Talking Tech and 2020 with Bill Gates!

[Music] first of all thank you for joining me again yeah here in Seattle a little Rainier than last time but yeah this is more typical than this time of year I believe it so last time we chatted it was 2019 I feel like 2020 to have any news resolutions or things you focus on at the beginning of a new decade well this year I'm gonna travel a little bit less than normal the theme of the annual letter last year which is why we spoke was surprises and so I read the the anglo letter for 2020 and I'll link it below if anyone wants to check it out but the theme was swinging for the fences so how does that different for you this year how does that look as a strategy and as an overall plan for you well this annual letter we kind of took that twenty-year perspective because it's our anniversary we got going all the way back in the year 2000 and had you know dreams of having huge impact in US education and a global health with global health because of some new vaccines that we've been involved with and those have really gotten out we you know swung for the fences there and actually it succeeded education has been a lot tougher where although we've done some good curriculum and done some things for tutoring and kids getting feedback you know we don't have the dropout rate graduation preparedness still you know the system is is not dramatically improved in nowhere near as good as we want it to be right I feel like you always seem to swing for the fences in general it's just sort of a new way of framing it but I have to ask if you are swinging for the fences what if you miss well hopefully you get more than one swings yeah either at the same problem like you know multiple malaria vaccine constructs so that you know if you have two or three the combined chance of success much higher or that you're working in multiple areas not just one area right you know in climate for example add a company that's trying to make a nuclear reactor that would be very cheap and that would have safeties so that the public would be very accepting of it now you know even I realize that's high risk you know less than 50% chance all that comes together and yet if it did and the only reason I'm involved is it would really help with climate let us generate electricity without any greenhouse gases I have a quote from you on climate from the annual letter and I think it's pretty good as I read quotes back to people from their speeches a lot but this is something you wrote tackling climate change is going to demand historic levels of global cooperation is that I guess one of the biggest challenges of climate change and there's always ways to innovate in tech and innovate and other fields but is the cooperation of all these companies that all have to chip in to make a difference one of the biggest challenges yes the getting to zero means you know that all the country is going along in all the different sectors of emissions so it's not enough if you just do passenger cars even that's super hard and very important but you also have to do industrial and agriculture and other forms of transport like planes and and long-distance trucks and so the number of innovations is very very high and in some of these areas the green approach will still cost more than the dirty approach and so convincing people that the benefits of stopping these emissions mean that you should be willing to pay extra for some of these activities if we get super good innovation in a few cases we might get the green Premium I call it to zero so that you you don't pay any extra but because there's so many sorts of emissions some of them will be premium priced and yet we have to go to you know 194 countries and get almost all of them particularly the big ones yeah to go along or else the motivation for the others you know falls apart and the whole thing fails and on that same theme you know the premium of something that might be considered better cleaner for the environment we spoke about Tesla briefly last time and I think what you've mentioned basically was they have a great product but they're still premium it's still more expensive to get one which is why it's it's not everywhere do you think that if that problem is solved that could be one of the the more important things towards advancing an advent of sustainable transport like that's one of the most important things for that company and eventually for the entire industry is to bring the premium down to hopefully zero so that it's a no-brainer to go electric or zero emissions yeah the premium today is is there but over the next decade except that the range will still be a little bit less that premium will come to zero so if we take all the sectors passenger cars is actually one of the most hopeful and certainly Tesla if you had to name one company that's helped drive that it's them now all the car companies including some other new ones are moving super fast to do electric cars actually you know the biggest concern is will the consumers overcome their range anxiety you know I just got a Porsche Tyco cam which is an electric car okay and I have to say I mean it's premium priced car but yeah it is very very cool that that's my first electric car and I'm enjoying it a lot yeah I have to follow up on that because that's a car I'm super curious about you don't see them nearly as much but when you see pretty much everywhere is test model 3 yes that's I see them all over Seattle you see them all over downtown and if you're in LA is there anything like missing from that experience obviously it's a fun car but other than getting the price down and continuing to make a better product is there any other reason not to go electric I guess well the range you know if you can want to go a long distance right the pervasiveness of recharging the time to recharge yeah you know compared to filling up a tank of gas the amount of energy that's going in you know per minute of filling your gas tank is kind of mind gasoline is very dense energy 30 times more dense than the current lithium