Bill Gates on How to Tax the Rich, AI, Misinformation, & the Election | On With Kara Swisher

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Speaker 17 Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.
I'm Kara Swisher. We're off today for the holiday, but we have an episode of On with Kara Swisher for you.

Speaker 16 Oh, yay.

Speaker 16 Yay.

Speaker 1 Who's on this time?

Speaker 6 The head of DEI from the National Forestry Service.

Speaker 17 No, no, no, that's just, that's what I say for pivot. This is my interview with Bill Gates.
You might have heard of him.

Speaker 16 Oh, my God.

Speaker 17 In front of a live audience.

Speaker 16 I got to be honest.

Speaker 7 That's impressive. That's impressive.

Speaker 17 Thank you. I try.

Speaker 17 Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 17 Last week, on a muggy evening in New York City, I visited the legendary Paris Theater on 58th Street to interview the also iconic Bill Gates about his latest Netflix docuseries.

Speaker 17 It's called What's Next?

Speaker 17 The Future with Bill Gates, and it's about some of the biggest issues we face at the moment: AI, disinformation, global health, the wealth gap, and how technology could help or not.

Speaker 17 It's a funny and substantive series by Morgan Neville, who did docs like Won't You Be My Neighbor about Mr.

Speaker 17 Rogers, Roadrunner about Anthony Bourdain, and 20 Feet from Stardom, which garnered him an Oscar.

Speaker 17 It's a good match since Neville got Gates to actually use his own experiences as case studies in some of the episodes. It's surprisingly intimate, actually, and I actually really liked it.

Speaker 17 I didn't think it would be as good as it was, and it really is, especially for people who don't know a lot about these topics.

Speaker 17 It was also great to be back on stage with Bill, whom I've interviewed many times, including an historic interview with the late Steve Jobs.

Speaker 17 While we've had plenty of disagreements over the three decades I've covered Microsoft and also Bill Gates, I took the opportunity to dig a bit deeper and ask him about his interests and investments into many of these areas, including nuclear power, how he would handle attacks on the rich, and the outcome he's hoping for in the upcoming presidential election.

Speaker 17 Plot spoiler, he implied, referencing climate change deniers, that he's voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, although he certainly didn't make an endorsement. I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 17 And by the way, we love that you're listening. And it's even better if you hit subscribe to follow the show to get even more exclusive conversations like this in your feed every Monday and Thursday.

Speaker 17 So let's get to it live from the Paris Theater.

Speaker 17 Hi, everybody.

Speaker 17 How are you doing? I used to come to this theater as a kid. It's fantastic to be here.
Owned by Netflix. Wow, that's something.
Anyway, thank you for coming. It's a little lightness here.

Speaker 17 Inequality, AI, climate change,

Speaker 17 disease. What else are we talking about? But at least we're not Eric Adams, are we? Okay, I had to do that.

Speaker 16 Oh, come on.

Speaker 17 Anyway, I love New York.

Speaker 17 Anyway, I'm very excited actually to talk to Bill. I've interviewed him

Speaker 17 dozens of times over the many years. We first met when he came pouring out of a cab in very sweaty, summery Washington, D.C.

Speaker 17 I thought he had arrived in the limo, but it was some other guy, and he just got out of a D.C. cab and did an amazing interview with the Washington Post editorial board.

Speaker 17 and came himself and everything else. So that's where we started.
I've covered Microsoft for years and talked to him a number of times. We've agreed, not that much, but disagreed a lot.

Speaker 17 But also, I'm really, I I think this phase of his life is really interesting, and he really is an information sponge curiosity.

Speaker 17 And he loves to take apart problems. I think what he's done with

Speaker 17 what he's done around disease and other things is really interesting. Last interview we did was about climate change, which is a book that he wrote,

Speaker 17 and it's actually coming true today, a lot of the stuff he was talking about. So, without further ado, Bill Gates.

Speaker 17 We meet again.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 there's so much to talk about. I think what we're going to do is we're going to throw to some clips and then talk about them.

Speaker 17 We're literally going to have to rush through this stuff because we've only got about 40 minutes to get through all these major topics, and you could do hours on each of these things.

Speaker 17 But let's start with AI. Let's go to the clip to start with.
And you're talking to James Cameron.

Speaker 16 You know, me is a, hey, innovation can solve everything type person. Right.
Says, oh, thank goodness now I have the AI on my team.

Speaker 18 I'm probably more of a dystopian. I write science fiction.
I wrote the Terminator.

Speaker 18 Where do you and I find common ground around optimism, I think, is the key here.

Speaker 16 I would like the message to be balanced between, you know, this longer-term concern of infinite capability with...

Speaker 16 the basic needs to have your health taken care of, to learn, to accelerate climate innovation.

Speaker 16 You know, is that too too nuanced a message to say that AI has these benefits while we have to guard against these other things?

Speaker 18 I don't think it's too nuanced at all. I think it's exactly the right degree of nuance that we need.
I mean, you're a humanist, right?

Speaker 18 As long as that humanist principle is first and foremost, as opposed to the drive to dominate market share, the drive to power, if we can make AI the force for good that it has the potential to be,

Speaker 16 great.

Speaker 18 But how do we introduce caution?

Speaker 18 Regulation is part of it, but I think it's also our own ethos and our own value system.

Speaker 17 So that's the perfect person, the creator of the Terminator, which I think has informed a lot of people about AI, the idea that it's here to kill us, essentially.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 17 the first person I talked about AI with was Elon Musk, actually, who was quite worried about it at the time. He thought it was here to kill us.

