Plain English with Derek Thompson - Bill Gates on Progress, Food Technology, and the Battle Between Climate Change and Innovation

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

In 2015, 193 world leaders agreed to 17 ambitious goals to end poverty, fight inequality, and stop climate change by 2030. Seven years in, the world is on track to achieve almost none of those goals, according to a new report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. But the world really is getting better, the founder and philanthropist Bill Gates tells Derek in this episode. Around the globe, poverty, hunger, and child mortality rates are falling. Income, health care coverage, and lifespans are growing. Bill and Derek talk about the “best news in the world,” why genetics is the most exciting domain in all of science, and how Gates is helping to build the future of food in Africa. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. You can find us on TikTok at www.tiktok.com/@plainenglish_ Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Bill Gates Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Matt Bellany, founding partner of Puck News, and I'm covering the inside conversation about money and power in Hollywood. With my new show, The Town, I'm going to take you inside Hollywood with exclusive insight on what people in show business are actually talking about. Multiple times a week, I'll talk to some of the smartest people I know, journalists, insiders, all of whom can break down the hottest topics in entertainment to tell you what's really going on. Listen now. Today's episode is about the state of human progress. And I am very pleased to say that for a topic this big, our guest is Bill Gates. So just this past weekend, I was in Michigan visiting my grandmother, Moe, and we stopped by her friend's place for dinner. And as we were drinking wine, catching up, my grandmother's friend asked me whether I was optimistic about the future or whether I shared her feeling that the world was basically going to help.

Now, evidence that the world is going to help, by the way, isn't in short supply. You've got the pandemic. You've got global warming, which looks unstoppable. Women's rights are backsliding in Afghanistan, and I think a lot of Americans would argue, they're backsliding in the U.S. too. Eastern Europe is at war. Western Europe is facing an energy crisis. China's probably in a recession.

So what is there to be optimistic about, she said? And I told her, you know, you picked an interesting week to ask me this very big, very difficult question because I'm working on two things right now that I think offer an answer to it. I'm working on this article for the question. Atlantic and this podcast for the Ringer about a new report from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on the topic of global progress. And I got to talk to Bill Gates about this report. So what is this report? Well, seven years ago, about 200 world leaders agreed to a bunch of development goals for the world, things like the elimination of global poverty, the eradication

of world hunger, big stuff like that. And today, the foundation releases its update to those sustainable development goals. Now, there are two ways to read this report, I think. You could read it in a disappointed way because the report does conclude that the world is on track to achieve, quote, almost none of its development goals. Almost none. Or I think you could read it in an optimistic, and I would say realistic way, which is that for all the absolute shit that we have gone through in the last two years, the last decade, the last century, humankind is better off than it was, a generation ago in almost every single category that matters. What do I mean?

Well, according to the report, which published just this morning, as I write in today's piece in the Atlantic, since 1990, the share of children who are malnourished has fallen by 30%. The rates of tuberculosis have declined by 30%. Rates of maternal deaths per live birth have declined by 40%. The share of children who die before the age of five? has fallen by 50%, the prevalence of neglected tropical diseases, has declined by roughly 70%.

The share of the global population with access to toilets and safe plumbing has increased by roughly 100%, and finally taking the long, long view. The share of people around the world who die from famine has declined by roughly 99% since the late 1800s, despite the world's population being roughly five times, larger than it was in 1870. It is hard to imagine statistical proof of material progress that is more compelling than this.

We thought a century and a half ago that more living human beings would doom life itself to a state of abject misery and constant hunger, and instead the population increased by 5x, and famine declined by a factor of 100. And now, in my experience, I found that there was a certain kind of person who doesn't really like hearing about all of this. I think some people fear that folks like me who recite these facts of progress are requesting that other people stop complaining about the world. But on the contrary, let me be explicit. I think complaining about the world is part of what makes progress happen. Complaining about gender inequality, pointing out racism, identifying labor discrimination,

abhorring global inequality, these things are essential to making the world better. I just also, separately, want us to see reality as it is. The world is bad. The world used to be worse. And it's getting better. And it needs to get better still. Now, the news media is very good at telling you about breaking stories that are bad, sudden, and surprising.

