 First of all, Bill, since you need no introduction, I still am going to introduce you. And I'm going to introduce you as a Stanford dad. Welcome. So let me first say my first encounter with you was when I was in a few months as a first director of RPE. And people had arranged a meeting with you in your office. And I went out there, and you were a few minutes late. But you walked in with a document, and I realized that was my congressional testimony. And I said, shoot, I'm going to be grilled. Which you did. You did grill me nicely. But then I think I told you that I think, Bill, I think you're the only one who's actually read my testimony. But I just want to take this opportunity for, at that time, I asked you that I need help from you because we were starting off RPE. And I had never been in Washington. And I need all the help I could get. And I just want to take this opportunity to first thank you for your support for RPE. Whenever I used to meet you, you used to ask me, how can I increase a budget? And that was a tough question to me because I had to say that's the president's budget. And you did your magic on the hill. I don't know what you did. But RPE survived because of you. Thank you so much. So let me start by saying a few things. You are one of the founding fathers of the computing industry. You democratized computing. And you touched billions of people. And for those people who you could not touch with computing, you and Melinda have touched with your incredible work on global health. And for which, and I'll just put it out there, I hope. I know you're not looking for it. I hope you get a Nobel Peace Prize at some point. Thank you. So given all that, you're pretty much with your work, your legacy, you've touched pretty much all of humanity, almost. So how did you get interested in energy? Well, how can you not be interested in energy? I mean, civilization, as Vashlav Shmiel, who's the best writer about energy, says actually his latest book, I think it's his 42nd, is titled Energy and Civilization. And I recommend all 42 of them. But this one, if you don't have time to catch up, just read this one, it covers a lot. The intensification of energy use is how we've escaped a subsistence type existence. The Industrial Revolution is about energy, primarily coal, at that stage. And when I put my foundation hat on and look at what needs to be done for Africa, poor countries in general, but particularly Africa, the amount of electricity per person has gone down in Africa over the last 20 years. And there's no way you can build, there's an upper bound on what you can do with an economy unless you get infrastructure, including roads and electricity up to a certain level. So it's a huge concern that all these developmental goals we have are unachievable unless you get energy available there. And then you combine that with the fact that the people who are the most going to suffer from the built-in warming that is unavoidable and from the additional warming that is avoidable that we won't avoid, those are subsistence farmers in Africa. They're going from having one out of 12 years where their harvest fails, they will get to the point where it's one out of four years. And that leads to severe malnutrition, starvation, at a time when the population grows, soil quality, many factors are working against you. So I'm not just a believer in taking the 9% of your income that Americans spend on energy and saying, OK, let's just pay a premium to feel like we're clean people. But rather, you've got to solve this problem for China, India, and Africa without making energy super expensive. So that constraint makes what's already an almost impossible problem, even slightly more difficult. So given your interest in this, when the Paris Agreement was going to be signed in Paris in 2015, you put together with your fellow high-network individuals around the world something called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, what was your goal? What was the long-term goal in that? Well, my general view, when people come to me and say, hey, the world is going to fall into a state of disaster, this is a huge problem, it's unsolvable, my view is, well, maybe they're underestimating the power of innovation to come along and change and improve things. And so in the 90s, when I was reading about climate change and then after the 2000 where Ken Caldera, David Keith, a few people, I started having them on a regular basis to educate me and telling me what to read about climate change. The thing that blew my mind was that people would talk about these downstream taxes and subsidies, but there was no discussion about upstream incentives, no discussion about increasing the energy R&D budget, the US energy R&D budget post. It was reduced by Reagan. Carter had driven it up and Reagan drove it down and it stayed down. And all these climate people, they never talk about the research budget. I think it's partly a confusion about the nature of the problem, what it means that electricity is only 25% of the problem and you need reliable electricity. And the goal is not to take a bow because you use natural gas and you've got a factor of two. That's nothing. That contributes zero. In fact, because the forcing function is sooner on natural gas. Completing coal to natural gas right now in the next 50 years and then shutting it down, that's a net addition. It's just that you're doing your math wrong because you don't understand the way the lifetime trade-offs are done for natural gas anyway. So the idea that R&D wasn't like the prime thing. And I remember sitting with Obama, there were a bunch of us there, I'd created this coalition and I was saying, hey, if you can only do one thing, increase the R&D budget. And he said, no, I can do the carbon