Bill Gates, Chair of the Board, Breakthrough Energy Ventures

[Music] for about 20 years or so you've been the wealthiest man in the world but because you've given away so much money recently Jeff Bezos became wealthier do you think if you had stayed in college and gotten your college degree I mean you don't feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world is that right no I mean it's a sign that I haven't given the money away fast enough to drop out of the top ten you know and the markets been strong actually the market has been strong Microsoft is up 35% this year so to what do you attribute that uh the company you know it's doing super well sought you know dollars a great CEO you know the whole dream of the importance of software has really come true the five most valuable companies in the world are these technology companies Microsoft you know has a good share of that I get to spend about a sixth of my time now is over at Microsoft so recently you said that the biggest mistake you've made professionally was that Microsoft should have had the Android technology why was that the biggest mistake well when you're in a field you know we were in the field of doing operating systems for personal computers we knew the mobile phone would be very popular and so we were doing what was called Windows Mobile we missed being the dominant mobile operating system by a very tiny amount we were distracted during iron at Rus trial we didn't assign the best people to do the work so it's the the biggest mistake I made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set we were clearly the company that that should have achieved that and we didn't we allowed this Motorola design win and therefore the software momentum to go to Android and so it became the dominant non Apple mobile phone operating system globally but today your market cap is the I guess in the world you're the only company over a trillion dollars so how much better could you have been well market cap is only kind of an indirect thing that in a imperfect way will reflect what the company's doing Microsoft would be far more valuable if we had one the mobile operating system competition Android is a huge asset for Google recently I had a chance to interview your wife Melinda who with you is the co-chair of the foundation that you've set up I'll talk about that a moment and she described how you met and she said that you approached her in a parking lot and you asked her for a date and you said in three weeks we could have a date and she said that wasn't spontaneous enough and then she gave you her number and then you called her right away and said how about dinner tonight is that spontaneous enough and is that true or is that apocryphal that's close to true I I had a dinner that night that got done at about 10:00 so I called her up and said okay let's meet after 10:00 which apparently that was spontaneous enough I so worked out yeah it did okay so let's talk about what you most want to focus on today which was breakthrough energy and what you're doing in in the climate change area and everyone I think knows you've set up a foundation we'll talk about it later but your two main areas of focus are K to 12 education United States in health care in the least wealthy work parts of the world recently you've decided to make another effort not necessarily for your foundation but through breakthrough energy to try to do something about climate change why are you so worried about climate change well the climate change is a problem that gets worse every year and yet what you have to do on a global basis is very dramatic and reshaping the entire physical economy that we have the greatest suffering from climate change will be farmers in poor countries that is the droughts the floods the heat will cause the problems we already have of malnutrition and deprivation to get substantially worse and so it's a very complex problem and it's a problem that fits where I see my value at it which is looking at something through the lens of innovation not just the Rd part but the creation of products and the deployment of products and so helping educate people about ok what we're what are the sources of these greenhouse gases and how do you get on a path of innovation so that you can get global adoption and actually bring emissions down dramatically you know I have that now as a priority to articulate that along with those the other two that you mentioned that part of your foundation or your doing this outside your foundation ok the the part where you mitigate and you help the poor countries with better seeds and better policies partly through development aid that is through the foundation that mitigation part the part where you invent new ways of making fuels electricity cement steel meat that is done directly by me with a lot of investments including the fund that you mentioned the so called breakthrough energy ventures is a fund that I assembled a group of 22 people to put money into companies that are trying to commercialize the breakthroughs right but that's a fund of 1 billion dollars right you put in 250 million so can 1 billion dollars really make that much of a difference a billion it's actually been very catalytic so far they have 20 investments late next year will probably raise another billion to a billion and a half you know this is all about innovation broadly defined you know we need to make these dramatic changes and right now the premium if you said ok if you have to make steel with no emissions that steel would cost you four times what steel does today your electric bill would more than double if if we just take the technology we have today so yes supporting those companies and drawing other investors in one thing breakthrough energy has done has gotten a lot of co-investors green investing didn't go very well in the first round and so it looked like a field that might evaporate to some degree because bibi's come in and being able to bring a depth of understanding to these things not only they've been able to invest the first billion will be fully committed within the next year but we've gotten other investors so that's gone quite well in in the technology they only invest in companies who have a chance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a half a percent each each company and you know they've