Bill Gates on possibility, AI, and humanity

so Bill we've known each other for some time now we probably don't want to quite date it but it's been it's been a while and one of the things that I love about doing podcasts uh with my friends is that I actually in research learned some things that I didn't actually know before and apparently there's this kind of trifacta of three criteria um it's uh will it have a big impact will you learn something will it be fun what are some of the projects that immediately come to mind that are the kind of the most

interesting that meet that Trifecta for you like what what in that goes Ah that's something that met all three in as fun and exciting for you well until age 20 I got to read about lots and lots of things you know so I ranged quite broadly including auditing a lot of courses at Harvard that I wasn't even signed up for weirdly then when I got into software I had to suppress my sort of normal desire to be polymathic and be monomaniacal and so from age you know 20 to 35 I didn't stay up to date

on you know geology uh by the time I was 30 I started cheating reading uh some other things in particular uh when I turned over the CEO role so it's nice now that partly because the foundation touches on a lot of things I do get to range pretty widely and there's a few topics like climate you know then you have to learn about weather and materials and energy and uh so it's a great excuse uh for learning things nowadays Global Health gets a lot of my attention and so you know I do put a lot

of energy into that because it really fits all of those criteria and it's such an underinvested field you know that you can invent tools that save Millions you can save lives for less than $1,000 per life but you know you have now you got climate you've got AI no shortage of interesting topics uh in in the world today for somebody like me and you know my ability to know people who can help educate me in the online tools the combination means you you don't have to worry about getting confused cuz someone I I know someone

who will straighten me out so one are your projects that actually hit all three for me is your recent Netflix series I loved it what's next the future with Bill Gates and I will humbly say I think it has a lot of DNA in in common with this podcast it's about the future it's about what could possibly go right so can you just tell us a little bit about how was that experience making that show and is there any memorable moment maybe an outtake that didn't didn't make it into the Final Cut well five years

ago I did a a documentary with Davis gugen time inside Bill's brain and he picked things I was working on that could fail nuclear fusion uh polio and uh Magic toilets that don't need sewer systems and that was an interesting Paradigm you know why was I putting money into those when essentially no one else was this one is quite different because it takes topics that like misinformation that I don't know the answer I mean literally that's one of the few problems I say Okay young people we screwed this one up you better create around it

you know is AI going to help is a I going to hurt it was fascinating talking through with my kids did they want to be on the series you know and two of them were like Ah that's doesn't seem like a priority and then ph's like yeah you know Dad you you're so out of it on this digital stuff you still try to send me email uh let me straighten you out on these things which you know really became uh the case you know I met people that I hadn't talked to much before I'd never

met Lady Gaga before uh and you know so that was kind of a privilege and you know way very interesting person you know on the global Health we had so much footage you know that's the one that I worry will any will it get the viewership that the others will get because you know we really do know what to do in that space it's it's kind of amazing and because it's far away people I think would learn a lot because you know they they're not confronted with 500,000 Malaria deaths a year and the fact we

see a path to drive that that to zero I mean I think the tagline come for Lady Gaga stay for Global Health like you got it you got it absolutely yeah Netflix might use that on its rotation what are you currently most excited about in terms of the technologies that will make a massive difference of changing what's possible at scale yeah the current situation is that all the things I'm working on that relate to Innovation whether it's climate or these health issues a lot malnutrition infectious disease or you know digital tools for say teaching or

or health the pace of innovation is faster than I would would have expected and I you know I have a prettyy high expectation I go to product meetings and say how come we can't do this twice as fast just do that many times a day uh and yet Innovation is even exceeding my best hope so it's super promising in all of those areas you know take malnutrition almost half the kids in Africa their brain and bodies don't develop and we haven't understood chemically they're getting enough calories you know what are the micronutrients or the mixing

in their diet that causes them to be on average 5 in shorter than they would be and you know 20 IQ points less capable than they should be which for them and their countries is pretty profound and now with the latest tools of science you know looking at these bacteria in the gut the microbiome and okay how do we influence that we clearly have a path to solve malnutrition and you know people should go wow that that is a very very big deal in terms of of the uplift that comes out of that you know

on the energy side things like either getting fision or Fusion to provide both very cheap and constant reliable electricity you know that's a longer time frame in in the the fusion case so but you know there's a ton of companies I'm invest in in five so deep understandings of complex science things including all these diseases this next 20 years is going to be mind-blowing and actually knowing a little bit about the Mal nutrition go the next level depth on the bullion so make it a little more tangible so people could say oh my God we're

there now yeah well with malnutrition if you don't get the right vitamins during pregnancy or in your first several years you can never catch up you know so it's a sad fact you don't get to go back and say okay eat your weedies uh and you get the IQ points and the the physical capabilities and it's weird that you're just missing small amounts of things like vitamin A and vitamin D and so how do you solve that well you could fortify a food like us breakfast cereals are are fortified but you have to find some