tax and the R&D budget. Well, and we ended up getting nothing at all. Even though the R&D piece, which is a long lead time piece, which is very necessary, probably could have been done. So in any case, as part of the Paris Climate Accord, I'd gone to 30 different countries and said, will you come and commit to double your energy R&D budget? And in fact, the only reason Modi came to the event was because he was enthused about that. We picked his name for it, which was called Mission Innovation. And there was this big announcement there. And in fact, most of the countries that announced have followed through. The US is slightly off a straight doubling, but in total an extra three billion now has gone into R&D since that event, which does tilt the odds slightly in the favor of the breakthroughs that we need. Now, we also need the basic research budget is only an enabling thing. You need the next step after that, but it is certainly critical and was not on the agenda. So a lot of people are very optimistic, as you know, with wind and solar, the renewables cost coming down, the battery costs are coming down. You think that's enough or do you think we need more? No, that is so disappointing. I mean, really, Voslav yesterday, he said, okay, here's Tokyo, 27 million people. You have three days of a cyclone basically every year. It's 22 gigawatts rate over three days. Tell me what battery solution is going to sit there and provide that power? I mean, let's not joke around, your multiple orders of magnitude, you know, oh, $100 per kilowatt are, that's nothing. That doesn't solve the reliability problem. And remember, electricity is 25% of greenhouse gas emissions. Whenever we came up with this term clean energy, I think it screwed up people's minds because they didn't, now they don't understand, I was at this conference in New York, I won't name it. And they were saying all these financial guys got on stage and said, we're gonna rate companies in terms of their CO2 output. And we're gonna say this company puts out a lot of CO2 and financial markets are magical and all of a sudden the CO2 will stop being emitted. And I was like, okay, how are you gonna make steel? Do you guys on Wall Street, do you have something in your desks that makes steel? What, where's the fertilizer, cement, plastic, where's it going to come from? Do planes fly through the sky because of some number you put on a spreadsheet? So the madness of this so-called finance is the solution. I don't get, I just don't get that. There is no substitute for how the industrial economy runs today. And the paradigmatic country is India. Will India pay a premium price to have materials, to build buildings, to get rid of slums? Will they pay a premium price for air conditioning? Basically the answer is no, the voters there won't and they probably shouldn't deny themselves when their greenhouse gas emissions per person is only a 20th what the US has already emitted. And so who should go first and get emissions per person down to make up for what's done in the past? Of course that should be us. So there's not even an argument in justice that says that price premium ways of doing all the things, not just electricity, that that happens. So the idea that we have the current tools and it's just because these utility people are evil people and if we would just beat on them and put it on our rooftop, that is a real, that's more of a block than climate denial. The climate is easy to solve group is our biggest problem. So what are the breakthroughs do you think we need in terms of technology? Well, it's pretty straightforward that in the electricity sector, you either need something like nuclear fusion or fusion that runs 24 hours with the high duty cycle or if you're going to rely on intermittent sources then you need some monster miracle that's more of an order of magnitude away from anything. This is grid storage, not consumer vehicles going 300 miles. This is, hey, Tokyo, don't worry about it. It was cheap to solve. And by the way, you're only getting value out of that battery once a year. So do the math on what that looks like per kilowatt hour. Anyway, so you have electricity generation. You have the industrial economy, so you have to figure out how to make all those things. A lot of the things, if you can make cheap hydrogen act, that actually solves several of those things in terms of the chemistry type side of that. But steel and cement are kind of special and require particular solutions. You have transport problems other than cars, which the energy intensity is far more difficult. And the 24% of the emissions are agriculture and meat related emissions. And those are very difficult. There, I fund things like Impossible Foods, Beyond Meat, a variety of companies to try and completely change how products that the acid test is, can you tell it's artificial meat or not? If you can tell, we're in big trouble. So the goal is sometime in the next five years to have that product, at least in the ground beef category, be such that you cannot tell the difference. And that's pretty big. I mean cows, if they were a country, they would be in the top five emitters in the world. And that's just cows. And people believe me, they've tried to feed them different things or put a little torch on their butt or things. It doesn't work. But it's also the deforestation that is caused by grazing and things like that. That's right. But the beef, if you get to a certain GDP per person, actually you have reforestation. So Massachusetts today is more forested than it's been in the last 60 years. But in general, you do get deforestation. So if you take Indonesia and Brazil, their biggest category of emissions by far is the land use piece. If you take Australia and New Zealand, it's the cows