Walker Learners Podcast number 6 27 to this week. It's my birthday tomorrow. That's right. It's Oh, my God. Kyle's Clarke's birthday. Kyle Clark is rad on Twitter. It is actually my birthday the day this is out. So there, listening to this on my birthday today. Happy birthday. It's your birthday, You know, like that is very nineties birthday. So yeah, I mean, it's you know,

we have to pay royalties if we saying the actual birthday. So it's a bargain berth, Dick. I better birthday song. I like the casual birth Teoh Rob Thomas approach to it. There. You got your parking broke? A Yeah, Yeah. You're talking birthday er kind of morphed into a lettuce. More set of the it will. It's your birthday. God, no people that I could like having like nineties demons inside of you. Your shirt open, Rob Thomas.

Alanis. More set coming after. It's like that scene in Scrooge where you get to the elevator and depth of my body is a road map of the nineties. This'll podcast is I'm gonna say this was huge for us. Um, this is Bill Gates. Oh, I've heard of him. You have you heard of William H. Gates? The third and Ah, Israel. Full name William H. Gates. The third, you know,

about the third try to keep track of that shit. Yeah, well, you escaped William H. Gates. The third. Which, by the way, if you're, ah, billionaire captain of industry, I feel like traditional captain. Industry rules would dictate that you need to go by initials on like he should have been. Wh Gates the third. Oh, that's a good name.

It was my dad's name. My dad was a bowler like that. Didn't feel like they're obvious. Arming. Yeah, and Bill Gates was actually very disarming. Super sweet guy. It was. It was really fun to talk about. We went up there because the annual Gates Foundation letter eyes is come is coming out today. Actually, the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation, where they basically tell you the Gates Foundation has set aside e. I mean, it's got a million dollars of money that they're, uh it's a really inspiring letter,

like like I was reading through it. It's it's amazing, like they're such a great foundation. I mean, you know, one school of thought is hoard all your money and another school of thought is like fix the world. Give as much of it back as you can is incredible. So we've accomplished. So there's there's a few things about this. Episode Number one. We talked a lot about the Gates Foundation, you know, we drifted a bit into some of the nerdier stuff that I wanted Teoh asking about what did ask him if he's played Zork and I'm very proud of You know what? I forgot to ask him. Gift if Ah oh, I know I'm mad.

I forgot I should have asked him the ultimate mansion for me. But one fell in particular was exceptionally keen on focusing on the foundation as you'll hear you know, which I completely understand. I mean, like, there, you know, the work they're doing is incredible and of course, should be trying to save the world and to save the world. Could you please stop talking about your computer games from 1981? But what kind of world we want to live in without disease or poverty? If you can't talk about obscure text adventure so but what I will say this, you know, in the moments where we drifted into that with him. Obviously, he was passionate.

He's obviously passionate about the Gates Foundation. But there was something really special I could see in his just being in front of him and seeing in his face, talking about Comdex, talking about, like, the old days, the real days of computing and how they built the TRS 80. I mean, like it really I could see like this is a guy, this heat, that he loves this hearing him rattle off old program code language, just sort of just like it's nothing so much fun. So it was a really great experience. And so when we were wrapping up the interview the reason that it's that you will see that it's an hour and 15 minutes long, um is because as well as you know, his bill was leaving to go do something else,

they said, OK, so if you want to go downstairs, you can talk some other people from the foundation on at first, you know, like I fully admit, I think I was like, Oh, you know, I think I'm good, you know, we got we got the guy like I think, uh, you know, I think I think I think we're good, but I thought,

you know, let's I'm kind of curious to see And they said, Well, there's this guy named J Winger and Jay is heading up. He's an epidemiologist and he's heading up Our efforts to eradicate polio was like All right, well, that actually sounds kinda interesting. So I sat down and talked to Jay for about 35 40 minutes on then Julie Sunderland. She handles the investment pool that the Gates Foundation essentially invests of, like a billion and a half dollars, like like you would if you were in, like, an investment pool. But instead of trying to make money, what they're trying to generate is a better lives for people. So I talked to her for like another 35 minutes.

So Bill is 0 to 40 minutes, and so if you feel like I got it, you know, like that's that's all I came here for. That's great. But I would also further challenge you to listen to Jay, who had any jail credible story that blew my mind incredible stories about about literally trying to eradicate a disease from the human race on, and Julie was a phenomenal talker and super engaging and so many things that I didn't understand about. Like, like why you can't just go give a country a billion dollars and okay, you're fixed like ways that they have to do that by building infrastructure and creating technologies and things that actually, like, make the social soil fertile for for them toe to flourish. So I would say, you know, give it a shot and listen to the whole thing,

because they both at the end of it, I was like, Holy shit, I can't believe I almost didn't do that because I wouldn't have got we wouldn't have gotten this. And so, you know, I just want to thank the Gates Foundation for having us up there. And, um and it was It was an incredible experience. Happy birthday, Kyle Clark. Isner's podcast number 6 27 with William H. Gates the third now entering nervous stock home. We'll keep our name tags on. We'll make it easy. Oh,

my non eso You can't be in this building without a name way. We're gonna have to ask you to start. You're gonna Are you here? You're literally hasn't. You're like his human name tag. You let everyone know everyone. Are you taking a boat leg of this pocket way? Didn't give it away. I think we're about to get a taste way. We're gonna get taste. Okay, Good. All right. Okay. Oh, pressure.

Why does his recorder look better than us? Pretty similar. Different. Like his design is a little more another sounds even better. Some years as one of those cool buttons on this, uh, welcome to your offices, Mr Bill Gates. Uh, I'm wondering, uh, you've been doing meetings that you've been doing interviews all day for the Gates Foundation that was going on today? Yeah. I started a to eight this morning. Did a couple, uh,

the annual letter comes out, uh, next Wednesday. And so it's a chance toe talk about what we saw. Of course, this year. Focus on what could be done in the next 15 years. I read the letter. It was at eight pages. Great. Quick read. But a lot of information about there was some things in the letter that I actually never occurred to me. That there's I want to try to cover a lot in a little bit rain. That we have with you. So it's flues conversational. If you want to swear,

go ahead. There's no restrictions. Damn filled, waiting so filthy. But ultimately, what never occurred to me? Someone told me a couple years ago. I think people just assume, Oh, well, if you have a lot of money, you could just give money to someone. And that fixes other problems. And the answer is no. You actually have Teoh. From what I want to understand,

you actually have to give them the infrastructure to figure out how to distribute that money properly. Is that true? Well, in the end of the day, it's not money that counts. It's having a good job being well educated, having your kids be healthy and so making sure that those systems the education system, the primary health care system, the food growing system, agricultural productivity, rare those things work well. It's pretty complicated because it's a mix of government and the private sector and really learning why those things haven't worked well in poor countries. It does require a lot of learning because, you know, it's far away. It's very different then what we experience day to day in a country that's that's quite well off.

Yeah, well, but is it because it kind of seems like, Well, money is treating a symptom. You have to do the preventative work to make sure that people are educated, they have the right systems in place. But then to do that, don't you need money? Like, what's the What's the chicken and the egg scenario? Well, if you go back 300 years, um, things were pretty rough. Over 30% of kids died before the age of five everywhere,

even the country that was the best off. Some countries got ahead in terms of building. Ah, very productive agricultural systems of the nutrition. The amount of food and the variety food you got was very good then. That's really the bootstrap. Your agricultural productivity is kind of the starting point. Then that allows you if you do that well, Teoh doom or in the way of education, to do more in infrastructure on then, of course, we got electrification mechanisation productivity in the agriculture sector went up so dramatically that most labour than could go over to all these other things. And, uh, most of Africa is still back in that base. where almost everybody's a farmer and most of their output is simply for sustenance just to feed themselves.

And so we have a lot of understanding of Okay, we got productivity up. How can we help them do that? And you're right that when you're poor, the bootstrap is difficult. That's partly why foreign aid on philanthropy come into play role. Those governments say they look at malaria and say, Not only is that killing kids, but it's causing even the kids to survive because of the way their brains been messed up. To not be ableto learn to not to be able to contribute, they might think. OK, we need to get rid of malaria, but the kind of science and money Teoh create a malaria vaccine and get that out there. They just don't have the resource is the scale to do it. And so they do.

Look to the rich countries, including the United States, to step up and say, OK, you've got science, you've got money. You know, this is all part of humanity. I talk about global citizenship in the letter, uh, and that some of that's been happening and it has helped Ah, a number of poor countries move up. In fact, if you go back to 1960 there were Onley, a few rich countries and lots of very poor countries. The big miracle of the last,

uh, 75 years is that many of those poor countries like China, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, South Korea went from poor into middle income. South Korea's actually the extreme. They've gone all the way to where now they're they're part of the rich country club. But way still have a number of poor countries, a lot of them in Africa, Not just you still have Yemen and Afghanistan and a few others, but numerically the most are are in sub Saharan Africa and we know what needs to be done. Some of their soils aren't just good. You know their terrain. They don't have infrastructure without roads. A lot of this stuff is more difficult in when you're a poor country,

you tend to have pretty poor governments. That and you don't have as many well educated people that people are spending their time getting enough foods. The idea voting. It's more about expressing loyalty to your tribe than it is evaluating somebody's bureaucratic excellence and creating things. And so governance tends not to work very well until you get up to a middle income status. Now, when you say if you go back 200 years and you go back to 1960 you literally can do that, right. The space needle is a time machine that you're using. Travel back in time is my correct. I was alive in 1960 five years old, was born a couple miles south of that space needle there. But we can We have an amazing view right now of the Space Needle and the MP Museum, which is incredible. And you ever go? Do you ever just you ever go wonder around the MP museum?

You probably know that that's Ah, Paul Allen creation. He had a fascination with, uh, fascination or position. Oh, he plays the guitar. Loved Jimi Hendrix. Uh, you know, I e. I apologize. Say to me, Are you experienced? Tried helping way. And so anyway,

he built that. It's actually nowadays it's got science fiction. It's got quite a variety of things that they've been driving up the traffic. So yeah, it's kind of interesting that our visitor centers right there across from the MP and then that, uh, this whole Seattle center area had a world's fair back in 1963 which is one of my earliest memories coming and seen, You know, at the time they were showing video phones and Selectric typewriters. What was robots in the home? Well, we're getting there. Yeah, well, did you mean so I'm kind of bummed there's no more worlds for. I mean,

I understand that the internet and that's sort of the localization of the global community sort of made it not as sexy to be like, Oh, that's what's going on over there. Oh, that's what's going on. Now you can just you can just go onto gets motors some ago these these these items air coming out like Do you miss the world's fair? Well, they're still our world's fairs that take place. You know, we just had a consumer electronics shortly before it happened to go. So there's still place based. Stop the show off Things es is hot. Hot air balloons were big this year. Yes, in front of it there I loved Did you like Do you like CS the grind of CS? Yeah,

I gave the keynote. Their, uh, for over a decade I would do a kickoff and talk about you know how hardware and software were coming together in magic ways. Uh, and there was another show that was in the fall there. Comdex kind of the personal computer industry show. That's where back in, uh, 1990 I gave a speech called information at your fingertips and talked about your digital wallet and, uh, how all the world's information would be there. No, it's fun. I mean, those those were events to kind of see what your competitors were doing and meet with your channel that people are selling the products.

