In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - Bill Gates

Episode Date: February 20, 2023

What will come after AI? Is net zero in 2050 a realistic goal? And what does Bill Gates read? We will cover all this and much more in this special bonus episode! The production team on this episode were PLAN-B’s Nikolai Ovenberg and Niklas Figenschau Johansen. Background research was done by Sigurd Brekke.Links:Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi everyone, and welcome to our podcast in good company. I'm Nikolaj Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Southern Wealth Fund. And today, I've just had the most interesting conversation of my life with Bill Gates. Stay tuned. So Bill Gates, warm welcome to Chile, Oslo. Well, it's great to be here. What do you want to achieve in Oslo? Well, Norway's been a partner of the Gates Foundation,

particularly in global health work. Back in the year 2000, we and others co-founded the Gavi Alliance for Vaccines. We've worked together on the Global Fund. Norway's generous and thoughtful, so we end up working together to uplift the poor countries quite a bit. Well, Gavi has been a tremendous success, right? Absolutely.

Vaccinated a billion kids. Yeah, so the deaths per year of children under five at the turn of the century was over 10 million, and now it's below 5 million. And the vaccines that Gavi has been able to get out to poor children is the majority of why we've been able to cut that death rate. We'd like to cut it even more. It's about a 5% death rate. In rich countries, it's 1%. So our goal is to get to 1%. We'll come back to the health aspects of what you're doing. But you recently talked about the triple threat of energy, food, and health. Now, what is the role of the government in

addressing these challenges? Well, government, you know, people count on government to think ahead for things like climate or pandemics, you know, earthquakes, to have equity, to have a strong social safety net. net and, you know, helping the entire world, you know, treating all children's lives as having value is, you know, some governments prioritize that. Sadly, with the price of energy going up, that hurts fertilizer, which hurts food, which hurts health. And so although the suffering in Ukraine itself is extreme, there'll also be a lot of suffering in the poor countries,

just the knock-on effects of all those costs. And aid budgets will be strained because of the need to support Ukraine. Now, what's the role of corporations? Well, this is a famous topic. You know, corporations, of course, have some deep expertise and competing in the market, you know, making their products more effective is a big goal, treating their employees well, helping with their communities. The best companies also have a sense of purpose in terms of where their expertise, whether it's, you know, food or medicines, you know, how they can help reduce inequity.

The degree to which that's a priority, you know, a lot of good discussion. Now, we are, as you know, a financial investor. What's the role for us? Where do we come in? Well, that's, you know, are there ways of both by not investing in certain companies or by working with the managements of the companies you invest in to get them to think ahead, both to anticipate things that will affect their business and to be more of a positive change agent. And I've certainly seen some examples of that that are quite effective.

Some people would take it so far as to say that if a company is doing anything like greenhouse gas emissions, you shouldn't invest in those. And that, to me, is potentially a problem because then nobody's working with those companies to help them make the transition. We are very much on the same page as you there. We remain owners and try to help the companies through this transition. Now, you say in one of your books that if you really want to change things, you should run for office.

Have you ever thought about it? No, personally, that wouldn't be a fit for me. I love the job I have. I'm not term limited. And I know, long-term goals like HIV vaccine or, you know, understanding malnutrition and solving that. So I work a lot with governments, the entire foundation, you know, and European governments in Norway are very generous. So we end up partnering to solve the big issues. Talking about big issues and kicking off on the climate side, you say that climate change is the hardest challenge we as a species has ever faced. Why is it so difficult? Well, the energy intensification of the economy that starts with the Industrial Revolution

is, you know, it's a phenomenally positive development. And, you know, we could make steel, we could make cement, we could make paper and chemicals, we could move around, we could just flick a switch and lights would turn on. That modern economy, the physical economy at its heart, is based on the use of hydrocarbons, oil, natural gas, coal. And so we're asking the world to make this shift away from those in the remaining 27 years between now and 2050. And so nothing that

radical, that scale has ever been done. And yet, you know, appropriately, we've taken that as this ambitious goal because to the degree we fail to do that, the weather is going to get worse and worse. It's a lot of ecosystems will collapse, a lot of poor people will have their lives deeply affected. So, you know, it's a very important goal, but we shouldn't underestimate how difficult it will be. Now, when you look at that, what kind of renewable energy source will be the most important here, you think? We're certainly going to have a mix of energy production. And so we ought to move at full speed to adopt solar as fast as we can, onshore wind as fast

as we can, offshore wind as fast as we can. Hydro, there's a few more places we can add, but not that many. There's kind of a wild card for both nuclear fission and fusion. You know, will the economics be good? Will the safety be good? Can you cite it appropriately? So I think we ought to invest in both of those to see if it can be part of the solution. But we're not moving as fast on any of these as we really should. And how can we speed it up? Well, to get to 2050, every country has to have this green grid.

