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

Episode Date: October 15, 2024

Pivot is off for the holiday! In the meantime, we're bringing you an episode of On With Kara Swisher. Kara is chatting with Bill Gates, the co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, and the co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill has been one of the richest people in the world for decades, and he's also spent decades giving away his fortune and working on some of humanity’s most vexing challenges. That’s the focus of his Netflix docuseries What’s Next? The Future with Bill Gates, where he dives into AI, misinformation, global warming, inequality, and disease. Kara pushes him on the issues, his proposed solutions, and the always tricky details — plus, she finds out who Bill wants to win the presidential election.  This interview was recorded in front of a live audience in New York City. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Pivot comes from Virgin Atlantic. Too many of us are so focused on getting to our destination that we forgot to embrace the journey. Well, when you fly Virgin Atlantic, that memorable trip begins right from the moment you check in. On board, you'll find everything you need to relax, recharge, or carry on working. Buy flat, private suites, fast Wi-Fi, hours of entertainment, delicious dining, and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. delicious dining and warm, welcoming service that's designed around you. Check out virginatlantic.com for your next trip to London and beyond, and see for yourself how traveling for business can always be a pleasure.

Support for this show comes from Betterment. Do you want your money to be motivated? Do you want your money to rise and grind? Do you think your money should get up and work? Don't worry, Betterment is here to help. Betterment is the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle. Their automated technology is built to help maximize returns, meaning when you invest with Betterment, your money can auto-adjust as you get closer to your goal, rebalance if your portfolio gets too far out of line, and your dividends are automatically reinvested. That can increase the potential for compound returns. In other words, your money is working like a dog while you can be sleeping like one and snoring like one too.

You'll never picture your money the same way again. Betterment, the automated investing and savings app that makes your money hustle. Visit betterment.com to get started. Investing involves risk. Performance is not guaranteed. Hi, everyone. This is Pivot from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Kara Swisher. We're off today for the holiday, but we have an episode of On with Kara Swisher for you. Oh, yay. Yay. Who's on this time? The head of DEI from the National Forestry Service. No, no, no. That's just, that's what I say for Pivot. This is my interview with Bill Gates. You might've heard of him. Oh my God. In front of a

live audience. I gotta be honest. That's impressive. That's impressive. Thank you. I try. Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. Last week, on a muggy evening in New York City, I visited the legendary Paris Theater on 58th Street to interview the also iconic Bill Gates about his latest Netflix docuseries. It's called What's Next? The Future with Bill Gates, and it's about some of the biggest issues we face at the moment. AI, disinformation, global health, the wealth gap,

and how technology could help or not. It's a funny and substantive series by Morgan Neville, who did docs like Won't You Be My Neighbor about Mr. Rogers, Roadrunner about Anthony Bourdain, and 20 Feet from Stardom, which garnered him an Oscar. It's a good match since Neville got Gates to actually use his own experiences as case studies in some of the episodes. It's surprisingly intimate, actually, and I actually really liked it. I didn't think it would be as good as it was, and it really is, especially for people who don't know a lot about these topics. It was also great to be back on stage with Bill,

whom I've interviewed many times, including an historic interview with the late Steve Jobs. While we've had plenty of disagreements over the three decades I've covered Microsoft and also Bill Gates, I took the opportunity to dig a bit deeper and ask him about his interests and investments into many of these areas, including nuclear power, how he would handle a tax on the rich, and the outcome he's hoping for in the upcoming presidential election. Plot spoiler, he implied, referencing climate change deniers, that he's voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, although he certainly didn't make an endorsement.

I hope you enjoy it. And by the way, we love that you're listening. And it's even better if you hit subscribe to follow the show to get even more exclusive conversations like this in your feed every Monday and Thursday. So let's get to it live from the Paris Theatre. Hi everybody. How you doing? I used to come to this theatre as a kid. It's fantastic to be here. Owned by Netflix. Wow, that's something. Anyway, thank you for coming. It's a little lightness here. Inequality, AI, climate change, disease. What else are we talking about? But at least we're not Eric Adams, are we? Okay, I had to do that. Oh, come on. Anyway, I love New York.

Anyway, I'm very excited actually to talk to Bill. I've interviewed him dozens of times over the many years. We first met when he came pouring out of a cab in very sweaty, summery Washington, D.C. I thought he had arrived in a limo, but it was some other guy, and he just got out of a D.C. cab and did an amazing interview with the Washington Post editorial board and came himself and everything else. So that's where we started. I've covered Microsoft for years and talked to him a number of times. We've agreed, not that much, but disagreed a lot. But also I'm really, I think this phase of his life is really interesting and he really is an information sponge, curiosity, and he loves to take apart problems. And I think what he's done

with, what he's done around disease and other things is really interesting. The last interview we did was about climate change, which is a book that he wrote, and it's actually coming true today, a lot of the stuff he was talking about. So without further ado, Bill Gates. we meet again so there's so much to talk about I think what we're going to do is we're going to throw to some clips and then talk about them we're literally going to have to rush through this stuff because we've only got about 40 minutes to get through

all these major topics and you could do hours on each of these things. But let's start with AI. Let's go to the clip to start with. And you're talking to James Cameron. You know, me as a, hey, innovation can solve everything type person says, oh, thank goodness now I have the AI on my team. Yeah, I'm probably more of a dystopian. I write science fiction.