We're not as good at telling you about stories that are good and slow-changing, even when they are the stories of the century. So that's what this episode is about. The stories of the century. We only had about 20 minutes to interview Bill Gates on his report. Bill Gates is busy. But I think it's a full 20 minutes. And I hope it serves as a moderate corrective to my own tendency to overlook the long view

and forget that the most important stories in the world aren't just sudden and bad. They're often slow and hopeful. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Thank you so much for being on the show. You bet. Let's begin with your goalkeeper report, which looks at some key measures of human progress around the world.

One of the themes of this report is that we live in an age of crisis, whether it's inflation here in the U.S. or war abroad, but that sometimes crisis can force people to do things that reroute the future. And one example in your report is AIDS. At the beginning of the century, It was projected that in 2020, five million people would die from AIDS. In fact, 500,000 people died. That number is 10 times smaller than the projection.

What is the key lesson that you want people to take from this dramatic shift toward progress in the HIV-AIDS epidemic? Well, it'd be easy in the face of all these challenges to sort of turn away from thinking about Africa and the challenges there. You know, we have, you know, electricity, price increases, inflation, you know, all sorts of things that have us turning a bit inward. And yet the level of generosity, you know, that's kind of considered great, is 0.5 or 0.7 percent of GDP. So a fairly small percentage because those dollars are so impactful, whether it's buying better seeds or buying HIV medicine, you know, we're innovating these costs so that in the health field, you know, we're saving lives for $1,000 per life saved, which is very different than rich world medicine, you know, that would be willing

to spend a million dollars per life saved. So we're not sort of saying, okay, everything we have, you know, everyone can have. Maybe, you know, 50 years from now, we can. can say things like that. But here we're just talking about the basics of survival and avoiding malnutrition. So I am optimistic that we don't turn away, that if we fund the R&D, if we fund the delivery systems, that we'll get back on track. The world has this report card called the Sustainable Development Goals, which is where we should be by 2030. And because in 2015, when we set those goals, we didn't expect a pandemic. We didn't expect a war on Ukraine, and we were a little aspirational in some of the goals.

If you look at that report card, you'd be like, wow, you know, maybe I should drop out. But, you know, this is about millions of lives. And so every year, the foundation puts out the goalkeepers report. And usually it's about half things that we're, you know, doing well on and about half things were behind on. Sadly here, we took food in particular and gender as two things to get into some examples where things are going well. But the overall picture is very challenged. And yet, because of the progress before the pandemic and because of the innovation, including new vaccines using MRNA and the new seeds we've been talking about,

I remain optimistic when I think of the 10 to 20-20-year-time. frame. So your review of the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals had a lot of bad news because it's been a really tough two years with war, the pandemic. I want to ask you about one piece of good news here. And I think it might be the best piece of news on the planet in the last 30 years. It is the share of newborns and children who die before the age of five. That number has declined since 1990 by 50%. How did this happen? The biggest reason why that number's gone down is that we got the vaccines out to almost all of the children in the world. And so this group called Gabby that's created in the year 2000 is helping buy those vaccines.

And the prices have gone way, way down. So that's now affordable. So you have a diarrheal vaccine, a pneumonia vaccine. then couple that with the Global Fund, which is also created at the same time, and focuses on HIV, TB, and malaria. Malaria mostly kills young kids, and that's where we invent these new bed nets and we keep those bed nets up to date. And so, yes, it's a combination of somewhat better nutrition and economic progress, but over half is delivering, not just inventing, but delivering through the primary health care system, even in the poorest countries, quite a few new vaccines.

And so that statistic, you know, I think the world should be very proud of. All the donors who are involved, our foundation is a piece of that. But it's the reason why, you know, keeping these foreign aid levels at, you know, what is considered a generous level is such a moral cause. You mentioned Gavi. And for those that don't know, Gavi is a public-private global health partnership that buys and distributes vaccines to people around the world, most importantly children who are vulnerable to diseases like measles and ammonia.

