Bill Gates

in the world. In February, Gates announced that he was stepping down as Microsoft's chairman to focus on charitable work at his foundation, the Bill of Melinda Gates Foundation, and Gates sat down with David Rubinstein, co founder of the Carlisle Group and hosts of the Bloomberg television show Peer to Peer Conversations to discuss global warming, carbon emissions, regulating big tech, and why he thinks the impossible foods and

beyond meat can help the environment. For about twenty years or so, you've been the wealthiest man in the world. But because you've given away so much money. Recently, Jeff Bezos became wealthier. Do you think if you had stayed in college and gotten your college degree. I mean, you don't feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world was at right. No, I mean it's a sign that I haven't given them money way fast enough to drop out of the top ten, you know,

and the market has been strong. Actually, the market has been strong. Microsoft is up thirty this year. So to what do you attribute that? Uh, the company, you know, it's doing super well. Such in Ndala is a great CEO. You know, the whole dream of the importance of software has really come true. The five most valuable companies in the world are these technology companies. Microsoft, you know, has a good share of that. I get to spend about a sixth of my time now is over at Microsoft.

So recently you said that the biggest mistake you've made professionally was that, um, Microsoft should have had the Android technology. Why was that the big this mistake when you're in a field, you know, we were in the field of doing operating systems for personal computers. We knew the mobile phone would be very popular, and so we were doing what was called Windows Mobile. We missed being the dominant mobile operating system by very tiny amount. We were distracted

during Iron and Trust trial. We didn't assign the best people to do the work. So it's the biggest mistake I made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set. We were clearly the company that that should have achieved that your two million areas of focus our cater twelve education, United States, and healthcare in the

least wealthy parts of the world. Recently, you've decided to make another effort, not necessarily through your foundation, but through Breakthrough Energy to try to do something about climate change. Why are you so worried about climate change? Well, the climate change is a problem that gets worse every year, and yet what you have to do on a global basis is very dramatic and reshaping the entire physical economy

that we have. And so it's a very complex problem, and it's a problem that fits where I see my value at it, which is looking at something through the lens of innovation, not just the R and D part, but the creation of products and the deployment of products, and so helping educate people about Okay, what where, what

are the sources of these greenhouse gases? And how do you get on a path of innovation so that you can get global adoption and actually bring emissions down dramatically, Because that's part of your foundation, or you're doing this outside your foundation. Okay, the the part where you mitigate and you help the poor countries with better seeds and

better policies. UH, partly through development aid that is through the foundation, that mitigation part the part where you invent new ways of making uh fuels, electricity, cement, steal meat that is uh done directly by me with a lot of investments, including the fund that you mentioned. The so called breakto Energy Ventures is a fund that I assembled a group of twenty two people uh to put money

into companies that are trying to commercialize the breakthroughs. Right, but that's a fund of one billion dollars, right you put in two So can one billion dollars really make that much of a difference a billion? Uh? It's actually been very catalytic so far. They have twenty investments. UH late next year will probably raise another billion to a billion and a half. You know, this is all about

innovation some right now. The premium if you said, okay, you have to make steal with no emissions, that steel would cost you four times what steel does today. Your electric bill would more than double. Uh if if we just take the technology we have today. So um Yes,

supporting those companies and drawing other investors in. One thing break Through Energy has done has gotten a lot of co investors green investing didn't go very well in the first round, and so it looked like a field that might UH evaporate to some three because d vs come in and being able to bring a depth of understanding to these things. Not only have they been able to invest, the first billing will be UH fully committed within the next year. But we've gotten other investors, so that's gone

quite well. And in the technology they only invest in companies who have a chance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by a half a percent each each company. UH. And you know they've found twenty and I'm sure they'll find another twenty. I'm the smallest investor in that fund, I think, So am I going to get my money back and make a return? Or Um? What what do you say? I'd say it's of the things you invest in. It's probably one of the higher risk things. It is being

done on a commercial basis. UH. You know, we're likely to have a few significant successes, so it's not philanthropic in the sense that you can deduct it. UH. But the time frame of the returns and the riskiness of the turns are fairly high. So we do expect UH to make a profit out of that fund. So Why do you think some people do not believe that there is such a thing as climate change. What is propelling them to say there's no climate change? Is it's scientific

evidence or some other political reason. I won't mention anybody, but there are some people who don't think that there is climate change. Well, you know, they must not have taken enough science courses or something. I don't know it. Uh. The climate is a complex issue, and you know, just understanding how you do the abatement requires a lot of in depth study. In the United States, it's become somewhat

of a partisan issue, which is unfortunate. Uh, you know, it might make it harder to achieve the type of agreements we need uh here here in the United States. But you know, we have two problems. We have the people who deny climate and then we have the people who think it's easy to solve, and we need to help educate both of those groups. But in the history of human civilization, is there any evidence that people will do things that will affect their great great grandchildren but

that they won't see the benefit from. Well, the United States, actually, of all governments, has been willing to take on very difficult problems like cancer and make gigantic investments knowing that the real payoff would be many decades down the road. Uh. You know when that was first being pushed. Uh, you know, people are saying, hey, this is important. Climate change is like that where you've got to take a long term perspective.