found 20 and I'm sure they'll find another 20 now I'm the smallest investor in that fund I think so am I gonna get my money back and make a return or what what do you say I'd say it's of the things you invest in it's probably one of the high-risk things it is being done on a commercial basis you know we're likely to have a few significant successes so it's not philanthropic in the sense that you can deduct it but the the timeframe of the return right and the riskiness returns are fairly high so we do expect to make a profit out of that fund so why do you think some people do not believe that there is such a thing as climate change what is propelling them to say there's no climate change is its scientific evidence or some other political reason I won't mention anybody but there are some people who don't think that there is climate change well you know they must not have taken enough science courses or something I don't know it the climate is a complex issue and you know just understanding how you do the statement requires a lot of in-depth study in the United States it's become somewhat of a partisan issue which is unfortunate you know might make it harder to achieve the type of agreements we need here here in the United States but you know we have two problems we have the people who deny climate and then we have the people who think it's easy to solve and we need to help educate both of those groups all right on climate change it used to be called global warming why was it changed from global warming to climate change the the problems caused by the greenhouse gases is worse than just the average temperature going up it causes there to be extremes of precipitation that is more floods and more droughts and so people thought just that warming piece it's too easy to think hey two degrees centigrade big deal all you know turn up my air conditioner and so the idea that it's sea-level rise it's heat waves these things are climate change publius a better term to capture the breath of problems but in the history of you know of human civilization there's there any evidence that people will do things that will affect their great great grandchildren but that they won't see the benefit from them in other words if you try to eliminate carbon the atmosphere you can't really do it in your lifetime because the carbon is kind of trapped there so maybe if we change our policies a hundred years from now there might be a reduction or forty years from now but very rarely do people's want to do something that's gonna help their great-great-great unborn grandchildren so how do you motivate people to do something well the United States actually of all governments has been willing to take on very difficult problems like cancer and make gigantic investments knowing that the real payoff would be many decades down the road you know when that was first being pushed you know people are saying hey this is important climate change is like that where you've got to take a long term perspective and government at its best is when it's taking that long-term perspective and funding the basic Rd and the policies that lead to scale deployment so today if we do nothing respect to climate change will the oceans rise up and if you have oceanfront land or is it going to be underwater in 20 or 30 years not well the the uncertainties in these models are still fairly high and so for example by 2100 the question of whether we have do we have 1 meter of sea level rise or do we have 2 meters of sea level rise that's within a level of uncertainty now those numbers is it's been studied more and more have gone up the before the IPCC only took the most conservative view which would have been about a half meter now the understanding is okay it's at least a meter and significant possibility that it's 2 meters now a large part of the carbon we have in the atmosphere now is caused by the electricity grid which is about 25 percent or so exactly so 24 percent it comes from agriculture and forestry why is that causing such a big increase in carbon well the mat category is a variety of things when you clear land you're taking in the carbon that's stored seeing the trees or plants there and you're releasing all of that like burning the land say in Indonesia for palm oil plantations another thing is that cows and other grass-eating species have a digestion system that emits methane and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas and so cows alone account for about 6 percent of global emissions and so we need to change cow cows just cows alone how are we going to do that well actually of all the categories the one that has gone better than I would have expected years ago is this work to make what's called artificial meat and so you have people like impossible or being on meat both which I invested in you eat it as well and you like it that absolutely you can go to Burger King and buy the impossible burger all right is it healthier for you or just healthier for the audience it's slightly healthier for you in terms of less cholesterol it's of course dramatic reduction in methane emissions you know animal cruelty manure management and the pressure that meat consumption puts on land use you know the main reason why we need to increase the agricultural output over the rest of this century is not the population increase it's that as countries get richer they eat more meat and meat is a very inefficient way of creating calories and so it's super helpful now with respect to solar for example is solar a solution there are problems it is part of the solution if the Sun would shine 24 hours a day it does somewhere then that 25% you'd have a solution so wind and solar are very helpful and the fact that the prices those have come down quite a bit but people think may think that's a total solution to that electric sector electricity unfortunately has to be reliable it's gotta work during you know say the 10-day period that Tokyo who needs 23 gigawatts of electricity has you'd have no solar and no wind for say 10 day periods and so the the need to have baseload generation like nuclear are others or to have a miracle in storage so that you can save that energy is very high the final solution to climate change when we really get to zero a lot of things that use hydrocarbons today like natural gas heating of buildings or homes will shift