing attacks on subsy cables, we are seeing of course accelerating cyber attacks, how do you how do you assess the state of the world? Uh, it's better to remain paranoid, which we do, and build in resilience as you said.

And so when we're looking at our subsea cable network, we uh do build in resilience to have alternate approaches, we're building globally, we've been building now in the southern hemisphere as well, um, when we build cables as an example, one of the things that has multiple benefits is we will build what I will call a trunk from say Africa to Australia, and then we will have it in chunks with nodes along the way that builds in a resilience for the cable itself, but it also provides something else that we're really proud of, it provides the ability off of a node to light up island nations along the way, oftentimes working with governments that say we want to help light up a nation which maybe Google otherwise wouldn't.

So as an example, one of the ones I'm really proud of is when we lit up Fiji, uh, and I was talking about this at the Asia Pacific economic um conference, and we had the prime minister of Fiji happen to be in the room, I said we lit up Fiji, and his comment was it was a gift to everyone in Fiji because what that does is link them to all the opportunities that come otherwise from being having access, and what's really important to remember is a third of the globe still is not online, still is not connected, so this gives us that added ability to provide something that as he described is an economic opportunity for Fiji for generations to come.

With all um these tech companies chasing the opportunities here, do you think tech companies are now accepting lower returns for their investments? Well, I think that at this point what we're all looking at is this theoretical economic upside, which assuming it materializes creates the opportunity for attractive returns, and I think there's a self-calibrating element to the pace of investment that comes from that thesis.

Now when I said you know 20 trillion theoretical economic upside globally, it's four trillion in the US alone.

What is it require to get that? You know, it's not applying using chat Bots, it's actually radically rethinking every element of your business, it's how do you interact with with customers to drive more revenue, it's what are operating efficiencies in the business, it's what are risk analytics, thinking front to back on your operating processes because this gives you an opportunity to approach them differently, that's what leads to that the economic upside which then drives the returns.

And so I think that uh it's we've each got to make sure that we're we're calibrating as we go regarding the upside, and then the other part to your question about returns that we're very focused on and others are as well, is how do you increase the efficiency of that denominator, all the capex that it's being invested.

And so we're approaching that in a number of ways, Sundar talked about it, the meaningful improvements in model efficiency, the meaningful improvements you've already asked about in TPUs.

Our Trillium chip, our most recent chip, is about 67% more efficient than the prior one, so we're continuing to drive efficiency in the capex utilization while also trying to help unlock monetization upside.

Now related to this is is the corpor culture and how you structure innovation, is there a particular way that you structure innovation at Google? It's been such a core part of who we are, I think the driver of everything that we do.

We have an extraordinary research team, as an example, everything that's being done in Google DeepMind, the Demis is leading.

And then on top of that, we have efforts, I think more to your question, for example, in the early days of Google, there was something called Google Labs, small, scrappy teams and told go find something, and Sundar reconstituted that a couple of years ago, and you've seen already a number of really exciting things come out of a small, scrappy, focused, empowered team, so for example, hopefully you and others listening have used NotebookLM.

It's one of my favorite, it's the opportunity to take your own your content, speeches you're interested in, anything you're interested in, ingested into NotebookLM, it can give you some of the information that you need, but you can also listen to it as an AI podcast that can make things sort of more accessible, maybe within an enterprise or I've talked to some people in the public sector, and their wow moment was, wow, you mean I can take all these things that we publish that people probably don't read and make it easier for them to ingest the information, the answer is yes.

A little further back, this was years ago actually, but we now have 20 billion searches a month using your camera with Google Lens, if I want your shirt, you know, I can take a photo of it and then I can find where to buy it and priced and everything else, or I can I do with other things like art, who's that artist, I still get an ohow moment from that.

When I first got here, I saw how different it was in the way we worked, and granted I was coming from a financial institution, not another tech company, but it's literally embedded in the technology that we use, so it just starts right from square one with Google Docs, collaborative docs, every every way we're constantly interacting, and it just adds a velocity to the work that you do.

You just see people constantly coming together in ways that are exactly what the founders talked about at inception, it's about serendipity and the joy that comes from that.

But I think the core point is it's the ethos from the people come in, there's a high bar that's set, we want to make the maximum difference to humanity, that's what we talk about a lot.

I'll give you one more Demis story, um, when he was embarking on AlphaFold and the concept of predicting the protein structure for every protein known to humanity, previously it would take a year or two just to do one, he wanted to do all 200 million, it was one of the grand challenges that had been out there for a long time, and some scientists said how could this be possible, and his answer was why not, and that ethos that why not is a large part of how I answer your question, and you hear it in meetings, it's like why not take it on.