Speaker 17 Later, he evolved it into us treating us like house cats. Then he said we were like anthills, that the highway will come through and just cover us, etc.
It was always a happy day with Elon Musk.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 17 when I was watching this, I watched it again on the train up here. It's advanced quicker than anyone, including yourself, had thought, right? That it's moved quicker.

Speaker 17 And you talk about this, and it's a very good explainer in the film.

Speaker 17 But I want you to sort of unpack why you're still very sunny about it, I would say. And I think you lean towards the possibility.
So talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 16 Well, the idea that computers would eventually become intelligent and do human-like things, you know, as soon as you learn how to program, you're thinking, wow, what can't software do and why not?

Speaker 16 And so prosaic things like visual recognition, speech recognition. seemed out of reach.
You know, I was age 15 when I saw this Stanford SRI Shaky the Robot video.

Speaker 16 And I thought, wow, we are getting close. Look at that.
Shaky almost can do these things. So it has been

Speaker 16 mostly disappointing when the neural nets came in. Then the prosaic stuff, the speech and video got strong.

Speaker 16 But even then, the idea of representing knowledge, being able to read and write, still seemed out of reach. And I believe that we'd have to explicitly understand how to represent knowledge.

Speaker 16 I didn't think that pure reinforcement would cause this great knowledge representation to emerge. And even GPT-3,

Speaker 16 you know, it's like, it's still statistical. It's not really a word model.
And so it's going to be deeply flawed. But by GPT-4,

Speaker 16 that was wrong.

Speaker 16 And so, you know, right up there with my first demo of graphics interface with Charles Simoni, I'd say, you know, that demo of ChatGPT-4 was the most amazing demo I've ever seen.

Speaker 17 I think a lot of people attribute the huge amount of information we've been putting into the internet right now as the leaping point.

Speaker 17 What do you, because I was at a dinner with very, a very smart group of technologists and they didn't know. So talk about not knowing, because

Speaker 17 software is about knowing.

Speaker 17 You put something in, you take something out. But what is, what do you attribute the leap to recently?

Speaker 16 Well, there's a subtlety to how the world gets represented that this is captured.

Speaker 16 If you told me to write a piece of software that you could say, you know, rewrite this like Shakespeare would, or like Trump would, or like

Speaker 16 Harry would,

Speaker 16 this thing,

Speaker 16 I would have no idea how to write a piece of software that is as fluent as this is.

Speaker 16 And so that's an emergent set of capabilities that shows that it is, in a deep, deep sense, representing what it is to write like Shakespeare. Right.

Speaker 16 And how our algorithms generate that, you know, is subtle enough. And we have a lot of mathematicians working on, you know, trying to figure out those representations.

Speaker 16 But it does make it harder for us to know, okay, where is it correct? Where is it incorrect?

Speaker 17 Right, but it's not Shakespeare. It can write like Shakespeare.
When does it move to whatever Shakespeare may be? That's the idea. It's representing us.

Speaker 16 Well, if your goal is utilitarian to say,

Speaker 16 compare humans in terms of medical diagnosis to this ability to look at all the medical records and see outcomes, to look at all the latest medical literacy,

Speaker 16 to look at your sensor data over your lifetime. Clearly, the computer is very close and will exceed human diagnosis capability within the next few years.

Speaker 16 It will be superior at a very profound and important task. And that's just provable that it will be better.
If you're talking about art, okay, then we don't have an agreed utility function.

Speaker 16 Why is some art more popular than others? Okay,

Speaker 16 it can't enter that realm because there's no data to center it on a common metric.

Speaker 17 What then is it lacking? I mean, you're talking about utility. You often talk about healthcare, education is another area, drug discovery,

Speaker 17 gene research, et cetera, et cetera. These are all utilities.

Speaker 17 But

Speaker 17 a lot of the worries are about things that aren't utilities, that it will start to make decisions for us.

Speaker 17 Where's the worry point that you have? Because often most of the technologists talk about the positive parts about it.

Speaker 17 And I understand why you would talk about the negatives in the beginning, given our past history recently.

Speaker 16 Well, there's three things you can worry about.

Speaker 16 One is

Speaker 16 that

Speaker 16 bad people with bad intent will use AIs for cyber crime, bioterrorism, nation-state wars.

Speaker 16 And so in that case, you think, okay, let's make sure the good guys have an AI that can play defense against those things. And that makes you want to move ahead and not fall behind.

Speaker 16 The second thing you could worry about is that the rate of change where

Speaker 16 technical support jobs, telesales jobs,

Speaker 16 you know,

Speaker 16 in the same way that that medical diagnosis will be superior with the right training set and a few more turns of the crank on how we drive reliability, that there's great progress on that,

Speaker 16 it will be superior at

Speaker 16 a telesales or tele support type job, which, you know, that those are big parts of the economy.

Speaker 16 And so even though you can say, okay, that frees those people up so we can have class size of five and every, you know, handicapped kid can have a full-time aid and elderly people, you know, can be engaged in social activity.

Speaker 16 We have unmet needs for labor. If it's

Speaker 16 we free up all this labor, we can shorten the work week. But the rate of change is scary.

Speaker 16 And so those are the two I worry about. The third one that comes up a lot is the loss of control.
My view is if you've managed to get through the first two,

Speaker 16 that actually that's not the hardest of three. And it's actually kind of weird to go to that one because it's pretty far off in the future.
We know that bad people will use AI in a bad way.

Speaker 16 The AI itself,

Speaker 16 you know, I think it doesn't care. I don't think that's the one to obsess,

Speaker 16 particularly given the rate that this is happening. This is not a generational change.
This is a within a 10-year type change.

