Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (2019) s01e01 Episode Script
Part 1
1 [wind rushing.]
[narrator.]
Bill writes code for days without sleep.
But instead of going to bed, he needs to blow off steam.
[engine revs.]
Hitting the desert roads of Albuquerque at night, he drives faster and faster pushing the limits of his car and the law.
[camera shutter clicks.]
[click, hard drive whirring.]
- [computer beeps.]
- Hello, I'm Bill Gates.
- [mouse clicks.]
- [tapping on keyboard.]
In this video, you're going to see the future.
- [announcer.]
Mr.
Bill Gates.
- [applause.]
[news anchor.]
Forbes Magazine calls Gates America's richest person.
[anchor 2.]
Six point three billion dollars.
- [anchor 3.]
Worth 40 billion dollars.
- [anchor 4.]
One hundred billion dollars.
[man 1.]
Bill Gates is one of the most remarkable people - [woman 1.]
Arrogant.
Greedy.
- I've ever met.
- [man 1.]
Predatory, capitalistic brainiac.
- [woman 1.]
A devil.
Impatient optimist.
- [man 2.]
Your brain is a CPU? - Yes.
[woman 2.]
He thrives on complexity.
[woman 3.]
He's the smartest person I've ever met.
[man 3.]
He did drop out of college.
You guys never understood the first thing about this.
[anchor 5.]
Greatest American businessman of his generation.
[woman 4.]
He was changing the world with software.
[anchor 6.]
Is Bill Gates stifling technological innovation? They're supposed to be jealous, supposed to be agitated.
[man 4.]
Bill wants people to think that he's Edison - and he's really Rockefeller.
- I'm done.
[error beep.]
[man 4.]
If he were Edison, he'd be less dangerous.
[woman 5.]
Can I just ask you one more question? [man 6.]
Will the real Bill Gates - [cartoon.]
Damn, Bill.
- please stand up? - [mellow instrumentals.]
- [typing.]
[mouse clicks.]
- [faint alarm beeping.]
- [cheery instrumentals.]
[narrator.]
When Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft in 2008, he was worth more than 58 billion dollars.
He built that fortune thinking about computer software, operating systems, spreadsheets, and the Internet.
So in August 2012, what was on his mind? [director.]
So basically, we loop around this way.
[Bill.]
Okay, good.
There's a lot of spider webs up here.
Melinda always has me go first 'cause she doesn't like cobwebs.
And I don't mind cobwebs.
[director.]
I first met Bill when I was at a film screening.
I walked over to introduce myself and noticed he was reading.
I looked closer and realized it was a Minnesota state budget that he was combing over line by line.
In his tote bag were 37 other budgets.
Immediately I wondered, who is this guy? [director.]
What's your favorite food? - Hamburger.
- [director.]
What's your favorite animal? Dog.
[director.]
What's your favorite animal that you eat? Cow.
- [director.]
What do you eat for breakfast? - Nothing.
- [director.]
Favorite snack? - Nuts.
- [director.]
Coffee or tea? - Way more coffee.
[director.]
What is your worst fear? [Bill.]
Mmm I don't want my brain to stop working.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[director.]
Even before he left Microsoft in 2008, Bill and his wife and partner Melinda were already building what's now the world's largest foundation.
They spend nearly five billion dollars a year, work on US public education, women and family planning.
They get antiviral drugs to HIV patients, vaccines to the poorest kids.
But what I really wanted to know what does Bill actually do? [woman.]
Eight o'clock, Artificial Intelligence Tech Review, nine o'clock, TerraPower meeting, 10:30, Microsoft board of directors, half an hour lunch, he'll call with Warren Buffett, 12:30, sanitation meeting, an education strategy review, interview with a journalist.
And then at the end of the day, he'll go over to the IV lab and spend some time there.
[director.]
Is he on time? He is on time to the minute every single meeting without fail.
Time is the one commodity that he can't buy more of.
It's a limited resource.
It's finite.
He's got the same 24 hours in a day that the rest of us have.
[soft instrumentals.]
[woman.]
I watch him sometimes do his best thinking when he's walking.
In our family space at home there's a place I will sit down, and if he's working on something, he will pace back and forth.
It helps him somehow organize his brain.
[Bill.]
You have to pick a pretty finite number of things to tell your mind to work on.
You have to decide what should you care about? You know, what you'd really like is for all the children of the world to be treated equally.
[soft instrumentals continue.]
[director.]
What strikes me is how optimistic you are.
Do you think that was just physiological? Or is that just like your chemistry? [Bill.]
It must be.
When I was very young, they nicknamed me Happy Boy.
I had an older sister who didn't, you know, beat me up or anything.
[laughing.]
[woman.]
He did smile all the time.
My first memories of him are he and I would go and spend like a night or the weekend at my grandmother's house.
And we would play, um, sort of like make-believe, like kids would play, we'd make houses and whatever.
My brother would always be the dog.
[director laughing.]
[Kristi.]
He was sort of a towhead, smiley little kid.
[director.]
It was an early morning when Bill and Melinda read a story in the paper that would change the course of their foundation.
[man.]
The point of my article was to remind people that kids around the world are dying for reasons that are entirely preventable just because they happen to be born in Niger and not New York.
We saw this article and I remember saying to Bill, "This is unbelievable.
People are still dying of diarrhea.
How could that be?" Because by then, we had a young daughter.
And I knew if this child that I'm holding had diarrhea, I'd go to the pharmacy, I'd go to the doctor.
If I was a mom in the developing world [baby coos echoing.]
this child might not make it.
[soft instrumentals continue.]
And you can feel, I think, as a parent, that capacity of how tragic that would be and how needless and senseless.
Just because the world won't focus on it.
Are you kidding me? We had made the commitment that the vast resources from Microsoft will go back to society.
But what this article did for us is it really got us thinking about global health and what could you do? [Nicholas.]
I They had started philanthropy.
They were providing computers in southern Africa.
And it was kind of frustrating.
Didn't really feel like it was very effective.
They were searching around for new issues.
And the most important article I've ever written for that reason.
[laughs.]
[Melinda.]
Bill went on to read the World Development Report about how many kids are dying of diarrhea.
[pages rustling.]
[Bill.]
At the time this book comes out, twelve percent of all kids die before the age of five.
Three million times a year, parents are burying children because of diarrhea.
And in the world that I'm spending time in, I've never met a single parent who had to bury a child because they died of diarrhea.
So it makes you wonder, hey, is the world applying its incredible set of resources to eliminate these deaths? [soft instrumentals continue.]
[director.]
What I think is a miracle is that a thousand influential people have this book but never read it.
You happen to be one of the most influential people and you've read it, and you understood it, and you decided, okay, this is the action I wanna take.
Yeah, this book would sit on a lot of shelves.
- It's It's not - [director laughs.]
- [Bill.]
It's not a page-turner.
- [laughing.]
[automated voice.]
Eight plus four.
Four plus nine.
Twenty plus two.
- [record static.]
- Nine plus seven.
Seven plus five.
[director.]
Do you remember the day when you realized that you were smarter than other kids your age? [automated voice.]
Three plus six.
Ten plus two.
[Bill.]
They used to have these records they'd put on, and a voice that would say, like "13 plus 18.
" And I'd write the answer down, look at other students.
The recording would go fairly quickly.
Thirteen plus 18.
Seventeen plus nine.
Ten plus 32.
And so as I'd write the answers down, you could see people kinda going "Ah! This is too fast.
" So I had a sense that my mind was snappy on, you know, simple addition type things.
[director.]
And by 8th grade you take this math test, and you do best in the state.
[Bill.]
Yeah.
[director.]
And not just best in the state from 8th graders.
You did best in the state from every eighth, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grader.
That's pretty mind-blowing.
Which parent pushed you to be the best? [Bill.]
My mom.
[Bill.]
My mom was very engaged in all of our day-to-day activity.