And so it was a big deal in my Microsoft Day toe figure out how we'd make a splash it those shows. But But now, I mean, it's now, you know, when channels like the E network sharp showing you stuff from si es. But what were the early days of personal computing? What were these? What were these conventions like? They were going back? Yes. This is how the podcast works. May be great, but we want to get back to that. Yes, Yes,

yes, yes. This is just this is just the ebb and flow of how, uh, yes, yes, yes, yes, I promise. Uh, all right. Yeah, it was interesting that first computer shows were these West Coast computer faire on that's actually met Steve Jobs. He was in his booth with the some of the early apple twos, and I would stay with the company mitts. Uh,

hu, we did the software for that had this AL tear 80 100 of the altar and the shows were kind of podunk. But there was certain sense of excitement. You could go around, see things, and then when it got really big with convicts were like, Wow, you know, this is so corporate. Now, people have models in their booth and, uh, you know, got really amazing. And they built other exhibit halls. Uh,

but at first, it was just kind of, you know, the people talking about their stuff, And we actually created a midst mobile that went around the country and started user groups. And I spent a lot of my times going out speaking at user groups. That's a phenomenon. That's that's not not as activists it as it was back then. Do you feel I mean, what did you learn during that period that you're now applying to the foundation? Like what? What are some of the things? So what are some of the similarities and what are some of the tools that you feel the picked up? Well, the idea of taking on complex science and engineering projects and finding very smart people getting to the basics of Hey, how do you stop malaria?

Have you stopped HIV? Uh, who's the smartest lets, you know, commit resource is to them. And even if it takes 56 years and even if we hit some dead ends, let's stick with it. That kind of engineering belief that was core to Microsoft success that carries over to this work. The thing that's different is that in the I t. Space, if you come up with something fantastic like a Windows 95 then word of mouth a little bit of razzle dazzle it. It gets out there in the world we work, and now we're trying to get vaccines to all the Children in the world. You're working through health care systems that people don't necessarily show up. They don't have electricity. The health care center is not in the right place.

The training isn't isn't done the way it should be. And so that delivery mechanism. We spend a lot of time both on that upstream invention. Sure, which is very, very, very key in a better seeds. New vaccines. But we also spend a lot of time on this, this delivery part, the downstream part where you create women's groups and create measurement systems. You get training programs in, and you're dealing with governments that have very, very few resource is and not much background. And so how do you help get them to be self sufficient? Have have the system work?

There are places like Rwanda in Ethiopia, where that's gone extremely well. There's places like Nigeria in Pakistan, where it still needs to be done right? And so a to least when you're writing code for a machine, it's basically a mathematical problem, I would assume, But when you're dealing with, like, how do you crack social code? You know, like when you're basically trying to figure out how to organize people and how Teoh, how to essentially program a culture to re program a culture to understand something, Yeah, the social things are not that mysterious. I mean,

if you get the women in the village together to talk about Hey, is the health care being done properly and talk to each other about we all should get our Children vaccinated. Ah, that creates a pressure that helps maintain the performance of the system. And if you have a system that really checks vaccine stock outs, have somebody send a photo of that store room every week and just look and say, Hey, there's nothing there. Um, you know, then if the right rewards air in place, that measurement system could drive you to do things pretty well, so I don't think it's it's because it's super complicated. Your you have to do with very finite resource is and people with very modest training. But we're getting there. It's kind of like going out creating user groups.

You gotta do it everywhere. Yeah, does it. When you started the foundation, did it feel like, Oh, this Do you get that charge again of starting a brand new thing trying to revolutionise something, trying to bring, you know, a technology where there was not technology? Absolutely. All of our programs take one uh, like sanitation of Okay, why don't slums in poor countries have good sanitation? And you know what kind of problems that could We create something that would almost take the sanitation and make it valuable. And so it's worth cleaning it up and not having the diseases and the the smell that the way it works Today's is,

uh, so awful when you first sit with the engineers and say, Okay, what you know, what's the energy content? What's hard about this? That is like kicking off a software product. Software development cycles tend to be shorter than vaccines or, um, sludge management systems or even new seeds. A lot of the foundation stop is a 68 year product cycle because of the trials that you have to do safety trials for medicines or field based trials for crops and in software you know, used to be two or three years now for a lot of things. It's more like six months or a year, so you do get spoiled in i t. That the ability to get very quick feedback and change products very rapidly. Most other industries,

even in the rich world, don't have that type of quick cycle time. I was surprised It never occurred to me in reading the letter. And it's one of the goals was to bring digital banking. Teoh too, People. And it never occurred locally, of course. Well, they need They need to have a way Teoh store their money and be able to distribute their money across long distances and especially if they're used to, like a barter system economy. So how do you How do you go in and teach people like this is a bank and you can trust it. And you know, you don't have toe put. You don't have to put whatever money you have under a mattress. You can put it here,

and even though you can't see it, it's fine. Well, they have, uh, money lenders in the village, and they just charge extremely high interest rates. And, you know, so you have to fund a funeral or Madison, then that's where you turn. So they have the services, but they're very inefficient. They're putting their savings into same by buying a cow or something that you could get sick or, if you want to sell part of it, that could be very tricky,

and it's really just because the way the ritual designed banking, it's got high overhead. It can't deal with the $1.50 transaction without peaking. 20% of the money tau fund the personnel on overhead costs. And so what? The digital revolution gives us a chance to build a banking system where for even very small amounts of money, the transaction fees were under 2% which people view is reasonable. And so Kenya with which is the place this has happened the most. Uh, your cell phone is It is a debit card, and the fees are very low, particularly if you're stain. You're not converting back into currency or just taking money that sent to you. And then you go into the shop and pay digitally there. And now people are creating innovative products for farmers and school fees. And,

um so another thing we take for granted has been a huge problem for the poorest that it's not available to them. Yeah, I want I want to ask a couple history questions, but I promise you it's going to get us back trying to create as many shareable moments as possible. Um, what do you do on a teletype model? 33. What can you do on that machine? But you can do Lord case. That's like having caps lock on all the time. What you do? You know, the computers were so expensive back then that you would go on, turn on that teletype in what was called local mode, where you would type and a paper TP would encode the characters. It was eight channel,

uh, paper tape. And so it would asking in code, Uh, what types You type up your program in basic. Then you would take that tape and put it in the tape. Reader, call up the computer because you were being charged for every second you are online, and you could play that tape which would go a 10 characters per second just faster than you can type. So that saves time, and then you would ask it to run and you would pay for the CPU time. Now, one of the teachers at this school accidentally had an infinite loop in his program. And so he went and spent $300 before he realized so no teacher ever wanted to go in there ever again, and so myself. Paul Allen and few other kids kind of took over this teletype room,

and we ended up teaching the programming classes and, you know, we got down the learning curve, figured out what to do enough that when a company in town here I got a computer, they kind of brought us in to just mess around eso we We kept getting experiences even at a very young age that gave us a lot of exposure to very state of the art software and programming. What does? It gets interesting, And I think it also does apply to the work you're doing, the foundation that you're coming into this technology, which there's not really much of a precedent for and going. Oh, what we have there is the potential for this thing here. But not only do we have to figure out what types of things we can make, we have to figure out what it is like. We have to try to understand what the possibilities there's almost. There's almost like there's a philosophy.

They're more than just math and engineering. We have to see what's possible. You know that you can eradicate diseases that uh, you can raise productivity. There's some precedents for these things. There was the green Revolution that Norman Borlaug's lead, where they got much better seed varieties in the 19 sixties and seventies, and that toke where people had expected a lot of starvation. Actually, countries like India, instead of having starvation, were actually able to raise the number of calories per person during exactly the period where they thought that would happen. Because that factor of two with the better seeds made such a magical difference. And, you know, that's like a piece of software that that he got out to those farmers.

But when? But when you're looking at technology in 1968 are you seeing like this is this is There's so much here in this machine with no lower case. There's so much here, like you're essentially having to create the idea of the technology. In addition to advancing the technology well, the key insight that Gordon Moore said is that we'd have exponential improvement in thes things. And, you know, at age 13 I knew enough mouth to say that, Hey, if you're going to be doubling, then what you're saying is computing power is going to be effectively free. And if you look at that world where only a few big organizations have computers and you know they're used for government scientific programs or printing bills and things, you say, OK, how would it be used it if it was free?

And that's where the dream of personal computing, a small group of people including myself and Paul Allen, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Jim or Bunch people had a very different conception. That that this was going to be a tool for personal creativity, personal communication and eventually on sale got hooked together. This information at your fingertips phenomena would emerge out of that. So we had, even though it's kind of a quantity of thing to say if something's going to get a million times better, it's qualitatively different. And even people like Ken Olsen, who is the CEO of Deck you know, said, Why would anybody want a personal computer? Because he was thinking about how many computers where he was?

Uh, he and his team were the revolutionary who said, No, it's not just mainframes, it's not just million dollar computers. It's $10,000 computers. We came along and said No, it's it's $200 computers. Uh, and it did require looking at it at things in a in a very different way. That software association there weren't many software companies are about 20 or 30 who did mainframes, minicomputers suffer. Their big award was when you sold 10,000 copies and they called me up after I done the AL tear on the Commodore Pat on the Apple two in the RadioShack TRS 80 and a whole bunch of machines as my first computer. And they said, Well, how many copies have you sold?

And I said, four million that possible. They're not four million computers in the world, I said. Yeah, actually, there are 90% of all the computers in the world run Microsoft Basic. There's this thing that's happened without the traditional computing world noticing, and that's why it was so kind of wild when IBM actually came to us and said, Okay, we want to get into this new world. You help, uh, design this thing. You do all the software for it and do it in two years because it usually took them five years to get a product on my yeah, here said it was my first computer and my favorite game.

Did you ever play the Zork? Siri's sure you love that you liked the dorks. What were some of your other favorite? Yeah, Tear Sadie. We did the character set where he could do borders and things to your Sadie was interesting, cause I had this cram everything into that really small wrong. And they were very impatient getting the things done. They actually had a really limited energy or basic, uh, before. But then we decided to make it. Ah, lot Richard tears. He was a fun project to work on. And we'd let you do address the screen you used to be.

