>> rose: welcome to the program. tonight an encore edition of a conversation with bill gates. happy thanksgiving. bill gates just received the presidential medal of freedom from president obama. >> a f government is blind, then things like tax evasion, child pornography and perhaps most importantly terrorism enabled by nuclear biological weapons, then our government isn't able to fulfill some role of stopping those things. >> rose: right. and, so, it's great that people are talking more, you know, post-snowden and everyone about how do you feel about those safeguards. if we can't, as a society, discuss those safeguards and build them in a way that we feel good about, then government won't be able to fulfill its function.

>> rose: for this thanksgiving day, bill gates for the hour. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: bill gates is here. he is microsoft's co-founder and co-chair of the bill and melinda gates foundation. his mission is to invent our way out to have the climate change challenge, to put billions into clean energy research and development. the break through with coalition members include mark zuckerberg,

joe besos and jack mar. a commission commits government to double their funding. initiatives aannounced november at the climate summit in paris where 195 countries reached an agreement to lower grous greenhe gas emissions. welcome. >> thank you. >> rose: here's what's interesting to me. it seems to me, with all the concentration on the foundation that you've made and all the great things that have taken place in terms of poverty and health, two things have come out in watching your curiosity. one is agriculture and your understanding of how crucial agriculture was and second is energy. so you pose this question -- if you could have a superpower, what would it be? you could think about being able to defy gravity, see through walls, think about everything, but you said what? >> i said the energy that

getting energy for everyone would transform their life as much as anything i could think of. the idea of flipping a light switch and the lights come on or setting the temperature and it's hot or cold, if you went to somebody in africa who doesn't have energy and said that was possible, it would seem as bizarre as somebody flying or seeing through walls. it really is a type of super power. americans have the equivalent of 200 humans, you know, pushing an axe along their behalf so that their lights light up and their materials get made and food gets made. you know, it's that much -- modern life is that much about energy intensity. >> rose: in fact, you show two things that are interesting to me. one, is you show a global map of the world and you show africa at night. and parts of affect are almost

dark. the extraordinary thing to read your letter is that 1.3 billion people, 18% of the population, do not have electricity. >> in africa, unless we do better than the current expectation, 80% of the people without electricity will be in africa 30 years from now. so they haven't progressed that much, and when you go there at night -- melinda and ewere in the suburbs of lagos driving along -- it's eerie because all of the lighting is people burning things in big oil barrels. so you think well, this is like some strange movie not a normal city at all. >> rose: the goal coming out for you an and others is cut greenhouse gases by 80% by 2050. >> yeah, as long as you are emitting greenhouse gases, it stays in the atmosphere for

hundreds of years. not all but most of it. the rest of it tends to go back into the soils or into the ocean, which then you have acidification problems. but as long as emissions are above zero, then you have a positive warming trend, and that warming trend is what creates the strange weather and causes crops not to grow as well and particularly during equatorial regions, you're getting up to heat levels that plants and humans do very poorly at. ironically, you should go on to the northern lattitudes. there is actually a net benefit there, but a lot of humanity, particularly the poorest, live in the area where the heat will cause terrible problems. >> rose: most of the majority of the world's energy is produced by fossil fuels. >> that's right, overwhelmingly. and if you take the forecast that's made that doesn't assume some incredible innovation,

that's going to continue for the next 40 years. but very responsible forecasts on the path we're on today is we won't be able to make a change away from that. >> rose: unless we do what? well, innovation to me is the answer to most problems, including energy. so i think of india, because they don't have le electricity, they're collecting fire wood that's destroying their environment, the women and children are breathing smoke and get respiratory diseases, it's health is awful so even if they survive, they don't get enough protein in their diet, there is every reason why india should have electricity. it's great for their people. unfortunately their straightforward path to get there is coal, yet india is big

enough that if they go down the straightforward path, we won't meet any of our climate change goals. yet today, we have no alternative that's etch as close to as cheap, including reliability which is always a fundamental characteristic of energy systems, you cannot power india as cheaply with the other things as you can with coal. so only through innovation can you square the circle and say should india electrify or avoid greenhouse gas emission. which going forward they won't emit as much co2 per person as us in 100 years. >> rose: is this your biggest passion? >> it's the long-time thing that requires so much coordination and science and politics come together. i'm very fascinated about it.