that are there that are the biggest. So you need innovation in a surprising number of sectors of the economy. And unfortunately, the goal is zero. Actually the way they do the models now because they're trying to make it look like 1.5 degrees isn't the biggest joke ever. They show these gigantic negative emissions. And I'm the biggest funder of various carbon capture things, lickwoods, solid, you name it. But the likelihood of that being economic, that is more than two orders of magnitude non-economic right at the moment. And as Vasav reminds us, it would have to be 10 times the size of the oil industry. That is the amount of stuff that you would have to stick underground. It's just 10 times the entire oil industry. So let's talk about the agricultural side because I think that's really important. I'm a product of the Green Revolution, which was this short strain of wheat. I would not be here if it was not for that. Do you think given the tools that we have in biology today of CRISPR-Cas9 and all the gene editing, do you think there's another Green Revolution we should have not just for food but for carbon as well? And maybe a combination of the two at one shot. Do you think that's possible? Well, yeah, the Gates Foundation funds a thing called improving photosynthetic efficiency. And there is literally a factor of two to be had in terms of changing the basic photosynthetic pathway. There's about four different things you have to do, but the photosynthetic pathway is not optimized. That is, there was an evolutionary bottleneck when CO2 levels were very low and these plants don't have the right Robisco and the right, they turn off, they don't like to die. And so they're not maximizers in terms of their output. And so there are various ways that you can change photosynthesis. That would be extremely valuable, not just in the plant economy, but also as you move that over into trees that are extremely good. They sequester carbon extremely well. That's a large standing stock of carbon, although it's a one-time gain unless you do some, put it down below the ground, eventually it'll rot and recycle back in. So yes, and I think it's like improving photosynthetic efficiency, not funded. What could be cooler than improving photosynthetic efficiency? So yes, we need a new green revolution. Agro-ultra productivity in Africa is a quarter of what it is in the U.S. and Europe. It's partly, you don't have extension service, you don't have fertilizer, you don't have irrigation. But it's also that these seeds are not well adapted to the various environmental conditions. And Africa has more variety than any other continent. So the variety of types of seeds you need is actually a lot greater. That whole seed thing is not well invested in, but if you care about climate adaptation, the thing you would most invest in by far the top of the list would be more productive seeds. So if you're only having three or four good years, you either maintain buffer stock or you sell it and you have cash that holds you through that year that your harvest isn't working. Likewise, there's a lot we can do to deal with high temperature and deal with drought. There are crops like sorghum that teach us how you can deal with tough conditions. So switching subject, you are a big supporter of nuclear. And in fact, you invested in terror power. And my question to you is that right now, it is not cost competitive in the United States. Korea has done very well in this. And terror power is going to install, I think, the first thing in China. And so what are your thoughts on how to make nuclear, which is a carbon, as you said, base load power, how do you make it competitive today? Yeah, so nuclear starts out per reaction with a million times advantage over burning hydrocarbons. So you think, hey, a factor of a million, we must be able to preserve at least some of that and not be absurdly expensive. In fact, in the US, nuclear is not even close to being competitive. It's probably a factor of four or five non-competitive. The key parameters in a nuclear build are how long it takes to build, what your interest rate of your money is, and maybe some uncertainty factor of whether you get stocked or not. And so in China, those numbers are basically three to four years and 2%. Whereas in the US, there may be eight to nine years, 15%, and maybe 50% chance you'll get shut down before you get started. So when you're competing with super cheap natural gas, there's no way. Also, current designs are, although per output, it's the safest form of energy ever created, more than say, natural gas lines that blow up in neighborhoods or coal mines that create particulate that's not good for health. Because it happens in Chernobyl-like events, it's unfortunate. Those designs that have high pressure and they don't have a good heat pool and they require operators to actually look at lights and do things, it's a pathetic design. And yet it hasn't been changed, it hasn't been redone in the digital age where we can massively simplify it, make sure there's no pressure anywhere which forces you to, in our case, a sodium pool design. So it's on paper, which is where it exists in this incredible simulation. This thing is phenomenal, incredible. And of so-called fourth generation nuclear, it's the only well-funded project. Even so, it requires the US and China to work together. How's that going? It requires a lot of patient capital, but nuclear in China is cheaper than coal. Do you need more tariffs, by the way? Well, we need comedy. We need US and China to work together to bring this solution because the US understanding of these issues is phenomenal. We shut down FFTF, but there was a lot of materials learning there that was quite fantastic. And the Chinese are where they're going to build