Bill Gates on Trump, AI, and a Life of Revolutionizing Tech

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, ANCHOR: Well, now in the U.S., 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.”

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Bianna. And, Bill Gates, welcome back to the show.

BILL GATES, AUTHOR, “SOURCE CODE” AND FOUNDER, MICROSOFT: Great to be here.

ISAACSON: One of the things I love about this new book of yours is you dig deep into your childhood, very reflective, and you even talk about your quirky 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 innovators. To what — yes, Elon Musk and others. To what extent do you think that that was actually a superpower for you?

GATES: Well, it certainly held 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 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, that that deep interest made me a software expert.

ISAACSON: 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 know, you’re not actually the nicest kid in the family. And the psychologist gives you a simple piece of advice, which is I think you’re a lucky kid. kid. Tell me how that informed your “Source Code.”

GATES: Yes, I was using a lot of my mental energy to sort of plague my parents about the arbitrariness of their rules and feeling like, OK, that was some, you know, great thing that I was 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 going to help you in the long run. They’re really on your side. And so, that was wonderful that he convinced me to redirect my energy and think my parents is more positive. And so, it worked better after he had flipped my focus.

ISAACSON: You have a certain humility in this book. And there’s a wonderful thing that Benjamin Franklin said that helps with humility is realizing you’ve been wrong at times. Tell me what realizations you had growing up that you were wrong about, and it helped you change the way you look at things.

GATES: Well, I definitely — when I first started working with other people, you know, I was only good at working with people like myself. You know, I believed in long hours and I was pretty harsh. And so, so as even in these early Microsoft days where I have 20 employees figuring out, OK, not — just because you’re smart at programming it doesn’t mean you’re good at other things, it doesn’t mean you’re good at managing programmers. And so, constantly saying, oh, there are 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.

ISAACSON: And were there any things that you wanted to make good for people that like the professor that you told him he was wrong or others where you say, OK. I got to make it good on these folks?

GATES: Yes, there were a number of people that I — as I was writing the book, I was sad to hear were no longer alive. Like, one of the professors had actually been nicer towards me when I got in trouble than I had realized, you know, and wrote — written a lot of very positive things about —

ISAACSON: Wait, wait, wait. How did you get in trouble?

GATES: Oh, well, I was using the Harvard computers a lot. And there was a question of was the way I was using them, had they agreed to that or not. In the end —

ISAACSON: You were actually writing code for the first personal computer, right?

GATES: Exactly. This basic interpreter you know, which I put in the public domain and — 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 quite fair. But for a while, it looked like they might — I might really get in trouble, and I didn’t realize this professor would very much come to bat for me.

ISAACSON: You had a 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.

GATES: Well, I’m hopeful that some significant portion of that can be reversed and preserved. You know, Elon, of all the elimination he’s done, 99 percent of it of these employees of USAID who work overseas and very tough circumstances, and they allow the U.S., in addition to our military power, to get out there and help out with famine and HIV medicines, including this program called PEPFAR. 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, yes, Elon, I think said, OK. we made a mistake. We went overboard. But now, you know, what is the equilibrium? How many of those people can be kept so we can continue to save tens of millions of lives?

ISAACSON: How many people could — lives could be lost if they don’t rectify this?

GATES: Oh, it’s definitely in the millions. PEPFAR has kept over 20 million people alive with HIV drugs, you know, started by President Bush and continued on a bipartisan basis, literally up until the day that Elon decided it wasn’t a good organization.

ISAACSON: It seems almost that it’s almost worse than never having done it at all. If you put people on HIV and AIDS drugs and then, all of a sudden, one day they disappear.

GATES: Yes, I think whoever was doing these software queries and finding less than 1 percent of these things that they were kind of, in many cases, incorrectly saying outrageous things about I don’t think they really have the picture of that here on the field. And so, you know, keeping people alive from HIV, the U.S. has done a great job. And, you know, even if we have to reduce that some on an abrupt withdrawal is a terrible thing.

ISAACSON: 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?

GATES: Well, most people, when they’re asked, think the foreign aid is a big part of the budget, like 5 percent, and they think it should be more like 2 percent, when in fact, it’s actually 1 percent. There is the uplifting element that if these countries can get out of the poverty trap, then they participate in doing business with the U.S. They have gratitude towards us. So, even beyond the moral reason, maintaining stability, reducing illegal immigration, you know, we have something in common that we can help these countries. And now, there’s a little bit of a, you know, do they favor China over us? And because of this PEPFAR, you know, they’ve been very much positive towards the United States.

