Shadowing Practice: Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat on The David Rubenstein Show - Learn English Speaking with Video
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365 sentences
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This is my kitchen table and also my filing system.
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Over much of the past three decades, I've been an investor.
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The highest calling of mankind I've often thought was private equity.
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And then I started interviewing.
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While I watch your interviews, I know how to do some interviews.
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I've learned in doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top.
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I asked him how much he wanted.
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He said $250.
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I said fine.
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I didn't negotiate with him.
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I did no due diligence.
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I have something I'd like to sell and how they stay there.
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You don't feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world, is that right?
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In recent years, one of the most powerful people in the financial and technology worlds has been Ruth Peratt.
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She served as chief financial officer for Morgan Stanley and then as Chief Financial Officer for Google and Alphabet.
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She now serves as President and Chief Investment Officer for Alphabet.
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I sat down with her recently in Davos to talk about what she's going to do in her new position
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and how she's going to invest more than $100 billion that Alphabet now has.
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So we're very pleased to have Ruth Barrett here.
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Ruth, as you may know, has recently been promoted.
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She, for almost the last decade, has been the CFO of Google and Alphabet.
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And now she still has that title, but she's now also the president and chief investment officer for Alphabet.
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Is that right?
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I am, and it's great to be here with you.
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So you have three jobs, CFO, president.
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Do you get three salaries for that?
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I think I'm doing okay.
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Okay.
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So everybody wants to talk to you here because you've got a lot of money.
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You've got over a hundred billion dollars of cash to invest so people want to see you
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Why do you come to Davos because people are just going to be bombarding you give me money for this or that?
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Is it really worth the effort to schlep all the way here?
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Or are you happy to come here and you actually meet people you actually want to see?
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Well, I've actually been coming here since I ran tech banking at Morgan Stanley back in the 90s
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and was hunting for fees And
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so I think it's sort of become one -stop shopping you make the trip
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and then you get to see people from Asia
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and Africa Middle East Europe it's so it's just
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that one -stop shop let's talk about your background now
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that you mentioned it where did you grow up I grew
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up I was born in England mostly grew up in California California your father was a professor at Stanford
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or something like that my father actually was a Holocaust refugee
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so my father escaped from Vienna right after Kristallnacht
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and made it to Palestine he no high school education he
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ended up enrolling in the British Army fought in the Battle of El Eman
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and in the army taught himself physics because he figured
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if he survived he needed something that somebody valued after the war
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that actually that worked that plan worked he ended up getting to England where I was born
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and then eventually got to the United States who sponsored by Senator Kennedy
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so he spent his whole career at Harvard and then at Stanford
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so I mostly grew up in California California okay
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so you're in here in Stanford for a nice area Silicon
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Valley why would you want to go to a business school
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at Wharton why did you go across the country to go to business school
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and why did you want to go to business school to
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begin with why not be a physicist like your father well I loved Wharton
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so I'm not gonna not gonna give you
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that you know I thought I was gonna end up being
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from first of all I got I got married my husband was a lawyer on Wall Street
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so I was commuting but I thought
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that I would go into investment I thought I'd go into consulting and then And I took this amazing mergers accounting class,
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kind of geeky, and decided I was going to go into mergers and acquisitions, so ended up on the East Coast.
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Okay, so you ultimately became the CFO of Morgan Stanley.
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Right.
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And many people thought you might go in the government someday, and you actually could have been the CEO of Morgan Stanley.
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Why would you leave the important world of finance for something less significant like technology?
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Why would you do that?
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You know, kind of right time, right place.
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It's like when I was the CFO of Morgan Stanley, I started in that position January 1st, 2010, when James Gorman took over as CEO.
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And I think he's an all -star CEO.
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Absolutely amazing.
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Great partner.
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And when we started, it was 2010, so after the financial crisis, but Morgan Stanley was still very challenged.
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You know, Moody's was going to downgrade the bank at one point.
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It was kind of shaky.
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And I think that he and we together, the team, led this extraordinary kind of recovery.
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And it got to the point 2015 where I was ready for the next chapter and I got this call
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Google it seemed okay, so all right made
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that move where we get the Google You were at Morgan Stanley
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when the great meltdown the great financial crisis of 07 08 occurred
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And it is said that it you know people thought
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that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs and everybody else was going to go under
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Were you living through that and did you actually think Morgan Stanley was going to make it at that time?
