Transcript of Bill Gates’ Interview on Figuring Out With Raj Shamani Podcast

I’ll tell you a little story. So during the pandemic, me and my sister, we were watching the Netflix documentary “Inside Bill’s Brain.” And halfway through it, I told my sister that, “Hey, you know what? One day I’ll sit with Bill Gates and I’ll directly speak to him and get inside his brain,” just randomly. And she was laughing. So this one’s for you.

BILL GATES: You did it.

Observations About India

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah. So it’s an opportunity. I don’t know how. It just came out of my mouth, and it’s happening today. So thank you so much for doing this. Well, you’ve come to India quite often. Tell me something that you have observed about India, which a lot of people don’t know about.

BILL GATES: Well, people probably, because they’re here all the time, don’t recognize how much things have changed. If you go away and come back, then you see, wow, the level of entrepreneurship and the amount of innovation that’s actually taking place here. It’s pretty fantastic.

And for the foundation, we’ve been here originally because a lot of the health challenges were here, and we still care a lot about that. But now a lot of our invention is being done here, whether it’s vaccines, obviously, we have some incredible partnerships, but it’s broadening to better seeds, better diagnostics, the ways that we can use AI for health or education. So the innovation ecosystem has really exploded, and that’s going to be great for India. It’s going to be great for the world.

RAJ SHAMANI: So when you meet other leaders around the world or when you meet your billionaire friends, what’s the first thing you tell them about India? Is it the same thing, what you just told me?

BILL GATES: Yeah, it’s, you know, we had such a great experience in our work in India. I encourage people to come and tap into the great things going on.

RAJ SHAMANI: Is there anything specific you tell them?

BILL GATES: Well, my connection with India goes all the way back to the Microsoft days when we at first would hire people from India and bring them to the United States. And both the United States and India were kind of mad at us because we were taking the smart people and moving them, and then they came back here to India and created the Microsoft India work, which has been absolutely fantastic.

So, up until the year 2000, I mainly knew the tech scene. So, a lot of Bangalore, Hyderabad, seeing the country more broadly, that’s in my foundation work. So, Bihar up, seeing where we could partner and help with things. I still want to take more vacation here. I’ve done a little bit, but there’s a lot of great places in India that I haven’t been to.

India’s Global Talent

RAJ SHAMANI: Talking about Microsoft and taking people from here to US. People like Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai. There have been incredible CEOs around the world. Why do you think India is becoming a global talent capital for the world? Do you think anything special here which is out there?

BILL GATES: Well, 20% of the world’s people live here in India. And India’s had a particular emphasis on engineering software, and turned out a lot of top people. And so when you get people like Sundar Satya, who are both great at engineering and management, that’s a magic combination.

And these companies are looking anywhere in the world to find that mix. And so India’s getting about its fair share of those top leadership positions. It partly comes from having great universities, not just the IITs, but starting with them, that’s using the incredible talent that’s here.

Philanthropy and Inheritance

RAJ SHAMANI: So talking about Indian talent, you do a lot of philanthropy work here and you’ve met a lot of talented people here, a lot of rich people here as well. Do you believe that all the money that rich people have or like people who have made wealth for themselves, they should use it for charity work, they should pledge it. In India, there’s usually a lot of people believe that as parents, it is their duty to save everything for their kids, for the inheritance, right? Like the kids will get everything. What do you think is the right mindset? Using all the money for pledging and giving it back to the society or giving it to the children?

BILL GATES: Well, I think everybody gets to decide on that. In my case, my kids got a great upbringing, education, but less than 1% of the total wealth because I decided it wouldn’t be a favor to them. It’s not a dynasty. I’m not asking them to run Microsoft. I want to give them a chance to have their own earnings and success, be significant and not overshadowed by the incredible luck and good fortune I had.

Different families see that differently. I think the people who’ve made fortunes from technology are less dynastic and so they’ll even take their capital and give a lot of that away. You can have the view of giving away your capital or just giving away your earnings. And, of course, I love all philanthropy, but the tech sector is probably the most aggressive about giving most of it away.

RAJ SHAMANI: Now, there are other sectors. You have not seen that in any other kind of industry where people try to give?

BILL GATES: Not to the same degree. It tends to be giving more of the profit as opposed to the actual base capital.

RAJ SHAMANI: You know, in India, a lot of kids also fight with their parents on inheritance. Have your kids ever spoken to you and be like, “Hey, why are you not giving us everything or anything?” Has it ever happened?

