56. Bill Gates: Conspiracy theories, AI, and the politician he most admires

27:14You know, on balance, you know, it's probably net positive, but it's not without its challenges. Thinking, as you said, being a grandfather and getting into an older stage of life, is there a sense in which you would like to have a final chapter? I mean, you've had two extraordinary chapters as a business person and then as a philanthropist. But I guess, I don't know how you would think, but maybe you have 10, 15, 20 years of active life left. Have you got a sense that there's some new type of chapter? Well, hopefully 20. I've taken on some big challenges. I mean, the work in global health and agriculture, we have some very ambitious goals, including malaria eradication, you know, shaping AI so that it helps the poorest, both in rich countries and in developing countries.

28:04And it's a gigantic force for equity. That's a huge opportunity, a huge challenge. change. So, you know, I love my work. I, you know, the people I get to work with, the potential for progress. So yeah, I hope I get 20 more years. That would be fantastic. And on the AI issue, we talked to Reid Hoffman on the podcast a while back, and we also talked to Mustafa Suleiman. And I sense there's a sort of sliding scale of optimism and pessimism on that one as well. You seem to be in the very optimistic side of the debate on AI. You see this as a majorly net positive for the world? Well, whenever you have innovations, they're kind of neutral in a way and they can end up, you know, empowering just the rich.

28:51They can end up, you know, having unexpected negative side effects. You know, with AI, we can already say that, you know, bad people can use this as a tool for cyber attack or designing weapons of bioterrorism. So, you know, we have to shape this so that the good things like tutors for kids who need to learn, you know, better medical advice. We need to shape this and, you know, have great AIs that are doing cyber defense, you know, so making sure it's used well will be important. So, yeah, I share all the concerns, but I also see the positives as being incredibly large. Bill, I mean, obviously, you know far more about both computers and government regulation than either of us or almost anyone in the world.

29:38So, On the basis of your vast experience of this, what are the kinds of things that you think policymakers maybe need to focus on that they're not focusing on? What are some of the big structural challenges of a technological change like this that maybe we haven't grasped yet? Well, the hardest thing is that since World War II, most technologies that had to do with weaponry, the U.S. and its allies were ahead. And that was even kind of a nice industrial bootstrap that low-volume technologies were used by the military and then eventually would come down in cost and be applicable to a broad industrial or consumer market.

30:22Today, AI, the government market for it is not large enough to really shape anything. The big market is business and consumers. And so, you know, governments have a challenge that, you know, they aren't the early people who funded it. Actually, if you go way back 20 or 30 years ago, it was government research money. But now it's the Google, Microsoft, et cetera, R &D money is huge. And so how you get the collaboration with these state-of-the-art things where government is thinking about it, it's harder than in the past. And how about proliferation? I mean, at the moment, it's very dominated by huge companies like Microsoft, but Facebook has been open sourcing things.

31:11There's been drives to try to get AI off the ground in UAE. One could imagine, presumably, a world in which quite powerful large language models in 10 years' time are in the hands not of four enormous American companies, which could be presumably regulate and control more easily, but in the hands of many, many people outside the United States with more risk. Is that right? Well, but the key thing is that the good guys have better AIs than the bad guys. The issue is not the AIs getting out of control. It's AIs by people with ill intent being more powerful. So just take cyber defense. If the good guy cyber defense AI is as good or better than the bad guy cyber attack AI, then that's a good situation.

31:55And you're not going to stop development of AI globally. Somebody can argue that maybe you should try and do that and create a world army to go around and invade computer labs, but not many people are pushing on that. And so you're going to have these increasingly powerful AIs that hopefully the good guys stay ahead on. And that basically requires essentially that you guys are making the progress and we don't end up with some giant emerging in some unfriendly state, China and Middle East or something, which is then able to leapfrog ahead. Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that particular countries are bad guys.

32:36So there are, you know. There are bad Americans and Brits too, Rory. You know, Russia's the one who's, you know, attacked a neighboring country. And, you know, hopefully most countries want to see this stuff be shaped appropriately. You've been a leader. You've met a lot of leaders. Just give me a sense of what sort of leader you admire, both from business and from politics, which give me a couple of business leaders and a couple of political leaders that you look at and you think, I like them. I've learned from them. Well, the business leader I probably learned the most from is Warren Buffett.

