Extended interview: Bill Gates on his business acumen and more

Welcome. I'm Tracy Smith and this is Here Comes the Sun, a closer look at some of the people, places, and things we bring you every weekend on Sunday morning. Bill Gates has accomplished many feats in his life, from co-founding Microsoft and becoming a billionaire in his 30s to creating a nonprofit foundation that has given away nearly 80 million dollars in grants. But before all of that, he was just a kid growing up in Washington, where his parents and teachers thought he was different, and so did he. He's written about it in his newly released autobiography, The First of Three Parts, and discussed it with our Lee Cowan. My social skills were very slow to develop, so except for a few boys similar to me, I didn't have that many friends. He's not saying that for sympathy, he's just being analytical. It's the way his mind works, and it's the way the first of his three-part autobiography is written. Here is the the setup, the source code that, you know, almost certainly was going to lead to some pretty amazing impact. Later in the show, Bill Gates on how he got so good at business. Where do you think your business acumen came from? Well, I've always had kind of this oversimplistic view that if you're good at math, then a lot of things you should also be able to figure those things out, you know. So in business, you have your income and your costs, and you subtract those and, you know, try to get a good number. And the software business, you know, was a great business because if you sell a lot of copies, even at a very low cost, you can have income that's not connected to your costs. And I was afraid, you know, many of the companies I admired, like Wayne Computer, had just gone out of business. Then we visit the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where contemporary art superstar Christian Marclay has created a 24-hour film comprised of clips from cinema and television history. The time shown in the film and television scenes within Marclay's creation coincides with the actual time in real life. It's been more than a decade since the film was last in New York, but as Marclay told our Conor Knighton, he wants viewers to be hyper aware of the time they're spending watching a clock. The clock runs on a continuous loop, synced to the precise time of day. When the kids in the breakfast club are whistling at 1131 a.m., it's 1131 in real life. An hour later, Rain Man announces, minute by minute, the footage functions as an actual clock. That's all coming up right here, on Here Comes the Sun. Bill Gates might have stepped down as Microsoft CEO a quarter century ago, but he's still changing the world with his philanthropic work, especially on global health issues. He's a man who's constantly in the spotlight, but as Lee Cowan found out, he's also a man who will always find time for his favorite burger. Mr. Gates, I'm Dr. Leonard Hofstadter. We've actually met before. Bill Gates may not strike you as an actor, certainly not a comedic one. I mean, ever since I was a little kid, I've looked up to you like, like a hero. But he can be a funny guy. Do you like a tissue? How about a hug? How about a tissue? Even when he was arrested at the age of 21, his smile makes you think there was a lot more going on in that head than just computer calculations. I was driving from Albuquerque up to Seattle, and I got three very, uh, serious speeding tickets. You got three? Yeah. On that one trip? On that one trip. What's a long trip? Uh, this is great. I love this little car. Yeah, pretty nice. We were relieved to learn that the top speed of his all new all electric Fiat red was only about 100 miles an hour. That car was a birthday gift from Bono. Yep, that Bono, as if there's any other. Well, we've been working together on this global health stuff for a long time. These days, he's known largely for his philanthropic work, especially on global health issues. To date, the Gates Foundation has given away nearly $80 billion in grants, most of that from Gates and his former wife Melinda's own pocket. But for most of us, he'll always be the Microsoft guy. This is my last keynote, even though he stepped down as CEO a quarter century ago. The one thing that really held me back was, what if I leave and the company's doing very poorly? A, I'll feel bad and B, I won't know whether to jump back in or not. But, you know, fortunately, I've never had to even think about it because my successors have been amazing. He was the boy one. The Harvard dropout and became a billionaire in his thirties by focusing not on building computers, but selling the software that ran them. Please welcome Bill Gates and the Bill Gates dancers. By the time he launched Windows 95, he was on top of the world. He had every right to be dancing to the Rolling Stones and yucking it up with the likes of Jay Leno. Windows 95 is so easy, even a talk show host can figure it out. But on this day, as he drove us to his favorite drive in Burger Master, a Seattle institution. Great. All right. Looking to get started for you. Gates seemed less like one of the world's richest men. We're here to go. What do you think? For here? We'll do the tray on the window and more like the kid who just used to come here with his dad decades before he'd be calling sports heroes, rock stars and world dignitaries his friends. My social skills were very slow to develop. So except for a few boys similar to me, I didn't have that many friends. He's not saying that for sympathy. He's just being analytical. It's the way his mind works, and it's the way the first of his three part autobiography is written. Here is the set up the source code that, uh, you know, almost certainly was going to lead to some, uh, pretty amazing impact. Bill Gates knew he was different. So did his parents. So did his teachers. Had he been growing up today, he says he likely would have been diagnosed as autistic. Well, when I'm concentrating, I'll actually sometimes start rocking, which bothers people without my