There's an incredible humility here, a sense every year that this is the last great year, and that started the moment I got here, and I remember as I was listening to the stories like, well, they're all these headwinds, they're always headwinds, and so that humility I think inspires people to push higher on for themselves and their team and try and figure out what else can we do.

And that's been an ethos, I think, search for innovation coupled with humility.

How do you install humility in an organization? It starts from the tone from the top, I mean, if you look at Sundar as a leader, he brings this um integrity and ethos about him, and that's the expectation uh I think for the entire team.

Do you think it makes a difference that the founders are still around? Well, I think it's been, you know, Sergey in particular, um, at the couple years ago, as the team was pushing forth on on Gemini, uh, was very engaged and back in uh sitting with them, and he made a comment that this is the most exciting time in computer science that we had only just scratched the surface previously, and when you think Google's done pretty well, like when he first said that to me, I got chills because I think about how much has been accomplished by Google, but that level of excitement and the magic of what's to come, you know, has to be infectious um for every one.

And so it's been yeah, it's been a joy.

People are working because they're getting a real charge out of what they're doing, and you don't need to tell you or me how many hours to work, you know, there's a joy that comes from it.

You know, at at Google, we're still um of the view that the way we get the best outcome is we want people in three days or more a week, and teams can figure out what works best for them to get maximum kind of maximum productivity, progress.

Who do you hire? Really smart people, and uh it's a it remains a a rigorous process, the number of applicants remains you know daunting, um I think that depending on the area, you know, there's there's a mix of um I you know what I would say what I would look for is a mix of those people who um come with what I will call pattern recognition, the experience that gives you a sense that of predicting what's going to come from here or very specific domain expertise, but then evidence uh high performance and creativity, pushing themselves, achieving achieving remarkable things along the way.

Talking of which, uh Ruth, you've uh achieved remarkable things, uh and you worked in Morgan Stanley before you before you joined Google, uh and you were there during the financial crisis, and uh uh did a did an incredible job, what did you what did you learn from the financial crisis because you were really involved at the very top?

Yeah, I learned a I learned a lot at the the time I was running the Financial Institutions Group, which meant responsible for banks, insurance companies, asset management, I was on the investment banking side, and one of the most privileged times in my career is when Secretary Hank Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury, said he wanted a team to basically be seconded down um at US Treasury, and initially we went I went down in in July of '08 to focus on the housing crisis, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and to try and understand understand and diagnose what could be a trigger for what we would call a run on the bank, run on on agencies, so we went through Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac with him, and then I led the group that went um through the AIG crisis as well, and then onward.

And there were a lot of really important lessons that came out of it.

The first most the most important lesson from the crisis is to identify your greatest source of vulnerability ahead of time and protect against it, so for financial institutions that would be liquidity, without liquidity, nothing you couldn't operate, and in that moment in that September, October 2008 moment, you couldn't procure liquidity, durable liquidity if you tried, and we did and you couldn't, um, but six months prior, you could have, and I think a really important lesson for everyone is do that question, what is your greatest source of vulnerability, you can protect against it early on, but not in the moment.

The second really came out of AIG, as we now all know, the crisis in AIG really started because of the derivative sub in the UK, not the op not the insurance operation, and the problem was there wasn't visibility about the risk that was being taken on by the derivative sub, and so the metaphor that I've used since then is you would not drive a car with mud on the windshield, you cannot run a business or a country with mud on the windshield, use data and analytics to clear away that mud, and then you can actually go faster because you're taking calculated risk, you're taking sworn risk.

I think the other really important lesson uh was that there are no good choices in a crisis, and so go for the least worst and just keep moving because standing still can actually just amplify, magnify, and you're not going to end up with a good solution in any event by definition, you're in a crisis.

Say actually the last one is make sure you have a team with horizontal vision because you got to connect the dots across a lot of different issues.

How do you protect the Google against future vulnerability? So I asked myself that, I then said, okay, I need to apply those same rules here, I think the greatest source of vulnerability for us and frankly really across industries is around innovation and long-term investing.

And notably, when you come to campus, um, you will see that Larry and Sergey put a dinosaur on our campus that it's name Stan to remind us every day that if we don't innovate, we too can become dinosaurs.

And I think it's really important to maintain um efforts like what Sundar did with Labs, Google Labs, other things that are continual Catalyst to continue to really spur small teams to think big and and also from a capital allocation perspective to make sure you're investing for long-term long-term growth.

Talking a bit about the personal growth, you worked with what is called the Trillion Dollar Coach Bill Campbell, who has uh well worked with a lot of in successful people, but how did you how did you end up working with him and just what did you learn from him?