BILL GATES: You know, you don’t want your kids to ever be confused about your support for them and your love for them. And so I do think explaining early on your philosophy, that you’re going to treat them all equally and that you’re going to give them incredible opportunities, but that the highest calling for these resources is to go back to the neediest through the foundation.

And they’ve seen the success of the foundation. I hope they’re very proud of the foundation. And I’ve seen cases where kids actually tell their parents to be more philanthropic. I think the younger generation sometimes actually is pushing against this idea of the wealth just being passed down mostly. And that’s so, every family’s a bit different.

Dinner with Indians

RAJ SHAMANI: I have last question on India and then we’ll get to the foundation work and try to understand you as well. If you get an opportunity to invite three Indians for dinner, dead or alive, who would that be?

BILL GATES: Well, I get to spend time with some incredible people in India and I get time with the Prime Minister and understand his vision and how we fit into that. This 2047 thing that everything is lining up to try to achieve that.

There was a great scientist, Raj Bond, who created the Department of Biotechnology. There was a mathematician, Ramanujan, who I would have loved to have met him because he was almost mysterious how he was so genius at what he was able to do.

I got to work with Ratan Tata. I’m getting to work with all of the amazing philanthropists and a lot of the innovators here. I get to see small companies. Early on I just went through some of these companies using AI in health, some for profit, a few nonprofit.

We had a great 25-year celebration and this great sitar artist came and that was a pretty special thing. So it’d be hard for me to pick. There’s so many incredible talents, you can’t pick three. I think I offend some people by not including them.

Starting a Business in India

RAJ SHAMANI: Fair. You were talking about small companies. If you were to start something from zero in India today, where would you put most of your time and what the first step you’ll take?

BILL GATES: Well, you’d mostly start a company because you think you enjoy working on something and you think you have a world class understanding of a unique contribution. For me, that was software for this day and age.

If you think you understand fusion, that’s great. If you’re successful, which that’s risky, you could really improve the world. AI is sort of the today’s equivalent of what I did when I was young to see, wow, the possibilities are unlimited. And so I’d probably be doing one of these new AI companies if I was starting out today.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you still feel there’s opportunity, a lot of opportunities in AI to build something as significant as what you have built or it’s pretty late?

BILL GATES: Well, the big companies are putting a lot of money into it and the number of companies globally is huge. Many people didn’t even know these Chinese companies were doing all this work. And yet some of the best results over the last six months have come from three or four of the models there.

When I got going in computing, it was a very small set of people. And people thought we were crazy, that we set a computer on every desk and a computer in every home. And that just seemed strange to people because they couldn’t see, they didn’t get software and they didn’t get the exponential improvement of the chips was making computing basically free.

So I’d say it’s tougher to get out in front. There will be new companies. I mean, Nvidia is almost as valuable as Apple and Microsoft. And yet they came into prominence only really in the last five or six years, although they’re about 15 years old. So there are opportunities, and there will be some new companies that use AI to achieve unbelievable success, but it’ll be two or three out of 10,000 and would I be able to do that again? Hard to say.

Misunderstandings About Bill Gates

RAJ SHAMANI: You talked about, like, when you started, a lot of people thought that, what are you doing? This is some random thing these guys are trying to do. They may be stupid, they may be thinking too big, whatever, right? And over the time, every time you do something big, usually people do not understand you or anyone, like, not just you, like, whoever wants to start something new and big. In today’s world or as of today, what’s the biggest misunderstanding about you? What do you think? What do people misunderstand about Bill Gates?

BILL GATES: Well, whenever you hear about somebody who’s got some degree of power or ridiculous amounts of money, you might think they have grand schemes, and there’s almost a sense that their values are different than your values and that you should be concerned about their agenda.

Hopefully for the people who actually do know me, and how much I love the foundation work and how I work with my friends or my kids, it’s very different from the people who just think, “Oh, wow, he’s one of these guys who’s pushing levers and has too much money and too much authority.”

Major Mistakes and Challenges

RAJ SHAMANI: So that people misunderstand about you and talk about misunderstanding. Have you made any major mistake that people don’t know about?

BILL GATES: Well, some of my mistakes are very public. I mean, Microsoft, we had lots of products that didn’t work. We did a phone operating system, and now Android took that position. So I certainly messed that up in a huge way.

For the foundation, we often have multiple plans. We wanted to have an HIV vaccine. We don’t have that yet. We’re working on a very cheap toilet, but it’s still too expensive, so that’s taking a lot longer. We don’t have polio eradication done. I’m still very committed to that, but it’s taking a lot longer than we thought it would.