food that even the poorest households who are the most likely to be malnourished because they're not getting eggs and and milk and meat and it turns out these bullion cubes are preferably bought by low-income households because it gives them something tasty and it's very cheap relative to how tasty it is so now we're going to put a lot of vitamins particularly vitamin A into that bilon Cube it raises the price about 3% to do that something I love about what you do is you identify the problem you bring data to it you test it figure

out like especially because you're working with populations who are low income in Africa the poorest of the poor like even if you're raising the price 3% you have to build that into everything that's happening and so now we want to get into all of the different areas that you're focused on and so let's start with climate uh I was lucky enough to have dinner with you and Reed and a few others a few weeks ago and one of the interesting things you were talking about is you were saying how one of the interventions that we

need to do is around cows I feel like everyone sort of knows that maybe cows contribute to climate but you were giving me very specific interventions that could move the needle could you talk more about those yeah so there's basically two ways to help with cows cows are about 5% of global emissions which is pretty unbelievable wild uh and if your goal is to get to zero you you don't get to skip the cows or the steel or the cement or you know any of those big areas so there's a whole class of solutions of

making meat without cows uh today it doesn't taste as good and it cost too much it's going through a little bit of a lull but you know those companies imposs Beyond Memphis and others uh are pursuing that in terms of the cows we actually have we pursued many solutions so one is to vaccinate the cows in a way that they're gut by bacteria that emit the methane which is also called natural Gast or stage4 which is a the second most important greenhouse gas you can vaccinate them and that species of bacteria uh isn't there their

stomachs are very special because they can eat grass you know it's a three-stage uh fermentation process basically there's another way you can change what they eat and you could either put that in their water or their feed there is a drug to change the microbiome not a vaccine but a drug that looks very promising and then there's a solution where you stick a sort of a metal thing into the skin of the cow and it actually burns the methane and all of these look to be quite cheap and implementable even in Africa and so I'm

you know this is one where I wasn't hopeful when I I got started a decade ago and now it's just a question which solution for which country ends up being the the best yeah some of it's similarly amazing to like what you did with the toilet and all the rest it's like doesn't look like it's possible now it is and it makes a huge difference one of the other funny things when we were talking about the discovery of the workaround cows over the dinner tables once you focus on it it's not just the systemic climate

change but it's also the questions about like for example what this can do for quality of life in Africa right so say a little bit more about like milk production and cow breeds and other things cuz it's like I never thought bill as the cow expert but here we are well I didn't grow up knowing much about cows uh so protein is a very important part of a good diet and foods with proteins tend to be very expensive so if you can make chickens and cows live longer and be more productive then that's super beneficial

so the West has taken these cows these holsteins and driven them up so they make 30 lers of milk a day whereas the normal cows uh make less than three lers a day so you have this factor of 10 productivity through the genetics of that cow now you can't just fly a whole Steam down to Africa because the heat eat and the diseases it's not adapted but if you do the cross breeding properly only giving up a little bit of the productivity say down to 20 lers still a factor of six better you can improve

those cows you also take the idea of grazing where the cows are going out into areas that are now being fenced off and you can change it so the cow's largely stationary and the food which they call fod is brought to the cow so you avoid these incredible conflicts but between the the grazers and the the other farmers and so it's one of the most exciting Foundation things and once you we do the R&D and get those good cows in it's private Market sustainable we're further along with chickens you know so I was in Ethiopia

a few weeks ago seen that we've cut the price of chickens in half women are who do this you know they make extra money they give some of the extra eggs to their kids as well as as selling them so it's taking but it's leveraged off of the West you know that spent the last 100 years doing selective breeding of of both uh chickens and cows so obviously when we're thinking about chickens and cows it's climate change it's malnutrition it's potentially war and conflict if we zoom out on climate change what is the sort of

statistic that for you sort of represents the gravity of the situation or what are you working towards to decrease when you think about you know climate in general well the the size of the emissions and which is over 50 billion tons CO2 equivalent per year uh and the pie chart of okay you know one of the big five areas you know like transport is one of the big five but then you know cars planes boats trains underneath that you know electricity which is coal natural gas uh industry buildings agriculture you know I want everybody to

have that pie chart in their head and you know the theory of change which is that we need to make all those things without them costing more you know I always say there's two numbers 50 billion and zero uh zero is what we want emissions to be and zero is what we want the extra cost of green cement green beef green rice uh you know green car uh we want it even at the low end where you park on the street because even if the world should pay a lot for green things they won't because

it's a global problem the real problem is for future Generations the negative impacts have been somewhat overstated for the current generation actually but the because it accumulates and gets worse over time if it causes us to help those future Generations that you know uh it's not not a a terrible thing the damage is mostly in poor countries uh it's almost like people didn't realize weather's always been a problem and they're like oh every bad weather thing that's climate no there was bad weather uh before and it's you know slightly getting worse but it's near the