i still have polio eradication and our health stuff as the things that we feel like, gosh, we're on track, we know what the do. the one is in the category of great importance, and if you wait 20 years to get started, then the time it takes to invent, to change the system, you're really going to miss the window on it. so it's got a funny kind of urgency even the damage in the next 20 or 30 years is not that dramatic. >> rose: but you've got to get it started. >> absolutely. >> rose: and you believe you can get to zero by the beginning of the next century? >> i believe innovation, there are over app dozen different paths, and we only need one of them to work to get us this cheap, reliable energy, then, yes, you have to deploy that and get to these what are wildly ambitious goals. >> rose: and talking about innovation, what's interesting, you talk about an energy miracle. what would that be?

>> well, anything that's half the price of today's energy, cheaper than coal, and totally reliable, doesn't depend on the wind blowing or the sunshining, that's an energy miracle. so, for example, if you could take sunlight and directly make gasoline from sunlight, that's called solar fuels, and there are scientists who can do that. now, it's about 100 times less efficient than it needs to be to make any sense, and, so, that one isn't even ready for a startup company. that one still needs to be in the government labs getting basic research funding, you know, three or four times what it's getting today, and then, with luck, it will get to the point where companies will get started and high-risk, high-return investors will come along. >> rose: so you're looking for a miracle. what you want to do now coming is to enlist both private

funding which you and jeff and others are in this. at the same time, you want to make sure the government has a role. >> that's right. basic research -- their unique role is basic research. the universities, the national labs. you're not going to get private investors to fund the level of research because that's just the very beginning material science, stronger magnet, tensile strength, things that will be critical, just like in the medical sector there's a great pharmaceutical industry, but the u.s. government spends 30 billion a year on basic health research, and it's been fantastic for the country, it's been fantastic for the world. in energy, we're down at less than 6 billion, so that's the number that i'm hoping, and the

commitment was made in paris by 20 governments including the faiths to double their -- including the united states to double their energy in r&d over five years and develop the supply innovations and make it good for group of investors. >> rose: the letter, who is it addressed to? i had the impression you were addressing it just to high school students. >> right, that's the other thing for us. the two themes, the energy which i elaborate on and melinda talk about time and how women have to spend lots of extra time, more than men do, in the household. a kid in high school newspaper in ap apalachia, kentucky, askes about superpowers, and she said time, i said energy.

and that, as we talked about it, really pointed out to us that those are the such basic things about the experience of poor people, and even in the u.s. people can appreciate how important energy is and there is still a time imbalance, so those became the theme. yet these are not problems that there is some ten-year solution to. so the younger generation, their voice, their willingness to look at things in new ways. you know, i hope the invention takes place. today's teenagers will be in their 20s and a lot of the wild thinking that drives innovation comes from that group. >> rose: what are the three crazy ideas you think might have potential? >> well, i mentioned this idea of some energy to generate fuels and that's unique because unlike generating electricity where batteries that store electricity are super expensive and don't

last very long, storing gasoline in a big gasoline tank, you just make the tank bigger and it can sit there for as long as you want and when you want the energy, you just burn it and it's very dense. it's ten times more dense in energy content than the best batteries we have today. so that really will be special. taking nuclear energy and overcome ago number of the -- overcoming a number of problems, the cost of the plants, the safety of the plants where people worry will you have another fukushima r chernobyl-type accident, that's another path we could go down. we could take wind that's way up in the jet stream and capture that. now, that requires materials that are ultra strong, which would be valuable for many things. i mean, you could build bridges that last forever. and we're really on the verge of that type of understanding.