33:14He's not in the tech industry, but he's incredibly thoughtful. I got to know him a long time ago and I'm still learning from him. What qualities does he have that most don't? He steps back and he's thoughtful about how business works. He thinks a lot about people. You know, he shares his thoughts in his annual letter. He's a student of human nature and, you know, his understanding of the world has led to sort of an unbelievable level of success in terms of all the different companies that he's either owned part of or owned all of. And politics? You know, in politics, you know, I have to be careful in terms of, you know, saying who my favorites are.

34:03They can be dead. You know, people who believe in helping other countries. I mean, you know, we had the period in the UK where you had Blair and Brown and Cameron and the aid budget, you know, went all the way up to 0.7%. And that was miraculous. And that money was well spent. I mean, that's the Global Alliance for Vaccines, which, you know, this year will go into replenishment. Do you think the UK has lost its leadership role in this space? It's up in the air, I'd say. Quite diplomatic there. I mean, we've dropped from 0.7 to 0.5. We're spending a lot on refugees inside the United Kingdom, the overall expenditure.

34:45No, we're not. You're not at the peak, but you're still the 0.5 well spent is still makes a massive difference. And so, for example, maintaining your commitment to Gavi, where the UK has been the biggest funder of Gavi, the Gates Foundation II, that'll show that you still believe in this stuff. Someday it'd be nice for the country to get back to 0.7. And presumably to spend less on refugees inside the United Kingdom and more abroad. Yeah, and you're not allowed to count that after they've been here for several years. So hopefully doing a good job getting them into employment so they're not a huge, huge drain.

35:27But yeah, we've had that as a diversion in many countries. And that's why if you look at the African number, it's gone down quite a bit. It's shocking. I mean, I think my bilateral budget when I was in office in 2019 was over£4 billion. And as far as we can tell from the figures at the moment, they probably spent£600 million bilaterally last year. I mean, it's been an astonishing drop. Well, the cut to 0.5 is tough, and then you have these multi-year commitments. Many of the multilateral things I would stick up for, Gavi, Global Fund, even the World Bank Ida, which most people don't understand, is a key source of finance, particularly as things are financially difficult for African countries right now.

36:15I mean, very, very difficult. Can I return to Alice's question? Give us a sense for a human being, a politician that you really admired as a person, not just in terms of their commitment to 0.7, but is there a world leader that you've met and you've thought, I like the way their mind works, I'm impressed by that? I mean, who did you warm to as a person? Well, I've gotten to know both Brown and Blair pretty well. I'll actually see Tony Blair today. Our foundation works with him in terms of helping African governments have more capacity. And I always value talking to him, learning from him. I have to say, Cameron coming in and saying that he was going to push the aid level up, the first time I met with him, it's like, really?

36:59Wow. That is quite incredible. incredible. You know, so there are leaders who take these issues that don't have a gigantic constituency, but the moral impact of this is phenomenal and choose to prioritize those. How did you feel, this came out particularly during COVID and the work you were doing on vaccines for that. How do you feel when you become part of this whole kind of conspiracy theory stuff going on? Does that bother you? Does it get to you at all? Well, in my overall situation, I have nothing to complain about. Somebody coming up to me on the street, which is Apple sometimes, and saying that I've chipped them and I'm following them around.

37:46As long as I'm safe, you almost have to laugh that, lady, why would I want to know where you are? I mean, really? Is that how I spend my time is tracking you? But how do you think this stuff happens? Because it became like a kind of running theme during the pandemic. No, on a global basis, I either started it or was profiting from it and doing all sorts of strange things. That was completely unexpected. Is that the first time it really happened on that scale? Yeah, no, I never had anything like that. I mean, as I had a Microsoft, people love you, people hate you. You made it hard for other software companies to charge lots of money.

38:30And so there were certainly extreme viewpoints, but completely making up, like saying that I profit from vaccines or that vaccines, instead of saving millions of lives, actually are bad for children. You know, that's a total reversal. And the fact that people needed a simple explanation during the pandemic. But in a way, you became victim there to something that's happening to a lot of people in politics now, which is the whole fake news thing and the power of a conspiracy theory to take hold. Do you have within the organization people who are actually thinking about how you deal with stuff like that?