My My dad was amazing as a role model, but the person who tried to get me excited about things, that was very dominated by my mom.
[woman.]
She was very warm.
She had a very good sense of how to make people feel comfortable.
She was very socially skilled and not in a fake way, in a very genuine way.
She cared about people and was interested in people.
[Bill.]
This is my mom.
This is actually some early medical stuff being displayed at this university that my mom must have been involved with somehow.
She was very big in the social scene in the Seattle area.
[Kristi.]
She was on a lot of volunteer boards and did that kind of thing with United Way and that ability to be a good board member then got her other positions on boards that actually that paid.
[Bill.]
The university, the insurance company, the phone company There's certainly no doubt that my involvement in the community has had a tremendous impact on the business career that I now have as well.
[Libby.]
That was my mom.
Suit on, put together, briefcase, walking out the door to a meeting.
There was a newspaper article and there was this photograph of a boardroom table, and my mom was the one woman sitting at the table.
[Kristi.]
I think we always had the impression that she expected us to succeed, to be successful.
She'd talk about, "Oh, those parents must be proud their kid's doing that," or, "Those parents must feel a little bad their kid's not doing that.
" She had a certain sense of values that were uh communicated to us in that kind of indirect way.
[Kristi.]
She was a force.
And she wanted our family to be a force.
[birds chirping.]
[rattling.]
[speaking Wolof.]
[indistinct chatter.]
- [wheels rattling.]
- [indistinct chatter.]
[goat bleats.]
[goat bleats.]
- [soft instrumentals.]
- [child shouts.]
[children shouting and laughing, muted.]
[Nicholas.]
I did reporting in both Africa and India, and I remember in India at one point I had to pee, and so I asked the woman I'd just been interviewing, the family I'd just spent several hours with, "So, you know, where can I pee?" And she pointed me somewhere and I realized it was taking, it was taking the urine in this gutter to where they were collecting their water to drink.
People were defecating in the same spot.
[director.]
In many developing countries, people choose to go outside because they can't stand using a pit latrine, a hole in the ground that has a terrible smell and often overflows.
For half the world's population, more than four billion people, there is no good option.
[woman.]
There's a whole area of global development called WASH.
So WASH stands for water, sanitation and hygiene.
Most philanthropies that work in that space of water, sanitation, and hygiene, work on water.
Like you hear a ton about water, everybody's into water.
People say, "Oh, we need clean water.
" Well yes, the water should be clean, but you can give people clean water.
If their kids are playing in mud that has human sewage in it, that's where all the diarrheal infection is taking place.
[Sue.]
Very few philanthropies work on sanitation.
So sanitationis two main things: toilets and sewer systems.
They are both areas where there's been a nearly complete lack of innovation.
[director.]
So Bill went looking for people who could apply a new way of thinking to the problem.
He called mechanical engineer Peter Janicki.
[Peter.]
I have never thought about sanitation.
I thought about a lot of other things.
[director.]
If you visit Peter's aerospace company, there's a lot of technology in warehouses you're not allowed to see.
[mechanical tapping.]
Here, they build top secret parts for the military and more.
[Peter.]
So when Bill first came to me, and said, "Are you interested in working on this sanitation problem?" I thought to myself, "What sanitation problem? If there's anything that we've solved, in my opinion, it's sanitation.
" [director.]
Most of us don't think about what happens after we flush.
Clean water fills the bowl, dirty water gets flushed.
Flushed water travels through a complex network of pipes and arrives at a treatment center.
There, the water goes through things like a grit chamber [low frequency humming.]
gravity belt thickener, and a sludge digester.
[whirring.]
All to produce safe water.
[gurgling, whirring.]
You start looking at the United States and the population, it's a big country, and there's actually not that many people live here.
Three hundred million people in America.
Then you start looking at these other countries.
They have ten times the population density that we have.
And everybody wants to do what we're doing.
[Bill.]
If you build slums without putting the piping in, going back in, getting the water, building the piping, it would be tens of billions for a single city to go in and build up modern sanitation.
It is not a system that will ever scale down to very poor countries.
[director.]
Even if they could afford to modernize, that solution requires way too much energy and water.
So we have a pit in the ground that smells so bad that it makes you wanna throw up or we have multi-million dollar waste water treatment plants.
Those are our two solutions.
We're like, "Okay, this is the way it is.
Get used to it.
" [director.]
Bill wondered what it would take to reimagine both toilets and sewage systems.
[Bill.]
What if you can fund inventors that could come up with something that's a tenth the cost? You know, that's pretty magical.
And you end up saving millions of lives.
[dogs barking in the distance.]
[man.]
When I was six years old I can still remember my dad telling me about the death of one of my brothers.
[mellow instrumentals.]
And then, at nine years old, uh two more.
And then later, one more.
I was big enough to understand what it means to lose to lose siblings.
And yeah.
[Doulaye.]
I eventually end up going to the university.
I started learning why people die.
That was the time I realized, yeah, people die because of very preventable diseases.
It was like a hit.
I was lucky.
I was still alive.
So What could I do? [director.]
Doulaye left his village in Côte D'Ivoire and moved to Belgium to study sanitary engineering.
But at the university, he realized that everyone talked about improvements that would only work in developed countries.
I could never imagine those things working in the places I was coming from.
I had started really questioning all the professors.
And asked them, "Can you create new solution?" [director.]
For a decade, Doulaye couldn't find anyone willing to answer that question.
And then, he got an email, inviting him to meet Bill at the foundation.
The only thing I knew was he started Microsoft, he was very successful.
Why in the world someone like this want to talk about fecal sludge, pit latrine, and toilet? [director.]
Finally, Doulaye found someone in the western world who understood what he knew from experience.
[Doulaye.]
It was the first time in my life that conversation was not about whether it is difficult to solve.
The conversation was about why it doesn't work.
What have you tried? What have we never dared to try? [director.]
Bill and Doulaye spent hours posing all sorts of questions.
Could a toilet not only collect waste, but turn it into fuel? Would burning poop inside the toilet create enough energy for it to run itself? Would it be possible for a toilet to work without pipes or even outside water? [Doulaye.]
We came to a conclusion that it would be possible.
[director.]
Bill knew there was still one big question left to answer.
How could he transform their scribbles on a whiteboard into something that actually works? [Lauren.]
Measure What Matters, The Vaccine Race, Haiti Prioritizes, Blockchain Revolution, Strength in Stillness, Inventions That Changed the World, How to Make a Mind, Fundamentals of Deep Learning - [paperbacks thump.]
- Quantum Mechanics and Algorithms, The Book of Why, Bad Blood, Life 3.
0 Educated, To Be a Machine, The Perfect Weapon Elastic.
[director.]
And how often are you packing this? This gets refreshed on a weekly basis.
It gets packed and cleaned for every trip he does, certainly, because he has more time to read while he's traveling for his work for the foundation.
- So this goes everywhere with him? - This goes everywhere with him.
[man.]
He is joyous about learning things, like no one I've ever met in my life.
He doesn't read one book about something, he'll read, like, five books about something.
Most of which are too dense for any mortal to read, right? And he reads really fast and synthesizes really well.
The most amazing thing is he almost always knows more than the other person he's talking to about whatever it is, it's unbelievable.
[man 2.]
When I've been with him on vacation, he'll read 14 books.
That's a gift, you know, to read 150 pages an hour.
I'm gonna say it's 90 percent retention.
Kind of extraordinary.
[Melinda.]
One thing about Bill is he is a multi-processor.
He'll be reading something else but then processing at the same time.
And when he's off reading, you think, "Hey, you could have gone to bed an hour earlier," that's actually when he's working out some of his emotional life.
[soft instrumentals.]
[director.]
What do you remember about him? I remember thinking: - he's kind of weird.
- [laughs.]
And his friends are weird.
They're kind of nerdy and they think differently than me.
My brother was happy to be locked in his room for hours focusing on one thing or another.
When you're ten and you're walking into his room, what do you see? Um, I see a mess.
