How Bill Gates Wants To Be Like Warren Buffett: Retirement 'Sounds Awful'

Hi. The magic of software is the change agent that improves our world and reshapes our world. That vision is probably more true today than it was then. You know, back in the early days when I said software was important, if I had 50 people in the room I was like, yeah, we're making progress here. You know, today somebody can raise billions of dollars for a new AI company with just kind of a few sketch ideas. I think I was lucky that my belief in software made me unique, or quite relatively unique. You know, just believing in AI, that's not very unique. So I would have to develop some unique view of how you design AI systems. You know, something that other people didn't get, that even they were like, oh, that's crazy, that's wrong. If you're just going with the mainstream, like, okay, AI is important, there isn't much value added there. And so I hope my young brain would see AI and say, oh, the way those things work is so stupid. And, you know, I'm encouraging young people at Microsoft, OpenAI, wherever I find them, you know, hey, here's the frontier. And, you know, because you're taking a fresher look at this than I am, and that's your fantastic opportunity. In my 20s, you know, I didn't believe in weekends and vacations. So, you know, that was kind of out of control, how I pushed myself. You know, now I, you know, take vacations, I play a lot of tennis. My view of success was very much Microsoft-centric. Back then it was just, you know, is my code really good? Does it work? Fortunately for me, as that ownership became valuable, now I can define my success in terms of empowering other people, you know, sharing what I did wrong, what I did right, and providing my resources to things like malaria or climate change, where the normal market mechanism doesn't work in terms of, you know, what society's priorities are. And so I can take the fact that I'm so lucky to have many billions and take, you know, 95% of that through the foundation, through breakthroughs, and spend it. So it's a much more generative, less 24-hour-a-day view that, you know, am I a net adding value, which in global health, you know, has been very successful. The climate work looks very promising, and I'm just super lucky to be in a different phase, but still able to feel like it's making a difference. I think I've got at least another decade that I'm working pretty much full-time, you know, the foundation will celebrate its 25th anniversary next year, actually Microsoft its 50th, and the foundation, you know, we haven't got rid of polio, we haven't got rid of malaria, and I'm very, very committed to those things. We want to cut childhood deaths in half again from 5 million to 2.5 million, so at least 10 years, if my health allows, working at this level, I'd say. Hopefully it'll be more like 20 or 30. My friend Warren Buffett still comes into the office six days a week at age 93, so, you know, I hope my health allows me to be like Warren. Misinformation is the one where I a little bit had to punt and say, okay, we've handed this problem to the younger generation. You know, my naivete that when we made information available that people would want correct information. Hearing my daughter talk about how she'd been harassed online and how her friends experienced that quite a bit, you know, brought that into focus in a way that I hadn't thought about before. We have context where we want correct information, like hopefully when we want medical advice, but then we kind of like in our, you know, community and enclave having shared views that, you know, kind of pull us together. We should have free speech, but if you're inciting violence, if you're causing people not to take vaccines, you know, where are those boundaries that even the U.S. should, you know, have rules? And then if you have rules, you know, what is it? Is there some AI that encodes those rules? Because you have billions of activity and, you know, if you catch it a day later, the harm is done.