 Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. I'm Michael Fully Love, the head of the Lowey Institute. Welcome to our beautiful headquarters here at 31 Bly Street for our first event of 2023. Let me begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which the institute stands, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to their elders past and present. As many of you know, last year was a big year for the Institute. We hosted the Finnish Prime Minister, Sana Mareen, the Director-General of the WTO, Ngozi, Akonjo-Uweila, Singapore's Prime Minister, Lisian Long and of course the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky. 2023 is even more important for us because it's our 20th birthday. It's two decades since my Chairman, Frank Lowey, established the Institute in order to deepen the Australian debate about the world and to project Australian voices abroad. And in the past two decades, the Institute has produced outstanding pieces of research such as the Asia Power Index, the Pacific Aid Map and of course the Lowey Institute poll. We've published nearly 50 of our flagship Lowey Institute papers and nearly 500 other reports, analyses and policy briefs. We've published nearly 20,000 articles on the interpreter and we've hosted several thousand events with leaders and thinkers from around the world. In terms of events, we have a few rules at the Institute. We like them to be intellectually stimulating. We like them to be engineered like a German luxury car. We like them to start on time and to finish on time. And the other rule we have is never to host events before Australia Day, which marks the end of the Australian summer. That would be like hosting an event in Seattle or New York in August. But this year we've made an exception to that rule because we have the opportunity to host a very significant figure, Mr Bill Gates. Bill Gates is many things. He's a software engineer, a business leader, a philanthropist and a pickler. For the uninitiated, that's someone who plays pickleball, which is a cross between ping-pong, badminton and tennis. Of course, we don't know about Bill Gates because a pickleball. In 1975, in New Mexico, Bill co-founded Microsoft, which grew into the world's largest software maker and revolutionized personal computing. In 2000, Bill co-founded the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to promoting global health, access to education and to reducing poverty. And since its establishment, the Foundation has contributed nearly $60 billion to advance these causes. Let me pause on that figure for a second. $60 billion. Today, Bill Gates and I will sit down for a conversation about preparing for the challenges the world faces, including pandemics, climate change, food security and other topics of the day. There will be an opportunity for questions from the audience, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of those. But in the meantime, please join me in welcoming Bill Gates to the lectern. Welcome. Well, welcome, Bill. First of all, what brings you to Australia? Mostly vacation. I was up at Lizard Island for about five days here in Sydney for five days, and then I'll on Wednesday go down and see the last five days of the Australian Open and Melbourne. All right, let me ask you about some of the big topics at which you've thrown your intellect and resources over the last 20 years in particular. Let me start with some of the global health issues. Let me start with COVID. I always felt that COVID was like an x-ray of societies in the sense that it revealed the strengths and weaknesses, it revealed the frailties of societies. In your country, I think it's fair to say that COVID exposed many political and institutional frailties and inequalities. You look at a country like China, on the other hand, they had a completely different strategy for dealing with COVID, but they probably held on to COVID-zero for too long. They strangled, did a lot to strangle economic growth and, of course, limit the civil liberties of Chinese people. It's very hard to make policies towards a pandemic in the middle of it, but when analysts look back on the pandemic in 20 years' time, which countries do you think they will say got it right? Who got the balance right? What are the lessons we should learn from how our different countries approached this dreadful disease? I wouldn't say any country got it totally right. Some of the things that would stand out would be that Australia and about seven other countries did population scale diagnostics early on and had quarantine policies associated with that that meant that you kept in that first year when there were no vaccines, because hospitals could have gotten overloaded like they did in many countries, you kept the level of infection low. So at the end of the day, the Australian death rate per capita will be about 12% of most rich countries, including the United States. And it's that first 90 days where the US did not scale up diagnosis and quarantine. You know, so that's definitely a best practice that in the future countries need to have dedicated personalities to practice how they connect up with the, in this case, the PCR diagnostic industry was the magic there. We're going to have even better diagnostics that are cheap and that we can manufacture in the billions very quickly for the next time. Another best practice was the US government funding the vaccine research in the US put out $14 billion to a variety of vaccine companies, not just US vaccine companies. And that accelerated the availability of both mRNA and non mRNA vaccines that if you get those to people over 60 or who have immune system deficiencies, you can cut the death rate by about 70%. And so any country that deferred infection out into the period where you had vaccines, you have some treatments, and we shifted from the initial Wuhan variant to the Omicron variant that kills about 40% as much as the original variant, then you get a huge benefit. So for example, China, where we'll never know the true death numbers, but they