equator where your absolute temperatures defeat outdoor work and the current crops that we have that's where you're getting into conditions that humans have never thrived in well on the electricity side and we'll get to nuclear in a minute cuz you and I share a passion and that being a great source and there's all kinds of things one the need of electricity second you have good scalable clean cost-effective power you can solve all kinds of ills what are the other energy sources of Renewables and green energy that are capturing your attention outside of nuclear well of

course we want to keep driving solar to be cheaper you know that's gone way better than was expected uh and there's some new things using perov skites that'll drive the efficiency up of that you know we want to drive wind cost down including offshore wind which is still quite a bit at a premium we want to improve energy storage but it's not realistic to think we'll completely solve that problem which is why why you you need nuclear in in the mix uh as well geothermal actually looks like it might play a role you know the

Western half of the United States actually has pretty good hot rocks uh and then there's geothermal companies that want to dig really deep holes uh that's more early stage but fvo and one other company are showing that they can actually get reasonably good pricing and now they're scaling up uh you know Google just did a purchase agreement at at a premium to help them scale up which is uh you know all the tech companies are very oriented towards not raising their emissions which will take advantage of that to get these products onto a learning curve

you know eventually we want to have a zero green premium but somebody has to help get us you know which solar was very subsidized and then under certain depth definitions has now gotten to a a zero green premium there's a few things like title that probably is pretty limited uh you know solar panels in space maybe you know some people have even talked about okay put the whole data center up there uh it's just bits uh actually moving bits from space to ground is easier than moving energy uh from space to ground so you know

in particularly because launch costs are down you can at least dream of of those things that's kind of uh a far out thing but uh you know should be in the portfolio of of innovation one of the things that I think that it's useful to highlight for most people is they like for example the current discussion of AI is always going to be all this electricity but the investment that all the hyperscaler companies are putting into the kind of how we make clean D centers how we have clean power and all the rest is like

that subsidy for the R&D and these Advanced purchase Agreements are exactly the kind of thing where you kind of like different ways of conceptualizing public private good yeah I mean I say that rich countries Rich companies and Rich individuals should bootstrap the market for these green products you know we should buy clean Aviation fuels you know some nations may mandate uh that for private Aviation which that would definitely be a good thing because it would get the volume to go up so that eventually we can get something with a uh either a zero or very

low green premium into commercial Aviation which is another 6% of the emissions we have to get all the way to zero so yeah the the and it's important to remember that all that data center demand it's big numbers and it's coming quickly over the next six or seven years but it's not as much as electric cars or electric heat pumps so we've our climate solution because you can't avoid using the energy somehow the only non hydrocarbon way we really know how to make energy is in a portable form is electricity so we get rid of

coal and natural gas but you have to make a lot more electricity to replace the the either heating or industrial uh capacity that those direct hybrid carbons provided and can you tell us a little more about solar you were telling me actually about the amazing increase in ability of solar panels and like what percentage of the sun they capture for energy which was fascinating but you also said that you don't think you know batteries aren't going to be here in time or is it we just need more time to get the batteries where they are

the cost is too high and I feel like not having the batteries we need is what is inhibiting solar from being the energy source that can save us all most places we should be adding solar as fast as we can and we're actually you know limited by the grid capacity so I love solar you know the efficiency you know started out at like 10% it's in the 20s now it could get as high as 40 with new approaches over the particularly profs guide over the next decade or so but it's not just a 24-hour storage

problem lithium ion batteries are now sodium and others will solve your 24-hour problem but you have periods of time like the Midwest gets a cold front where you get 10 or 12 days all the batteries ever made in history for every car every computer wouldn't store a day of electricity and if you're only using a battery once a year that is you charge it and it's sitting there for this unusual thing that's super expensive electricity instead of getting the capital value out 365 times a year you get it out once so various seasonal and bad

weather things uh where you you don't want to shut off power particularly if it's being used to heat homes it's way more complicated than people think electricity doesn't move long distances today it's mostly coal or natural gas plants that are fairly near to the usage and yes there's Innovation and transmission actually fairly exciting stuff but we're going to have to have a mix you know in particular if you look at a country like Japan where there's essentially almost no solar potential there and even the wind has periods where you have too much or too little

the US happens to be very blessed we have incredible wind and uh solar resources and these open- Source models that are now we're modeling out okay what does that Energy System look like are are part of seeing okay when can we get there and there's a lot of these goals that uh are not well thought through it it's going to be harder than we wished it would be one of the things that you already mentioned gesture at before is that part of the reason why we need nuclear uh fision and fusion is because of the

fact that the all these awesome Renewables solar wind uh Hydro Etc um well Hydro can do a little bit more 24 but yes but they have they have limitations on when they generate and when they don't and so and then battery storage is a challenge and so you and I have invested in some fusion things together uh say a little bit about what's the hope uh and the and the possibilities for fusion fusion is where you take the big atoms like uranium and as they split you get energy and fusion is where you take the

