Very impressed with Assange's technical chops in this discussion. I only read about a third of the discussion, but I kept getting the feeling that he was trying to dumb the topic down to a level Schmidt would understand.
Schmidt is reasonably technical. He wrote the original "lex" lexical analyzer generator program.
Eric Schmidt has a PhD in Computer Science and was an engineer and engineering director for many years before becoming the President of Sun. I would say he's somewhat more than reasonably technical.
Its possible they were both aware that this would be published in part or in full at some point. They may have speaking to an unknown audience as much as each other.
> Schmidt and Cohen requested the meeting, they said, to discuss ideas for "The New Digital World", their forthcoming book to be published on April 23, 2013.
Assange wrote some code for a pre-nmap port scanner. If he'd chosen a different path I think he would've been a pretty decent security researcher.