RAJ SHAMANI: So talking about foundation work, you’ve impacted millions of lives, and you spend a lot in making people’s life better. What’s your biggest challenge today? Because somebody watching this might think that at your level, with so much power, influence, money, you can actually fix a lot of problems. What do you think is your problem? What challenges do you see here?

BILL GATES: Well, I love the scientific challenges. I mean, we still don’t fully understand malnutrition. We have some tools to reduce it, that’s super exciting, but I’m really pushing our research workers hard that we need to know more about that.

I do think getting money to help the very poorest countries, a lot of which are in Africa, is challenging. Asia, many of the countries are having good economic growth. And Africa has a lot of unique governance or instability or disease challenges.

Telling people they should help out other humans, even though they’re far away and speak a different language, that’s not as easy as I thought it would be. Right now, some of the rich countries, including my country, are cutting their aid budgets. And I’m very disappointed that, to me, that’s not the golden rule of treating people like you’d like to be treated.

Encouraging Young People to Help Others

RAJ SHAMANI: So what do you think all the people who are watching this, including me, young people, should do so that we could convince more people to help other people?

BILL GATES: Well, when you’re young, if you’re here in India, you can probably travel some modest distance—an hour or so—and see people who don’t have the same opportunities you do. They’re smart, but their school’s not good or they get some health problem and they’re not able to access things.

I would say, in India, programs like the aspirational district program, India does talk openly about the places that are the worst off. And that’s pretty impressive. Even issues like sanitation, that most governments wouldn’t catch them talking about toilets, this country took on a pretty aggressive plan and made a lot of progress on that. So you can go out and see people and develop empathy without going too far.

RAJ SHAMANI: And you spent hours and hours and days in this country, you spent millions on vaccines and trying to take care of health care challenges. What’s one problem you feel that money cannot fix?

BILL GATES: Hmm. You know, there’s a lot of talk about obesity. And when I saw the prime minister, he was talking about various yoga type things that people would adopt. But it’s been hard. Not many countries have gotten the behavior change. Maybe India can pioneer some approaches there.

But frankly, and I’ll sound like a technologist, the most promising thing is actually a drug class called these GLP-1 drugs that are going to go off patent and become cheap. So I always like—I’m a little over-focused on a scientific solution. So maybe a combination of that behavior change and the new tools. But behavior change is hard. We haven’t succeeded in that as much as we’d like to.

RAJ SHAMANI: Tell me one behavior we all should adopt.

BILL GATES: Well, the behavior that’s helped me is basically being a student all the time, wanting to learn things and being pretty brutal with myself of do I really understand what’s going on? Do I understand some AI thing or some disease thing?

Fortunately, I can meet with people who in many cases can help me understand and then knowledge, if you’re careful about building your knowledge, it all kind of connects together. But reading a lot, being a student, having people who can teach me, that’s been not only fun for me, but also a big part of my success.

RAJ SHAMANI: So all of people who are watching this actually feels pretty validated at this point because this whole podcast is about learning from really incredible people like you. And we have so many questions that we just keep asking to learn more, to get inside your brain. So thanks for validation.

BILL GATES: Perfect.

Gates Foundation’s Work in India

RAJ SHAMANI: What’s fascinating for me this time in your journey, like this time, your visit to India, the full Gates Foundation board is here and that’s pretty unique. And they get to experience India. What do you think? What are your priorities with regards to this nation? Why is the whole board here? What are you guys trying to figure out? What are the things that you’re doing?

BILL GATES: Well, as much progress as we’ve been part of achieving here in India, there’s still a lot to do. The child death rate is about a third of what it was, but it’s still almost three times higher than in a rich country. So we should all want to close that gap. That’s equity.

I mentioned malnutrition. The country is very serious about that. And yet, it means that your brain never develops. And sadly, if whatever dietary or disease things affect you during pregnancy, in your first year, even if later you get a fantastic diet, your brain and your physical capabilities, they don’t adjust. You’re sort of permanently affected.

We’re working with some great scientists here. A lot of the tools of biology have gotten a lot better. So I do think in the next decade, we’ll totally get to the bottom of that. And I’m thrilled to do that. And a lot of the scientists we partner with, including some at ICMR, but lots of institutions around the country, they’re also committed to that.

Predicting Future Trends

RAJ SHAMANI: So you work here a lot, and with the foundation, you work around the world on a lot of things. And because of all of this passion and data and this intention to try to help people, you’ve been pretty accurate in trying to understand trends way before normal people. You were pretty accurate in predicting so many epidemics as well. Is there something that you know which we don’t? How do you spot these things way faster?

