Fire. Okay. Try to keep the answers a little bit short. What will be the future of, and what should be the future of? So, I'm going to give you a topic. You have to tell me what you think will be the future of this and what should be the future of. Okay. So, what will be the future of and what should be the future of billionaire and politician friendships?
You know, politicians have historically hung out with—you know. But Franklin Roosevelt, you know, was a very equity-oriented president, did brilliant things. He hung out with rich people, and you know, he hung out with people who were creating companies and saw problems and things like that. So, I don't think there's some sin, you know, there. If you're not careful, you can get a level of corruption or misset the priorities of the country. But hearing from business people about what's going to happen and what would let them move faster, you know, that's an important dialogue. When I started Microsoft, I was proud that I had no office in Washington, D.C., and I learned to regret that. That was a mistake.
Okay. What will be the future of and what should be the future of family?
I'm not sure that changes all that much. You know, having kids is a miraculous thing; having grandkids, a miraculous thing.
So, I'll tell you why I asked this question, cuz in your book *Source Code*, you give a beautiful story. You said that the best code that you have ever written in your life was the first code that you wrote. And you wrote that code when you wandered on a snowy path and you wrote code in your mind, and that is still to date the best code you've ever written. With all the technology now in everybody's hands, it's tougher and tougher to expect children to wander into these stray paths and probably come up with that kind of code. So, how does a parent give children these snowy path moments that happened for you?
Well, my parents actually struck a pretty good balance of setting very high expectations and giving me a lot of freedom. In those days in the United States, you know, you could go out to play and your parents wouldn't necessarily know where you were. You could go out on hikes.
Today, I don't know about India, but today in the United States there's concern that if it would be even a little bit unsafe, you're very protective of your kids. And now there's, I think, a recognition that that's probably gone too far—that letting kids hang out with kids, make mistakes, maybe even get themselves in a little bit of a mess. I think I benefited from that.
Okay. What will be the future of, what should be the future of truth?
Well, I was naive in thinking that the arrival of the internet would be the most wonderful day for truth. That you could go and somebody would tell you something that was going on and you could look up and say, "No, that's wrong. Here's the court filing, here's the statistics." It was interesting to read Harari's recent book, *Nexus*, where he says—and I'm sure he's right—that when the printing press was invented, the most popular books were about how to find and kill witches. And so that was the societal use of this fundamental thing that now we look back on and we say, "Yes, the printing press, what a fantastic thing." So, the idea that for meaningful periods of time we'll take an advance and it will actually go against human interest, I found that fascinating. But until social networking came along and it created a sense of jealousy and concern, I always thought that technology was an unadulterated good. The fact that you could use a word processor or spreadsheet, all that stuff—in those early days, it wasn't questioned. In fact, when people would say, "What's wrong with technology?" the answer was that it wasn't getting to all the kids. It was the so-called digital divide, that we needed to have everyone have access.
Okay. What will be the future of the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C.?
Well, politicians are going to have a tough time with AI because they're not that hands-on, and it's advancing at a pretty quick rate. The 2024 election, AI was not part of the debate. It wasn't like, "Okay, this one has good AI policies and this one doesn't," or any contrast. I was a little surprised at that. But I would predict that by 2028, our next presidential election, policies around AI, how you shape it in a good way, will be a primary topic—one of the three most important topics—because people will be starting to see not only the white-collar AI, but the blue-collar AI, which involves robotics, which today is very limited. But the number of people working on that, the advances in that, guarantee if it's not 2028, by 2032 the job market will already be starting to change.
So, good or bad? The relationship between Silicon Valley and D.C.
I'll say good, just because I like to say nice things.
Okay, the future of Brand India.
You know, not many people are offended by India. It's got great—you meet great Indians all over the world, people like Satya Nadella. And a lot of people don't know much about India, to be honest. They should come more, learn more. Lots of great things they could do. If India can stay on the path, this 2047 plan, that's not just beneficial to India, it's beneficial to the whole world. And the fact that you have 20% of humanity that runs, okay, semi-chaotic, but truly democratic elections, and works out all the priorities—there's more money for health, there's more money for education, the metrics about where are we falling short, what are the aspirational districts where we need to do better. The fact that the competition really is in good governance, not group A is going to get advantaged over group B—which if you go back far enough in Indian politics, there was a lot of group A is going to be advantaged over group B. But as enough voters are voting, "Hey, is this guy really going to run the country, including things like health, well enough?" that's created a very positive dynamic that you're competing in good governance.
Did you guys discuss this—you and the Prime Minister? Did you all discuss exactly this when you met him yesterday?
Well, we always have a lot to discuss, including AI and the latest projects that we're involved with. I have to say he's been very encouraging about the engagement in India. He was glad to hear our board was here and that we were going to invest even more in Indian innovation.
Fantastic. Okay. The future of nationalism.
You know, nationalism often gets extreme in a scary form. If you go to the Olympics, you see nationalism in this really benign form where, like in Paris, there was a great Olympics. I was lucky enough to spend time there. The French were so excited that their teams were actually doing pretty well and that they had done a good job of hosting. And then the whole atmosphere where when people get up and root for the USA thing, it's not really at the expense of other people, and then you play those national anthems. Some of them are not as good as others, but that's nationalism in a really fine way. Nationalism at its most extreme leads to wars, and there's no way to destroy value and lives more than wars. In general, we haven't had since World War II that many wars, although right now we've got a little bit of an uptick and it's a horrific thing. So, we have to shape nationalism. In Africa, a lot of those countries, it's weird to say, but they don't have enough nationalism. When you say to somebody, "Are you a citizen of X?" they'll say, "Not really, I'm a member of this tribe." And so, it's almost like the extreme of Indian politics where when they go to vote, they're voting for their fellow tribe members independent of how well they're going to run the primary healthcare system.
Sure. No, true. Okay. Social media or Big Pharma: what's in more urgent need of regulation?
Well, it's interesting. Social networking, people can say, including me, can say how social networking had all these negative things. But other than maybe banning young kids from using it up to a certain age or having certain protocols so that it's not distracting kids in school, other than that, whenever I say to people, "Okay, striking the balance between not saying that all vaccines are terrible," which can cause people to harm themselves—it can be an awful thing—but where do you draw the line between free speech and harmful speech? Now, when you get things like in Myanmar, where you're inciting riots and things like that, and social networking is part of that, that's clearly over in the negative. You're denying the Holocaust, or you're saying that vaccines are all bad and terrible, or that I'm doing something with tracking people's whereabouts with vaccines—I mean, that's just not helpful. But how exactly do you draw that boundary? We have over 150 countries that each get to try to do that. I don't know any country that really has this great formula for where you strike that balance.
Okay, so I'm getting a few hand signals from the back, so we're going to be running out of time. We've got about five minutes more, right? Five, six minutes, yeah. Okay, so I'm going to try to get through a few more questions. I'll ask you to keep the answers a little bit shorter. Your favorite innovation from India that can tackle a global problem.
I mean, cheap vaccines, DPI—that's a hard choice for me.
Okay. Which country do you see winning the chip wars? Is there one winner and one loser?
Well, as of today, Taiwan in terms of making chips is the winner.
