to this Talks at Google event.

My name is Bradley Horowitz.

I'm Vice President of Streams, Photos, and Sharing

here at Google.

It's my pleasure to welcome you all for this very

special afternoon together.

How many of you got to attend yesterday's event?

Oh, good.

It looks like about half.

We had a tremendous amount of fun.

We had four world-class musicians

sitting up here talking, jamming,

talking about their craft, laughing.

I laughed.

I cried.

It was beautiful.

And more today.

Today we're going to have a conversation

between two old friends, Arturo Bejar Philip Glass.

And Arturo I've known for quite a long time.

He's a bit of a Silicon Valley institution.

And in fact, yesterday I learned that it was Steve Wozniak who

actually brought Arturo from Mexico to Silicon

Valley for the first time.

He later went on to found a team called the Paranoids at Yahoo,

which was the first of its kind, really,

in the Valley that really focused on issues of spam

and abuse, and he carried forward that work

to Facebook, where he was at for many years,

building the product infrastructure team there

and then working on issues of compassion

and bullying and making that a safe and comfortable place

for all of its users.

He's since moved on from Facebook

and is now focusing on being a father and a photographer,

and one of the subjects of his photography

is, in fact, Philip Glass.

Philip Glass is a world renowned composer and pianist

whose work spans generations.

He has composed over the last 25 years more than 20 operas,

8 symphonies, two piano concertos,

and numerous soundtracks to films

and all the while maintains his extensive solo creations

on piano and organ.

He grew up in Baltimore, studied at Juilliard,

moved to Europe, where he trained with Nadia Boulanger

and closely worked with sitar composer Ravi Shankar.

When he returned to the States in the 60s,

he formed the Philip Glass Ensemble

and still performs with that group to date.

At almost 80, he's collaborated with folks from Paul Simon

to Yo-Yo Ma and presents and performs solo keyboard concerts

around the world.

In 2011, he founded the Philip Glass Center,

a home for artists, scientists, and conservationists

to collaborate and produce a culture of renewal

for our time.

So I want to invite these two friends up here

to have a conversation and maybe even a bit of performance.

Philip, Arturo, welcome.

ARTURO BEJAR: Thank you.

PHILIP GLASS: Thank you, Bradley.

Thank you.

ARTURO BEJAR: Thank you so much.

So I wanted to start, maybe, a little bit

seeing how I ended up here next to you.

When I was in college, the weirdest thing I had ever heard

came on the radio.

It was "Knee Play Number 5."

And I couldn't leave there.

I needed to go to school, and I couldn't

leave to go to school because I had to listen to it.

And then I listened to "Einstein"

for God knows how many times.

And fast-forward 20 something years.

And I mean, there is a little place called Carmel Valley

that's near Carmel-by-the-Sea, and I go into the video store,

and there's a flyer there that says,

Philip Glass presents the Days and Nights Festival.

And I pick it up, and I'm like, well,

it can't be that Philip Glass.

Is there another Philip Glass that's doing this?

And I went to the first festival,

and I sat down to watch this dance piece,

and right behind me, he was sitting there.

And during the break, I went up and said hello,

and he was very kind with attention and conversation.

And ever since then, I have been photographing for the festival,

and in the process of doing that,

I have seen a collaboration that is extraordinary

because it spans from young people-- like, from 20 to 80--

from Africa to Japan, across cultures, across disciplines.

And being able to be a part of that has been an amazing gift.

And so what we'll hope to talk about today

is a lot about that process and collaboration.

And I wanted to start off by asking you about your journey,

how you ended up in Big Sur.

PHILIP GLASS: I was just thinking about that.

The festival we have at the-- it's

the last week of September, Big Sur this year,

at the Henry Miller Library.

It seems to be-- it was a destination which--

I didn't know what it was, but it became that.

When I was just beginning writing music-- and then

shortly after that I went study at Juilliard--

I would spend my time practicing the piano

and working like everybody else, and I felt so

cut off from everybody because that's all we did.

And not just me.

Everybody did that.

And I thought, well, if this is going to be my life,

to be this isolated, this is not going to happen for me.

So I began immediately-- I was 19

at the time-- I began working with dancers

who were the same age as me.

And that's always a good idea for anybody

who wants to know, where do you start?

You start with people your age, and with luck, they

stick around for a while.

And I began working with theater companies, with dancers,

and I began immediately-- I wanted

to get out of the practice room, and I also

wanted to be able to perform.

And I found that dancers always knew the music.

Theaters often needed music.

And so I didn't have to create a concert

career at the beginning.

I just started playing music with other people,

and that just continued.

And then the other thing that was really interesting

was I was concerned very much that the music that I

was doing-- I guess you could say

it was modernistic music of a certain kind.

But I felt that I wanted to see, how does that

fit into the world that I live in, into the everyday world?

And I began to think of all of the social issues,

political issues, and by the time I was in my 30s,

I was writing operas about people

who changed the world through their ideas,

like a opera about Gandhi, an opera about Einstein.

I began using music and theater music particularly

as a way of addressing the issues of life,

of what we are living.

I didn't really want an abstract music, and though in many ways

you can hear it as abstract, music has that quality.

It always has the quality of-- it

is emotional and abstract at the same time.

So we'll always have that.

But I wanted to connect the music with the power of ideas.

So I got involved with scientists.

The other thing when I was a kid-- so I was born in '37.

So by 1945, '46 people began knowing who Einstein

was because of the atomic bomb.

But suddenly, this scientist became-- he was actually

our first science superstar.

Everybody knew who Einstein was.

And what we used to say in that time

was that everyone knew who Einstein

was but no one understood the theory of relativity.

They said six people in the world understood it,

which is-- I don't think that was an exaggeration.

Well, actually, I think there are many more people who

know it, but that was the idea.

But I got very interested in scientists,

and I began to see-- before I was at Juilliard,

I was at the University of Chicago,

and I was studying mathematics and physics,

and I wasn't particularly good at it.

I loved it, but I realized that I was never

going to be very good at that.

What I could do-- I was writing music.

I knew that it was going to be music.

I became very interested in scientists