A TechStuff Tour of Bill Gates's House

that line. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense. I have a feeling madness. I tell you madness. I figure it's a colloquialism, but I'll settle for that. Sott. Yes, you happen to know who lives at eighteen thirty five seventy three Avenue, Northeast, Medina, Washington. Well I do, but I'll pretend I don't know who that would be. Bill Gates. Ah, yes, yes, Bill Gates, the billionaire, the founder of Microsoft, the amazing philanthropist. I mean his philanthropic efforts have been phenomenal. That that's

just me being genuine. The guy has given billions of dollars to charities. I'm sorry when you say phenomenal, I start singing phenomena in my head. So so we had some people right in on both Facebook and an email over well pretty much since we've done our did our episode about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, Ages and Ages ago. You guys might not remember those, but we did a pair of podcasts about Steve Jobs and Bill Gates because

the two have very interesting parallel lives. The development of Microsoft in the development of Apple have almost the same timeline but very different pathways. Anyway, we had several people right in and say, Hey, I heard that Bill Gates has this really cool house and it's really technologically advanced, and I want to know more about it. So we did some digging and we've got some information. Now we should point out that neither of us have been to

Bill Gates's house. Nope, and neither has Tyler. Tyler, you haven't been, have you? Okay that Tyler just said he has not been. Um, Josh and Chuck, strangely enough, have yet to go to Bill Gates's house, but that could change by the time this podcast goes live. Anyway. Um, what we do know we know from various articles. One big one was in u S News and World Report. Yeah. I hadn't actually read that article before doing research on it, and it is a few years old now. Um, but

they do give you an idea. They even have some illustrations of what the house looks like. Of course there are photos, um, mostly you know, taken either from a boat from Lake Washington or from an airplane flying over our helicopter flying over the estate. Yes. Yes, his pool house is bigger than my house. Yeah, that was one of the interesting notes I read repeatedly across various websites. I should also say that kudos to U. S. News and World Report because you created an article that has

been plagiarized widely on the internet. Um. That is a problem when you're looking for multiple sources of information. Chris and I were looking through lots and lots of different sources and we kept coming across the same paragraphs, I mean, exactly the same word for word, with the same titles and everything. And I'm thinking, where the heck that was Which one of these was the first? And it turns

out it was this U. S. News and World Report article. Um. I had actually originally read about this his house in a Sky magazine article years and years ago, but the Uh. Yeah, the the whole size of it is enormous. According to that U. S. News and World Report article, if you add up all the buildings, because there are several on his on his estate, if you add up all the buildings,

you get to about sixties six thousand square feet of building. Yes, the average home is around two thousand square feet, yes, which is still larger than my house. Yeah, but you know, yes, and his garage is like three times as large as the average house. Yes, it's silver six thousand square free actually one of his one of his garages. He has three of them, all right, So look we're jumping ahead

of ourselves, so let's give you a quick overview. So, yeah, sixty six thousand square feet of residents if you add up all the buildings together, which U. S. News and World Report is very helpfully points out. Rather, they point out helpfully that, um, that's one point five acres one of half acres of just rooms. And uh it has seven bedrooms, twenty four bathrooms including ten full baths, six kitchens, and six fireplaces. So yeah, this is uh it's on Lake Washington. Um. If you were to get in a

boat and go from Seattle across the lake. You would eventually hit his his house and then be very politely escorted off property, assuming you weren't invited. I mean, I'm certain that he's very hospitable towards invited guests, but the uninvited type, I assume we meet a a friendly but stiff resistance. That's just me guessing. I have not tried to get into Bill Gates's house. I learned my lesson after going to Coubertino. Uh, that's a that's a joke.