because of they they're deferring it to where it's owned upon and they have some level of vaccination as a percent on a per capita basis, they'll have about a third of the death rate of the rich countries, including the United States. So even though you're right, there's it was a huge cost to pay, and very few countries could have actually organized themselves to suppress infection. They should have jumped on vaccines, particularly for the elderly, much faster, and that would have allowed them to open up some sooner than they did. So nobody, I would say gets an A on this one. Sadly, epidemics come along so rarely that it's easy to be incompetent, earthquakes, fires, they come more often storms. And so governments, they're pretty good on fires. There hasn't been a 5000 death fire in the world for a long, long time. Epidemics, hopefully this will get us to take them seriously at least for the next 20 or 30 years. What about at the international level? What about the World Health Organization? It turned out to be a polarizing, there was a lot of polarized discussion about the WHO in your country in mind, a lot of criticism of the WHO for being soft on China. What sort of marks would you give the WHO for its performance? Well, the WHO was so mistreated by the U.S. and other member countries that it's very hard to do your job when your largest donor is completely withdrawing in the middle of an epidemic. It's not exactly a functional thing to do. What possible benefit would that have had to stop the reporting, stop the information sharing that was going on through WHO? WHO did not have dedicated staff in this area. The one benefit they have is that they do work on infectious diseases like polio. So the idea of large campaigns, of communicating with the public about infectious disease, they have some of those skill sets and their work was incredibly beneficial. The WHO is going to need more resources to have a dedicated team, not just for when the epidemic comes, but to go to the world's countries and make sure that these drills are being done. We do fire drills. The Defense Department does war games. We need for epidemics to practice. In fact, one of the reasons why Australia did well is that it, like Taiwan, was threatened by SARS-CoV-1. And so this idea of, okay, who are these PCR people? How do you get them engaged? It was partly practiced because of that previous threat. And so we need to be doing every five years a really comprehensive exercise at both country and regional level of pandemic preparedness. And you need a global group that's kind of scoring everybody and saying, hey, if you're not participating in this, you could be the source of the next pandemic. And that's bad for the entire world. This is like a fire that goes global. And Bill published this fabulous book, Bill Gates, How to Prevent the Next Pandemic, which has a whole bunch of innovative ideas about the lessons the world can learn. Let me ask you this, Bill. Does the way the world reacted to COVID, does that make you more or less confident about our ability to deal with other challenges? I mean, as you've said, the world did great on some fronts in terms of vaccine development and innovation. Some countries did well at suppression of the vaccine. But on the other hand, we had polarization, vaccine nationalism, inequality. Does it make you more or less of an optimist about the world's ability to deal with all these problems that your foundation works on? Well, if you zoom out and say, okay, where were we 300 years ago? The average lifespan was 24 years. And it didn't matter if you were a king or a popper. You were subject to huge infant mortality and extremely low levels of literacy. And so the scope of human innovation over time through a variety of things, including energy intensity, which, okay, that has a side effect we have to go out and deal with, it's a phenomenal story. And the amount of IQ in the world that's being educated, the quality of the tools we have to drive forward our innovation, whether it's in health or energy or education, those are fantastic things. Now, we also invent things like nuclear weapons. Some of the tools of biology could actually be used by a bioterrorist. Pandemic risk comes from two sources. One is nature, which generally these are diseases of animals, zoonoses that come across and infect humans. And this case, a bat virus. It's one of the four big families of viruses that we know its receptors can change that they attach to the human lung and become human respiratory disease. And that's the main thing to worry about is respiratory disease, because you get very fast human-to-human spread. So there's a class that's got measles in it, a class with flu, a class with coronavirus, and a fourth class, all of which we need to have standby tools, both antivirals and vaccines that can deal with those. It's very doable. So on the tools front, we can be far more prepared. The reason pandemics are so scary right now is that human travel is so pervasive. In the Spanish flu epidemic, the reason it spread so fast was we had World War I demobilization. And so we had an unnatural level of travel. That level of travel is less than 1% of today's modern travel. So the big scary thing is how quickly things can go global. And that's why you need both sewage and air surveillance in all airports so that you quickly see is there something out of the ordinary that's spreading. And the tools for that will be available. So yes, I'm an optimist, but mankind's expectations, political expectations, trust expectations, modernity comes with some risks as well. But overall, I know I'm incredibly optimistic. So far, the amount the book has had an impact, I'd say is near zero. But the distraction of the Ukraine war has been part of that. People need to say WHO is a very, very critical asset. And so if you want to criticize it fine, then get them more resources, get them good people, get them an even better personnel system, where they have personnel that are really dedicated to infectious disease activity. All