I see a mess, a total mass, books all over the place.
I think left to his own devices, he might have stayed in his room and read books all day long.
[Kristi.]
You could just see that he was different.
I don't think he perceived himself as being different.
I don't know how much he was in touch with what was more normal, just 'cause he was so introverted.
[director.]
He wants to be in his room and do what? Um [laughs.]
Chew pencils.
[Kristi.]
He was just thinking.
- [pages flutter.]
- Pondering.
[light crunching sound.]
My mom had a hard time getting him to do things.
They had a really rocky relationship.
- [knocking.]
- She couldn't get to him.
[Bill.]
My parents' authority seemed arbitrary.
I really didn't want to follow their rules.
I would not speak for days at a time.
[sighing.]
I felt like I was in some struggle.
[director.]
Does Bill get frustrated? [Sue.]
Oh, yes.
Yeah, he's fierce, he is fierce.
It's scary.
I mean, he gets like really frustrated.
[keyboard clicking.]
[director.]
Bill wrote to the most prestigious universities asking them to think about fixing the world's toilet problem so that together they could begin saving lives.
[tense instrumentals.]
Most didn't bother to reply.
[Bill exhales.]
[exhales.]
[Sue.]
When he's frustrated, it's, - "Let's go faster.
" - [Bill exhales evenly.]
"Let's solve the problems.
And let's figure out what's between us and victory.
" [racket pops.]
[director.]
What is the longest you've played on a single day? Oh, eight hours.
- Eight hours? - Eight or nine.
What's the hottest you've played, what temperature you've played in? A hundred and six.
Who first taught you how to play tennis? Uh, my parents.
In the summers we played.
We came up and went to Hood Canal and They wanted us to do all the sports, so even baseball, swimming [lightly pants.]
football.
[director.]
Favorite memory from Camp Cheerio.
[Bill.]
Uh, you know, having my dad who's the mayor lead the singing march.
We had a lot of songs, but the theme song was from the Bridge Over the River Kwai song, it was March on the road to Cheerio [humming.]
Here we go Time for a real sensation - [faint whistling.]
- At the place that we all know Pam-pa-ram-pa-ram-pa [theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai playing.]
- [director.]
Why do you love that so much? - [Bill laughs.]
[Bill.]
Well, just because I was a kid and those were good times.
[theme song continuing.]
[Kristi.]
We'd go with nine or ten different families and we'd rent out the whole resort.
[whistling from theme song continues.]
[Libby.]
This tradition of Cheerio was built around games.
There was a tennis tournament for the adults.
There were Olympic games for the kids.
There was a gunny sack race, there was a running race, there was an obstacle course, carry an egg on a spoon.
Nothing fancy, but definitely competitive.
[whistling from theme song ends.]
- [racket pops.]
- [Bill exhales evenly.]
Oh, no.
Almost.
[director.]
Bill knew that the best and brightest engineers are too often focused on well-funded projects - for business and the military.
- [droning instrumentals.]
So he had to find a way to get them to think about toilets.
[Libby.]
At Cheerio getting your spot on the podium was really important.
[racket pops.]
[Kristi.]
He wanted to win.
[Bill.]
Through that.
[Libby.]
My brother happens to be very competitive.
[Kristi.]
But I think that competitive thing got him going.
Nice.
- [dreamlike instrumentals.]
- [Bill exhales evenly.]
[director.]
Bill went back to eight universities.
But instead of asking them to present their designs in private - he had another idea.
- [cheerful instrumentals.]
[news anchor.]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is leading a competition to invent a new toilet that doesn't [news anchor 2.]
From technology to toilets, Bill Gates and his wife [news anchor 3.]
This wasn't a day for your everyday throne.
[news anchor 4.]
Microsoft mogul Bill Gates is looking for ways to flush out contaminated drinking water around the world.
[news anchor 5.]
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is offering nearly seven million dollars [news anchor 6.]
All entrants must operate without running water, electricity, or a septic system.
The foundation expects to use prototypes within the next [news anchor 7.]
Prototypes include a toilet that uses microwave energy to turn human waste into electricity [news anchor 8.]
Some bottles turn urine into water for flushing or used insects to eat it.
The maggot is not a very choosy thing when it comes to what it wants to eat.
[cheerful instrumentals continue.]
[camera shutters.]
[director.]
Even Bill was amazed by just how audacious these ideas were.
[keyboard clicking.]
But he also knew it would take years for even one to become a reality.
And still, every day, thousands were dying.
[Peter.]
You have pit latrines in communities, and eventually they fill up.
Now what do you do with this material? It's absolutely full of pathogens.
And they have no place to put it.
It's gotta go to a sewer treatment plant.
[director.]
In other parts of the world, modern sewage treatment simply doesn't exist even in urban areas.
[Peter.]
I traveled and I saw a whole bunch of wastewater treatment plants.
None of them were running.
The sewer was just going around them.
They build them but they can't afford to run them.
[director.]
In Dakar, most human waste pours into canals that flow directly into the Hann Bay.
[seagulls squawk.]
There, infectious diseases spread at alarming rates.
Just as Bill asked Doulaye to help him reinvent the toilet, he wondered if Peter could help invent a new treatment plant.
One that doesn't waste water, or require a lot of energy.
I was a little bit discouraged at first because [stammers.]
I couldn't think of a technical solution.
A lot of people were looking at filtration.
They were like, "I gotta filter this somehow.
" And in my view, you can't filter something that's so radically different every time.
[Peter.]
So this is, uh, sewer sludge.
What do you think's growing in there? Tomatoes.
You know why? Because people eat tomatoes.
And the seeds go through the person and they end up here.
Looks like it's pretty dry.
[Peter.]
Believe it or not, there's actually a lot of really good stuff in in shit.
There's a lot of water.
And so I started looking at it, saying, "I can boil it.
" [playful instrumentals.]
[director.]
Bill and Peter knew that boiling poop would generate steam, - and that steam generates energy - [gears clicking.]
and energy is necessary to power a sewage system.
But what if a treatment center could use poop to power itself forever? [bubbling, steaming.]
"And just maybe," they asked "could that steam produce clean, drinkable water?" [water filling glass.]
[director.]
So, by the time you were 12, things got really bad with your mother, right? [Bill.]
Yeah, I definitely gave my mom a hard time not following along with what she wanted and really trying to detach myself.
[director.]
And what So how did you express that frustration? [Bill.]
Oh, just disobedience, disrespect.
I mean, it's kind of embarrassing to think about it now.
[utensils lightly clinking.]
- [director.]
In an argument over dinner - [chair slides.]
Bill shouted at his mother in what he describes today as "Utter, totally sarcastic, smart-ass kid rudeness.
" In a rare burst of anger, Bill's dad threw a glass of water at Bill's face.
[Kristi.]
They actually got some counseling.
They pretended that it was a whole family problem and we all went.
[laughs.]
Um, but then it became clear that it was my mother and my brother.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[Bill.]
I said to him, "Hey, I'm at war with my parents.
I don't know if you can help me or not.
" And he said, "Well, that's it's not a very fair war.
You're gonna inflict more pain on them than they inflict on you.
And they're really on your side.
" So, you know, I'm Basically, I had the wrong way of looking at things.
It took him about three months to convince me of that, but it was brilliant.
I think it was sorta, "At some point, you've gotta let your mother have her way.
That's just the way life is and you've gotta let your mother have her way.
" [indistinct conversation.]
[Bill.]
The real question was how I would do in the real world.
Pushing up against them where they really cared about me, that wasn't the real world.
She was intentional about creating opportunities for him to be social.
I mean, for example, when my dad would go to American Bar Association meetings, they would have him come and be a greeter or do something that forced that engagement.
Even at Cheerio there were sort of beautifully engineered interactions between the children and the parents.
One of the things that the parents would organize is a drawing to see whose house you would go to for dinners.