I wrote The Terminator. Where do you and I find common ground around optimism, I think, is the key here. I would like the message to be balanced between this longer-term concern of infinite capability with the basic needs to have your health taken care of, to learn, to accelerate climate innovation. You know, is that too nuanced a message to say that AI has these benefits while we have to guard against these other things? I don't think it's too nuanced at all. I think it's exactly the right degree of nuance that we need. I mean, you're a humanist, right? As long as that humanist principle is first and foremost, as opposed to the drive to dominate market share, the drive to power. If we can make AI the force for good that it has the potential to be, great. But how do we introduce caution?

Regulation is part of it, but I think it's also our own ethos and our own value system. But I think it's also our own ethos and our own value system. So that's a perfect person, the creator of the Terminator, which I think has informed a lot of people about AI, the idea that it's here to kill us, essentially. And, you know, the first person I talked about AI with was Elon Musk, actually, who was quite worried about it at the time. He thought it was here to kill us. Later, he evolved it into us treating us like house cats. Then he said we were like anthills, that the highway will come through and just cover us, et cetera.

Always a happy day with Elon Musk. But when I was watching this, I watched it again on the train up here. It's advanced quicker than anyone, including yourself, had thought, right? That it's moved quicker. And you talk about this. And it's a very good explainer in the film. But I want you to sort of unpack why you're still very sunny about it, I would say.

And I think you lean towards the possibility. So talk a little bit about that. Well, the idea that computers would eventually become intelligent and do human-like things, as soon as you learn how to program, you're thinking, wow, what can't software do and why not? And so, prosaic things like visual recognition, speech recognition seemed out of reach. You know, I was age 15 when I saw this Stanford SRI Shakey the Robot video, and I thought, wow, we are getting close. Look at that. I shaky the robot video. And I thought, wow, we are getting close. Look at that. Shaky almost can do these things. So it has been mostly disappointing when the neural nets came in. Then the prosaic stuff, the speech and video got strong. But even then, the idea of representing

knowledge, being able to read and write, still seemed out of reach. And I believe that we'd have to explicitly understand how to represent knowledge. I didn't think that pure reinforcement would cause this great knowledge representation to emerge. And even GPT-3, you know, it's like it's still statistical. It's not really a word model. And so it's going to be deeply flawed.

But by GPT-4, that was wrong. And so, you know, right up there with my first demo of graphics interface with Charles Simone, I'd say, you know, that demo of chat GPT-4 was the most amazing demo I've ever seen. I think a lot of people attribute the huge amount of information we've been putting into the internet right now as the leaping point. What do you, because I was at a dinner with a very smart group of technologists, and they didn't know. So talk about not knowing, because software is about knowing.

You put something in, you take something out. But what do you attribute the leap to recently? Well, there's a subtlety to how the world gets represented that this is captured. If you told me to write a piece of software that you could say, you know, rewrite this like Shakespeare would or like Trump would or like Harari would,

this thing, I would have no idea how to write a piece of software that is as fluent as this is. And so that's an emergent set of capabilities that shows that it is, in a deep, deep sense, representing what it is to write like Shakespeare. Right. And how our algorithms generate that is subtle enough. And we have a lot of mathematicians working on

trying to figure out those representations. But it does make it harder for us to know, okay, where is it correct? Where is it incorrect? Right, but it's not Shakespeare. It can write like Shakespeare. When does it move to whatever Shakespeare may be? It's representing us.

Well, if your goal is utilitarian, to say, compare humans in terms of medical diagnosis to this ability to look at all the medical records and see outcomes, to look at all the latest medical literature, to look at your sensor data over your lifetime, clearly the computer is very close and will exceed human diagnosis capability within the next few years.

It will be superior at a very profound and important task. And that's just provable that it will be better. If you're talking about art, okay, then we don't have an agreed utility function. Why is some art more popular than others? Okay, it can't enter that realm because there's no data to center it on a common metric. What then is it lacking? I mean, you're talking about the utility. You often talk about healthcare. Education is another area. Drug discovery, you know, gene research, etc., etc. These are all utilities. But a lot of the worries are about things that aren't utilities,

But a lot of the worries are about things that aren't utilities, that it will start to make decisions for us. Where's the worry point that you have? Because often, most of the technologies talk about the positive parts about it. And I understand why you would talk about the negatives in the beginning, given our past history recently. Well, there's three things you can worry about. One is that people with bad intent will use AIs for cybercrime, bioterrorism, nation-state wars. And so in that case, you think, okay, let's make sure the good guys have an AI that can play defense against those things. And that makes you want to move ahead and not fall behind. The second thing you could worry about is that the rate of change where technical support jobs, telesales jobs,

tele-sales jobs, you know, in the same way that that medical diagnosis will be superior, with the right training set and a few more turns of the crank on how we drive reliability, that there's great progress on that, it will be superior at a tele-sales or tele-support type job, which, you know, those are big parts of the economy. And so even though you can say, okay, that frees those people up so we can have class size of five and every, you know, handicapped kid can have a full-time aid and elderly people, you know, can be engaged in social activity. We have unmet needs for labor. If we free up all this labor, we can shorten the work week. But the rate of change is scary.