And government at its best is when it's taking that long term perspective and funding the basic guaranty and the policies that lead to scale deployment. Now, a large part of the carbon we have in the atmosphere now is caused by the electricity grid, which is about so exactly so Um, it comes from agriculture and forestry. Why is that causing such a big increasing carbon Well, the mat

category UH is a variety of things. When you clear land, you're taking in the carbon that stored, seeing the trees or plants there, and you're releasing all of that like burning the land, uh saying Indonesia for um palm oil plantations. Another thing is that UH, cows and other grass eating species have a digestion system that emits methane, and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas, and so cows alone account for about six percent of global emissions. And so

we need to change cows just cows alone. How are we going to do that? Well? Actually, of all the categories, uh, the one that has gone better than I would have expected five years ago is this work to make what's called artificial meat. And so you have people like Impossible or Beyond Meat, both which uh I invested in. You eat it as well, and you like it, that's absolutely. You can go to Burger King and by the Impossible burger.

All right, is it healthier for you or just healthier for the It's slightly healthier for you in terms of less cholesterol. It's of course dramatic reduction in methane emissions, you know, animal cruelty, manure management, and the pressure that meat consumption puts on land use. What about electric cars? Do you think that's a solution. Absolutely? They If you look at the transport sector, passenger cars with about another factor of two to three in battery improvement, which is possible,

the mainstream for passenger cars can become electric. So you have to make that transition. Uh, you've got to scale it up. You've got to make sure electricity is zero emission. But for trucks and planes, uh, there's almost no chance the batteries will be good enough, and so there you'll still need to create liquid fuels, either with electricity or biofuels. Uh some way. Fuels are amazing. You know, the energy density of gasoline is thirty times the energy density of

the best battery we can make. And so if you look at like a a container ship that crosses the ocean, having your fuel be thirty times less efficient would mean that nine of the weight you're carrying would be the batteries instead of the cargo. And so trucks and planes and boats, electrification is unlikely to work in those cases. So we need ways of making fuels that are are zero carbon. When you talk to heads of state about this, do they roll their eyes and say, we're happy to me,

do you can I have a selfie with you? And so forth? But do they really do anything? And what are you trying to get heads of state to do? Well? In the um Paris Climate Conference, one of the things that was missing was to focus on R and D and uh. So actually France said yes, we want that to be for the first time at a COP a real issue that gets discussed. And so what was called Mission Innovation, which Prime Minister MODI got to pick that name.

That idea of a commitment of over thirty governments to double their energy R and D was a significant milestone that came out of that conference. Uh. In order to get that commitment, UH I had to make the commitment that there would be breakthrough energy that would take things out of those labs and help get them into the marketplace.

So there's been some progress. Climate is complicated enough that UH, you know, you don't want you want a broad set of people in the government to understand the the complexities and in terms of the R and D work that needs to be done, unless the US is deeply engaged, it's unlikely to happen because so much of the world's capacity to do that innovation is here in the United States. States pulled out more or less of the Paris Accord, though not technically so for another year or so. UM.

Is that of concern to you? And do you think this is going to hurt the effort to change climate change around the world. Yeah, it's a huge step backwards. Even if you meet all the current commitments in that climate accord, you're still way over two degrees of warming and most countries are behind the commitments they made. Those commitments were a set of reductions where you would compare your two emissions to your two thousand five emissions. And

there's a little bit of that, that's easy. The shift from cold and natural gas, which is one kind thing, is a lot of that. Uh. And yet the world is falling in short and so to him, people like the United States say, Okay, that's even that's not important. Uh. It just shows how daunting this is going to be. There's no way we'll get there without the US coming back in in a strong way. You think if you met with President Trump you could convince him on Paris

to maybe get back in. Or is that beyond your capabilities to do that? I I someone else should do that. Um. All right, now, the largest companies in the world and the United States today are technology companies Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and so forth. UM. Do you worry that there's too much power and too much data in the hands of these technology companies? And are you surprised that government hasn't

done something more than they've done today about this? Well, technology has become so central that government has to think, Okay, what does that mean about elections? What does it mean about bullying. What does it mean about why are tapping authorities that lets you find out uh what's going on financially or uh, you know, drug money laundering, things like that.