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there were days I did not it was bad
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so I was running financial institutions banking at the time
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and probably the most meaningful part of my career was
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when Hank Paulson called and said I need advice I need some bankers here
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and so I went and led a team that worked on Fannie Freddie
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and then AIG and those were very very challenging days
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and coming out of it at the bed you know we did Fannie Freddie and then we did AIG, put them into conservatorship and I got to Morgan Stanley,
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John Mack was CEO at the time and he said okay you're in charge of liquidity, figure out liquidity.
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And of course days before what very much was running out of liquidity there was no way to get liquidity.
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In fact one day we were trying to figure out what to do
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and I was on the trading floor and I'm like can we maybe sell the chairs, they were Herman Miller chairs.
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I thought that might be a solution.
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That was supposed to be funny but it was actually really scary at the time
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and so no it was hard but we did this whole series of different teams
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and it worked you know MUFG came in they were an incredible partner the government came
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and we became a Fed regulated bank but there were some very scary times
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and a lot of important lessons okay so you got
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that deal done then presumably some headhunter called you up
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and said you should be the CFO of Google
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and did you how did you tell John Mac or James Gorman
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and you were going to leave to be the CFO of a tech company.
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Was that easy to do?
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So, 2015, Morgan Stanley was in a really good spot.
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I happened to be with Bill Campbell, an iconic leader in Silicon Valley.
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He's been written about as the trillion -dollar coach.
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He coached Steve Jobs, Larry, Sergey, Sundar, Eric, so it's a privilege to sit with him.
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And at the time, I said, you know, I'm ready for the next chapter, but the one thing I'm not going to do is be CFO again.
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We spent two hours in his living room, And at the end, he said, okay, I heard you clearly, not CFO.
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And I said, exactly.
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And he said, okay, so the best, I've got the best idea for you, CFO of Google.
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And, of course, I immediately said, well, I hadn't thought of that one.
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That one is interesting.
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But did you tell him this would mean you wouldn't be
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able to work with private equity people as closely as you had been?
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You know, sometimes hardship in life is worthwhile.
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Are we going to have driverless cars in our lifetime?
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You can actually hail a Waymo in San Francisco, hop in it and get where you want to go, it's pretty remarkable.
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So what's it like moving from the East Coast, where everything is finance and money, to the West Coast, where everything is technology?
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Did you fit in right away
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and did you really know how to use all the computer things that they give you to use?
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So it was pretty fun.
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There were plenty of times where I would sit around in meetings and literally I would be Googling terms.
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And at one meeting, Larry Page actually caught me Googling terms.
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And he kind of pointed that out to other people in the room, which was a little embarrassing, but I figured there were some things that I could do that they couldn't do.
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And so it was a learning curve.
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And my dad always, he taught me at a young age a term that I've used constantly with my teams.
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He said, in his lab at Stanford, if a physicist could not define a quark in under 30 seconds, they didn't know what they were talking about.
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And so I use the quark test all the time.
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If somebody's rambling on and on and they can't get to the point they probably don't know what they're talking about, they fail the quark test.
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My finance team knows this quark test.
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And at Google, I'm working with amazing computer scientists, so they never fail the quark test.
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They can explain things really clearly, which shoots you up the learning curve.
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But did you understand what they were talking about from the beginning, or did you have a special tutor that's taught you technology?
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I had actually run tech banking and took Google Publix.
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I had a little sneak preview.
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So today, for people who are not experts on Google and Google search, Larry Page really developed the Page system, I guess it was called.
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And it was unique, but when he came to get the initial money in Silicon Valley, people said, well, there's plenty of search engines out here.
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There are like 12 or 13 search engine companies and
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so people didn't think it was anything so unique what turned out to be
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so unique about the page system
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that it made Google such a powerful company I actually remember those days
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because I was one of the people who said why do
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we need it was actually the 8th search engine why do you need the 8th search engine
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and I was at Morgan Stanley at the time
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and 1998 running banking
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and our research analyst Mary Meeker an iconic analyst got pulled her team together
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and said you know what let's do a test let's look at all the search engines let's do queries
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and see speed and relevance of response
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and I think she may have started with
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that eight search engine question as well but it quickly rose to the top and
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that has been the ethos all along we still to this
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day have more than a hundred product innovations every quarter the whole idea is continue
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challenging ourselves about how to make the product better more relevant faster
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and what's extraordinary sitting where we are today is how searches evolved
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so back then it was 10 blue links whoever's old enough
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in this room to remember 10 blue links that's what it was and then it went to
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image search voice search and now multimodal search
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if i want your tie i can take a picture of your tie
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and then i could just i can lens it
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and i can find a place to buy your tie
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so this whole evolution of search just keeps extending the runway for search
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so it's very different obviously today than it was
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so let's suppose i do a google search on something maybe i shouldn't be doing a google search on
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or something not that you ever do i wouldn't do that
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but i just theoretically um can somebody from google an officer like you look up what i've searched
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no you cannot absolutely adequately protected right protected even if the government comes along We do not look at what you search.