there are two approaches people think about. one is you can just take solar and wind and make them really cheap and that's probably not too hard, and then you could have a battery that's ten or 20 times better than any battery we have today. >> rose: what's so difficult about developing a good battery. >> it's chemistry and the number of charges you can put into an area, those rules, there is not a semiconductor thing that lets us just jam those things in. you're going between a liquid and solid phrase and as you do it the solid tends to degrade. so if batteries could last instead of 400 charge-discharge cycles, they could last 4,000, that would change the economics. i have money in many battery companies and a bunch i don't, and i would say all of them are

having a tough time, because proving something doesn't degrade in some physical way over 4,000 cycles, it's not something you can test overnight. it's very pragmatic stuff. so batteries in the last hundred years haven't improved as much as we would need them to to make this the path we go down. now, that is a very possible path. we should invest in both the research and companies along that path, but that's the one most people think is going to come and it's not as easy as they think. >> rose: what, 50 years? you can't put a time on it. the only reason i'm confident is if you take 12 paths -- nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, the batteries we talked about, a total of about 12, taking burning hydrocarbons and capturing the car bee --en -- ce

flue, the chemny stack, that's another one. so you get the risk capital, even if individually they're only 20% likely, if you pursue those 60 different things, then the chance of a success is very high and that's what i think we should do. >> rose: two quick questions before we turn to health and other things you're doing. number one, have climate deniers gained strengths or are they -- what? where would you put that component open our po -- compont of our population. >> the problem of climate denial is not a problem outside the united states. >> rose: why is that? a good question. the policymakers on many issues

like agriculture crops called gmos, europe is more skeptical on the science on that than the u.s. is. on climate change we are more skeptical particularly in telling policymakers look askance at that. there is another group that people believe climate is a problem but think it's easy to solve, so, okay, as soon as the utility guys don't stand in the way of rooftop solar this thing is solved for the entire world and for transport industry, home, everything we need, that notion that their simple solutions also stand in the way -- >> rose: that inhibiting forward progress. >> until the 2015 november talks, the idea of improving the amount of innovation,

improving -- increasing r&d was not discussed, and i feel kind of amazed at that. the 20 countries did commit there. that's good. >> rose: including china. including china and all the big ones you would want to, even india, all made the doubling commitment. we've always put a lot of money into the demand side for clean energy. we have tax credits, we have what are called renewable portfolio standards where utilities are required to buy a certain percent of energy from renewable sources. so if you take the effective payments, the price of electricity and tax forgiveness, we put a lot into that demand side and so has germany and japan and others. we need to have a balance where we're driving the supply of innovation as well. >> rose: everybody is talking about the zika virus.

you looked hard at ebola. tell me where you see this and what's necessary and what did we learn from the ebola crisis? >> well, in the case of ebola, the orchestration of the resources, the private sector's ability to make diagnostics and antibodies and drugs and vaccines, that was pulled together very slowly, and there was no road map for, hey, if we're moving quickly what's our liability, what is the regulatory path for these things, if there's three or four companies working on it, which ones have the best one and should go twice as fast, which one should drop out, that was chaotic, and only now do we have these good ebola tools, which if that had spread a lot faster, we would have felt terrible about that. zika is different, spread by mosquitoes, not human-to-human contact, and there's still a lot of measurement to be done to understand, is there some narrow

part of your pregnancy where you can be affected? is it required that you also have had dengue at some point? but it's a bad situation and and good an emergency was declared. we could sit down, figure out the innovations that could come in, in case killing mosquitoes, because this particular mosquitoes lives in urban areas mostly around the equator, and one of the great heros of global health long ago said we should wipe out these particular type of mosquitoes and he came very close to it. now he started to think, that would have been a good thing. this carries dengue, chicken and

yellow fever. >> rose: you have said mosquitoes are the most dangerous animal on earth. >> that's right, in terms of what kills the most humans. do humans kill the most humans? do lions, sharks? the humans killing humans is a strong number, too, but unless war gets extreme in some year, the 600,000-plus kids who die of malaria, which is a mosquito-caused death, that is the animal that generates the most mortality. >> rose: and malaria? it's all malaria, yeah. there is a few others, but malaria is 95%. >> rose: so what should we do about the mosquito. >> there are a couple of ideas for changing the mosquito that we have been funding in order to

work on dengue and malaria. one idea is that you actually put a bacteria called wolbochy into the mosquito and it doesn't carry the parasite hardly at all. so we've done field trials on that. appears it works for dengue and also zika, so that may get ruled out more quickly. an even more powerful tool that spreads faster but more controversial is to take the new gene editing technology people call crisper and have male and female mosquitoes pass along either something that prevents them from carrying the virus or kills the progeny, those are both approaches, and use gene editing which create a gene driveway means all of your children both male and female

