well now in the US International Aid is also on Trump's foreign policy chopping block for now a federal judge has paused a funding freeze on usaid Tech Giant Bill Gates joins Walter Isaacson to discuss how the global fight against disease could be affected by the sweeping Cuts as well as his new Memoir source code thank you bana and Bill Gates welcome back to the show great to be here one of the things I love about this new book of yours is you dig deep into your childhood very very reflective and you even talk about your
quirky uh personality into details when you were young obsessive in your own mind and you say if I'd been born now I'd probably be diagnosed with on the autism spectrum and a lot of people I write about seem to have those traits and great innovator to what yeah Elon Musk and others to what extent do you think that that was actually a superpower for you well it certainly help me back in terms of my social skills I was late to develop there but it was a big asset in terms of taking something I was interested
in and being able to put very long hours into it whether it was math to begin with OR software development you know I I I got a lot of feedback I got a lot of exposure and so you know by the end of this book even though I'm still quite young uh that that that deep interest made me a a software expert you call your book source code It's a Wonderful title because it's sort of a nice metaphor for the input you get as a kid become part of your operating system let me ask you
about one or two of those inputs one of them is when your parents bring you to a psychologist because you're you you're not actually the nicest uh kid in the family uh and the psychologist gives you a simple piece of advice which is I think you're a lucky kid tell me how that informed your code yeah I I was using a lot of my mental energy uh to sort of plague my parents about the arbitrariness of their rules and feeling like okay that was some you know great thing that I was uh a able to
make things a little hard for them and the person I spent time with sort of said no it's you have an unfair Advantage it's not uh going to help you in the long run they're really on your side and so uh that was wonderful that he convinced me to redirect my energy and uh think of my my parents as more uh positive and uh and and so it worked better after he had uh flipped my uh Focus you have a certain humility in this book and wonderful thing that Benjamin Franklin said that helps with humility
is realizing you've been wrong at times tell me what realization you had growing up that you were wrong about and it helped you change the way you look at things well I definitely uh when I first started working with other people you know I was only good at working with people like myself uh you know I believed in long hours and I was pretty harsh and so as even in these early Microsoft days where I have 20 employees figuring out okay not just because you're smart at programming doesn't mean you're good at other things it
doesn't mean you're good at managing programmers and so constantly uh saying oh they're different types of intelligence and I have to learn how to work with all of those even though my only natural ability is working with sort of Hardcore engineers and were there any things that you wanted to make good for people that like the professor that you told him you was wrong or others where you say okay I got to make it good on these folks yeah there are a number of people that I as I was writing the book I was sad
to hear we're no longer alive like a one of the professors had actually been uh nicer towards me when I got in trouble than I had realized you know and wrote written uh a lot of very positive things about wait wait wait how did you get in trouble oh well I was using the Harvard computers uh a lot and there was a question of was the way I was using them had they uh agreed to that or not in the end writing code for the first personal computer right exactly this this basic interpreter uh you
know which I put in the public domain and uh but they did in the end admonish me for bringing a non-student Paul Allen my co-founder into that computer room which was actually uh quite fair but for a while it looked like they might I might really get in trouble and uh I didn't realized uh this this professor very much come uh to B for me you had a uh three-hour dinner with President Trump right after he was elected and I remember we talked about it a little and you said you tried to talk him into
keeping some of the foreign aid and all you really got was that he really listened to you and said maybe he'd call you before he made a final decision tell me what the upshot is because he seems to have along with Elon Musk pretty much decimated usaid well I'm hopeful that uh some significant of that uh can be reversed and and preserved you know Elon of all the elimination he's he's done 99% of it are these employees of usci who work overseas in very tough circumstances and they allow the US in addition to our military
power to get out there and help out with famine and HIV medicines uh including this program called pepar and so I know a lot of those workers I know that work you know a very very high percentage of it is stuff every taxpayer would be proud of so there's a little bit of a discussion you know that yeah Elon I think said okay we made a mistake we went overboard but now you know what is the equilibrium how many of those people can be capped so we can continue to save tens of millions of lives
how many people could lives could be lost if they don't Rectify this oh it it's in the millions uh pepar has kept over 20 million people alive with HIV drugs you know started by President Bush and continued on a bipartisan basis literally up till the day that uh Elon decided it wasn't a good organization it seems almost that it's almost worse than never having done it at all if you put people on HIV and Aid Drugs and then all of a sudden one day they disappear yeah I think whoever was doing these software queries and
finding less than 1% of these things that they were kind of uh in many cases incorrectly saying outrageous things about I don't think they really had the the picture of that here on the field and so you know keeping people alive from HIV the US uh has done a great job and you know even if we have to reduce that sum on an Abrupt withdrawal uh is is a terrible thing but there's a larger picture which is I don't think people understand either how much we do in foreign aid or even why we do foreign
aid so leave aside the details why should we be giving foreign aid well most people when they're asked think the foreign aid is a big part of the budget like 5% and they think it should be more like 2% when in fact it's actually 1% uh there is the uplifting element that if these countries can get out out of the poverty trap uh then they participate in doing business with the US they have gratitude towards us so even beyond the moral reason maintaining stability uh reducing illegal immigration uh you know we have something in common
uh that we can help these countries and now there's a little bit of a you know do they favor China over us and uh because of this pepar you know they've been very much uh positive towards the United States you know Michael Bloomberg when the US pulled out of the Paris Accord recently said he's going to help make up for it is there anything The Gates Foundation can do in this regard well usaid was giving out over uh 40 billion a year and so the Gates Foundation even it's the largest philanthropy is only about 9
