Bill Gates Traumatized His Parents: The Early Years You Don't Know About | The Big Interview | WIRED

So I had like four times where I thought, hey, I'm pretty good at programming. And then I was either given a hard task or got feedback. And I said, no, there's another level here. So by the time I go to Harvard, I've had thousands of hours of complex programming experience. I was so lucky in those things. Hi, I'm Stephen Levy. Today, we spoke with Bill Gates about privilege, his desire to succeed and how as a kid he drove his parents insane. This is The Big Interview. I know that you have been thinking about doing a first person book, some sort of autobiography for many, many years. I talked to you about it like 30 years ago, maybe. Why do that now? I hired Rob Guth to help me dig out all the old facts, you know, get the report cards and go talk to all of my friends and colleagues from early days. So, yes, it's a project we've been working on for some time. It was only about 18 months ago that we decided taking this first phase of my life, about 25 years, right as I start Microsoft and doing a book and where my parents, my upbringing, the luck of what I was exposed to. That was the whole story. And once that idea came up, I got quite enthused about it because, you know, we weren't getting into the current stuff where there's still a lot not figured out. I mean, the foundation's goals are ongoing. Even Microsoft, although I play a modest role as an advisor, the AI stuff is, of course, very, very much ongoing. And so it was really fun to take this period and try and explain how amazing my father was, my mother, my sisters, just a huge variety of things that got me to be kind of forward looking. And by the time I'm 20 years old, I found myself more enmeshed in programming and the magic of what programming could do than almost anyone. So, you know, I love the way it's come out that we just do this first 25 year period, which we're calling Source Code. And then another book can take the whole Microsoft story. And then a different one can take the philanthropic work and contemplate that. Well, by doing that, by breaking that out, it becomes way more personal than anything that we've seen from you. People like me have been pounding you, asking you questions. When can be self-reflective? And, you know, and you've done it here. I know that you admire the Agassi book by J.R. Maringer. I don't know whether you considered him to be a co-writer. You know, that thought you might have? No, we I mean, we had our team pretty early on, but that's a great book. But you, in a way, went on there and you held a mirror to yourself. This is very much a Boulding's Roman, you know, like a coming of age story. And sometimes the mirror didn't portray such a flattering image, did it? I mean, I had my ups and downs. I had conflicts with my parents. I had, you know, I was using Harvard Computer Time and they were confused about what I was doing. The first customer had MITS. We had a complex contract. We ended up in a dispute, surprisingly, with them. You know, my relationship with Paul is a very central piece of how Microsoft comes together. And, you know, Paul and I are working together super well and then disagreeing. So, yes, between my parents and Paul, you know, and I had a lot of uncertainty, even though the software thing, there were many experiences that made that just such a unique thing that, wow, why do I see this when other people don't see it? But, yeah, it's, you know, hopefully a very human story. It's not immaculate conception. Well, it is a human story. I think one where it gets to very emotional ground. I remember I did a profile of you, I think, in 1999. And your father told me a little bit about some of the stuff in here. And he said, you your mother was traumatized by the situation. You wouldn't talk for days on end. You know, you say yourself that, you know, the things that really interested you were reading and math and being inside your own head. And in some ways you weren't kind to your parents. And I think unrolling some instances like that, you seem a little remorseful. Well, I give both of my parents in each in their own way a lot of credit for how they shaped me. You know, with my dad, it was much more setting an example of always being serious about his work, of sharing anecdotes with my mom. It was far more intense that, oh, you didn't get up here as soon as I wanted or your your table manners weren't as good as I wanted. So, yeah, in the case of my mom, I was often falling short. You know, she did get me to interact with the adults that were around. That was a skill that became quite valuable for me. So she helped complement my intense desire to study and understand things. Yeah, the tension between my mom and I was, you know, she was always pushing for me to do better and, you know, eventually proud of what I achieved. But that was that was a complex relationship. Very, you know, amazing. I mean, my mom was a phenomenal person, not just her social skills or her ambition for herself, her husband and me, but just she was a special person. Clearly, there was a lot of love, but they were at their wits end to figure out what to do with you. Towards the end of the book, you say something that you say if this were today, you would have been diagnosed, you said, probably on the autism spectrum. What led you to that conclusion? When do you start thinking about that? Well, I know when I was growing up, this idea that they I would go and talk to a therapist was actually quite of an unusual thing. And this guy, Dr. Cressy, who really got me thinking about, OK, what was I trying to achieve in this conflict with my parents? Did I really have some thought in mind or was I just trying to make trouble? That was, I think, quite unusual. But back then, the idea that kids were very different and some kind of interventions, you know, that just wasn't commonplace at all. I was clearly somewhat hyperactive. I could concentrate a great deal. And I think the the fact I did get to see that therapist was good. Who knows what it would have been like? You