You could only do cereal output, but then we let you put things in arbitrary places on the screen. Anyway, that is pretty gooey. I don't understand that. All we could do is characters Give me the graphic designer find we couldn't do arbitrary bit bit maps on the screen. The graphics were of delusion of your city was very kind of big blocks. Uh, and then they did a product called Color Computer. That got more resolute was the second passion. Yeah, I had that one to college computer was really good. You could get up to your tummy like you could hook. You could hook the terminal up to your TV, and the tears say that I had was basically just an all inclusive. It just looked like an old timey computer.

Yeah, I had that black white screen built in, but color computer was more like an apple to, uh, it was more advanced than an apple to where it used the TV displaying it was ableto generate, cause that was 6800 based. Where's the The TRC was C 80 C 80 base. So there are about five different chips that I did basic for 65 to 60 100 CDT were the main ones. And then, you know, the big milestone, of course, is when we moved to what was called 16 bit computing because that's the bus size. But really it was 20. We went from 16 bit addressing to 20 bit, addressing which that factor of 16 made a difference.

And then, of course, we went to 32 bit dressing, which is what carried us for most. Most of the are now word, but 64 bit address. Well, I read. I read. I read a quote from you from 19. Anyone that said 640 k ought to be enough for anybody. Yeah, that's a that is not a correct. That's not a quick Okay, please. Now,

now it is time to to set the record straight. Yes. So we went from the eight bit computers, all these early ones. They were 2 to 16 64 k address ability. And so once you hit 64 k, that was it. Now we did. People did plug in cards with what it was called bank switching, where even only have 64 k address. You could change the mode and say, Okay, now I'm switching thes other memory chips in. Then when I went from when we commenced IBM to use the it was 80 88 which is apparent to the 80 86 that gave us that 20 bit addressing. So that's a megabyte. And we took some of that amused Haram and I Oh,

that's how you get from a mega about done 6 40 k. And that was a factor of 10. Gives you some room, and so software, like uh, Mitch comported 123 which was kind of breakthrough spreadsheet because he had the extra address ability, but it still wasn't gonna be enough. We had done a lot of vax work, which is a full 32 bit address space PDB, tens of strangely 36 bit address space. So I never thought 6 40 Kate would be enough. It was it. It was a nice, tight it a silver and it gave us enough to do graphics. And so the the IBM PC had had graphics 6 40 by 200 on the normal video card. Ah,

but then it's the next generation, which is the Mac where the graphics gets really fast and really good or 3 86 based computers. What do you again? This is going to apply to solving global problems. But so, you know, in the computing world you're looking around, you're going okay. Are you looking at what other people are doing and going? How can we How do we make our mark or find our place? You're basically there's a healthy competition going on in the world. At that point in the world of technology, are you essentially compete Is there a competition with the foundation for, you know, mortality and humanity, like you're basically almost fighting the elements in a weird kind of way.

Yeah, it's not classic competition in that, you know, there's 10 groups working separately on malaria in you. No one will win and nine lose. Everybody works on malaria, uh, shares all their ideas. And it's through the combination of better bed nets, better drugs, better delivery, better diagnostics that are modeling. We're gonna need all those things to defeat the disease. So when you know there's a lot of gatherings about infectious diseases here because we have, ah, lot of expertise and most these areas where the the biggest funder and everybody's just working together on the same problem.

And you know, that's kind of good, because things were more open and helpful, um, very different than in the computer industry, where it's classic kind of market based competition, which works super well for software. How many Thai restaurants should do have various things, but we have There's so few resource in the world compared to how tough these problems are, uh, that the community is really pulled together. Yeah, kind of the opposite of Computer World, where no one wants to share anything with. You know that's not true. I mean,

there's all sorts of, you know, we decided that having the platform be available and nobody needed permission to write software to distribute software. It's funny. We've got backwards now because to sort of maintain quality, now you're forced to buy through these stores. And so, in a way, it's less flexible now to run arbitrary bits on a device. Then it was in the heyday of personal computing. Now you know there's certain pro pro user reasons why that control, uh, isn't isn't just pure, purely bad, but it's a tiny, bit less flexible.

Is convenience the enemy, do you think in our culture it's like obviously in the opening? Same of the letter is, you know, when Bill and Paul Allen, uh, saw world basically where the computers were everywhere and were part of our entertainment part of our work. But is do you think convenience is part of our cultural enemy and not good back then, it's like, Oh, if you wanted computing, you kind of had to have some type of understanding about how it works and now, No one you don't really understand anymore is like, Oh, just turn it on and make it work and have it sent me a car, you know?

Are we too spoiled with convenience? No, it's it's great that we can take things and make them simple so you can focus on other things. You know, if somebody is writing the book, I'm glad they don't have to understand how we do Foot notes and bonds ligatures. You know, we did a lot of work so that they can focus on how they, uh, do their their creative process. No, it's amazing. What a tool. The personal computer and now tablets phones in all the incarnations of digital devices are letting us communicating better ways, be more creative. It's revolutionizing the media business,

even scientific collaboration, which that foundations involved in the fact we could take all our studies to make them free on the Internet. You know, the storage cost is around in there, the ability of anybody to search in and see patterns. You know, basically, every trial we do, we create a digital form of it, and then even peek people work in other areas contained that data and and learn from it. So the fact that we hide old complexities, uh, that's that's the nature of progress. What's your favorite font? Uh, you know,

we did this. There was this very cool idea to take the fact that the red, blue and green dots aren't at the same place and actually use that to create what are called true type font. Yeah. Yeah. Where you you get mawr resolution by actually playing with the colors. And it turns out some people see the fringing effects slightly more than other people. So there's even a parameter you can tune where you give up a little resolution and you get a little less of that funding color thing. Anyway, that was one of our when we're doing true type fonts. That was to me that the very coolest thing was, we figured out how to get how to get more resolution out of an LCD screen. That's that stuff. Well, I'm working on stuff like that. That's very similar.

You know, I we had a session with Nathan Myhrvold and Max Levchin last week where we talked about how you use digital currency systems to reduce corruption because you could say when you transfer this money. Oh, for that you need to take a picture of the car that you feel put the gasoline and to you know, if you're going to collect your vaccination for you have to take a picture of, uh, yourself doing those vaccinations so we get to do invention. Uh, now it's focused on the needs of the poorest. But when you're talking about this sewage processing machine in the complex ways that it deals with, sometimes the inputs very drives sometimes very wet. You can't handle that. Uh, how reliable assistant gonna be or you're talking about new things with vaccine technology. It's the same type of kind of I get to learn a lot, meet with great scientists,

you know, take big risks about pursuing different approaches for these diseases. It feels, you know, as Fonda's as the innovation from the early computing days, which I loved. What? And I know you, you guys are working on more effective condoms for Third World countries. Well, what an amazing problem solving to say. Oh, well, it's not just that we have to have a mortar effective contraceptive form of contraception, but are to protect against credible diseases, but also toe actually like,

make it as natural as possible. So people are more motivated, like it's really getting to the underlying part of the problem of motivating people to want to use them. Yeah, in a sense, a condom should reduce HIV transmission. Um, and yet, you know, a lot of men don't choose to use them. So this idea of using carbon nanotubes to make a structure that, uh, is not permeable and yet, isn't it like a thick, thick layer of of rubber? You know,

we've funded We've given a lot of people, not much money for the first stage. It was just 100,000, but a lot of people applied. Said they had ideas about how to do that. And, uh, now we're getting results in deciding who we fund for the next stage. That typically about 3 to 5 million. What were the Now that nerd culture has basically become very widely accepted, which it was not when I was growing up, I don't know what it was like. What were what were the proto nerds like and what was their place in the social stratum? Well, in an extreme sense. You're only a nerd if you're not social,

and people are talking to you and you're not talking to them. And you're just kind of going to your computer and just sitting there all day. And, uh, now the term is used in such a variety of ways. You know anybody you understand software talks about, you know, technological thing. Back then, it was sort of the kind of a shunning up. The athletes are cool, right? You know, the cheerleaders air cool. You know, if the computer guy asked the cheerleader out,

she knows to say no later. Hardly. She regretted. Same. Um, so yeah, you know, it's it's great that, you know, girls learning code or being fast I'll with computers is kind of a mainstream accepted thing. And so now these terms, geek and nerd, it's not totally clear. Even hacker, uh, you know,

what does that mean? Used to mean you crashed. He's big time sharing computer systems and got in trouble for doing it. Now it's just like, Oh my God, I got in the wordpress, you know, like I don't know if that really counts is the same thing, but it is, the lines are a little bit blurred. And now there's a pop culture element. In addition, Teoh just just a technological element. But as we sort of sort of winding as we're gliding this bird in for landing What what types of responsibilities do you think that you know? Because obviously not everyone, not everyone can be,

you know, a major philanthropist. Like what are some like micro for philanthropies that we can engage in? What can everyone do well in In the tech world, almost every company can think about access. You know, our is the service. They offer the heart where they offer you can get out to kids in the inner city to these developing countries, and often when you have software with very low march on costs the idea of having tiered pricing where if you can do the distinction right and we do it with vaccines and drugs, the idea that you'd make it be safe, free and education or free In African countries, there are ways you can make the stuff available or, if you have technical skills, say, during the Ebola crisis, something like How do we look at the maps and do the case reporting system more broadly.

Every one can be what we call a global citizen and have some awareness of this huge difference between the poorest two billion in the life we have and use. Learn. Take some aspect to learn about it. Disease, Some environmental thing. A particular country they can try and and get out. I encourage people to visit. You know, go for a nice safari, but then have a couple days where you, uh, see what what the conditions are. You'll be motivated because you'll see there's been huge progress and that, you know, it's pretty hands on stuff you'll meet, meet people that you'll want to help.

People's voices politically are very important, cause the big money actually not fill out to be. The big money is thes government aid budgets that fund Global fund for HIV or copy for vaccines. And we're always on the verge with budget cuts that this far away stuff, you know, Hey, does that really work? Will somebody complain if we caught it? Um, we need a a movement that says No, we're all part of humanity. We care about those things we don't want, even when budgets are tough. We don't want those things to be caught. So we're trying to draw people in because, you know,

part of the beauty of of the increased innovation and wealth of the world has, as we ought to be, able to embrace humanity. Asshole. Not to say OK, do I have enough heat? Does my family does my country, but rather a to global level things like a HIV and malaria? Let's get rid of those and let's avoid the negatives. Let's not let epidemics sweep the world. Let's not let climate change. Take this farmer productivity, which is always on the edge for the substance substance farmers get them better seeds and minimize, uh, the amount of ah ah, heating global warming that takes place so that,

uh, whatever innovations we have can offset that that negative. And what's ultimately your How do you view success like across any for yourself? If you're for the foundation like, do you have a couple like a principle or two that defines like this is how I know I'm successful. This is how I know this project is successful. Well, we have some very particular goals of, even though malaria can't be eradicated in the next 15 years. I'd be super disappointed if in my lifetime we can't bring an end to that. Likewise, H I V T B. I say in the letter that in the next 15 years won't get four diseases. Polio. That's the best known of those. And that's pretty incredible,

because heretofore there's been only smallpox, so one in the entire history, humanity. So getting for now and then being on the path to get, uh, other big ones after that, you know, that's pretty exciting. That credo of the foundation is all lives have equal value. And so the dream would be to say that, you know, somebody born in Africa has as much chance of, uh, getting nutrition education, surviving to adulthood as somebody born anywhere on the planet. And that gap is is being greatly reduced in my lifetime.