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You can go into incognito mode, but we do not look at what you search.
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Okay.
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So the company for a long time was called Google, and Google used to be spelled differently.
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Why did they spell Google that way as opposed to the way it was originally spelled, which was E -L?
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Did they not know that it was spelled differently?
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Well, there are a couple of stories around this.
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So one of the stories that I think is true
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and fun is that one of the early venture checks actually wrote it
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that way so they went with it okay
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so why did Google was a brand name that's working very well companies making a lot of money
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and so forth but why did you need to go to Alphabet and who came up with that name
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Larry and Sergey had a vision about kind of the next iteration
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and there were a lot of different things
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that they were investing in the whole spirit of
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which is you want to make sure you're investing for long term investing for the future And in the earliest days, what they did is they created something called X.
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It was the moonshot factory within Google, Google X.
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And it gave birth to things like Gmail.
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It was really relevant for all of the type of innovation that came out of Google.
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And by 2015, their view was, we want to be able to avoid distraction on Google, let Google do what it's going to do,
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and create another set of businesses that the founders could focus on and really nurture growth outside of it.
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And so the word, as you would know better than anyone, is alphabets.
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And so you put the two together, and that was the goal.
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So it used to be when Google started, you had what was called 20 % time.
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Right.
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So for 20 % of your time, you could do whatever you wanted.
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Theoretically, it might be helpful to the company, but it wasn't supposed to be necessarily.
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So do you still have 20 % time, or did they go away?
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Well, it was actually a little more structured than that.
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The goal was if you had some great engineering idea and you wanted to launch a new product, you could do it in one of two ways you could leave, or you could be told, you know what, in 20 % of your time,
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why don't you go experiment with this and see if you can grow it.
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So rather than having great ideas constantly leaving, the view was, let's nurture the talent, let's give people these growth opportunities, let's give it a go.
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And so that's what the 20 % time was.
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Did any 20 % time product ever get to the market?
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Well, Gmail is not an inconsequential.
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Billions of users.
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Google Brain came out of that.
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It's our core part of our ai business
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and then we've continued to evolve it
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so it moved over to become um x waymo came out of it
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so there's quite quite a bit and quite a bit of features
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and applications speaking waymo are we going to have driverless cars
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in our lifetime well i welcome everybody to come to san francisco
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because you can actually hail a waymo in san francisco hop in it
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and get where you want to go and it's pretty remarkable have you done that absolutely really it's safe
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it's so safe that the most fascinating part is within about 15 seconds people are bored
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because it's so safe they're like they realize you know what you don't need a helmet
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or anything not get safe right you need a helmet with many drivers on the road
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you have a challenge that many people would like to have
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but they don't have which is you've got over 100 billion dollars of cash
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and so are you going to invest that in private equity firms
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or are you going to do new technology what are you
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going to do with 100 billion dollars more than 100 billion dollars of cash
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and um you know have you thought about
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that you have people coming up to you all the time with great ideas for
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that cash uh we do as you would imagine
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so look we're continuing to invest in the business there's a lot of extraordinary upside in the business
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and then we do make investments and acquisitions and
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so do all of our peers there's a lot that's exciting going on in the world
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and so we're looking across the board starts within the business then it goes to investments
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and acquisitions then obviously return of capital through a not inconsequential share repurchase program Let's talk about artificial intelligence.
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Artificial intelligence has gotten a lot of publicity in the last year or so.
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And OpenAI has gotten an enormous amount of it.
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And they have an affiliation with another technology company.
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I can't remember the name of it.
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I've heard that.
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Another one.
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But do you have your own kind of OpenAI company, or do you do it all internally?
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And what do you do to compete with OpenAI and this other technology company?
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So we've been infusing product at Google with AI for more than a decade.
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In fact, billions of people today are benefiting from AI across our products.
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It's benefiting what you see in search, in maps, in commerce, in YouTube.
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You know, I just mentioned multimodal search, the ability to search with your camera.
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When you search for your kids in photos, that's AI.
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AI.
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So AI has continued to be a way to enhance what the product experience is, and we've done that historically through two groups within Google.
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One, Google Brain, I already mentioned, and the other is DeepMind, an extraordinary acquisition back many years ago, led by an extraordinary entrepreneur, Demis Asadis.
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And we've put the two together last year, which has been really exciting.
