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The 15 Wildest Things Google Chairman Eric Schmidt Has Ever Said

Eric Schmidt Dances Gangnam Style
Eric Schmidt Dances Gangnam Style

Eric Schmidt is the former CEO of Google and currently serves as its chairman.

He was originally brought in as the “adult supervision” for founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, but, as one of the most vocal senior executives at Google, he’s also said some pretty controversial, provocative, or bizarre things over the years. 

We’ve rounded up a sample of some of his weirdest quotes.

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On privacy: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

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On Google’s famous “Don’t Be Evil” rule: “When I showed up, I thought this was the stupidest rule ever, because there’s no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something.”

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On competition: “Our business strategy is not to compete.”

On what Google can do: “One day we had a conversation where we figured we could just try and predict the stock market … and then we decided it was illegal. So we stopped doing that.”

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On Google’s staggering collection of personal info: “Would you prefer someone else? Is there a government that you would prefer to be in charge of this?”

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On getting caught on Google Street View: “With Street View, we drive by exactly once, so you can just move.”

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On chance: “Serendipity can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.”

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On Google searches: “I actually think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions. They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.”

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On what people want: “Brands are the solution, not the problem. Brands are how you sort out the cesspool. … Brand affinity is clearly hard wired. It is so fundamental to human existence that it’s not going away. It must have a genetic component.”

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On the future of individual targeting: “The technology will be so good it will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them.”

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On the Android operating system: “Not secure? It’s more secure than the iPhone.”

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On being creepy: “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.”

On uses for Google Glass: “There’s obviously issues, shall we say, of appropriateness of how people are going to use these things. There’s a right time to have Google Glass on, and there’s a right time to have it off, if you take my drift.”

On the NSA: “There’s been spying for years, there’s been surveillance for years, and so forth, I’m not going to pass judgement on that, it’s the nature of our society.”

On the global warming “fact problem”: “The media gets confused because they don’t believe in facts, and public policy people get confused because they don’t believe in innovation.”

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