Speaker 17 Sure. One of the things that's that when you just say loss of control, I think some of us are loss of control to giant companies that are going to dominate this area.

Speaker 17 OpenAI is raising money at $150 billion valuation. There's some sort of kerfuffle going on among all the executives, but it's turning into a for-profit corporation.

Speaker 17 It started off as a nonprofit to help humanity. Now it's going to help

Speaker 17 humans, a few humans, a few select humans. Microsoft now has vaunted ahead with its investment in open AI and everything else.

Speaker 17 If there's a few corporations running this,

Speaker 17 I would worry about that. Would you?

Speaker 16 Well, in general,

Speaker 16 you have this thing called competition.

Speaker 16 And the main thing you want

Speaker 16 is that it's so competitive that the improvements go to benefit the user. That is, the quality of medical diagnosis improves the health system.

Speaker 16 The availability of that personal tutor that I was out in Newark seen

Speaker 16 a few months ago, that that becomes super cheap for kids in the inner city, not just

Speaker 16 wealthy kids. And I've never seen such intense competition.

Speaker 16 It's the same way as the internet in 2000, 2001.

Speaker 16 The failure rate will be unbelievable because there's sort of a, oh, it's an AI thing, give it a high valuation. So consumers will be the primary beneficiaries.

Speaker 16 Now, if you ever get to the point where one company is knocking the other companies out, then fine, the competition authorities can come in. But we're in no, you know, we're not even close to that.

Speaker 16 You know, Google is still extremely capable in this space. OpenAI plus Microsoft, but you know, there's, you know, Elon's got XAI, you've got Anthropic,

Speaker 17 you know, at least by Amazon.

Speaker 16 There's some 15 companies

Speaker 16 that aren't that far from the state of the art, who are lowering prices, they're investing way above the revenue level. And so, this is the formula for the benefits to flow to society.

Speaker 17 Okay, we're going to rush through this, but what's very quickly your biggest worry, a real worry, and your biggest benefit right now?

Speaker 16 Well, the biggest benefit is

Speaker 16 that I think this technology, and this is my primary engagement with it, we can get it

Speaker 16 to

Speaker 16 the inner city, we can get it uh to africa within the same time frame that it gets to the wealthy unlike any other technology in history this one i think we we can get it out uh on an equity basis and your worry my worry is just that it this is

Speaker 16 the most unbounded thing this is not just a tractor you know, obsoleting farmers, where you say, okay, it turns out there are many other unmet needs there. This,

Speaker 16 you know, which we thought would first come for blue-collar work through robots, you know, the surprise was that with this language facility, it actually is coming first for white-collar jobs, but the blue-collar thing is happening

Speaker 16 just a little bit later,

Speaker 16 you know, certainly within the next three, four, five years.

Speaker 16 And so.

Speaker 16 It's so disruptive at a time where government, who you expect to take the excess productivity and you know spread it around in a fair way reduce the work week our general trust in the capacity of government to do complex things is pretty low yeah I that would so it was a good run guys so congratulations all right let's roll the next clip which is an area I really spent a lot of time do you find yourself Even at this age, using your phone and staying on social media more than you want to?

Speaker 16 Oh my gosh, yeah. TikTok is so addictive.

Speaker 20 I'm on it like all all the time.

Speaker 16 And have you ever run into crazy misinformation about me? Crazy misinformation about you all the time.

Speaker 20 I've even had friends cut me off because of these vaccine rumors, but I'm a public health student at Stanford and I think that there is just so much nuance on how do you communicate like accurate public health information or scientific data.

Speaker 16 I don't know.

Speaker 16 I need to learn more

Speaker 16 because I naively still believe that digital communication can be a force to bring us together to have reasonable debate.

Speaker 20 I think one thing like you don't really understand about online is like it's not really like logic and fact that went out. Like people want an escape.
They want to like laugh.

Speaker 20 They want an engaging video. They want to be taken away from boring reality.
And so like the most popular video of you online is you literally trying to do the dab.

Speaker 16 Bill, can you do the dab real quick? Damn, Bill?

Speaker 20 Or you jumping over the chair.

Speaker 17 Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position?

Speaker 16 It depends on the size of the chair. I'll cheat a little bit.

Speaker 16 Yes!

Speaker 20 Those are the most popular because people want to escape from things. So I don't think fact and reason always went out online.

Speaker 16 But the thing about, you know, I make lots of money from vaccines, it's even hard for me to figure out where that comes from. It's not like a political organization.
It's just madness.

Speaker 16 And who promotes that?

Speaker 20 I think it's fear. I mean, everyone was stuck at home during a pandemic.
We're all scared for our lives. No one really knows what to trust or what to believe.
So that's what our society does.

Speaker 17 Okay.

Speaker 17 So can you do the chair right now? No.

Speaker 16 A smaller one. Yeah,

Speaker 17 a little stool.

Speaker 16 I can do a stool.

Speaker 17 Your daughter's very wise.

Speaker 17 But most of the stuff about you isn't funny, actually. I spend a lot of time telling people you're not Satan,

Speaker 17 that you don't put chips in people's brains. I spent an inordinate amount of time doing that, which is an unusual position for me to be in.

Speaker 17 But let's talk a little bit about information. You talk about Anthony Fauci, who has had death threats.
I just interviewed him recently.

Speaker 17 One of the reasons the government is in the trouble is the polarization, which is fueled by online stuff. And there's no question about it.

Speaker 17 I know they're trying to come up with studies that it's not true, but a new study just came out showing it is absolutely true.

