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The New Yorker Radio Hour
Bill Gates on His New Memoir and Dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago
00:32:31
The Microsoft co-founder and public-health philanthropist discusses the future of A.I., vaccine skepticism, and the politics of technology in 2025.
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- [00:01]
Bill Gates
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. Listener supported WNYC Studios.
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David Remnick
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
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Bill Gates
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Long before Mark Zuckerberg was toying with something called the Facebook as a Harvard student and before Elon Musk ever dreamed of self driving cars and conquering space, Bill Gates was running Microsoft. Windows established itself as the dominant operating system for most of the world's personal computers. Gates was the avatar of a new breed, the tech mogul. And for a long time, he was rated the world's wealthiest person. His new memoir, Source Code, explains just how he got there. Microsoft remains one of the world's most valuable companies. But for nearly 20 years since stepping back at Microsoft, Bill Gates has devoted himself almost entirely to philanthropy. The Gates foundation is one of the largest nonprofits funding public health around the globe. And that's made him, maybe to his surprise, a divisive figure, particularly where vaccines are concerned. It's also put him in a tricky spot politically. The foundation needs to work closely with the federal government on public health. And yet Gates did not join Musk, Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos at the inauguration. And I should note here that Bill Gates and I talked just before the funding freeze last week had thrown so many agencies, including public health programs, into a state of chaos. You know, at a certain point, it emerged that you donated tens of millions of dollars to the effort to elect Kamala Harris. Donald Trump won. And we are now witnessing many of your colleagues in the tech world at the highest level. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos flocking to Mar A Lago and want to be as close to power as possible. You're smiling, Riley, but what is the emerging picture here?
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Well, you know, President Trump was elected and he, you know, is going to make a lot of policy decisions. And I would say the range of possibilities in many areas has never been as broad. I, you know, sought out President Trump and I, you know, right after Christmas, went down to Mar A Lago and actually had a really good, very long dinner with him and, you know, talked.
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What do you discuss?
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Well, the, you know, we talked about the world broadly, but my first request was on HIV where the question of does the US maintain the PEPFAR program that's over 20 years standing, that keeps over 10 million people alive with HIV medicines. I explained to him why we should maintain that and that I think we can innovate to eventually cure HIV and the need for that, but that that'll take some time to do and, you know, encouraged him to look at the kind of things he'd done with warp speed.
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You're talking about the COVID 19 vaccines, right?
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And see if those could be applied to this HIV cure work.
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How did he respond?
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He was quite enthused about that. You know, I talked about polio quite a bit and how we need to have governments like Pakistan prioritize these campaigns because we never gotten rid of polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And so, you know, my foundation has the US government, both for research and delivery in health as a key partner. And I will do my best to work with this administration. And you know, so I got his ear for three hours. He couldn't have been nicer. Doesn't mean that other people won't come in and say the HIV money should be cut. But you know, I did my best.
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Do you worry that you might be in some way punished by being on the Democratic side in the election this last time around? It's not beyond Donald Trump in history shows for him to favor his allies and punish what he sees as his enemies.
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No, you can definitely worry that there have been sort of broad attacks on foundations and okay, some of them are a bit woke, but overall I think they serve a valuable purpose. There's been a broad attack on vaccines, which of course the Gates foundation is the biggest funder of vaccines in the world.
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Well, let's take that. What are your biggest concerns regarding vaccines on a global level when you've got the administration that you've got now and the influence of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
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In office, I still think people will come to their senses on this one. The key reason why we went from 10 million children dying every year at the turn of the century to less than 5 million today is because we got new, very inexpensive vaccines out to most of the world's children. And you know, 5 million deaths a year, that's a big thing. And in fact, if we stay serious about global health, we could cut those deaths in half again.
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But do you see an impulse when either at your three hour dinner with the President or whatever contact you've had with the returning administration, do you have confidence in them where that's concerned?
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Well, I said to him, that he'd done a very good job on this warf speed that accelerated the availability of the COVID vaccine and encouraged him to be more public about that or said that was a worthy thing. And we talked about why the pandemic kind of drove people apart and that we're less ready for a pandemic today. You would have thought the pandemic, at least for a while, we'd get serious about it. And yet, you know, understanding how we work with who and how we get CDC to engage in the right way. So I'm a bit surprised. But, you know, because millions of lives are involved, I do think the whole vaccine thing know, people will remember that, you know, this is a miraculous invention.
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There's a lot of talk now more than ever about oligarchic structures in the United States, far more than before. Is there an oligarchy growing in Washington?
