I do not consider myself a journalist. Nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though i have a day job of running a private equity firm. Leadership find how do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . So, yout 20 years or have been the wealthiest man in the world, but because you have given away so much money recently, jeff bezos became wealthier. If you had stayed in college and gotten your college degree, you do not feel inadequate . Is that right . Not given sign i have away the money fast enough to drop out of the top 10 in the market has been strong. [applause] up 35 thissoft is year. What do you attribute that . Bill the company is doing super well. The whole dream of the importance of software has really come true. Most Viable Companies in the world are these Technology Companies. Microsoft has a good share of that. I get to spend a six of my time over at microsoft. David you said the biggest mistake you have made professionally was that microsoft should have had the android technology. Why was that the biggest mistake . Phil we were in the field of doing operating systems for personal computers. We knew the mobile phone would be very popular. We were doing what was called windows mobile. We missed being the dominant by a very tiny amount. We were distracted, we did not assign the people to do the work. The biggest mistake i made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set, we were clearly the company that should have achieved that. David your two main areas of focused our k12 and health care. You decided to make another effort through Breakthrough Energy to do something about Climate Change. Why are you so worried about Climate Change . Bill Climate Change is a problem that gets worse every year and yet, what you have to do on a global basis, is very dramatic in reshaping the entire physical economy that we have. It is a very complex problem and it is a problem where i see my looking at something at the lens through the lens through the lens of innovation. The deployment of products. Helping educate people about, ok, what are the sources of these Greenhouse Gases . How do you get on a path of innovation so that you can get Global Adoption and bring emissions down dramatically . Are you doing this outside your foundation . Bill the part where you mitigate and help the poor countries with better policies, partly through development aid, that is to the foundation. The part where you invent new electricityng fuel, mehat is done directly by with a lot of investments, including the fund you mentioned. It is a fund that i assembled a group of 22 people to put money into companies that are trying to commercialize the breakthroughs. David that is a fund of 1 billion. You in 250 million dollars. You put into hundred 50 million. We will probably raise another 1. 5 billion. This is all about innovation. Withu have to make steel no emotions, it would cost you four times with no emissions, it would cost you four times than it does today. Supporting those investors, investinggh energy did not go very well in the first round. It looked like the field did because being able to bring in a depth of understanding to these things, not only have they been able to invest, the first billion will be fully committed within the next year. We have other investors. That has gone quite well in the technology, they only invest in companies who have a chance of reducing Greenhouse Gases mesh gas emissions by half a percent. They have found 20 and i am sure they will found find another 20. David i am the smallest investor in that fund. Am i going to get my money back . Bill of the things you invest in, it is probably one of the higher risk things. It is being done on a commercial basis and we are likely to have a few significant successes. It is not philanthropic in the sense that you can deduct it. [laughter] andtimeframe of the return the risk of the return, fairly high. We do expect to make a profit. David why do you think some dont believe there is such a thing as Climate Change . There are some people who dont think there is Climate Change. Takenthey must not have science courses or something. I dont know. [applause] issue. Mate is a complex understanding how you do the abatement requires a lot of indepth study. States, it has become a partisan issue, which is unfortunate. It might make it harder to achieve the type of agreements we need in the United States. Problems, the people who deny climate and the people who think it is easy to solve. We need to help educate both of those groups. David in the history of human civilization, is there evidence that people will do things that affected their greatgreat grandchildren but they will not see the benefit from . Bill they have been willing to take on difficult problems like cancer and make gigantic investments knowing that the real payoff would be many decades down the road. When that was first being pushed, people were saying, this is important. Climate changes like that. You have got to take a longterm perspective. Government, at its best, is when it is taking that longterm perspective and funding the basic r d and the policies that lead to skill deployment. Worried that there is too much power and too much data in the hands of Technology Companies. Bill what does it mean about elections . David a large part of the carbon is caused by the electricity grid, 25 or so. Bill exactly. David 24 comes from agriculture and forestry. Category is a variety of things. When you clear land, you are taking in the carbon that is in the trees and releasing all of that. Burning the land in indonesia for palm oil plantations. Cows andhing is that other grass eating species have a digestion system that emits methane and methane is a very powerful greenhouse gas. Cows account for 6 of global emissions. We need to change david how are we going to do that . Bill of all the categories, the one that has gone better than i wouldve inspected five years ago, would have expected five years ago is this work to make artificial meat. You have impossible and beyond david do you like it . Bill absolutely. You can go to burger king and by the impossible burger. Yous slightly healthier for in terms of less cholesterol. It is a dramatic production in methane emissions, animal cruelty, manure management. The pressure that Meat Consumption puts on land use. Bill electric cars . Is that a solution . Cars, theenger mainstream for passenger cars can become an electric. You have to make the transition. You have to make sure electricity is zero emissions. For trunks and planes, there is almost no chance the batteries will be good enough and there you will still need to create liquid fuels either with electricity or biofuels from waste. Fuels are amazing. The Energy Density of gasoline is 30 times the Energy Density of the best battery we can make. If you look at a container ship that crosses the ocean, having your fuel be 30 times less efficient would be 90 of the weight you are carrying would be the batteries instead of the cargo. Trunks and planes and boats, electrification is unlikely to work in those cases. We know the we need ways of making fuel that is zero carbon. David when you talk of heads of state about this, do they roll their eyes . Can i have a selfie with you . Do they really do anything . The paris climate conference, one of the things was missing was the focus on r d. Actually, france said yes, we issuehat to be a real that gets discussed. It was called mission innovation, that idea of a commitment of over 30 governments to double their