Speaker 17 The polarization has been further impacted, especially around, we use the word misinformation, disinformation, but it's really propaganda, isn't it? That's really what's happening.

Speaker 17 1.2 billion views were of Elon doing misinformation on his platform he bought, which he enjoys to spew misinformation on. It's actually the biggest purveyor of misinformation right now.

Speaker 17 Can you talk a little about this and the worries you have? Because it does directly impact you yourself, which I'm not worried about you, but

Speaker 17 everybody here in this room.

Speaker 16 Well, I didn't anticipate that If you want to belong to a group, there almost become certain beliefs.

Speaker 16 uh

Speaker 16 you know the election was stolen uh you know vaccines have negative effects right you know

Speaker 16 is a self-interested individual uh you know who somehow gets royalties from vaccines i mean you know totally false provably wrong uh i want to track the position of of people i don't know why i do but it's amazing because you're satan but go ahead but even even satan Satan doesn't need to know where people are.

Speaker 16 What does he do with it?

Speaker 16 So

Speaker 16 that's, it's just strange. And, you know, we always try to deal with it with humor.
And as you say, I have nothing overall to complain about.

Speaker 16 But the idea that your sort of group beliefs are reinforced online. And so you have developed a reality that when people say, no, the election was not stolen,

Speaker 16 you're like, no, that would be almost denying that I'm part of this group. And so I'm going to behave that way.

Speaker 16 It's incredibly

Speaker 16 scary because it's definitely putting us into separate camps. And it's hard to see.
People say, oh, we didn't regulate social media properly. Well,

Speaker 16 do we know now? You know, are we regulating it today? Is there a clear understanding of it?

Speaker 16 And then, of of course, AI that we just discussed, if anything, supercharges the ability to create credible misinformation.

Speaker 17 What would you do now to stop this? Because I think people are in their own separate. Microsoft was an early investor in Facebook, mate, when it was a $15 billion valuation.
Nice one.

Speaker 17 That was a good one.

Speaker 17 I doubted that. I'm sorry.
I was wrong.

Speaker 17 But when you think about what should be done now, because if people are in their own information bubbles in a way that's profound, and then AI, for example, can supercharge it, as you say.

Speaker 17 What would be the solutions to avoiding that?

Speaker 16 Well, most things where the country has been off track or even the world has been off track, you start to see the harms. And then

Speaker 16 people self-correct.

Speaker 16 Parents play a role.

Speaker 16 Educators play a role. And some degree of banning the extreme behavior plays a role.
But first we have to come to a view that, okay, this really is a problem.

Speaker 16 The United States may not be the first place to get this under the control. We have the First Amendment

Speaker 16 and

Speaker 16 our

Speaker 16 divisiveness is particularly high. I wish I could say, okay, such and such a country has done this extremely well.

Speaker 16 The country that actually controls craziness on the internet is China, but they do it in a way that

Speaker 16 does

Speaker 17 they do like to track everybody where they're going.

Speaker 16 Yeah, and they don't let crazy things out there.

Speaker 16 They do better, but at the loss of democratic freedoms.

Speaker 17 So, what do you do in a situation when, say, you have someone like Elon who has suddenly decided to let misinformation flow toxic waste all over the place?

Speaker 17 And in some cases, people who try harder, like a Mark Zuckerberg, who you who you were a mentor to him, he and I had a big argument about Holocaust deniers a couple years ago.

Speaker 17 And I kept saying, this is going to lead to anti-Semitism down the line. And he said, well, we're not going to regulate them at all.
We'll see what happens.

Speaker 17 And you can see what happens when you anticipate. So is there anything government can do? Or are we at the mercy of these companies to decide?

Speaker 17 You know, because years later, Mark did clamp down on Holocaust deniers, but it took him to do it, which is problematic, I think.

Speaker 16 Well, you know, the question is, do you create some level of liability for these companies? Correct. And many forms of that would essentially mean social media companies would go out of business.

Speaker 16 But, you know, we, a little bit, I think we ought to edge in the direction of forcing them to take some more responsibility.

Speaker 16 It is very tricky because if somebody says, you know, vaccines in general kill people, that's wrong and it caused older people who needed COVID vaccines not to take them.

Speaker 16 If people say, hey, vaccines sometimes have side effects,

Speaker 16 that's true. You know, we need to talk to people about the net benefit and how we avoid those side effects and things.

Speaker 16 So the exact dividing line where, you know, all of a sudden, you know, some AI wakes up and shuts it down or labels it,

Speaker 16 I don't even feel like we're trying to find that. that happened.
Well, who is responsible?

Speaker 17 Is it the parents? Like California is banning different things. Different states are doing.
Where is the line? Because it can't be Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Speaker 16 It just can't. Nobody's really, there hasn't been much regulation.
You know, take even young people getting online. That's not an enforced thing.
So I'm a little surprised how

Speaker 16 hands off

Speaker 16 we've been on these things.

Speaker 17 With kids, especially, I mean, we over-regulate them offline and we under-regulate them online. It's really.

Speaker 16 No, no, I thought Anxious Generation and many observations along those lines are very profound and we should take action on them.

Speaker 17 So if you could do one thing, what would it be? I know what I would do, but what would you do?

Speaker 16 Misinformation actually is the one topic, and I say it in the series, that

Speaker 16 I say, hey, young people, you grew up with this thing. You understand the phenomena better.

Speaker 16 We basically pass this as a big problem to you.

Speaker 16 In AI, I have thoughts, global health, I have thoughts, but misinformation, I'm just stunned that

Speaker 16 there aren't more clear constructive things relating to policy and technology.