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I can't relate to that term. I think of it more in terms of Russia, actually, and weirdly, why is that, though? But we can't say that money was the key to this election. The party that spent, I think it's widely accepted the party who spent less money won the election.
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I'm talking about something else. I'm talking about the influence that somebody like Elon Musk will exert. I'm talking about the way Mark Zuckerberg has been behaving of late, talking about the influence on media barons, like, well, it's one of his interests is Jeff Bezos and his kind of reversals when it comes to the Washington Post. Does that not concern you?
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The balance between following the new theme that the voters have chosen versus sticking up for enduring principles? I do think we can look at this behavior and say, okay, which is this, and maybe have they gone too far? You know, Trump will be making a lot of very key decisions. And the idea that people, you know, that in the Gates foundation will be trying to help them make those decisions, well, that part I'll have to stick up for. We are not going into opposition. We are continuing the partnership we've had with every administration.
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Vaccine development has been a gigantic focus of the Foundation's work, and. But as a result, you've become the subject of a boatload of conspiracy theories, especially around Covid. One of the most amazing of these conspiracy theories was that you wanted to use a COVID 19 vaccine to implant, wait for it, microchips in people. Where does this come from? How do you explain vaccine skepticism? And where do you lay the blame for the way these theories and attacks come at you? And whoever else believes in that vaccine?
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Well, I guess, you know, to start with the idea of sticking metal needles in children, you know, and they scream and get a fever, you know, and that's the best thing you can do to protect their life. It is counterintuitive. And in most of the countries we work in, you know, our vaccine work is mostly in the poor countries where the deaths are. If there's a period where people are skeptical about vaccines, very quickly you'll see kids die of measles. So there's a correcting factor that. Wait a minute. These kids died in the US because these infectious diseases don't come into the country much at all, and kids are well nourished. You can have a laxity in vaccine coverage that is dangerous. But you don't see the problem, you know, for quite some time. And even when you see it, it won't be tens of thousands of deaths. It will be a very small number. So, you know, we have good sanitation, good nutrition. We're very lucky. I couldn't believe the craziness. And, you know, Robert Kennedy was part of promoting some of these things. He wrote a book about how Fauci and I, you know, he said kill millions to make money, which is exactly correct. If you invert the sign, yes, I give billions to save millions, not the other way around. And so a little bit you have to have a sense of humor about what the heck, you know, why were people under so much pressure for over simplistic explanations? And, you know, the vaccine came in and saved millions and millions of lives. And, you know, next time, the next pandemic could be 10 times as fatal as this one was.
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It's been pretty clear for a while now that there's been a kind of ideological battle in the tech world and a new ethos began to take hold. Did you have DEI initiatives at the foundation or at Microsoft?
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Oh, sure.
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To your distress, or do you think it was a good thing?
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I think all those things had a core of excellence. You know, I'd given, I have a scholarship that's been given to tens of thousands of kids. It's only for minorities. That's it. And you know, that was attacked. I think that was legitimate. I'll stand up for that. But, you know, we did a thing about mathematics and somebody who got a little bit of money for us said that, you know, the idea that there's one answer in math is a racist, you know, sort of white thing, that there's just one answer in math. And so, you know, when you let Something run, it can get pretty extreme, you know, so both sides. Look, you know, I'm a centrist, and I'm more of a technocrat than a political person. On many social values, I'd lean to the left because of the influence of my parents. And so, you know, I was sorry to see the left go so far that, you know, some of it deserved.
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A backlash, and particularly on. You're talking about cultural issues. Mainly.
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Mainly, yes.
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Tell me about your encounter with Bernie Sanders. I watched that conversation between the two of you on your Netflix series, what's Next? I don't see a throne on your head. Right. You're not King Bill.
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All right, Nate, you got me on that one.
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It wasn't unfriendly, exactly. It wasn't rude. But I was watching two people on a hugely different plane of existence somehow.
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Well, Bernie's one of these people who can say, look, everybody should have shelter and medicine. And how do you disagree with that? As we get richer, the safety net should get more generous. FDR raised the safety net. LBJ raised the safety net. It's great that Obamacare raises the safety net. These are fantastic things, how far we can go. Bernie's would make tax. I would make taxes more progressive, but he would go further than I would. He would essentially 100% tax wealth above a billion dollars. And you can say I'm biased, since that would have affected me, but I think that goes too far in terms of the balance of encouraging innovation in new companies versus getting as much for the government to have.
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He thinks that just the notion of being a billionaire is innately immoral. How do you do that? Right.