even sort of being aware of it. So I haven't outgrown that, uh, type of behavior. Is the rocking kind of a soothing thing? Is it something you just do to concentrate? But it must be. I mean, it's it's a habit. I mean, they did put me on a rocking horse to help me go to sleep. They put me in a cradle, so it's definitely their fault. Whether he is or isn't on the spectrum matters little, he says. I mean, even today, there's not like some magic medicine that gets rid of the bad part and let you keep the good part. He writes that his parents took him to therapy, sent him to private school and tried to unglue him from his books by getting him into sports like skiing, even football. I was forced to now that was on. There were three teams. There was the varsity, the JV and then, uh, even below JV. And so we were the lowest tier. And amongst that third tier, I was semi decent. But that's all it could be said. Almost everything he viewed through the prism of mathematics. As you talk about mass and being good at math and how that kind of revealed all these hidden structures in life and gave all the chaos of the world a certain amount of order, which if you're like me, he was not good at math. All I see is sometimes chaos. I don't see the patterns. I don't see the structures. Well, you know, I think science is beautiful thing that you know, physics, chemistry, biology. The more you learn, the more kind of the pieces fit together because all these topics connect. You're called a genius and I will. Well, no, I don't think that embarrassed you at all. They call you a genius. In conversation 40 years ago with their own Jane Polly, the then William Gates, the third made it clear he was in charge of his destiny. I'm used to having a company where, um, the ideas that I have are something that I can easily pursue. Are you competitive? You think? Yes. People would say I'm competitive. Yes, definitely. I mean, there was an industry panel once where everybody was disagreeing with me. And at the end of the panel, one of the competitors says, Look, Bill is wrong. Bill works so much harder than we do. He's going to succeed. We might will just give in. You don't get to be part of that 1% club without making a few enemies along the way. He is a complicated guy. Forcing us to divorce the Internet from our operating system would be like requiring one of the automakers to sell cars without car stereos. Some say he was ruthless in his business practices, and there are plenty of charges that today is just part of a new American oligarchy. You write in the book about how you said when you first came here as a freshman that you were like a kid in a candy store. There were glimpses of his determination even as a freshman at Harvard. I room was this one here on the first floor. He almost got kicked out for breaking the rules in the computer lab. It turned out I'd used by far the most computer time, and so they're like, Well, what are you doing? You know, you're an undergraduate. What the heck? Great to see you. Yeah, it's impressive. You're here. His computer science professor, Harry Lewis remembers him well. Years ago, he dug out the original code that Gates started writing over Christmas break in 1974. This was a work of beauty. Those pages of basic interpreter code became the Bible of the software revolution. The 69 year old Gates says he's made plenty of mistakes, including meeting with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Of all the tabloids had a field day with his divorce, he now says that was one of his life's biggest regrets. You know, when I was a student, um, you know, I was just trying to learn a lot. I was very curious. But for every critic, how do you decide what to work on? Somebody has gone through many stages of their career. There are just as many like these students at Harvard who speak of Bill Gates in the same breath as Thomas Edison. Hey, you finished yours. You did well. I was good. Almost finished mine. I got a double like his burger. Sometimes Bill Gates has bitten off more than he can chew in his life. Maybe it was a way to challenge himself even in the face of those who still want to challenge him. I've been unbelievably lucky and led a very interesting life. It's not. It's not stopping. Up next, an exclusive excerpt from Lee Cowan's chat with Bill Gates. Something you can only see right here on. Here comes the sun. Stay with us. As promised, here's more from Lee Cowan's interview with Bill Gates. Did you learn anything you think about yourself in the process of writing the book? Well, thinking back on where I was different, you know, like we went through the archives and got this 200 page report I did on Delaware, you know, where the other kids turn in 10 page reports. And even though that's wood bound, amazing. Yeah. And I put real work into the cover. Uh, you know, I remember feeling kind of embarrassed about that, even though there was nothing really wrong with what I did. Any surprises? Things you remember that maybe you hadn't talked about in a while or thought about the steadiness of my dad, his values, uh, you know, how both my parents on their own way, uh, were very helpful, you know, getting my sister to look it over and, uh, tell me what, what rang true to them. That was fun. You know, that, you know, it actually been more fun than I expected. Was it hard to step down as CEO? I, you know, stayed as CEO until the year 2000. Um, and in some ways it was a relief to hand the reins over to Steve Ballmer, who I knew super well, and I stay another eight years. So I'm working for Steve for those eight years. I'm allowing myself, you know, I do make in the year I stepped down to CEOs when I make the gift to the foundation that makes it the biggest in the world. And so I'm part time, uh, learning about philanthropy. Um, no, I, once I made up my mind, um, I felt very comfortable with it. Where do you think your business acumen came from? Well, I've always had kind of this oversimplistic view that if you're good at math, then a lot of things you should also