Speaker 17 Yeah. So you're just like, good luck.
Good luck, young people. You know, actually the way my kids dealt with it is they took all social media off their phones, which I thought worked rather well.

Speaker 17 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 28 It's built to grow with your business, whether you're just starting out or you're already scaling up.

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Speaker 21 It's time to put the clutter aside and focus on what really matters, running your business.

Speaker 11 Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you?

Speaker 14 Try Odoo for free at odu.com. That's odoo.com.

Speaker 17 Okay, next one. Let's go to the next one.
We're moving on very quickly into climate change. Another happy topic.

Speaker 31 If you think of our addiction to fossil fuels and the way that we're going about attempting to wean off of it, we're losing. The fossil fuel industry is making record profits.
Emissions are going up.

Speaker 31 People are right to be incredibly skeptical and disillusioned.

Speaker 16 There's part of the movement that I don't fully agree with, which is that you denigrate the current way of doing things before we have a replacement.

Speaker 16 I wish there was as much emphasis on the new thing, but

Speaker 16 I'm an optimist and I think we will limit temperature increase.

Speaker 17 So this is something you spent a lot of time on. That's what our last interview was about.
You seem worried at the time of where it's going, the temperature increases.

Speaker 17 Obviously, we have another hurricane in Florida, and yet legislators are pretending climate change doesn't exist.

Speaker 17 Talk a little bit about where we are right now. And one thing that you talked about a lot, which I've been spending a lot of time studying, is nuclear energy.

Speaker 17 Microsoft just recently is possibly going to open Three Mile Island, which I'm like, AI, Three Mile Island, great.

Speaker 17 Seems like it could go well. But actually, it could.
It could actually go well in order to bring compute power for AI.

Speaker 17 Talk a little bit about where we are now,

Speaker 17 because it's really,

Speaker 17 it seems to be accelerating and young people are very worried. Again, another bag of crap we've handed them in this regard.

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 the key to solving climate change, you know, I wrote a book with a theory of change that has to do with replacing all emitting activities for goods and services with new approaches that are green, that have no emissions.

Speaker 16 Today, those green approaches are extremely expensive. Green cement, green aviation fuel.

Speaker 17 You talked about the green premium.

Speaker 16 And only by

Speaker 16 funding innovation, having some degree of tax credits and buyers willing to pay extra.

Speaker 16 Then, as you scale up, those costs come down and you get the magic that says you can even go to a middle-income country like India and say, okay, here's this new way to make cement.

Speaker 16 It does not cost more. And so

Speaker 16 in 2015, when the Paris Accord is signed, I commit to create Breakthrough Energy. I'm there with country leaders, Modi, Obama, and they commit to double energy R ⁇ D budgets,

Speaker 16 which they did to a small degree. They

Speaker 16 didn't get to that doubling. But now Breakthrough Energy and other investors are

Speaker 16 funding unbelievable innovation, new ways to make steel, cement, meat,

Speaker 16 you name it.

Speaker 16 And although those won't roll out in time on a global basis to hit a two degree target, they will roll out and they'll avoid us getting to extreme warming.

Speaker 16 The sad thing about climate change right now is people given how much we'll be able to limit it,

Speaker 16 they overestimate the impact of climate change on rich countries. You know, rich countries have air conditioning, we can change our crops, we have savings.

Speaker 16 The big losses are near the equator where you have poor people who depend on agriculture. And when you hurt agriculture, you cause malnutrition, which causes a lot more death.

Speaker 16 And so the picture of the suffering and the need for climate adaptation should lead to us being more generous to these countries at a time where, because of other things, we are actually being significantly less generous to the poor countries.

Speaker 17 So one of the things you talked about is nuclear as a solution, correct?

Speaker 16 Absolutely. Nuclear fission and/or fusion will be very, very important along with renewable sources.

Speaker 17 You said renewables aren't enough, but I mean, you questioned.

Speaker 16 Renewable alone is not enough because of the intermittency. You know, Japan will not be powered by renewable energy.
South Korea won't be powered by renewable energy.

Speaker 16 When you have a cold snap and that cold front is sitting there, no wind, no solar, people still want their houses not to be sub-zero.

Speaker 17 Right. So talk a little bit because there's a bunch of people, including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who are working on nuclear at Helium.

Speaker 17 They're talking, I just was with someone who was talking about how you're going to have a small nuclear device in your house to heat it. Everyone's going to have a small nuclear device.

Speaker 17 I'm just telling you, I have to sit and listen. You don't have to listen to these people.

Speaker 17 But how do you look, how does that roll out given the

Speaker 17 reputation?

Speaker 17 I mean, I know it's laughable, but Three Mile Island, you're like, maybe not. But at the same time, maybe.
So how do you make that argument? How is Microsoft going to make that argument?

Speaker 16 Well, you know, coal kills people when it's mined. It kills people from local pollution.
Natural gas pipelines blow up.

Speaker 16 I'm not involved in third-generation nuclear, which is what resuscitating that plant is. I am a large funder of fourth generation nuclear, which is a plant with no high pressure in it,

Speaker 16 very different design that everybody, just like, you know, they said you should recover rocket stages to make spaceflight cheap.

Speaker 16 They've always said you should use metal cooling because all these safety issues of what happens when you shut the reactor down are completely solved. It's a very simple design,

Speaker 16 and we should be able to do it for about a third of the cost of current reactors. So, you know, we're pursuing that dream.

Speaker 16 Everything about nuclear fission and fusion, people have a great deal of skepticism of will it be cheap enough and what will the safety look like?