inherit something, even if only one of your parents have it, that it's dominant into that generation, to not survive or to carry the bad virus. >> rose: if you were coming out of high school today, you have been asked this question before and i asked it ten years ago, if you were coming out of high school today, knowing what you know in terms of genomics and knowing what's going on in technology, which field would you enter? >> that would be a hard choice. >> rose: because the others got so much more exciting. >> yeah, the digital stop in terms of vision and robotics continues to be very exciting. not without challenges as it moves at full speed, but mostly positive enablement. so that's a wonderful field and will generate tons of jobs people should want. biology, all the medical work is also an incredible thing.

understanding how these genes work and actually, in some cases, you have to use the digital tools to attract the genes and understand them. there are companies working on robotic assisted surgery that could raise the quality and lower the cost. >> rose: coming together of genomics and technology. >> exactly. we have stem cells, genetics. so the field of biology is so amazing and a kid has interest, the champs that they could lead huge breaks is gigantic there but i also want to see energy because we need bright minds to drive that as well. >> rose: and the mind we might not have access to because not having energy they would not have a full development development. >> fortunately, that's the great thing, as we uplift more countries, then they get more educated and contribute more. the u.s. leads in science, but countries like china now will

also contribute. >> rose: and you have mentioned in the letter and i mention it again the idea is clean energy. not just to have energy, but they've got to have clean energy. >> that's right. the greenhouse gases constraint, it would be nice if it was only a 20% reduction, but the fact that it's essentially eliminating it from rich country energy systems, that is daunting but necessary, and that's why all this parallel work is needed. >> rose: on the digital side you mentioned artificial intelligence. part of that has to do with robots and finding out what does that mean in terms of jobs and population that might not have a job and all those kinds of questions about how we spend leisure time and the rest of that. but there are also things that concern you and other people. just you, what is your concern about artificial intelligence? >> in the long run, the scale of the intelligence is unbounded,

and nobody knows -- >> rose: nobody knows how smart it could get. >> no, it will get a lot smarter than us. it's so smart we'll have to ask it, hey, how smart are you? and it will tell us. so the near-term problem that's predictably in the 20-year time frame is labor substitution, not super intelligence. >> rose: labor substitution. ight, where that's kind of an embarrassment of riches problem where you have people to help other kid in school, every handicapped and elderly person, that if you're not needed in the warehouse, do other things. >> rose: it dovetails into what melinda said about freeing time. >> it will free up time to do all the drudge rithings, so

spending time with the kids and being more connected socially, we should be able to do more of that. >> rose: she tells a wonderful story in her part of the letter which i guess was a family in africa, i think, and the wife spent all her time going to get water and bringing it back and finally she was about to leave the marriage and she comes home and the bags are packed and he says, what can i do -- i'm paraphrasing -- she says, i'm doing all the stuff, you know, everything, all the stuff at home and you need to help me. so he agrees. he starts taking the water himself. they split that. all of a sudden he get involved in that and they determine there is smarter ways to do this and start collecting rain and doing other things. her point is freeing up people to have time to participate in all the issues jointly. >> that was interesting because when he first helped out, he was ridiculed by the other men and he's, like, no, i'm going to keep doing this, and what they

told melinda is that set an example for that village. we have a tiny case of that where i was driving, when i was c.e.o. of microsoft, our children to school quite a bit, and i don't know for sure, but other wives used that to encourage their husbands that they couldn't say they were too much more busy than i was at that particular time. >> rose: back to artificial intelligence. so what's the time frame on this? >> for the labor substitution, it will be substantial in the 5-to-20-year period. warehouse, security, things that -- the computers used to not be able to see, and we are really good at physical manipulation, making the bed, cleaning up the room, carrying a patient upstairs. the amount of adjustment and

ability, it's quite incredible, but one software achieves -- once software achieves those things, then it's kind of unbounded. like sorting parts in a warehouse, picking things out of a bin. computers are just now getting to human level. the problem is, ten years from now, they will be at three or four times the human level and the humans aren't on that same type of improvement curve, and so it's like farming. it's like saying, oh, tractors are going to destroy the world. well, because that took generations, people did adjust. here, the speed, it will come a little faster, and some people sort of almost don't think it will happen because we've sort of been saying this will happen before it happened and it's, like, oh, they have been saying that. it's true. we cried wolf -- wolf, wolf, wolf! and next thing we know, there's a damn wolf!