39:07Or do you just accept it as part of the baggage of being a very wealthy, very powerful, well-known person? Well, it's gone down somewhat with the end of the pandemic, but, you know, like there were a few malaria cases that showed up in the U.S. and people were saying, okay, that's me doing that. Or, you know, I own one four thousandths of the farmland in the U.S. and people have some view that somehow connects that. Yeah, one four thousandth of the farmland. But what can you do with one four thousandth share? At least in my math, I have a hard time pulling off a conspiracy unless you get up to at least two or three, four thousandths.

39:51And I have people who track it and we often think, which of these things should you respond to? You know, if they get broad enough, then you want to respond. If they're just in the truly crazy niche, then probably you don't want to amplify it. So, as we mentioned, we've been talking to Reid Hoffman, and of course, one of the things he's very interested in is friendship. And I wondered whether you had any particular thoughts on friendship yourself. Yeah, I'm good friends with Reed. And I do think in the thinking about how you relate to people, there's a David Brooks book that just came out called How to Know a Person, which is pretty fantastic.

40:33got me thinking a lot about, okay, as I'm listening to people, is it clear to them that, okay, in what situations am I an illuminator, which is a positive term used where people feel seen and energized by how you're engaged with them? And how many people do I have the energy to really stay up to date with them? And am I, you know, if I really pick that and do that well, You know, so during these last 20 years or whatever, I'm a good friend. So I read, I love the fact that even us nerdy guys are thinking about our humanity and trying to do better. And just before I go back to one of those, meditation is something that I notice you talk about a bit, or at least sometimes when I go on some app or read a book, there's a recommendation from Bill Gates.

41:22But is that still a very active part of your life? I never got into this super long meditation where you do like an hour or go off, you know, for three days or things. I did, and it comes and goes, have a practice of taking 15 minutes in the morning with things like Headspace and found that valuable. But I have to admit, you know, I'll get busy and, you know, I can go six months and then, you know, go back to it. It's a little bit like my physical therapy. My last question relates to climate. You do hear a lot of young people sort of feel that the climate battle is kind of lost, that we're not on track, that the world is kind of burning and going to hell in a hand card.

42:11You don't think that. You're more optimistic. So just give that pessimistic young person a reason to be hopeful, but also a reason to get active. Well, there's a great book, the Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World book, which some people will find controversial. It's a very important corrective to remind people, A, we are making progress, and B, the world does not end at two degrees. We don't want to get there, though. We will get there. There's no stopping us passing two degrees. In temperate zone countries, in terms of your overall economy or livelihoods, it's actually not a gigantic thing.

42:55Yes, you have to pay to make various changes. You have to have air conditioning more like the U.S. does in kind of this pervasive way. The really bad stuff is if you let it go, say, above three degrees or if you live near the equator and you're dependent for your food on your yearly harvest. You have no savings. And so the fact that the weather is going to make things tougher, that really is quite dramatic. And so take, for example, the UK. Emissions per person are down very dramatically. You started the coal thing. Now you're by and large out of that. The government made some commitments, which I think are great, to try and have nuclear be a complement to the renewables, which makes it more feasible to get completely green.

43:49You know, so climate, there's incredible innovation going on, which I have a group Breakthrough Energy that funds a lot of that. And what I'm seeing makes me very hopeful that we'll, you know, stay not too far above two degrees and that the right adaptations can mean the overall impact is not super disastrous. Final question for me. what's the most interesting human personal thought that you've had over the last few years that you talked about um warren buffett sharing wisdom what would be a sense of a type of wisdom that you felt you've developed over the last few years an insight well i'm sure there's one single sentence thing uh if you're writing a book about your life and everything you learned how would you sort of start that book?

44:42How would you encapsulate what you feel you've learned as a person through your life? You know, I benefited by being a student and never giving that up. You know, a sense of curiosity. You know, I find the world really fascinating. I'd encourage other people, you know, maybe different subject areas than the ones like math that drew me in. But that's worked super well for me. Even today, I'll sit with research scientists on a couple of topics, and they'll tell me about their latest work. And I'll think, okay, can I help facilitate that? And how does that go forward? So, you've got to stay curious.