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And Therefore we should 100% tax any wealth above that, and so there wouldn't be any billionaires. No, I disagree with that.
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Why?
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Because the goose that lays the golden egg is, hey, start a company, raise money, invest capital in making an Alzheimer's drug trial costs $500 million. You better create some big upside for eventually somebody succeeding at that. And building a new nuclear plant costs billions of dollars. And so I have a company that I do for climate reasons that's trying to create a cheap and safe nuclear fission reactor called Terrapower. And if the people involved in that didn't have sort of great upside, it wouldn't make as much sense.
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I guess what he's saying is something more than that. And you were quite patient with the whole conversation, as was Bernie Sanders, but he could not fathom, and I think it's probably near impossible for almost everybody to fathom, why being a billionaire 1 billion is not enough, especially when we are saturated with images in the media of immense indulgence. Yachts, planes, all kinds of almost phantasmagorical displays of wealth that are, I have to say, a bad. Look.
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You know, if I was in charge of the tax system, I would have paid three times as much in taxes as I've had. I've paid 14 billion in know, which is probably a record.
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You did $14 billion in your working life?
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Yeah, to the U.S. government. And there are ways I could have done things to lower that number, but I didn't choose to. But I should have paid more. But I wouldn't outlaw billionaires. I think that really, you know, makes you divide. It leads to all sorts of weird things. And I don't think when we look at society, I think we should look at the safety net more than. Yes, if some people are rich, they're going to spend the money in crazy ways. That's part of what freedom lets people do. And yes, progressive taxation systems. At some level, you should pay very high rate, including on investments, which is where the very, very, very big fortunes are made. And weirdly, investments are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. Anyway. My dad and I were the two big proponents of the estate tax, which was a very lonely thing. You know, we had a year. There was no estate tax. So, you know, I'm closer to Bernie than I am to the current system. But I'm not out there where Bernie is, because why is the US More innovative than other countries? I do think there's something there.
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I'm speaking with Bill Gates. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue our conversation and just a moment.
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Unknown
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Rocket Money. The start of a new year is the perfect time to get organized, set goals, and prioritize what matters most. One common top priority for many of us is financial wellness. Thanks to Rocket Money, financial goals can feel achievable. They show you all of your subscriptions right in one place and pull together spending across different accounts to track spending habits. Rocket Money's dashboard also gives you a clear view of your expenses across all of your accounts and can help you easily create a personalized budget with custom categories to help keep your spending on track. Whether your goal is to pay off credit card debt, put away money for a house, or just build your savings, Rocket Money makes it easy. Rocket Money has over 5 million users and has saved users a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and Reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money. Just go to RocketMoney.com NYRH today that's RocketMoney.com NYRH.
- [18:22]
Bill Gates
Do you have a car, truck, boat, motorcycle or RV that is no longer of use to you? No matter what shape it's in, you can donate it to WNYC even if it's 100 years old. Donating is easy, the pickup is free, and you'll get a tax deduction. Learn more@wnyc.org Car.
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David Remnick
Hey podcast listeners. Chris I'm Chris Marocco, food director of Bon Appetit and Epicurious and host of the Dinner SOS podcast. Every week on Dinner sos, my test Kitchen colleagues and I help listeners figure out what they should be cooking right now. And this winter, we're helping you embrace all things cozy cooking, letting you join the Ba Bake Club and getting back to basics with simple strategies to level up your home cooking. So don't miss out. Listen to and follow Dinner SOS wherever you get your podcasts, and if you have your own kitchen question, email us at dinnersosnappetit.com Happy Cooking.
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Unknown
This is the.
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Bill Gates
New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I've been speaking today with Bill Gates, the co founder of Microsoft. Gates was 30 when Microsoft went public in 1986, and the IPO made him a billionaire. His business practices at Microsoft were often criticized as monopolistic, even ruthless, and make no mistake, it's still an immense conglomerate, invested in cloud, servers and AI and much more. But today, Gates seems generationally and dispositionally distinct from people like Elon Musk. A new memoir called Source Code talks about how he fell in love with computing, and it stays on Gates early life covering just through the founding of Microsoft, I'll continue my conversation now with Bill Gates. Now, when you were a kid, you've written, you told a therapist when you were very young that you were at war with your parents. How old were you then? And moreover, who were you at that time? What was that war all about?
