Talking Tech & Saving the World with Bill Gates!

Sup guys, MKBHD here. Alright, so as far as tech people becoming billionaires and then turning into philanthropists for the greater good, Bill Gates is pretty much the gold standard as far as that goes. He's on pace to give away something like 99.96% of his wealth to charities and foundations. So for those wondering what he's doing with those billions and billions of dollars, every year he and Melinda drop this annual letter where they explain sort of their view of the world at that time and what they're doing about it. So I'll leave the link to this year's new 2019 annual letter below, but I got to actually go up and chat with him in Seattle about this year, how he was looking at it, and this is that chat. Alright, Mr. Gates, thank you for sitting down with me for a couple minutes. I'll try to learn as much from you as possible in our time. Super. I think a lot of my audience will know you from your work at Microsoft, a lot of tech heads watching these videos, but you've also forged this entire, I could call it a second career, as a philanthropist that I think is equally as interesting and impressive, so I'll try to tie those things together. First of all, the annual letter. Can you summarize the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation annual letter in like a sentence or two? Well, Melinda and I get a chance to go all over the world, particularly in Africa where a lot of our health work is. We go into a lot of classrooms where our education work is, and so every year we try to think, okay, what would other people be interested in, in terms of new innovations, things that are going well, going poorly. This year we framed it as surprises. So I was studying the population growth in different countries and the age pyramid in different countries, and so I'm finally seeing some good technology used in the classroom to try and let the teacher focus in on really talking to the students and not just grading the homework. So that was another one, and it is actually quite a diverse set of things that we've made our surprise list. So one of the things I read that I found really interesting in it was you sort of broke down the biggest contributors to greenhouse emissions, so manufacturing, agriculture, transportation. The transportation one hit me because I'm really into electric cars. That's one of the specific areas of tech focus on the channel. So I'm curious, what's your take on electric cars? Have you gone electric? How do you feel about them? Well, Tesla's an amazing product that is catching on, but it's still a pretty small percentage of the market. It's a premium-priced vehicle, and they lost their $7,500 tax credit, so it's making it tougher. Now, a ton of the other manufacturers are going to come in, partly because California has zero emission and partly because people see these trends. There'll be a lot of really great electric cars to choose from. Now, will it get down to the volume price categories? And then for transportation, it's not just automobiles. We've got trucks. We've got trains, boats, planes. And so solving the entire transport sector isn't going to be easy. Transport is hard. Industrial is hard. It's a wide range of innovations we're going to need. And also, I read that, especially in the U.S., truck driver is an extremely popular job. In fact, in more than half the U.S., truck driving is the most popular profession in that state. So it sounds like electric might not be the only solution to transportation. Well, the passenger car, the power output you need is lower than for a truck. So eventually, batteries might work for a truck, but it's a far more difficult problem because just the weight is a lot higher there. Even those passenger cars, one thing to be careful of is unless the electric sector has gotten to zero, the electric car is still an emitter because of the indirect emissions from the electricity it uses. And so only in the places where you both get the electric cars to be a high percentage and you get the electric sources to be zero emission, then you've got that passenger transport car piece getting near to zero. So that's the goal. The AI conversation. It seems like it's kind of hard to ignore it in 2019. And I've had conversations with other people who are more negative about it, more pessimistic about just AI and the possible downside. I'm curious if you're more optimistic about the upside of AI or uses for it or ways to possibly make an impact in what you're trying to do. Well, AI is allowing us to make advances in fields that are really important, like understanding the biology of the human body. It's super complicated. And so if you look at all the data you gather, because the sensors are getting better, trying to understand, okay, how do we help people with obesity? How do we take cancer? Where is the point you want to interfere? Even the one that's really difficult is the brain is so complicated that we don't have drugs for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And so we want not just people to live longer, but them to live really quality years and not have the medical costs be expanding. That scenario, AI, people feel like, yeah, I'm not against that. So see, it definitely has a lot of upside as far as helping to research certain things, helping to find patterns that a human necessarily wouldn't have picked up, things like that. So in medical fields it's useful. So I agree with you on that. I'm really happy about that. If you could give a couple short bits of good news, some good progress you've observed that some people might not know about to sort of counteract the bad news everyone seems to hear about, what would you say? Yeah. We used to have 10% of all children born would die before they reached 5 years old. That number is now 5%. And with the right innovations we can get it by 2030 to 2.5%. So we've gone from 12 million were dying to now 6 million. And so it's every year 6 million lives saved. All these things are tricky because you don't want to say to people that we shouldn't be mad about the remaining problem. So saying to people, hey, feel good about the progress, and still be mad that 6 million are still dying, that's an interesting dichotomy. It's a good perspective to have because you have to be proud of the progress that's been made, but you still have to look forward at all the work yet to be done. And that's kind of, I guess what I'm wondering, my next question is you've put billions of dollars and over a decade into the foundation's work on these issues. Does it make you optimistic about the future, that so much progress has been done, or do you look at the challenges ahead and that's an overwhelming massive amount of work? In a broad way, the work has gone so well on global health, better than we expected, and the innovation and science that will give us new tools like an HIV vaccine, a malaria vaccine. So in my lifetime, I hope the whole issue of these diseases that are caught in poor countries, mostly infectious diseases, we can essentially solve those problems. And we're close on polio eradication. When I look at politics, I have to admit, there's some trends in terms of what trust people have or how they're polarized. I do worry about that. That's not a deep area. I don't bring, unlike the biology, where I get to study it and see it. I'm on the same footing as everybody in seeing these political trends. But yes, there are things that I do worry about. But overall, the human condition, our ability to feed, prevent disease, help people live an enjoyable life, we are making great progress on those things. So as long as we stay committed to them, it makes me love the work and remain optimistic. Well, I hope, obviously, your work goes as far towards those successes as possible. And I guess my last question would be, knowing that you're doing all this work, but someone in my position, I'm not a philanthropist, I don't necessarily have the means, how does someone like me or someone watching this help in the best way they can? Well, I wish more people could actually get to these countries, join the Peace Corps, spend time, even just spending a few weeks there and see how great the needs are and see the progress. A lot of volunteer work in the United States builds that sense of, okay, we care about other humans, even beyond our own family group, even people who have very different experiences. So at a young age, a little bit of giving money away to form that habit and picking which things you really want to give to, including lots of things here in the US, and getting involved with volunteer time. Those are the people who I think will help kind of bring the world together and avoid just this divisiveness that is my greatest concern. I couldn't end a Bill Gates interview without asking, can you still jump over a chair? That's a good question. Probably not. If it was a very small chair. I'll count that as a victory. That's a victory right there. No, I used to be able to even jump over a garbage can, but I'm afraid. I play tennis, so I'm in reasonable shape, but not my jumping skills. That's all good. I appreciate it. Thanks again for the time. Thanks for coming out. Yeah, appreciate it. Great to meet you. Hopefully we get to do it again.