over to use electricity so one of the net Cerie elements is to get electricity to zero but the electric sector even in the US will have to more than double in size because transportation and buildings and industrial applications that have used hydrocarbons directly will shift over to use electricity well on electric grids there's been that's been in the news lately with respect of what we might have done in Russia and do you worry that if we have these big electrical grids the United States they could be something to being knocked out by some kind of cyber terrorism well that's even true today there are things like the internet and the electric grid that modern society is very dependent upon and so as we grow the electric sector you know we'll have to take that very seriously the u.s. is not built substantial new transmission even some very obvious projects for a high voltage line that was going to take power out of Oklahoma and take it into Tennessee even that didn't get built so there's a real policy problem with transmission which is a necessary piece of the eventual zero emission electricity solution now you've been an investor in new types of nuclear technology is that the solution nuclear better nuclear plants it is for many many locations a an important part of the solution to have energy that's available on demand and today's nuclear plants unfortunately their safety characteristics their costs just don't make them competitive so the two that are still being built in the u.s. that will be fairly expensive electricity so the third generation of nuclear which is what's being deployed right now is way too expensive the question is can we create a new generation fourth generation advanced nuclear whose economics are over twice as good you know whose waste is a tenth whose safety is much better and the answer is yes we can because we haven't done a new generation of nuclear and we have much better understanding of how to do that whether the United States will step up for the pilot plant for the fourth generation is a question what about fusion is that an answer fusion is very exciting it's very difficult to do so there's about seven companies that are messing around with fusion breakthrough energies put money into the MIT related one called Commonwealth fusion systems that technologically is very very difficult no one has gotten to so-called energy breakeven where you have to create ten million degrees of temperature in order for this reaction in the Sun the fusion to take place and so to do that economically and get not net power output is a huge scientific challenge it definitely should be funded but unlike fission that's very straightforward engineering to build that in exploration doesn't require invention fusion requires a lot of invention what about electric cars do you think that's a solution absolutely they if you look at the transport sector that's 15% of passenger cars with a bout of another factor of 2 to 3 in battery improvement which is possible the mainstream for passenger cars can become electric so you have to make that transition you've got to scale it up you've got to make sure electricity is is zero mission but for trucks and planes there's almost no chance the batteries will be good enough and so there you'll still need to create liquid fuels either with electricity or biofuels someway fuels are amazing you know the energy density of gasoline is 30 times the energy density of the best battery we can make and so if you look at like a container ship that crosses the ocean having your fuel be 30 times less efficient would mean that 90 percent of that weight you're carrying would be the batteries instead of the cargo and so and planes and boats electrification is unlikely to work in those cases so we need ways of making fuels that are zero carbon when you talk to heads of state about this do they roll their eyes and say we're happy to meet you can I have a selfie with you and so forth but do they really do anything and what are you trying to get heads of state to do well in the the Paris climate conference one of the things that was missing was a focus on R&D and so actually France said yes we want that to be for the first time at a cop a real issue that gets discussed and so what was called mission innovation which Prime Minister Modi got to pick that name that idea of a commitment of over 30 governments to double their energy Rd was a significant milestone that came out of that conference in order to get that commitment I had to make the commitment that there would be breakthrough energy that would take things out of those labs and help get them into the marketplace so there's been some progress climate is complicated enough that you know you don't want you want a broad set of people in the government to understand the the complexities and in terms of the R&D work that needs to be done unless the u.s. is deeply engaged it's unlikely to happen because so much of the world's capacity to do that innovation is is here in the United States pulled out more or less of the Paris Accord though not technically so for another year or so is that of concern to you and do you think this is gonna hurt the effort to change climate change around the world yeah it's a huge step backwards even if you meet all the current commitments in that climate Accord you're still way over 2 degrees of warming and most countries are behind the commitments they made those commitments were a set of reductions where you would compare your to 2030 emissions to your 2005 emissions and there's a little bit about that's easy the shift from coal to natural gas which is one kind thing is a lot of that and yet the world is falling short and so to him people like the United States say okay that's even that's not important it just shows how daunting this is going to be there's no way we'll get there without the u.s. coming back in in a strong way you think if you met with President Trump you could convince him on Paris to maybe get back in or is that beyond your capabilities to do that i someone else should do that alright so let me go back for a moment to the early days you famously dropped out of Harvard and you then started your company but you I think said subsequently that actually you thought the computer revolution was occurring or their software resident revolution was occurring