right, let me ask you about climate change. You wrote earlier this month that the world isn't on track to avoid the limitation of global warming by the 1.5 degree mark. What is a realistic target then and what is this level of warming likely to mean in relation to effects on the world and humanity? So climate change is not yet the negative effects of it at some level like malaria that kills 400,000 children a year. The reason that climate change is worth investing in massively is because it will get worse and worse over time. And if you allow the warming to go to an extreme level, say three degrees centigrade to four degrees centigrade, then all sorts of natural ecosystems disappear. And all sorts of places in the world you can't do outdoor work. So the tropical areas agriculture would be impossible outdoor work during large parts of the year would be impossible. There's a lot of humanity, sadly the less wealthy part of humanity. There's this huge correlation that temperate zones are much, much wealthier than tropical zones. So the injustice here of the emissions are from the rich countries and the negative effects are largely in the next 30 years, largely to the poorest countries. And the amount that you have to change is unbelievable. Hydrocarbons are part of the miracle of modernity. That is humans used to have their own energy output was available to them and burning a little bit of wood. Today in a rich country you essentially have 40 people who work at your energy level who are making sure your lights are on or that you can drive around or things like that. And all of that is all hydrocarbon based. So we're replacing steel, cement, transport, electricity. And we have to do that worldwide. If one country does a good job, that's not the solution. So you have collective action problem and you have a huge innovation problem that a lot of the IQ isn't on steel and cement. Go to your top universities and say, hey, who here loves cement? And the answer a decade ago was, say you go to MIT or Tsinghua or whatever top university, you just wouldn't see the smartest people rethinking in the way of doing steel and cement. Fortunately, that's changed. In 2015, one nice thing that happened on the side of those Paris talks was an event that Prime Minister Modi, President Obama and I hosted which was, hey, innovation is going to be a big part of how we take the cost of being green and ideally over time actually drive that down to zero. So it's a super important problem that there is a paradigm to solve it. There's no chance you'll hit 1.5 degrees. It's very unlikely you'll hit 2 degrees. The key is to minimize the warming as much as possible. And at this point, staying below 2.5 would be pretty fantastic. And I do think that's possible. You mentioned the war on Ukraine as distracting the world's attention from some of these big issues, including poverty and climate change. How should the world balance these two competing imperatives, the long-term existential threats that climate change provides, the importance of development of global health, but at the same time, the absolute right of a country like Ukraine to be able to live freely in the international system, free of the coercion by its neighbors? There's only a limited amount of bandwidth in the world. How do we balance these two kinds of very different imperatives? Well, the dream of helping poor countries has been that rich countries would be willing to take 0.7% of GDP, which would end up being maybe 2.5% of the government budget, and dedicate that to helping poor countries. That level, 0.7%, has not been achieved. The world at large is about a third of that across rich countries. Europe is by far the most generous. Germany hits the 0.7%, UK's 0.5%, Sweden's 1%, although moving down to 0.7%, Norway restored their 1% commitment. The idea is that even as you've got challenges, even like Ukraine, you've got to push up to that level. The US is at 0.22% of GDP. Australia is very similar to that. We find ourselves with this overseas development assistance at about 180 billion a year. It's not enough and sadly it's going down now because Europe, that's the source of 60% of that, finds itself with the indebtedness that it got during the pandemic, interest rates going up, defense costs going up, refugee costs going up, electricity costs going up. In every one of those things means that the prioritization of helping the poorest, let's just say the poor countries in Africa, isn't as high up as it used to be. I wish they'd maintain those levels or even grow them. The war on Ukraine will end. I certainly understand the resources being expended there. It's an incredible tragedy. That tragedy has huge impact on developing countries. The cost of food, fertilizer, and all these things are going to kill as many people outside of Ukraine as get killed in Ukraine. War, in terms of humans wasting resources to go backwards, war is top of the list. The sooner we can bring it to an end, the better. The development goals are the UN set goals for 2030, so-called sustainable development goals. We won't achieve those goals. The wars meant that even the ones that were set like the health ones, which the Gates Foundation was very involved with, they were set very realistically. If we'd stayed on track, we'd kept the rate of improvement since year 2000. We used to have 10% of all kids dying before the age of five. That is over 10 million at the turn of the century. Now that's been cut to 5% of kids, less than 5 million a year. The goal we had was by 2030 to cut that half again. We'll miss that by probably eight years. It's because of the war. The innovation part of that, where we make vaccines cheaper, we invent the vaccines, we understand malnutrition, has actually gone better than anybody would have expected. But just the delivery money, the focus, the governance in the countries involved has meant that we'll miss every one of those goals. You mentioned Australia, and of course we saw that you called on Prime Minister Albanese at Kiribati House over the weekend. How