a lot of reactors, really build them. I mean, they'll show you the sites that are quite serious about it. So if nuclear has a chance, that's probably it. So you're talking about the technological side if you could somehow bring down the cost and make it safer, but these are all playing in the energy markets. And the energy markets are short-term, and these are investments that are, in a nuclear case, 60 years, maybe 70 years, maybe even longer in the future. So is there some innovation on the market side that will actually favor the long-term investment? Should there be some innovations out there? Well, unlike software where the customer set for a particular software product is very heterogeneous, and a new entrant can go in and say, okay, we'll serve the customers who want the really cheap form or the ones who want the simple one or the ones with lots of features. When it comes to pumping electrons at people, there's like one commodity market that is more than demanding about reliability. And so the incentives for a utility company in going to their regulator and saying, okay, we wanna make electrons with this new technology, what possible reward do they have for taking risk that will either fall on them or fall on the ratepayers? It's a market whose R&D percentage is the lowest of any large market. In that case, I'm not calling an education a market. It has the lowest R&D percentage of any part of the economy. But energy of the market, quote, market, quote, driven areas has extremely laundry. And it's partly what you say is anything you do today, your patent, by the time it's used in volume, that your patents will probably have been expired. And so it's not like software. And people have been spoiled by software. And in fact, the great venture capitalists here in the Valley who supported a lot of green stuff got a lot of negative feedback because they were taking on these much tougher problems. And that's why a new sort of wave of that with incredible help from John Dorb and old coastal people who really pioneered the area. Now this breakthrough energy ventures is trying to step in to that space of, okay, we'll fund things and we have a 20 year lifetime which is longer than a typical venture structure. You put your own money behind that and there are other people putting money in the breakthrough energy ventures. Now that you're seeing sort of the new technologies and the entrepreneurial spirit coming up, what excites you and where are the gaps? I'm more excited than I expected to be. And I was calling up those people and saying, hey, let's put a billion dollars together. They were like, is there good stuff out there? And I was, oh, sure, absolutely. And I was hoping that was true. So we hired an amazing team, a high percentage of XRPE people who are fantastic. So it was only a little over a year ago when we got the team in place and the deal flow that they've seen. And we have a kind of a ridiculous criteria which is we don't invest in something unless if it works, it will avoid a half a percent of greenhouse gas emissions. So we can do artificial meat, we can do new ways of making steel across the whole range. It's not just electricity, but we're not gonna invest in some other thing. So like climate court, which Vinod had in his green fund, thank God because that's what made it profitable, that wouldn't fit our criteria of what to invest in. And even so, we are seeing a lot of great stuff. In fact, if you set aside money for the later stages of these companies that they don't need yet, it'll only take us maybe two to three years before all that money is committed to those companies and whatever successful follow on things we think we need to be part of. And so we'll go back and say, hey, let's do more. So the deep thinking, and these are, there's no guarantee. The fact that chips actually work or sending signals through the air actually works. It's assuming there are great breakthroughs like that, which only nature knows the answer to those things, but it appears that making hydrogen cheap, making steel cheap, there at least for every crazy thing we need to solve, we're finding at least three or four people, most of them will end up being wrong, who are willing to say, hey, write us a check and we'll go work on that. Terrific. Any prospects of nuclear fusion? Yes, the breakthrough energy did put money into Commonwealth fusion systems, which is sort of an MIT approach where you take the fact that you can do these extremely high Tesla magnets. And so you take the design and it's a lot smaller. Also the problem with fusion isn't just making it work and nobody's ever gotten real energy break even. Making an economic is hard because in our fusion work, we have these neutrons and they degrade our materials and it's the toughest thing about the so-called traveling wave reactor design of terrapower. These fusion guys, those neutrons are in a completely different league in terms and so how they replace materials over time is very difficult and there are maybe, there are actually more fusion companies in the North America, several are Canadian, today than there are fusion companies. In a certain sense, if you put aside SMR, they're really other than terrapower aren't any really big play fusion companies. For this fusion, there's quite a few. Now a lot of them look sketchy to me, but thank God. They need to try, they need to try. Yeah, I mean, having a dozen companies is very impressive that that's going on. I think we are seeing not only magnetic confinement fusion but also inertial confinement and actually combinations of those two that are actually being tried out. Now some of them will fail, many of them will fail but hoping that some of them may or one of them may actually succeed and that that's the breakthrough