but actually you were wrong and if you'd stayed at Harvard for another two years or so it wouldn't made a big difference is that right or not yeah the urgency that I felt that if we didn't get Microsoft going right away that somebody would do a great job building a software company we won't have a chance that probably ended up not being true that I could have waited two or three years and the opportunity to do Microsoft still would be there but anyway I felt a sense of urgency and you know it's not like you know I still get to take courses and learn things today you know things like the learning company and if all sorts of great books so it's not like I've missed some part of my education right when you dropped out your father and mother said are you sure you know what you want to do if one of your children dropped out of college to start a company what would you say well I'd have to say yes but the dropping out is not an irrevocable decision you know if you try and start a company it doesn't go well they always let you go back and so if you don't have you know kids that you need to support you know it's a very low-risk thing particularly in the culture of the United States we're trying to start something and and baling is not a black mark for the rest of your life when you were starting Microsoft there were a lot of other software companies and you were not number one at the beginning I think there were mothers who were a little bit further ahead what was it that enabled you to beat everybody else in the software business was it Bill Gates was it something else what was the unique factor that made you the most successful yeah we were actually the first and but there were companies and they were all kind of single product companies who got ahead of us in terms of sales you know by about 1991 we did become the largest of all of them we were an engineering company we were about how you hire smart people and how you use tools to develop software broadly we were global and we weren't about a single product so like for example WordPerfect was a word processor somebody might remember they did so well with that product that their gross sales rivaled ours when we were doing a broad set of products as soon as graphics interface caught on which was Windows that became memes from in 1995 we became far larger than the other software companies now subsequently you know Google Apple Amazon have become you know also extremely successful but in the 90s we were the strongest okay by far now the largest companies in the world in the United States today are technology companies Apple Facebook Google Microsoft and so forth do you worry that there's too much power and too much data in the hands of these technology companies and are you surprised that government hasn't done something more than they've done today about this well technologies become so central that government has to think okay what does that mean about elections what does it mean about bullying what does it mean about wiretapping authorities that let you find out what's going on financially or you know drug money laundering things like that so yes the government needs get involved I for the earlier zuv Microsoft bragged to people that I didn't have an office in Washington DC and eventually I came to regret that statement because it was kind of almost like taunting Washington DC and so now the technology companies partly because of the lesson of Microsoft of course you know they could have seen that lesson through AT&T or IBM or Kodak or a lot of innovators as well they're very engaged there will be more regulation of the tech sector things like privacy I'm sure though and there should be at some point federal regulation that relates to that the fact that now this is the way people consume media you know has really brought it into a realm that you know we need to shape it so that the benefits outweigh outweigh the negatives all right so it's said that that when Facebook was coming along you tried to buy Facebook did you you regret not paying a higher price to buy it then because you could have bought it maybe for a billion or two billion no I mean we bought a small part of Facebook and that was a super successful investment they what what Mark did wasn't within our ambit you know unlike mobile operating system that absolutely was because of our engineering culture doing this social networking thing we weren't destined to be the leader in that now we through an acquisition we have LinkedIn which for professional communication and networking is in a very strong position and has lots of growth opportunity now there was a company that was started in Seattle near you company called Amazon and they were supposed to be selling books over the Internet and then later other things but then they started Web Services cloud business how did Microsoft miss that business of cloud and you're now number two in it but were you surprised that you were kind of beat to that game by a company that wasn't really a sophomore company well the natural companies to do the cloud would have been your classic enterprise vendors IBM Oracle sa P who really in terms of the true horizontal cloud aren't aren't there at all it is a surprise and it's a huge credit to Jeff Bezos and his team that they got out in front and with AWS did the best cloud product today the Microsoft is a strong number two and a huge distance to number three and so it's it is a source of strength for Microsoft but yes there are many companies including Microsoft who should feel bad that they didn't they didn't get ahead of Amazon and doing that work so if you were 20 years old today and you wanted to start a new company drop out of Harvard what company or what area would you want to start it in well this is a great time to be doing innovation because the tools of innovation are so much better there are lots of things in biology that are very interesting there are lots of things in energy that are interesting given my background I would start an AI company that whose goal would be to teach computers how to read so that they can absorb and understand all the written knowledge of the world that's an area where AI has yet to make progress and it will be quite profound when we achieve that goal so are you worried about the power of AI to disrupt our civilization and put people out