do you think Australia, the new government, the new Labor government in Australia, how is that government going both on climate and development? Of course, it's up to its ambition. It's legislated some domestic targets on climate change. You said no country gets an A for COVID performance. How are you feeling about Australia's performance on climate and development? Well, Australia was fairly unique until quite recently at not having a climate commitment. It was a little bit surprising because Australia is one of the few countries where the upside of things like minerals, renewable energy, doing some of the iron ore processing here domestically, Australia is very blessed, whether it's wind or solar, it's quite phenomenal. And your land area per person, compared to say Singapore is pretty good. And so the opportunities created by a world that is getting rid of greenhouse gas emissions, Australia is rare in that the opportunities exceed the things you have to give up. You have to give up a large part of the, and eventually almost all of the coal mining activity. What happens with beef? My climate group Breakthrough Energy just announced literally today an investment in Australian group called Ruminate that helps cows not be so much a source of methane emissions. So we have two paths to solving that. That's 6% of global emissions are cows who burp and fart methane to an extreme degree. You can either fix the cows to stop them doing that, or you can make beef without the cow. And both of those will be pursued to see which one can lead to the best product in terms of taste, health and cost. So it's great to have Australia on board on climate participating. It's great to have the IQ starting with the Australian universities involved. I was just at the climate finance group here, which is doing really excellent work. Sharing ideas about, okay, when does hydrogen come in, which approach will be best? How do we make sure the US work, which has been accelerated by a bill that passed Congress called the IRA, how do we make sure that that's all complementary? So it's great to have Australia engaged in climate. The world isn't going to trade with people who don't have serious climate commitment. So Australia was a bit of an outlier until recently, even though it's very advantaged in that. The foreign aid budget is great. It's spent on polio, it's spent on global fund. I wish it was closer to 0.7% and over time, I hope it tends in that direction. There's a lot of things like where our foundation funds work here. We fund a lot of agricultural work with the Australian government. Helping farmers deal with climate change and have more productivity is actually a super important thing. Australia is amazing when it comes to agriculture, including tropical agriculture and dry land agriculture, which are the two most important ecosystems that we need much, much, much better crops for. So I think it's great. Australia is pushing back up a bit on the aid front and now engaged in the opportunities that climate change will create. I mean electricity will be cheaper. By the time it's all said and done, electricity here will be cheaper and the industrial base will be stronger. Let me ask you about a couple of major players on the world stage. Let me ask you about Ukraine. I mentioned to you before we came downstairs that I interviewed President Zelensky on this stage virtually. Just thinking about his leadership, what have been your impressions about the way he's led his country, but also the way he's communicated the urgency of his challenge to the world? Are there lessons that can be taken from that in terms of how some of these other challenges can also be communicated to the world? Well, it's very impressive that he's been able to draw the country together in the response. People did not expect Ukraine to be successful in avoiding Russia taking over the entire country. So there's a mix of Russia was much weaker and less intelligent than was expected and Ukraine was far stronger in aligning. Pre-war, the Ukrainian government is one of the worst in the world, corrupt, controlled by a few rich people. Really unfortunate for the people in Ukraine. Ukraine has better agricultural land than the United States does. I mean, it is the breadbasket viewer, but it's an incredible location. So hopefully post-war, as it gets rebuilt, it'll first come up to Eastern European levels, then eventually European levels. So it's a country that has a lot of promise. But in the meantime, it's been destroyed and no one knows how long this war will go on. Can I ask you about your own country, the United States? I mean, when you built Microsoft, it was a period of incredible American confidence and expansion to which indeed your industry and your company contributed. It's been a tougher period, I guess, in the last few years, a huge amount of division in the United States. How confident are you about the future of the United States? Well, the portion of the world's innovation that comes out of the United States is still extremely high. If you look at, okay, where's the best AI work being done, the best cancer work, the best name a field, agricultural innovation. The U.S. has this unique advantage that it draws in talented people from all over the world. Our government policies aren't always as welcoming of our key asset as it should be. But there's really no other country that takes the best people from South America, the best people from Europe, the best people from Asia, brings them together into both government-funded, philanthropic-funded and private-sector-funded innovation. And so the role of the U.S., whether it's climate technologies or curing cancer, curing obesity, whatever, I'd say is as strong today. There's no country that is going to take that position. It's not like all the smart people in the world are saying, hey, let's all go to China and hang out. China is a very innovative country, very important, arguably the number two innovator. But the distance is unbelievable. It's not a global collective of the risk-taking