So yes, the government needs get involved. I for the earliers of Microsoft break two people that I didn't have an office in Washington, d C. And eventually I came to regret uh that statement because it was kind of almost like taunting Washington, d C. Uh. And so now the technology companies, partly because of the lesson of Microsoft, uh of course, you know, they could have seen that lesson through a T and T R IBM or codact or a lot of innovators as well. They're very engaged.

There will be more regulation of the tech sector, things like privacy, I'm sure though, and there should be at some point federal regulation that relates to that. The fact that now this is the way people consume media, uh, you know, has really brought it into a realm that uh, you know, we need to shape it so that the

benefits outweigh outweigh the negatives. So if you were twenty years old today and you wanted to start a new company drop out of Harvard, what company or what area would you want to start it in Well, this is a great time to be doing innovation because the tools of innovation are so much better. There are lots of things in biology that are very interesting. Uh, there are

lots of things in energy that are interesting. Given my background, I would start an AI company that whose goal would be to uh teach computer's kind of read so that they can absorb and understand all the written knowledge of the world. That's an area where AI has yet to make progress, and it will be quite profound when we achieve that goal. So are you worried about the power of AI to disrupt our civilization and put people out

of work? Those kind of things. The increased productivity that will come from a I will create dilemmas about what should people do with that extra time? And you've got to consider that a good thing, even though it will be an interesting set of adjustments that have to take place. You assess the two most urgent issues were K to twelve in the United States and health in the less developed areas. How did you pick those two? Any regrets about picking those two? And have you made progress on

either of those two? Well, global health is our biggest area, and there the progress has been really unbelievable, not just because of our work, but our partners that include the US government spending on pet far the European donors who have really stepped up on these health issues. One of the metrics of importance is the number of children in the world who died before the age of five. When we got started in the year two thousand, that was

over ten million a year. Now it's about five million year, and so you know, it's just mind blowing, and and people aren't that as aware of it. Iss you'd like them to be. The those deaths. Because of getting out vaccines and understanding a bit more about nutrition, those deaths have been cut in half. Now the goal is to cut them in half again. Our US education work, uh that is not just K through twelve, that includes higher it as well. They're the key metrics, uh, dropout rates, UM,

math and verbal achievement. Those metrics have moved essentially not at all. And even as the US is spending more resources on education, we spend by far more than any any country in the world, and yet our results are quite a bit worse. Uh then, Uh, almost all the other rich countries and even some middle income countries. You know, even Vietnam now is passing us in terms of their math results. So the there, the fields as a whole in our work has not had the impact we hope for.

So today people come to you all the time for money. I assume everywhere you go people say, by the way, I have this thing you should invest in. By I have a couple of myself I've mentioned later, No, not just gonna do now, a couple of things you should invest in or things you should give money to. So how do you resist it you have some person who says no for you, or how do you do that? Let many people? How many people say no? Well, once

you pick what you care about. If somebody has something that can make a difference in global health, we're super interested. And you know we have staff people and if it's to do with global help, some of those people will come out and talk through with you whatever your innovation is and how we can partner with you on that. You know, so that's clearly in our area. If it's something that can substantially improve K through to welve education,

then we're going to be very interested in it. If people are asking outside of those things, then you know, fortunately you can say no, because focuses is key to philanthropy. So people have recognized over the years that raising children is difficult. Jackie Kennedy famously said, if you mess up raising your children, nothing else matters. You have three children, seem to be well adjusted, and you've kept them out of the newspapers and so forth. How do you avoid

spoiling kids like that? I think that's a huge problem. You know. Obviously our kids have benefited from having a great education and an opportunity to travel and uh, you know, so they're very lucky in that sense. Making sure that the visibility or the way people treat them is not unnatural. There're some challenges that come with that. So far, they've handled it well. You know, Melinda uh is the one who deserves any are certainly almost all the credit uh

for the kids so far doing very well. You know, our kids, we've said to them that that, you know, the money is going to the foundation, and so they don't think of themselves as sort of aristocratic. What do they say to tell them that? They say, can you give me a little bit or something? Or they don't they don't ask for some they'll get a little bit. How much money has your Foundation given away today about forty billion dollars. Yeah, we're now up to giving six

billion dollars a year. So finally, UM, if people are watching now and they say, all right, I want to do something about climate change, but I'm just one person. I don't have the resource of Bill Gates says, what can any average person do to have some impact on climate change? In your view? Well, certainly they can take things like, uh, these new meat products or how they buy electricity, and they can help, uh draw hive up the scale of the green solutions. The most important thing

at this stage is their political voice. Uh, there's going to be a need to put substantial resources into this effort, and you know we need will need a bipartisan solution and to send the right signal to the market. You actually don't if you just win one year and then it gets repealed, that doesn't help at all. The key is what people see the policies will be over the next thirty years on a consistent basis, and that means it's a much higher bar than just a one time victory.

That was Billy Melinda Gates Foundation co chair and Microsoft co founder Bill Gates