Maybe we won't get it to absolutely zero, but, uh, we can shrink it. It'll be, say, 90% less than when we started this philanthropic work, so that that feels pretty good. And then the idea of spreading, uh, sharing, how much we enjoyed philanthropy and getting involved in these causes, you know. Hopefully there's a broader sense. And that's more typical both in the U S. And around the world,

where there are people who are having success, whether it's in the tech industry, other areas who can also get back. Oh, sure, of course. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, we're done, I guess. Did you have your good? Yeah. I loved you on that episode of Frasier, were you?

That's favorite shows, Fraser, but yeah. Thank you so much. It was really great getting even 40 minutes with you. And I think coming over. And I hope that Is there anything we should see while we're here? Like, what's your favorite thing in Seattle that we should see before we leave? Ah, well, you mentioned the MP. Uh, that's pretty good. You know, Pioneer Square is kind of our historic centre.

Uh, this whole areas getting a lot of biotech, uh, stopped Paula has been involved in developing is pretty cool. He's got his brain institute, uh, down here. But it's not that visual. Actually, Emerald City guitars is over there. Will you miss grunge? Do Miss Crunch Bill? I was never that I didn't fit my energy. I'll be enjoyed the Bill Gates chat and now moving ahead, as I promised in the intro, Um,

here's Jay Winger, who is an epidemiologist and leading the charge to eradicate polio. Kyle Good. No, he's eradicating polio. Kyle, it's a specific strain of Oh God, it has my name on Well, you're not a person. You're a strain of polio, like I mean Osmosis Jones. Yeah, you are My God references, my beloved Bill Murray Fill. All right, let's let's cut out of this.

But a stranger and more esoteric. Here's Jay Wanger, Epidemiologist for the Ability Linda Gates Foundation and Julie Sunderland, who handles the investment funds. Please get comfortable in this strange living room in the middle of your office building. I like that This I haven't really tooled around the office

a whole lot yet, but I see a lot of like

we've seen a bunch of focus rooms. Yes,

focus on which one to go to.

You don't know this room to figure out what you need. A pre focus room eyes. They're a distraction room. No, no one. Well, it's but well, you know, there's some buildings that you go in and then you really get the sense like Oh, they just needed space. So they just put a desk there. But here, you really get the sense. Like someone really thought there needed to be five focus rooms on this wall and then dry erase board on this one, and this had to face this way you can feel, but somebody did that. I can feel the planet,

but you would hope. I mean, like, you would hope with what you guys are doing on what you're up against and what you're trying to solve. You would hope that the building that is your home would have some planning so that you then go do some some planning. So just tell us briefly, You know what? Your what your role is here, and then we'll kind of branch off from there. I know you worked in epidemiology. So is that Is that your primary focus? Here?

I was an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and also W H O. For about 25 years before I came here. I'm director of the polio program, and a lot of people work on polio in the foundation. I have a small group which is, uh, primarily focused on making sure that way Use the current tools that we have in country to get rid of disease. Yeah, There are other groups in the foundation that work on different things. Get communication, folks do this. We have people who work on upstream research looking, trying to develop better vaccines to help us finish the job faster and finish it off at the end. But I'm primarily in charge of the group that does the direccion country work in the application off of interaction with the global programme to finish off.

So how do you, uh how do you just make sure that we're make sure that we're recording little? It's okay and then close the door. Thanks. Um, when you're up against it disease, any diseases but polio now, because that's the one with relevant or in general, do you see it

as, uh, you see it as an enemy or do you see it? It's something like, No, we need to understand this so we can just control look better. Like, what's your philosophy? Up against a disease with polio stories is a little every infection is different, But the polio virus has a interesting history and that it started to cause outbreaks of disease. And polio is a bad disease. You it's a virus. It only infects humans so it can't reproduce anywhere else. To continue to have holy on the world, you have to have the virus getting continuing to reinfect new people, right? It will go into a person you swallow.

It reproduces in your gut. A person's immune system will get rid of it in 4 to 6 weeks, and during that time the virus face, they have to get excreted. And in somebody else, some other little kids, usually as a swallow water or eat something that has fully of IRA phone. And then they get infected. And that cycle just keeps on going and going and going. Now just a. A very small percentage of people who get the virus in them actually get paralyzed like less than 1%. But maybe one out of 200 kids who actually get infected will get paralyzed. But when the process happens, it can be very bad. It can do everything from paralyzed your your lung muscles, in which case you die unless you have supportive care and then there are these great pictures from the 19 fifties in the United States,

with entire gymnasiums filled with iron lungs, basically respirators, where they would put kids who I couldn't breathe anymore in them and grieve for them until sometimes they get a little bit better and strong enough to be then sometimes just our lungs, essentially forever until he died, just sort of the worst case analysis. But the other kind of process with more common is, is when the virus would strike nerves at the do leg or arm. And in that case, you get permanent paralysis off that limb. Is that FDR? That's FDR, classically right that he actually got up when he was an older, older guy, like it is late thirties. But yeah, he ended up with two paralyzed legs and could never walk after that and became a big proponent of the March of Dimes that actually started to raise money to do something about it.

But after all that happened, it was becoming a huge deal in the United States, so that in the fifties, if you in the summertime in the fall, parents were scared to let their kids go swimming and scared Teoh, go to movies with their kids because any time you the theory was anytime you got a bunch of people together or had infected water, you could get disease, and it reached really almost a panic level. A couple of vaccines were developed during that time, which could protect kids from disease, and we found out that it could you could even do one step better. If you use the vaccines right, you could immunize enough kids so that that virus would not find another kid to in fact Oh, and so then you could actually have an entire population where the virus was not anymore. Essentially, the virus died out like the dinosaurs.

Sure area. So that happened in the United States first and then a couple of countries in the developing world start to use the vaccines the right way. And in South America they got rid of all of the disease that they had there too. So we had a whole peace of the world that was polio free. And based on that experience, the World Health Assembly declared that we should eradicate polio from the world and every country in the world signed on in 1988 to get rid of, to do enough vaccination to get rid of that virus in their country. And that's the global polio program started with W Toe and UNICEF, Rotary and CDC getting together and promoting this thing. And it went along pretty well, using that, using these key vaccines to get the job done about the in the two thousands we got stuck in about in a couple of countries. And these were places where populations of kids were either very poor and very crowded, with no sanitation. So far, it's really spun around really easily infect people or places where people didn't really want to go like places where they were having civil wars.

Sure, And so we got stuck in India, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and those are the places where the marsh is still there. Rice was spinning around in those places had been eliminated from everywhere else in the world, but occasionally because people have the virus in there got. And if you get a traveler that can go anywhere now with planes, you would take Asian get re infection with the virus in other countries. And so those countries presented a threat to the world, and until we finished in those countries, we wouldn't make it. And for a couple of years we were stuck. It was very hard to get it done there. But through a number of innovations and hard work with the countries in the partners,

India had his last case in 2011. And right now we have gone six months in the entire continent of Africa with its been not a single polio case reported. So that's what a huge breakthrough, and we're looking now to focus on that last chunk in the Afghanistan Pakistan block. If we can get rid of it there, the world is polio

free. How do you have you? You know, this part of epidemiology, Deal with the politics or even the social politics, Like just hearing you say, Well, people panicked and they did that like you. People start panicking or they don't really understand how something is spread and they start making bad decisions because they just don't have enough information. Do you partially deal with that, too?

Yeah, it's a huge. The last stages of polio eradication have really been an exercise in not just the science and epidemiology of what's going on with virus, but how to deal with countries and especially and populations that air that air moving. And they're usually moving because there's there's a problem. Sure, if your GPA kind of populations or countries where this'll civil situations is a big mess on their civil wars or they're so much terrorist activity that people are afraid to go in and vaccinate kids. So those air the those of the last frontiers, the last holdouts of the polio virus are really in places where nobody, nobody really wants to go. And it's very difficult to deliver vaccines that kids everywhere really should

have. That makes it basically just These are things that get in the way of you Just when you're like, Hey, we're just trying Teoh fix problems in four boat. Can we just get rid of the roadblocks?

Yeah, well, that's right. I mean, there there are a lot of it gets very tricky because, in contrast, I mentioned in the fifties there was polio everywhere in the United States, and people are already worked out up about it. Now the program has been so successful that there's essentially hardly any polio in the world anymore. We used to have hundreds of thousands of paralysis cases a year, and and people were scared of it. Now, even in these countries where we still have the polio virus, even in Afghanistan, Pakistan there only a couple of 100 cases. So it's hard to get, you know, that the population concerned about about it is a little bit reduced, especially with all the other problems that they have in

these places. But it's okay because you're not just trying, Teoh. You're not just trying to attack a virus. You're trying to change people's behavior patterns.

Sure, Yeah, that's right. Well, well, we are to an extent. That's right. It's It's tricky to get. I think this gets really broader. What we're trying to do is is deliver something to every kid, no matter how poor they are, or how how distant they are from from a riel city on. And even if no one cares about thes particular people were trying to get this this health intervention there to every kid. So it's really a sort of a huge equity issue that we're working on an end. What we're doing now is trying to ensure that when we go to these places, we not only give them give polio vaccine, but we do other stuff to other health,

health interventions, vitamins, nutrition, other vaccines. And so that is that in some ways, we are trying to, uh it changed the way people think about what's what's available and what kids everywhere should have. So

just because I don't obviously not really ever having talked with an epidemiologist before. What's day one? Is it like C s I where you're going? Okay, here's the enemy. And like, what? What you when you first come in and you know that you know you're up against polio. Yeah. Worried that you do a great job because diseases are diseases. It'd be great to like to do list polio. Check What a great what a great thing to check out for the day. But so I just try to understand, You know, how you come in what information you gather, how you start trying to understand it, and then how you start trying to figure out how to fight

it. Yeah, well, that's That's a good question. I think it's some of that stuff is the same for any infectious disease that you have. So if we see a case, looking at outbreaks is a classic thing that epidemiologists do. And so we had a case, uh, disease happened in Syria, actually, just last year. Case. Syria hadn't had a case of polio for a decade. They used to have a pretty good immunizations. That's where 95% of kids got all the vaccines they ever needed. But course Syria in the last two or three years has been had a lot of problems,

and the immunization system fell apart. So kids born in the last two years were had been vaccinated. All we've got a case of of a kid with paralysis came into a hospital there they cultured the stool and the sample turned out It was it was poorly of arson. So we say, Yeah, I would. What happened there with Why are we getting polio bars here? And so the epidemiologist is basically looking and saying, Why is this disease happening here? What is it about? This population is different from from the other ones. And what we found in Syria was the big deal was that no kid less than two had been vaccinated pretty much for anything in the last two years because the immunization system totally felt quite do this civil disturbance. The other question, it always is. Well, you have a where the disease come from.

