All right. David i dont consider myself a journalist. Nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though i have a day job running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership . What is it that makes somebody tick . David for about 20 years, you have been the wealthiest man in the world. But because you have given away so much money recently, jeff bezos became wealthier. Do you think if you stayed in college and gotten your College Degree you do not feel inadequate because you are the only the second wealthiest man in the world . Bill it is a sign i have not given the money away fast enough to drop out of the top 10. The market has been strong. [applause] david the market has been strong. Microsoft is up 35 this year. To what do you attribute that . Bill the company is doing really well. Great ceo. The whole dream of the importance of software has really come true. The five most valuable companies our Technology Companies. Microsoft has a good share of that. I get to spend a sixth of my time at microsoft. David recently, you said the biggest mistake you made professionally was that microsoft should have had Android Technology . Why was that the biggest mistake . Bill we were in the field of doing operating systems for personal computers. We knew the mobile phone would be very popular. We were doing what was called windows mobile. We missed being the dominant operating system by a tiny amount. We did not assign the best people to do the work. The biggest mistake i made in terms of something that was clearly within our skill set, we were clearly the company that could achieve that. David your two main areas of focus are k12 education and health care in the least wealthy parts of the world. You recently decided to make another effort not for your foundation, but for Breakthrough Energy to do something about Climate Change. Why are you so worried about Climate Change . Bill Climate Change is a problem that gets worse every year, and yet, what you have to do on a global basis is very dramatic in reshaping the entire physical economy that we have. It is a very complex problem and a problem where i see my value added, looking at something through the lens of innovation. Not just the r d part, but the creation of products and the deployment of products. Helping educate people about what are the sources of Greenhouse Gases and how do you get on a path of innovation so that you can get Global Adoption and bring emissions down dramatically. David is that part of your foundation or are you doing this outside your foundation . Bill the part where you mitigate and help poor countries with better seeds and policies partly through Development Aid is through the foundation. That mitigation part. The part where you invent new ways of making fuels, electricity, cement, steel, that is done directly by me with a lot of investments, including the venture that i assembled a group of 22 people to put money into companies that are trying to commercialize the breakthroughs. David that is a fund of 1 billion. 150 million. Can 1 billion make that much of a difference . Bill 1 billion, it has been catalytic. So far, they have 20 investments. Late next year, we will probably raise another 1 billion to 1. 5 billion. This is all about innovation. If you said you have to make steel with no emissions that will cost you four times what still does today. Your electric bill would double if we take the technology we have today. Yes, supporting those companies and drawing other investors in. Breakthrough ventures has gotten a lot of investing. Green investing did not go well in the first round. It looked like the field that might evaporate to some degree. Because we have been able to bring a depth of understanding, they have been able to invest. The first 1 billion will be fully committed in the first year, but we have other investors. That has gone quite well. The technology they only invest in companies that have a chance of reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions by a half percent. Each company. They found 20 and i am sure they will find another 20. David i am the smallest investor, will i make my money back and make a return . Say . Did yoo you bill of the things you invest in, it is probably one of the higher risk things. It is being done on a commercial basis and we are likely to have a few significant successes. It is not philanthropic that you can deduct it. But, the timeframe of the return and the risks are fairly high. We do expect to make a profit. David why do you think some people do not believe there is such a thing as Climate Change . What is propelling that to say there is no Climate Change . Is it Scientific Evidence or a some other political reason . I wont mention anybody, but there are some people who do not think there is Climate Change. Bill they must not have taken enough science courses, i do not know. The climate is a complex issue. Just understanding how you do the abatement requires a lot of indepth study. In the United States, it has become a partisan issue, which is unfortunate. That might make it harder to achieve the agreements we need here in the United States. We have two problems. We have the people who deny climate, and then people who think it is easy to solve. We need to educate both of those groups. David in the history of human civilization, is there any evidence people do things that their greatgreatgrandchildren but they will not see the benefit from . Bill United States has been willing to take on different problems like cancer and make giant investments knowing the real payoff would be many decades down the road. When