Bill Gates would start this kind of company today

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 the government hasn't done something more than they've done today about this well technology's 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 uh what's going on financially or uh you know drug money laundering things like that so yes the government needs to get involved i for the earliers of microsoft prayed to people that i didn't have an office in washington dc and eventually i came to regret uh 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 uh of course you know they could have seen that lesson through att 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 they'll and there should be at some point federal regulation that relates to that the fact that now this is the way people consume media uh you know has really brought it into a realm that uh you know we need to shape it so that the benefits outweigh outweigh the negatives um all right so uh it's said that that when facebook was coming along you tried to buy facebook um 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 uh no i mean uh we bought a small part of facebook and that uh was a a super successful investment they what what mark did wasn't within our ambit um you know unlike mobile operating system that absolutely was because of our engineering culture doing the 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 uh of growth opportunity now there was a company that was started in seattle uh near you um a company called the amazon and uh they were supposed to be selling books over the internet and then later other things but then they started uh 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 beaten to that game by a company that wasn't really a software company well the natural companies to do the cloud would have been your classic enterprise vendors ibm oracle sap 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 uh and so it's it is a source of strength for microsoft but yes uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 uh 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 the 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 20s you know i didn't believe in weekends back then uh not to mention vacations so i'm you know fairly lazy compared to myself in my 20s where i was a true uh fanatic uh 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 uh at all and my rule was very hands-on role you know i i'm very lucky that my foundation work the part-time work i do for microsoft i see that extending you know for decades into the future and having an understanding of innovation uh you know i think shaping innovation in many of these areas uh there is a unique role that i can i can help play okay so but being bill gates is 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 uh particularly if i'm i'm with my family people are reasonably discreet so it's not a problem you're driving a car people ever stare at you saying what is he sure driving a car sure but that's okay and uh 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 um you get a lot of points off of those players or not not if they're playing full out no not a chance uh and you've given up golf that was in one of your other sports so you don't play well i've largely given it up i i still play a little bit and what about bridge are you still a big bridge player i i love playing bridge it's a a game that the players are aging uh quite a bit it hasn't caught on uh was that good or bad because no it's unfortunate uh because it's a great game but right so when you want to go buy something can you go like in a department store and buy anything or how do you shop you shop online or you just go buy anything and you have to 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 uh and go shopping together and you know she's got good taste so it's it's a a neat father-daughter activity one time uh your wife told me that when you drop your daughter off in college the first day at uh stanford she's graduated for now um the roommate didn't know that she was going to be the roommate and then you needed things to fix up the room and you went to lowe's to buy things in lowe's uh was it unusual for you to go in the lows did people stare at you do you go into lowe's or walmart very much or things like that no it was actually kind of hard to assemble uh some of that stuff uh you know i wanted augmented reality to help show me how to put the pieces together properly but you know people are very nice uh you know overall so 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 uh you know traveling and then i i get to do quite a bit of reading uh in that case you read how many books a year you try to read 50 50 books a year okay and do you um comment on those books and you recommend those books and probably 15 a year i do serious reviews of um you know i mentioned at lunch i'm reading this jill the poor of these truths which is this great uh 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 okay all right it's history book okay let's go back to your foundation okay i ask people all the time i say to them uh suppose you had the problem of bill gates and melinda gates you have 100 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 99.5 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-12 in the united states and health in the uh less developed areas how did you pick those two any regrets about picking those two and have you made progress on either of those two well global health uh is our biggest area and there the progress has been really unbelievable not just because of our work but our partners that include the u.s 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 died before the age of five when we got started in the year 2000 that was over 10 million a year now it's about five million a year and so you know it's just mind-blowing in the in and people aren't that as aware of it as 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 in 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-12 that includes higher ed as well there the key metrics dropout rates uh math and verbal achievement those metrics have moved essentially not at all and even as the us 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 uh 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 uh results so the the there the field as a whole and our work has not had the impact we hope for part of 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 had 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 uh the u.s 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 uh 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 uh but anyway it's largely succeeded almost as a