So you had to learn to follow their rules, eat their food, and socialize.
[indistinct chatter.]
[director.]
So if your parents had left him alone and not forced him to deal in the real world, do you think he'd be the same guy? [stammers.]
I don't think so.
You don't know, but I don't think so.
I think my parents had a lot to do with how he turned out.
[announcer.]
Please welcome Mr.
Bill Gates.
[crowd cheers, claps.]
[continued clapping.]
[Melinda.]
So it's viable they could get it value engineered down.
It's not out of the realm that they could get it to the price point that we want.
[Doulaye.]
There critical challenge there is with the heat exchanger, is the heat recovery.
So we are really looking at the best company in the world who have expertise in that.
Do you see there being just one manufacturer ultimately in China or multiples? [man.]
The way they're structured [director.]
Melinda brings just a great different point of view that makes you more effective.
[Bill.]
Yeah, well, she's totally my partner.
[director.]
There's real partners and there's superficial partners.
And you chose to make her a real partner.
[Bill.]
No, she's a real partner.
'Cause she is, you know, totally equal in how we do these things.
[Melinda.]
We weren't quite there yet when he left Microsoft, to be frank.
'Cause he'd run the company, right? He was the CEO of the company and the chairman of the board.
I knew he was for it, we just needed to change a few of our ways of working together.
[Mike.]
It doesn't feel like there's any inequality.
You know, even though he's the one that started Microsoft and not her.
Like he appreciates everything about her, as opposed to, like, complaining about her or something.
I've never heard him complain about her.
He's the only person I know who I've never heard complain about his wife.
[camera shutter clicks.]
[Melinda.]
I was good at math in high school.
My high school teacher decided to go to the head principal when she saw these Apple computers at a conference.
- [typing on keyboard.]
- So we started programming in high school.
Between math and puzzles, which I love both, it was like this whole puzzle, and I just loved it.
[Mike.]
I started working at Microsoft in 1983, and in '87, we hired seven MBAs, six guys and her.
And she had gone to Duke and gotten a degree in computer science and an MBA in five years.
So the other people in this "pledge class" of MBA's were all like 26 years old.
She was maybe 22 and a half, right, and she was the only woman.
[director.]
Within a very short time, Melinda was running her own division, overseeing hundreds of people.
[Melinda.]
In the consumer division, we were trying to think through the human experience, the user experience.
Bill has amazing scientists and innovative ideas for getting new toilet technology.
It will absolute change the developing world.
But if they can't think about the experience of, a mom is the one who takes her child to the toilet The moms tell me in the villages, "If men can see over the wall, I'm not going in there.
It's not safe and it's not private.
If I can't take my child into the little stall with me it doesn't work, I can't leave the child outside.
" That's where I'm willing to be a bit of grist with Bill.
I'll poke him a bit.
Like, "Well, how are you thinking about this piece and how are you thinking about that?" We listen and respect each other and then we come to a common viewpoint, and that's what we take forward.
And what are you hoping to get out of the toilet fair this time that's gonna happen in China? At the last one there was a bit of, "We're still in a science mode.
" - Mmm.
- [man.]
Could this work? [thumping instrumentals.]
[man.]
Our hope is to show enough momentum that that's no longer the question.
[Doulaye.]
When you arrive, you will be straight on the stage to deliver your keynote.
This is going to be a very big historic moment.
[indistinct chatter.]
[man 2.]
At the top of page three, underneath the lectern there is a shelf with the, uh the poop prop.
So you'll be standing there and it's it's just right under there.
Okay.
[thumping instrumentals continue.]
[distant indistinct chatter.]
[man 3.]
Can you say a few words for me please? I'm trying this strange microphone.
You got that? Thumbs up.
Thank you.
There's two bottles of water in the podium that have already been cracked.
Do they look different than the feces? - [laughing.]
- They're on the bottom shelf.
[Bill.]
He didn't get that.
Believe me, that was a Do I set 'em there? Because then nobody wants them.
[man 3.]
So they're on the bottom shelf.
[Bill over mic.]
And we've been working all these years to fund the early stage research.
Now's the time to take it and drive it to maturity.
[cheery instrumentals.]
[director.]
Six years after the first toilet fair, the engineers have refined their early prototypes.
What began as a brainstorm on a whiteboard had finally come to life.
This toilet utilizes a screw to separate urine from feces.
Burning the waste generates energy to power the screw.
All that's left a small pile of ash.
This squat toilet dries then burns waste to create heat that disinfects the urine.
And this one is powered by solar panels, and uses an oxygen composting process.
The by-products: fertilizer and water for flushing.
We really do see ourselves on a cusp of a sanitation revolution.
[director.]
Many of these toilets require no outside electricity or plumbing.
And they were ready to replace the pit latrine forever.
But the capital cost? For the time being, about $50,000, uh, US dollars.
The cost of this now is around, uh, 50,000.
[director.]
For all the progress, Bill knew that a $50,000 toilet was way out of reach.
[Bill.]
This thing's gonna have to cost less than $500.
And right now we're more than ten times greater than that.
[director.]
The solution: find a partner in this room to manufacture it and bring the cost down.
[Bill.]
I brought a little exhibit here.
This is a container of human feces.
Inside there could be over 200 million rotavirus particles, twenty billion shigella bacteria, and a hundred thousand parasitic worm eggs.
That's what kids, when they're out playing, they're being exposed to all the time.
[director.]
If he failed, it would be seven years of work and 200 million dollars wasted.
[tense instrumentals.]
[director.]
As a businessman, what are your blindsides? What are the moments that you feel like, "Oh, this is what I'm not so good at"? Well, innovation-based businesses are the only ones that I bring anything to it all.
[steam hissing.]
[Bill.]
I like to push the level of risk of doing things that wouldn't happen without leadership and vision.
[director.]
In only 18 months, Peter and his team were able to build a working prototype of a stand-alone treatment plant.
They called it the Omni Processor.
And the machine worked exactly the way they imagined it would.
[Peter.]
So this is the solution when, you empty pit latrines, and instead of dumping all this stuff in the river, you bring it to a centralized Omni Processor.
It evaporates the water, solids go into a fire, we burn them, we boil more steam, and drive a steam engine to make electricity to drive the whole process.
[director.]
It requires no external power and no outside water.
- [metal clatters.]
- And in the end, the only byproducts are electricity, ash, and clean, drinkable water.
We're, you know, looking at all these water samples coming out of the Omni Processor.
[faint truck beeping.]
[Peter.]
You know where it came from, you can see the pile of shit that it came from five minutes ago.
He just grabs a glass and he takes a look at it - and boom! Just tastes like water.
- [Bill speaks indistinctly.]
[director.]
But building a prototype in just 18 months wasn't enough.
Bill pushed Peter to get this machine up and running where people needed it.
[Peter.]
I have access to hundreds of mechanics and engineers and electricians, and getting it to run every day is a piece of cake.
But sending it to Dakar and getting it up and running but to actually do that is kind of a big deal.
[Kristi.]
Early on at Microsoft, my mom became sort of his right-hand person.
[Libby.]
When he bought a house, making sure he actually had a house cleaner, helping him have a wardrobe when he was getting a photograph taken for some magazine.
[Kristi.]
I think he was very happy with that 'cause as a 25, 26-year-old guy, he, that was great, "I don't have to worry about all this stuff.
" She made him be really thoughtful early in his life at Microsoft about what it meant to be a community contributor and the importance of that.
She introduced him back into the community, she, you know, got him involved in United Way.
She was his guidepost.
I never thought that he, you know, at that point, that he'd get anybody to marry him.
[soft piano notes.]
Melinda and my mom got along really well.
I think my mom did a great job of sort of realizing that she needed to step back a little bit.
[director.]
Do you think he knew how serious her cancer was? Yeah.
Yeah.
- [somber instrumentals.]
- [Bill.]
She was becoming very frail.
It was pretty clear she had at most a year to live.
[Kristi.]