And so those are the two I worry about. The third one that comes up a lot is the loss of control. My view is if you manage to get through the first two, that actually that's not the hardest of the three. And it's actually kind of weird to go to that one because it's pretty far from the future. We know that bad people will use AI in a bad way. The AI itself, you know, I think— It doesn't care. I don't think that's the one to obsess, particularly given the rate that this is happening.

This is not a generational change. This is within a 10-year type change. Sure. One of the things that's, when you just say loss of control, I think some of us are loss of control to giant companies that are going to dominate this area. OpenAI is raising money at $150 billion valuation. There's some sort of kerfuffle going on among all the executives,

but it's turning into a for-profit corporation. It started as a nonprofit to help humanity, but it's turning into a for-profit corporation. It started as a non-profit to help humanity. Now it's going to help humans, a few humans, a few select humans. Microsoft now has vaunted ahead with its investment in open AI and everything else. If there's a few corporations running this, I would worry about that.

Would you? Well, in general— Although you're a big shareholder of Microsoft. We have this thing called competition. And the main thing you want is that it's so competitive that the improvements go to benefit the user. That is, the quality of medical diagnosis improves the health system, the availability of that personal tutor that, and I was out in Newark seeing a few months ago, that, you know, that becomes super cheap for kids in the inner city, not just wealthy kids. And I've never seen such intense competition. You know, it's the same way as the internet in 2000, 2001.

The failure rate will be unbelievable because they're sort of a, oh, it's an AI thing, give it a high valuation. So consumers will be the primary beneficiaries. Now, if you ever get to the point where one company has knocked the other companies out, then fine, the competition authorities can come in. But we're in no, you know But we're not even close to that. Google is still extremely capable in this space, OpenAI plus Microsoft. But Elon's got XAI, you've got Anthropic, at least 15 companies

that aren't that far from the state of the art who are lowering prices. They're investing way above the revenue level. And so this is the formula for the benefits to flow to society. Okay, we're going to rush this. But what's very quickly your biggest worry, a real worry, and your biggest benefit right now? Well, the biggest benefit is that I think this technology, and this is my primary engagement with it, we can get it to the inner city. We can get it to Africa within the same timeframe

that it gets to the wealthy. Unlike any other technology in history, this one, I think we can get it out on an equity basis. And your worry? My worry is just that this is the most unbounded thing. This is not just a tractor, you know, obsoleting farmers, where you say, okay, it turns out there are many other unmet needs there. This, you know, which we thought would first come for blue-collar work through robots, you know, the surprise was that with this language facility, it actually is coming first for white-collar jobs, but the blue-collar thingics. Just a little bit later.

Right. You know, certainly within the next three, four, five years. And so it's so disruptive at a time where government, who you expect to take the excess productivity and, you know, spread it around a fair way, reduce the work week, our general trust in the capacity of government to do complex things is pretty low.

Yeah, so it was a good run, guys. So congratulations. All right, let's roll the next clip, which is an area I really spent a lot of time. Do you find yourself, even at this age, using your phone and staying on social media more than you want to? Oh my gosh, yeah.

TikTok is so addictive. I'm on it like all the time. And have you ever run into crazy misinformation about me? Crazy misinformation about you all the time. I've even had friends cut me off because of these vaccine rumors, but I'm a public health student at Stanford. And I think that there is just so much nuance on how do you communicate like accurate public health information or scientific data.

I don't know. I need to learn more because I naively still believe that digital communication can be a force to bring us together, to have reasonable debate. I think one thing like you don't really understand about online is like, it's not really like logic and fact that win out. Like people want an escape. They want to like laugh, they want an engaging video,

they want to you know be taken away from boring reality. And so like the most popular video of you online is you literally trying to do the dab. Uh, Bill can you do the dab real quick? Damn Bill! Or you jumping over the chair. Is it true that you can leap over a chair from a standing position? It depends on the size of the chair. I'll cheat a little bit.

Yes! Those are the most popular because people want to escape from things, so I don't think fact and reason always went out online. But the thing about, you know, I make lots of money from vaccines, it's even hard for me to figure out where that comes from. It's not like a political organization. It's just madness. And who promotes that? I think it's fear.

I mean, everyone was stuck at home during a pandemic. We're all scared for our lives. No one really knows what to trust or what to believe. So that's what our society does. Okay. So can you do the chair right now? No. A smaller one.

Yeah, a little stool. I can do a stool. Your daughter's very wise. But most of the stuff about you isn't funny, actually. I spend a lot of time telling people you're not Satan, that you don't put chips in people's brains. I spend an inordinate amount of time doing that, which is an unusual position for me to be in.

But let's talk a little bit about information. You talk about Anthony Fauci, who has had death threats. I just interviewed him recently. One of the reasons government is in the trouble is in is the polarization, which is fueled by online stuff. And there's no question about it. I know they're trying to come up with studies that it's not true, but a new study just came out showing it is absolutely true.