batteries and now a factor to improvement in the range will get it so most people it's you know only less than 3% of car sales and globally today Norway is higher than that and China's looks to be one of the markets that will develop the most quickly so you know price will it's important for that to come down the of course you spend a little bit less on the electricity than you would spend on gasoline and the maintenance cost is a little bit less although the insurance right now is a little bit more premium car so yeah I know chance yeah that repairs on you know like these mirrors that are really rich and complicated yeah you know fixing the mirrors to be a hundred bucks now it's like fifteen hundred so you know there's there's some work to be done on a few of these areas but clearly of all the climate areas I'd say that one's the most hopeful for sure it's a way to future that say alright so I was a youtuber I feel like I have to ask about YouTube and you know with all the work you've done with not only spreading vaccines for as many people as possible but there's also kind of the the second job of spreading information about vaccines you mentioned an angular letter people who are hundreds of meters from somewhere where they could have gotten a vaccine and didn't what do you think about the role of sites like YouTube and the spread of not just information but potentially misinformation when it comes to things like vaccines or climate change yeah it's very tricky because historically the newspapers or the the media were very responsible about not letting untruths about vaccine safety get out there now it's you know the you don't want to get rid of the good thing which is that anybody can publish that barriers to entry the diversity of voices is so phenomenal compared to traditional publishing right I feel like and you have a bit of a youtube presence so you're able to share information about things through social medias social media age so I feel like that ideally helps your cause more than a hurts it yeah my audience probably isn't deep with the vaccine doubters yeah you know I in a creative way trying to get positive messages to be interesting and we have work to do on that you know I would have thought using experts sometimes have acknowledged that the all the internet would just make it so much easier to learn about things and yet in some ways you know people aren't seeking out complex information particularly if it disagrees with some preconceived notion that they have so you know how can social media get out there and be a little bit of a force for education particularly on climate where yeah without a consensus we won't do the hard things that will save things for the next generation so we want to we want to push the information that helps the most amount of people to as many people as possible that's one version of swinging for the fences yeah and you know activate people want to do more than just you know make their salary they want to be involved with the cause and for a lot of people some way of engaging either as a consumer an advocate a donor in climate change that I'm amazed at how the interest levels going up I hope it's not a cyclical thing I hope that's kind of a permanent thing because the the challenge requires you know decades of it being a very top issue as opposed to okay for three or four years that was kind of interesting let's move on to something else all right last question and this is inspired by Nilay Patel who has interviewed you before from the verge which is just a total tech question as a person as busy as yourself when do you do email I you know I do some on the phone I do a lot of very PC centric persons I sit at my desk with a nice big surface screen and you know I get in early to do email a lot at night particularly if I get a long email I'll mark it as unread and then that night I'm going through the last few days looking at what I've marked Assam red said okay that's got an enclosure let's really go through that give a thoughtful response to it I dunno if I over schedule myself the symptom of that is I'm starting to fall behind on email I'm not Sam super responsive and that you know that can be you know a bad thing you know today I got mail about you know this corona virus outbreak and how you know should the foundation step up and do something I'm you know I'm glad I was there to give a really quick yes sure yeah launce definitely some things are urgent and but it it's a it's a gauge of am i managing in my schedule well that people feel like I'm a quick quick to reply I try to click to reply but we can't always be thank you again for the time I appreciate it yeah great good see you again hopefully do it again sometime excellent

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 3,537,419

Rating: 4.8945174 out of 5

Keywords: Bill Gates, MKBHD, talking tech, taycan, Bill Gates burger, Bill Gates 2020, Annual letter, Bill Gates interview, Bill and Melinda Gates, Gates Foundation

Id: FV2tMP37ygs

Length: 12min 4sec (724 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/donnie1984]

Is anyone else kinda surprised he just now bought an EV?

[u/buckus69]

It's a premium price car, but...

For Bill Gates, there is no such thing as a premium price car, but it's kind of telling that even a man with his resources thinks the Taycan is expensive. The man could buy the entire production run for like the first 10 years.

[u/nod51]

I thought Gates drove a Model X at one point

[u/ActingGrandNagus]

The amount of people in this sub that get bitter about the Taycan is insane.

[u/NONo443]

Did he not have an EV1? Or is this wordsmithing because the EV1 was technical a lease program?

[u/bostontransplant]

If you are a billionaire it probably makes sense to buy.

[u/buckus69]

So he can add it to his 100 other Porsches?

[u/Kenneth_Hughson]

Bill gates seems like a really nice down to earth guy

[u/PrintersStreet]

He's avoided buying a Tesla because he knows very well how big of a clusterfuck hides under the beautiful shell of every new tech product.