that was first being pushed, people are saying this is important. Climate change is like that. You have got to take a longterm perspective, and government is is when it is taking that longterm perspective and funding the policies. David you worry there is too much power and too much data in the hands of Technology Companies. Bill technology has become so central, governments have to think about what is immune about elections, what does it mean olling . David a large part of the carbon in the atmosphere is caused by the electricity grid which is about 25 or so. Agriculture and forestry. Why is that causing a big increase in carbon . Bill the category is a variety of things. When you clear land, you are taking in the carbon in the trees or plants and you are releasing all of that. Burning the land, say in indonesia, for palm oil plantation. Another thing is that cows and other grasseating species have a digestion system that emits methane. Methane is a powerful Greenhouse Gas. Cows alone account for about 6 of global emissions. We need to change just cows alone. David how are we going to do that . Bill of all the categories, the one that has gone better than i wouldve expected five years ago is this work to make artificial meat. You have people like impossible or beyond meat which i invested in. David do you eat it as well . Do you like it . Bill absolutely. You could go to burger king and buy the impossible burger. David is it healthier for you . Bill it is slightly healthier in terms of less cholesterol. It is dramatic reduction in methane emissions, animal cruelty, manure management and the pressure that Meat Consumption puts on landuse. David are electric cars a solution . Bill absolutely. If you look at the transport sector, passenger cars with another factor of two to three in battery improvement which is possible, the mainstream for passenger cars can become electric. You have to make that transition. Youve got to scale it up and make sure electricity is zero emission. But for trucks and planes, there is almost no chance the batteries will be good enough. You will still need to create liquid fuels with electricity or biofuels. Fuels are amazing. The Energy Density of gasoline is 30 times the Energy Density of the best battery we can make. If you look at a container ship that crosses the ocean, having your fuel 30 times less efficient, 90 of the weight you are carrying would be batteries instead of cargo. Trucks and planes and boats, electrification is unlikely to work in those cases. We need ways of making fuels that are zero carbon. David do heads of state roll their eyes and say can i have a selfie with you . But do they really do anything and what are you trying to get heads of state to do . Bill in the paris climate conference, one of the things that was missing was the focus on r d. France said yes, we want that to be for the first time a real issue that gets discussed. Mission innovation which Prime Minister modi got to pick that name, the commitment of 30 governments to double their energy r d was a significant milestone that came out of the conference. In order to get that commitment, i had to make a commitment that there would be Breakthrough Energy that takes things out of those labs and get them into the marketplace. There has been some progress. Climate is complicated enough that you want a broad set of people in the government to understand the complexities. In terms of r d that needs to be done, unless the u. S. Is deeply engaged, it is unlikely to happened because so much of the worlds capacity to do that innovation is here in the United States. David United States pulled out more or less of the paris accord, though not technically so for a year or so is that of concern to you, and do you think this will hurt the effort to change Climate Change around the world . Bill it is a huge step backwards. Even if you meet the current commitments in that climate accord, you are way over two degrees warming, and most countries are behind the commitments they made. Those commitments were reductions where you compare your 2030 emissions to your 2005 emissions. There is a little bit of that. That is easy. The shift from coal to natural gas is a lot of that, and yet the world is falling short. To have people like United States say even that is not important just shows how daunting this is going to be. There is no way we will get there without the u. S. Coming back in in a strong way. David do you think you could convince President Trump to get back into paris . Or is it beyond your capabilities to do that . Bill someone else should do that. [laughter] david the Largest Companies in the world and United States today are Technology Companies apple, facebook, google, microsoft and so forth. Do you worry there is too much power and data in these Technology Companies, and are you surprised the government has not done something more than they have today about this . Bill technology has become so central that government has to think about what does that mean about elections . What does it mean about bullying . What does it mean about wiretapping authorities that lets you find out what is going on financially, or drug Money Laundering and things like that. Yes, the government needs to get involved. I bragged to people that i did not have an office in washington, d. C. I eventually came to regret that statement because it was kind of like challenging washington, d. C. Now, the technology company, microsoftause of they could have seen that lesson through at t or ibm or kodak, a lot of innovators as well. They are very engaged. There will be more regulation of the tech