Talking Tech and 2020 with Bill Gates!

First of all, thanks for joining me again, yeah, great in Seattle, it's raining a little more than last time, but yeah, it's good, this is more typical than this time of year, I guess, so last time we chat It was in 2019. I feel like in

2020

yes. Do you have any news resolutions or things you focus on at the beginning of a new decade, well, this year I'm going to travel a little less than normal, the topic of last year's annual letter, that's why we talked, they were surprises and So I read the annual letter for

2020

and I'll link it below if anyone wants to see it, but the topic was swinging for the fences, so how is that different for you this year?

What does it look like as a strategy and as an overall strategy? Please plan this annual letter well for yourself, we take a 20 year perspective, because it is our anniversary, we started back in 2000 and if you only knew, you dreamed of having a big impact on US education and global health with health because of some new vaccines that we've been involved in and they've really gone out, you know, they swung for the fences there and it was actually successful, the education has been a lot more difficult, although we've made a good plan of studies and we have done some things for tutoring and for the children to receive feedback you know that we do not have the dropout rate preparation for graduation yet you know that the system has not improved dramatically and it is not as good as we want it to be true, I feel that you always seem to swing for the fences in general, that's kind of a new way to frame it, but I have to ask you if you're swinging for the fences, what happens if you miss?

I hope you get more than one swing at the same problem, as if you knew multiple malaria. vaccine builds so you know that if you have two or three, the combined probability of success is much higher or that you are working in multiple areas, not just one area, you know, in climate, for example, I have a company that is trying to make a nuclear reactor that would be very cheap and that would have security so that the public would accept it very much now, you know, even I realize that it's a high risk, you know, there's less than a 50 percent chance that everything that is combined and yet if it were and the The only reason I'm involved is that it would really help with the climate.

Let us generate electricity without greenhouse gases. I have a quote of yours about the climate from the annual letter and I think it's pretty good. I read people quotes from their own speeches. a lot, but this is something you wrote: addressing climate change is going to require historic levels of global cooperation is I guess one of the biggest challenges of climate change and there are always ways to innovate,

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nology and innovate in other fields, but it's the cooperation of all these companies that have to contribute to make a difference, one of the biggest challenges. Yes, getting to zero means knowing all the countries participating in the different sectors of the missions, so it is not enough if only passenger cars are made.

Even that is very difficult and very important, but you also have to do industrial and agricultural and other forms of transportation like airplanes and long-distance trucks, so the number of innovations is very high and in some of these areas the ecological approach will continue. current. costs more than the dirty approach and therefore convincing people that the benefits of stopping these emissions means that we should be willing to pay more for some of these activities if we get a super good innovation, in some cases we might get the green premium which I call zero so you don't pay any extra, but because there are so many types of emissions, some of them will be priced higher and yet we have to go to 194 countries and get almost all of them, especially the big ones . some, yeah, uh, keep going or the motivation for others falls apart and everything fails and on that same topic, you know the premium of something that could be considered better or cleaner for the environment, we talked briefly about Tesla last time. and I think what you basically mentioned is that they have a great product, but they're still premium, it's still more expensive to get one, that's why it's not everywhere.

Do you think that if that problem is solved, that could be one of the most important things to advance the arrival of sustainable transportation like that is one of the most important things for that company and, eventually, for the entire industry, is reduce the premium to, hopefully, zero, to make it a no-brainer to go electric or have zero emissions. Yes, the current premium is there, but over the next decade, except the scope will remain a little less, the premium will go to zero, so if we take all the sectors, passenger cars are actually one of the most hopeful and certainly Tesla. uh if you had to name one company that has helped drive that it's them now all the car companies including some new ones are moving very quickly to make electric cars actually you know the biggest concern is whether consumers They will join them in overcoming their range anxiety.

You know, I just bought a Porsche uh ti cam, which is an electric car, okay, and I have to say it's a premium Chrysler, but yeah, it's very, very cool, that's my first electric car and I'm really enjoying it. Yeah, I have to stick with that because that's the car I'm really curious about. You don't see them as much, but when you see almost everywhere there are Tesla model 3s. Yes, I see them everywhere in Seattle. They're all over downtown and if you're in Los Angeles, is there anything you're missing from that experience? Obviously it's a fun car, but other than lowering the price and continuing to make a better product, is there any other reason not to go electric?

