Gates, Dangote, Nooyi and Son on the Power of Technology

all of us are of an age probably we might not be here 30 or 40 years from now we might if we're lucky but if you had the chance to give up everything you currently have and give it up your wealth your fame your accomplishments and live through the next year's of 30 years or so of innovation and start all over again would you rather live through the next 30 years of innovation and see what's the world's gonna become or would you like to stay where you are right now you're happy to stay where you are would you like to give it all up and see the innovation in the next 30 or 40 years [Music] give up everything else because all right though you would like to living longer worth the better deal okay you know David I'd like to see something in my two kids told me I asked them what they'd like for their birthday they said we'd like a week without the internet okay so in a way I'd like to go back to those days when life was little simpler simpler okay awesome but everything for the future okay so in your in your current life let's assume you're gonna have the current life let's talk about that what has been the most important innovation that you have seen in let's say the last 10 years in the world in which you operate what's been the most important change or innovation I think in the in the world that I operate in especially in Africa if you look at it that is a massive GSM revolution you know I mean if you look at us in Nigeria you know we had just about 500,000 lines in 2001 by 2017 we already have 139 million lines so it's a massive you know and you can see what Roland's did in India well you know they are able to create 100 million lines in 170 days right bill well I had a early career in the digital revolutions and that's still the fastest moving thing and it's so horizontal in nature that it'll change banking education scientific research sales and marketing today a lot of my focus is more on the health area and particularly miracle vaccines getting a malaria HIV TB vaccine those are the things that you know I get to back amazing scientists the digital revolution isn't slowing down so we get the benefit of that but in terms of equity its these health breakthroughs that I'm most excited about and you think people with health great breakthroughs can live to be 90 100 hundred and ten hundred well I'm not working on that problems there's other Silicon Valley billionaires who want to live forever my main focus is on the inequity that there's still so many it's a hundred times more likely for a child in Africa to die than a child in the United States and these are all solvable diseases we can get rid of that inequity extending life is very difficult because you're many of your body parts including your brain wear out so I am NOT in in that field I'm in the malaria HIV nutrition game right I don't think your brains gonna wear out but okay o Indra David I think every aspect of our life is changing because of what all these chaps are doing with technology but I think the single biggest thing that I feel good about is the rate technology is enabling gender inclusion because women are being enabled a lot more and they're actually their voices are being heard and I hope that progress is going into the future well let me ask you about that you have done two things in your career that we're very innovative one you're a immigrant the United States and became the CEO of one of the most important companies the United States in the world but you're also a woman so what was it was more difficult to become the woman CEO or the Indian immigrant CEO all of it all of it I I think it was all of it because remember I came into the workforce when they were hardly any women in senior executive positions so now we have numbers but 20-30 years ago when I first started working there weren't too many women so I'd say that I you know was it was difficult being a woman and being in the workforce I think being an Indian immigrant got me attention because I was often the only colored person in the room and so that got me attention but I had to work harder to prove that the color and the gender actually should not be counted against me I could do a damn good job too well you have to be better qualified than white men right so Massa what's the biggest innovation that you've seen in the last ten years or so in your world well I think the the not just ten years last 30 years the innovation of the micro processors using microprocessor as a base to create internet that is they has changed the life of almost everybody on their ass but going forward it's I think it's accelerating even even more on that Hamas earlier in your career you were a technology in innovator and at one point I think in year 2000 you lost seventy billion dollars of net worth what did it feel like to lose 70 billion dollars of net worth in one year well it was a crash everybody crashed but somehow you know I at the bottom of the crash I actually revived my spirits of the fighting by the way by the way maybe bill does not know for three days I became richer than bill in that day well then after twelve months later I became almost broke nineteen ninety nine percent drop in our share price ninety nine percent in one year so one let me ask you one other question about your career for a moment at one point you made an investment of twenty million dollars in a little company that wasn't heard of by many people caught I think it's Alibaba it became worth about ninety billion dollars and now worth about a hundred and thirty billion so how did you decide that Halle Baba was a good investment and do you have any more like that you could recommend to us the Jack Ma not because of the business model not because of the technology it's because of his charisma in leadership and China had