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And so we are building on that foundation
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that has been an experience for the last decade what's the
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excitement of working in technology in silicon valley is it even more exciting than working in finance
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or not quite as exciting
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but okay it's hard to believe it's more exciting i mean
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we're living in the most extraordinary time with ai bill gates just said
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that completely agree engineers who've been at google since inception are saying
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that this is the most exciting time in computer science in our lifetime
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which always strikes me as profound because Google's done okay and
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and and what's extraordinary about it really goes to building on this decade of innovative work in AI and
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so where are we now we're at the we're what we're
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doing is we're addressing some of the most profound social challenges with AI in ways
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that are transformative so to give you an example of examples I think
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that one of the extraordinary places for all of us
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and we've heard a lot about it here over lunch is health care
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and part of the reason is it's the ability with ai to aggregate
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so much data that you can actually have a level of diagnosis
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that is better than what specialists can do
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so one example breast cancer back in 2015 google had a
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breakthrough in detection early detection of metastatic breast cancer one in seven women will be diagnosed with breast cancer.
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I was one of those.
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I've had breast cancer twice.
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So when I heard about this, I did the only rational thing.
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I called my oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering, and I said, is this really as important as I hope?
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And he said, unequivocally, because only with AI can we democratize health care.
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It's the only way that oncologists everywhere, radiologists everywhere, all of the medical profession has the ability to leverage the insight
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that AI will give you through scans reviewing a million scans
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we're doing the same in other forms of cancer we're doing
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it with something called diabetic retinopathy blindness caused through diabetes which can be prevented if diagnosed early enough and
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so I think that
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when you look at the impact of it this is what
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motivates our engineers we're seeing in healthcare we're seeing an education
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we're seeing with food scarcity you can improve crop yields by looking at pest issues in informing we're looking at
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so many different ways
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that AI can make a difference on the most profound issues one last one
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because it's you asked am I excited about it yes it's better than even finance climate change you know SOS
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or crisis alerts extraordinary we've seen the impact of buyers
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and flooding 250 million people a year affected by flooding
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but with AI we can predict
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and are with seven days notice where the water flows will be to get people out of harm's way.
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So this is not science fiction, this is here today.
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On climate change, to be realistic about it, is there things that you think that AI can really make us more readily make us able to solve climate change?
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Is that your point?
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You think we can?
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Well, there's both adaptation and mitigation.
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So around climate change, we have a whole other set of efforts going on
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so for example one of the major sources of emissions is
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what you see right out the window here start stop from cars we have something called project green light
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which streamlines that so you don't have the start stops we have something else
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that looks at planes major source of carbon footprint our contrails
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what many of us think are the beautiful white plumes off the back you can adjust flight patterns
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and reduce carbon footprint so the short answer is yes
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and it's happening today it's not a hope for science fiction
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you've been public about your breast cancer you've talked about it written about it
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and so forth why did you go public about it many women say they don't want it to be known
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that they might have breast cancer maybe that's right or wrong
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but why were you so willing to be public about it it is a really personal thing
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when i was first diagnosed i didn't want to talk about
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it i was at a bank one of few women you know i was bald
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and it's like it's not what you want to talk about
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but I got to the point where I realized in this day
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and age if you get the right care actually these diseases are manageable
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and the scariest part is not knowing and
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so to me it was important to actually make it clear this is manageable you can get through it
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and to actually be a resource for people
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so for many women you're a role model you have a successful career in finance
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and technology you were on your first husband right yeah yeah
314
and hanging on hanging on right so and you have three kids and
315
so you've done it all you've had it all you you're
316
you're you know have a successful career successful marriage three healthy happy kids can you tell us something
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that doesn't make us so feel jealous about you
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because you're I mean here you know everybody can't be as good as you
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so make us feel that everything isn't perfect for you leaving aside the breast cancer so
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that everybody else doesn't feel like they're not gonna be able
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to live up to your standards oh man look I think
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that one of the most important lessons I learned early in
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my career you know as a woman in banking there weren't
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many of us it wasn't the easiest environment there were a
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lot of men I've now gently decided to call blockheads but you know they were worse and blockheads.
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And they made it difficult.
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And you learn to be resilient.
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The one thing is I was going to outlast them.
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And that would be the joy that came from it.
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And fortunately there were obviously a lot of extraordinary men at Morgan Stanley.
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There weren't enough senior women in the day and there are more now.
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And so I learned to chart my career.
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I went to people who would take a risk on me.