there. So you have assembled an amazing group of billionaires in this breakthrough energy coalition and you are now investing in technology but that platform that you have is obviously more than just technology. What else do you wanna accomplish with this group of people that you've assembled worldwide? Well obviously we wanna be a voice to encourage these research budgets to go up and stay up and to be spent properly. We just did a deal with the European Union where they put money into fund startups, literally European Union money and it's because they're worried that if they raise the research money, there won't be investors coming to Europe and finding the really good work there and so it was a sort of quid pro quo. We never could have gotten that mission innovation R&D increase if we hadn't said that there will be a venture fund that will take the best work and carry it forward ideally all the way into a product. So being a voice of okay, what are the regulatory barriers to these startup companies? What types of tax credits and approach are very helpful? Today it's mostly the learning curve for solar and wind which is that really compared to other technologies that have this weird thing of working 24 hours a day. Should you really be funding the intermittent stuff with all the money and putting no money in the stuff that works all the time? So the tax policies, you gotta think Japan or Germany and the US for bootstrapping the solar panel industry which is today largely a Chinese industry. Well, you got these people from all over the world and they're very influential. You are a global citizen. Do you think we have a shot at some point at a global carbon price? Well, the globe is a big place. You have 194 countries. I'm involved in eradicating polio and so I deal with Northern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan, Afghanistan. I know where in Kandahar we still have polio. So if you say global that brings up an image to me that okay, you're not gonna get every country in this thing. And it is interesting that of all the tough problems, stopping pandemics, solving climate change, they are cooperation problems that no one country alone can do that. I'm hopeful that you can get most of the rich countries involved in that. I think it's a very helpful thing to send that price signal. It's not Pagovian in the sense that it substitutes for the damage. It's not at all. It's simply a price signal that incense some risk-taking behavior but not the classic Pagovian hey, pay the price okay. That's what the burden to society was. It's not within a factor of 100 of what that is as you project out into the future. Certainly for things like carbon capture and sequestration because that will, there's not a view that that will ever be positive economics. You've got to have that and that probably is a necessary thing. And you have to have a sense that it'll be there over a long period of time. I do think some things that are, I think will come back. I think the US will re-enter the Paris climate accord but take Germany, who's very well-meaning, they managed to make their consumers pay the highest electricity prices in the world. Their net carbon reduction is less than 10%. So the world has not had a year where we make less CO2 and that will be an interesting year if it's not because of a massive recession. What is that year? But yes, the attacks would make sense but when you map it into India, are you really taxing those poor people who are just getting air conditioning for the first time? You know, wow, I want to meet that politician who figured that out. Well, we started the discussion with some subsistence farmers in Africa and others and they are, many of them, as you have seen, are still in the 19th century. So do you think that they should get the infrastructure that we had in the 20th or is there a possibility of leapfrogging that they did in telephony? And if so, what would be that infrastructure? What would be the system that will empower them and get them out of poverty with the energy? Yeah, one thing that really is irritating to me is when people think, oh, let's just get Africa to use clean energy, you know, get them. They are a rounding error of emissions. If they need to build hydrodams, let them build those dams. And yes, the reservoir causes methane emissions. It's fairly big numbers. But Africa should not be constrained. They should do whatever it takes to reduce malnutrition and starvation. And so, and people get confused. They think, oh, let's let them have little lights at night. Well, you don't create any jobs. The amount of electricity required to create a job, that is not intermittent electricity. That is electricity that's there all the time. So just, you know, cheap solar panels, which is great, that is no solution. They need grids. They need, you know, rather large amounts of power. Yes, I hope that we have some breakthrough that their relative lack of installed base makes them a good candidate. But if you really say who's going to add energy capacity in the next 25 years, that's India and China. You know, China still has one doubling left if India is on a reasonable economic growth post. They have a factor of four still to increase. You know, Sub-Saharan Africa is the eventual problem. But this problem should first be solved in China and India with examples from the richer countries. And then we can map it onto Africa. So I'm not seeing many things that are like cell phones where they completely obviate the need for a grid, for example. Now, if somebody has that invention, hallelujah. Terrific. On that hallelujah note, thank you so much for being here. And you have a standing room, you know, only out here. Let's thank Bill for being here and sharing his thoughts with us. Right.