Where do you see the role of fossil fuels going forward?
Well, we have to outcompete fossil fuels now to do that properly.
They you know, they shouldn't get subsidies.
And in fact, a carbon tax over time should be put on so that the
new, you know, say, the electric car or the plane use hydrogen.
The fact it doesn't emit carbon. You're helping it get adoption.
Those companies have skills. You know, if you want to sequester
carbon or, you know, nuclear waste or there's a lot of skills if you want to
make biofuels, you know, some of those companies will take the capital and
skills they have. You know, so I wouldn't, you know, say,
okay, I wish they weren't there. You know, people still you know, there's
no country that can say, okay, we have zero emissions.
You know, people want to drive to work. You know, in fact, the excess supply
when Russia cut off its supply in the world, was sort of glad that that that
was available. And so, yes, oil and gas needs to be out
competed and those companies need to join
the effort. I know you look at a lot of technologies
and a lot of innovation, but is there one thing that you've been most excited
about in the past five years or that you're you're most excited about for the
future? And we talk about nuclear fuel.
I mean, we talk a lot about the really big, you know, exciting stuff.
What are you excited about? Well, you know, I love all my children
and I have these hundred companies and, you know, I never knew that
we'd get a new way to make steel or cement or beef.
It's fair to say that if we can get either nuclear fission or fusion to be
safe and broadly accepted and very economic because it's not weather
dependent, it would be very complementary to the large amount of
solar and wind that we're putting into our electric system.
And so I'm a I'm biased. I'm a huge investor in in both fusion
and fusion and hoping that it comes in time.
We can't count on it in a patient.
It has been too expensive and fusion doesn't
exist yet. But fusion 15 years from now, like
what's your. I know it's a guess at the moment.
Well, of the of the four companies I'm invested in,
one of them Commonwealth fusion has incredible power things will have to go
well that in the late 2030s they'd be making electricity and and start to
scale it up. So
that's an aspiration. But it's a great company and we have
three others that aren't quite that early but you know, are within 5 to 10
years of that. I mean, we're in a strange place in the
planet right now because there's a lot of unknowns.
It's it's technology. It's of course, climate change.
Or do you find leaders distracted or are they still putting climate change as
some of their top priorities? Well, we can't have as our only
priority. I mean, you know, we still need to buy
vaccines and bednets. And, you know, when there's a war, you
know, that properly demands attention. And even the aid budget, you know, for
those refugees and everything it is, I wish there hadn't been a pandemic or
Ukraine war or Middle East unrest. Those are going to take away from the
amount of attention we have on continuing to make health progress and
climate change. So,
you know, those are are bad developments.
If you'd only seen 10,000 people come, you know, versus 35,000 last time, you
might've said, wow, we are really getting distracted.
Instead, twice as many came here, including a lot of the big businesses.
So the signs I'm seeing are that while we still have to deal with those things
and we have limited resources, we have to spend them well, that climate
progress is is moving ahead.
Even though we won't, we meet our highest aspiration.
Bill Gates, one final question on do. How how does that fit into your vision
for? Well, A.I.
is such a powerful technology and you know, this recent advance where the I
can basically read and write that's going to affect every human
activity. And so we're using AI to find new drugs.
We're using AI to look at climate change.
And so all of our companies are going to move faster because I help some explore
different solutions and move a lot, a lot better.
So. You know, certainly for challenges like
this, I is very much our friend.