How is this? We hadn't had a case in Syria for 10 years. Is this something that was it actually always there? And we just didn't find it or what happened. And so, what we do with each of these viruses? Each polio bars, it gets isolated from anywhere in the world, goes to the lab and there there is an international network of these things and they sequenced the virus and they look and see. OK, what were the genetics of this thing? And then they track it. They look back at the at the bank of gene sequences from all the polio bars that have ever been isolated world, which is somewhere on you contract and see who is that poliovirus? His mother and father. And we found that polio virus in Syria actually came from Pakistan,

which made a lot of sense because privacy and we knew was having disease. And that was one place was turning around, and apparently some traveller at some point had transmitted in there, and that was helpful for us because it showed that No, this wasn't some ridiculous. Some really bad situation where polio bars had had been there and had never been stopped. But this was a new importation into a place that had just recently developed a bunch of kids who are really susceptible. So I mean, an epidemiologist, the epidemiologist working this thing is basically to say Okay, when a virus happens when it disease cases, these happens. Why is it happening? How did it get there and why did these people get it as opposed people? Once you know that you can go in there and fix it,

but you get that information. Where were you getting

that information? Well, we get it from from surveillance data and then surveillance is important. Every country in the world, as they say, signed on back in 1988 to get rid of polio. Part of that deal is that every country in the world has some system where they're actually looking in their population for polio cases. The way that works in most countries in the world, including Syria, is that of health care people even, you know, quack doctors and anybody who takes care of a kid is part of the system, and they get notified that if they see a kid with paralysis, the one thing they need to do is get a stool sample, actually get to stool samples over over two week period and make sure that stool sample get sent up line to the labs. And so they do that even in places incredibly, even in places like that are sort of basket cases in terms of organization like Somalia or South Sudan.

They have systems where if there's a paralyzed kid, a couple of stool samples get get drawn up and they send it up the line to the lab. This under the capital in the capital, will send it to some other lab who can actually do something with it. The culture, it and culture for polio bars. And from that, that's a system that is in gear,

so they have to be looking out for that. They have

to be looking out for it. Well, you the other way. If they weren't looking out for it at all, you would eventually get overwhelm. You would eventually get developed. Somebody you would get All these people with paralysis coming in and somebody would think. Must be something we owe. Just about system we have is better than that. You know, this system we have is something that works routinely. And we have to work at it to keep it going, Because again, a lot of these places that you haven't seen polio case in 10 years. You're interested in getting this feel stool sample Sort of shrivels a little bit, but but it was a constant sort of cultivation of the system to

make it work. Are you Conrad? I mean, I just like it. I would imagine that this is a field that most people would be like. Yeah, that I have a contractor working in epidemiology like, Oh, shit. Everything's gonna kill me easily. It doesn't you worry about that?

Well, you know, not so much. I think. It's funny. Yeah. Infectious disease, train originated, infectious disease guy. Epidemiologist. You think that I actually don't worry me personally? Don't worry about that much, but it was true with my kids. Every time my kids got a fever, I was working on manage itis, which is a, of course,

back in CDC infection of the brain in it. It's a swelling, every matches, right? So even in jeans and high fatality rate every time, like I got the flu or a fever, I'm sure they had

because you're you're in Alaska working with these infectious diseases, my kid probably somehow got so but and so someone, something like Ebola happens. You know everyone. And it becomes basically the headline that everyone's talking about. And then there's there's widespread panic. Oh my God, a bull When you know realistically the percentage of a chance that someone in at least in this country that all the sudden Ebola would become, you know, an epidemic, you tibial pretty low, I would imagine, because of all the protocols that are in place, you know where people write to freak out so much or, you know, or was it it was just like, No, that's really

not a huge problem. Well, I think you know, the Ebola thing is really unfortunate. Bullet is again a really bad disease, right? And, ah, a huge case retail rate and difficult to care for the patients once you get sick. But it is like a lot of infections is we do know something about it. And we do know how it spread from previous studies and epidemiologists. And so I think that the issue was with Ebola. It was not so much that we didn't know what to do. It was Mawr, an issue of implement implementing the control methods in the places where it was happening. And those countries that it that it erupted in in in West Africa were unfortunate in that their their general health care systems were so, uh,

sub optimal that they I couldn't really rise to the occasion in the right way. And I think that, uh, this is the edible thing did become a huge, a huge issue, not as much because we didn't know the science of it as much as because it was just very difficult to implement the control mechanisms in the places

that happened. But do you think people's response to it was did not match what the actual threat level waas Is there an acceptable or even healthy amount of panic when you're dealing with something like this? Or like we have people more freaked out, they're not gonna you know, they're not gonna make stupid decisions Or

is it just not helpful? Well, I think that that it clearly, as I said, Ebola is a bad disease. Your any time it happens, you know it needs to get ratcheted up to a to a major level of concern and key actions have to take place. And I think that not all the time everything happens quickly

enough, right? What's your biggest challenge with with your work? Like what?

What's the biggest hurdle with polio program with? You know, I think that, as I said, we've seen a lot of progress in just the last year or two, getting the political will, getting the partners together, and then each country were We're working in polio. It's it's the way the work gets done is the government of the country is bought into it, and then the local development partners. Whether it's over, it's over. UNICEF for the Defender U. S. A. D. All those folks have to get coordinated to actually get the job done in these places where there are multiple multiple problems like poor routine immunization systems,

terrorist attacks, bad logistics, you know, all that kind of stuff. There a lot of problems to take care of it. And I think are are our major problem right now is is a common went to the police pregnant. Just getting all of those systems to work together to get a get a complete immunization of of the population at risk. And that takes a lot of it, takes a lot of coordination, and it takes a lot of determination, Especially when you're facing things like like, uh, civil civil servants is and

civil wars Well, you know, because with polio, obviously everyone came together. Teoh create this. This community of people don't You were actually gonna find it, So I think most people go. Why wouldn't you just do that for every you know? Like why? Why specifically pull their one? Why not? Is it just a question of resource is And

how does it? Well, the decision to eradicate the disease is is a is not a totally easy one. Not all infectious diseases can be eradicated. Polio is it is a good candidate for that because, as I said, it only infects humans. So that means that all you have to do right vaccinated every kid in the world on, and then and then you're finished. But but most infections. These are not like that. A lot of infective diseases have other reservoirs, like tetanus, for example, which is another vaccine. Another disease we vaccinate for. It lives in the ground,

and it lives in the ground for a really long time. And there's no way you can really get rid of it in the ground. Yeah, it's so is there So some diseases are just plain old, not a radical, and other infections that maybe might be theoretically a radical, meaning that they're not. They don't affect every living thing in the world, and you don't have to sterilize the planet to do it. Uh, we just We are still working on the tools to see what you know. Maybe don't have a vaccine that works well enough to actually get the job done, or we don't have the right. We don't actually have the the theme, the medicines or vaccines to kill it off. So there's a lot of issues.

There are some other potential, the diseases that could be eradicated. But I think that but it's a little bit of a trade off between how difficult it would be to do that and how much we want to work on other things. Theo The the one of the things both difficulties in eradicating polio and even the Ebola thing highlight have been that a lot of countries still don't have just the basic medical, the basic system to give most people medical care. And that is a big deal. You know, getting everybody up to a level off health care and nutrition that is, that will address a wide range of problems. Is is really another another area of work that the foundations putting a lot of a lot of input into right now, increasing the primary health care system if effectiveness and capacity and general health health care, yeah, the ability to give give health care to people in the world is another. Another way to approach a lot of a lot of disease issues.

What's your favorite part of your job? What do you like them out like? What do you do? Oh, yes, this is This is what I want is what I want to

do. I mean, you know, I mean, the idea of saying OK, here's an infection, and we can actually get rid of it. And we can actually cause a change in the ecology of the world that will get rid of this disease is great. When when I see well, like we've gone now too, you know, haven't had a case in Nigeria. A case of wild polio virus since July of last year. That's never been done before. It looks to us like the virus is completely gone from the continent of Africa. To have to have caused a change like that to say Okay, we really have an entire huge chunk of the world where this virus is not there.

What we've done is use a tool, use the vaccine toe, actually cause something to happen that is saving kids lives and making sure that nobody is gonna get paralyzed from polio There again, that's a great That's a great thing. And you know that the effort that goes through to do that is not really just our effort. We only play a part of it when I was in India for five years working on the polio program there and and, uh, we would part of the program is to do national immunization dates to try to identify every kid, lesson five and make sure they get they get the vaccine in, like a one week period Now in India, every kid under five is 170 million kids spread over the entire country. And so we had teams of vaccinators and each team was like a mother and a father. And it's somebody carrying the vaccine thing, going to essentially every house in India, knocking on the door and seeing if there was a kid lesson fighter. And if there was, they put two drops of accidental mouth that that thing to organize that on a national level to vaccine 170 million kids is just a huge undertaking

on my door and said, Hey, can I put a droplet on your kids? Might be like leave.

Well, that happens, and that's why the challenges. But what do you be able to manage that to do that in places that are just incredibly difficult? And then to have it work as in Africa, whereas in India is great, that if there was exciting thing that that to be a part of me, that's that's it, really to see that you've actually contributed to getting rid of

disease. And how long is it? How long does it have to be gone for you to say like all right. What? We've eradicated it? Yeah. Is it two years? Five years? 10 years

again. What? We the actual plan. And this is based on assessments of how good that surveillance system is that I talk to you. But the plan is after the last case, we want to follow for three years. Way. Wanna watch? Three years and we don't declare it done until three years. Two years after the last case. So if we get through last case in 2015 we won't declare it Dun Dun Dun until 2018. But during that time, it's not like we haven't done anything during that time. Basically, no kids are getting paralyzed by polio, so it's essentially we would declare in 18 4015. Muslim was the eradication

date. So I'm sure you are a walking dead fan.