BILL GATES: Well, the biggest change agent in my lifetime has been the miracle of digital, now moving into the AI phase of that digital revolution. The fact that as a young person, I was programming at age 13, and by 18, I had thousands of hours of really strong feedback about getting better and being pushed. It’s a really lucky thing to have such a familiarity with the thing that’s going to change the world.

I wrote a book called “The Road Ahead” a long time ago that talked about the Internet and digital money and video conferencing. Then when I moved into the foundation work, the health work, people in that community understand pandemics. And so my saying, “Hey, there’s a big risk, and the thing that’s going to kill 10 million additional people is likely to be a pandemic”—that’s commonplace knowledge if you’re in the global health community.

It’s a very small community. But I was just somebody who was listened to stating this. And sadly, most of the people who listened to that prediction listened to it after it came true. What my goal was, was for people to hear that and actually stop it from happening.

Current Fears and Concerns

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s usually the case, right? Like, people listen to pieces, golden advice, nuggets way after the time has passed. Because of this, do you fear anything today?

BILL GATES: I definitely hope that we shape AI in a positive way. It’s such a big impact on being smarter than humans that it will change our world a lot. And it’s definitely new territory.

So I have a list of about five things. AI—shaping AI properly is at the top of that list. But avoiding the next pandemic, avoiding nuclear war, bioterrorism, climate change. It’s only about five or six things that we need to minimize the chance of and use our additional wealth and insights against those things.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you have any personal fear? What’s your biggest fear?

BILL GATES: You know, it’s not like I’m afraid of heights or planes or fire or anything like that. I hope I’m—I’ll be sad as my brain gets less capable, which, as I turn 70 this year, I’d be lucky to have 20 years of being able to learn. Maybe I’ll get lucky and get a little bit more. But that disappoints me because I had such an amazing time learning things and I used to think of old people as not contributing all that much and now I’ve had to change my mind about how important old people are.

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you feel different?

BILL GATES: I don’t at all. Probably if I took an IQ test, I would do a little bit worse than when I was 25. But I’ve accumulated enough knowledge, so wisdom can compensate a little bit for a slight reduction in intelligence. And I do think it’s like a muscle that if you’re pushing yourself to think and learn, you stay—it really helps your capabilities a lot.

But yeah, I have a fear that eventually I’ll lose—I won’t want to pick up a 500-page book. I’ll look at it and go, “Are you kidding? I’m done with that.”

RAJ SHAMANI: So with age, you have not felt any changes in your brain?

BILL GATES: Not really in terms of flow.

RAJ SHAMANI: Wow.

BILL GATES: No, I don’t think so. Whenever you can’t remember something, you’re like, “Oh no!” But maybe a tiny bit of that, but then it’s just a little bit because you’re looking for it. When I was in my 20s, if I couldn’t remember something, I was like, “So what?”

Changes Over Time

RAJ SHAMANI: Is there any change you feel because, so Bill Gates at 25 and Bill Gates at 70, is there any change that you feel personally?

BILL GATES: Well, in my 20s I chose to focus on one topic from age 20 to about 31 or 32. I told myself, “Hey, I love biology and math and all these things, but I want to be the person who’s advancing software faster than anyone else.” And so I really did narrow my focus, and I didn’t take much time off, and I could stay in the office 72 hours and then crash. So my adrenaline was really unique.

Now, my understanding of how to manage people other than myself wasn’t that good. I look back and I’ve learned a lot since then, but just my stamina and focus for that period of my life, being kind of a maniac was the right thing. My competitors would say, “Oh, no, you work too hard.” And I’d say, “Yes, I do.”

RAJ SHAMANI: Do you think that’s great advice for every young person who’s watching? Be a maniac in your 20s?

BILL GATES: It’s not for everyone. But if you’re in a race and a little bit moving a little bit faster can make a difference, then, yes, your 20s, when you have no wife and no children, that’s the time to do it.

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s the time to be a little maniac about certain things.

BILL GATES: Right.

RAJ SHAMANI: You also just mentioned that you love learning, which obviously the world knows. But during this conversation also, you just talked about it a little bit again and again. What are you currently learning or what do you want to learn now?

AI’s Impact on Mental Health and Learning

BILL GATES: Well, there’s a lot going on. I just staying on top of that is something I very much enjoy, and I get to sit and talk with the top people at OpenAI, and I get to play around with things. But then when you think about what about AI applied to mental health care, isn’t that one of the most exciting things? Because we can never have enough therapists and even people who aren’t suffering massively, maybe we could help even people with mild symptoms.

What does this AI companion look like, and how can that help us? My friend Reid Hoffman just wrote a book called “Super Agency.” He’s got a really good chapter about this. So I’m pushing myself to try and understand what can we do there and meet the people who are pushing the boundaries, because I see such potential.