energy r d was a significant milestone that came out of that conference. In order to get that commitment, i had to make a commitment that there would be Breakthrough Energy that would take things out of those labs and help get them into the marketplace. Progress. Been some climate is complicated enough that you dont want you want a broad set of people in the government to understand the complexities. In terms of the r d, unless the u. S. Is deeply engaged, it is unlikely to happen because so much of the worlds capacity to do that innovation is here in the United States. David the United States pulled out of the pirates a quote paris accord. Is that a concern to you . Will this hurt the effort to change Climate Change around the world . Bill it is a huge step backwards. Even if you meet all the current commitments in the climate accord, you are still way over most countries are behind the commitments they made. Those commitments were a set of reductions where you would emissions to2030 your 2005 emissions. The shift from coal to natural gas, which is a onetime thing, is a lot of that. The world is falling short. To have people like the United States to say, even that is unimportant, it shows how daunting this is going to be. There is no way we will get there without the u. S. Coming back in in a strong way. David do you think you could convince President Trump . Is that beyond your capabilities . Bill someone else should do that. [laughter] david the Largest Companies in the world our Technology Companies. Apple, facebook, google, microsoft and so forth. You worry there is too much power and too much data in the hands of these Technology Companies and are you surprised the government has not done something more than they have done about this . Bill technology has become so central that government has to think, what does that mean about elections . What does it mean about bullying . Wiretapping authorities . Drug money laundering, things like that. The government needs to get involved. I brag to people that i did not have an office in washington, d. C. And eventually, i came to regret that statement. It was almost like taunting washington, d. C. , and now the Technology Companies, partly seense they could have that lesson through a lot of innovators. They are very engaged. There will be more regulation, things like privacy. There should be Better Regulation that relates to that. The fact that now this is the way people consume media and it has really brought it into around that brought it into a realm that we need to shape its of the benefits outweigh the negatives. David you have three children and they seem to be welladjusted. Youve kept them out of the newspapers. Bill that is a huge problem. David if you were 20 years old today and wanted to start a new company, what company or what area would you want to start it in . Bill this is a great time to be doing innovation because the tools of innovation are so much better. There are lots of things in biology that are interesting. There are lots of things and energy that are interesting. Given my background, i would airt and i company an Company Whose goal would be to teach computers how to read so they could understand all of the written knowledge of the world. That is an area where ai has yet to make progress and it will be quite profound when we achieve that goal. Bill are you worried about the power of ai to disrupt our civilization . Bill the increased productivity will create dilemmas about what should people do with that extra time. You have to consider that a good thing even though it will be an interesting set of adjustments that have to take place. David the two must urgent issues are k12 in the United States and health care in the lessdeveloped areas. Have you made progress . Bill Global Health is our biggest area and the progress has been unbelievable. Not just because of our work but our partners, the u. S. Government spending the u. S. Government, european donors. One of the metrics of importance is the number of children in the world who die before the age of five. When we got started in the year 2000, that was over 10 million a year. Now it is about 5 million a year. It is mind blowing. People are not as aware of it as you would like for them to be. Those deaths because of getting out vaccines and understanding a bit more about nutrition, those deaths have been cut in half. Now the goal is to cut them in half again by 2030. Our u. S. Education work that is not just k12 but includes higher ed as well, the key rates, math and verbal achievement, those metrics have moved not at all. Even as the u. S. Is spending more on education, we spent more than any country in the world, and yet our results are quite a bit worse than almost all the other rich countries and even some middle income countries. Even vietnam is passing us in terms of their math results. Our work has not had the impact we had hoped for. David people come to you all the time for money. I assume. How do you resist . Bill many people. Like many people. Once you pick what you care about, if somebody has something that can make a difference, we are super interested. We have a staff of 1500 people and if it is to do in Global Health, some people come out and talk through with you what your innovation is and how we can partner with you. That is clearly in our area. Cant is something that improve k12 education, we will be very interested. If people are asking outside of those things, fortunately, you can say no because the focus is key to philanthropy. David raising children is difficult. Jackie kennedy said if you mess up raising your children, nobody nothing else matters. You have three welladjusted children. How do you avoid spoiling kids like that . Bill i think that is a huge problem. Our kids have benefited from having a great education and opportunity to travel. They are very lucky in that sense. Andng sure the visibility the way people treat them is natural. So far, they have handled it well. Melinda is the one who deserves almost all the credit for the kids so far doing very well. Our kids, we have said to them, the money is going to the foundation and they do not think of themselves as aristocratic. David do they say, can you give me a little bit . [laughter] bill they will get a little bit. David how much has your Foundation Given away . About 40 billion. David if people say, i want to do something about Climate Change but i am just one person. What can an average person do that has some impact on Climate Change . Bill certainly, they can take things like these new meat how they buy electricity and they can help drive up the scale of the green solution. The most important thing is there political voice. There is going to be a need to put substantial resources into this effort. A bipartisan solution and to send the right signal to the market, if you just win one year and then he gets repealed, that does not help at all and then it gets repealed, that does not help at all. Let people see what the policies will be over the next 30 years on a consistent basis. Isis a just higher bar it a much higher bar than a onetime victory. His father died when he was four and his mother had to move the family to a rough neighborhood in the south bronx where he did not fit in. Again, thisoved him time to a military boarding school in pennsylvania. Westmore found his calling as a leader in military school going on to johns hopkins, oxford, and Deutsche Bank before volunteering for a tour in northern afghanistan as an officer with the 82nd airborne division. Back in the united