small atoms primarily hydrogen as as you put them together you release energy the middle of the periodic table is uh the most stable and so you're getting relativistic energy uh uh through the that Mass decrease Fusion is very difficult uh it involves you know temperatures that are like the center of the sun you know millions of degrees and so that's plasma physics which we know a lot more about you know we're using AI tools to study those things and now there's a variety of techniques tokok uh which uh Comm Fusion System is using being the

one with the most credible schedule for say 10 years from now most the others are probably more like 15 years away but at some point Fusion Energy will be extremely cheap and it's not it doesn't have the same waste problems that Vision does you know I think those are are solvable problems and I'm investing in that because that's more like a six-year time frame if everything went perfectly so we society as a whole even though a lot more money is coming into it we're still under investing in fusion and fusion given that the value of

cheap electricity specifically is so fundamental to society I mean if you know somebody says you we have a water shortage no there's a lot of water it just takes energy to move that water and desalinate it so if energy is cheap you have infinite wonderful water everywhere in the world but the energy is is too expensive right now to do that at scale even recycling things you know why can't we you know atoms don't leave the planet tiny bit of hydrogen but it's all there and the reason we don't is that the energetic costs of

restoring things to their original state is is too high well one of the um for our listeners a ter power super awesome way of kind of actually using nuclear fusion waste as Fuel and so getting a compounding effect is one of the things that you guys have been working on for number of years maybe even 10 2006 is when the fision company ter power gets started yeah exactly um now one of the things that always amuses me about some of the current public dialogue around AI is like oh is this going to accelerate climate change

because of the electricity cost and I think what you know most of these people are not realizing how we can also use AI to help us with climate so because like if we can get a lot more intelligence applied to various problems that can help us with clim say say a little bit about how you're thinking in that Arena you know the extra electricity load is you know it's there but it's it's like a 10% add-on you know it'll challenge the way that we do green accounting a little bit and I wish fision and fusion

were sooner because this sort of gold rush for AI backend capacity is kind of the next a years and even fision will only be able to make a modest contribution in the 2030 time frame to that uh electricity Supply so the value of AI in solving the scientific problems of okay how do you grow how do you make plants more productive okay you model photosynthesis and you model how you change the plant genetics in order to double the activity that's a very profound Advance improving photosynthetic efficiency in fact you know because it's kind of a

far out thing the foundation is the primary funer of that as as the we show that it it can work okay other other people will come into that but anyway AI for material science uh biology it is a a gigantic accelerator so take whatever green product you think is going to be the hardest to get the zero green premium rethink how hard that's going to be because the AI tools are so phenomenal at accelerating all of these Paths of innovation yeah and actually one of the things I've been thinking about is like while it's a

big electricity cost for training these scale learning machines once you have that intelligence like like that's how we've made everything is through intelligence once you have that intelligence to amplify across the board like applying that to climate change has got to be a like there's got to be some multiplier effect of we get this much actually savings and carbon and other kinds of things through the application of this electricity I I don't know what the multiplier will end up being but I'm certain it's there no it's absolutely there there are some goals like not going

above 1.5 degrees that even with AI being a net positive contributor because of the difficult of scaling in all the areas in all the countries uh you know some of those goals we will miss but the we will avoid the level of heating that would be disastrous and we will need to do some adaptation particularly in in poor countries so I want to switch gears another area where I think you're probably best known is global health and I think it's an area where AI can do so much and my husband is a public health data

scientist so he's particularly excited about this area of the interview you have focused on the eradication of disease and I think but fact check me in 1980 the who declared that small poox was eradicated and that's the first and only disease that we have eradicated you've said let's tackle polio let's tackle malaria how do you pick what is the next disease you're going to tackle like what an amazing ambition and then how do you go after it yeah so most diseases we're going for a burden reduction only very few diseases should you try to go

for eradication because it's very very hard to get to zero and right now with polio you know we're in Afghanistan we're in Gaza we're in Somalia we're in DRC and you know we're having to execute High coverage vaccination campaigns against misinformation and violence in the toughest places in the world so it's very very hard polio close there's one called guinea worm which is compined to Africa where you know President Carter just got to a 100 he's been a a champion of that uh so we're hoping he'll be alive not only uh to vote in the

election but also to come to the guinea worm celebration party he's it's going to take a couple years so uh he's going to have to hang on a little longer so the magic thing that happened at the turn of the century was people got serious about global Health about really measuring okay kids die of diarrhea but what caused that diarrhea they die of pneumonia malaria okay it's more clear what that is but let's even though there's no Market the people who die of malaria half a million kids a year they it's not like you can

make a business case of hey go to Silicon Valley and do a malaria startup and you know look at that spreadsheet uh the line that says life saved will look good but the line that says uh profit will have a lot of red numbers cuz you they can't afford these tools so medical science is very distorted towards Rich World conditions and even amongst Rich World conditions towards cancer and uh a few other things so the incentive system is you know potential could be improved but the Gates Foundation that's our place we come to fill in