He did everything he could and he looked into trials and what the different options were for treatment, and it was just a little too early in the progression of cancer research to really help her.
My mom loved Melinda and thought that she was a great addition to the family and perfect for my brother.
Right around the time that Bill and Melinda we're getting married, she was quite ill.
[somber music continues.]
She died the June after they got married.
She died of breast cancer.
[director.]
What was the worst day in your life? Mmm, like the day my mother died.
[faint thumps of windshield wipers.]
[rain pattering.]
[Bill.]
My mom had been fading quite a bit.
And so I'm driving to the house I grew up in.
- And I'm speeding - [engine revs.]
- [police siren whoops.]
- and I get pulled over.
- [footsteps approaching.]
- The officer walks up and I was just sobbing.
And I say, "My mom died and I'm going home.
" Even though we had expected it and here it was.
Mom was gone.
[tranquil instrumentals.]
[Libby.]
When things are difficult emotionally, he goes to his safe space, which is intellect.
It's hard for him to feel pain.
I think it was an extraordinary loss for him.
And I kind of wonder, you know, whether there was some um some things that were left undone for him.
She would be so prou I mean, it's a shame she's not here 'cause she would be so proud of him.
But she Yeah.
Um [stammers.]
It's a shame she's not here.
[director.]
If she could see you today, you think she'd be proud of you? I think so.
Uh She never thought my table manners were perfect.
I don't think I've, uh solved that.
So she'd have, you know, still things that uh, she'd encourage me to do better on.
[mellow piano instrumentals.]
[Kristi.]
Taking his brain and putting it in our family with my mom pushing him to do the social stuff that's all stuff that got him sort of to focus his brain not just on the learning and the educational part, but more on the doing part.
[mellow piano instrumentals continue.]
[director.]
Today in Dakar, the Omni Processor is treating one-third of the city's fecal sludge and providing clean, drinkable water.
[Nicholas.]
In journalism we tend to cover what happened today.
We're all over a press conference, an explosion.
We don't cover things that happen every day.
We tend to miss those stories about the everyday suffering.
And we miss the story about everyday improvement in living conditions.
Because things that happen every day are never quite news.
[birds squawking.]
There's this battle for eyeballs in the journalism world.
And covering global health is not a way to get eyeballs.
[Nicholas.]
This article was quickly forgotten except that it had a couple of important readers in Seattle.
[director.]
In November 2018, Lixil, one of the world's largest manufacturers, announced it would develop one of Bill's toilets.
[mellow piano instrumentals continuing.]
[cheerful electronic instrumentals.]
[narrator.]
Bill writes code for days without sleep.
But instead of going to bed, he needs to blow off steam.
[engine revs.]
Hitting the desert roads of Albuquerque at night, he drives faster and faster pushing the limits of his car and the law.
[camera shutter clicks.]
[click, hard drive whirring.]
- [computer beeps.]
- Hello, I'm Bill Gates.
- [mouse clicks.]
- [tapping on keyboard.]
In this video, you're going to see the future.
- [announcer.]
Mr.
Bill Gates.
- [applause.]
[news anchor.]
Forbes Magazine calls Gates America's richest person.
[anchor 2.]
Six point three billion dollars.
- [anchor 3.]
Worth 40 billion dollars.
- [anchor 4.]
One hundred billion dollars.
[man 1.]
Bill Gates is one of the most remarkable people - [woman 1.]
Arrogant.
Greedy.
- I've ever met.
- [man 1.]
Predatory, capitalistic brainiac.
- [woman 1.]
A devil.
Impatient optimist.
- [man 2.]
Your brain is a CPU? - Yes.
[woman 2.]
He thrives on complexity.
[woman 3.]
He's the smartest person I've ever met.
[man 3.]
He did drop out of college.
You guys never understood the first thing about this.
[anchor 5.]
Greatest American businessman of his generation.
[woman 4.]
He was changing the world with software.
[anchor 6.]
Is Bill Gates stifling technological innovation? They're supposed to be jealous, supposed to be agitated.
[man 4.]
Bill wants people to think that he's Edison - and he's really Rockefeller.
- I'm done.
[error beep.]
[man 4.]
If he were Edison, he'd be less dangerous.
[woman 5.]
Can I just ask you one more question? [man 6.]
Will the real Bill Gates - [cartoon.]
Damn, Bill.
- please stand up? - [mellow instrumentals.]
- [typing.]
[mouse clicks.]
- [faint alarm beeping.]
- [cheery instrumentals.]
[narrator.]
When Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft in 2008, he was worth more than 58 billion dollars.
He built that fortune thinking about computer software, operating systems, spreadsheets, and the Internet.
So in August 2012, what was on his mind? [director.]
So basically, we loop around this way.
[Bill.]
Okay, good.
There's a lot of spider webs up here.
Melinda always has me go first 'cause she doesn't like cobwebs.
And I don't mind cobwebs.
[director.]
I first met Bill when I was at a film screening.
I walked over to introduce myself and noticed he was reading.
I looked closer and realized it was a Minnesota state budget that he was combing over line by line.
In his tote bag were 37 other budgets.
Immediately I wondered, who is this guy? [director.]
What's your favorite food? - Hamburger.
- [director.]
What's your favorite animal? Dog.
[director.]
What's your favorite animal that you eat? Cow.
- [director.]
What do you eat for breakfast? - Nothing.
- [director.]
Favorite snack? - Nuts.
- [director.]
Coffee or tea? - Way more coffee.
[director.]
What is your worst fear? [Bill.]
Mmm I don't want my brain to stop working.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[director.]
Even before he left Microsoft in 2008, Bill and his wife and partner Melinda were already building what's now the world's largest foundation.
They spend nearly five billion dollars a year, work on US public education, women and family planning.
They get antiviral drugs to HIV patients, vaccines to the poorest kids.
But what I really wanted to know what does Bill actually do? [woman.]
Eight o'clock, Artificial Intelligence Tech Review, nine o'clock, TerraPower meeting, 10:30, Microsoft board of directors, half an hour lunch, he'll call with Warren Buffett, 12:30, sanitation meeting, an education strategy review, interview with a journalist.
And then at the end of the day, he'll go over to the IV lab and spend some time there.
[director.]
Is he on time? He is on time to the minute every single meeting without fail.
Time is the one commodity that he can't buy more of.
It's a limited resource.
It's finite.
He's got the same 24 hours in a day that the rest of us have.
[soft instrumentals.]
[woman.]
I watch him sometimes do his best thinking when he's walking.
In our family space at home there's a place I will sit down, and if he's working on something, he will pace back and forth.
It helps him somehow organize his brain.
[Bill.]
You have to pick a pretty finite number of things to tell your mind to work on.
You have to decide what should you care about? You know, what you'd really like is for all the children of the world to be treated equally.
[soft instrumentals continue.]
[director.]
What strikes me is how optimistic you are.
Do you think that was just physiological? Or is that just like your chemistry? [Bill.]
It must be.
When I was very young, they nicknamed me Happy Boy.
I had an older sister who didn't, you know, beat me up or anything.
[laughing.]
[woman.]
He did smile all the time.
My first memories of him are he and I would go and spend like a night or the weekend at my grandmother's house.
And we would play, um, sort of like make-believe, like kids would play, we'd make houses and whatever.
My brother would always be the dog.
[director laughing.]
[Kristi.]
He was sort of a towhead, smiley little kid.
[director.]
It was an early morning when Bill and Melinda read a story in the paper that would change the course of their foundation.
[man.]
The point of my article was to remind people that kids around the world are dying for reasons that are entirely preventable just because they happen to be born in Niger and not New York.
We saw this article and I remember saying to Bill, "This is unbelievable.
People are still dying of diarrhea.
How could that be?" Because by then, we had a young daughter.
And I knew if this child that I'm holding had diarrhea, I'd go to the pharmacy, I'd go to the doctor.
If I was a mom in the developing world [baby coos echoing.]
this child might not make it.