And you're going to be using a lot more electricity because the energy you used to get from the gasoline to power your cars, that's now electricity. The natural gas you would have used to heat your home, in many cases, that will be electricity. So we have to double the electric grid while making it green and keeping it reliable at the same time. And so it's very daunting. So it's very daunting. A lot of countries are not permitting building these and building the transmission that goes with them as quickly

as they need to be consistent with the goals that we've set. Now, you have a better view into the future here than most people in terms of innovations and the technological developments. Now, what are you most hopeful for? Yeah, in 2015, when the Paris Accords were signed, the resources going into innovation were very low. Governments had not increased their energy R&D budgets. Very little venture capital was going into green companies

because they'd tried that a few times and it hadn't gone well for them. And so one of the side themes in Paris called mission innovation was to get governments to commit to more R&D, and I committed as the host to create Breakthrough Energy with lots of venture-type funding. with lots of venture-type funding, that's now resulted in over 100 new clean energy startups that cover every area of emissions.

So we've got cement, steel, food, planes, boats, you name it. And hopefully enough of those will be successful to make being green actually quite economic. The term I use to refer to the price difference between a clean product and the current dirty product, I call that the green premium. And for something like cement, the green premium is over 100%. For aviation fuel, it's over 100%. If we innovate to get that green premium to be very small,

ideally zero or even negative, then the adoption on a global basis, not just rich countries but also middle-income countries, will happen pretty naturally. But today, in many areas, those green premiums are so high that the rich countries really have to drive innovation. Now, I appreciate you're an optimist, and I love optimists. And you have this wonderfully optimistic tone in your books as well. But isn't that zero in 2050 actually realistic?

I think it'll be extremely difficult. So, you know, they talk about a 1.5 degree goal. I'm afraid that's not realistic at this point. Even two degrees would require everything to go perfectly. Sadly, you know, since we set those goals, we had a pandemic. We have the war in Ukraine. And, you know, it's hard to say, will there be smooth sailing thereafter between now and 2050? But the key point is that the innovations I see will bring these costs down dramatically.

bring these costs down dramatically. And so I'm a huge optimist that we will get to net zero, even if we miss it by some number of years. I really believe that if we focus on innovation and scale up, and we get the cooperation around that we need, we'll come very close to getting to net zero in 2050. Okay. How important is the Inflation Reduction Act? It's huge, right? Yes, it's a very important piece of legislation because there's $369 billion of resources in there for clean energy projects. For example, there's a credit for people who make green hydrogen that's very generous,

and it's going to get a lot of people trying out techniques and get the scale up. What we need to see is the same sort of price reduction that we've had with solar power and onshore wind. We need to see that in all these other categories. Green hydrogen is still about four times more expensive than it needs to be to be used as a substitute in industrial processes like steelmaking. And so I think that the tax credits in that bill are going to drive massive activities, to drive massive activities, including these innovative small companies partnering with big companies to scale the stuff up and therefore get the cost down. How instrumental were you in getting through this? Well, I certainly was a proponent and I know Senator Manchin, so I was talking with him. But the credit really goes to the top leaders

in the Congress, people like Senator Schumer, Senator Manchin. My Breakthrough Energy Group has a lot of expertise. So as they were talking about different policies, we gave input. But I wouldn't take credit for it, but I'm making sure all of my clean energy companies are going full speed ahead to take full advantage of the acceleration it provides. So all those American subsidies, where does it leave the Europeans? I mean, for instance, Norwegian battery factories and so on? Well, I'm disappointed that the IRA distorts somewhat trade in cars and components for cars. trade in cars and components for cars. Certainly as between Europe and the U.S., we should have, I personally think we should have free trade in everything having to do with cars. That competition is good for both regions. And I hope this thing can be refined so it's not

distorting anything about the electric car market. When it comes to things like green hydrogen, there is essentially no market for green hydrogen today. And so the idea that for the next decade, the bootstrap European governments will fund some projects in Europe, the U.S. will fund some, I think that's healthy. It'll create a market, and then we won't need the tax credit. Sometimes tax credits don't go away when they should, but in this case, I think for the next 10 years,

having that there is great for the entire world. Now, moving on to health. What are the global health priorities going forward? Well, the basic metric that we focus on is this child to death. And then we research, okay, is it malaria? Is it diarrhea? If we improve their nutrition, you know, we treat lives as having equal value. And so anything where more kids are dying in poor countries means that it's an unjust world. And fortunately, without, you know, massive resources, you can help invent new vaccines.