( laughter ) >> rose: but on the more concerning side in terms of intelligence, is there breakthrough necessary or is it so underway it's just time and accumulation of technological advantages? >> i think on the labor piece, hardly any of the experts in the field would disagree that that's coming. on this piece about intelligence, you could get the very best people in the field and half would say, ah, i don't think that will ever happen, or i think that will take forever. i'm amazed that it's so -- it is not alsubject of which there is -- a subject of which there's consensus and even to be afraid of it. >> rose: or even where you are. >> i'm worried about it. >> rose: are you as worried as elon musk is? >> yes. >> rose: who says it more dangerous than nuclear catastrophe? >> yes. >> rose: eventually more

dangerous than nuclear catastrophe. >> because if this happens, it changes life as we know it, so life is changed for the entire population. >> rose: what's that scenario? that the machine is far more intelligent than -- >> rose: and, therefore, they control us? >> and, therefore, our sense of purpose and the notion of which humans are in control of it or are humans in control of it will have profound consequences. >> rose: and how long before that happens? >> when people answer that question, they're a little bit guess eing. i don't think it will happen in less than 40 years. >> rose: 40. and i can't say for sure it will happen in less than 100. >> rose: 40 years is 2056. no time at all. >> rose: i know! that's no time at all. >> rose: this is in the lifetime of your children. >> right. even if it's 100 years, the idea

that -- the thing about this one is -- >> rose: they're smarter than humans, in 50 years, machines are smarter than hume snnls. >> because humans created them, yes. >> rose: but if they're smarter, they will determine the future of the world, not -- >> or the humans who control them. >> rose: or the humans who control them, because humans can decide what goes in and can come out? the humans will write the software. >> there will be some subset of humans who control the machines. >> rose: oh. and who are they? >> the private sector is doing more state of the art intelligence work than the public sector. >> rose: the great advances including the internet came out of the defense department. >> the early stage, yes. and then it had contractors like

vbn, and then eeventually the infrastructure is on the private side. the i.t. revolution is largely moved to be privately funded. >> rose: in terms of artificial intelligence, it's all in the private sector. >> the the best stuff is in the private sector now. >> rose: what i'm finding out is people in hedge funds and venture capital are pouring money into it because they believe it's going to unlock some kind of future. >> right, and even if you focus on it as a narrow thing like, hey, what stock should i trade, you may be creating a general capacity for intelligence. >> rose: well, there is a lot of that now even. >> right. >> rose: as you would know. so it's a thing that we ought to -- the discussion and debate ought to begin. it's not like banning that

research would be a good move because that just pushes it to less visible locations. >> rose: speaking of a public debate that ought to begin, let's talk about security versus privacy, encryption, apple, the f.b.i. and the federal government, where do you stand? >> well, it would be valuable if the safeguards that the government had in terms of the information it was acquiring, when it would go for that information, how it would deal with it, that people felt comfortable with that, because if government is blind, then things like tax evasion, child pornography and perhaps most importantly terrorism enabled by snoorl biological -- nuclear biological weapons, then our government isn't able to fulfill some role of stopping those things. >> rose: right. and, so, it's great that people are talking more, you know, post-snowden and everyone about how do you feel about

those safeguards. >> rose: okay. if we can't as society discuss those safeguards and build them in a way that we feel good about, then government won't be able to fulfill its function. >> rose: so therefore, if you're responsible for the edecision as to whether -- for the decision as to whether apple should allow the government one time only to come in and provide, in their labs, software so the government can then try to have access, are you in favor of that? are you in favor of a private company -- in this circumstance, apple -- in the secrecy of their own lab and their ability to destroy what they create after they provide this to the government one time only, should they be able to do that? >> every case up till now, when the government's come in and says, what's the banking information? banks like to keep their customers' information private,