[soft instrumentals continue.]
And you can feel, I think, as a parent, that capacity of how tragic that would be and how needless and senseless.
Just because the world won't focus on it.
Are you kidding me? We had made the commitment that the vast resources from Microsoft will go back to society.
But what this article did for us is it really got us thinking about global health and what could you do? [Nicholas.]
I They had started philanthropy.
They were providing computers in southern Africa.
And it was kind of frustrating.
Didn't really feel like it was very effective.
They were searching around for new issues.
And the most important article I've ever written for that reason.
[laughs.]
[Melinda.]
Bill went on to read the World Development Report about how many kids are dying of diarrhea.
[pages rustling.]
[Bill.]
At the time this book comes out, twelve percent of all kids die before the age of five.
Three million times a year, parents are burying children because of diarrhea.
And in the world that I'm spending time in, I've never met a single parent who had to bury a child because they died of diarrhea.
So it makes you wonder, hey, is the world applying its incredible set of resources to eliminate these deaths? [soft instrumentals continue.]
[director.]
What I think is a miracle is that a thousand influential people have this book but never read it.
You happen to be one of the most influential people and you've read it, and you understood it, and you decided, okay, this is the action I wanna take.
Yeah, this book would sit on a lot of shelves.
- It's It's not - [director laughs.]
- [Bill.]
It's not a page-turner.
- [laughing.]
[automated voice.]
Eight plus four.
Four plus nine.
Twenty plus two.
- [record static.]
- Nine plus seven.
Seven plus five.
[director.]
Do you remember the day when you realized that you were smarter than other kids your age? [automated voice.]
Three plus six.
Ten plus two.
[Bill.]
They used to have these records they'd put on, and a voice that would say, like "13 plus 18.
" And I'd write the answer down, look at other students.
The recording would go fairly quickly.
Thirteen plus 18.
Seventeen plus nine.
Ten plus 32.
And so as I'd write the answers down, you could see people kinda going "Ah! This is too fast.
" So I had a sense that my mind was snappy on, you know, simple addition type things.
[director.]
And by 8th grade you take this math test, and you do best in the state.
[Bill.]
Yeah.
[director.]
And not just best in the state from 8th graders.
You did best in the state from every eighth, 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grader.
That's pretty mind-blowing.
Which parent pushed you to be the best? [Bill.]
My mom.
[Bill.]
My mom was very engaged in all of our day-to-day activity.
My My dad was amazing as a role model, but the person who tried to get me excited about things, that was very dominated by my mom.
[woman.]
She was very warm.
She had a very good sense of how to make people feel comfortable.
She was very socially skilled and not in a fake way, in a very genuine way.
She cared about people and was interested in people.
[Bill.]
This is my mom.
This is actually some early medical stuff being displayed at this university that my mom must have been involved with somehow.
She was very big in the social scene in the Seattle area.
[Kristi.]
She was on a lot of volunteer boards and did that kind of thing with United Way and that ability to be a good board member then got her other positions on boards that actually that paid.
[Bill.]
The university, the insurance company, the phone company There's certainly no doubt that my involvement in the community has had a tremendous impact on the business career that I now have as well.
[Libby.]
That was my mom.
Suit on, put together, briefcase, walking out the door to a meeting.
There was a newspaper article and there was this photograph of a boardroom table, and my mom was the one woman sitting at the table.
[Kristi.]
I think we always had the impression that she expected us to succeed, to be successful.
She'd talk about, "Oh, those parents must be proud their kid's doing that," or, "Those parents must feel a little bad their kid's not doing that.
" She had a certain sense of values that were uh communicated to us in that kind of indirect way.
[Kristi.]
She was a force.
And she wanted our family to be a force.
[birds chirping.]
[rattling.]
[speaking Wolof.]
[indistinct chatter.]
- [wheels rattling.]
- [indistinct chatter.]
[goat bleats.]
[goat bleats.]
- [soft instrumentals.]
- [child shouts.]
[children shouting and laughing, muted.]
[Nicholas.]
I did reporting in both Africa and India, and I remember in India at one point I had to pee, and so I asked the woman I'd just been interviewing, the family I'd just spent several hours with, "So, you know, where can I pee?" And she pointed me somewhere and I realized it was taking, it was taking the urine in this gutter to where they were collecting their water to drink.
People were defecating in the same spot.
[director.]
In many developing countries, people choose to go outside because they can't stand using a pit latrine, a hole in the ground that has a terrible smell and often overflows.
For half the world's population, more than four billion people, there is no good option.
[woman.]
There's a whole area of global development called WASH.
So WASH stands for water, sanitation and hygiene.
Most philanthropies that work in that space of water, sanitation, and hygiene, work on water.
Like you hear a ton about water, everybody's into water.
People say, "Oh, we need clean water.
" Well yes, the water should be clean, but you can give people clean water.
If their kids are playing in mud that has human sewage in it, that's where all the diarrheal infection is taking place.
[Sue.]
Very few philanthropies work on sanitation.
So sanitationis two main things: toilets and sewer systems.
They are both areas where there's been a nearly complete lack of innovation.
[director.]
So Bill went looking for people who could apply a new way of thinking to the problem.
He called mechanical engineer Peter Janicki.
[Peter.]
I have never thought about sanitation.
I thought about a lot of other things.
[director.]
If you visit Peter's aerospace company, there's a lot of technology in warehouses you're not allowed to see.
[mechanical tapping.]
Here, they build top secret parts for the military and more.
[Peter.]
So when Bill first came to me, and said, "Are you interested in working on this sanitation problem?" I thought to myself, "What sanitation problem? If there's anything that we've solved, in my opinion, it's sanitation.
" [director.]
Most of us don't think about what happens after we flush.
Clean water fills the bowl, dirty water gets flushed.
Flushed water travels through a complex network of pipes and arrives at a treatment center.
There, the water goes through things like a grit chamber [low frequency humming.]
gravity belt thickener, and a sludge digester.
[whirring.]
All to produce safe water.
[gurgling, whirring.]
You start looking at the United States and the population, it's a big country, and there's actually not that many people live here.
Three hundred million people in America.
Then you start looking at these other countries.
They have ten times the population density that we have.
And everybody wants to do what we're doing.
[Bill.]
If you build slums without putting the piping in, going back in, getting the water, building the piping, it would be tens of billions for a single city to go in and build up modern sanitation.
It is not a system that will ever scale down to very poor countries.
[director.]
Even if they could afford to modernize, that solution requires way too much energy and water.
So we have a pit in the ground that smells so bad that it makes you wanna throw up or we have multi-million dollar waste water treatment plants.
Those are our two solutions.
We're like, "Okay, this is the way it is.
Get used to it.
" [director.]
Bill wondered what it would take to reimagine both toilets and sewage systems.
[Bill.]
What if you can fund inventors that could come up with something that's a tenth the cost? You know, that's pretty magical.
And you end up saving millions of lives.
[dogs barking in the distance.]
[man.]
When I was six years old I can still remember my dad telling me about the death of one of my brothers.
[mellow instrumentals.]
And then, at nine years old, uh two more.
And then later, one more.
I was big enough to understand what it means to lose to lose siblings.
And yeah.
[Doulaye.]
I eventually end up going to the university.
I started learning why people die.
That was the time I realized, yeah, people die because of very preventable diseases.
It was like a hit.
I was lucky.
I was still alive.
So What could I do? [director.]
Doulaye left his village in Côte D'Ivoire and moved to Belgium to study sanitary engineering.
But at the university, he realized that everyone talked about improvements that would only work in developed countries.
I could never imagine those things working in the places I was coming from.
I had started really questioning all the professors.
And asked them, "Can you create new solution?" [director.]
For a decade, Doulaye couldn't find anyone willing to answer that question.
And then, he got an email, inviting him to meet Bill at the foundation.
The only thing I knew was he started Microsoft, he was very successful.