What? You sure? Yes. You

just can you watch a zombie show and epidemiology like, are you just seeing glaring mistakes of characters making like don't drink the damn water? You must be. That's where it's spreading. Whatever you watch it ableto for watch outbreak shows.

No way, you know? Yeah. I mean, uh, I do. I think I shouldn't say this against, but zombie shows always particularly bothered a little bit because I can't. I have a hard time making that jump from. This is what I know in science can happen, right? And then they got those zombies

there. I just can't make that. I don't know. I can't think

of the body system that could actually work that way.

But it's comforting that you think that putting that aside,

you know, you know, I do think I am. It is interesting to see the outbreak movies because I think that they they do. Sometimes they're glaring errors that are made. And other times, it's just it's just oversupply.

28 days later is a great outbreak movie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So is that when you watch that to go, well, that's never gonna happen. Like it, You know, there's not gonna be something that's so pandemic that it basically the every government falls and the world is in chaos like it's what science was was a step ahead Well, yeah, I think a better place, I

think. Well, there's two things I would say, but that one is that, you know, it's a bad idea for a virus to kill. Everything it infects

mean because there's no more

hope. That's right. Right. That would be a bad thing to do. Uh, but I think that,

you

know, I just look back historically. And if we think Okay, there have been humans on the world for a long time and even even is in historic time. What has happened? You know, probably the worst thing that's happened. That the worst thing, the black plague, right? It's pretty bad. Yeah, that was that was a bad thing. And there, you know, you saw Ah, third of Europe die off in a in a swath,

and that was pretty grim. But even there, you know, there was enough variation in the genetic variation both of us and in the virus and the bacteria problem that that, you know, it didn't get everybody. I mean, I think that that what we have now is And what you do see in these movies that we do have the capacity to relatively rapid partly because of epidemiologists, but also because of the guys in the lab. Sure, you are to serve assess pretty rapidly what's going on and assess how it's being spread. And there are way certainly are in a much better situation than we were back in the 1300 addressees.

Don't you think gonna do If a pissed off monkey breaks through a cage invites you in the face, man, that's a very bad what can just sort of wrapping up what can, uh, what can people do like Is there anything the general public can do to help you do your job or to help you know the science of general? Try to eradicate widespread disease? I

think for the polio thing, it's it's very important that we finish this job. It is easy in the United States now. Nobody you talkto if anybody knows it fully was, you know, you talk to somebody so isn't gone. Well, yes, of course it is gone in the United States, but it's not going in the world. And I think I think the big the most important thing we could look for support with this is just the recognition and the affirmation that we can beat this disease, we can eradicate it. But we have to finish the job and continuing to put pressure and support the final efforts to finish it off. Because if we you know, if we don't finish it off everywhere, it's just gonna come back, write it.

But if we do finish it off in the last places where it is, then we're home free. And and then, you know, kid anywhere is gonna have to worry about getting paralyzed from polio bars, and that is that's what we're really shooting for. But I think that that what we can't sort of dropped the ball in the last yard. You know that in some ways, you know, when you have a disease that's going from 99% of the world, then 99% of road thanks

What? And that's because the media like people in the media. I'm sure that must play a huge role in, you know, like headline News, because everyone will go. Okay, Now, this is the for lack of better term sexy new disease that everyone freaked out about. And they forget about the one that they didn't finish before. Yeah, and it's not getting attention, which means it's not getting as much funding, which means it's not getting as much. You know, resource is time devoted. Teoh.

Yeah, that's the problem. And people or people will. Sometimes complaint is Oh, look, we're still putting all the 20 in polio. Nobody gets it anymore. Yeah, right. But

the reason nobody's getting it is putting that we don't want them to start getting. And if this is

our window of opportunity right here, if we can, we can just make that extra push and finish it.

Then we can turn the money

off. Sure, you know, but But until we finish it, we can't. We have to protect. We still have to protect the world as long as there's someplace that's generating polio bars. So that's that's the

biggest issue. Last question. Uh, what is there? Is there a disease in the world or something? The world where you're like Oh, but that's really scared. Like, is there one that really sort of breaks you like if it's been elaborate, like I don't really go in that lab, put on to HAZ mat suits and I look at it from behind glass And is there anything that's that's really it's truly horrifying? Or do you have a pretty even appropriate, even emotional approach? Teoh Every disease,

you know? I mean, there are There are diseases that are scarier than other diseases and more, more acutely threatening. I don't, uh You know, I actually think, as you know, in the context of what I said before, that we do have the capacity now to evaluate these things and look and assess the risks and actually take steps against most of them that we can sort of see, You can imagine difficult combinations. Sure. You know, but but, uh, no, I

don't think this disease a disease did they have to do different diseases have different personalities in a way where you where you go? Well, they do seem to be, you know, certain behavior patterns that they express. Now. I'm not saying that they haven't a consciousness, but I just Are there certain certain personality traits where you would go? Oh, polio tends to like this and something else tends to let a like. Can you predict their behavior patterns? Sure

there are. I mean, polio is an intra varsity lives in the gut. It loves sewage, you know. And so it's gonna be there so I could try. That's a good question. The it can survive it. It depends, and it depends a little bit on how much sunlight there is. What? The temperature is lovable, but it is basically in terms of hours, two days, two, maybe a week or two if you're really in tough shape. That's why that's why we can get rid of it,

because it will be in the human body for 4 to 6 weeks. Maybe eight weeks did it. And if it gets excreted, most of it will die within a couple of hours to a day or two. And then and then it will be going on a little bit unless it gets picked up by another human, you know, but but yet, but clearly these viruses do have ways that they act. So I Sometimes I feel like I've been in enough places with polio. If I go into village, I can sort of.

I almost fell. I e understanding what

is conditioned place. Yeah, yeah, but they do things differently, and that's but that's again. What? That's a little bit what Epidemiologist in my previous life working and CDC worked on, uh, disease called mysterious. It's which is a bacteria, but that has its own way of acting. And there's a recent outbreak in caramelized apples about that. But that's it. That's a very different bacteria. It's a weird one, because we know it can actually grow in the refrigerator. Unlike most most bacteria,

you put him in the fridge. That's why you put him in the fridge, because they it doesn't. It's too cold, so bacteria don't grow mysterious, can grow in fridge. You can actually reproduce there. So it's a disease is often associated with Jesus and cold cuts and that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, that that disease has a characteristic way that it acts. Polio has another characters that trying to figure out when you see something that you see a case of disease, identifying what it is is key and in identifying who's got it and why they've got it is the other is the next step in trying to control.

This is a great conversation. I've really enjoyed talking to you, and I hope that you do. I hope that you're able to eradicate polio and then, like, cut to you next, David Caruso. Like a CSS style opening. Yeah, Yeah, but, uh, thanks. Jay was really great talking to you, man. Thank you. I know I can four times in a weird way,

that is very intense. Polio. Eso just Could you please tell people specifically what it is? I mean, I have your bio here, so I see that you are the director of program related investments for the for the Gates Foundation. But but what does that mean? What is that? Is that those words mean? So most of the foundation does is grant making we do about $4 billion a grant making per year. But we have this secret pool that actually can do We don't tell anyone. I e dio equity investing in companies. We can do loans we do guarantees on. So I managed the cool. It's a $1.5 billion investment pool that actually invests in companies in investment funds in partnerships to advance our program goals in partnership with essentially private sector companies. Right?

And ultimately, what are the program goals? Our program goals are eradicating polio. You are eradicating malaria or, uh, increasing digital payment infrastructure around world. So in places where we think that a partnership with the private company canadensis goals, then we'll go and instruct or something really cool to create incentives for companies to focus on these problems doing it to generate more. My, you're doing it to completely. Bill's correct. So if you think about it, if we're trying to solve all these incredibly difficult problems, we need to get cool. Cos we need to get entrepreneurs. We need to get innovation.

We need all the skills of the private sector brings to bear Thanks. Yeah, fully over here. Over here. Cool. Just disappeared. What? You must have to make tough decisions then, based on, because obviously there's There are infinite number of causes in the world which require re sources. And so how do you pick and choose, like how do you prioritize? Basically, Well, you just spend a while j winger who's really man more, but I don't think so.

If that don't get yeah, so we don't. So I managed an investment pool, but my investment pool is always displayed in partnership with our program team. So I got most brilliant people around the world I often joke that I played biotech disaster on TV. I don't know anything about biotech, but I actually have a pretty big pool. If I take investments, how can I possibly do that? I'm smart enough to know that I don't actually know anything about antibodies back seen. I don't know this stuff, these words, words, but so what I do is I partner with these brilliant scientists in these brilliant policymakers who actually understand how we're going to solve these problems. And then we then partner with the companies to try to figure out how to use the resources that they bring to you. Basically,

you're smart enough to look at. People go, you're smart to you fix that thing. And here is the resource is to go do that. One of the funny experiences. When I first started, this was I was sitting in a room with Chris Wilson, who's head of our discovery Brilliant man. And he was talking, and I had, and I realized that I didn't understand maybe half the words that are coming out of his mouth. But the really comforting thing is he only stood understands half the words that are coming but we sort of know each other. We know that he's brilliant on time to pick. Things may not be brilliant on finance things, but he thinks I am so so what is your biggest challenges right now? I think the general,

I think the way most people think about money is wrong in the sense that they go used for money at it. And it's somehow it's a genie that just magically, it solves itself. But we have that magical, magical, but money needs, you know. It needs an infrastructure and it needs someone. Figuring had distributed evenly distributed Papa properly, and so So what are the challenges with that? It's actually really hard, so it sounds really exciting. Everybody all you have such a cool job. It's actually really hard for that reason. Meeting money is not the problem. The problem is,

how do we create? I mean, we're very simple creatures. We respond to incentives on the private sector is designed to respond to some pretty simple incentives profit for investors, profitability for companies you know it's capitalism works because it's a pretty simple incentive system. What we're doing is we're introducing a different kind of incentive were basically saying, We want to use all the good things that you have around manufacturing capability and innovation, and we want to apply it to something that's not driven by that sort of simple profit incentive. So I think that my job and I think it's a skill that we've developed. I don't think we're, you know, we're finished developing that skill. It's really how do I create the right incentives with these companies to focus on these problems and we can use a bunch of different things. We can use money. We can throw money at the problem. We can use partnership,

meaning we're bringing skills and knowledge about these markets that they may not have. You know, the foundation has an incredible network of people and knowledge that we can also bring to bear. So what we're really looking for is those partnerships where it's good for the company, they can build a business off of it, and it's good for us in that their skills and their capabilities are being brought to bear in a really constructive way, not forcing them to do it or not having to throw money at them. But in a way where those incentives are aligned to get things done. How do you do that? I mean, how do you How do you make people understand? You know, this is this is the most effective way to filter this money through the system in order to achieve the goal. So we everybody in the development world, they call this innovative finance. And what I say is it's actually not that innovated.