and innovation that we need for key problems. So the U.S. is politically weaker today, I would say, than it's been. And that's scary for the world. The current world system is designed around U.S. leadership. And as other countries have gotten richer, these middle-income countries, including China and India, need to play a strong role in world governance and how the U.S. seeds the kind of unique role we've had and makes that all work, particularly given our political polarization. There's a lot to worry about there. Can the world count on the U.S. like to stay a member of the WHO during a pandemic? Pretty basic. Are you playing the role that is beneficial to the U.S. but beneficial to the whole globe, not as clear that we'll always do that as I would have said it was 10 years ago? And what explains that polarization? What explains the breaking of the politics to a point where a great country like the United States that created the international system would threaten to withdraw from the WHO during the pandemic? What's the reason for it? Well, there's a lot of books you could read and still not understand it. I don't fully understand it. And I'm a student of the issue. The way that we select politicians, the way that news brings you the bad news and not the good news, I mean, trust in institutions, and this is a global phenomenon, but most acute in the United States, trust in institutions during the last 20 years has been going down, trust in military, judiciary, corporations, politicians, you have in the U.S. where you do you like your politicians? It's 7%. Well, we're a democracy. We picked those politicians. In China, you say, do you like your politicians? And 80% say yes. Well, they didn't pick those politicians. So it's not supposed to work that way. So do the people around for political office play a role of gathering around experts and taking a long-term view which isn't, is politics now more organized around the things that separate us? You're always going to have populists elected. You're going to go through a cycle where the elites are viewed as having had too much control and looking down on the rest of the population. That's okay. We have a particularly dangerous form of populism right now where it's connection to the kind of complex decisions that need to be made in the U.S. health care system or even political reform are a bit concerning. Now, you always have old people like me who look and say, oh, God, this time it's really getting screwed up. And the answer to that is there's young people who have a fresh look at this thing, and there are a set of problems like misinformation and political polarization. I'm dying to help get behind some young person who has approaches to it that I haven't come up with. You mentioned the role of news and, of course, one big difference between now and when you were building Microsoft is social media. How worried are you by developments at Twitter and in general the potential of social media to drive polarization and division and crazy ideas and conspiracy theories? Well, the digital availability of information should be a positive thing for democracy. I can go and read any bill in the Congress. I can go and look at who voted how on that bill. I can go and look at the Medicare budget and see, okay, when is it going to go bankrupt, and okay, what are the various ideas about fixing that? So the free availability of information naively, certainly within the IT industry, people like myself who got a chance to be part of creating these things, we thought it would be a net plus for democracy. And that is still there. That access to information is incredibly beneficial. The fact that that's been taken, where you can kind of just find people who believe QAnon and sit there all day long and be told how right you are and not pulled out of that, that is definitely one of the four or five problems I put into the next generation must figure this one out bucket. All right. I'm going to come to the audience in a second. I do want to ask you about China, though, because you've mentioned China a few times. So I asked you about how optimistic you are about the United States. How optimistic are you about China? They're not an immigration country. They're not nipping at your heels really on the innovation front. Economic, the projections for economic growth over the next couple of decades have come down recently. They still struggle with the fact that they're an authoritarian state. And so therefore, sometimes if you're an authoritarian state, you can make things happen as they showed with the suppression of the virus. But on the other hand, in terms of perfect decisions being made on imperfect information and the inability to course correct, it's not a positive. So how bullish are you on China? Well, China's gone from in 1980 being incredibly impoverished, poorer than India. I mean, literally with starvation and malnutrition to being the most wealthy middle income country in the world. And that's, you know, it's only 1.4 billion people. So it's incredible. And it's great for the world. No, it's it's not a democracy. And, you know, when as you get very large middle class, who doesn't want arbitrary rule of law, you know, will there be some point in time when it moves in that direction, they're an outlier today in terms of that level of wealth and still being as as autocratic as they are. But you know, I tend to see China's rise as a huge win for the world. I mean, that's 20% of humanity. They today match their their portion of the global economy and their portion of the global population match exactly. You know, countries like Australia, US, we, you know, have per capita GDP is five times what the Chinese have. So we have a disproportionate share of the world's economy. You know, I do think the current mentality of the US to China, and which is reciprocated, is kind of a lose lose mentality that if you ask us politicians, hey, would you like the Chinese economy to shrink by 20% or grow by 20%. I'm afraid they would vote that, yeah, let's immiserate those