Why in the world someone like this want to talk about fecal sludge, pit latrine, and toilet? [director.]
Finally, Doulaye found someone in the western world who understood what he knew from experience.
[Doulaye.]
It was the first time in my life that conversation was not about whether it is difficult to solve.
The conversation was about why it doesn't work.
What have you tried? What have we never dared to try? [director.]
Bill and Doulaye spent hours posing all sorts of questions.
Could a toilet not only collect waste, but turn it into fuel? Would burning poop inside the toilet create enough energy for it to run itself? Would it be possible for a toilet to work without pipes or even outside water? [Doulaye.]
We came to a conclusion that it would be possible.
[director.]
Bill knew there was still one big question left to answer.
How could he transform their scribbles on a whiteboard into something that actually works? [Lauren.]
Measure What Matters, The Vaccine Race, Haiti Prioritizes, Blockchain Revolution, Strength in Stillness, Inventions That Changed the World, How to Make a Mind, Fundamentals of Deep Learning - [paperbacks thump.]
- Quantum Mechanics and Algorithms, The Book of Why, Bad Blood, Life 3.
0 Educated, To Be a Machine, The Perfect Weapon Elastic.
[director.]
And how often are you packing this? This gets refreshed on a weekly basis.
It gets packed and cleaned for every trip he does, certainly, because he has more time to read while he's traveling for his work for the foundation.
- So this goes everywhere with him? - This goes everywhere with him.
[man.]
He is joyous about learning things, like no one I've ever met in my life.
He doesn't read one book about something, he'll read, like, five books about something.
Most of which are too dense for any mortal to read, right? And he reads really fast and synthesizes really well.
The most amazing thing is he almost always knows more than the other person he's talking to about whatever it is, it's unbelievable.
[man 2.]
When I've been with him on vacation, he'll read 14 books.
That's a gift, you know, to read 150 pages an hour.
I'm gonna say it's 90 percent retention.
Kind of extraordinary.
[Melinda.]
One thing about Bill is he is a multi-processor.
He'll be reading something else but then processing at the same time.
And when he's off reading, you think, "Hey, you could have gone to bed an hour earlier," that's actually when he's working out some of his emotional life.
[soft instrumentals.]
[director.]
What do you remember about him? I remember thinking: - he's kind of weird.
- [laughs.]
And his friends are weird.
They're kind of nerdy and they think differently than me.
My brother was happy to be locked in his room for hours focusing on one thing or another.
When you're ten and you're walking into his room, what do you see? Um, I see a mess.
I see a mess, a total mass, books all over the place.
I think left to his own devices, he might have stayed in his room and read books all day long.
[Kristi.]
You could just see that he was different.
I don't think he perceived himself as being different.
I don't know how much he was in touch with what was more normal, just 'cause he was so introverted.
[director.]
He wants to be in his room and do what? Um [laughs.]
Chew pencils.
[Kristi.]
He was just thinking.
- [pages flutter.]
- Pondering.
[light crunching sound.]
My mom had a hard time getting him to do things.
They had a really rocky relationship.
- [knocking.]
- She couldn't get to him.
[Bill.]
My parents' authority seemed arbitrary.
I really didn't want to follow their rules.
I would not speak for days at a time.
[sighing.]
I felt like I was in some struggle.
[director.]
Does Bill get frustrated? [Sue.]
Oh, yes.
Yeah, he's fierce, he is fierce.
It's scary.
I mean, he gets like really frustrated.
[keyboard clicking.]
[director.]
Bill wrote to the most prestigious universities asking them to think about fixing the world's toilet problem so that together they could begin saving lives.
[tense instrumentals.]
Most didn't bother to reply.
[Bill exhales.]
[exhales.]
[Sue.]
When he's frustrated, it's, - "Let's go faster.
" - [Bill exhales evenly.]
"Let's solve the problems.
And let's figure out what's between us and victory.
" [racket pops.]
[director.]
What is the longest you've played on a single day? Oh, eight hours.
- Eight hours? - Eight or nine.
What's the hottest you've played, what temperature you've played in? A hundred and six.
Who first taught you how to play tennis? Uh, my parents.
In the summers we played.
We came up and went to Hood Canal and They wanted us to do all the sports, so even baseball, swimming [lightly pants.]
football.
[director.]
Favorite memory from Camp Cheerio.
[Bill.]
Uh, you know, having my dad who's the mayor lead the singing march.
We had a lot of songs, but the theme song was from the Bridge Over the River Kwai song, it was March on the road to Cheerio [humming.]
Here we go Time for a real sensation - [faint whistling.]
- At the place that we all know Pam-pa-ram-pa-ram-pa [theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai playing.]
- [director.]
Why do you love that so much? - [Bill laughs.]
[Bill.]
Well, just because I was a kid and those were good times.
[theme song continuing.]
[Kristi.]
We'd go with nine or ten different families and we'd rent out the whole resort.
[whistling from theme song continues.]
[Libby.]
This tradition of Cheerio was built around games.
There was a tennis tournament for the adults.
There were Olympic games for the kids.
There was a gunny sack race, there was a running race, there was an obstacle course, carry an egg on a spoon.
Nothing fancy, but definitely competitive.
[whistling from theme song ends.]
- [racket pops.]
- [Bill exhales evenly.]
Oh, no.
Almost.
[director.]
Bill knew that the best and brightest engineers are too often focused on well-funded projects - for business and the military.
- [droning instrumentals.]
So he had to find a way to get them to think about toilets.
[Libby.]
At Cheerio getting your spot on the podium was really important.
[racket pops.]
[Kristi.]
He wanted to win.
[Bill.]
Through that.
[Libby.]
My brother happens to be very competitive.
[Kristi.]
But I think that competitive thing got him going.
Nice.
- [dreamlike instrumentals.]
- [Bill exhales evenly.]
[director.]
Bill went back to eight universities.
But instead of asking them to present their designs in private - he had another idea.
- [cheerful instrumentals.]
[news anchor.]
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is leading a competition to invent a new toilet that doesn't [news anchor 2.]
From technology to toilets, Bill Gates and his wife [news anchor 3.]
This wasn't a day for your everyday throne.
[news anchor 4.]
Microsoft mogul Bill Gates is looking for ways to flush out contaminated drinking water around the world.
[news anchor 5.]
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is offering nearly seven million dollars [news anchor 6.]
All entrants must operate without running water, electricity, or a septic system.
The foundation expects to use prototypes within the next [news anchor 7.]
Prototypes include a toilet that uses microwave energy to turn human waste into electricity [news anchor 8.]
Some bottles turn urine into water for flushing or used insects to eat it.
The maggot is not a very choosy thing when it comes to what it wants to eat.
[cheerful instrumentals continue.]
[camera shutters.]
[director.]
Even Bill was amazed by just how audacious these ideas were.
[keyboard clicking.]
But he also knew it would take years for even one to become a reality.
And still, every day, thousands were dying.
[Peter.]
You have pit latrines in communities, and eventually they fill up.
Now what do you do with this material? It's absolutely full of pathogens.
And they have no place to put it.
It's gotta go to a sewer treatment plant.
[director.]
In other parts of the world, modern sewage treatment simply doesn't exist even in urban areas.
[Peter.]
I traveled and I saw a whole bunch of wastewater treatment plants.
None of them were running.
The sewer was just going around them.
They build them but they can't afford to run them.
[director.]
In Dakar, most human waste pours into canals that flow directly into the Hann Bay.
[seagulls squawk.]
There, infectious diseases spread at alarming rates.
Just as Bill asked Doulaye to help him reinvent the toilet, he wondered if Peter could help invent a new treatment plant.
One that doesn't waste water, or require a lot of energy.
I was a little bit discouraged at first because [stammers.]
I couldn't think of a technical solution.
A lot of people were looking at filtration.
They were like, "I gotta filter this somehow.
" And in my view, you can't filter something that's so radically different every time.
[Peter.]