RAJ SHAMANI: So what would you advise young people to start learning today and from where? AI itself?

BILL GATES: Well, if you have a mathematical mind, not everyone should learn AI. These tools are going to be available to everyone, and so you ought to be a user of AI. But the underlying stuff, that’s a pretty narrow set of people who will have an opportunity to push on a new training method. And even people who grew up with software, some of them don’t really get this because it’s a bit more mathematical than it is just a programming type thing.

So as a user, if you like doing creative work, yes, AI is going to change your world. And AI hopefully can help you do things faster and better. So my prescription would be to use it for the areas that you’re excited about.

RAJ SHAMANI: Any area that you’re excited about. Learn from, learn about that, and try to make a bridge between AI and that industry.

BILL GATES: Right. I mean, the Internet has so much educational material on it. So between all that material and then an AI that can help take long documents and you can have a dialogue with it. You can do it in text or you can now do these generated podcasts about things. It’s a great time to be a learner. When I was young, I had to go to the library and read the encyclopedia alphabetically, no multimedia. This is a paradise.

India’s Role in Global Philanthropy

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah. Thanks to you guys, because the digital world, you made it easy for us. We don’t know the world, what it looked like to go to library and read about something. We get fidgety if we don’t get an answer in three seconds. I have last two questions for you. One is, in your philanthropy work with the foundation, how is India contributing to your global strategies?

BILL GATES: Well, more and more of the innovation is being done in India. India’s got a depth of talent and a desire for frugal solutions. And so even though the rich world, US, Europe, we have a lot of talent for some basic science thing like immunology, a lot of the new insights will keep coming from those institutions. But when it comes to actually putting the pieces together, including something like AI for healthcare, I was just meeting with a number of companies working on various pieces of that in India.

We need better seeds and we need better weather advice for farmers. And so although we’re going to continue to do a lot of implementation here in India, help get things rolled out, more and more of our sort of product research work will be done here, both because it benefits India, but we’re also very good if it’s saving Indian children really working well.

Our foundation has a lot of presence in Africa. So even take the classic example where India was totally the leader on this digital public infrastructure, the digital money and identity Aadhaar thing, funding the Africans to come here and learn and helping to create the open source software that makes it easy for them. That’s now a huge agenda item which is kind of a South-South thing with a little bit of facilitation from us.

Legacy and Future Goals

RAJ SHAMANI: Got it. And here’s the last question. If the world had to write one sentence next to the name Bill Gates, what would you want them to write?

BILL GATES: You know, I don’t do my work based on some epitaph. Ideally, they’d say that, wow, there were these diseases around, polio and malaria and malnutrition, and now we don’t have to think about that, partly because he championed putting more great thinking and resources into ending those problems.

I hope people look at the word polio and go, what was that? When you read Dickens novels and they talk about somebody had consumption, it’s like, what is that? Well, that’s actually TB. So hopefully some problems that we can actually finish and then move on.

RAJ SHAMANI: Which problem do you think will be finishing?

BILL GATES: Well, polio. I expect even in five years that’ll give us the credibility to go after things like malaria and measles.

RAJ SHAMANI: That’s amazing.

BILL GATES: Oh, it is. It’s going to be fun.

RAJ SHAMANI: It’s amazing. In five years we can make that a reality. It’s going to be incredible for humankind. Wow.

BILL GATES: Yeah. It’s only happened once. Smallpox was eliminated back in 1980. So polio, serious disease, it’s going to be the second.

RAJ SHAMANI: Wow. I really truly wish that it happens faster than what we’ve just talked about and I hope that more than by the time the foundation gets in full fledged in the work, I believe instead of not two, three, there could be multiple of them so that you lost counting. That should be the goal and I’m expecting for it.

Well, thank you so much for doing this, sir. It was pleasure having you. When I was a kid, I was growing up in school, you were the richest person in the world before.

BILL GATES: I gave it away.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yeah. So your name would pop up. So just to talk about you and how you made your money was a proud feeling in school and in friend circle. Everybody would respect you that “oh, you know so much about this person.” And from there, that kid sitting right in front of you and trying to being in a situation where I’m sitting with you and figuring out what’s going on in your brain, it’s an incredible opportunity. I’m so grateful. Thank you so much for doing this. It’s a dream come true.

BILL GATES: Great. We’ll have to do it again.

RAJ SHAMANI: Yes, we need to. I’ve got you on camera now.

BILL GATES: Thank you.

RAJ SHAMANI: Thank you. Pleasure.

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