of work those kind of things the increased productivity that will come from AI will create dilemmas about what should people do with that extra time and you've got to consider that a good thing even though it will be an interesting set of adjustments that have to take place so most people over the last 200 years or so whoever they the wealthiest person in the world was didn't usually work that hard when they got to be 60 or so they kind of took life easy you seem to be working pretty hard what motivates you to still work so hard well I love my work the work of the foundation is super interesting I get to meet with the scientists I get to go out in the field I do think your habits are sort of set in your 20s and 30s and by my standards of the twenties well you know I didn't believe in weekends back then not to mention vacations so I'm you know fairly lazy compared to myself in my 20s when I was a true fanatic you know all I believed in was working on software night and day and and for my 20s that was perfect I didn't have a wife or family at all and my role was very hand hands-on role you know I'm very lucky that my foundation work the part-time work I do for Microsoft I see that extending you know four decades into the future and having an understanding of innovation you know I think shaping innovation in many of these areas there is a unique role that I can write I can help play okay so but being Bill Gates pretty famous over the last quarter century so can you go to a restaurant and people don't bother you people are pretty nice about that particularly if I'm I'm with my family people are a reasonably discrete so it's not a problem driving a car people ever stare at you saying what is he heard I'm a car sure but that's okay right and when you your sport now is tennis right that's right so you've played with some of the best players Roger Federer and others you get a lot of points off of those players hurt not not at their plane full-out no not a chance and you've given up golf that was here in one of your other sports that you don't play I was largely giving it up I still play a little bit and what about bridge are you still a big bridge player I I loved playing bridge it's a game that the players are aging quite a bit it hasn't caught on was that good or yeah because you know it's unfortunate because it's a great game but right so when you want to go buy something can you go and like in a department store and buy anything or how do you shop you shop online or years go by anything and you they use a credit card or cash or what do you do yeah I you know for a while I I didn't do that much but it's something one of my daughters enjoys doing is helping pick clothes for me so we go out and go shopping together and you know she's got good taste so it's it's a neat father/daughter activity one time your wife told me that when you drop your daughter off in college the first day at Stanford she's graduated from now the roommate didn't know that she was gonna be the roommate and then you needed things to fix up the room and you went to Lowe's to buy things and Lowe's was it unusual for you to go into Lowe's that people stare at you do you go into Lowe's or Martin Walmart very much for things like that no it was actually kind of hard to assemble some of that stuff you know I wanted AG meant a reality to help show me how to put the pieces together properly but you know people are very nice you know overall when you're super nice when you're relaxing today is it to go on a trip with your family go someplace you've never been before go on a boat play tennis what is the best way that you relax I you know traveling and then I I get to do quite a bit of reading in that case I don't read how many books a year you try to read 50 50 books a year okay and do you comment on those books and you recommend those books and probably 15 year I do serious reviews of you know I mentioned at lunch I'm reading this Jill Lepore of these truths which is this great history of the United States but there's so many fantastic books I have one coming out could you review that I will I will alrights history book okay let's go back to your foundation okay all right I ask people all the time I say to them suppose you had the problem of Bill Gates and Melinda Gates you have a hundred billion or whatever it might be and then you say okay I give you a hundred billion dollars and then you go buy a yacht at a plane or a house then you've got ninety nine point five billion left what do you do with that and the problem did you had that problem and you would assess the two most urgent issues were K to 12 in the United States and health in the let's develop areas how did you pick those - any regrets about picking those - and have you made progress on either of those two well global help is our biggest area and there the progress has been really unbelievable not just because of our work but our partners that include the US government spending on PEPFAR the European donors who've really stepped up on these health issues one of the metrics of importance is the number of children in the world who die before the age of five when we got started in the year 2000 that was over ten million a year now it's about five million a year and so you know it's just mind-blowing and people aren't that as aware of it is you'd like them to be the those deaths because of getting out vaccines and understanding a bit more about nutrition those deaths have been cut in half now the goal is to cut them in half again by 2030 and then we do have you know the pipeline of new vaccines and and new tools particularly a nutrition that give us an opportunity to do that so our global health work because of the partnerships we've had because of the innovation has been more successful than we expected our u.s. education work that is not just K through 12 that includes higher ed as well they're the key metrics dropout reads math and verbal achievement those metrics have moved essentially not at all and even as the u.s. is spending more resources on education we spend by far more than any any country in the world and yet our results are quite a bit worse than almost all the other rich countries and even some middle-income countries you know even Vietnam now is passing us in terms of their math results so the there the fields as a whole and our work