but no bank ever defied the government. i think apple at the end, they're just forcing a complete judiciary process. i don't think apple is saying -- say it goes to the supreme court, i don't think they're saying they will defy the government, they're just forcing -- >> rose: no, they're just saying right now they're not going to do it so it will be appealed to a district appeals court and the supreme court. i'm just asking you, what would you do if you were the executive? would you do the same thing tim cook has done? >> i think they're saying, hey, as a society, we think this discussion on safeguards is important. i don't disagree with that. >> rose: nobody disagrees with that. >> at the end of the day, we want a government that has this ability, and we trust it to use that visibility on our behalf. that's where, in order to stop innovation in biological

weaponry from being turned against humanity, you really need government to have a role of trust. >> rose: to have access. now, historically, governments, you know, the f.b.i. in some cases, they haven't always earned that trust, but i claim it's important for the public to figure out what structure would put us back into a situation where the u.s. government has the safeguards so we do trust it so if the courts rule against apple on this, we're not saying that's a terrible thing. >> rose: but i want to understand what you would do. and you are as versed as anybody in this as i know. >> the only choice apple has is to wait for the higher court ruling. >> rose: which? over time, i expect the government will decide not to be blind and it will exercise its sovereign power not to be blind,

but there will have been a debate about visibility. >> rose: are you okay with tim cook waiting until it walks its way through the judiciary process or is it possible -- >> because -- >> rose: -- is it impossible to do a one-time-only, in this case of this one computer and this one iphone, that belonged to a terrorist? >> apple agrees it is possible. but it improves they can do so. they've already admitted they can do so. >> rose: right. your bank can take your banking information and give it to the u.s. government. they have that ability. your phone company can take your phone calls and give it to the u.s. government. >> rose: but they have an encrypted iphone that does not allow them to do that. >> no, that's false. the information that the government is seeking is not in the security processor and the logic about challenging the

security processor with a pin is not in the security processor. so there is not a technological question here. >> rose: what is the question? the the question is what will the final court rule on this issue. that's really the only question. >> rose: why is it so hard to get you to say yea or nay? because most of silicon valley is supporting what apple is doing, not on the idea that we want to wait to see what a judiciary body says, they're saying we don't think the government should be able to access an encrypted phone. apple says they don't know how to do it, but now we know they do know how to do it. >> right. and endorsing the idea of all the government's behavior with accessing information in the past, nobody would want to do that because there are cases where the government overused --

well, more j. edgar hoofe hoovei think, more clear. >> rose: absolutely. and, so, the idea that you're forcing the discussion about, gosh, what would it mean if you can't trust the government ever to get banking information or call information or iphone information? you know, it would be great if we could agree on what safeguards would get us back to the same. at least this government is working on our behalf tracking down terrorists. >> rose: ios7 and 8, you were presented with a very different situation in terms of encrypted phones. yes or no? >> the information on that phone is accessible to apple. >> rose: right. if anybody was confused about that, now they're not.

that information is accessible to apple. that's a tech logical -- but it doesn't really matter. it's like your bank saying, oh, we can't possibly access your account information. your bank can and they can resist court orders if they choose to as well. >> rose: this is a hard case, i assume, because of trim, because, i mean -- because of terrorism, because there is no violation -- i mean, the person who had the phones, two people are dead. >> right, the issue is the precedential effect of is this a government who will safeguard information and use this cape inability an appropriate way. >> rose: that's why you have judicial standards. >> and why you have a democracy that has debates about what should the patriot act one, two, three, four look like and the congress can decide, no, the

government never gets to see bank accounts and travel records or anything. that's all political. the statutes that are in question were enacted by the united states congress. turns out they're using one from a long time ago, but eventually, as it has been with the patriot act, this will all be subject to democratic discussion, but it won't be corporations if th in e end, although they can talk to congressmen just like anyone else. >> rose: this is one i don't understand, and you can help me. obviously apple knows they can do it if they're directed to, all the way up to the supreme court and the law of the land if they say you can do it, do it. they're fighting it because they say, if, in fact, they do this for the government, that all the people who have bought iphones under the assumption that they were protected, that they will