I'm not trying to get into Steve jobs This house either. He actually has Between the two would be more frightened of Jobs. Um. Yeah, there's approximately ft of waterfront for the property, which costs around twenty five thousand dollars a foot. As I recall, I read an interview where he he specifically pointed that out. It was kind of interesting. It's

built into a hillside. So the while there are there is this huge square footage involved, most of that is not visible or a good portion of it is invisible because it's built into a hillside. Um, and that was partly in order to improve energy efficiency. It was actually thoughtfully done. It was like, you don't I'm gonna have this enormous estate, but I want to do it in a way that is responsible. Yeah, there are there are signs that heat. Uh. And the developers took developers, I'm sorry,

it just hit me. Um, they took some pains to make it green, or at least greener than than you might expect for such a large place, and including the fact that there's an estuary, which is uh, you know, there's an artificial stream and wetland area. Um designed basically there there's some there are some retaining walls around the house. Um, and there's some water runoff and the estuary is designed

to mitigate that somewhat. Yeah. Actually, one of the architects and designers for his estate, Jim Cutler, was the one to convince Bill Gates to include the wetlands as part of the design in order to mitigate that runoff problem that you mentioned. And according to an interview I read, uh, Cutler said that it took it took some convincing because Bill Gates pointed out that waterfront property and around Seattle is very expensive. He said, well, I paid for this

waterfront property. You want me to turn into a swamp. Cutler said, well, this is a way for you to connect back to the world. It's a way for you to provide a disappearing resource because more and more people are building homes along the lake and destroying the natural wetlands. This will create wet lands that will allow salmon to spawn. It will allow wildlife to come back into the area. And according to Cutler, he says that the wet lands is now Bill Gates. One of Bill Gates's favorite UM

parts What favorite features of his of his home? Pretty cool? Yeah. Color also had a couple of other interesting things to say. Um. For one thing, the a lot of the house. The house is made up of various materials, but a lot of the the wood of the house is a Douglas fur that's recycled. It actually comes from an old warehouse and lumber mill. And when Cutler talked to Bill Gates about this, back when they were first talking about building the house, that was when you may have heard about

the spotted owls. You remember that the spot owls in the Pacific Northwest they were in uh they were in danger because their habitat was being destroyed in lumbering lumbering. In lumber lumber yards, people were cutting down the trees that the spot owls were living in and because we're you know, walking very heavily through there and it was destructing. Yes, they were lumbering through. That was that was my mistake, and I'm glad that we managed to have to highlight it. Um.

It doesn't bother me at all. I do it all the time. So at any rate, you know, I just love the mental picture. It is pretty funny. I think these lumbering owls. Actually, I just imagined these enormous ones. At any rate, let's get back to the topic at hand,

uh cutler. Bill Gates really wanted the Douglas fur as part of the wood being you and Color said, well, you know it's we got to find a way to do this in a responsible manner and found a guy who sold um reclaimed would essentially recycled wood, and told Bill Gates, hey, if we if if you buy, if you build a sawmill to in order to uh to um produce this repurposed wood and you know, cut it down to the right size and everything, we could build

your house out of it. And Bill Gates thought this was actually a great idea, and he set up a sawmill for salvage lumber. It was called g. R. Plume and Company and Corey to Cutler. It costs a couple of million dollars to build, and Bill Gates funded it. And it wasn't you know, it was not just to build his house. It's also the idea of being able to reuse wood so that you don't have to cut down,

you know, adult trees. That's pretty phenomenal too. I think, yeah, that that that is um and I ironically enough, I guess in the way of the the Douglas fur that is used in Mr. Gates house, uh comes. It's five years old apparently, um, but it came from an ancient lumber mill. Uh so, and as part of the construction process they really polished it up and made it look

really really nice. Um. The house, by the way, is in a large style, um so they used that in a stainless steel roof, and uh they made the hardware. They analyzed the hardware, so all the the metal furnished UM finishings basically look sort of used but are still you know, very very up to date. Yep. It's got lots and lots of like the above ground parts, any we have lots of glass that kind of most of the windows face west so that you get the beautiful

sunsets over Seattle. And then, uh, the the house itself has a very sophisticated computer system running all the way through it. This is probably what most of our fans were curious about, was the computer system running on are in the house. Yeah. Um, it turns out this is a what we know of. It sounds like it's pretty sophisticated,