45:27Stay curious, get involved in things that can surprise people on the positive side, hopefully with a value-based goal of reducing inequity. And what have you learned not to do from your younger self? I think most people who are driven are very tough on themselves. Like, you know, if you're thinking is sloppy or if you didn't work hard enough. And it's very hard not to take whatever that standard is that you're driving yourself with and over apply that to other people. Like if they say something that's kind of sloppy. Okay. If you said that, you'd say to yourself, I'm an idiot today. But over time, really thinking twice about, okay, on balance, I want to challenge this person, but also I pick them and I'm spending time with them because I see that they have incredible potential.

46:24So I should never confuse them about that. If you get to that point, fine, spend time with someone else. So management and leadership, the way you do it to yourself versus others, it took me certainly into my 30s before I understood how utterly different those two things were. Well, listen, thanks for coming in. Thanks for talking to us. And see you soon. Thank you very much indeed. Bye-bye. Thanks. Thank you.

46:56well firstly Alistair a huge huge thank you for getting Bill Gates on I mean that's a you know a really serious person and I'm I'm very pleased that we managed to get him on the show what did you think of it I mean fascinating he obviously is a hugely interesting figure very interesting to watch him close up lightened up at moments when I didn't necessarily expect him to and sort of slightly what's the opposite of lightning up got a bit heavier got a bit heavier and other times i didn't expect it um he's and i actually although i think he struggled a bit with your final answer about about wisdom i think the whole stay curious thing is is actually that there's a restlessness in there that you feel it's so difficult to read him isn't it i mean i he is extremely clever he reads all the time um he you know particularly of course was was praising this book, which comes out as somebody who works on the world in data, which you admire.

47:56He's very, very interested in data. I felt when I've interacted with him in the past, a little bit what people said about him as a business person, which is this real sense that he often does quite like picking a fight around a statistic. And you can feel sometimes that he's trying to prove that he's cleverer than you do. And I, of course, can get a bit irritated about Because if he's arguing with me about Iran. Because you think you're cleverer than him. Because you went to Eden. He went to another private school, but you went to Eden. I don't think so much about that. I think it's more for something like when we were arguing about Iran.

48:29I thought, well, wait a second. You know, I do speak a bit of fast tea. I've spent quite a lot of time in Iran. You haven't. Give me a little bit of respect. Give me a bit of space for the possibility that I might know what I'm talking about. But I think he, I get a feeling that when we're talking, for example, about what it's like kind of being him going around the place. And he's very well known. As he says, he gets stopped by people in the street and say, why are you chipping me? He's got the apparatus around him almost of a kind of head of government. And yet, I sort of felt he was quite surprised when I asked him whether he felt more powerful than heads of state and heads of government.

49:08Like he doesn't. But he's interesting. He does. I think he's very conscious of the fact that governments can do things that he can't do. I mean, it's the big question, of course, of our world, because these people worth over $100 billion have unbelievable power. But his answer, I don't have an army. And I guess he would also remember the monopoly trust cases taken against him by the US government. He will be conscious that there are things governments can do, tax people, police, army, that even the richest man in the world can't do. I mean, in the end, of course, the US government, if he broke the law, would put him in prison and it wouldn't matter that he was...

49:43It was interesting how he didn't particularly want to single out politicians. I was obviously very pleased that clearly Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were his most popular politicians. But then he felt, I've got to mention the Tories, so I'll throw in David Cameron as well. But he doesn't want to. And even though anybody listening to that will understand, I think, that he is pretty scared about Donald Trump coming back. He's not like Reid Hoffman, who comes out and says, this is a real and present danger to the world. and I'm going to give loads of my money to Joe Biden to help stop him. He doesn't want to do that.

50:17Exactly. So if Reid Hoffman had been questioning me, he would say, look, all this stuff is fine that you're doing, but the biggest existential threat almost to the world is Donald Trump coming in. And if you really want to put money in an efficient way, stopping Donald Trump becoming the president will make more difference to the world over the next five years than anything else you can do. He clearly doesn't quite feel that. I was also interested in your view on, it's a bit unfair, but on his communication style because he is very cautious, almost, I felt, sometimes more cautious than a politician.