is that the things that aren't Market driven like getting diarrheal vaccines cheap enough for all the kids of the world not just the rich kids who don't die of diarrhea but the the that also used to be a half million now down to 100,000 so as we went from 10 million under five deaths per year in the at the turn of the century to 5 million diarrhea was one of our best pneumonia we got a vaccine out for that which was a very expensive vaccine that we worked with all the vaccines companies Western and Asian

to get those prices down and so we're we're basically driven by the inequity where we say why do mothers die in childbirth 20 times as much in Africa why do kids die 50 times as much in their first five years in in poor countries particularly Africa but also southeast Asia and so we're you know taking all of those and saying okay let's find the best science ien let's understand the field conditions you know is this stuff deliverable uh will it be accepted you know we have crazy ways of killing mosquitoes that that alone doesn't get

rid of malaria but if you treat a lot of humans and the reinfection rate has been massively reduced then you can get to the point the US got to because we had malaria where you've cleared during the low season that's the uh winter here and the dry SE seon there you've actually cleared the py site so there's no humans so there's no reinfection uh taking place and you know in the next hopefully well less than than 20 years we have 5 years now we need to do the tools so our goal is to finish polio

during this 5 years and then with new tools get the credibility to get the world to fund a a malaria eradication starting in 2030 yeah totally awesome one of the other projects we work on together is AI and Drug Discovery and so this is one of the ones I think we may actually even begin to see you know some of the earliest you know kind of global benefit from so where in what areas of AI drug Discovery are you kind of most focused on and think can make a kind of a global Health difference understanding

protein and molecular shape space is a perfect AI problem because we have databases the protein database that you know we have uh 150,000 molecules we know the shapes and so we've trained AI on those their ability to predict the shapes and therefore the drugable sites in these proteins uh you know that is accelerating medical Discovery there was actually a company called schoder that was doing it prei but now there might be 20 times as many people uh and uh progressing much faster because AI is is very very well suited to this and eventually AI won't

just model the lowlevel what the shape is but it'll model the cell and the organ and the organism and so even complex disease Dynamics you know it's beyond human understanding to map out all the different things that go on the AI models as you gather the data which will be the limiting factor will help you understand you know over nutrition malnutrition uh way better than we do today so you know most things put aside neurological in the next 10 to 20 years I would say the likelihood of dramatic uh medical advances even in the neurological

one thing Alzheimer's uh I'd say those would be solved and I love talking to these companies about okay which part of the problem they're solving I mean one of the things that strikes me is I feel like it's super fashionable today to be oh the world is terrible the world's a dumpster fire it's getting worse the past 30 years have been horrible the next 20 are horrible and yet talking to you I'm like no stop if we actually look at the data things have been getting better especially in global health over the last 30 years

and often because of AI the future's bright there's so much that can happen and you just sort of touched on not just sort of the technological progress but also some of sort of bureaucratic some of the some of the other things that perhaps AI or or else can unlock are there things that AI can unlock that are just boring administrative or helping healthcare workers that aren't sort of about cuttingedge technology but are other ways that AI can help in the public health field you know in the same way that the microcomputer Revolution allowed me at

a young age to think okay Computing will be free therefore what would an individual do with free Computing uh and you know Paul Allen and I kind of saw that and said okay software is the only thing that will hold that back whereas older people kind of thought o computers are expensive and so the idea of oh it'll be doing spreadsheets or word processor they'd be like are you kidding me uh that's just too expensive here it's even more mind-blowing that you could say white collar worker capability and eventually although robotics is still uh very

specialized eventually horizontal blue collar productivity will be very inexpensive so you know I take an MRI diagnosis that a friend has and you know chat GPT does such a good job of explaining it uh you know and showing you know where it got that material the creativity the fluency is kind of mindblowing and so all of us should have this crutch of yes if you just want to know what fertilizer is Wikipedia was good but if you want to know what a trip with a 16-year-old for four days with a budget of $4,000 to Italy

in August looks like nobody wrote that thing but the the AI uh if it's connected up properly it is mind blowingly good at those things so we're already all you know in our life of uh you know writing poems or uh speeches or uh understanding or having complex material summarized you know we're already getting a a a huge benefit and you know that you know a lot of white color work uh you know should already be either more productive or you know drive towards towards higher quality so actually one of the things this conversation is

reminding me of that I haven't actually ever asked you is you know there was this decade or so of a lot of focus on personalized medicine where are we at currently on that is that improving is that is the is the promise of that turning out at all I always am put off by people's fascination with n equals one medicines uh you know a half million kids die of malaria you know millions of people are diagnosed every year with Alzheimer's so I'm just the impersonalized medicine guy I'm like uh you know the world does not