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And I said, what's my highest and best use
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and they opened doors that I didn't know existed
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and to me that's the most important is those hard days
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bad lessons I just chalk them up to being lessons
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so I don't actually record them so what do you do
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when you're not working on technology being a wife being a
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mother you have a tennis player you're a golfer what do
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you do for relaxation to the extent you have time for relaxation
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well I kind of merge things I know there's nothing more
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joyful to me than going on hikes with my kids
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or bike rides with my kids um and
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so it's you know it's a lot of
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that are your parents alive now they are not
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and did they live to see your success uh before they passed away they did my mom actually
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when i was a young kid said she was a psychologist
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and she said what's really important for women is have your own identity
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and a career outside of the home she told me that
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when i was eight my little sister was six for some
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reason she thought that's the time you need to send
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that message so i'm grateful to her for
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that message your father did he ever say this is better
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than being a physicist what you're doing my dad was pretty remarkable you know the tail end of
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that story about his journey from no high school education to a phd
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and a career at stanford is he said education is your passport for freedom
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and so the only point he impressed on us over
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and over was really focus on education keep opening doors
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and take risks
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if he didn't take the risk he took to get himself
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out of Austria to teach himself physics he wouldn't have made it
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and he was so grateful to get to the United States
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so if there's anything else it was that the life
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that he never expected he would have and then to have a family.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This B2 speaking lesson is built on the video “Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat on The David Rubenstein Show”. This video has 365 sentences and 4538 words to shadow. The speech runs for 23:55. The speaker talks fast, about 190 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 85% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| quark noun | /kwɑɹk/ | In the Standard Model, one of a number of elementary subatomic particles having fractional electric charge that forms matter. They are theorized not to exist… |
| liquidity noun | /lɪkˈwɪdəti/ | The state or property of being liquid. |
| silicon noun | /ˈsɪləˌkɑn/ | A nonmetallic element (symbol Si) with an atomic number of 14 and atomic weight of 28.0855. |
| diagnose verb | /ˈdaɪ.əɡˌnoʊs/ | To determine which disease is causing a sick person's signs and symptoms; to find the diagnosis. |
| physicist noun | /ˈfɪzɪsɪst/ | A person whose occupation specializes in the science of physics, especially at a professional level. |
| profound adjective | /pɹəˈfaʊnd/ | Descending far below the surface; opening or reaching to great depth; deep. |
| blockhead noun | A stupid person. | |
| driverless adjective | Without a driver (of a vehicle). | |
| inconsequential adjective | /ɪnˌkɑnsəˈkwɛnʃəl/ | Having no consequence; not consequential; of little importance. |
| manageable adjective | /ˈmænəd͡ʒəb(ə)l/ | Capable of being managed or controlled. |
| multimodal adjective | Having or employing multiple modes. | |
| nurture noun | /ˈnɜːɹ.t͡ʃəɹ/ | The act of nourishing or nursing; tender care |
| footprint noun | /ˈfʊtpɹɪnt/ | The impression of the foot in a soft substance such as sand or snow. |
| theoretically adverb | in theory; on paper | |
| relaxation noun | /rᵻˌlækˈseɪ.ʃən/ | The act of relaxing or the state of being relaxed; the opposite of stress or tension; the aim of recreation and leisure activities. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| end up verb | To bring to a conclusion. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| get over verb | To overcome. | |
| come along verb | To accompany. | |
| come up to verb | To approach. | |
| come up with verb | To manage to produce, deliver, or present (something) by inventing, creating, thinking of, or obtaining it. | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
| go away verb | To depart or leave a place. |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- I didn't negotiate with him.
- Do you get three salaries for that?
- I think I'm doing okay.
- Why would you do that?
- Are we going to have driverless cars in our lifetime?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've actually been coming · we've been infusing |
| “Used to” used to + verb — a past habit or state that is no longer true | used to be |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've been · I've often thought · I've learned |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | been promoted · was born · is said |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 94 contractions and reduced forms, such as we're, I've, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: worthwhile /ˌwɜː(ɹ)θˈwaɪl/, breakthrough /ˈbɹeɪk.θɹuː/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: inconsequential /ɪnˌkɑnsəˈkwɛnʃəl/, relaxation /rᵻˌlækˈseɪ.ʃən/, detection /dɪˈtɛk.ʃən/, hardship /ˈhɑɹdˌʃɪp/, affiliation /əˌfɪliˈeɪʃən/
- Long words — get the stress right: liquidity /lɪkˈwɪdəti/, inconsequential /ɪnˌkɑnsəˈkwɛnʃəl/, manageable /ˈmænəd͡ʒəb(ə)l/, democratize /dɪˈmɑkɹətaɪz/, incognito /ˌɪnkɒɡˈniːtoʊ/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like quark, liquidity, silicon.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.