Speaker 16 But, you know, I'm putting billions into it because I am quite confident we can make that case.

Speaker 17 So what do you say to young people like this who we still are dependent on fossil fuels?

Speaker 16 Well, the banning fossil fuels before you have a substitute

Speaker 16 is a way of getting

Speaker 16 governments elected who don't think climate change exists.

Speaker 16 If you just say, no, you can't drive to work. I mean,

Speaker 16 so we,

Speaker 16 why do they go to universities and say, don't invest in the existing? Why don't they go and say, please take your money and invest in these new approaches?

Speaker 16 Because if you take your money away from the existing stuff, that doesn't create a solution. You know, when I was at 2015 in the climate crisis, I'm like, you guys are making a bunch of pledges.

Speaker 16 What's your plan for steel? There were zero startups. about making steel a new way, 6% emissions, cement, also 6%.

Speaker 16 No work going on. So if you want to out compete the dirty stuff, you actually have to get the entrepreneurs, you have to inspire them, you have to have high-risk capital.

Speaker 16 And so a lot of the things, I love the activists because the issue is a huge issue and they deserve all the credit for keeping it there.

Speaker 16 But when they say the solution is to stop consuming, you know, that means that can India build basic shelter. So we're not going to stop using cement, a lot of of cement.

Speaker 16 Even if rich countries didn't build another building ever, it's a rounding error. This is a middle-income country problem of providing basic

Speaker 16 lifestyle level goods and services. And so it's an invention problem.
Now, I say that about everything, but in this case, it's correct. All right.

Speaker 17 Is there anything really unusual you've invested in? And then we're going to move on to the next one. Well,

Speaker 16 there's so many

Speaker 17 things.

Speaker 16 We have 130 companies that Breakthrough Energy is funded.

Speaker 16 We have new ways of making food.

Speaker 16 We have ways of making cows not emit natural gas. The idea that there's hydrogen that you can dig, geologic hydrogen, that might surprise people.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 that's going to be a huge help to solve this.

Speaker 17 You know, I'm going in a hydrogen-powered plane soon. You want to come?

Speaker 16 Wow. Yeah.
You want to come?

Speaker 16 Anyway, yes, I'm funding a lot of that stuff.

Speaker 16 I hope it works. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Each one of my four children were like, no. And I said, yes.
I'm getting in it. Anyway, let's go to the next thing.
Are people too rich?

Speaker 16 Speaking of that, all right?

Speaker 16 Under the tax system I would go for, the wealthy would have, say,

Speaker 16 a third as much.

Speaker 19 Well, needless to say, I would go a lot. further.

Speaker 19 And I think, you know, and your friend Warren Buffett makes the point that his effective tax rate is lower than his secretary's and that is not what the American people want to see they do want to see the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes but you have a political system which unfortunately represents the needs of the wealthy much more than the needs of ordinary Americans you know they do these happiness questionnaires have you seen that you know oh yeah what they find is countries where people have that economic security as in Scandinavia usually Denmark or Finland or somebody ranks at the very top.

Speaker 19 Why is that? I think it's because people don't have to deal with the stress about how they're going to feed their kids or provide health care or child care. If you take that level of economic stress,

Speaker 19 if I say to somebody, you're never going to have to worry about whether you're going to feed your family, whether your kids are going to have health care.

Speaker 19 Thank you.

Speaker 16 Is it going to make their life perfect? No.

Speaker 19 Will it ease their stress level?

Speaker 32 bring more happiness, security?

Speaker 19 I think it will.

Speaker 17 Well, kudos to you to talk to Bernie.

Speaker 17 I remember when we had Elizabeth Warren, I think one of the years you're a code,

Speaker 17 everybody,

Speaker 17 especially men in the audience, you could feel them seize up when she was talking about these kind of things of the rich paying more taxes.

Speaker 17 Kamala Harris, Vice President Harris, talked about it last night in an interview. Fair share.
Nothing against capitalism, but everything's out of whack.

Speaker 17 And actually, corporate tax rates are at the lowest since 1939 right now. While

Speaker 17 people like me pay 40-some percent in taxes. I know, I know.
I need better lawyers. I need your lawyers.
So

Speaker 17 tell me, talked about this and why did you want to address it? Because

Speaker 17 you've talked to Mark Cuban. I've talked to him a lot about the wealth tax and things like that.
So how do you deal with income inequality?

Speaker 17 Because I feel like it's fueling a lot of the division that we find ourselves in.

Speaker 16 Well, the idea that you have the opportunity to create a company that's very valuable,

Speaker 16 the U.S. is the envy of the world

Speaker 16 at that. And so,

Speaker 16 while I would set tax rates quite a bit higher for rich people,

Speaker 16 you know, it's still, we still have to grow the economy to get to the ideal level. to set the safety net as high as Bernie alludes to.
As you get richer, you raise the safety net.

Speaker 16 That's the story of the United States.

Speaker 16 The government's not very good at executing, so

Speaker 16 it's always imperfect. But I would not make it illegal to be a billionaire.
So that's

Speaker 16 a point of view.

Speaker 16 He would take away over 99%

Speaker 16 of what I have.

Speaker 16 I would take away 62% of what I have. So that's a difference.

Speaker 16 You definitely do get to the point where you're not, you're killing the goose that lays lays the golden egg i you know north korea very equal unbelievable equality so i i i don't even like the equality framing because you know a hundred years ago most people were never literate right uh you know so we've created wealth and i think that the system that does that has a few elements that we shouldn't throw out.