know, kids are much more looked over. You know, the thing where I was able to go off to the computer center or, you know, even spend all that time alone, you know, even going out on those hikes. You know, people are protective enough. They might, you know, you describe these epic, crazy hikes that, you know, you wouldn't think of sending a 12 year old or 13 year old today. They were super dangerous. Yeah. Even though now you'd have a GPS tracker. Well, has that realization sort of shaped you? You're a super curious person. Curiosity is something that runs through this book. You know, have you pursued the curiosity about that in terms of understanding yourself? Well, I do. Even at this age, I love learning new things. And I view all of my work as kind of being a student and, you know, super lucky. Not just the things I get to read, but, you know, these days you can learn so easily and then I get access to experts. I mean, you know, when I'm confused about the A.I., you know, Sam Altman gets 10 people together and, you know, we sit and talk. You know, I'm very lucky that my career path has meant that my deep curiosity, I've been able to maintain it. And I think it is part of my success is really wanting to understand things in a pretty deep way. Another thing which struck me reading the book is, you know, I knew you came from a well-off family and something again you referred to towards the end of the book. How much privilege is part of your story? You know, you know, you say, no, I was like a white male, you know, that's in a privileged position. But your family was very well off at various parts. Your father sort of like swoops down, you know, and with like legal help. And you get in trouble at Harvard and he flies out across the country. And it seems that just at other times teachers would come in. Even though you were inside your own head, people had your back at every turn. Oh, there were teachers who put such a high percentage of their time into me versus the other students. I was so lucky in those things. And if one funny thing is my parents were well off. But compared to the kids at this private school, I was below average. I mean, they had bigger houses and, you know, they had wealth. My dad was well paid to be a lawyer, but we weren't a family that had wealth. So I managed to both have the benefit of being at that school and actually have a little bit of a chip on my shoulder that, hey, you guys are so much better off. You know, your parents gave you a car and you didn't have to work in the summer. But yes, you could hardly design a better childhood, you know, including a time sharing computer terminal showing up when I'm 13 years old and the high school scheduling, which is this super interesting algorithmic problem where because I was good at math, they asked me to solve it. You did this unbelievable scheduling thing for your for your school. Right. And the first time they asked me, I say, no, I don't know how to do that. And then six months later, when tragically the people working on it are in a plane crash, I've actually figured out how to do it. So the first serious algorithm was actually, you know, deciding when the classes would meet and who would be in which classes, which is a very kind of cool problem. And so, you know, then to have that, then to have TRW have this incredible project that was very state of the art in terms of real time reliability and to have the great programmers there, including Norton, embrace me and say, yeah, you think you're good, but, you know, this code is not very good. Right. It's like a mentor you had when you were working on this project for TRW as a kid. Right. So I had like four times where I thought, hey, I'm pretty good at programming. And then I was either given a hard task or feedback. And I said, no, there's another level here. So by the time I go to Harvard, I've had thousands of hours of complex programming experience. And then, you know, when I get there, I get to do even more. So, yes, the fact that parents encouraged me as a male, the idea of doing all being weird like this was, yeah, it was kind of OK. The school I went to and that's high school is a fantastic high school. I had at least five or six teachers who kind of saw a spark in me and really engaged with me. Melton Gladwell in his book about Outlier says that the ingredients are like 10,000 hours. Certainly you've topped that by a big number in terms of programming. 10,000 hours of practice doing something. I guess a degree of time timeliness, you know, which you just talked about. I still find that kind of unsatisfying. What makes Bill Gates Bill Gates? Well, certainly it's not just the circumstances, but that's gigantic. I mean, that eliminates, you know, people born at a different time. And, you know, many people who didn't get the education opportunities. Yes, there's still, you know, a few million kids who are in the same milieu as I am. And then it's OK, you know, seeing my father, you know, understanding the common sense of business, seeing a business like Visio Control, you know, that was up and down, you know, the early engagement with Digital Equipment Corporation, which, you know, to me was this vaunted company, you know, that proved that it wasn't just mainframes. And those people embraced me. I mean, I got to know them in many phases. And pretty much they offered me a job just because I wanted that that reinforcement. So, yes, there's something about my desire to succeed in my skill set. You know, being forward looking, which, you know, my friend Kent Evans, who's in the book, helped really cement that, you know, Kent helped shape me as forward looking, amazing person. And then Paul's more off reading about the chip stuff. You know, I didn't read Electronics Magazine. Well, after Paul showed me it, OK, then I did. But that's Paul. And it's actually pretty unnatural because he's two years ahead of me. The fact that he seeks me out and says, you know, Bill, what does exponential improvement mean? And I say, are you kidding? That is mine. Exponential improvement is a very, very special thing that doesn't happen, except