The polarization has been further impacted, especially around, we use the word misinformation, disinformation, but it's really propaganda, isn't it? That's really what's happening. 1.2 billion views were of Elon doing misinformation on the platform he bought, which he enjoys to spew misinformation on. It's actually the biggest purveyor of misinformation right now. Can you talk a little bit about this and the worries you have? Because it does directly impact you yourself, which I'm not worried about you, but everybody here in this room. Well, I didn't anticipate that if you want to belong to a group, there almost become certain beliefs, you know, the election was stolen, you know, vaccines have negative effects.

Right. And recently Haitians eating dogs. Fauci is a self-interested individual, you know, who somehow gets royalties from vaccines. I mean, you know, totally false, provably wrong. I want to track the position of people. I don't know why I do, but it's amazing. Because you're Satan, but go ahead. But even Satan doesn't need to know where people are.

What does he do with it? So that's, it's just strange. And, you know, we always try to deal with it with humor. And as you say, I have nothing overall to complain about. But the idea that your sort of group beliefs are reinforced online, and so you have developed a reality that when people say, no, the election was not stolen, you're like, no, that would be almost denying that I'm part of this group. And so I'm going to behave that way. It's incredibly scary because it's definitely putting us into separate camps.

And it's hard to see. People say, oh, we didn't regulate social media properly. Well, do we know now? Are we regulating it today? Is there a clear understanding of it? And then, of course, AI that we just discussed, if anything, supercharges the ability to create credible misinformation. What would you do now to stop this?

Because I think people are in their own separate... Microsoft was an early investor in Facebook when it was a $15 billion valuation. Nice one. That was a good one. I doubted that. I'm sorry. I was wrong. But when you think about what should be done now, because if people are in their own information bubbles in a way that's profound,

and then AI, for example, can supercharge it, as you say, what would be the solutions to avoiding that? Well, most things where the country has been off track or even the world has been off track, you start to see the harms. And then people self-correct, you know, parents play a role, educators play a role, and some degree of banning the extreme behavior plays a role. But, you know, first we have to come to a view that, okay, this really is a problem. The United States may not be the first place to get this under the control. We have the First Amendment, and our divisiveness is particularly high.

I wish I could say, okay, such and such a country has done this extremely well. The country that actually controls craziness on the internet is China, but they do it in a way that destroys... They do like to track everybody where they're going. Yeah, and they don't let crazy things out there. They do better, but at the loss of democratic freedoms. So what do you do in a situation when, say, you have someone like Elon who's suddenly decided

to let misinformation flow toxic waste all over the place. And in some cases, people who try harder, like a Mark Zuckerberg, who you were a mentor to him, he and I had a big argument about Holocaust deniers a couple years ago, and I kept saying, this is going to lead to anti-Semitism down the line. And he said, well, we're not going to regulate them at all.

We'll see what happens. And you can see what happens when you anticipate. So is there anything government can do, or are we at the mercy of these companies to decide? Because years later, Mark did clamp down on Holocaust scenarios, but it took him to do it, which is problematic, I think. Well, the question is, do you create some level of liability for these companies? Correct. Well, you know, the question is, do you create some level of liability for these companies? And many forms of that would essentially mean social media companies would go out of business.

But, you know, we, a little bit, I think we ought to edge in the direction of forcing them to take some more responsibility. It is very tricky because if somebody says, you know, vaccines in general kill people, that's wrong. And it caused older people who needed COVID vaccines not to take them. If people say, hey, vaccines sometimes have side effects, that's true. You know, we need to talk to people about the net benefit and how we avoid those side effects and things. So the exact dividing line where all of a sudden some AI wakes up and shuts it down or labels it, I don't even feel like we're trying to find that happy medium. Who is responsible? Is it the parents?

Like California is banning different things, different states are doing. Where is the line? Because it can't be Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. It just can't be. Well, nobody's really, there hasn't been much regulation. Take even young people getting online. That's not an enforced thing. So I'm a little surprised how hands-off we've been on these things.

With kids. I mean, we over-regulate them offline and we under-regulate them online. It's really quick. I thought anxious generation and many observations along those lines are very profound and we should take action on. So if you could do one thing, what would it be? I know what I would do, but what would you do? Well, misinformation actually is the one topic, and I say it in the series, that I say, hey, young people, you grew up with this thing. You understand the phenomena better.

We basically pass this as a big problem to you. And AI have thoughts. Global health have thoughts. But misinformation, I'm just stunned that there aren't more clear, constructive things relating to policy and technology. Yeah, so you're just like, good luck. Good luck, young people. You know, actually, the way my kids dealt with it is they took all social media off their phones,

which I thought worked rather well. We'll be back in a minute. Fox Creative. This is advertiser content from Zelle. When you picture an online scammer, what do you see? For the longest time, we have these images of somebody sitting crouched over their computer with a hoodie on, just kind of typing away in the middle of the night. And honestly, that's not what it is anymore. That's Ian Mitchell, a banker turned fraud fighter.