50:46Politicians learn to at least sound like they're being a bit more relaxed. He was in therapy at 11, wasn't he? Had quite difficult relations, I think, with his mum. I think the stories, at least in the biographies, are that he was very, very bright. He was in a state school which wasn't really testing him and his parents felt that actually they had to get him into this private school, which he benefited from incredibly. But because he wasn't really being tested, wasn't really being pushed. But I think also you can see how, let's imagine he didn't have any money. Let's imagine that he didn't have much power.

51:20It was interesting when he arrived, for example, you were outside getting a cup of tea, I was sitting here, and he suddenly just sort of appeared at the door. You wouldn't look at him if you didn't know who he was and think, there's a really powerful guy. He doesn't look like a kind of powerful guy. He looks a kind of pretty average American bloke. Yet he's developed into this phenomenon and has been at various stages of his life the richest man on the planet. And from an incredibly young age. I mean, one of the weird things is that he was a huge global celebrity, I think even in his late 20s.

51:55In his late 20s, yeah. And so it must be very odd to carry for 40 years the sense that you are. And of course, business is a sort of religion. I mean, you know, everybody or many, many, many people around the world, hundreds of millions of people are obsessed with his business story. How did he make his money? So it must be very, very odd to have all that projected on you. And then there's something quite heroic about him maintaining his curiosity, continuing to read difficult books. I also felt there was a deeper sense of humour that was wanting to get out at times, but he stays buttoned. If we'd had longer, how would one have really got him to talk a little bit about the personality traits of politicians he liked or their characters or anecdotes?

52:37Because again, even with two pushings, it's very much I like them because they committed 0.7%. And then I'll make the case, I'll say again, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron, Gavi, the International Vaccine Programme, etc. so i think he's um i don't think he'd be that successful a politician i think he'd find it quite difficult and i think that's one of the reasons why he although he's involved in these massively political issues he stays out of what we would define as politics so i suspect you'll listen you know these countries he'll go to some of these countries where he's sitting down with dictators he's sitting down with people who don't share necessarily the values but he's not going to call them out because he's trying to help them improve his countries.

53:20Yeah, you notice that when I said, you know, what happens AI gets in the hands of China or the Middle East? He immediately said, oh, I'm not sure, you know, that they're necessarily bad countries. Yeah. He was prepared, I think, to accept Russia as a... I think Russia as a current bad actor is a pretty home run for any American, I would have thought. No, but he was, I think he's, what I liked was being able to sit here and judge somebody. I always like to look in their eyes and see, do they really, really, really care about this stuff? And the truth is, he really, really, really cares about this stuff.

53:51He really cares about this stuff. I think the other thing that's weird about being Bill Gates is that the first thing that people are aware of meeting him is that he's worth over$100 billion. And so if you're me working in the field of international development, all that happens all the time is what I try to do to him, which is to try to convince him that he should be putting his money into whatever we believe in. I mean, when you weren't in the room, Rory, I did try and say, look, have you thought about investing in Burnley Football Club? Because we're down in the bottom of the league. He had the same answer as he did to my idea of unconditional cash transfers.

54:24Burnley Football Club is really important, but I think malaria may be more... But if you look at the list of causes, campaigns that he makes very, very large contributions to, it's a very long list. And it's really impressive. I mean, I may be frustrated about the fact that I'm not convincing him something I deeply believe, which is that I think he's not thinking enough about poverty in and of itself. His focus is on health, really. He wants children not to die. He wants people to live longer. But if I had them longer, I would say, but one of the challenges is they may be living longer in lives of miserable, grinding poverty.

54:57And actually giving$1 ,000 to someone can really allow them to address their nutrition, allow them to address their education, their shelter, all these things that he's not engaged with. But his superpower is also his focus. If he'd been more liable to be dragged in 100 directions by these kind of conversations, he wouldn't have achieved as much as he has on things like malaria and polio. Good. Well, onwards and upwards. See you soon. See you soon. Thank you.

55:43Thank you.