Bill, you have this penumbral view of the scientific front. frontier. What is the one domain of science that you are most excited about right now? You know, our ability to understand genetics, to sequence, to edit, you know, that has, for many diseases, like perhaps curing HIV or sickle cell, which is present everywhere, but mostly in Africa. Those things are super expensive, but we have a way that over the next decade, we think we can get that down to a single shot

that's less than $1,000. And so, you know, the excitement of the scientists to take it from a million dollars to, you know, Cure Sickle, Cells, CLE, HV, down a factor of a thousand, And, you know, it's great to see the number of pathways and ideas. And, you know, I love working with those scientists and, you know, giving them the resources to go full speed ahead. Your report this year goes deep on a topic that's been all over the news recently, but that I've always wanted to know more about.

And that is the future of food. Your organization's working with some really cool companies and groups in this space of agriculture tech. The entire world got a lesson in food security this year. The war in Ukraine is clearly contributing to a burgeoning food crisis in Africa and Asia. And I think it's worth starting here with a pretty basic question. Why did a crisis in Europe threaten to starve millions of people thousands of miles away in sub-Saharan Africa? Well, sadly, Africa is a significant net food importer. And so, you know, they're buying these crops on the world market, and they're also buying the fertilizer on the world market.

And so when you have less fertilizer getting out or the price of natural gas going up, which is a key ingredient for fertilizer, then the price goes up and, you know, some farmers just can't afford that. We also have the climate change weather, which now is, you know, creating more droughts, including a very big one in the Sahel region in Africa right now. And so Africa has such low agricultural productivity about a quarter of what rich countries have. And so when you get weather setbacks or, you know, fertilizer costs going up, what you see is a dramatic increase in malnutrition and even in some areas actual starvation. So let's bring climate change fully into the picture here because, as you mentioned, the war in Ukraine has been a big problem for global food supply, raising the cost of fertilizer, natural gas. But climate change going forward is going to be a much, much bigger problem. You call it the largest threat to food production since the invention of agriculture. So let's get our arms around the problem itself.

Tell me, when your foundation funded a project to analyze African corn or maize production, you saw some deeply alarming results. What did you learn? Well, the story for maize in the United States is a very positive one, where you have these seed makers constantly improving the seed. And so, you know, because the temperatures are rising, they use different seed varieties, and they're able to actually maintain high productivity. That same sort of advanced seed is not available in Africa.

So they're using seed that they've used for decades, and yet, you know, the hotter it gets, you get a dramatic reduction in the maze outdoors. output. And so sadly, even though, you know, the rich countries have caused climate change, we haven't funded the work to get the best seeds adopted to African needs where their weather is quite different than ours is. And they don't just use the main cereal crops. They use maize and wheat, but the variety there includes lots of things like sorghum, millet, cowpe. And so the seed improvement agenda has been vastly underfunded. And so these smallholder farmers, which are the majority of the population, you know,

the closer they are to the equator, the worse off they are. And we're not helping them like we should. So you did this project and you projected that Maysield is going to decline in the future as temperatures rise and rise. more people in Africa may be hungry, and they'll be more vulnerable to global shocks from wars like the one that we're having this year. And there's so many ways that we can think about trying to solve this problem of African hunger. We can say, how do we change global energy policy to slow climate change? And of course, we should try to do that. But another strategy that we can try at the

same time is to improve agricultural technology so that Mays can be grown under hotter conditions. Tell me, are we any closer to being able to do that? Yes, we understand a lot about improving maize. Texas, for example, is getting new varieties to maintain their productivity, because that's a much hotter part of the United States. Africa's not identical, so you still have to do some adaptation to get a maize seed that works well in Africa. know we can do it. And that science is getting better all the time because it benefits from things

like gene sequencing and gene editing that come to us from human health, gigantic investments. You know, thank goodness plant DNA is the same because, you know, the agricultural world couldn't afford to invent those tools. And so, yeah, we have the short-term mean, you know, which is the acute crisis, you ship food in. But the only real solution is to help those farmers have maize that's both higher productivity and can deal with the temperature and the drought challenge. And we've seen we've had projects, you know, where that went very well. And slowly but surely the African countries are beefing up their expertise, you know, so they can decide to give approval to these new props. So there's, you know, almost a factor of two in productivity, which would make all the

difference that with the right investments over the next 15 years, that's, that can be achieved. And tell me a little bit more about drought Tigo, this product that you've invested in that sounds, well, you call it in your most recent paper magic seeds in terms of its ability to grow corn or maize under really, really hot conditions, precisely the that we expect to see more of in the near future? Yeah, so this variety, when it's trying to grab CO2 out of the air, it doesn't leak as much water out. That's a challenge plant has as they open up their storming