You can, through partnerships like Gavi, get those vaccines out. So I'm stunned at how successful our global health work has been. And, you know, the pandemic was a setback. You know, now aid money is going to be pretty tight as long as the war is on. But overall, it's an incredible story, you know, huge heroes in the field, huge great scientists behind all of that work. So you look at where you can save the most lives per dollar, basically. Exactly. And infectious disease has been the big area. We are saving lives for less than $1,000 per life saved. If you can't measure it, would you not invest in it?

For instance, mental health, not so easy to measure. Well, it's great. There's a lot of great work going on in mental health. For many things that you have the condition in rich countries, the key thing our foundation would do is see the advances in the rich countries and see if we can make them inexpensive. But we're working to make it inexpensive so we can use gene therapy to cure diseases like sickle cell disease, which is mostly in Africa, or even to cure HIV. But we watch the rich world because our resources, you know, compared to the overall health care market are minuscule. What's the best way to strengthen primary health care around the world? Yes, primary health care is the key. Most people in low-income countries never meet a doctor their whole life. You know, they're born with a hopefully a skilled attendant, but not a doctor.

And primary health care is where the vaccines go out, the malaria medicines go out. Now we're using it for even things like HIV and TB. And so we do a lot of work to strengthen primary health care. Now you say that innovation is your hammer. You try to use it on every nail you see. So what are the nails you're seeing here? What are the innovations that you think will save the most lives in the next 5 to 10 years? Well, early on it was getting more vaccines for

diarrheal disease and getting them to the kids in these poor countries. You know, ironically, the kids in rich countries were getting this rotavirus vaccine where their risk of death was very low, but it wasn't getting to the kids who needed it the most. And so helping new vaccines to be invented and then helping to get their price down dramatically, that's been a key role for the foundation. Now we're really investigating malnutrition. We think we're getting to the bottom of why some kids, their brains and their bodies don't fully develop.

Partly we're going to have to give mothers better nutrition during pregnancy, partly kids even at a young age, we're going to have to get better nutrition to them. The scientific understanding of this microbiome and how it gets dysregulated and you get inflammation in the gut is very promising to give us low-cost interventions to dramatically reduce malnutrition. In your book about the pandemic, you lay out how it can be prevented, right, and what we should be doing. Yet, not much is happening, right? How come it's just like, it's a drop in the ocean, it's not very expensive, the things you mentioned, and yet it's just not happening? It's not very expensive, the things you mentioned, and yet it's just not happening.

I'm a little surprised that we don't strengthen the global institutions, particularly WHO, to have a group that is helping countries practice their pandemic response like you practice a fire response or earthquake response, or, you know, even your military does war games to make sure they're ready. We need that for pandemics, because if you can stop an outbreak before it goes global, you know, in this case, you would have saved $10 trillion to the economy and so much, 20 million deaths and all sorts of problems with education and depression and government debts that we're going to be working our way out of for a long, long time. So what does it cost to put these things in place to prevent it? To do the things at the global level would be maybe a billion a year.

And so the cost really isn't what's holding us back. We need to get a year. And so the cost really isn't what's holding us back. We need to get a consensus. Maybe if the Ukraine war hadn't come along, we'd have that. So it's a little slower than I expect. But, you know, as I wrote the book to try and make the case for that, I attend conferences. I'll go to the Munich Security Conference and talk about. So I do think that, I think the world will come together around that because the cost in absolute or compared to something like climate change is tiny.

Yeah. I mean, you mentioned the security conference. How worried are you about bioterrorism? I think if there's anything that's underestimated as a future threat, it's bioterrorism. And it's so daunting, I don't like to have people feel like I'm exaggerating that. But it's a serious risk. And everything you need to do to prepare for a natural epidemic is a subset of what you need to do to be ready in case in the future there was a bioterrorist attack. So I hope that the rich world governments really get together and focus some of their spending on dealing with that.

What does a worst case bioterror attack look like? Well, you know, say smallpox, which has been fully eradicated, if somehow that was recreated, you know, the death rate from that is 50 times higher than it was from COVID. So it's, you know, it's so mind-blowingly tragic that it's good to take precautions. Moving tacky a bit here.

Technology. Now, when we last met in California, you mentioned that you were still reviewing Microsoft products before they were launched. And I just think that sounds fantastic. Now, why are you doing that? Because it's fun? Yes, it is fun.

Satya Nadella, the CEO, does a great job, and he engages me in reviewing the products. That helps me see how we can use the latest digital technology for the work of the Gates Foundation, and hopefully I can encourage the developers to head in the right direction. More recently, a lot of that has been taking this AI work and saying, okay, how do we shape that as a powerful tool?

Now, what do you think about the new technologies you're seeing? I'm quite impressed that these AI technologies are showing an ability to read and write. Heretofore, a computer could regurgitate the text of a book, but if you gave it like a test, did it really understand the information, it wouldn't be good. And what we're starting to see with these large language models, including ChatGPT, is some ability to read and therefore to write. There's a lot of work to be done to make them increasingly more accurate,

more customized, but it's a pretty profound advance that'll be a tool in many, many professions to make people far more efficient. Now, it seems like complexity is doubling every six months here in these models. What's the endgame? Where is this going to end? Well, if you have the ability to help white-collar workers by looking through complex documents, whether it's a contract or a lawsuit or a drug application, the implications for productivity are pretty significant.

In one of the early applications, instead of when you do search, just getting a bunch of links, you'll be able to have a dialogue, say, okay, I'm taking my family degrees, here's how old my kids are, here's how much I can spend. And you're going back and forth and refining it. And so it's like talking to a person who's very knowledgeable. So, you know, certainly in the search piece, it's a very, a far better experience than anything that we've had to date. Are you worried about any aspects of it?

Technology always has a downside. You know, hydrocarbons, sadly, we didn't realize at first, but now, you know, we understand that. Digitization, you know, our social network spreading bad things and what should the rules be around that. So it's pretty rare that you have something new that doesn't have some downside. Just the disruption of, okay, what does that mean for job training? You have people worried about essays that kids write. They'll be able to cheat and have the computer do it for them. And it's great people are debating these issues. I think overall, the benefit will be net positive, but I do not pretend there's not a lot of care that we're going to have to

exercise, particularly in areas like health, where we have a labor shortage, even in rich countries. So if you could make doctors more effective, help them with their paperwork, help them find different things, help them track what's going on with their patients, that could be good. what's going on with their patients, that could be good. But we'll have to be, just like the driving application, the accuracy is going to have to be super high. And we don't have that yet. No.

What's going to be the next technology after AI? AI is the one that I've been thinking about my whole life and wondering, okay, how hard is it? How are we going to get this? Until the last year or so, I'd say it was going a little slower than I expected. But now, it's actually surprised me that we have this acceleration. things like nuclear fusion to have super cheap energy, you know, someday electricity could be phenomenally cheap, and that would be great for society. Someday, you know, we'll understand the brain and health well enough that, you know, even tough things like Alzheimer's will be able to cure. So we have a lot of frontiers out there, but AI will be the biggest thing in this decade, I would say. Can you see who's going to win it?

Will there be a winner? No, I'm not sure there will be a winner. I mean, Google has owned all of the search profits, so the search profits in aggregate will be down and their share of it may be down because we've been able to move, Microsoft has been able to move fairly fast on that one. You know, eventually we'll create a personal agent

that understands all your communications and what you're reading that can help you and give advice to you. And in a sense, the personal agent will replace agent that understands all your communications and what you're reading that can help you and give advice to you. And in a sense, the personal agent will replace going directly to Amazon or going directly to Siri or going to Outlook or going, you know, so the fact that Google owns search, Amazon owns shopping, Microsoft owns productivity, Apple owns sort of everything on an Apple device. Once you get this personal agent, it kind of collapses those separate markets into a, hey, I only want one personal

agent. And of course, it can help me shop and plan and write documents and, you know, work across my devices in this rich way. And so a decade from now, we won't think of those businesses as quite as separate because the AI, it'll know you so well that when you're buying gifts, planning trips, and it doesn't care if Amazon has the best price fine, if somebody else has a better price, and you don't even have to think about it. So it's a pretty dramatic potential reshuffling of how tech markets look. Right.