come after them. i had cy vance, district attorney in new york, say to me i have 120 cases which are about encrypted data in an iphone and every one of them i would like to see opened up because it would be evidentiary important to me. in china, they say we bought those phones because we thought they would be safe from challenge. now they believe you can't have a one-time only solution here, that, in fact, if apple does this, that what their business model was about, what their marketing was about, what their relationship with their customers were about will be voided. are they right or wrong? >> they can access this information. >> rose: i know that. you've said that three times. i know that. >> and the -- >> rose: but they're saying if they access it for this case, then everything -- >> just like your bank, just like your phone company. >> rose: that's right. anyone who says they can

override may not be able to do that in the end. >> rose: how is microsoft different? >> all the tech companies are insisting that the government have really formal orders for anything that they do. you know, no tech company is ever going to volunteer information. there is still some discretion about you're forced to go through the court process. but the tech industry, this is a political decision about when governments can access information and what those safeguards look like, and i would say the tech companies are for good reasons and saying, hey, let's really have this debate about safeguards because, in the digital world, the amount of information about your

behavior that somewhere is larger -- now, in some cases in london where they have cameras, they have dropped crime rates and various things. you know, is that okay? in the u.k., they decided that the net benefit of that, and countries will have different rule about these things. >> rose: i'm asking because i'm trying to fully understand this. cook said they have asked us to build a backdoor. is that what the government is asking, a backdoor? >> in the same way when the bank looks up bank account information they have to type the password in, in this case the password is a piece of code that says allow an un-- allow an arbitrary number of pins to be entered. >> rose: they are asking apple to do something. >> just like they ask a bank to type in the account number and print the thing out. >> rose: and deliver us the

documents. >> yeah, that's doing something. >> rose: max whom you and i both know and admire -- this is what i'm ingt trying to get you to say one side or the other -- apple should offer the f.b.i. the exact data but they should not offer them a master key. >> yeah, that would solve this particular case. >> rose: and is that what they should do then, offer this exact data but not a master key? >> the only discretion apple has is whether to go through this whole judiciary process or not. i'm not going to say, no, they should stop now and not go through the judicial process, because i do view the discussion about, hey, isn't the government on our side? wait a minute, why are so many people reluctant for the government to have access an and there are quite a variety of governments, what does it mean

about that? >> rose: and you value your own privacy. >> sure. >> rose: and so do i. but the notion of what is absolutely unacceptable or not, people also should, you know b kind of educated about that. >> rose: i want to talk about other things, too. you've said some really fun things. you've talked about the role music has played in your life, and you talked about the fact that, when you got married, melinda loved willie nelson, and willsy nelson was there. you talked about -- i think you did the thing in london on a desert isle? >> exactly. >> rose: what did you choose to bring to the desert isle? >> there was a willie nelson song i had him sing when he came down by surprise which is called "blue skies." >> rose: she didn't know he was come sphg.

>> no, i gave her that surprise and she did a custom spoof version of the economist where all my friends wrote articles was her equivalent gift to me. >> rose: you also talked about richardfeinman as the feature you would like to have. we all know him about the spaceship disaster when he figured it out. what was it about him? >> he was so tough on himself in terms of whether he understood things, that he understood physics in a deep way, and, so, his lectures explaining physics he gave in the 1960s i still consider the best way for somebody to learn why physics is interesting and why it was confusing and how they straightened themselves out and what it means to an experiment. >> rose: the caltech one. this lecture series was at columbia. then he goes to caltech and does

the most criewlg freshman physics course ever done that even he thinks, man, i think i made it too hard for them and that leads to thefeinman lectures on physics. if you want to test your physics knowledge o or refresh it, there is nothing better to read. >> rose: did you read them? yes, but slowly. it's the slowest thing i've ever read. >> rose: do you likely regret not learning a foreign language? >> yeah, i feel like some isolationist, lazy person. >> rose: then why didn't you? lazy, you are not. >> i got fanatic about software and kept putting it off and still, to this day, i'm hoping to get around to it. french is easy enough that i should just do that. now, mark zuckerberg went and