sector. Things like privacy. There should be at some point that a that relates to that. The fact that this is the way people consume media has really brought it into a realm that we need to shape it so that the benefits outweigh the negatives. David you have three children, seem to be welladjusted, and you have kept them out of newspapers. How do you avoid spoiling kids like that . Bill i think that is a huge problem. David if you were 20 years old today and you wanted to start a new company, drop out of harvard, what area would you want to start it in . Bill this is a great time for innovation because the tools are so much better. There are lots of things in biology that are interesting. There are lots of things in energy that are interesting. Given my background, i would start an a. I. Company whose goal would be to teach computers how to read, so they can absorb and understand all the written knowledge of the world. That is an area where a. I. Has yet to make progress, and it will be profound when we achieve that goal. David are you worried about the power of a. I. To disrupt our civilization and put people out of work . Those kinds of things. Bill the increased positivity that will come from a. I. Will create dilemmas about what should people do with that extra time. Youve got to consider that a good thing even though it will be an interesting set of adjustments that have to take place. David you said the two major issues are k12 in the u. S. And health care in the less developed areas. Have you made progress on either of those . Bill Global Health is our biggest area, and there, the progress has been unbelievable. Not just because of our work, but our partners that include the u. S. Government spending, european donors who have stepped up on health issues. One of the metrics of importance is the number of children who die before the age of five. When we got started in 2000, that was over 10 million a year. Now it is about 5 million a year. It is just mind blowing, and people are not as aware of it as you would like them to be. Those deaths, because of getting out vaccines and understanding more about nutrition, those deaths have been cut in half. Now the goal is to cut them in half again by 2030. Our u. S. Education work, not just k12 but includes higher ed as well, they are that key metrics. Dropout rate, math and verbal achievement. Those metrics have moved essentially not at all. Even as the u. S. Is spending more resources on education, we spend by far more than any country in the world, and yet, our results are quite a bit worse than almost all the other rich countries. Even some middleincome countries. Even vietnam is passing us in terms of their math results. There, the field has not had the impact we had hoped for. David people come to you for money, they say i have something invest in or give money to. How do you resist . Do you have a person that says no to you . How do you do that . Bill once you pick what you care about, if somebody has something that can make a difference, we are super interested. We have a staff of 1500 people, and if it is to do with Global Health, some talk through whatever your innovation is and how we can partner with you on that. That is clearly in our area. If it is something that can substantially improve k12 education, we will be interested in it. If people are outside of those things, fortunately you can say no. Focus is key to philanthropy. David people have recognized that raising children is difficult. Jackie kennedy said if you mess up raising your children, nothing else matters. You have three children, seem to be welladjusted, and you have kept them out of newspapers. How do you avoid spoiling kids like that. . Bill i think that is a huge problem. Obviously, our kids have benefited from having a great education and opportunity to travel. They are lucky in that sense. Making sure the way people treat them is not a natural, there are some challenges that come with that and they have handled it well. Melinda is the one who deserves all the credit for the kids so far doing very well. Our kids, we have said to them that the money is going to the foundation, so they do not think of themselves as aristocratic. David what do they say, can you give me a little bit . They dont ask for some . Bill they will get a little bit. David how much money has your Foundation Given away . Bill about 40 billion. We are up to giving away 6 billion a year. David if people are watching now and say i want to do something about Climate Change but i am just one person, i dont have the resources what can any average person do that has some impact on Climate Change . Bill certainly, they can take things like these new Meat Products or how they buy electricity, and they can help drive up the scale of the green solutions. The most important thing at this stage is their political voice. There is going to be a need to put substantial resources into this effort. We will need a bipartisan solution, and to send the right signal to the market if you just win one year and then it gets repealed, that does not help at all. The key is what people see the policies will be over the next 30 years on a consistent basis. That means it is a much higher bar than a onetime victory. Scarlet i am scarlet fu. This is bloomberg etf iq, where we focus on the access, risks and rewards offered by Exchange Traded funds. Headwindslobal persist but Global Opportunities abound. Where in the world offers the best growth and value for your dollar. Women in etfs. How the rise of passive investing paved the way for women to make inroads. Playing defense to win. The search for haven