subtle thing so uh warren buffett can you describe your relationship with him um he is a little bit older than you and you develop this 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 um warren's 25 years older than i am uh 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 of buying and selling of stocks as a value-added uh part of society except for private equity i'm you know more involved in the innovation uh part but when i met warren the fact that he had this model of how the world worked you know he he asked me why can't ibm put you out of business which is a a very smart question uh you know because at the time ibm was ten thousand times our size uh 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 uh by you know what wouldn't you well their mistake was when you developed the software for their ibm pc they should have bought it from you as opposed to licensing 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 uh kind of an innovator's dilemma thing that this very low-end way of looking at computing personal computing the technologies that came with that out of that now dominate everything corporate computing cloud computing warren buffett so he developed a relationship with him and he became a bridge player with him and offer and so yeah um one day he calls you and says guess what i've got an extra 100 billion dollars i don't know what to do with i'm going to give it to you what did you say well it was unbelievable that he chose uh a substantial part he created five foundations uh that are that he's uh giving substantial money to a high percentage of that went to our foundation that basically doubled uh 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 we asked him uh and he said no so anyway warren is an unbelievable person i've learned immense amounts from more 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 of myself i'll mention later no not just now a couple things you should invest in or things you should give money to so how do you resist do you have some person who says no for you or how do you do that let many people uh 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 1500 people and if it's to do with global health some of those people 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-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 focus is 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 has 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 uh you know obviously our kids have benefited from having a great education and an opportunity to travel and uh 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 or certainly almost all the credit uh 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 do they say if you tell them that they say can you give me a little bit or something or they don't they don't ask for some they'll get a little bit okay but uh are they going to be involved in the foundation no and uh the foundation you have a finite uh length of the foundation i think it's is it 20 years or after the last of us to go yep so why 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 uh you know assume you know melinda's going to 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 u.s 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 uh 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 your foundation given away today about 40 billion dollars 40 billion yeah we're now up to giving six billion dollars a year okay that's pretty good um so do you have any regrets about not having started philanthropy earlier because i think you didn't retire from microsoft full-time to about 50 or so is that right yeah so i until the year 2000 i had not done significant philanthropy as a percentage of my wealth i'd given you know hun 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 uh i was part-time uh on the foundation work from 2000 to 2009 uh 2008 sorry when i retired from microsoft and then i flipped so that i was full-time at the foundation and part-time at microsoft and that that's worked out well for me uh 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 has 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'd feel inadequate about something there must be something i am super lucky uh you know they marrying melinda uh the experience at microsoft uh that although it had its ups and downs was uh phenomenal uh 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 anti-trust 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 uh and you know so it and it probably accelerated my requirement uh by five or six years which overall for me probably was a a good thing um you know i don't think it was a principled 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 uh time when i'm reading and things are making sense um you know going out and seeing the impact of the foundation's work uh meeting with scientists who think we can make breakthroughs to help solve climate uh 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 uh to orchestrate the resources and policies behind them so you know i love i love my work um 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 going to try to teach them software or how would you no i don't think of microsoft as a dynastic organization uh so finally um if people are watching now and they say all right 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 uh how they uh buy electricity and they can help uh 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 wouldn't have time to go through that but right now if you were to convey one message to 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 uh 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 your the dollars you give to global needs actually will have substantially more impact per dollar uh because the you know if you you can save a life for a thousand dollars if you just fund measles vaccination 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 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 high-risk investing or behaviors consumer there's lots that that people can do that give us will increase our chance of success

Channel: CNN Business

Views: 952,790

Rating: 4.770227 out of 5

Keywords: tech, microsoft, business, google, bill gates, business news, CNNB, artificial intelligence, CNN Business, latest, videos, facebook, CNN

Id: s7O3oCWZgjE

Length: 25min 51sec (1551 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019

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[u/jorjorbiinks]

Any chance for endorsement from Gates?

[u/wheresthemolly]

Id rather pay a VAT tax than more regulation

[u/BazookaShrooms]

Can you imagine? Gates, Elon and Obama coming out to endorse Yang at yangpalooza?! Would be flipping epic.