billion a year you know there are some really unusual things like medical trials that are being interrupted that you know that's actually quite unethical that we may step up in a very minor way but there's nothing out there that can replace things like pepar or the president's malaria initiative it's just these are very tight times for all donors other rich countries are uh more generous than we are as a percentage of their economy uh the African countries are very indebted so uh no the if this money goes away uh there will be dramatic consequences you
know Robert Kennedy Jr Secretary of Health and Human Services you know in his book he accused you and Dr Tony fouchy of a historic coupet against Western democracy and all the things from vaccines to covid to pandemic that you've been interested in how is this going to affect your ability to do what you've been doing at the Gates Foundation well the Gates Foundation is going to work with the government uh you know the NIH is the best medical research organization in the world just like usaid is the best Aid organization and uh we've done a
lot with them the pipeline of innovations that I got president Trump enthused about including things like eventually having a gene edit for an HIV cure and so that'll be under uh Robert Kennedy so you know I'm going to uh go meet with him and explain you know why uh has he agreed to meet with you I think it's very very likely uh that we'll get a meeting late this month I I hope so I'll be reaching out to him uh I noticed at the inaugurations I'm sure you did that all the tech Bros are there
in the front row they used to be Tech nerds now they're invited to the front row of the inauguration what happened to the tech nerd culture to become so cool and Tech bro like and what do you make of them all being in government now well the profit streams of these tech companies are phenomenal I mean these are the mo highest value companies in the world and of course the government whether it's through uh the software they buy or AI regulation or antitrust they affect these companies a lot so you know unlike when I naively
thought Microsoft didn't need to be in Washington DC and that was a great thing about this country now all those companies uh have a huge presence and so you know they're they're you know playing a for-profit game uh I'm no longer in that but you know I can understand why they uh they're they're being very uh responsive and and trying to to connect do you think there's some danger of uh those that type of uh Tech bro mentality coming into the government well the government needs to be independent you know and work on behalf of
the the taxpayer and the consumer and you know so there's always been a question as big business and government are uh aligned you know it's early days here uh to see you know how it gets managed uh you know issues like antitrust and government purchasing AI regulation uh so I'd say I find it fascinating uh they are kind of competing to get get the most attention when you came down here to New Orleans a couple years ago and spoke at tulang to my students you talked about open AI chat GPT had just come along uh
and you said you were going back and working with the Microsoft teams to embed uh AI into it how has that gone what what's going to be the thing we'll see coming out of that well the last three years uh since the chout gbt large language model and many excellent competitors have come along the progress has been pretty amazing you know they still can't solve all the problems they still have reliability issues uh but the performance and uh that reliability is on a track that it's going to be profound how they can increase uh to
first White Collar productivity and then as the robots get better uh all of the economy including Blue Collar as well and so for me I advise Microsoft and then I take that knowledge so that the Gates Foundation can get these Technologies to students in the Inner City in the US and to uh the developing countries particularly in Africa not have it be a 20-year delay between usage in the rich World versus developing World you've been an advisor with uh open Ai and its relationship with Microsoft what do you make of Elon musk's sort of surp
to me surprised bid to try to take back open AI from Sam Alman and maybe from the ownership stake of Microsoft well AI is about the most competitive space I've ever seen you know whether it's independent companies like Elon has his xai there's anthropic and many others you know Google and Microsoft are the two biggest companies investing uh not just tens but literally hundreds of billions and so uh you know I think some of these Maneuvers are uh you know sort of driven by the the personal relationships but overall uh the you know I've never
seen anything more competitive which is part why the progress we're seeing is so rapid way back in 1997 in a previous Century I interviewed you for Time Magazine and I asked you if you thought there was some something fundamentally different between the software of computers and the wetwear of our carbon based system uh and what we call Consciousness and let me uh went back and looked at it and here's what you told me you said I don't think there's anything unique about human intelligence all the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions
operate in a binary fashion we can someday replicate that on a machine that was before you raised three kids you watch them look at your face and recognize it that was before chat GPT came along see you so let me ask you again sort of the same question is there something fundamentally different about the way we humans can engineer a I and the way that nature or Nature's God created the human mind well certainly they're not the same but if the if the question is say take medical diagnosis or a robot uh doing factory work
will the quality of that factory work or that medical diagnosis from the software exceed human capacity the answer is yes in time it will now you'll be missing the wonderful uh humanness uh and you know humans will still uh with their extra time choose to interact with each other by and large you know Consciousness probably won't be there but anything that's utilitarian the AI uh will eventually surpass human capability you write near the end of the book that piecing together memories helps me better understand myself what was the most interesting self uh Revelation that piecing
together memories came well it's stunning to me uh how lucky I was with my dad my mom the time I was born that you know many times where i' be exposed and very good software people adults would guide me on how to improve just number of those things that came together that meant at the uh End of This Book which is the start of Microsoft you know I was in a position to see that software and having the world's best software Factory you know could make a huge contribution and so uh you know my amazement
my gratitude my you know reflecting back on friends and family uh was a very fulfilling exercise that humbled me in terms of all the the incredible things I've I've gotten to experience amazing uh gratitude humbling do you think a machine will ever be able to give that feeling no feeling is a intrinsic thing that you know we we understand that's like Consciousness uh it will be able to write words like that but uh not experience the the the real human emotion that I did Bill gages thank you for joining us again thank you [Music] [Music]