Speaker 17 So clearly,

Speaker 17 being capitalistic, being an entrepreneur, creating, giving people incentives to do things.

Speaker 17 So what do you do when people have, you know, they were just talking about who's going to be the world's first trillionaire, which is astonishing to think about.

Speaker 16 Well, there's no trillionaires. Not yet.
I don't think there will be. You don't think there will be.

Speaker 17 No. They thought it would be, it wasn't you, but I think you're okay again.

Speaker 17 I remember meeting with someone who was a billionaire, and I said, You've got, this was 10 years ago.

Speaker 17 I said, you have to do something about income inequality, or you're going to have to armor plate your Tesla. And then I looked at them and I realized they kind of wanted to armor plate their Tesla.

Speaker 17 They wanted to live in that world. But how do you deal with that on a real level when you do have this insane amount of wealth and people still in abject poverty?

Speaker 17 Where do you come together with someone like Bernie Sanders?

Speaker 16 Well, abject poverty is

Speaker 17 different.

Speaker 16 Is in Africa, there is abject poverty. So, you know, I give tens of billions to Africa to relieve abject poverty, and I encourage others to do the same.

Speaker 16 It's not a very big club of people people uh involved in that. My

Speaker 16 dad, uh, he's deceased, but you know, he and I were

Speaker 16 worked on uh promoting the estate tax. I'm a huge believer in the estate tax, I continue to promote that.

Speaker 16 You know, they actually got rid of the estate tax briefly, you know, and I think that's a mistake because those are dynastic fortunes, not

Speaker 16 somebody who actually created something.

Speaker 16 And so I think we, I think, and it's stunning to me how countries don't have an estate tax. China does not have an estate tax.

Speaker 16 You know, Europe has very limited estate tax. So, you know, I think we should have higher taxation on the rich, but not that would prevent you from having large fortune.
I wouldn't set a ceiling.

Speaker 16 And then I think for what once you pay those taxes, whatever's left over, you should engage in philanthropy.

Speaker 16 You should take the skill that allowed you to succeed in business, you know, hiring people, think through and through scientific organization

Speaker 17 and give it away. How hard is that to do right now? There's not a ton of people following in your footsteps, I would say some.

Speaker 16 You know, we have people who are giving a lot away.

Speaker 16 And, you know, in the giving pledge, you can look, there are people who are giving at

Speaker 16 a pretty good rate.

Speaker 16 You know, I think people should do more. I think they would enjoy giving more.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 what you're talking about is the idea that the middle class feels very squeezed. This is a topic in this election.
Trump wants to give more tax breaks to the wealthy.

Speaker 17 Colin Harris is talking about giving tax breaks to the middle class. Where do you think,

Speaker 17 what would you, if you were running for president, what would be your stand on this?

Speaker 16 Well, I wouldn't get elected.

Speaker 16 I would bring up the deficit and say that, yes, we can tax the rich a lot more, but even so,

Speaker 16 you know, the 2017 tax cut, a lot of that's going to have to expire because the deficits will lead to a level of inflation that voters will not be happy with.

Speaker 16 There's a huge leg in this, but nobody talks about the deficit.

Speaker 16 I would raise the safety net somewhat, but I would also,

Speaker 16 for future generations, reduce the deficit quite a bit.

Speaker 17 So 62%, you, you would keep 62%, we can have the rest. 38.
We can have 30%. You would keep 38%.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 17 And we can have the rest?

Speaker 16 If you had the tax system I have in mind, if that had been in place throughout my entire life, I would have about 38% of what I have.

Speaker 17 All right, we'll take it.

Speaker 17 All right, last one, episode five. Can we outsmart diseases? Your biggest topic.

Speaker 16 When you sit in those wards, you know, you just see how parenting things are because the wards are never adequately staffed because malaria is quite seasonal.

Speaker 16 It says the rainy season comes and the mosquito population grows exponentially.

Speaker 32 As a kid, I can't even tell you how many episodes of malaria I went through. I can still clearly see you know the picture of my father.
He was standing next to my bed,

Speaker 32 looking at me. I could really see, you know, a lot of fears in his eyes.

Speaker 32 If malaria were killing 600,000 people in the U.S. or in Europe, the problem would have completely changed by now.

Speaker 17 So malaria was one of the areas you focused on most strongly. Talk about where it is right now.
I remember you let mosquitoes out at TED, as I recall, which you're not going to do here.

Speaker 17 But where is it right now from your perspective in these worldwide diseases? Still, you know, it's not neglected anymore because of you and the Gates Foundation. But where is that?

Speaker 17 And what are the diseases you're looking at?

Speaker 16 Yeah, so malaria at the turn of the century, when the Gates Foundation is created, is killing a bit over a million a year.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 over the first 15 years of this century, we got it down to about a half million and it's gone up slightly from there, but just say a half million a year you know this is a disease that there's almost no funding because the disease is in the poor countries who don't have the resources and the rich countries just aren't involved they don't they don't see it as a problem we do have in the pipeline some incredible tools so that gentleman you met there, Diabati, is a scientist in Burkina Faso

Speaker 16 who has tools to kill mosquitoes.

Speaker 16 And

Speaker 16 we're going through a lot of experiments based on his work and others. And within three to five years, this tool will be ready for release.

Speaker 16 And so if we get a surge in funding, then we could start the effort to eradicate malaria, which by killing mosquitoes.

Speaker 16 Yeah, so what you have to do is get rid of 90% of the mosquito population. And so the reinfection rate, you slow it down enough that you can test and treat.