people, not understanding that for the global economy, the invention of cancer drugs, the solution of climate change, you know, we're all in this together. We're humans, we innovate together, and we have to change the modern industrial economy together in a pretty dramatic fashion. So, you know, I'm very aligned with Kevin Rudd on this, you know, he reads, I read Zero Mandarin, he reads lots of it. So, you know, I try to benefit from his understanding, but I'd say in the US, we'd be in a minority where people are kind of hawkish. And I think that could be self-fulfilling in a very negative way. All right, we've got about 15 minutes to take some questions from the audience for Mr. Gates. So, I'm going to ask you to put up your hand if you'd like to ask a question. If I call on you, please keep your question short, and please make sure it's a question. So, we can get through as many as possible. So, who would like to ask, yes, I'll take this gentleman, and then I saw Jennifer Sue, and then I saw Tim Costello. Yes, Peter Hannon from The Guardian. Just quickly on China, I'm wondering about the death rates on COVID, given that we're really only just starting to see, you know, what the spread might be, and whether that might turn out to be, for instance, larger than the US. But secondly, on the climate issues, unless I missed it, I don't think I heard you mention small modular reactors, have you gone off nuclear energy as a possible solution? And with Ukraine pushing up energy prices, is this a time to shift faster into renewables? Yes, so my work in climate is largely managed through a group I created called Breakthrough Energy, and we're invested now in over 100 startups that this one here in Australia ruminate, I think it's like the 103rd, and, you know, fantastic. Many of those companies will fail, but as a group, they have solutions to electricity, airplanes, steel, you know, every climate area, and not just mitigation, but also adaptation. We've got great companies, and now government groups like CEFC are getting behind actual projects. We'll mature those technologies and get the green premiums down to zero. Nuclear technology, which comes in two buckets, nuclear fission and nuclear fusion are very, very promising. It's a non-weather dependent form of energy generation that's a million times more efficient per reaction than hydrocarbons. Now, making it cheap and safe, you know, we don't understand the science well enough to do that for fusion today. I'm in four of 14 fusion companies. Infusion, the biggest effort in the world today is a company I'm the primary investor in called Terrapower. I think the idea that Australia is watching other countries and saying, okay, over the next 15 years, you know, prove, show us, can you make something that's safe and cheap, and, you know, you deal with the waste and all those things. I think that's a very good attitude. There, you know, some countries have opted in to be part of that next 15 or 20 years. I don't know if we'll succeed. I'd put billions of dollars into it, so I must think there's some chance of succeeding there. So, no, I'm very involved in that. It would help us solve climate and low-cost energy for poor countries if fission or fusion succeed, but we need a set of plans that aren't dependent on those things succeeding, where we use a mix of storage, carbon sequestration, transmission, and renewables as the mix. Even if nuclear succeeds, we still are going to be 60 or 70% renewable, so it's just a question, do we have that as a base load capability? Anyway, I can go on and on about that, but yes, I think the world is under-invested in those innovations because they could make a huge difference. Jennifer Su. Jennifer Su from the Lowings Institute. Thank you, Mr. Gates. What would you say to the assessment that private philanthropy is a threat to democratic accountability and a more equitable society because private philanthropies do not shift power imbalance within existing structures and institutions, but reinforce them? Well, if you step back and say, should we be working on malaria? When the Gates Foundation is by far the biggest funder of malaria in the world, when we put in 30 million, we became the biggest funder of malaria work. At the time a million children were dying, today it's 400,000. We have a clear path over the next 20 years to get that to zero. So any world that's not funding getting rid of malaria deaths is an interesting world, and this is an interesting world. I mean, you know, African countries, there's no R&D for the things that kill their children. There's no R&D for their crops. And as I said, the global aid budgets towards those things are dramatically lower than there should be. So to the degree that philanthropy can take on equity-driven issues like agriculture of the poorest, the health of the poorest, you know, somehow I've convinced myself it's a good thing. Now, you know, rich people should be taxed, at least in my country, more than they are today. I don't think, you know, we should outlaw billionaires. You know, we have systems that try not using capitalistic incentives like North Korea or, you know, China up until 1980. So, you know, can philanthropies do good things? Yes. Do we have a way that the poorest in the world, their voice are heard or we're paying attention to them? No. Philanthropy pays part of the role in filling that gap, but we shouldn't have to count on it. Most things that you need day in, day out that relate to equity, that's what you should get governments to do. Tim Costello in the second row. Thanks, Bill. This has been terrific. It seems to us in Australia the danger in America is now the lack of any shared story, but it would seem that's true of us globally. So globalization was the shared story, free trade and comparative advantage. And we're all in this together and global innovation and MDGs achieving breakthroughs, but the retribalizing turning inwards seems to now be set in with aid budgets dropping and people saying we're not going to trust just-in-time supply chains. We're