I guess good. the range you know if you want to go a long distance, right, the pervasiveness of recharging the time to recharge, yeah, you know, compared to filling a tank of gas, the amount of energy that goes in, you know, per minute of filling your gas tank. It's kind of mind-blowing, I mean, gasoline is a very dense energy, 30 times denser than current lithium batteries and now a factor two improvement in range will get you, so most people who know just less three percent of automobile sales. Nowadays globally, you know, Norway is higher than that and China seems to be one of the brands that will develop the fastest, so you know the price will go down, of course, you spend a little less. electricity than you would spend on gasoline and the maintenance cost is a little less, although the insurance right now is a little more premium cars, yeah, and the repairs, you know, like these mirrors that are really rich and complicated , Yes, you know. fixing the mirror used to cost 100 dollars now it's like 1500 so you know, there's work to be done in some of these areas, but clearly of all the climate areas I would say one has the most hope, it's far from the future for sure.

I mean um okay so as a YouTuber I feel like I have to ask about YouTube and you know with all the work that you've done not only with distributing vaccines to as many people as possible, but there's also the second job. to spread information about the vaccines that you mentioned in the annual letter, people who are hundreds of meters from somewhere where they could have received a vaccine and did not. What do you think about the role of sites like YouTube in disseminating not only information but also potentially? misinformation when it comes to things like vaccines or climate change yes it is very complicated because historically the newspapers or the media were very responsible for not allowing falsehoods to be spread about the safety of vaccines, now you know you don't want to get rid of the good ones.

Which is that anyone can publish those barriers to entry, the diversity of voices is so phenomenal compared to traditional publishing, right? I feel like you have a bit of a presence on YouTube so you can share information about things through social media. It's kind of the social media era, so I feel like that ideally helps your cause more than it hurts. Yeah, my audience probably isn't very engaged with the vaccine hesitant. Yeah, you know, in a creative way, I try to send positive messages. It would be interesting and we have work to do on that. You know, I would have thought that using experts in scientific knowledge would make the entire Internet a lot easier to learn about things.

And yet, somehow you know that people aren't searching. put out complex information, especially if it doesn't agree with some preconceived notion that they have, so you know how social media can come out and be a bit of a force for education, particularly around climate, where without a consensus we won't do the hard thing . things that will save things for the next generation, so we want to, we want to push information that helps as many people as possible to as many people as possible, that's a version of swinging for the fences, yeah, and you know, activating people want to do more.

In addition to earning a salary, they want to be involved with the cause and, for many people, some way to participate, whether as a consumer, advocate or donor in climate change. I'm surprised how the level of interest is increasing. I hope it's not a cyclical thing, I hope it's a permanent thing because the challenge requires you to know that for decades it's been a very important topic instead of being okay for three or four years, that was something interesting, let's move on to something else. Right, last question and it's inspired by uh Neil i Patel, who interviewed you earlier from the edge, which is just a totally

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nical question for a busy person like you.

When do you send emails? You know, I do some over the phone. I am very much a very PC-centric person. I sit at my desk with a nice big surface screen. Well, and you know, I'm early to send emails a lot at night, especially if I get a long email, I'll mark it as unread. and then that night I'm going over the last few days looking at what I've marked as I'm ready to say okay, that has an enclosure, let's really go over that and give a thoughtful response. I know if I went over schedule. Myself, the symptom of that is that I'm starting to fall behind on an email.

I'm not very receptive and you know that can be a bad thing. You know, today I received an email about this coronavirus outbreak. and how do you know if the foundation should step up and do something. You know I'm glad I was there to give a very quick yes answer. Some things are definitely urgent and, um, but it's a measure of, am I imagining this? my schedule is good, people feel that I am quick to respond. I try to be quick to respond, but we can't always thank you again for the time. I appreciate it. Yes, it's great to see you.

It's good to see you again. I hope we can. do it again sometime excellent