Speaker 16 And if you go through a bunch of low seasons where you've done that, this is what happened in

Speaker 16 the U.S. We had a lot of malaria, but at the time you could spray DDT onto ponds and that decimated mosquito populations.
And so

Speaker 16 because of winter's low seasons, we actually got to zero. We're trying to create the equivalent in places like Nigeria,

Speaker 16 where, you know,

Speaker 16 as a child, you have a one in six chance of dying before the age of five.

Speaker 17 So when you think about this,

Speaker 17 is it continues to be the most important disease you're fighting right now, malaria? Or are there others that you're...

Speaker 16 It's hard to rate.

Speaker 16 TB kills the most people

Speaker 16 of any disease.

Speaker 16 Malnutrition is the one thing if I had...

Speaker 16 a wand I would get rid of because if you're not malnourished you're less than half as likely to die even if you get malaria, diarrhoea, or pneumonia and it cripples you for life because you can never catch up if your brain doesn't develop when you're young.

Speaker 16 You know, sickle cell disease is this evil disease. We have a $2 million cure, but the foundation is working to make it a $200 cure.

Speaker 16 And that means we could take it to Africa, where you have millions of kids with sickle cell versus 60,000 in the U.S. And every one is a tragedy.

Speaker 17 So those are the ones you're focused on. Because another one in this country, at least, is heart disease and obesity of course, which is sort of the opposite.
That's right.

Speaker 16 We lived to a very

Speaker 16 old age.

Speaker 17 We'll be back in a minute.

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Speaker 17 So when you think about, we've got to go in a second, but when you think about how you outsmart disease, you've been at this for what? It's not 20 years, right? Is this something?

Speaker 16 Yeah, no, the foundation is created and becomes the largest at the turn of the century.

Speaker 17 So what

Speaker 17 are you most focused on as you move into the new phase of what you're doing? Still, malaria and TB and these diseases.

Speaker 16 Health broadly.

Speaker 16 You know, we work in agriculture because that we can, you know, make eggs and milk really cheap we can have crops that deal with climate change so a lot of that's climate adaptation related but global health

Speaker 16 you know all of the resources i have uh will go to these these global health issues and we ought to be able to achieve uh in my lifetime we're almost done with polio uh we should be able to get rid of measles malaria uh almost all of malnutrition.

Speaker 16 So, you know, it's actually very exciting work. It's very hopeful.
You know, we've come a long ways from 10 million a year dine to now 5 million.

Speaker 16 But to get down to that 1%,

Speaker 16 we have to cut it in half three more times.

Speaker 17 So what's next for what's next? What are you going? Space travel? Are you going to Mars with Elon?

Speaker 16 Nope.

Speaker 17 What are you going to, are you going to do more of these?

Speaker 16 You know, I

Speaker 16 think we'll go three, four, five years and see.

Speaker 16 Well, what interests you?

Speaker 17 These are big topics, but is there,

Speaker 17 again, space travel is one, cloning?

Speaker 16 Well, genetic editing and being tasteful about how we use that.

Speaker 16 You know,

Speaker 16 I focus on that to cure sickle cell at a very low cost or to cure HIV at a very low cost. So it's about the diseases that make the world incredibly inequitable.

Speaker 17 All right, last question. Are you hopeful or, you know, it's pretty tense right now.
It's still, and it's been tense for a couple of years out of COVID. We're still sort of not recovered from that.

Speaker 17 And a lot of people aren't. How do you, what is your mood right now?

Speaker 16 Well,

Speaker 16 you know, ask me on November 6th

Speaker 16 whether climate change is real or not.

Speaker 17 So I'm guessing who you're voting for, but

Speaker 16 you can definitely guess

Speaker 16 where my energy is going. Overall, I'm still an optimist.
I mean,

Speaker 16 if you zoom out and say, okay, where were we 50 years ago, 100 years ago,

Speaker 16 humans are ingenious at doing things.

Speaker 16 I hope that the younger generation can look at polarization, look at the negative effects of digital, including misinformation, but not only.

Speaker 16 misinformation and

Speaker 16 shaping AI so that its miraculous capability in health and education isn't canceled out by

Speaker 16 disorder and

Speaker 16 a

Speaker 16 lack of purpose. So we have left some real challenges for this next generation.
But I'm overall very hopeful.

Speaker 16 I get to see more innovation than other people, so I understand why I would be more hopeful. There's a lot, whether it's climate or health,

Speaker 16 that is very, very exciting.

Speaker 17 Great. Well, I have to say it's a very good idea.
You're pretty good at interviewing. I mean, I'm not going to lose my day job, but nonetheless, you do a nice job.
Anyway, thank you so much.

Speaker 17 And thank you, Bill Gates.

Speaker 33 Thank you.

Speaker 17 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Rousselle, Kateri Yoakum, Jolie Myers, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher, Kaylin Lynch, and Claire Hyman.

Speaker 17 Our engineers are Rick Kwan, Fernando Aruda, and Aaliyah Jackson. And our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 17 If you're already following the show, you get to fly in a hydrogen-powered plane with me and Bill Gates, if he dares. If not, Satan is indeed tracking you.
He's just not Bill Gates.

Speaker 17 Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Carrou Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Carrou Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

Speaker 17 We'll be back on Thursday with more.

Speaker 1 Support for the show comes from Odo.

Speaker 3 Running a business is hard enough, and you don't need to make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other.

Speaker 6 One for sales, another for inventory, a separate one for accounting.

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Speaker 10 And the best part is that Odo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

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Speaker 30 Plus, it's easy to use, customizable, and designed to streamline every process.

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Speaker 11 Thousands of businesses have made the switch, so why not you?

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