These days, online scams look more like crime syndicates than individual con artists. And they're making bank. Last year, scammers made off with more than $10 billion. It's mind-blowing to see the kind of infrastructure that's been built to facilitate scamming at scale. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scam centers all around the world. These are very savvy business people. These are organized criminal rings. And so once we

understand the magnitude of this problem, we can protect people better. One challenge that fraud fighters like Ian face is that scam victims sometimes feel too ashamed to discuss what happened to them. But Ian says one of our best defenses is simple. We need to talk to each other. We need to have those awkward conversations around what do you do if you have text messages you don't recognize? What do you do if you start getting asked to send information that's more sensitive? Even my own father fell victim to a, thank goodness, a smaller dollar scam, but he fell victim and we have these conversations all the time. So we are all at risk and we all need to work together to protect each other. Learn more about how to protect yourself at vox.com slash zelle. And when using digital payment

platforms, remember to only send money to people you know and trust. Support for this show comes from Arm. Have you ever thought about the technology that makes this podcast possible? Whether you're listening on your phone, in your car, or via a laptop, there's also the data centers that make it all work. One company is at the heart of it all. It's the same company that powered the smartphone revolution and is helping define the AI revolution. That company is called Arm. Arm designs compute platforms for the biggest companies in the world

so they can create silicon solutions to power global technology. Arm became a NASDAQ 100 company in less than a year of its IPO and is proudly NASDAQ listed. Arm touches nearly 100% of the globally connected population. 99% of smartphones are built on ARM. Major clouds run on ARM as well as all major mobile and PC apps. Now their engineers are tackling the insatiable demand for compute and power efficiency that AI is creating. AI-enabled ARM CPUs are able to provide the compute platform for the global AI revolution in the years to come.

But for now, relax and enjoy this podcast. It's very likely running on your very own ARM-powered device. Visit arm.com slash discover to learn more. Support for Pivot comes from Vanta. Whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program, demonstrating top-notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever. Vanta automates compliance for SOC 2, ISO 27001, and more, saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust. Plus, you can streamline security reviews by automating questionnaires

and demonstrating your security posture with a customer-facing trust center, all powered by Vanta AI. Over 8,000 global companies like Atlassian, FlowHealth, and Quora use Vanta to manage risk and provide security in real time. Get $1,000 off Vanta when you go to vanta.com slash pivot. That's vanta.com slash pivot for $1,000 off. Okay, next one. Let's go to the next one. We're moving on very quickly into climate change. Another happy topic. If you think of our addiction to fossil fuels and the way that we're going about attempting to wean off of it, we're losing. The fossil fuel industry is making record profits. Emissions are going up.

People are right to be incredibly skeptical and disillusioned. There's part of the movement that I don't fully agree with, which is that you denigrate the current way of doing things before we have a replacement. I wish there was as much emphasis on the new thing, but I'm an optimist, and I think we will limit temperature increase. So this is something you spent a lot of time on. That's what our last interview was about. You seem worried at the time of where it's going, the temperature increases. Obviously, we have another hurricane in Florida, and yet legislators

are pretending climate change doesn't exist. Talk a little bit about where we are right now. And one thing that you talked about a lot, which I've been spending a lot of time studying, is nuclear energy. Microsoft just recently is possibly going to open Three Mile Island, which I'm like, AI, Three Mile Island, great. Seems like it could go well. But actually, it could. It could actually go well in order to bring compute power for AI. Talk a little bit about where we are now, because it's really, it seems to be accelerating, and young people are very worried. Again, another bag of crap we've handed them in this regard. Well, the key to solving climate change, you know, I wrote a book with a theory of change that has to do with replacing all emitting activities for goods and services with new approaches that are green, that have no emissions.

Today, those green approaches are extremely expensive. Green cement, green aviation fuel. You talked about the green premium. And only by funding innovation, having some degree of tax credits and buyers willing to pay extra, then as you scale up, those costs come down and you get the magic that says you can even go to a middle-income country like India

and say, okay, here's this new way to make cement. It does not cost more. And so in 2015, when the Paris Accord is signed, I commit to create Breakthrough Energy. I'm there with country leaders, Modi, Obama, and they commit to double energy R&D budgets, which they did to a small degree. They didn't get to that doubling.

But now Breakthrough Energy and other investors are funding unbelievable innovation, new ways to make steel, cement, meat. Clothing. You name it. And although those won't roll out in time on a global basis to hit a two-degree target, they will roll out and they'll avoid us getting to extreme warming. The sad thing about climate change right now is people, given how much we'll be able to limit it, they overestimate the impact of climate change on rich countries. You know, rich countries have air conditioning. We can change our crops.

We have savings. The big losses are near the equator where you have poor people who depend on agriculture. And when you hurt agriculture, you cause malnutrition, which causes a lot more death. And so the picture of the suffering and the need for climate adaptation should lead to us being more generous to these countries at a time where, because of other things, we are

actually being significantly less generous to the poor countries. So one of the things you talked about is nuclear as a solution, correct? Absolutely. Nuclear fission and or fusion will be very, very important along with renewable sources. But you said renewables aren't enough. But I mean, you're quite certain. Renewable alone is not enough because of the intermittency. You know, Japan will not be powered

by renewable energy. South Korea won't be powered by renewable energy. When you have a cold snap and that cold front is sitting there, no wind, no solar, people still want their houses not to be sub-zero. Right. So talk a little bit, because there's a bunch of people, including Sam Altman of OpenAI, who are working at Helion. I just was with someone who was talking about how you're going to have a