have the resources to do n equals one Solutions if some super rich person you know funds that maybe it helps the scientific discovery path but you know I couldn't bring myself to be involved with that because it's so unjust to take finite resources eventually yes understanding everyone's genetics and saying okay your drug doses different because of this uh and so you know I'm I'm kind of taking a provocative position uh on this the the science that goes under that name is very good science the people who work on that are very well intended it's just

you know we have rare diseases we've created such an incentive for them versus widespread conditions we're not really uh allocating that effectively particularly I mean the insane stuff is is the the diseases of the the poor countries so can you actually say more about you've traveled recently Africa Asia all over about the conditions with healthcare workers on the ground what have you seen there and how can we help improve them well people should understand that most people in subsaharan Africa never meet a doctor not when they're born not when they're sick not when they die

and so it's this is not a doctor's thing so your image of healthare health care for most people in those countries is Primary Health Care a modestly trained person who can give you some antibiotics bed net vaccines very very importantly to give a a pregnant women their prenatal checks you know now we'll get an ultrasound evaluation in we'll see okay which 10% of pregnancies might be complicated and then the woman does need to get to somewhere where there's trained Personnel who could do a C-section so we can see with this AI trained ultrasound is it

going to be a complicated pregnancy and the predictions are stunningly accurate and go to that all that trouble which you couldn't afford to do for all pregnancies and you know so the greatest shortage of doctors in the world is there and so the idea that in native language through your smartphone which okay not everybody has but times on our side uh even in the the poor countries on this you will get health advice and a lot of the diagnostic tools will be available at a a point of care where individuals you know can take a

lot of people experience this with lateral flow covid tests you know now we're trying to convert those to be uh point of care but molecular tests and and still super cheap but also more more sensitive more uh accurate and so Healthcare is you know it's in a we only have $100 per person per year versus in the us where we spend 15,000 per person per year so it's you know it's a 150 times different and you know in fact there is triage involved in okay which things should you treat now even things like blood pressure

cholesterol obesity my hope is that not only are the cost of those treatments going down we're also going to put them into forms where it's like yearly dosing and so the cost in the delivery system of getting glp1 to all Africans you know 10 15 years from now you know will be able to do that so in addition to the elevation of humanity through all forms of of kind of global medicine and what is actually in fact Healthcare uh education is another area that you and the and the um foundation work on intensely and you

know obviously people have encountered AI a lot with this you know it's kind of like you know what is what does it mean um what are some of the the kind of maybe more surprising or other kinds of use of AI and education whether it's you know kind of a globally available tutor or other kind what are some of the AI for education for the world that's kind of captured some of your attention well I think the first thing to admit is that Tech lovers like myself have talked about the benefit of Technology being used

in education for our whole career and the actual benefit for the average student has been very very modest if you're a motivated student who can get on KH Academy 2 hours night or watch YouTube videos about photosynthesis wow you know people like ourselves we are able to learn in a way that's unprecedented you know there's a company called the Great Courses where I when I'm on the the treadmill I love watching uh those things just so much great stuff out there but the current math achievement of a high school graduate in the US is not

better than 100 years ago it's not like medicine uh where there's new tools and new understanding if if I said oh in 1900 the best math teacher was then you couldn't contradict me because it may be true and so we've done a lot and you know I'm I'm a Believer but AI because of the fluency and personalization I think we we can have very high aspirations of how we mix social experience and the cloud CL room experiences with the teacher and working on your own that correcting your pronunciation as you read things immediately telling you

no you didn't get this math problem right you know not turning in homework so two days later after the poor teacher spent all this time you're like well was that a manipulation error or was that a conceptual understanding error the AI uh and kigo is on The Cutting Edge of this but there's others like ck12 many that it'll say yes you you those two minuses you didn't cancel those uh properly as opposed to no you set the problem up wrong because you know these two trains you didn't get the when they pass each other algebraic

equation properly and you know so the the idea that it will learn how a tutor keeps students motivated you know using the domain like sports or health or Construction ction that the student can relate to the the promise of having fantastic personal tutors in the inner city us and in poor countries is super exciting and you know talk about an area that's underfunded you know Global education is and the magic formula for countries uplifting themselves is to have good health and good education and then their economy grows their tax collection grows and they're they're very

self-sufficient and that's you know why we want to help countries get out of the poverty trap not because it's an endless guilt thing but if we help them get there not only morally but economically stability you know many good things flow from those those countries being well off Global education is a very underdeveloped field but particularly now with AI you know I'm encouraging philanthropists to get in and showing that that there are things like structured pedagogy uh where the teacher given a a very clear way of teaching that we are seeing some some very good

results you know I really appreciate I think some people are like oh the boy who cried wolf it's like you told me 20 years ago that you know mukes were going to do it or that whatever and so you know people are skeptical like are we you know are we finally there can you tell us more about the First Avenue Elementary School in New York and obviously you're super concerned about Equity is this something that is replicable that could scale well so I love Con Academy but it was mostly used by motivated students and so