Now, we have geopolitical situations in microcompetitors, and we have it in AI as well. Do you think the U.S. will come out at the top here? Well, I don't think of technology as being partitioned country by country. I mean, the big tech companies have great engineers all over the world. And, you know, to the degree it's a general tool, you know, typically you just let people compete. The US-China relationship has some aspects where the U.S. is trying to keep technology from getting to China. Mostly so far, that's been about chips, the high-performance

chips. You know, I don't know how that'll play out in AI. You know, I'm afraid that AI has so many beneficial uses that if you attempt to partition the world, that could be very, very difficult. So if you put this all together, Bill, how is your life going to look differently in 10 years' time from a technological point of view? What's the world going to look like? Well, hopefully, in every area of emissions for climate,

including steel, cement, aviation, food, we will have done reasonable scale projects to prove out the technology. So in 10 years, I hope that we have green premiums pretty uniformly at zero, and we're just going as fast as we can to build the new cement factories and the new industrial economy. I hope in 10 years, certainly polio eradication ought to be done by them because we've been very close for a long time. The pandemic was a big setback in that. We won't have cut child to death now all the way to two and a half million, but probably, you know, we will have cut it from five million to probably three million, we will have cut it from 5 million to probably 3 million,

assuming there's no more surprising setbacks. And your everyday life in terms of technology and how is it impacting the way you live? I'll probably be writing birthday cards, making custom pictures using some AI software instead of doing a standard card. I'll be writing poems with a little help from the computer. I don't think my life will be dramatically different. I mean, I'm already buying, you know, clean aviation fuel, using electric cars.

You know, I spend $9 million a year, you know, to make sure that my footprint is offset in the gold standard, like $400 a ton type way. But I hope some of those things are getting affordable so everyone's using electric cars and reducing their emissions. Now, you are the biggest philanthropist the world has seen. What are the key learnings that you have made since you started this journey? I've been learning how to work with great scientists. I've been learning how to work with people who are out in the field. Learning how to work with governments in the sub-Saharan Africa.

We built up teams of people there and found ways to cooperate. Our work in India has gone particularly well. There's such a talent pool there that a lot of things we do, we prove them out in India. And then we understand, okay, that helps refine them so then they're ready to use in the rest of the world. Like digital money, India today has done a really great job on that. And so that innovation is becoming now available in Africa through the mobile phone. So, you know, it's a whole new career

and a very different set of partners. Even the science, I've loved meeting medical experts and having them educate me. So we're investing in high impact areas. Partnership is key because the scale of the problems is too big, even for a foundation like ours that compared to foundations were very big compared to governments or the size of the problems were not that big. When we met in California, you explained just how you spend money where you find the most leverage, right? So you tap into existing organizations and so want to get the most bang for the buck. Explain how that works and, for instance, how you used it in some of your work.

Well, I'll give malaria as an example. The normal market doesn't work because the people who get sick and die from malaria have so little money that there's not the normal profit motive to go out and make a vaccine or even bed nets for them. For a while, the world's militaries worked on that, but then they got prophylactic pills that were good enough, so they cut their research. And so philanthropy can come in in places where the market just isn't taking the human benefit into account, particularly when it's a what's called a global public good, like a better seed or a better vaccine that we make sure is available to everyone. You know, so the low cost vaccine manufacturers get access and they can take it.

The generic drug people can take it. And it's just an asset for the world. So that's where we've been able to come in and have a big impact. We also had a goal to improve education in the U.S., which we've had modest success there, not nearly what I'd hoped for. And that's strange because I thought that would be easier than working in global health. So the reality was the opposite of what I expected.

Education is not easy to get right. No, it's complicated because you have the teachers, they get to decide exactly how they do things and designing something that really works for them. We're still committed to that area, but with even more engagement with teachers. What you have had a lot of luck, though, is learning. I mean, you are learning new things all the time.

What's the key to stay curious the way you are? And what kind of method do you use when you learn new things all the time, what's the key to stay curious the way you are? And what kind of method do you use when you learn new things? I'm lucky that I can set aside time to read. I know that when I get confused, I have access to people who know all the different fields. Usually I can just send an email and say, oh, no, the way this machine learning algorithm works, what is going on here? You know, the immune system, okay, you've got T cells, B cells, what, you know, why aren't these vaccines lasting longer?