in rarer cases. Paul also clued you on to LSD, which you talk about taking a couple of times. Steve Jobs would always say that was like the formative experience and helped open up the gates of design in his mind. I didn't get that impression that you felt that to be, you know, a life changing experience. I think the batch that he got must have really been good for product design and marketing. I mean, my God, just think if I'd had that batch, you know, yeah, I did some, you know, crazy things when I was young. And, you know, Paul deserves some credit for that. But yeah, we did that together a few times. Eventually we we gave it up by the time we get serious about work. We're not not doing that anymore. You also mentioned the famous time you got busted for speeding. I spent the night in jail. I was hoping to learn more about that. You know, did that freak you out spending a night in jail? No, it was just kind of a funny thing. I mean, they thought it was strange to have somebody so young that had a nice car. And you had a Porsche. You know, what was the story with this kid? You know, was I a drug dealer or something that I clearly didn't fit their normal pattern. And, you know, we kept enough cash around that Paul was able to come down and bail me out. But it took him a few hours to get together. So, yeah, there's a famous mugshot of me in Albuquerque because I I got pulled over and didn't have my license. In the end of the book, you say that sometimes you look back and wish you were back again where you were when you were 13 years old and just like learning about everything. And you describe yourself at that time as someone who just lived largely inside your your head. Talk about that. Are you with all your success and all the access to the world, really, that you have? You look back and want to roll the tape back? Well, I've been so lucky that I'm not saying I want to go back, you know, and change something. But it was kind of amazing to live through that. Hey, I'm just this kid. And, you know, all of us are the same, too. OK, here's something I'm curious about. Here's some people that do it with me. That having a dream, you know, computer on every desk and every home, you know, the importance of software to actually have it come completely true and get to work with, you know, in this phase of my life with Kent and with Paul. And I'm just meeting Steve Ballmer at Harvard. But he hasn't come to. I'm sure we'll hear a lot about that. That'll be right at the start of the Microsoft book. You know, we're up in Seattle and I decide, boy, I can't run this thing myself. I need my friend who really gets business and management and people. And so he comes in. So it was so magical and so incredible that I do kind of miss that wonderful thing where the whole thing was in doubt. You know, there were days when I thought, oh, we are so messed up and other people are ahead of us. And, you know, who do we think we are to have these these wild dreams? And yet step by step, you know, we build this incredible group of people. You know, it's interesting. The book, again, is, you know, a coming of age story. But, you know, you talk about, you know, you look back and say how much we are shaped by who we are and we are like who we are. You know, you talk about saying, boy, I, I think somewhat remorsefully saying, you know, I was like a smart aleck in school and, you know, and that wasn't a smart thing to do. And you talk about being, you know, pushing back about everyone and maybe think really the way you behave in your deposition, you know, that being a smart aleck there, you know. And you think I was a smart aleck, that lawyer. Now that's a smart aleck. Not recalling the specifics of the interview is that it's very unlikely I would make a statement like that without some common understanding between myself and the reporter of what that term, which out of context is incredibly ambiguous, what it meant in the context of her series of questions. And just to be sure I understand it, what you're saying is that you don't remember what the definition was and you don't even remember that there was a definition, but you believe there must have been a definition or you wouldn't have been using these words, is that fair? There must have been a common understanding. I wouldn't say a definition. There's a certain clever boy, you know, shortcut use of sarcasm that allows you to communicate efficiently. It can be kind of funny. And yes, that whole kind of sparring that, you know, sitting at night at Harvard talking to each other, that kind of dialogue doesn't work when you're managing people or even my skill of procrastination, which at Harvard, you know, that was my personal position was, I don't work on these class till late. So, yeah, there's a lot of habits of being a young, trying to be a cool, maybe not succeeding, but trying to be a cool student that I actually had to break those habits. Procrastination, you know, being super clever and kind of sarcastic, tearing somebody's argument apart. I mean, yes, the underlying skill is actually for a while. But knowing not to deploy it as the, you know, kind of go to approach, which when I was a student, you know, was kind of my whole way of engaging with other people. You know, we have the one anecdote in there where I told this professor how wrong he was, and I was just so, so certain of myself. You were wrong. And then five minutes after I attack him, I realized, oh, God, there's a reason why it actually comes back. And his his thing was completely right. And I was completely wrong. That was a helpful experience because the guy was so nice about it. And I was so out of line. One final question. Do people really change? No, I think you moderate and you become wiser and you grow. But the idea of am I still pretty much that same kind of hyperactive, curious, maybe I can figure this out that other people can't figure out. And if I do figure it out, what am I going to do about it? Who do I work with on this? I, you know, I'm still 95 percent that same person. Bill, thanks so much for doing the big interview. Thank you.