Like my friend Warren Buffett, I feel particularly lucky to do something every day that I love to do. He calls it "tap dancing to work."
Make sure people get educated, help out with health emergencies. Those things, the government should do. That's 96 per cent of the economy, those two sectors.
Harnessing steam power required many innovations, as William Rosen chronicles in the book 'The Most Powerful Idea in the World.'
There's 20 companies that I have investments in - some batteries, some solar-thermal, one big nuclear thing. We need hundreds and hundreds of companies like that, so that in a 20-year time frame we really are starting to change the energy infrastructure.
In the next 15 years, we can halve childhood deaths. That's doable.
It is a high bar to say that it's more fun than working on software because the work at Microsoft that both Melinda [Gates] and I did was thrilling. We were making breakthroughs and empowering people.
[Warren Buffett ] met with all sorts of different groups about a lot of different things, but yes, he took the time, he listened and he wanted to understand about some of the different diseases and the strength of the American role in doing all these things.
When you say that after World War I there was a pandemic that killed more people than the war itself, most will say: "Wait, are you kidding? I know World War I, but there was no World War 1.5, was there?" But people were traveling around after the war, and that meant the force of infection was much higher. And the problem is that the rate of travel back then was dramatically less than what we have nowadays.
I am super lucky. I've been in the area where things have been changing and been part of the digital revolution, the magic of software, the internet, the computer, and now the cellphone... so it's been a great privilege.
I think Ebola is a great example of where the world really needs to come together. The three countries where this outbreak took place have had a lot of civil war, very weak health systems. And so, it did take a while for people to understand ....that eventually what we saw was a very unique Ebola epidemic. I think it is quite impressive what's being pulled together, and I think we will be able to get this under control.
I think when smallpox was eliminated, the whole world got pretty excited about that because it’s just such a dramatic success.
3D is a way of organizing things, particularly as we're getting much more media information on the computer, a lot more choices, a lot more navigation than we've ever had before.
For Africa to move forward, you've really got to get rid of malaria.
I meet people overseas that know five languages - that the only language I'm comfortable in is English.
I'm never fully satisfied with any Microsoft product.
Lectures should go from being like the family singing around the piano to high-quality concerts.
Money has always been in politics. And I'm not sure you'd want money to be completely out of politics.
The misconception that aid falls straight into the hands of dictators largely stems from the Cold War era.
I believe in generous aid policies.
I think we knew that this would be just like raising the kids together, this would be a fun thing to do in partnership. And you know, we're so lucky because we get to hire in very smart people. We get to partner with governments like the Canadian Development Organization - CIDA, USAID - tonnes of scientists doing this work. This is fascinating.
So not only are we saving lives now, we're creating the incentive for the breakthroughs that over the next generation will mean we can take AIDS, malaria and TB and bring those numbers dramatically down.
The death of a child is an incredible tragedy all over the world. Back in 1990, about 12 percent of children were dying before they reached the age of 5.
Investing in innovation, which was my broad theme talking to [Warren Buffett ], that included health vaccines, it included energy and education.
Contraception really shouldn't be all that controversial because it's a tool a woman can use to delay her first birth until she's, say, 18 or 19 years old.
Of my mental cycles, I devote maybe 10 percent to business thinking. Business isn't that complicated. I wouldn't want to put it on my business card.