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Well, I was about 10 when they first sent me to see Dr. Cressy, and I decided, you know, I could kind of figure things out myself, and I was getting better at cards than these adults, and their rules seemed very arbitrary to me. And I thought, you know, why that bedtime? Why those weird manners? And there was just some rigidities that I thought, no, I'm going to say no to this. I'm kind of embarrassed even to think back at it. But, you know, I was kind of showing my Independence. And fortunately, the therapist said, hey, that's really a waste of your energy. You know, fighting your parents, really, what's to be gained there? They're basically on your side.
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When did the penny drop? When did you come across the idea that early computing would be your life's mission? Obsession, possession, forget about fortune. That's, in a way, a lot less interesting. And much later.
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Well, at first, the computer was just a puzzle to figure out. And because I was good at math, people drew me in. And there were four of us who just stayed and were kind of obsessed at figuring out that puzzle. The part that makes it part of my destiny is when Paul Allen reads that these computer chips are going to double in power every year or two, which is called Moore's Law.
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That's Paul Allen, who co founded Microsoft with you.
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Yes. And I said to Paul, that can't be, because it just means computing will be free. And if computing was free, then we'd have a computer, as we later said, on every desk and in every home. And Paul said, no, it's true. And so intel, the chip company, you know, first they have a chip that's very limited, and we are able to call it the 800 Series A. We do some things with that. And then in 1973, they have the 8080. And I say to Paul, okay, this one is so powerful, you can do personal computers. And he's like, okay, let's build personal computers. I'm like, no, I don't want to do hardware. I just want to do the thing we're good at. I want to do software. Because the incredible exposure to software I had through many lucky things where I'd had literally thousands of hours by the time I'm 18, it meant that we knew how to write software, we knew it would be important, and that the chip causes that revolution. So it was in, you know, it's when I was about 16 that that dialogue with Paul pushed in that direction. I still thought, gosh, you know, my dad's a lawyer. I like politicians, I like professors. But my destiny was pretty set once Paul had that insight.
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Nothing happens in a complete vacuum. Why did Microsoft emerge early on to a certain degree as a kind of singularity and not somebody else and not something else?
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So in the early days, there are a number of software companies. We're the first. But in the next three or four years, the numbers come along. Many of them were single product companies, that is VisiCalc, you know, WordPerfect, a word processor. But they're only a single product The Microsoft conception was to be a software factory, to hire smarter people than other people did, to have better software tools, compilers, debuggers, and to do all popular software categories and to do it globally that, you know, I had an office in Japan when nobody did, you know, hired people in Europe.
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And so, so it's business acumen and conquering the world acumen as well as scientific and mathematical acumen.
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Yes, the vision was about software, not about a word processor or spreadsheet. Until Google comes along, which is a decade later, we don't have any competitors that are hiring the way we are and know, find very smart scientists and teach them how to program. We don't have anyone who's going all over the world and figuring out how do you do kanji, how do you do Hangul? You know, there's just nobody. And it was interesting. The Journal did an article about software companies where one time they say, ah, they're all kind of interesting. One is Microsoft and there's these others. Then two years later they actually wrote a piece that said, wait a minute, one of these companies is a software factory. And by that time with Windows 95, we were taking the word processing category, the spreadsheet category, the presentation category, the database category, and just totally gaining share in everything because of this factory excellence that nobody else had.
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At what point in your career and in your thinking did you not only take on board that you were changing the world in a profound way, in an incredibly positive way, but that there was also pitfalls to this, there are dangers to it. And that to this day we have on our minds when it comes to AI.
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I have to admit I thought of digital empowerment as an unadulterated good until social networking came along. I mean, I'll admit criminals could use PCs, but the idea that some digital products could play on human weaknesses. It wasn't until social networking that I saw that nobody ever said, hey, because Microsoft did a word processor, you know, somebody wrote a kidnapping note, you know, they just didn't see it that way. In fact, the virtuous thing was to make sure that the so called digital divide, where most people weren't getting access, that was our, you know, thing we needed to do, was to make sure everybody, you know, kids in the inner city, poor countries, you know, and keep driving the prices down, make it easier to use. And so I do look back on the naivete that first social networking and now AI. And you know, there's a lot of people who are very articulate about this. I just finished Harari's Nexus. You know, I love the thing where when they did the printing press, it was books about witches and how you find witches that were on the bestseller list, not Copernicus's Laws of Science.
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So what goes around comes around.
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Yes.
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So as AI is still. I don't know if you consider it in its infancy. People have been thinking about AI with. The New Yorker has been writing about AI in one form or another for decades, in a way, but it does feel like we're on this at this hinge point in history. Tell me about Microsoft's role in this ecology and how you want to differentiate from all the other AI enterprises.