pretty cool idea. And actually, Chris, you pointed out a few episodes ago and a neat update that the house could have using the the software from Connect, the capabilities of Connect. But we'll we'll get into what the original design was. We don't have any way of knowing whether or not Gates would upgrade. I mean I would imagine so, but we don't know, right because neither of us are on speaking terms of Mr Gates. Yeah, that's the That's the thing. The U. S. News and World Report, UH

profile of the house is several years old. The house is built in the late ninety nineties, you believe, or mid to late nineties, and UH from the U. S. News and World War part article, you might get the feeling that the technology is somewhat dated because the report said that it's running. Um. The system that runs the house uses Windows nt uh, which you might go, ha ha ha, how old. I'm sure that it's probably been upgraded once or maybe even twice since that article was

just unlivable terrible, um. But you know, honestly, it's designed to be Bill Gates's vision of the House of the future, so there's still some many things that I'm sure even if it were still running on Windows NTI. UM, I haven't seen anything that's newer than that that actually tells tells us whether or not the computer systems have been upgraded.

But it's still far The functionality is far more advanced than most of the stuff that most of us have in our homes because it's got the ability to recognize individuals and taylor what's going on uh in the house around them based on the identification of the person in question, right right, Yeah. Essentially, every person gets to build their own profile, and the profile will as they move through the house, the house adjusts to the person, which is

that's pretty cool. It reminds me actually of did you ever see the show Eureka? Yes, Eureka had Sarah. Sarah was the home of the Sheriff of Eureka, and Sarah was an automated house. My wife could tell you the entire what the acronym stands for. I don't remember. It's like self automated residents something or other. Unfortunately I don't have the whole thing. But anyway, Sarah would could identify people as they walked in and set the profile properly. Well,

Gates's house can do the same thing. Now. The way it works in Gates's house is that um it runs on well, at least originally anyway, runs on r f I D chips radio frequency chips. So each person gets a badge or a pen of some sort, pen p I in of some sort that has an r f I D chip in it. And then you create your profile.

So you tell the master computer system that you know, I really like Beethoven, I really and you know, Beethoven's Seventh Symphony, second movement is my favorite piece of classical music in particular, I want that in heavy rotation, but in general Beethoven, maybe some Mozart, etcetera, etcetera. And then as you move through the house, if you weren't wanted

to listen to music, it would start playing. And if you went to a different room, the music would follow you, so the music system would shut down in the room you have just left and start up in the room you just walked into. But it goes well beyond that.

It goes into everything from let's say you watch you were watching a movie in one of the rooms, and then you need to move into a different room, and the television would come on and the movie would pick up exactly where it left off when you were in the other room. Or even the climate controls. Let's say that you like it a little cooler than everyone else in the house, so you've established that it should be at seventy degrees, which in whichever room you're in, the

climate controls would adjust automatically as you move through. Because all of these different systems were tied into the master computer system and could be customized for a particular person. The question I have, of course, yes, how do you rank those R F I D chips so that if multiple people are in the same room, because these rooms are enormous. Some of these rooms are bigger than like a basketball court. So you sit there and think, well, if I'm the only person in this room, I'm going

to feel mighty lonely. So assuming there's more than one person, I wonder how it determines which person's profile wins out. Oh, I'm pretty sure I know who's gonna Well, I know who wins overall. Yes, exactly, exactly. Chris and I are both married, and we always know who wins in the end. It's always going to be the wife. But let's say she's not in the room, or that Bills not in the room. Let's say it's two guests. I wonder whose winds maybe the first? Yeah, I'm sorry, that's that's microsoft

if Bomber. If Bombers in the room, you defer to him out of fear. You don't want to be Limb from Limb. No, he's gonna call us one of these days. Yeah, but we won't be able to understand anything. I'll just be screaming. Come on. I respect the heck out of him as a salesman, as as a businessman. He's far more intelligent than I am. But man, that guy intimidates the heck out of me. Just watch go to YouTube.