be able to figure those things out. You know, so in business you have your income and your costs and you subtract those and, you know, try to get a good number. And the software business, you know, was a great business because if you sell a lot of copies, even at a very low cost, you can have income that's not connected to your costs. And I was afraid, you know, many of the companies I admired, like Wayne Computer had just gone out of business. And so we were like, wow, we have one period where we were short of cash. And I, I said, I, I never wanted that to happen again. So partly because I, you know, was a bit conservative about how quickly we built up our costs, we could afford some mistakes. I mean, we had products didn't come out on time or products that weren't as popular as I thought they would be. And, you know, math, it's another place where math sort of helps you see what, what the pieces are and how they, they need to connect. So at the end of the day, what, what do you want people to take away from this first part of your memoir about your upbringing and how you sort of came to be? Well, you know, hopefully I'm acknowledging the amazing circumstances and with my parents and the school that I went to. And I didn't go into all the individual teachers, but they were so fantastic with me. And, you know, maybe the way that I was challenged and given a lot of freedom, maybe there's some lesson in that. Up next, making time for a new film at the Museum of Modern Art. Welcome back. Christian Marclay first made a name for himself as part of New York's underground DJ scene. He was an early pioneer of mixing sounds and styles using record turntables. But after he began collaging album covers, he realized he was drawn to the visual arts too. Connor Knighton sat down with Marclay to discuss his celebrated piece, The Clock, now screening at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. From time to time, you might notice a shot of a clock in a movie. In a film like Back to the Future, they're key to the plot. Lightning strikes the clock tower at exactly 10.04pm. But often, they're just ticking away in the background. Or not ticking at all. This watch. Like the watch from Pulp Fiction, stopped at 11.46. Compile enough of these seemingly minute details and minutes can turn into hours, spanning decades of moving image history. That clock. What about it? Somebody obviously wanted us to know the time. In the case of The Clock, a 24-hour film comprised entirely of clips from cinema and television history, that somebody is artist Christian Marclay. It's not to create a trick or to make you forget about time. I want you to be totally conscious about it throughout. The clock runs on a continuous loop, synced to the precise time of day. When the kids in the breakfast club are whistling at 11.31am, it's 11.31 in real life. An hour later, Rain Man announces... Pause. Pause. 12.31. Minute by minute, the footage functions as an actual clock. This uncanny experience of watching some of your favorite movies and realizing that it's telling the time that you're living in right now, and it's eliminating that barrier between you and the world on screen. Stuart Comer is the chief curator of media and performance at MoMA. The effort that it took with Christian and the team of researchers locating the clock footage and all of these different clips is somewhat superhuman. When Marclay won Best Artist for The Clock at the 2011 Venice Biennale, it turned him into a contemporary art superstar. But the 70-year-old first made a name for himself decades earlier as part of New York's underground DJ scene. In those days, you would find records, you know, people would put them in the trash. Born to an American mother and a Swiss father, Marclay was raised in Switzerland and moved to the U.S. to attend art school in the late 1970s. I kept putting aside my work as a visual artist because I lived in a tiny East Village apartment and I didn't have a studio. So music at that time was convenient. It's easier to store records than canvases? Yes, but you need tolerant neighbors. Marclay's music was experimental. He was an early pioneer of turntable-ism. Please welcome record player Christian Marclay. Invited to spin on the short-lived show Night Music. I would destroy the records in performance, but then I had all these incredible covers, such an interesting history of graphic design, and I started collaging with them. One of Marclay's early successes in the visual art world arrived via his Body Mix series, in which he physically stitched together album covers to create new forms. He's unspooled cassette tapes to make prints and pillows. This is the entire tape output of The Beatles woven together. He's cut up everything from Japanese manga to movie subtitles, stacking cinematic fragments nearly 20 feet tall. Seems like collage is the through line with all of this. For me, I'm more interested in working with what exists rather than, you know, invent or draw something. In 1995, Marclay created Telephones, a masterful mashup of film phone conversations. Darling, it's me. What? The girl's dead. Are you sure you have a positive ID? No, not exactly. It's been more than a decade since the clock was last in New York. Marclay is extremely precise about where and how it can be screened, insisting that any museum showing the work stay open at least once for 24 hours so that audiences can see the nighttime section. Are there clock completists? Oh, there are definitely clock squatters, I would say. People who really commit to watching it. But Marclay insists the point isn't to see all of it. It's more to make you hyper aware of the time you're spending literally watching a clock. Here you're reminded that you have an appointment at a certain time, that you can't spend your whole day watching this thing. You're more than a viewer. You're a participant in a way, because your life infringes on this clock. I'm Tracy Smith. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you here next time on Here Comes the Sun.