going to be protectionists. That may be all poorer regional deals for security. Do we keep trying to pump up the ties of globalization as the story, or is there another story that we need to frame? Well, globalization is associated with a lot of things. The modern economy, which today is very hydrocarbon dependent, has been absolutely fantastic at lifting up lives. It was true before World War II we actually had higher percentage of world trade in the GDP that went down. So we've always had these fluctuations. I mean, if we eliminate, say, oil as a globally traded thing in large part, that'll depress global trade. That is the biggest single thing in terms of a dependency dollars in all of global trade is crude oil trade. And yes, we are trying to take that miracle of crude oil, which if it didn't emigrate greenhouse gases is the most unbelievable thing. I mean, it's cheaper than bottled water. It's more energy dense than the world's best battery by a factor of 20. And we're having to say, no, let's not use that. As we're able to see things with more data, the idea of coordinating trade networks of the lost world, that's been a huge uptick for trade, things like containerized shipping. And so there are still huge factors pushing for global trade. We have certain minerals that will need copper, lithium, cobalt as part of the screen entry revolution. And hopefully, we're not a target about how we go and make those available, even though we've got this fear of dependency on China. It is sad that we're devolving into a world where the willingness, certainly, of the US to be dependent on things from China, at least for a decade here, will be low. And it'll create significant inefficiencies. But the amount of innovation that is the improvement overall in the human condition is still going to be dramatic. We will cure obesity. We will cure cancer. We will eradicate polio. And so it's easy to get a more negative view of some of these trends than is really fair in my view. I'm still very optimistic that it'd be much better to be born 20 years from now, 40 years from now, 60 years from now than any time in the past. I'll take this lady in the white. Yes, just there. Yep. Hi, Nick Ed. Charlie with Results International. It's wonderful to have you here, Bill, in Australia. You've done so much to tackle global health crises over recent decades. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we bring some of the best minds together to tackle long COVID, which of course is a devastating condition. Up to 2% of people may develop long COVID and the Washington Post today has come out and said it could be magic and cephalomyelitis, what we've always called ME. So really keen to hear your thoughts on how we tackle this. You know, long COVID is still the uncertainty bars in terms of how prevalent it is and what form it takes. They're still gigantic. We fund the Gates Foundation does the best health data collection group in the world, which is called International Health Metrics and Evaluation. And they have a lot of studies out right now to understand about long COVID. There are a lot of confounders in that game. So people who take less good care of their health in terms of diet were far more likely to get infected with COVID. So when you go and look and say, okay, who has diabetes or prediabetes, just a pure survey will fool you because the likelihood of having COVID is much higher in a certain type of patient population anyway. That's kind of an obscure fact that makes the current raw data we're seeing still pretty unclear. We've always known that when you get acute viral infections, there are a few percent of people who their immune system never resets properly. So things like chronic fatigue syndrome is from any kind of acute viral infection. Likewise, autoimmune disease, the prevalence of that is much higher. The thing that's a little bit confusing right now is what's going on in terms of heart disease and diabetes or mental function. Is long COVID really very prevalent in that? And if so, is it treatable? Ideally, we'd get less people getting COVID. Now, most of the people in the world have been infected with COVID. Fortunately, most of those people will not get long COVID. So our foundation will be involved in this, but it's important to remember, we're about the diseases that are neglected. When there's a gigantic market, things like cancer, or most cancers, not all cancers like cervical cancer, we're super involved with or lung cancer for anti-tobacco type efforts that we're one of the two big funders for. So we're there in terms of some of the infrastructure on this, but it's not a top priority for us because no one else does infectious diseases basically. I'll take one more audience question. This lady on the corner was trying to get my attention. Yes. Thank you. Alison Howell from the University of Melbourne. You mentioned earlier Australia did relatively well compared to our peers across the globe in our pandemic response. I'm curious what you see as the three biggest pandemic threats coming to us and what unique role Australia can play in solving some of those, particularly as it relates to the intersections between philanthropy, private investment, and research and policy. Thank you. Well, first of all, we have to have a tools agenda, pandemic tools. The pandemic tools were crummy. Thank God for central lab PCR testing, which is the key tool that Australia was able to use along with quarantine policies to have far lower death rate than other rich countries. There's a site called World in Data that does a very good job pulling all of this stuff together. Obviously at the end, you have a little bit of ketchup, and you're still used to have a little bit of ketchup because your infection levels were so low in those first two years, but even once you put that ketchup in, it's a dramatic difference versus the average rich country. So we need to be able to scale diagnostics. We need to be able to make billions of high quality diagnostics in a month. We have several approaches to do that, one of which is a local device, one of which is a central lab device. We need antiviral drugs that can get rolled out within months. We need antibody treatments that can be adapted and manufactured. Today, the lead time on that is such that the virus evolution largely stayed ahead of the antibody treatments, and so the lives saved by antibodies is way less than we expected. The foundation always takes generic manufacturers and we fund them like to make Paxlavid. And sadly, because Paxlavid requires you being diagnosed early in your infection, we're sitting on millions of doses of Paxlavid that just won't be deployed because the health infrastructure to do that early diagnosis and get the drug out there isn't developing, and now the infection rates are large, the prevalence is fairly low. Anyways, so antibodies, antivirals, we think we can also have very early in an epidemic a thing you can hail that will mean that you can't be infected, a blocker, an inhaled blocker. We also need to fix the three problems with vaccines. The current vaccines are not infection blocking, they're not broad, so when new variants come up you lose protection, and they have very short duration, particularly in the people who matter, which are old people. And every one of those things is fixable. In fact, doing that work is going to help vaccinology very, very broadly. For example, the Gates Foundation, we have a malaria vaccine, but it only lasts for six months. And understanding, okay, how do we get the long-lived memory B cells in that case, it's very similar to figuring out how we make these COVID vaccines last longer. So this, fortunately, the rich world desire and the developing country desire is actually aligned in terms of what that R&D agenda should look like. So within, I'd say, a decade, we will have a tool set for respiratory pandemics that will be excellent. And so the one thing that still hangs in the balance is will we have the global capacity and the regular practice at regional and country levels that would mean that when a threat comes up, we act in such a way that it doesn't go global. In other words, that there isn't a pandemic, because you only call it a pandemic after it gets out in a widespread fashion. Bill, I'm going to ask the last couple of questions if I can. First of all, when you reflect back on the remarkable work that your foundation has done over the last couple of decades, is there one thing you're proudest of? And is there one thing that you're most frustrated by where you haven't achieved what you wanted to achieve? And what's the thing you're proudest of and what's the cause of the greatest frustration? Well, our work in global health that's cut the child to death rate in half is the work that we're most proud of. I mean, we have other work in agriculture that's amazing. Our work in nutrition has the potential to be mind-blowingly amazing, but we're not done with that yet. Things like anemia, we have some incredible stuff going on. But very early in our history, we were one of the organizations that created GOVEE, which funds vaccines for poor countries. And we continue to fund the invention of new vaccines that can be fed into GOVEE and the cost reductions of the ones that are already there. And we were a founder of Global Fund. Now, that's not to say our foundation is responsible for that result. We had many partners, including generous foreign aid budgets, inventive doctors, field workers. I mean, it's mind-blowing what had to come together to make it so that you go from 10 million deaths a year to 5 million deaths a year. But by far, that's the thing we're most proud of. As we go from 5 million to 2.5 million, that will be comparable to what we want to do with malnutrition, which is to take a third of the world's kids from being malnourished, which means an IQ of about 85. And I get that to be under 5%. That would be as impactful to the world in terms of justice. The human condition is even the next wave of death reduction. All right. Let me just change tack for the very final question. I was looking at a reading list that you suggested at the end of last year, and I think you nominated... I think you said it was your favorite book was Doris Kern's Goodwin's book Team of Rivals about Abe Lincoln, if I'm right, Abe Lincoln and his cabinet. Why are you so long on Lincoln? I think you're an Abraham Lincoln fan. What is it about his characteristics and his achievements that you admire so much? Well, he certainly lived in a very difficult time. And his own situation in terms of his child dying, the situation with his wife, he had a very tough life. And the Civil War was a complete disaster for both the North and the South. And yet, he did manage to maintain a moral view of what could come out of it in a positive way, that is getting rid of slavery and realigning the country behind that as a principle. The way he drew on other leaders was quite unbelievable. And he was viewed as a bumpkin from rural Illinois back when it was kind of a rural nobody place. And yet, he drew together the most sophisticated people in the country and got them working as a team. And to follow that through his vice president's letters back home, which are daily letters where at first he's like, oh, this guy's an idiot. I hope I can help him, too. Oh my, this is the greatest man ever. It's pretty inspirational. The U.S. in particular was very lucky to have him at that juncture. Ladies and gentlemen, we're out of time. Having broken the Australia Day rule, I can't break another rule by going over time. Bill Gates, I want to thank you for a very thoughtful and stimulating conversation. I think, ladies and gentlemen, you can sense Mr. Gates's energy, his restless intelligence, his ambition, his ambition to do good in the world. I want to congratulate you on the work of your foundation. I hope you enjoy the rest of your time in Australia. I'm not sure if you're going to get to the tennis, but I know your first love remains pickleball. So thank you very much, Bill Gates. Please join me in thanking him.