My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
Bitcoin is mostly about anonymous transactions, and I don't think over time that's a good way to go. I'm a huge believe in digital currency... but doing it on an anonymous basis I think that leads to some abuses, so I'm not involved in Bitcoin.
I remember thinking quite logically that I didn't want to spoil my children with wealth and so that I would create a foundation, but not knowing exactly what it would focus on.
What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.
The phenomenal generosity of the United States in its aid budget towards health issues is the best in the world. You can look at that broadly, you can look at it in terms of HIV, the PEPFAR money which came together in a Republican administration with bipartisan support.
I don't think there is any philosophy that suggests having polio is a good thing.
The year I was born, 1955, the first big disease-eradication program in the world was declared for malaria. After about a decade of work, they realized that, at least in the tropical areas, they did not have the tools to get it done.
K to 12 is partly about babysitting the kids so the parents can do other things.
The part of uranium that's fissile - when you hit it with a neutron, it splits in two - is about 0.7%. The reactors we have today are burning that 0.7%.
I'll get to see many disease eradications. and we're seeing a lot of progress.
Our work in global health is about things like cutting childhood deaths, and every year we continue to make progress there.
In the philanthropy game, you're going for different outcomes: saving childhood lives, having kids grow up - because they don't have malnutrition or disease - that they achieve their full potential. We take for Warren [Buffett] things that, because he's very intelligent about the world but doesn't get to go out in Africa and see what we see, we've taken and say to him where we stand and it's basically a very positive report that his gift has made a phenomenal difference.
Now we've got that [children's death rate] down to about 5 percent, so we've more than cut it in half, and that's because we're getting vaccines out, economic improvement also helps there, but the vaccines are why we've seen an acceleration in getting that down.
People think about this idea that there's 122 million kids that are alive that would not be if that fatality rate had stayed at the 1990 level, that's 122 million families.
We're still missing about a dozen vaccines that will make a huge difference. For adults, we've got HIV and TB are still huge; for kids malaria is still killing a half million kids a year out of that 6 million. We probably need some vaccines, but we need a little more data to make sure we're getting the vaccines that will save the most lives.
In most of these things our foundation is a co-funder, so I can say that a polio or an HIV vaccine, that I'm putting our resources behind it in a very big way and the U.S. government would be the best partner for those efforts.
If somebody is considering being willing to go out and work in the field in global health, those are a particular class of heroes because it's hard to work in those places. Our foundation gets so many of our learnings from people who've been out there and seen, "this tool is not going to work there, there's more of a problem here than you know." You should really get involved in that.
Our leadership [in Microsoft ] has that - "hey, we are the best in certain ways," and so we get the best people. That any kind of positive dynamic is quite good, so I love what's going on there, it's fun.
Melinda [Gates] has been my partner in raising the kids and I went from before I met her, intentionally having an unbalanced life, to having a more balanced life with all sorts of fun things that she and I do together.
If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the empathy and the diseases and the poor school. We will answer with our innovations and we will surprise the pessimists.
The Global Fund is a central player in the progress being achieved on HIV, TB and malaria. It channels resources to help countries fight these diseases. I believe in its impact because I have seen it firsthand.
[Melinda Gates] is a lot of fun to work with. There's some of the people skills that she's better at and cares about more. It'd be a mistake not to think of her as very numerical and interested in the science. I enjoy, if I get ahead of her, say, understanding the immune system, then we can spend a few hours, where I'm going through how amazing it is and interesting, and how that affects our creating new products, so I've always had a partner.
The huge turnout for Live 8 here and around the world proves that thanks to the leadership from people like Tony Blair and Gordon Brown the world is beginning to demand more action on global health and poverty.
There's a unique thing about the UK, where you give a very generous foreign aid budget to support globally, which is spent wisely. We partner with the government here to make sure that that money is spent well.
So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children. It's a very sad thing, because these vaccines are important.