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Yeah. So AI is the most profound technology of my lifetime. You can say that it's just a culmination of all the things I had a chance to be involved with. But it's more profound because it's about exceeding human capabilities in many areas and it's happening very quickly. So the opportunity to have personal tutors and great medical advice is incredibly positive. But it's so dramatic how it changes the job market and how we think of how humans spend time and what's valuable that. Yeah, this one really is scary.
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Look, I'm concerned about euphoria, gee whizness, where AI is concerned, and not a close enough attention on what could go terribly wrong. Not to be a catastrophist, but to be realistic. When you look at AI now, what are your biggest concerns in their specificity?
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Yeah, I wouldn't say that we're not talking about the problems. You know, my concern is we don't really have good answers to the problems. You know, even take social networking when people are like, oh, you know, why didn't we do more? Well, why didn't we do what? You know, people are still like, you know, firing their fact checkers now. I mean, is that going to make it better?
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You're talking about what happened at Meadow under Mark Zuckerberg.
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Right.
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I'm assuming you don't approve of that firing.
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I don't think that's going in the right direction. I can understand the pressures that he's under.
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Political pressure on that.
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Yeah. And sort of societal wave, including politics. But, you know, the fact that outrage is rewarded because it's more engaging, that's kind of a human weakness. And the fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety, that boy was that naive. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it, not some bat biology. So we haven't solved even the challenges of social networking. AI is much broader in terms of what it brings, and it's going to reshape the job market in a pretty dramatic way. And of course, leisure time is supposed to be good as long as people have a sense of meaning and purpose and all of that. And the debate about how we deal with the reduction in shortage, shortage of doctors, teachers, and yet what do we replace that with? I think that debate is still pretty simplistic and not many good solutions that I've seen.
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Microsoft's a partner of OpenAI, and I had an interview with Sam Altman, who's the CEO there, a couple of years ago. And when I asked him about the implications for the labor market, how people would make a living, who would be made redundant, his answer was kind of. It certainly didn't put my mind at ease.
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Well, Sam does not pretend to have all the answers, and I will give him credit for saying that the politicians need to learn AI and get involved and, you know, figure out what those regulations should look like.
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But do you have faith in politicians to be the arbiters of that kind of future in that kind of situation? You're smiling.
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No. The politicians are in charge, and democracy is better than any alternative. I was surprised in the 2024 election how little AI got discussed. I expect that the primary topic of the 2028 election will be policies around AI. You know, how do you change taxes, job markets? How does the government take advantage of it? What does it mean about war? I can't imagine anything that would be nearly as important or as discussed. And so the political class is just slightly paying attention to this now, and that has to change.
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Let me ask you, maybe it's a sensitive question, but your book is largely about how you became you and a story of development in many ways. You're now, I think we're about the same age. We both recognize we're not on the front nine of the golf course of life. And you think through your life and when you've made a contribution, when you've behaved well, when you've behaved badly, what are your deepest regrets?
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Well, my regrets, there's a lot of things that took me a lot longer to learn than it should have. You know, drawing in people with different skill sets and not just being oriented towards kind of scientific iq, you know, that took me decades longer than it should have. You know, I. Without going into any specifics, you know, I was sad that I divorced Melinda. You know, overall my life, I've been so lucky that saying Oh, I wish something had been better. Or that I gotten more problems right on some math quiz. That seems a bit churlish sitting where I am today right now. I do wish I had better answers about making social networking better. I know it's a problem, but unlike things like polio and malaria, where I really do know what we need to do that one, we've kind of left it to the younger generation to figure out.
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Bill Gates, thank you very much.
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Thank you.
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I really appreciate your time.
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No, it's great talking with you.
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Good to talk to you. Bill Gates was the co founder of Microsoft and he's chairman today of the Gates foundation, the largest nonprofit in the world. His new book is called Source Code. I'm David Remnick. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us and see you next time.
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David Remnick
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Sommer, with guidance from Emily Botine and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Bar, Victor Guan and Alejandra Deckett.
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Bill Gates
And we had additional help this week from Jake Loomis.
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David Remnick
The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Turina Endowment.
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Bill Gates
Hey, this is Justin Richmond, host of the Broken Record podcast. Every week I or my co host Leah Rose, sit down with the artists you love to get unparalleled creative insight. Our new series is looking at one of the most influential jazz labels ever, Blue Note Records. You'll hear from artists like legendary bassist Ron Carter, singer songwriter Nora Jones and guitarist Julian Losh. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcast.