I am pleased to welcome bill gates back to this table. Welcome. Bill thank you. Charlie here is what seems to me, with all of the concentration on the station, all of the great things that have taken place, two things come out of it. One is agriculture and your understanding of how crucial agriculture was and second is energy. So you pose this question. If you could have a superpower, what would it be . You could think about being able to defy gravity. Being able to see through walls. Anything. But you said what . Bill i said energy. Getting energy for everyone would transform their life as much as anything i can think of. The idea of flipping a light switch on or setting the temperature to hot or cold, if you went to somebody in africa who does not have energy and said that was possible, it would seem as bizarre as somebody flying or seeing through walls. It really is a kind of superpower. Americans have the equivalent of 200 humans pushing an axle on their behalf so their lights light up and materials get made and their food gets made. You know, it is that much modern life is that much about energy intensity. Charlie youd showed two things of interest. You showed a map of africa at night, and parts of africa are almost dark. 18 of the population do not have electricity. Bill in africa, unless we do better than the current expectation, 80 will be without withoutf the people africa 30y will be in years from now. They have not progressed to that much. When you go there at night, melinda and i were at the suburbs, it is eerie because all of the light is people burning things. You think that this is some strange movie, not a city at all. Charlie the goal is to cut Greenhouse Gases by 80 by 2050 . Bill yeah, as long as you are emitting Greenhouse Gases, co2 in particular, it stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Not all of it, but most of it. The rest of it goes into the soil or the oceans, and then you have acidification problems. That long residence in the atmosphere means as long as you are increasing co2, you have a positive warming trend, and that warming trend is what creates the Strange Weather and causes crops to not grow as well, and particularly in equatorial regions, you are getting up to heat levels that plants and humans do very poorly at. Ironically, as you go to northern latitudes, there is a net benefit there, but a lot of humanity, particularly the poorest, live in the area where the heat will cause terrible problems. Charlie the majority of the Worlds Energy is produced by fossil fuels. Bill overwhelmingly. And if you take the forecast made, without some incredible innovation, that will continue for 40 years. Very responsible forecasts of the path we are on today, we will not be able to make a change away from that. Charlie unless we do what . Bill innovation to me is the answer to most problems, including energy. I think of india as paradigmatic because they do not have electricity, they are collecting firewood. The women are breathing smoke. They get respiratory disease. It is awful for their health, even if they survive. They do not have light at night to read. They cant get protein in their diet. There is every reason why india should have electricity. Its great for their people. Unfortunately, these straightforward path to get there is coal. Yet india is big enough, theres enough people, if they go down that path, we will not meet any of our Climate Change goals. And yet, today, we have no alternative that is even close to as cheap, including reliability, which is always a fundamental characteristic of energy systems. You cannot power india as cheaply with the other things as you can with coal. Only through innovation can you square the circle and say should india electrify as fast as it can or should india avoid Greenhouse Gas emission . But they will not admit as we have for 100 years. Charlie is this it your biggest passion . Bill it is the long lead time thing that requires so much coordination and science and politics come together i am very fascinated by it. I still have polio eradication and our health stuff as the things where i feel it, gosh, we are on track. We know what to do. This one is in the category of great importance and if you wait 20 years to get started, then the time it takes to invent, to change the system, you are really going to miss the window on it. It has a funny kind of urgency even though the damage in the next 20, 30 years is not that dramatic. Charlie youve got to get it started . Bill absolutely. Charlie you believe you could get to zero by the beginning of the next entry . Bill i believe innovation there are so many different paths. We only need one of them to work to get us the cheap, reliable energy, yes. Then you have to deploy that and get to these what are wildly ambitious goals. Charlie talking about innovation you talk about an energy miracle. What would that be . Bill well, anything that is half the price of todays Energy Cheaper than coal and totally reliable, does not depend on the wind blowing or the sun shining, that is an energy miracle. For example, if you could take sunlight and directly make gasoline from sunlight, that is called solar fuels, and there are scientists who can do that. Now, its about 100 times less efficient than it needs to be to make any sense, and so, that one is not even ready for a startup company. That when needs to be in government labs Getting Research funding, three or four times what it is getting today, and with luck, it will get to the point where companies will get started and high risk, high return investors will come along. Charlie you are looking for a miracle. You want to invest both private funding and at the same time you want to make sure the government has a role . Bill that is right. Basic research. Their unique role is basic research. The universities, the private labs. You will not get private investors to fund the level of research because thats just the very beginning, material science , stronger magnets, tensile strength, things that are will be critical, just like in the medical sector. There is a great pharmaceutical industry, but the u. S. Government spends 30 billion a year on basic health research, and it has been fantastic for the country, it has been fantastic for the world. In energy, we are down at less than 6 billion, and that is the number i am hoping, and the commitment was made in paris by 20 governments, including the United States, to double their energy r d over a fiveyear period, and that will raise the supply of innovations and make it easier for these amazing groups of investors. Charlie this Foundation Letter who is it addressed to . I had the impression you are addressing this to high schools students. Bill right, that is a new thing for us. The two things, which i elaborate on and melinda talks about women, and women have to spend lots of extra time, more than men do in the household charlie melinda writes about this . Bill right. The kid in the High School Newspaper in appalachia, kentucky, great high school, asked us about superpowers, and she said time and i said energy. As we talked about it, that really pointed out to us that those are such basic things about the experience of poor people, and even in the u. S. , people appreciate how importance energy is. There is still a time imbalance. Those became the theme, and yet these are not problems there is some 10year solution to. The Younger Generation there voiced their willingness to look at things in new ways. Todays teenagers will be in their 20s, and a lot of them, the thinking that drives innovation comes from that group. Charlie what are three crazy ideas you think might have potential . Bill i mentioned the sun being used to generate fuels. That is unique because, unlike generating electricity where batteries that store electricity are super expensive and do not last very long, storing gasoline in a big gasoline tank, you just make the tank bigger and they can sit there as long as you want. When you want the energy, you just burn it and it is very dense. It is 10 times more dense in energy content than the best batteries we have today. That would really be special. Taking Nuclear Energy and overcoming a number of problems, the cost of the plants, this safety of the plants where people worry, will you have another fukushima or even chernobyl type accident, that is a path we can go down. We could take wind that is way up in the jet stream, and capture that. Now that requires materials that are ultra strong, which would be valuable for many things. I mean, you could build bridges that would last forever. We are really on the verge of that type of understanding. There are two things that people think about. You can take solar and wind and make them very cheap. Thats probably not too hard. Then you could have a battery that is 10 or 20 times better than any battery we have today. Charlie what is so difficult about finding better batteries . Bill the problem is its chemistry, and the number of charges you can put into an area, those rules, theres not like some semiconductor thing that lets us just jam those things in. What happens is you are going between a liquid phase and a solid phase. As you do that, the solid tends to degrade. If batteries could last instead of 400 cycles of charge discharge, if they could last 4000, that would change. There are ideas along those lines. I would say all of them are having a tough time because proving that something does not degrade in some physical way over 4000 cycles, if not something you can test overnight its very pragmatic stuff. That is why batteries over the last 100 years have not improved as much as we would need them to to make this the path to do that. Now that is a very possible path. We should invest in the research and the companies along that path. But that is the one most people think is going to come and its not as easy as they think. Charlie 50 years . Bill you cant put a time on it. You take 12 paths nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, the batteries theres a total of about 12, including taking and burning hydrocarbons and capturing the carbon from the chimney stack, thats another one. If you have five companies on each of these, so 60 total, and they get the basic Research Backing them up and they get the risk capital, he even if individually they are only 20 likely, if you pursue those 60 different things, then in aggregate, the chance of success is very high. And that is what i think we should do. Charlie a twopart question before we turn to health and all youre doing. Have climate deniers gain strength or where would you put that component of our population . Bill the problem of climate denial is not a huge problem outside the United States. Charlie why is that . Bill thats a good question. The policymakers on many issues like agricultural crops like gmos, europe is more skeptical than the u. S. Is. On Climate Change, we are uniquely skeptical, particularly in terms of telling policymakers, hey, look askance at that. Theres another group that is a little bit of a problem who believe the climate is a problem but think it is easy to solve. Ok, hey, as soon as the utility guys dont stand in the way of rooftop solar, this thing is solved, not just for the u. S. , but the entire world, not just for the power sector, but transport, industry, home, everything we need. That notion that there are simple solutions. For the november talks, the idea of improving innovation, the r d was not discussed. Im actually still amazed at that. The 20 countries did commit including china and india. All the big ones you would want to. They made the commitment. We have put a lot of money into the demand side for clean energy. We have tax credits. We have what are called renewable portfolio standards where utilities are required to buy a certain percentage of their energy from these renewable sources. If you take the effect of payments that increase the price of energy, we put a lot in the demand side so does germany and japan and others we need to have a balance where we are driving the supply innovation as well. Charlie let me turn to this recent experience, everybody is talking about these ecovirus. Everyone is talking about what did we learn from the ebola crisis . Bill in the case of ebola, the private sectors ability to make diagnostics and drugs and vaccines, that was together very slowly. There is no road map for, hey, wheres our liability . Where is the regulatory path . If there are three or four Companies Working on it, which one has the best one and should work twice as fast, which should drop out that was chaotic. Only now do we have these good ebola tools, which if that had spread a lot faster, we would have felt terrible about that. Zika is, of course, different. It is spread by mosquito. There is still a lot of measurement being done to understand, is there some narrow part of your pregnancy where you can be affected . Is it required you also had dengue fever at some point . Its great the emergency was declared. This time, figuring out the private sector innovations, and including in this case killing mosquitoes, because this particular mosquito, aedes aegypti, lived in urban areas along the equator. Now we wish that we eradicated it. This mosquito carries dengue, zika, chikungunya, and historically most important was yellow fever. Charlie you have said mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal on earth. Bill thats right. In terms of what kills the most humans. Do humans kill the most humans . Do sharks . Humans killing humans is a strong number too. But unless war gets extreme in some year, the 600,000plus kids who die of malaria, which is a mosquitocaused death, that is the animal that generates the most mortality. Charlie and malaria . Bill its all malaria. Theres a few others, but malaria is 95 . Charlie what should we do about the mosquito . Bill there are a couple ideas for changing the mosquito we have been funding in order to work on dengue and malaria. One is you put a bacteria into the mosquito, and then it doesnt carry the parasite partly at all. So, we have done field trials on that, and it appears that also does work it works for dengue. It appears it also works for zika. An even more powerful tool that spreads faster, but more controversial, is to take our new Gene Editing Technology and have male and female mosquitoes pass along either something that prevents them from carrying the virus or something that kills the progeny. Those are both approaches. But use gene editing, gene drive, which means all of your children, male and female, inherit something, even if only one of your parents have it, that it is dominant in that generation to either not survive or to carry the bad virus. Charlie if you were working at a high school today if you come in a high school today, knowing what you know in terms of what is happening in genomics you just mentioned gene editing, and what is going on in technology which field would you enter . Bill it is a hard choice nowadays. Charlie because the others are so exciting . Bill division in robotics continues to be a very exciting. Not without challenges, but mostly positive enablement. Its a wonderful field and would generate tons of jobs people would want. The medical work is also an incredible thing, understanding how these genes work. In some cases you are using the Digital Tools to track the genes and understand them. There are Companies Working on roboticassisted surgery that could raise the quality and lower the cost charlie coming together between genomics and technology. Bill exactly. So the field of technology is so amazing. I also want to say energy because we want bright minds there as well. Charlie and not having energy, they will not have full development . Bill as we uplift more countries, then they get more educated and contribute more the u. S. Leads in science, but countries like china now will also contribute. Charlie and you mentioned the letter i mention it again, the idea is clean energy. Not just innovation, but clean energy. Bill thats right. Greenhouse gases has constrained it would be nice if it was only a 20 reduction, but essentially eliminating it from energy systems, that is daunting, but necessary enough that all of this parallel work is needed. Charlie you have Artificial Intelligence. Part of that has to do with robotics and finding out what that means in terms of jobs and what does it mean in terms of population that may not have a job. But there are also things that concern you that concern other people. Just you. What is your concern about Artificial Intelligence . Bill in the long run, the scale of the intelligence is unbounded. Charlie we dont know how smart we can get . Bill it will get a lot smarter than us. It will get so smart, we can say, hey, how smart are you . And it will tell us. The nearterm problem, predictably in the 20year timeframe, is labor substitution, not super intelligence. That is kind of you help every kid in school, every handicapped kid, every elderly person. You should be able to reallocate hey, if you are not needed to work in that warehouse, go out and do other things. Charlie this dovetails into what melinda says about time. Bill thats right. It will free up time doing the drudgery things, so all the things about spending time with the kids and being more connected socially, we should be able to do more of that. Charlie there is a wonderful story in part of the letter, i guess it was a family in africa, and the wife spent all of her time going to get water and bringing it back, and finally she is about ready to leave the marriage, and he comes home and the bags are packed your it and he says, what can i do im paraphrasing and she said, im doing all the stuff. Im doing everything. All the stuff at home, and you need to help me. And he agrees. He starts taking the water himself. They split that. All of a sudden, he gets involved and they determined there are smarter ways to do this. They start collecting rain. Her point is, freeing up people to have time to participate in all of the issues jointly. Bill yeah, that was interesting because when he first helped out, he was ridiculed by the other men. He was like, well, no, im going to keep doing this. What they told melinda was, that set an example for that village. We have a tiny case of that where i was driving when i was ceo of microsoft our children to school quite a bit, and apparently i dont know for sure, but otherwise used that to encourage their husbands [laughter] bill they could not say they were too much more busy than i was at that particular time. Cha