learned chinese, gave a lecture. >> rose: and answered questions from the chinese. >> and my chinese-speaking friends say it was very, very impressive. >> rose: so, hey, there is still time. >> i'm a bit envious. >> rose: you're 50 something and he's 30. >> not chinese, though. i'm too much of a wimp. >> rose: i saw something the other day where you acknowledged you hacked into computers. >> yes, that was between age 14 and 16. we had limited access to computer time and -- >> rose: the library? yes, computers were super expensive so people used phone lines to dial into a big expensive computer and you would have 50 people all dialed in at the same time. that's -- you know, computer time was rare and scarce, and i knew where on the university there were a few computers and i

would get up at 5:00 in the morning and if they had a half hour free i would go and use it. in a few cases we figured out how to get on to computers that we wouldn't generally have been given access to. >> rose: software is the second love of your life, isn't it? >> i was obsessed with software from a very young age. so, yes, my 10,000 hours was devoted to learning how to write software. >> rose: and was that your core competence, writing software? >> yeah, math helped me learn software. >> rose: you loved math. and then i got so deep in software it later helped me with math. but the thing you do obsessively between age 13 and 18, that's the thing you have the most chance of being world class at. and i only have one thing i did obsessively from 13 to 18 and that's try to write good software. >> rose: try to write good software. did you write good software?

>> it was likely good then when i was 15 i got to work on this projects and thought, this guy is bert than me, he critiqued me. then later i got critiqued again and i thought, this was better. so it was helpful to have my comeuppance about how did my code compare with other people's code. then i was a bit on my own. but, yeah, i had to be pretty tough about how good can you get. >> rose: yeah, but my impression of you is you did pretty much what you wanted the as a teenager. >> after age 13 -- >> rose: that's when teenage begins. >> -- i had a -- my parents were reasonable and, you know, they were fairly busy. i had a very good deal as a teenager. >> rose: yes, you did. they sent me to a private school, there were lots of good kids there.

>> rose: did you have a therapist, too? >> that was my real transition where i was thinking that fighting with them was something that i could really prove something and they were smart enough to send me to someone who said that was kind of a war i have every advantage in and, so, it's a waste of my energy and i wasn't going to really prove anything because it was almost unfair, and he not me to set my sight on, okay, what am i going to do after high school? and my parents really were more of allies than my barriers in terms of thinking of that framework. he encouraged reading in areas i hadn't done like freud and psychology. >> rose: what are you reading now that you like? because you write these book reports and it is said you read two or three books a week. >> i try to. i end up on average reading one a week. i just finished sapiens, which

is quite good. i read this one that's only for old men called "younger next year," which is -- >> rose: what did you learn from that? >> it really beats you up about don't kid yourself, if you don't exercise like mad and eat well, you are in decay. >> rose: right. but on the other side, it says, until your '80s, if you exercise six days a week and eat reasonably, nothing heroic, then your decline from age 60 to, say, 85, with any luck, will be very, very minimal because you're telling your body to maintain your bone strength, your muscle strength, so i found it very help snoof. >> rose: and you're listening to that? >> i've never done strength training and it says you need to do that twice a week. so i've take an voi to do it -- a vow to do it. ask me next time i'm here

whether that will take. i've done zero days of strength training as of today, so you can see what the result is. if i come in looking buff, you will know this book had a profound impact on my behavior. >> rose: but you write these book records and you say you read the books even though you might not like them but you finish the books you don't like. >> yeah. >> rose: you don't give yourself margins. >> i don't give myself permission not to finish a book. >> rose: great to have you. thanks. >> rose: bill gates for the hour. thanks for joining us. see you next time. for more about this program and earlier episodes, visit us online at pbs.org and charlierose.com. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

>> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by: >> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. >> you're watching pbs.

(man) support for this program is made possible by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you! from american university in washington dc, best-selling author and financial expert, suze orman, answers critical questions about your money. tonight is all about you! the goal of money is for you to feel secure. the goal of money is for you to feel powerful. you have problems-- but here's the good news-- i have the solutions. (man) suze provides essential advice in... please welcome suze orman! [drums, guitar, & keyboard play in bright rhythm] ♪ ♪