enormous opportunity of the upside I said this is the guy that can be the leader for this innovation okay Andrew you've tried to take a company that was known for selling selling sugar water in some of the view of some people and make it a more nutritionally safe and better company was that hard to beat the bureaucracy back yet Pepsi when many people didn't want to do the things you wanted to do I think it was hard within the company it was hot outside the company I remember even investors telling me that you know don't forget we're Americans we like our soda and chips don't try to change us and when I asked them if they change their habits you said oh yeah we've changed our habits but we don't want you to change what you're doing so we had to fight battles across multiple fronts change does not happen quickly in our industries because we have to change consumer tastes we have to change the product portfolio we have to change the business system so it's still happening it's a work in process now if you go to up somebody's house for dinner and they say would you like Coke what do you say I do does that ever happen or you leave the dinner or you yeah sure I save just nice knowing you and I leave so bill I think yes I do leave without a doubt actually my secretary sends them a list ahead of time in case there's a mistake though I'd like to ask you a question I have asked you before but people are interested in this answer all of us have used personal computers are used to turning them on and we have to have three fingers to do so control-alt-delete and it's a little awkward sometimes to do that you were the person who came up with the idea of doing it that way why did you do that the IBM the IBM PC hardware keyboard only had one way that it could get a guaranteed interrupt generated so you know clearly the people involved they should have put another key on in order to make that work a lot of machines nowadays do have that as a you know more obvious function but no regrets about doing it that way it worked out okay well I'm not sure you can go back and change small things in your life without putting the other things at risk sure if I can make one small edit I would I'd make that a single key operation No now by the way you dropped out of college do you think had you gotten your college degree your life would have been better off well at the time it it felt like there was a huge sense of urgency that obviously the microprocessor was revolutionary and writing software for it a lot of existing companies including IBM with infinite resources would go and do that so if we were to have any hope you know the sooner we did it the quicker we did it the more hardcore we were about it and so I didn't want to waste a day and in my 20s you know I worked weekends I didn't believe in vacation we had to move at high speed because eventually IBM did come in and do us too and compete with us and you know lots of companies came along later of the companies that were formed in that period we were really the sole survivor Oracle did another type of software there about our vintage as a software company but those are the only two companies that really survived out of that era us because we were a broad product company we did platforms we were very international so I wouldn't it would have been hard to hold me back once I saw that opportunity Harvard which I loved was a very relaxed thing where he would sort of sit in classes and stay up all night and talk to people it didn't have that if I same intensity so I really once I saw the opportunity I was gonna leave and their parents what did they say they were saying hey we were paying your tuition what does this mean and I said well I'm on leave which is true I could have gone back Harvard's very generous about that I mean eventually the course catalog sort of changes on you and you're a little too old for it but they they weren't sure if it would succeed or not so they they thought maybe I'd head back but you know because I was single and mod just maniacal in those days it was a perfect thing for me and final question now your invent innovating in a number of areas but one of them is energy you've started a fund and it's to invest in energy innovation why have you picked that area well energy is a case where we have a real danger that even though innovation is fantastic it proceeds in different pieces in different industries and education it proceeds very slowly for a variety of structural reasons energy there really is no one incentive because a new type of power plant is going to take decades to prove your patents will be expired you know the the Regulatory Commission's don't want to take the risk of the new type of power plant we've seen with what's going on with nuclear how tough that's been and so because of climate change and because Africa actually has less electricity today per person than I had 10 years ago because the population growth has exceeded the electrical generation capacity increase we have a huge problem we need low-cost clean energy and so I do think that for those who have conspire capital that's risky capital that joining in on this is a great thing Massa was the one who got us over the top on our fund commitment thank you again is it easy to say no to Bill I guess not right I respect so much I never say no to him all right so you're now you have that funny you're now investing it right yeah yeah it's about a billion dollars and we spent the last year hiring the team now we've got an incredible team some people that you know and I'm really excited about what they'll be able to do and so it's about a 15 to 20 or time period a little longer than you'd have in say biology or our digital investment because just proving out plants and scalars is very hard now Alico rightly or wrongly many people think innovation isn't