It's really simple financial tools applied to areas that that haven't had these financial tools. So let me give you an example. We use a really simple tool in the health commodity market. So vaccines are really important to us contraceptive commodities, A really important to us, and you've got great manufacturers out there producing these things. But what they don't have a certainty about markets. They don't understand the donor environment. They don't understand what's going on in Africa. And so what we do is we come in and we say, Listen, we're gonna actually we know what's going on. So in the contraceptive implant space, Melinda made a big announcements. We know there's a lot of money for family planning out there. We're gonna guarantee you of all we're gonna do a volume contract and in exchange for that,

in exchange for bringing something that you need certainty about market, we're actually gonna Lord, we're gonna ask you to lower your prices. And so it's a win win. They get guaranteed volume, they get a bigger business and we get lower prices. Which means we can use the same donor dollars to double the number of people that can get access to these vaccines or these contraceptive input. How is that different than working in the private sector, working like a for profit when you're trying to, You know, when you're working in a pool of funds pool, what are some of the major difference or what did you learn when you came over? Yeah, absolutely. It was actually I come from an emerging market private equity background. So I ran around the world making investments and companies,

and I sort of thought I was gonna do something really similar there, you know, look at management teams, but business models, you know, think about one of the great businesses. It was kind of a reeducation for me because I'm still doing that same thing. We still need to find the best entrepreneurs and the best investors. We need to do all the hold ourselves accountable to that sort of the rigorous processes that investment funds go through. At the same time. I'm not. I gotta ship my mindset. Have to think about how do I use investment tools to solve problems? And that's a That was actually a surprisingly difficult shift to make, because when you're in an investment mindset, your program your most of your hamster on a wheel,

you just go and do the same thing. Um, and your program for the pattern recognition of great management, teens, great business models if you have to, then shift and say That's not what that's important But it's not the poor thing. The poor thing is, how do I use businesses to eradicate malaria? How do I engage with businesses Teoh reached? Get as many contraceptives to poor women in these countries is a cannon. It shits reminds. Wow on. Do you feel when you when you were practically before, what were some of the what were some of the common mistakes that you would see when you're analyzing a business structure? What do you see at the outset we go. They don't know what they're doing because businesses like,

what are some of the reasons that businesses fail? I mean, in the in the in my old world, recent business, especially in emerging markets, you know, it's it's a lot of people. It's management teams, it's can people get things done? So management talent is is a key component, and it's something that we have to figure out how to bring over to R. And it's one of the reasons why we think this is a powerful tool. So if we can get those great entrepreneurs that are focused on Snapchat, I'm sure I heard about it. I don't you know, I don't know.

I mean, there's so much creative. I mean, there's so many great people going in, creating businesses, creating solutions that we can't even imagine. I think one of the things that's so exciting for us is how do we get that, you know, incredible talent to focus on our issues, humanity rather than just you And honestly, I think people do. I think people want Teoh. I mean, I don't you know, of course I want to get filthy rich. But I also think they want to benefit humanity.

And that's the excitement about this again. It's hard, but you have to create the right incentives. You have to. We I think people don't ever think about what's the stage beyond filthy rich like. Okay, you have $100 million. Now what? You know now, what do you do with it? It is one thing that I never What do people you know, if someone has $100 million wasn't like they just have $100 million in a bank. What do you do with that money? Like, How do you How do you manage that? How do you You're basically putting it in a lot of different things to diversify,

I would imagine to keep it safe. I don't even know how you approached Funded sizes that big. Well, my $100 million but I managed, you know. You know what were you keep your money in their sockets in your boots? Yeah. In your boots. What did you learn from your like looking at successful businesses, looking at failing businesses. What? What sort of tools that you pick out before you came into this job that helped, um you know the thing about investments and the great investors, and I don't count myself in one of those. The great investors have instinctive pattern recognition. So it's that smell of what's gonna work in what's gonna not work.

And that's probably the most important characteristic that I learned. I learned, You know, you can make all the right plans, but a coup in Cote d Ivoire is gonna completely undermine. You know, you're the investment that you made in a great company. It's sort of so you gotta have the smell for those types of things. It's not. It's not. There's not. You have to be able to be comfortable in working in ambiguous sort of chaotic realities, which is what you know, business Business is business environments, organic places, you know,

great entrepreneurs. Great ideas emerge where you don't expect them to do. So it's really how do you find that pattern recognition to find the great people with great ideas and really enable those people to do things, and we're trying to do something really similar here, but on a on some levels, much grander scale. But if we can't get those sort of outliers, those great ideas take risks on on things that are really gonna do enable fundamental transformation in the markets in which we work. It's gonna be tough. The one thing I will say one of my other learnings for emerging markets specifically that I don't think we necessarily get working in the U. S or Europe is that it is incredibly difficult to grow businesses to be an entrepreneur. Those business environments are so tough, and so I have a huge amount of respect for entrepreneurs and businesses in these markets. But I also know that without sort of fundamental transformation in the economics of how those markets work, it's really tough to have the kind of scale transformation that we're looking for. So,

you know, one of the sectors that's super exciting to me right now is digital infrastructure, because what digital infrastructure does is it leapfrogs over physical infrastructure. So all the work that we're doing on mobile payments has the ability to do really a fundamental transformation in reaching poor people. So if you think about banking, if you think about even building businesses that are focused on poor people, it's hard you can't you know it's hard to reach them. It's, you know, to have a poor customer walk into a bank is really expensive for banks, so they're not going to serve it without a fundamental change in the economics. Sure, digital infrastructure allows us to change those economics, right. You don't have to build a physical place and have people you know. You could do what you could do it from here,

and that's such an exciting potential transformation. So that's my learning. Is one. Being an entrepreneur is bloody hard. You need to have the pattern recognition. Understand where you can put a great entrepreneur with a great with the company. But in these markets, especially sort of changing economics of the underlying businesses, whether it's an egg value, chains, whether it's in digital infrastructure and financial services, whether it's in health care delivery, that's gonna really be the thing that changes the way our ability to reach millions and millions of people. Let's go in in terms of, you know, this sort of social entrepreneurship and then also in the private sector as well.

You. I guess people really do have to understand not only what a good ideas and then on top of that are the people around it competent enough to execute it? But then, outside of that, is it something that people what's the adoption rate? Because you cannot predict what people I mean. You can kinda go Well, people tend to like This is something that people might need but you can't control. I mean, like, there's so many things that you know, it's not just whatever the sort of cultural zeitgeist is, but also, you know, Are they ready for it? You know,

maybe they're not. Maybe it's a couple of years too early. So how do you even how do you gain that system? You know, I think you have to have a really big appetite for failure. Bill does, which is one of the wonders of working with him because the reality you're absolutely right. It's so messy there, so many different factors. And so you gotta be willing to go out and, you know, accept the fact that a lot of these things aren't gonna work and take bets. And that's one of the things that's built into our investment programme, you know, were very, very conscious of the risks that were taking.

We actually you know our core analytics is not around. How much returns it's gonna be, it's how much risk are we taking and are we? Are we willing to take that risk in a way that's really clear sighted? And we're totally honest. We're totally transparent with Bill about the risk we're taking because I don't want him to come back and say You promised me I would have him Teoh understand that? Hey, there's like, a 75% likelihood that we're gonna have to write off this investment, but it's worth doing and it's worth doing, because if it wins, is if it's successful, it has such a great impact on she's Wilders like it. There's a human guards, human currency. Not just you know,

how many fat stacks can I get back from this like you're basically trying to literally changed, like improve humanity and when it works, it's pretty amazing. So we've got one investment that way. We've been working on for three years as a foundation. We just did a second round earlier this year. That's a digital payments company in Bangladesh and getting back to your comment about human. You know, the entrepreneur that runs this is unbelievable commodity, dear. And he's actually the dear brothers in Bangladesh. We're kind of famous. Iqbal Kadeer, his older brother, um, founded and grew grameenphone,

which is one of the biggest, the first and biggest mobile money mobile deployments 20 years ago in the developing world. So the serial entrepreneur brothers are out there, and they figured out how Teoh create a mobile money deployment that's worked on. And so we invested six million and grant money about three years ago and another 15 million last year. And they've gone in 24 months from 0 to 15 million customers and gets back to when we look at If you looked at like, the analysis we did were like Oh my God, this, you know, this is early stage, unproven model, you know, never been done before. Outside of Kenya like this is crazy. There's so many political issues associated. If it it's like you know,

this is this is terrifying. Put this much money in but worked and that and it worked because not because I mean Kamal and it baller or brilliant. But customers want it. It's a customer use case that makes sense for them transferring money over there. Cell phones, They're cheap. $7 cell phones that you can buy and, you know, bizarre in Bangladesh via a text message, you can transfer money from Doc out to the rural areas back to their families, and it's under a penny. In order to do that vs, they would have to pay to physically transfer that they love it. The people are just taken. We don't even you don't know how people are using this on, and it's one of those things where it all works.

Now I can tell you, I don't want to tell you about all the cases where hasn't. But it's really beautiful when it does work and be started jumping your baby has become a cultural thing that you cast money. You cast me and it's company so they actually become. So it's become like What is that autonomy? Or somewhere where the word becomes the thing like the brand name, because, like Kleenex, can you literally fly into cash and they have this beautiful magenta origami bird and it's all over the city and literally people will. Yeah, I'll be cashing Oh wow. So if you're not be cash, it's A. But that's an interesting I mean, I have just finding the opportunity for the right time. Like people were just ready for this now,

Like the technology was available emotionally, they were ready for it, you know, it was just It was just I mean, these types of so spoiled in our country, in terms of innovation, we become were like, we're like brats about innovation because, you know, because of what's happened in the last, you know, 30 40 years in terms of personal computing, you know, if it's something it something doesn't get completely innovated in 18 months or a year, like Oh Wood's would Tavaris again five years ago. You're already this much better off.

You know what are we screwed? Because we're so simple ways, actually, to be totally honest with you, I mean, I spend a lot of time working in develop a live in Africa for a few years and we're spoiled. We don't We were spoiled by innovation. You could say that negatively. But I think you also can say, Hey, we live in an incredible time, and if we can take that innovation capability and you know the good hearts of entrepreneurs of innovators. You goto Stanford and Stanford Business School. We do some recruiting Stanford Business School. And you know, I remember when I was in business school 20 years ago,

nobody had any interest in social sectors, notes all consulting, um, and investment banking. Now you go to business schools, go to Stanford Business School and half the class. They can't even fill the consulting slots because half the classes, like we want to go out and change the world. And I think that's a great thing. So I'm an optimist. Yeah, you can say it. Americans were spoiled, which we are. But I also think that, you know,

especially younger generations really care about making the world a better place. And I actually think that that's gonna be the major factor both in terms here, but also diaspora Dasburg attorneys into these markets. If you go into Nairobi right now, you've got some brilliant people coming back thinking about how they take their skills, that they that they built up working in the the developed world to the countries, and they're gonna be an incredible force for innovation. And it's, I mean, I don't want I don't mean to come down on America about it because I just think it's sort of I think it's kind of a human. I ask Bill about it, too. Is that, you know, is is this convenience a bad thing? Because we're so addicted to convenience and innovation.