and to grab the CO2, but water leaks out when they do that. And so this variety is much better at not leaking out the water. And so it can actually thrive with far less water. And that's one of the key reasons Mays does so poorly with heat is that the water need. And so it's kind of incredible that they'll have farmers grow the new variety in one field and then next to it, grow their traditional variety, and they'll see that difference. And then you get, you know, if you've gone through all the regulatory things and you get the word out, you can get very broad adoption. And so there is, there is hope here. You know, it's not that, you know, Africa with

its population growth and climate change effect, it's insoluble. In fact, of our climate budgets, You know, the $2 billion a year that the seed R&D system, which we call the CG system deserves to get, you know, it's not, that's not a gigantic amount. And the impact will be very, very dramatic. I thought reading about Droughtigo, this magic seed that you funded, was really thrilling because it made me think that the problems that we face with climate change, with future wars are so impossibly big to think about. But human ingenuity really can be. be at least a partial solution to a lot of those problems. We not only fear the future of hotter temperatures, we can also react to the future of hotter temperatures and make seeds that will thrive under those conditions. Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. So innovation is key not only to what they call climate mitigation, which is reducing emissions, but also to climate adaptation, which is reducing the suffering because we know we're guaranteed to have somewhat higher temperatures,

even if we do the best possible job on that mitigation piece. And sometimes people, when they think about adaptation, they just think of food aid. They don't think of the scientists in the lab coming up with, you know, something that's as miraculous as the Green Revolution, which was the doubling mostly for Asian farmers of their crop productivity to avoid starvation going back into the 1970s. Right. We have something like $60 billion worth of food aid worldwide and about $9, $10 billion worth of agricultural research. And to a certain extent, it's wonderful that countries like Ukraine or Russia, I suppose, to a certain extent, America can grow so much food that we can export it all over the world.

But it would be fantastic if those exports weren't necessary, if the African countries of the future could grow the amount of maize that they need. One thing that, you know, I love the history of technology, the history of science. I do think that one of the underappreciated aspects of the history of material progress is that invention alone is not enough. It is not enough to just say, oh, we invented magic seeds in the lab, and now the problem is solved. No, you have to make the seeds cheap. You have to tell farmers how to use them. These deployment questions aren't the most sexy things.

Like, a great CNN headline is, you know, hallelujah. We made climate change resistant corn. That's fantastic. But if the farmers can't afford fertilizer, it doesn't matter that we've invented these new seeds because they can't grow it. So tell me what you're doing in addition to the hard work of invention

on this deployment front, how you're helping farmers in Africa actually deploy this technology. Well, you're absolutely right. You've got to get through the country systems to get the seed approved. And so we're funding a lot of Africans scientists to help their country make expeditious decisions on seed licenses.

But you've got to get all the way out to the farmer, both with advice and with credit. The credit lets you buy the fertilizer, which is a very key ingredient. When Borlaug went to India to tell them, hey, you've got to use these seeds, he said, hey, there's three things you have to keep mine, fertilizer, fertilizer, fertilizer, because that's crucial. We use mobile phone technology to do what we call digital green, where we take farmers giving advice to other farmers, and we make that easily available.

And so knowing when to plant, you know, which varieties might fit the particular land, that you have, you know, which, you know, can you plant multiple crops over the course of the year, multi-cropping, which can be a huge economic advantage if you get the timing right. So, yes, this has got to get all the way to adoption. And if we don't know what the farmers want, you know, we might give them seeds that they don't like the taste of or that they're just risk averse. And they go back to using the seed that they're used to.

even though its productivity is going down. We will have to leave it there. Bill Gates, thank you so much. Thank you. I'm Derek Thompson. That was Plain English. Thanks very much to our producer, Devin Manzi. If you have any questions, comments, ideas for future episodes,

please shoot us an email at plain English at Spotify.com. That's plain, no space English at Spotify.com. And don't forget to check out our new, beautiful TikTok page. You can find us at at plain English underscore. Yes, that's at plain English underscore. And we'll see you on the TikToks. Thanks very much.