small nuclear device in your house to heat it. Everyone's going to have a small nuclear device. I'm just telling you. I have to sit and listen. You don't have to listen to these people. But how do you look, how does that roll out given the reputation? I mean, I know it's laughable, but Three Mile Island, you're like, maybe not. But at the same time, maybe. So how do you make that argument? How is Microsoft going to make that argument? Well, you know, coal kills people when it's mined. It kills people from local pollution. Natural gas pipelines blow up. I'm not involved in third generation nuclear, which is what resuscitating that plant is. I am a large funder of a fourth generation nuclear, which is a plant with no high pressure in it. Very different design

that everybody, just like, you know, they said you should recover rocket stages to make spaceflight cheap. They've always said you should use metal cooling because all these safety issues of what happens when you shut the reactor down are completely solved. It's a very simple design and we should be able to do it for about a third of the cost of current reactors. So, you know, we're pursuing that dream. Everything about nuclear fission and fusion, people have a great deal of skepticism of, will it be cheap enough? And what will the safety look like? But, you know, I'm putting billions into it because I'm quite confident we can make that case. So what do you say to young people like this who we still are dependent on fossil fuels?

Well, the banning fossil fuels before you have a substitute is a way of getting governments elected who don't think climate change exists. You know, if you just say, no, you can't drive to work. I mean, so why do they go to universities and say, don't invest in the existing? Why don't they go and say, please take your money and invest in these new approaches? Because if you take your money away from the existing stuff, that doesn't create a solution. You know, when I was at 2015 in the climate crisis, I'm like, you guys are making a bunch of pledges. What's your plan for steel? There were zero startups about making steel a new way. Six percent emission. Cement, also six percent. No work going on. So,

if you want to out-compete the dirty stuff, you actually have to get the entrepreneurs, to outcompete the dirty stuff, you actually have to get the entrepreneurs, you have to inspire them, you have to have high-risk capital. And so a lot of the things, I love the activists because the issue is a huge issue and they deserve all the credit for keeping it there. But when they say the solution is to stop consuming, you know, that means that can India build basic shelter? So we're not going to stop using cement, a lot of cement, even if rich countries didn't build another building ever. It's a rounding error. This is a middle-income country problem of providing basic lifestyle-level goods and services. And so it's an invention problem.

Now, I say that about everything, but in this case, it's correct. All right. Is there anything really unusual you've invested in? And then we're going to move on to the next one. Well, there's so many cool things. What's the weirdest energy thing? We have 130 companies that Breakthrough Energy's funded. You know, we have new ways of making food.

We have ways of making cows not emit natural gas. The idea that there's hydrogen that you can dig, geologic hydrogen, that might surprise people. That's going to be a huge help to solve this.

I'm going in a hydrogen-powered plane soon. You want to come? You want to come? Wow. Yeah, you want to come? Anyway, yes, I'm funding a lot of that stuff. I hope it works. Yeah. Each one of my four children were like, no.

And I said, yes, I'm getting in it. Anyway, let's go to the next thing. Are people too rich? Speaking of that, all right. Under the tax system I would go for, the wealthy would have, say, a third as much. Well, needless to say, I would go a lot further. And I think, you know, and your friend Warren Buffett makes the point that his effective tax rate is lower than his secretary's. And that is not what the American people want to see. They do want to see the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.

But you have a political system which unfortunately represents the needs of the wealthy much more than the needs of ordinary Americans. You know, they do these happiness questionnaires. Have you seen that? Oh, yeah. What they find is countries where people have that economic security, as in Scandinavia, usually Denmark or Finland or somebody ranks at the very top.

Why is that? I think it's because people don't have to deal with the stress about how they're going to feed their kids or provide health care or childcare. If you take that level of economic stress, if I say to somebody, you're never going to have to worry about whether you're going to feed your family, whether your kids are going to have health care. Thank you. Is it going to make their life perfect? No. Will it ease their stress level, bring more happiness, security? I think it will. Well, kudos for you to talk to, Bernie. I remember when we had Elizabeth Warren,

I think one of the years you're a code, everybody, especially men in the audience, you could feel them seize up when she was talking about these kind of things, of the rich paying more taxes. Kamala Harris, Vice President Harris, talked about it last night in an interview. Fair share, nothing against capitalism, but everything's out of whack. And actually, corporate tax rates are at the lowest since 1939 right now, while people like me pay 40-some percent in taxes. Nuts. I know, I know. I need better lawyers. I need your lawyers.

So Tom talked about this, and why did you want to address it? Because you've talked to Mark Cuban. I've talked to him a lot about the wealth tax and things like that. So how do you deal with income inequality? Because I feel like it's fueling a lot of the division that we find ourselves in. Well, the idea that you have the opportunity to create a company that's very valuable. Sure. The U.S. is the MD of the world at that. And so while I would set tax rates quite a bit

higher for rich people, we still have to grow the economy to get to the ideal level to set the safety net as high as Bernie alludes to. As you get richer, you raise the safety net. That's the story of the United States. The government's not very good at executing, so it's always imperfect. But I would not make it illegal to be a billionaire. So that's a point of view. He would take away over 99% of what I have. I would take away 62% of what I have. So that's a difference. You definitely do get to the point where you're not, you're killing the

goose that lays the golden egg. North Korea, very equal, unbelievable equality. So I don't even like the equality framing because 100 years ago, most people were never literate. So we've created wealth. And I think that the system that does that has a few elements that we shouldn't throw out. So clearly, being capitalistic, being an entrepreneur, creating, giving people incentives to do things. So what do you do when people have, you know, they're just talking about who's going to be the world's first trillionaire, which is astonishing to think about. Well, there's no trillionaires. Not yet. I don't think there will be. You don't think there will be. No. They thought it would be, wasn't you, but I think you're okay again.