It's like I just need more were already, You know, you get one device in the next day. You're already looking at all the blog's, like once the next generation device gonna be like, Why don't you just enjoy the one that you have? That doesn't million things you couldn't do two years ago, you know, do our is it? Is his convenience a problem? Or how do we How do we temper that? Like, how do we? Is it perspective? I mean, you have perspective because you like a city within Africa.

You've been around the world. You've seen you've seen outside the country, and you kind of understand, and you may be a little immune to it. So how do you How do Americans get less spoiled? Yeah, to That's a good question. When you were at it, I'll tell my I'll try to put it on to my kids. I don't know again. I'm a little bit like Bill and kind optimistic on. And I believe, you know, first of all, one of the things that's really cool and really important is the degree to which innovation allows. So we have all this innovation happening and we get distracted by it.

Great. So But when you have really great innovation that then leapfrogs in these markets, it's hugely beneficial. So let me just give you. I worked in Nigeria in 1990 when pre cell phone that was working for an investment fund and there were 300,000 landlines in Nigeria. So you go in, you flying to Nigeria and nobody could communicate in order to communicate. You had to go to a hotel. It costs an unbelievable amount of money. It was insane. And five years later, because of cell phone technology, which is, you know, American based innovation, you've got that you've got companies in their printing money because the uptake again is not dissimilar from what we're seeing with be cash and you go in and Nigerians or some of the most I mean talk about attention deficit like they're the most entrepreneurial.

You give them anything to work with, and they got, like, the worst government system in the world. And within that they managed to get things done because they're just these incredible entrepreneurial people, and you go in and all my Nigerian friends of three cell phones and they're running five businesses because of cell phones. So and I've said I want to at some point when I'm, uh, have I don't have many things to do. Go prove this, which is that the cell phone has had such an incredible impact on people's lives, their ability to generate income, their ability to form businesses, their ability to take care of the families. I think it's had more impact than 20 years of World Bank lending, so that's what we're looking for.

So if Americans want to be Braddy and entitle, but argon innovate general care, I want them to take that. What I want to do is I wanna have a great African entrepreneur Take that Braddy innovation and apply it and make the world make it lives better for something. Were you able to help out that Nigerian prince keep his $800 million? No. Yeah, no, I got lazy. I was going. Teoh get thrown and got busy and that's it. Really, guy. There's a couple of very princes just really need your help. If no one will respond to me, what you think is the most important innovation of the last 20 years.

I mean again, I'm biased because I saw it that I invested in it. It's itself so. But I mean, you could say Internet, but and, you know, obviously people would information based communications. Yeah, I have Ever since side fell short E i e. I think you understand. You know, there's an anecdote that from, um, I spent way too much time in hotels, cities in Africa.

Andi. I was having a drink with the Dogo rep at one point, and he talked about The fact is I own. Tiago owns breweries in breweries, very successful business all over Africa. And he said that when cell phones came in, their revenues went down because people made the choice. People trade off between drinking and talking to really well. I guess in a way, drinking is a form of like their socializing. A lot of people are socializing so they could help your friends without having some drinks. I actually have to trade it off and talking fair. You actually have to get my point being that cell phones were really transforming. The market's been credit, and that's why the digital infrastructure stuff. It's so interesting because we're taking it to another level.

And if you think about the businesses that can be enabled by being able to transfer money over the cellular infrastructure, it's incredible. If you start, you start thinking about information systems. Start, think about health data and what we could do with health data. If you start thinking about consumer data, what we could do is consumer data in these markets like I don't know, I don't know what this is gonna go, but I know that what it's done is it's dramatically lowered. The transaction costs, working with the poor. And that's one of the biggest inhibitions for companies to be successful. Well, it's what I think when I was earlier, sort of sort of saying like over addicted innovation rejected innovation.

But, you know, in a country like India, so now be cash net Well, now they've done it like they it's now. It's difficult to then, like, well, what's their next innovation going because now everyone has a phone, and now everyone has the ability Teoh to trade cash digitally. So, you know, looking ahead, what do you What do you think some of the next innovations are? What are some hurdles that we have Teoh overcome? Yeah,

ugly. An example that I think it's actually a really interesting question. So we're not invested in this company. I think Bill is as an individual because we don't do international education. But there's this really great great company, Bridge International, that does essentially franchise education. It's like education in a box on and a lot of people have invested in there. You know, there have incredibly low cost model for for education, and it's been enabled. And they started in Kenya. And it would be, I don't know, that they could do their business if they couldn't collect school fees over over the cell phone. So the point being that I don't you're going to see business is built on top of the cell infrastructure because you can't.

You can't do a little cost school model. It's really difficult. You have to go out, walk and collect fees. Sure, whereas if you can transfer it and there's an expected transfer or actually were invested in the coming cult and which is doing solar lanterns on the way that they, their business model works to reach the poor is they've got a chip that turns off the solar lantern if if if the customer doesn't pay for the solar lantern. So you know it's it's an electricity company, it's and the customers pay 40 shillings a month for their electricity. And it's an alternative to sort of kerosene, which costs, you know, cost more money than the 40 cents a showing for this solar lantern and if they and the beauty of it. So it's a solar lantern. It's an electricity company, but you couldn't do it.

You couldn't make it work if you didn't have the chip in there that allows you to finance it allows them to pay on a regular payments over over the cell phone. So this is just the beginning and of a wave of things that you don't even know are gonna sit on top of that. Is there anything brewing, essentially like an industrial size three D printer where you can send a machine into into an area and very quickly, inexpensively, you know, create housing. Oh, yeah, I've seen, but I have seen prototypes were like, Oh, look, we're gonna land like we're gonna create, like, a lunar colony,

or like, build something on Mars. One of the things that they would need to do is have machines, you know, as opposed to guys in space suits like construction guys in space suits like, Oh, it's hot today, you know, like, go in, basically go in and spit out three dimensionally like structures with cheap composite material and create housing. Yeah, we've got hundreds of those. I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe that's a good opportunity. OK.

Do you want to give me money to make a big machine that spits out stuff next? Okay, I'll stay like that. I can write it on a napkin and be like, Here's my tree. Knows about this, right? Three d question. Well, what it is, You know, I think a lot of drones Oh, my God. I'm sure now right. And very excited by drums. You are.

No, it's weird. I don't know. Ask Bill about that too. I can't already, Doctor. Next time. Yeah. This sort of flavor that how did so How? How did what? People pitching hundreds of drone help humanity thinks it'll be great. Yeah, that's a better idea. Don't. But Jay Jay was talking about OK, so Jay was talking about,

like, part of the way, you know, like part of the way to sort of control and nip disease in the body ist is surveillance. So, like, maybe maybe drones are away. Teoh, I joke. We were are investing in drums, but I and I and it sounds like a crazy idea. But all joking aside, like those are the kinds of out of the box ideas that we actually but grounded in some sort of reality show way do need to think about. We need to be thinking about taking risk on out flyers. And so we do. I'm not necessarily drones,

but that's the That's the kind of thing that we want. Great ideas, great minds. What what's what sort of the most what is what is the farthest outlier in your portfolio right now where anyone else would have bought like that's a crazy idea. But then you saw what you know what I think Maybe there are some interesting applications here. Like that part of the discovery process would be fun for you, especially seeing as I have no idea what anybody I feel like. You know what people are talking. My favorite is the premise. I don't know that a lot of crazy stuff is really in the life sciences space. We do a lot of early stage biotech investing, and it is pretty wild when you look one at the things that people are producing, but also the potential Teoh really dramatically change the way that we treat infectious diseases and human health more broadly, like it's not just gonna be about our priorities. It's gonna be about, you know,

the types of medicines that you would get. So let me tell you about the kind of So we invested in a company called Kaiman, which is run by Alan Bradley. Who's this brilliant, You know, Nobel Prize level scientists out of Cambridge. He runs the Sanger Institute, which was one of the partners for the human genome mapping. So just brilliant guy, nicest guy world on. He started a company that basically so if you think about product about product development in the pharmaceutical industry is incredibly expensive. It's like over $2 billion to develop any therapy or new vaccine. And that's the reason why medicines are so expensive. And we can't tolerate that because we're trying to get, you know, you talk to Jay about polio,

we need you know, we need 10 Cent at OPV. We need under a dollar I PV vaccines because we just can't afford it. The world can't afford, you know, to take these expensive Western medicines and pay the same price for these poor countries. So we're constantly looking for ways to lower, whether it's the price of vaccines in manufacturing but inner and our biotech portfolio, it's really how do we lower the product development costs? So what Allen did is if you look at the way Producto done and I'm speaking, I really don't know anything about this. My science people could explain it, but you've got a process that goes. What they do is when they have a new therapeutic, they start from us. They injected into a mouse in the way of the responses,

and then it goes to resist monkeys and then eventually gets into humans. But the problem and recent monkeys actually model of the human immune system. Really? Well, my stuff. So the error rate from a mouse, too from a mouse is really hot and so historically going a mouse and you go to monkey and doesn't work sucks to be a re smoking sex todo. So what Allen did as he engineered the mouse to mimic the human immune system. We call it the comments, and literally, you can go to Cambridge and you can go in and go to kind out. But you can go and you see, these months, they're the kind of and what it's done is it's it's were shortening the cycle, and we're doing a bunch of these different things. But,

I mean, that's crazy. Like, how do you engineer most? But he did it somehow also. So I have a couple investment ideas. One is drone chicken crews out condoms. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The other one is a smart rat where you basically engineer a rat. Teoh have beneficial viruses, and they go bite people and effectively inoculate them. So I feel like if you could If I could just get Yeah, I think 200 million should be good seed money,

Teoh. Sort of get Get those ideas off the ground that, you know, you just overwhelmed with you. Well, I know one. So I think the slogan be like, Let's make this chicken fly. Like, if you're willing, Teoh, You know, commit to now. I mean, it's like I said, bring it up.

Okay. Well, anything else you want toe say before before we let you go or anything else, it's important that you feel like people should know or good. What did you get back to work? Uh, best money to save humanity. It was great talking to you. Thanks, Joe. Now leaving Nerdist dot com. Enjoy. Over.