So when I was at Morgan Stanley, I've always had this view in life that I should ask what's my highest and best use and keep learning, and I loved being CFO with James Gorman, he was an absolutely extraordinary CEO, I joined him as his CFO the day he began as CEO, but after about five years, I thought, you know, I feel like I'm plateauing here, and I'm wondering what my next chapter is, and as you said, Bill Campbell is um one of the most extraordinary people that anyone could meet, Trillion Dollar Coach because he had coached Steve Jobs and Larry and Sergey, um, and I sat down with him and said I don't know what my next chapter should be, and I'd love to get your thinking about it.

At the end of the two hours, he said I have the perfect role for you, CFO of Google, we both sort of laughed because I had been so adamant the one thing I wouldn't do was be CFO again, I'm like if it's Google, of course, I had run Tech banking at Morgan Stanley involved with the Google IPO, loved Google for years, and um so that's how I ended up here.

I had run Tech banking at Morgan Stanley involved with the Google IPO, loved Google for years, and um so that's how I ended up here.

And then he was always an adviser who was here on campus, and just the wise voice who um was blunt and clear, and when something didn't make sense, you know, he was famous for saying kind of throwing the flag on the field, um, and just truly brought out the best in everyone, made told each of us make sure you always have that human connection and then go into the business item.

Do you mentor people? Yes, what's the key to good mentorship? Well, I think, you know, when I when you asked that question, I immediately thought of one of the most important discussions I had with someone who ended up becoming with a mentor sponsor, uh, a key person in my career, and it was back in 1996, and I was asked to uh lead technology Equity Capital markets, the part within a bank that's between Banking and sales and trading that really launches IPOs, and this was right at the beginning of the whole internet run of IPOs, there were not very many women on the trading floor, and the guy who ran institutional equities called me into his office and he said I think you're going to soar, but if you stumble, I'm here, I will back stop you, I am your senior air cover, and what really struck me is that we all need senior air cover, and we all need to be senior air cover for someone.

And what he was saying is I know you're going to run far and you're going to run hard, and but I'm here if there's ever an issue, if you need me for something something, and so for me on people who work hard for me, and I see this is a star who needs to be sort of unleash to run to to soar, um, I try and give them the advice that I think has served me best throughout my career, and it's about continuing to learn and have that senior air cover and really apply data and analysis to everything you do.

And I just keep coming back to those rules in particular, I think it's so important we each have senior air cover and our senior air cover, did you have a need air cover? You know, there was I was I've reflected on did I actually run into issues, there were small ones, there wasn't a crisis moment where I needed to go to him, but the insurance policy of knowing he was there and the message that he said I know you'll soar, but I'm here to back stop you in case there's an issue is actually a real Catalyst, it's empowering.

You mentioned um the need and wish to continue to learn, what are you what are you most exciting about learning now? Well, there's there's a there's so much when I talk about AI in this moment, and the conversations I'm having globally about the economic unlock, the real question is what does it mean to radically rethink your business or radically rethink the way you run the public sector?

My father was a Holocaust Refugee, he had no high school or college education, he ended up up enlisting in the British Army, and he fought in the two battles of El Alamein, and he taught himself engineering and physics because he knew or he assumed that if he survived, he wanted to get to a place that was safe, and he needed a skill that people would value, and he thought engineering and physics would be that skill.

And as a child, he always told me that his fellow soldiers would tease him and say you're going to be dead before you can ever use this, and he would say I'd rather die an educated man, and then the lesson for me as a child, my siblings, was education as a passport for life, and I firmly believe that, and I think that one of the most important things is never stop learning.

So that's why I said when I found myself plateau in my career, I would go to somebody I respected and say what is my highest and best use, and I was open to change and continuing to grow, I think that's one really important one, the other is Anchor everything everything in data at Wharton, you clearly get great analytical skills, a lot of other places as well.

You can argue with me in my approach to something, but you can't argue with data, and I always say don't give me flat data, put it into a sensitivity analysis so that we can debate your assumptions about the state of the world, growth rates, how much do I need to invest, let me engage you with the data, and that should be the basis for the argument.

And then the other thing I believe I told them, and I believe it is today as I did then, is Embrace Life as it comes, don't defer to a later time something which you can do now, because as I saw with cancer, you don't know if you're gonna have that later time, unfortunately that was 20 years ago, and I'm fine, but in the moment I didn't know, but I was grateful my bucket list wasn't very long, I had done what I wanted, been married to the same guy for many many decades, have three amazing kids, I Professional Care I wanted, don't put it off because life doesn't actually stick to your predefined schedule.

Well, Ruth, that's uh uh really motivational and beautiful place to to end this podcast, big thanks for being with us and thanks for sharing sharing all your thoughts and backgrounds, thank you so much, you it is always wonderful being with you, thank you for having me, thank you.