for the last I think it's like eight years they've been saying okay how do we get into the classroom how do we work with the teachers explain the stuff you know yes the computers the Internet stuff is getting more pervasive the pandemic actually helped a bit with that so Saul and I were amongst the first two people who open ey was nice enough to let us mess around with early chat gp4 and a lot of the cool things like having it uh write songs and poems actually Saul taught me that stuff I was like I

wouldn't have known to ask it can write like Shakespeare wow uh and so he you know has put a lot of con resources in he gets support from The Gates Foundation and many others has created this kigo and and he last school year he had it uh in a small number of schools but including this New Jersey new Yark New Jersey school and so I went there to meet the teachers to meet the students and see you know so you meet a kid who clearly is ahead of his class and sort of the factory based

model of you know 30 kids in a classroom you definitely have a problem where you need to do remediation and catch kids up but it also you're also pained by that kid who's ahead you know and maybe checking out or being dis disruptive and yet you know you think wow we want to drive that so the personal tutor aspect allows that student to sometimes be off on his own sometimes helping the other students and this you know con dashboard along with quigo which is seen you know so when you walk in your teacher in the

morning instead of people handing homework you have to doal with that you just go to your dashboard and say okay who connected in last night how many hints did they need how far did they get in the progression uh and you know you you're giving feedback you know you can have the parents connected up to that even the thing where a paper gets turned in you don't turn in the paper you turn in the AI session so you can just say to the AI okay how much did the student do uh what's your suggestion on

uh how we get them to either help with the first draft or help with the the grammar or the the the logic so it's great to see it being there and seeing it in person reminded me of embedding it in and always with teachers whenever you have some new thing there's maybe 10% of the teachers that latch on to it and you get these great results and then when you tell the other 90% you must use this those results almost always just disappear here uh and so okay how do we make this one one that

that scales you know so that humility of how far we haven't come is even with AI we we'll have to do that but I what I saw made me even more optimistic so one of the things that people sometimes miss about the approach that you and the foundation bring to these problems is you know not just quantification of like okay cost per life saved Etc but also the systems thinking and so what are some of the kind of non-te related levers for Change and education like what are some policy things that either we as As

Americans or you know the world should be thinking about to improve education you there's a lot of very good data about not having cell phones in the school and you know some great work going on there there's very good date about boys should probably start later than they do school school day should start later there's all the learning out of the charter school movement which it's hard stop because it shows that long school day long school year are incredibly beneficial engaging the parents in a you know here's where your kids having Challenge and communicating with

them although these digital tools are going to make that far easier for the parents who want to engage in that you know we're seen now in in communities where there are Charters the even though most the kids are in the public schools those Public Schools essentially compete they either adopt those practices or find their own ways so we're you know there are places like New Orleans or DC or Austin where school performance is up and so we ought to make sure that even as we try to put AI into this some of those learnings are

Incorporated I mean a as a mother of three boys I'm like how are they going to compete with the girls what is happening so to switch gears from education I think I'm going to steal one of your own questions which is if you had the opportunity to meet with someone from the year 2100 what would your questions be for them wow how did you deal with the the AI challenge opportunity you know did you know you you said earlier that I have this view that life is improving which is objectively true there's always footnotes like

nuclear weapons biot terrorism and now ai needs to be added to that list but you know the past 50 years life in general if you're a woman if you're gay I mean they it's kind of sad in a way that because we're so problem oriented we're not very reflective about hey 5 million kids a year aren't dying you know like you mean with climate people and they say oh no climate's going to ruin the world do you think you're going to go back to 10 million a year dying no way you're not going to go

back we it it is a super big headwind because of the impacts are agricultural so you know I bring my hay the world is pretty good but that 201100 person I hope to hear how they avoided I'll call it the four footnotes AI nuclear weapons biot Terror weapons and polarization you know people being able to get along and cooperate including in how governance adapts and which AI will force governance to come up with different way of taxing people and regulating things and it's a little scary that it's happening at a time when the the broad

trust in government is is at a a very low Point both relatively and absolutely what are some of the things that you think people should anticipate coming with AI in the next 3 to 5 years well it's so mindblowing you know sometimes hard to get your hand head around it no one expected the white collar thing to come before the blue collar thing you know so in like life 3.0 they have these Hills where the computers are doing the easy things and you know warehouse work which we can't yet do was down there in the

lowlands and helping diagnose you know was way up the hill or writing legal briefs our code uh and so it's we're surprised at that order but you know the so-called Blue Collar horizontal robot that can be told you know go to this construction site and help go to this restaurant go to this hotel and clean the rooms you know even if the price is such that in the home it only drops by for an hour uh doesn't live there at at first you know th those things are I believe with within within easily within the