What is it about duration or infection blocking? Yeah, but many people can send emails, but not many people do it the way you do it. Yeah, I'm lucky that I've sort of, I love being a student, and I've sort of stayed a student. For a long time, it was narrowly focused on Microsoft work. From age like 17 to about 35, I was pretty single-focused. Then when I stepped down as the CEO of Microsoft and started the foundation, I broadened my learning quite a bit and became fascinated by, you know, what do kids die from and why are some vaccines expensive and some cheap? And so, yes, I love to learn. I make sure I set aside a lot of time to read. I get exposed to people who are very good at explaining things. I don't, I try not to pull myself if I really

don't understand something. I say, you know, I don't understand this. Like, you know, the World Bank balance sheet, I didn't understand it. I've had a lot of people come in and help educate me. So now I sort of do. Now, the average attention span is 45 seconds. What is your attention span? When I'm reading, I make sure there's no interruption. You know, whether it's, some of that I do listening to an audio book like two times. But I'm really good at making sure there's no distraction. And I'm taking notes as I read and then, you know, kind of reviewing, do I understand this?

I have to say, the more you learn, the easier it is because things tend to fit together. And so learning new subjects gets easier because knowledge sort of connects all the things I've learned over the years. What do you read now? I'm reading about the history of blacks in Africa, and it's a book by French called Born into Blackness, and rather stunning history that talks about how the role of Africa and the development of Europe and the Modern World has largely been ignored. Very good book.

Before that, I read Mukherjee, who's a great health author. He's writing about the cell and what we've learned about cells. So I read a lot of nonfiction. What do you think is the book that's made the most impact on you? Well, if I recommend a book, it's usually the Steven Pinker, Better Angels of Our Nature, that really talks about how humanity has improved, that the way we run systems of justice, the way that we have less violent death, although right now it doesn't seem that way. Less Violent Death, although right now it doesn't seem that way. That book, along with the Hans Rolstein, Factfulness books are the two that I encourage everyone to read.

Now, you work so much on health and think so much about these things. I mean, how do you think about your own legacy? Well, I don't need to have a legacy. You know, if people forget there was a thing called polio. You know, that's a great legacy. You know, the consumption in Victorian novels, they'll say, oh, this person got consumption and that's actually tuberculosis. Well, you know, the people who helped invent drugs made sure that at least in the rich countries, that's no longer a problem.

So, you know, I hope infectious disease, the burdens are down so dramatically that as a source of inequity, that's largely solved by the time all the money gets spent. You know, we're looking at spending all over a 25-year period. So very ambitious goals for that timeframe. And if you're now looking back to yourself, 20-year-old, what kind of advice would you give yourself? Well, as a 20-year-old, I worked day and night, and it was just software, you know, the miracle of the PC and later the internet. I didn't understand different working styles, so I missed out on a lot of talented people.

I, you know, was in such a hurry. I was pretty brusque about doing things. So my intensity worked very well, but I've learned a lot since then about working with, you know, all different types of skill sets, different approaches. And I'm not so maniacal. I mean, is that age that has mellowed you? Because one of the things when I've looked through, you know, what I heard, listened through your interviews and so on, you never seem to lose your temper, right? And you have all these kind of strange insinuations and, you know, theories and so on, but you never get angry, right? Well, I've been very lucky. You know, my work at Microsoft was super fun. My work at the foundation is very fulfilling. You know, I have three healthy kids that are doing very well.

I have, you know, I've had one of the luckiest lives in the world. So even when I've had, you know, kind of negative surprises of projects that don't work overall, I have no reason to get angry about anything. I feel just super blessed. angry about anything. I feel just super blessed. And so to the many thousands of young listeners who are listening to this, what would be your advice to them? Well, what's worked for me is to be a reader and a learner and be pretty tough on myself about do I understand something or not. And try and be pretty broad. You know, I learn a lot of things by studying the history of, okay, you know, what happened in the history of chemistry, what happened in the history of physics.

You know, because everybody was completely confused if you go back far enough. And then, you know, various people come along or, you know, like Newton and come up with some general principles. You know, being, you know, having a good background in math and software, I think is a very helpful thing no matter what area you go into. I had great teachers who gave me a sense, okay, if you just try hard enough, you can figure these things out. So, you know, being a constant learner,

particularly in an age where the technology is going to be constantly changing. Well, Bill, big thanks for coming to Oslo. Big thanks for being on the podcast. But most importantly, a big thanks for everything you do to the world. Well, great to talk to you.