I remember meeting with someone who was a billionaire and I said, you've got, this was 10 years ago, I said, you have to do something about income inequality or you're going to have to armor plate your Tesla. And then I looked at them and I realized they kind of wanted to armor plate their Tesla. They wanted to live in that world. But how do you deal with that on a real level when you do have this insane amount of wealth and people still in abject poverty? Where do you come together with someone like Bernie Sanders? Well, abject poverty is different. In Africa, there is abject poverty. So, you know, I give tens of billions to Africa to relieve abject poverty, and I encourage others to do the same.

It's not a very big club of people involved in that. My dad is deceased, but, you know, he and I worked on promoting the estate tax. I'm a huge believer in the estate tax. I continue to promote that. You know, they actually got rid of the estate tax briefly, you know, and I think that's a mistake because those are dynastic fortunes, not somebody who actually created something. And so I think we, and it's stunning to me how countries don't have an estate tax.

China does not have an estate tax. You know, Europe has very limited estate tax. So, you know, I think we should have higher taxation on the rich, but not that would prevent you from having large fortune. I wouldn't set a ceiling. And then I think for once you pay those taxes, whatever's left over, you should engage in philanthropy. You should take the skill that allowed you to succeed in business, you know, hiring people, think through scientific organization, and give it away. How hard is that to do right now? There's not a ton of people following in your footsteps,

I would say some. You know, we have people who are giving a lot away. And, you know, in the giving pledge, you can look, there are people who are giving at a pretty good rate. You know, I think people should do more. I think they would enjoy giving more. So when you, what you're talking about is the idea that the middle class feels very squeezed.

This is a topic in this election. Trump wants to give more tax breaks to the wealthy. Kamala Harris is talking about giving tax breaks to the middle class. Where do you think, if you were running for president, what would be your stand on this? Well, I wouldn't get elected. I would bring up the on this? Well, I wouldn't get elected.

I would bring up the deficit and say that, yes, we can tax the rich a lot more, but even so, the 2017 tax cut, a lot of that's going to have to expire because the deficits will lead to a level of inflation that voters will not be happy with. There's a huge leg in this, but nobody talks about the deficit. I would raise the safety net somewhat, but I would also, for future generations, reduce the deficit quite a bit. So 62%, you would keep 62%, we can have the rest. 38.

We can have, you would keep 38? Yeah. And we can have the rest. 38. You would keep 38? Yeah. And we can have the rest? If you had the tax system I have in mind, if that had been in place throughout my entire life, I would have about 38% of what I have. All right. We'll take it.

All right. Last one. Episode five, can we outsmart diseases? Your biggest topic. When you sit in those wards, you know, you just see how preemptive things are because the wards are never adequately staffed because malaria is quite seasonal. It's as the rainy season comes and the mosquito population grows exponentially. exponentially.

As a kid, I can't even tell you how many episodes of malaria I went through. I can still clearly see the picture of my father. He was standing next to my bed, looking at me. I could really see a lot of fears in his eyes. If malaria was killing 600,000 people in the U.S. or in Europe, the problem would have completely changed by now. So malaria was one of the areas you focused on most strongly. Talk about where it is right now.

I remember you let mosquitoes out at TED, as I recall, which you're not going to do here. But where is it right now from your perspective in these worldwide diseases? It's still, you know, it's not neglected anymore because of you and the Gates Foundation. But where is that and what are the diseases you're looking at? Yeah, so malaria at the turn of the century, when the Gates Foundation was created, is killing a bit over a million a year. And over the first 15 years of this century, we got it down to about a half million. And it's gone up slightly from there, but just say a half million a year.

You know, this is a disease that there's almost no funding because the disease is in the poor countries who don't have the resources. And the rich countries just aren't involved. They don't see it as a problem. We do have in the pipeline some incredible tools. So that gentleman you met there, Diabadi, is a scientist in Burkina Faso who has tools to kill mosquitoes. And we're going through a lot of experiments based on his work and others. And within three to five years, this tool will be ready for release. And so if we get a surge in funding,

then we could start the effort to eradicate malaria. By killing mosquitoes. Yeah, so what you have to do is get rid of 90% of the mosquito population. And so the reinfection rate, you slow it down enough that you can test and treat. And if you go through a bunch of low seasons where you've done that, this is what happened in the U.S. We had a lot of malaria, but at the time you could spray DDT onto ponds, and that decimated mosquito populations. And so because of winter's low seasons, we actually got to zero. create the equivalent in places like Nigeria, where as a child, you have a one in six chance of dying before the age of five. So when you think about this,

is it continues to be the most important disease you're fighting right now, malaria, or are there others that you're... It's hard to rate. TB kills the most people of any disease. Malnutrition is the one thing if I had a wand I would get rid of because if you're not malnourished, you're less than half as likely to up if your brain doesn't develop when you're young. Sickle cell disease is this evil disease. We have a $2 million cure, but the foundation is working to make it a $200 cure. And that means we could take it to Africa where you have millions of kids with sickle cell versus 60,000 in the U.S., and every one is a tragedy.