next decade well and actually going back to your original vision of a PC on every desk with software that would help people do their work in lives and so forth what do you think is going to come now I I think a lot of people haven't realize that part of what's happening with current AI is essentially the largest programming language will be natural language EG English and everyone will have a coding assistant not just the PC but a coding assistant what do you think going to going back to those kind of early what do you

how do you think that will transform the world well the ability to navigate data you know which a long time ago you had to have some it guy write a thing and you know okay what's the header and footer and you know report there's a thing called RPG report generation language and you know in cobal you have this section in the picture anyway you know a lot of that stuff it's so OB obsolete it it it just makes you laugh the idea you can sit down and engage in a dialogue about data in a very

rich way means that you know our ability to run businesses better you know understand PX adapt to changing things will be so incredible and it won't require custom software and in fact the whole complexion of the software Market how many applications will there be you know at first what we have is everybody adding a I every application and saying okay pay me extra cuz now I got a little AI but in fact the number of applications you need you know think of a college which has a scheduling app a finance app a support the the

student app you know they that should all be one thing that every encounter with the student to the college is all uh maintained in a rich way so the software software applications will be very different and I'm you know trying to figure out okay how quickly does that happen it's incredibly beneficial that these this software is more adapting to you including creating user interfaces dynamically than you going okay I use this software package for this and then I go to this website and do this you're a low-level clerk you know even looking at your email

the email is so stupid that you have to figure it out it only can time sort the order it doesn't know what's important and then you have your message and you have to go back and forth and you're the one who puts it little folders and things I mean the I thought the semantic level of interaction with the computer would be higher by now even without AI but now with AI the idea that it the very high level task that I'm doing you know I'm working on my budget I'm considering buying a new home that

it will be working with you not at the spreadsheet cell level but at the oh uh you know let's break this t ask down in in a high level form here's what I can automatically go and and do for you it's you know super revolutionary you know we'll all have an agent that is a utilitarian help you get things done you know reads everything you read but the things you meant to read uh it reads uh and then you know you you your agent can figure out okay which parts of that are important enough to

to take your time to [Music] understand we are now switching to Rapid Fire I'll let Reed ask the first question is there a movie song or book that fills you with optimism for the future well the better angels of our nature Stephen Pinker sort of documents how violent death you know lifespan education have gone and you know there's some lessons of why we've done well doesn't guarantee and he doesn't say that's that's the future but you know if you have one book which should get you back into the mindset of okay how far have we

come what should we feel good about I I'd recommend that one fabulous and uh what is a question that you wish people ask you more often how does malnutrition work uh you know yeah I I a lot of things I think about are are boring and we should solve with most people having to ever figure out toilets and nuclear reactors and um you know understanding disease I'm surprised people aren't more Curious you know when I first said what do kids die of I had a hard time finding out and I would have thought well isn't

shouldn't we all be asking that kind of thing uh it's more important than GDP yeah exactly I love it um so where did do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry and of course that's very broad that inspires you well when India s an example of a country where oh there's plenty of things that are difficult there the Health Nutrition education is improving and they're stable enough and generating their own government revenue enough that it's very likely that 20 years from now people will be dramatically better off and and it's kind of a

laboratory to try things that then when you prove them out in India you can take to other places and so our biggest non- US office for the foundation is in is in India and the most number of pilot roll out things were doing anywhere in the world or with Partners in India you know if you go there and you've never been you might think whoa this is a chaotic Place uh and you know you're not used to so many levels of income all being on the street at at the same time but you you will

get a sense of the vibrancy mhm all right last question can you leave us with a final thought about what is possible to achieve if everything breaks our way in the next 15 years and and what's the first step to get there the potential positive path is so good that it will force us to rethink how should we use our time you know you can almost call it a new religion or a new philosophy of okay how do we stay connected with each other not addicted to these things that'll make video games look like uh

nothing in terms of the attractiveness of of spending time on them so it's fascinating that we will the issues of you know disease and enough food of climate if things go well those will largely become solved problems and you know so the Next Generation does get to say say Okay given that some things that were massively in shortage are now not how do how do we take advantage of that you know do we ban AI being used in certain Endeavors so that humans get uh some you know you know like you don't want robots playing

baseball probably uh because they're they'll be too good uh so we'll we'll keep them off uh the field okay how broadly would you go with that we are so used to this short world that you know I I I hope I get to see how we start to rethink the these deep meaning questions Bill atour to force thank you yeah great talking to [Music] you possible is produced by Wonder media Network it's hosted by AR finger and me Reed Hoffman our showrunner is sha young possible is produced by Katie Sanders Edie Allard Sarah schle Adrien

Bane and Paloma Moreno Jimenez Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor special thanks to sya yalamanchili SAA Sapa Ian Alice Greg biato parth ptil and Ben RIS and a big thanks to Aubrey bonovich Ian Saunders Christy Anthony Alex Reed Jen cresc David Sanger Larry Cohen Alicia salmon sha Simons Denali wean Andrea dramer John Ryder the whole team at Gates Ventures and little monster Media Company