has not had the impact we hope for or what you try to do in the education areas have something called common core and that was very controversial but now it's largely been adopted yeah so the in the United States there were some very strange things that is our math textbooks were twice the size of the other countries in fact three times the size of Singapore which has the best math education in the world and that didn't come about because of this process where the textbook companies always wanted adoption of new textbooks so they didn't have to compete with the used textbooks anyway they just got thicker and thicker and so the US would tend to try to teach too much in a year and instead of really cementing the basic knowledge and so the idea of the Common Core was to say what math should you learn in various grades make sure that by high school graduation you have reasonable math skills and so it became more rigorous it matched what the best standards in the u.s. were which were in Massachusetts and it meant that all the online material and kids who moved between different school systems you'd have this alignment and you know it's the world's most logical thing and yet it was super attacked you know as though math in one state is different than math in another state but anyway it's largely succeeded on almost as a subtle thing so Warren Buffett can you describe your relationship with him he is a little bit older than you and you develop his close relationship and then ultimately he gave you a large part of his fortune for your foundation how did that come about and were you surprised that he did that yes warmth 25 years older than I am you know he's absolutely an amazing person and I was lucky enough to meet him in 1991 I didn't reluctantly yeah I didn't think I wanted to meet him because I don't think a buying and selling of stocks as a value added part of society separate private um in a more involved in the innovation part but when I met Warren the fact that he had this model of how the world worked you know he asked me why can't I be M put you out of business which is a a very smart question you know because of the time IBM was 10,000 times our size and yet you know we would go on in terms of software innovation and even value the company to surpass IBM who was the dominant computer company when I was growing up by you know we the amount wouldn't their mistake was when you developed a software for their IBM PC they should have bought it from you as opposed to licensing is it that would have helped them but the it wouldn't have really changed things I mean the what's happened in computing required really thinking about the microprocessor and software in a very different way than they did with the mainframe it really is kind of an innovators dilemma thing that this very low-end way of looking at computing personal computing the technologies that came in out out of that now dominate everything corporate computing cloud computing warren buffett's so he developed a relationship with him and he yet became a bridge player with him and I forgot and one day he calls you and says guess what I've got an extra hundred billion dollars I don't know what to do with I'm gonna give it to you what did you say well it was unbelievable that he chose a substantial part he created five foundations that are that he's giving substantial money to a high percentage of that went to our foundation that basically doubled our ambition and so you know going after malaria eradication going after new seeds we added an agricultural thing we added sanitation because of the incredible resources he did what any name on it might have somebody asked him and he said no so anyway Warren is an unbelievable person I've learned immense amounts from war so today people come to you all the time for money I assume everywhere you go people say by the way I have this thing you should invest in but I have a couple myself I'll mention later no not good no a couple things you should invest in or things just give money to so how do you resist it you have some person who says no for you or how do you do that let many people how many people say no well once you picked what you care about if somebody has something that can make a difference in global health we're super interested and you know we have staff of 1,500 people and if it's to do with global health some of those people will come out and talk through with you whatever your innovation is and how we can partner with you on that you know so that's clearly in our area if it is something that can substantially improve K through 12 education then we're going to be very interested in it if people are asking outside of those things then you know fortunately you can say no because focuses is key to philanthropy so people have recognized over the years that raising children is difficult Jackie Kennedy famously said if you mess up raising your children nothing else matters you have three children seem to be well-adjusted and you've kept them out of the newspapers and so forth how did you do that and is that been more of a challenge raising healthy kids with a wealthy background that you have how do you avoid spoiling kids like that I think that's a huge problem you know obviously our kids have benefited from having a great education and our opportunity to travel and you know so they're very lucky in that sense making sure that the visibility or the way people treat them is not unnatural there are some challenges that come with that so far they've handled it well you know Melinda is the one who deserves any are certainly almost all the credit for the kids so far doing very well you know our kids we've said to them that that you know the money is going to the foundation and so they don't think of themselves as sort of aristocratic but what are they Sarah to tell them that they say can't you give me a little bit or something or they don't they don't ask for something they'll get a little bit okay but are they going to be involved in the foundation no and the foundation you have a finite length of the foundation I think it's 20 years or after the last of us to go yep so why not have a perpetual foundation well Warren has influenced my thinking on this quite a bit the idea our foundation is aimed at eliminating the diseases that disproportionately affect the poor to try