So those are the ones you're focused on, because another one in this country, at least, is heart disease and obesity, of course, which is sort of the opposite. That's right. We live to a very old age. We'll be back in a minute. Support for Pivot comes from Coda. Your team works best when you're all on the same page, and Coda does just that. It brings the best of documents, spreadsheets, and apps into a single platform. It helps teams collaborate by centralizing all of your processes and shared knowledge. With Coda, you can stay aligned by managing your planning cycles in one location. You can set and measure objectives and key results with full visibility across teams.

It also makes it easy to communicate and collaborate on documents, roadmaps, and tables. And you can make it work specifically for your needs when you access hundreds of templates and get inspired by others in Coda's gallery. Coda empowers your startup to strategize, plan, and track goals effectively. Take advantage of this limited-time offer just for startups. Go to coda.io slash pivot today and get six free months of the team plan. That's c-o-d-a dot i-o slash pivot to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. coda.io slash pivot. coda.io slash pivot philanthropic, empowers your team to rise to new levels of productivity and innovation by providing vast knowledge and rapid analysis. With Claude, your existing talent can harness cutting-edge AI to work smarter, brainstorm bigger, and pursue visionary goals, complementing human ingenuity. What a word salad! I'm going off script just to tell you I, no joke, use Claude almost every day.

I think it's fantastic. Claude is next-generation AI assistant built to help you work more efficiently without sacrificing safety or reliability. Anthropix Midway model, Claude 3.5 Sonic, can help you organize thoughts, solve tricky problems, analyze data, and more, whether you're brainstorming alone or working on a team with thousands of people, all at a price that works for just about any use case. If you're trying to crack a problem involving advanced reasoning, need to distill the essence of complex images or graphs, or generate heaps of secure code, Claude is a great way to save time and money. Plus, the Anthropic Leadership Team was founded in AI research and built Claude with an emphasis on safety. To learn more, visit anthropic.com slash Claude. That's anthropic.com slash Claude.

So when you think about, we've got to go in a second, but when you think about how you outsmart disease, you've been at this for what? It's not 20 years, right? Yeah, no, the foundation is created and becomes the largest at the turn of the century. So what are you most focused on as you move into the new phase of what you're doing, still malaria and TB and these diseases? Health broadly. We work in agriculture because we can make eggs and milk really cheap. We can have crops to deal with climate change. So a lot of that's climate adaptation related. But global health, you know, all of the

resources I have will go to these global health issues. And we ought to be able to achieve in my lifetime, we're almost done with polio. We should be able to get rid of measles, malaria, almost all of malnutrition. So, you know, it's actually very exciting work. It's very hopeful. You know, we've come a long ways from 10 million a year dying to now 5 million. But to get down to that 1%, we have to cut it in half three more times. So what's next for what's next? What are you going, space travel?

Are you going to Mars with Elon? Nope. What are you going to, are you going to do more of these? I, you know, I think, you know, we'll go three, four, five years and see. What interests you? These are big topics, but is there, again, space travel is one, cloning? Well, genetic editing and being tasteful about how we use that. I focus on that to cure sickle cell at a very low cost or to cure HIV at a very low cost.

So it's about the diseases that make the world incredibly inequitable. All right, last question. Are you hopeful or, you know, it's pretty tense right now still, and it's been tense for a couple of years out of COVID. We're still sort of not recovered from that, and a lot of people aren't. How do you, what is your mood right now? Well, you know, ask me on November 6th whether climate change is real or not. Right.

So I'm guessing who you're voting for, but. You can definitely guess where my energy is going. Overall, I'm still an optimist. I mean, if you zoom out and say, okay, where were we 50 years ago, 100 years ago? Humans are ingenious at doing things. I hope that the younger generation can look at polarization,

look at the negative effects of digital, including misinformation, but not only misinformation, and shaping AI so that its miraculous capability in health and education isn't canceled out by disorder and a lack of purpose. So we have left some real challenges for this next generation. But I'm overall very hopeful. I get to see more innovation in other people, so I understand why I would be more hopeful.

There's a lot, whether it's climate or health, that is very, very exciting. Great. Well, I have to say, it's very good. You're pretty good at interviewing. I mean, I'm not going to lose my day job, but nonetheless, you do a nice job. Anyway, thank you so much, and thank you, Bill Gates. Yeah, great. Thank you. All right.

Thanks. On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yochum, Jolie Myers, and Megan Burney. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher, Kaylin Lynch, and Claire Hyman. Our engineers are Rick Kwan, Fernando Arruda, and Aaliyah Jackson. And our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you get to fly in a hydrogen-powered plane with me and Bill Gates, if he dares. If not, Satan is indeed tracking you.

He's just not Bill Gates. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Thursday with more.