based in Silicon Valley or maybe in Seattle area or maybe in Japan or in China but they don't think of Africa as a place where a lot of innovation is that unfair and do you think there are a lot of African entrepreneurs in the next 10 years will really change the face of Africa well I think quite a lot of entrepreneurs in Africa you know sort of which they have invested in the last 10 years and they're also ready and willing to invest going forward it is unfair to say that yes this actually nothing is happening you know Africa because for example we have you know a locally designed by metric data which was actually you know created by for example a local company let me give you a small story we have about a million people done what foundation wanted to target 1 million women in various local government local government are the ones that you call counties here and we go to every local government we meet up a thousand women and we give them a you know a grant free grant to improve on their lives so that they can increase on the capital and see so at the beginning we had it done manually well you know once we give them the money were even taking a risk doing that with commercial banks taking the money all the way to be given them in cash but later on a local you know company you know design the biometric data well now we registered all of them we use the banking mobile system to pay the money and we also register all of them all of them they are now on a data out of the 1 million because it was going very slow lack of data and all this is so now we have reached 300,000 I will believe in the next two years we'll be able to complete the remaining 700,000 but would that we are able to now go back to these same people and find out ok fine this money that we gave them has it really changed their lives which it did and the same thing that you know on our joint partnership would bill in terms of fighting polio okay because what happen was that before we just had the mapping then manually by hand and we normally send you know by signatures to go out there they will not see years were slated 7 million children but then we keep on seeing the cases of polio going up and so when we use the GIS mapping ok and now we give this bus nature's bus nature's a you know a mobile right to take with them with a chip which means it will show as well and where they've been to and when they come back we know that they have actually been there to personate the same you know because we help track us on there I see so bill let me ask you about you've been involved in trying to beat back malaria what's the argument against killing all mosquitoes why don't we just eliminate all mosquitoes which I think we have the capability of doing and that would eliminate malaria what's the argument against that yeah the malaria is only killed by a type of mosquito called monopolies which is like one out of a thousand mosquitoes and you know the idea the main thing is that it's precedent-setting if you think okay humans can go and get this specie you know what's your criteria for anything that might be a nuisance and yet you might make a mistake it might be key to an ecosystem if you got rid of all mosquitoes there actually are some bats that feed on those mosquitoes and you'd have to look at those ecosystem effects the Anopheles are such a small percentage of mosquitoes and and there's no but no other species that's dependent on that that this new genetic approach called gene drive that it's still in the labs it's not totally proven but it has a good chance being able to knock down an offline populations by about 99 percent over a five year period that probably for the toughest part of Africa that includes Nigeria the you know sort of the center where malaria is really a huge problem we probably need that tool and so you know how are we gonna get consensus on that is tricky because you know some people worry I I suppose there must be somebody worse about mosquitoes most people worry about the precedent of how such decisions are made so Indra it's often thought that you hear about great technology leaders or great innovators they often are men is that because it's of a sexist thing where men don't tend to let women you know get the opportunity or is it some other reason and do you think gonna change anytime soon I'm not an expert on women and technology but I will say something interesting I was at an MIT event on Sunday and the president of MIT was telling me that 50% of the engineering graduates from MIT are women but if you go to most companies 50% of the engineering staff are not women and if you read some of the stories in the press about what happens in the Silicon Valley area 50% of the people are getting the funding or in the valley and not women so obviously there's something that's causing that leakage between MIT which is a premier institution and in practice so I think if we want to utilize all these resources that we are spending money on graduating we have to do something different final question masa is artificial intelligence a good thing for humans or not a good thing and if your robots going to take over humanity I think that the misuse of artificial intelligence could be horrible but there are thousands of good reasons to utilize artificial intelligence so good for Humanity it's solved the unsolvable diseases it's solved you know unsolvable you know disaster and many other things so I think it's really good ok well we're out of time that was allotted to us I want to thank you all very much for interesting conversation thank you thank you Mike [Applause]

Channel: Mike Bloomberg

Views: 131,778

Rating: 4.7792001 out of 5

Keywords: Mike Bloomberg, Mayor Bloomberg, New York City, NYC

Id: a2dbb2Y-QUY

Length: 20min 9sec (1209 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 20 2017