ISAACSON: You know, Michael Bloomberg, when the U.S. pulled out of the Paris Accord recently, said, OK, he’s going to help make up for it. Is there anything the Gates Foundation can do in this regard?

GATES: Well, USAID was giving out over 40 billion a year. And so, the Gates Foundation, even as 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. Look, we may step up in a very minor way, but there’s nothing out there that can replace things like PEPFAR or the president’s malaria initiative. It’s just — these are very tight times for all donors, other rich countries are more generous than we are. It’s a percentage of their economy. The African countries are very indebted. So, no, the — if this money goes away there will be dramatic consequences.

ISAACSON: You know, Robert Kennedy, Jr., secretary of health and human services, you know, in his book, he accused you and Dr. Tony Fauci of a historic coup d’etat 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?

GATES: Well, the Gates Foundation is going to work with the government. You know, the NIH is the best medical research organization in the world, just like USAID is the best aid organization. And 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 Robert Kennedy. So, you know, I’m going to go meet with him and explain, you know, why —

ISAACSON: Has he agreed to meet with you?

GATES: I think it’s very, very likely that we’ll get a meeting late this month. I hope so. I’ll be reaching out to him.

ISAACSON: I noticed that the inauguration is — 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?

GATES: Well, the profit streams of these tech companies are phenomenal. I mean, these are the most — highest value companies in the world. And of course, the government, whether it’s through the software they buy or A.I. 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, D.C., and that was a great thing about this country, now all those companies have a huge presence. And so, you know, they’re, you know, playing a for profit game, I’m no longer in that. But, you know, I can understand why they — they’re being very responsive and trying to connect.

ISAACSON: Do you think there’s some danger of those — that type of tech bro mentality coming into the government?

GATES: Well, the government needs to be independent, you know, and work on behalf of the taxpayer and the consumer. And, you know, so there’s always been a question is big business and government are aligned, you know, it’s early days here to see, you know, how it gets managed. You know, issues like antitrust and government purchasing A.I. regulation. So, I’d say I find it fascinating. They are kind of competing to get the most attention.

ISAACSON: When you came down here to New Orleans a couple of years ago and spoke at Tulane to my students, you talked about OpenAI, ChatGPT had just come along, and you said you were going back and working with the Microsoft teams to embed A.I. into it. How has that gone? What’s going to be the thing we’ll see coming out of that?

GATES: Well, the last three years, since the ChatGPT 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, but the performance and that reliability is on a track that it’s going to be profound how they can increase to first white collar productivity. And then, as the robots get better, 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 U.S. and to the developing countries, particularly in Africa, not have it be a 20-year delay between usage in the rich world versus developing world.

ISAACSON: You’ve been an adviser with OpenAI and its relationship with Microsoft. What do you make of Elon Musk’s sort of, to me, surprise bid to try to take back OpenAI from Sam Altman and maybe from the ownership stake of Microsoft?

GATES: Well, A.I. 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 not just tens, but literally hundreds of billions. And so, you know, I think some of these maneuvers are, you know, sort of driven by the personal relationships. But overall, the — you know, I’ve never seen anything more competitive, which is partly why the progress we’re seeing is so rapid.

ISAACSON: Way back in 1997, in a previous century, you know, I interviewed you for Time Magazine. And I asked you if you thought there was something fundamentally different between the software of computers and the wetware of our carbon-based system and what we call consciousness. And let me — I 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 ChatGPT came along. 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?

GATES: Well, certainly they’re not the same. But if the question is, say, take medical diagnosis or a robot doing factory work, will the quality of that factory work of that medical diagnosis from the software exceed human capacity? The answer is yes. In time, it will. Now, you’ll be missing the wonderful humanness and, you know, humans will still, 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 A.I. will eventually surpass human capability.

ISAACSON: You write near the end of the book that piecing together memories helps me better understand myself. What was the most interesting self-revelation that piecing together memories came?

GATES: Well, it’s stunning to me how lucky I was with my dad, my mom, the time I was born, that, you know, many times where I’d be exposed, some very good software people, adults would guide me on how to improve, just a number of those things that came together that meant at the 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, you know, my amazement, my gratitude, my, you know, reflecting back on friends and family was a very fulfilling exercise that humbled me in terms of all the incredible things I’ve gotten to experience.

ISAACSON: Amazing gratitude, humbling, do you think a machine will ever be able to give that feeling?

GATES: No. Feeling is an intrinsic thing that, you know, we understand, that’s like consciousness. It will be able to write words like that, but not experience the real human emotion that I did.

ISAACSON: Bill Gates, thank you for joining us again.

GATES: Thank you.