Go to YouTube and look look up bomb Steve Bomber on YouTube, and you will see some videos of something A very intense man, Yes, intense is probably the best word. Uh. Anyhow, Yeah, I'm sorry I got off on a tangent there. Yeah, your fault. I actually went looking for the acronym for for Sarah, which which I found. But before I do that, I found that. UM actually an article on device, which you know is sci fi with the channel that shows Eureka. But um, they did a little piece on it just

just this July. They called this ambient intelligence when your environment can know about you and know what's going on and uh, you know, basically make things the way you like them and taylor the environment around you. UM. And there's a group at the University of Essex and the United Kingdom that are working on a technology uh which is called I Space. UM. Yes, very appily. As some of the contents point out on the HDS it is

a work aside. But they're basically trying to find ways to adapt technology like the stuff that you find in UH bill Gates home to the average person and how to make that possible. Course we've run into people like the eyelink on the she leg locks where you can have control over that and the other automated home devices. But um, I think the the idea is to make them much more usable for the average person and hopefully affordable because this stuff is expensive. And it's passive, right.

I mean passive in the sense that you don't have to pick up a remote control and tell it to do these things. Right, It actually is sensing what's going on and you know, hey, Steve's in the room now I need to make you know, go ahead and turn on the coffee maker. You know, with this particular blend of being or whatever. You know, so passive from a user perspective, but active from the actual device perspective. Wow, messed in my head. Well, it's because when I said passive,

I realized that, well, it's actively doing something. I meant passive from the from my like, if I were walking through the room, I'd be like, I don't have to do anything, exact and everything for me. By the way, SARAH stands for self actuated residential automated habitat. There we are, I was, I was. I only got two of those words semi rights. But but no, there there are other

things that I thought were kind of strange. Um because according to the the article by Richard Folker's from This is the US News and World War War thing, you can you know, tell it you want to watch a particular TV show and you can walk through the house and the TV show will be on in whatever room you happen to be walking into. And I'm thinking it's going to be difficult to watch if you're moving from room to room. But okay, but I'm thinking, like, let's say that, you know, I mean, I can think of

an example. Let's say that you want you know, you're you're watching in the living room, and then you think, I could really go for a grilled cheese sandwich right now, I'm going to walk to one of the six kitchens within this estate and make myself a grilled cheese sandwich. But then you're thinking, but that do I pause the I want to be able to watch this this show while I'm making my sandwich, But unfortunately, the kitchen is

approximately a two mile walk from the living room. So how am I going to be able to do that? I'm just exaggerating for comedic effect, obviously, But then if you have again a television screen in said kitchen, there you go. Problem solved. You go into the kitchen and television pops on. It picks up right where you left off, and then you can make your sandwich while being entertained. And uh, I'm sure people are gonn right to me and barrate me for you pronouncing sandwich as sandwich. I

hope not. Some other elements that they have at this house. According to various articles, the uh, there's a pool, a huge pool. Yes, seventeen by sixty foot swimming pool has an underwater music system installed in there, so you can actually listen to your music while you're swimming underneath the water. Yes, I would recommend perhaps the swimming pool cues if you're going to be listening underwater. Nice just a guess, yeah, I would. I would recommend the aquabats. That's a nice little,

uh little hey. If you haven't heard the aquabats, go check them out. Any perhaps fish, Yeah, but you would drown if you would never come up for air fish because their jams last approximately three days. But the pools an indoor outdoor pool. You can actually go. You can swim under the wall, under a glass wall and emerge outside. I think that's pretty cool. Uh. There's a from the entry, there's apparently a grand staircase that is eight four steps tall. That is a very grand stair two ft long and

sixty three ft high. Um, there's also an elevator, so if you need an elevator, you can have one. There's a they have a theater inside the house, Um, seats twenty and uh there's a library that is bigger than Chris's house. Yes, don't remind me square feet library. Oh my gosh, this is the images I saw for the library, which, by the way, we're all um they were all uh computer generated images. It wasn't like an actual photograph of

an illustration. Uh. They looked amazing. And supposedly the library even has a pivoting bookcases, which is awesome, one of which hides a bar and uh I get ripped to read read Bill Gates's autobiography, that is the place to do it. Yeah. Actually, there's apparently some information about the house on the road ahead. Oh okay, so I wish I have not read. But I really wish I had known that before today. Would have been helpful to know before we started recording Plette. However, there is a very

famous book in that library, apparently the Codex Lester. Oh yeah, that's by one of my favorite guys in the whole wild world. It would be a Leonardo da Vinci. I'm wondering if I wonder if it has the code in it. The code, Oh that code, yeah, you know, the Da Vinci code. I hear a lot about it. I mean they've already got the swiveling bookcase. You know, it's just just a little bit longer. Can you imagine a scavenger

hunt in his house? Holy cow? Um, But he paid thirty point eight million dollars for that book, which is a sixteenth century notebook. It's Da Vinci's notebook. It is Da Vinci's No. Oh my god. Oh we have solved the mystery right here. On tech stuff. Uh yeah, there's also all these flat pal displays that are throughout the home that will well, this is another thing that's tied into the r F I D chap Right, it's the

it will display art that you like. So let's say that you go and you tell that tell Bill that, uh I call him Bill, You tell Mr Gates or you very politely mentioned at Mr Gates like I happen to really like art from the late Renaissance, and then he You can have your chip program so that every time you're walking through an area, it will automatically load images. Uh as if they were framed paintings from whichever era or artist you happen to like, and your experience is

even more accustomized. It's pretty when I don't know, of course, might I be like, can you generate stuff from the Calvin and Hobbes milieu. I just sort of assumed that it would show pictures of Mr Garf uncle and Mr link Letter. Oh yeah, that's kind of art. That kind of art. Actually, I think I'll probably say Berkeley Breath, We'll go with that early Bloom County. Yeah, it's it's possible.

I suppose, um you know, because I know that the r f I D uh initially used a pin you know that you'd wear on you think Star Trek communicator. I I that's how I always saw it like that from the next generation. Uh, but you know, theoretically you could have an r f I D chip implanted in you and then you wouldn't have to carry anything. Yeah. You know, if you have to deal with the ethics of implanting r F I D technology within a human being, yeah,

which has been done? Which has been done? It's an ethical question, Yeah, certainly, but you could you could certainly do that. Um, I can just imagine that that process when you walk through the front door. All right, now, hold very still. It's like this is going to sting like crazy for about an hour. Yeah, it's like you want to get into it. You know, your study and you left your badge at the other end of the house, and it's like, you can't get in, but it's me.

I'm sorry, Dave Nice Nice. Bill Gates's house is guarded by how fantastic um getting back to the house, there's other there's obviously other really big rooms. There's a formal dining room that can seed up to twenty four people. Um, there's a reception hall that can actually hold up to a hundred and fifty people. The reception halls is kind

of a separate building. It's designed for things like if you were to have like a big corporate getaway where all the executives would come to all the Microsoft executives wouldkind of Bill Gates's house. He could do a presentation there. You can have a full catered meal there. There's actually one of the kitchens is connected to that hall, and there's also this enormous screen in that um that hall,

it's uh, what was it? It's twenty two ft wide video display made up of twenty four rear projection television monitors, each with screen. Actually, that may have changed too. I remember reading about another display that was some of similar size, but it was using digital projectors as opposed to rear projection screens, so it may be that that's changed. Um. There's an activities building that's nine d square foot, so if you want to be in one of the smaller rooms,

you can go there. That's got a putting green. It's also got it's also the one that's connected to the boat docks. Yes. Uh, there's the three garages we talked about, including the sixty hundred square foot garage that can hold more than ten cars. Uh. There's a guesthouse. The guesthouse is just under two thousand square feet, so if you are a guest, and Bill Gates wrote much of his

autobiography there, um in the guesthouse seat. That was the first building that was built on his residents, and it was sort of the testing grounds for all this technology to make sure that would work on a larger scale. Uh. The exercise room is twenty five hundred square feet, bigger than some of the gems that you've seen. I'm sure, um and apparently has a trampoline room with the twenty foot ceiling ceiling. Can you imagine bouncing high enough for

twenty ft high was like a legitimate concern. Well, I don't know the strength of that trampoline either. Well little isn't known that Bill Gates can leap from a standing position fifteen foot straight up in the air. Now we're getting into Chuck Norris here, because only when he's wearing punkistadors they run tight. Uh. That always a lie what I just said. Yeah, we are getting into kind of a Bill Braski Chuck Norris sort of thing. When we start talking about like that, um and you might wonder

how much is this property worth? Well, in two thousand nine, the property taxes on the home were reported to be one point oh six three million dollars on a total assessed value of one forty seven point five million dollars, so almost a hundred and fifty million dollar home. Yeah, but you know, I mean again, we talked about this and you think about, Wow, that's that's like, that's excess right there. Compared to some of the opulent, crazy mansions

in the past. It's pretty modest. I mean, the the rooms are huge doubt they could house many, many, many people, and the technology is phenomenal and probably much more advanced than what we've laid out here, because you know, Bill Gates is a fairly private man. He's not going to necessarily publicize the technology that's in his home. I'm sure

he has some Microsoft surfaces in there were around. These were first built, right, but you think about some of the other like massive homes built by millionaires and billionaires over the past, like the Hearst Castle or the built More Estate. These homes truly have access down to an

art and a science. I mean, they're they're crazy. If you've ever toured any of those homes, they use your mind boggles, and how opulent and over the top they are, not necessarily like the Hearst Castle I think of as being a little tacky, and the built Ware Estate is a little less tacky, but both are way over the top, uh, compared to those Actually Bill Gates's estate, and you've got

to remember he's worth several billion dollars is understated. Yeah, So, I mean I find that admirable and the fact that he took energy conservation into consideration when building, when you know, having the house designed and everything. I think that says a lot too. It speaks about a very responsible approach to designing this massive estate, right Yeah. I mean it's certainly not something that that had to be uh taken

into account. I mean he's you know, he could have built a house many times the size of this one and still not even dented the amount of money that he has on hand. Um. So you know, it's pretty impressive in because there's so much high technology woven into the house. Um. I think that uh um, and probably

is why people find it so fascinating. Um. You know, they're there are other tech personalities who have had uh, you know houses mentioned, but I always hear Bill Gatesman house mentioned as the one that people want to know about because it's got, you know, the ability, it's got that interactive nature to it where it knows who you are and what you're doing. It's kind of creepy but

also cool and yeah. Like like we said before, Chris had pointed out earlier that the Connect technology might be used now instead of r F I D because connect as you know, I'm sure he knows if you've listened to our podcast about it has cameras in it that can identify a person and link that person to a profile.

So you could just theoretically switch out the r f I D readers with a series of cameras that are designed to recognize faces, and then you no longer even have to issue a pen to anyone when they enter the home. They would just walk around and the home would detect and identify the people as they walked around and adjust settings from there, which is again sort of creepy but also kind of cool. Um, So, yeah, I mean that's a possible. We don't know for sure. We

don't know that he's done that at all. It's just a guess. Yep, yep, And it would certainly be easy enough. I'm sure to have a couple of folks from Microsoft come over and, you know, maybe plug some things in for him. Do you guys want to help me out with that? Hopefully, hopefully he doesn't have to wait long for tech support. I wouldn't imagine. So can you imagine

if your house showed a blue screen of death? Yeah, that'd be rough anyway, Bill, if you're listening, Um, we would love to tour your home, either of us or both of us. We we would find we would be greatly honored. And uh and and um, I like the Ramans and uh punk music in general, just so you know, and and really, my art, let's just go with Andy Warhol. We're gonna go with Warhol for my art, okay, And so just keep that in mind, Billy and uh the

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