and make it so no matter where you're born your chance of survival and living a long healthy life are equal throughout the world that should be achievable you know assume you know Melinda's gonna live another say 40 years that gives us 60 years to solve those problems that's doable and we should take all our money and put it against us education and global health and there will be problems in the future that at least from my grave I won't understand very well and there will be rich people in the future in fact more rich people in the future than there are today so they they should use their intelligence and understanding to go after those problems having a pile of my money left over to go after those problems just doesn't make any sense how much money has here Foundation given away today about 40 billion dollars 40 billion yeah we're now up to giving 6 billion dollars a year okay that's pretty good so do you have any regrets about not having started philanthropy earlier because I think you didn't retire from Microsoft full-time here about 50 or so is that right yeah so I until the year 2000 I had not done significant the land to me as a percentage of my wealth I'd given you know hon a few hundred million dollars in the year 2000 I put 20 billion dollars into the foundation and so that's when we got serious I'd say so that was I was part time on the foundation work from 2000 to 2009 a 2008 sorry when I retired from Microsoft and then I flipped so that I was full-time at the foundation in part time at Microsoft and that that's worked out well for me you know some of these issues yes I wish like for an HIV vaccine we had started sooner because we'd be further along but anyway it the timing this worked out well so do you have any regrets in your life you seem to have a life that most people would love to live you got a happy family great marriage foundation business success is there anything can you make us feel good by saying you've done something that didn't work out or just make us because all of us feel bad because we look at you and we can't do what you've done so tell us something that's bad that you've done or you feel inadequate about something it must be something I am super lucky you know they marry Melinda the experienced at Microsoft that although it had its ups and downs was phenomenal the work of the foundation and no regrets about anything I wouldn't try and go back and change anything I mean for example the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft you know was bad for the company it created a lot of distraction we would have done a lot of things including the mobile operating system better if it hadn't been for that but in a way it was a lesson for me and you know so it and it probably accelerated my retirement by five or six years which overall for me probably would say a good thing you know I don't think it was a principle right set of activities but that's another story so today the greatest pleasure of your life is when you're doing what is it other than being interviewed by me or something like that what are the great greatest pleasure of your life uh you know time with kids time with scientists time when I'm reading and things are making sense you know going out and seeing the impact of the Foundation's work meeting with scientists who think we can make breakthroughs to help solve climate you know these are super interesting problems and you know having a broad set of system thinking applied to these problems is going to be necessary to orchestrate the resources and policies behind them so you know I love I love my work so do you your children are not married I think is that right not yet no so when they are do you look forward to having grandchildren absolutely and you're gonna try to teach them software or how would you know I don't think of Microsoft is a dynastic organization so finally if people are watching now and they say alright I want to do something about climate change but I'm just one person I don't have the resource that Bill Gates says what can any average person do to have some impact on climate change in your view well certainly they as a consumer can take things like these new meat products or how they buy electricity and they can help drive up the scale of the the green solutions the most important thing at this stage is their political voice there's going to be a need to put substantial resources into this effort and you know we need will need a bipartisan solution and to send the right signal to the market you actually don't if you just win one year and then it gets repealed that doesn't help at all the key is what people see the policies will be over the next 30 years on a consistent basis and that means it's a much higher bar than just a one time victory I should have asked you you started the Giving Pledge with Melinda and Warren Buffett and we won't have time to go through that but right now if you were to convey one message of people about philanthropy what you would like the average person who's not of your wealth to do one philanthropy what would you ask the average person to do well it's the best thing is to pick a couple of causes that you believe in deeply and find organizations that you can get involved in the social services and local communities the charter schools and local communities there's a host of very high impact important local things you're the dollars who give to global needs actually will have substantially more impact per dollar because the you know if you you can save a life for a thousand dollars if you just fund measles vaccinations or polio eradication those things are you know pretty mind-blowing in terms of the difference they can make but you know it's all in philanthropy is not based on picking you know comparing every single cause and picking the most impactful it has to be something that connects with you personally even you know the climate area whether it's advocacy or high risk investing or behaviors consumer there's lots that that people can do that give us will increase our chance of success so bill I want to thank you for taking time

Channel: The Economic Club of Washington, D.C.

Views: 91,114

Keywords: David M. Rubenstein, Bill Gates, Breakthrough Energy Ventures

Id: -PYffdGJw8Q

Length: 52min 7sec (3127 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 24 2019