So this is, uh, sewer sludge.
What do you think's growing in there? Tomatoes.
You know why? Because people eat tomatoes.
And the seeds go through the person and they end up here.
Looks like it's pretty dry.
[Peter.]
Believe it or not, there's actually a lot of really good stuff in in shit.
There's a lot of water.
And so I started looking at it, saying, "I can boil it.
" [playful instrumentals.]
[director.]
Bill and Peter knew that boiling poop would generate steam, - and that steam generates energy - [gears clicking.]
and energy is necessary to power a sewage system.
But what if a treatment center could use poop to power itself forever? [bubbling, steaming.]
"And just maybe," they asked "could that steam produce clean, drinkable water?" [water filling glass.]
[director.]
So, by the time you were 12, things got really bad with your mother, right? [Bill.]
Yeah, I definitely gave my mom a hard time not following along with what she wanted and really trying to detach myself.
[director.]
And what So how did you express that frustration? [Bill.]
Oh, just disobedience, disrespect.
I mean, it's kind of embarrassing to think about it now.
[utensils lightly clinking.]
- [director.]
In an argument over dinner - [chair slides.]
Bill shouted at his mother in what he describes today as "Utter, totally sarcastic, smart-ass kid rudeness.
" In a rare burst of anger, Bill's dad threw a glass of water at Bill's face.
[Kristi.]
They actually got some counseling.
They pretended that it was a whole family problem and we all went.
[laughs.]
Um, but then it became clear that it was my mother and my brother.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[Bill.]
I said to him, "Hey, I'm at war with my parents.
I don't know if you can help me or not.
" And he said, "Well, that's it's not a very fair war.
You're gonna inflict more pain on them than they inflict on you.
And they're really on your side.
" So, you know, I'm Basically, I had the wrong way of looking at things.
It took him about three months to convince me of that, but it was brilliant.
I think it was sorta, "At some point, you've gotta let your mother have her way.
That's just the way life is and you've gotta let your mother have her way.
" [indistinct conversation.]
[Bill.]
The real question was how I would do in the real world.
Pushing up against them where they really cared about me, that wasn't the real world.
She was intentional about creating opportunities for him to be social.
I mean, for example, when my dad would go to American Bar Association meetings, they would have him come and be a greeter or do something that forced that engagement.
Even at Cheerio there were sort of beautifully engineered interactions between the children and the parents.
One of the things that the parents would organize is a drawing to see whose house you would go to for dinners.
So you had to learn to follow their rules, eat their food, and socialize.
[indistinct chatter.]
[director.]
So if your parents had left him alone and not forced him to deal in the real world, do you think he'd be the same guy? [stammers.]
I don't think so.
You don't know, but I don't think so.
I think my parents had a lot to do with how he turned out.
[announcer.]
Please welcome Mr.
Bill Gates.
[crowd cheers, claps.]
[continued clapping.]
[Melinda.]
So it's viable they could get it value engineered down.
It's not out of the realm that they could get it to the price point that we want.
[Doulaye.]
There critical challenge there is with the heat exchanger, is the heat recovery.
So we are really looking at the best company in the world who have expertise in that.
Do you see there being just one manufacturer ultimately in China or multiples? [man.]
The way they're structured [director.]
Melinda brings just a great different point of view that makes you more effective.
[Bill.]
Yeah, well, she's totally my partner.
[director.]
There's real partners and there's superficial partners.
And you chose to make her a real partner.
[Bill.]
No, she's a real partner.
'Cause she is, you know, totally equal in how we do these things.
[Melinda.]
We weren't quite there yet when he left Microsoft, to be frank.
'Cause he'd run the company, right? He was the CEO of the company and the chairman of the board.
I knew he was for it, we just needed to change a few of our ways of working together.
[Mike.]
It doesn't feel like there's any inequality.
You know, even though he's the one that started Microsoft and not her.
Like he appreciates everything about her, as opposed to, like, complaining about her or something.
I've never heard him complain about her.
He's the only person I know who I've never heard complain about his wife.
[camera shutter clicks.]
[Melinda.]
I was good at math in high school.
My high school teacher decided to go to the head principal when she saw these Apple computers at a conference.
- [typing on keyboard.]
- So we started programming in high school.
Between math and puzzles, which I love both, it was like this whole puzzle, and I just loved it.
[Mike.]
I started working at Microsoft in 1983, and in '87, we hired seven MBAs, six guys and her.
And she had gone to Duke and gotten a degree in computer science and an MBA in five years.
So the other people in this "pledge class" of MBA's were all like 26 years old.
She was maybe 22 and a half, right, and she was the only woman.
[director.]
Within a very short time, Melinda was running her own division, overseeing hundreds of people.
[Melinda.]
In the consumer division, we were trying to think through the human experience, the user experience.
Bill has amazing scientists and innovative ideas for getting new toilet technology.
It will absolute change the developing world.
But if they can't think about the experience of, a mom is the one who takes her child to the toilet The moms tell me in the villages, "If men can see over the wall, I'm not going in there.
It's not safe and it's not private.
If I can't take my child into the little stall with me it doesn't work, I can't leave the child outside.
" That's where I'm willing to be a bit of grist with Bill.
I'll poke him a bit.
Like, "Well, how are you thinking about this piece and how are you thinking about that?" We listen and respect each other and then we come to a common viewpoint, and that's what we take forward.
And what are you hoping to get out of the toilet fair this time that's gonna happen in China? At the last one there was a bit of, "We're still in a science mode.
" - Mmm.
- [man.]
Could this work? [thumping instrumentals.]
[man.]
Our hope is to show enough momentum that that's no longer the question.
[Doulaye.]
When you arrive, you will be straight on the stage to deliver your keynote.
This is going to be a very big historic moment.
[indistinct chatter.]
[man 2.]
At the top of page three, underneath the lectern there is a shelf with the, uh the poop prop.
So you'll be standing there and it's it's just right under there.
Okay.
[thumping instrumentals continue.]
[distant indistinct chatter.]
[man 3.]
Can you say a few words for me please? I'm trying this strange microphone.
You got that? Thumbs up.
Thank you.
There's two bottles of water in the podium that have already been cracked.
Do they look different than the feces? - [laughing.]
- They're on the bottom shelf.
[Bill.]
He didn't get that.
Believe me, that was a Do I set 'em there? Because then nobody wants them.
[man 3.]
So they're on the bottom shelf.
[Bill over mic.]
And we've been working all these years to fund the early stage research.
Now's the time to take it and drive it to maturity.
[cheery instrumentals.]
[director.]
Six years after the first toilet fair, the engineers have refined their early prototypes.
What began as a brainstorm on a whiteboard had finally come to life.
This toilet utilizes a screw to separate urine from feces.
Burning the waste generates energy to power the screw.
All that's left a small pile of ash.
This squat toilet dries then burns waste to create heat that disinfects the urine.
And this one is powered by solar panels, and uses an oxygen composting process.
The by-products: fertilizer and water for flushing.
We really do see ourselves on a cusp of a sanitation revolution.
[director.]
Many of these toilets require no outside electricity or plumbing.
And they were ready to replace the pit latrine forever.
But the capital cost? For the time being, about $50,000, uh, US dollars.
The cost of this now is around, uh, 50,000.
[director.]
For all the progress, Bill knew that a $50,000 toilet was way out of reach.
[Bill.]
This thing's gonna have to cost less than $500.
And right now we're more than ten times greater than that.
[director.]
The solution: find a partner in this room to manufacture it and bring the cost down.
[Bill.]
I brought a little exhibit here.
This is a container of human feces.
Inside there could be over 200 million rotavirus particles, twenty billion shigella bacteria, and a hundred thousand parasitic worm eggs.
That's what kids, when they're out playing, they're being exposed to all the time.
[director.]
If he failed, it would be seven years of work and 200 million dollars wasted.
[tense instrumentals.]
[director.]
As a businessman, what are your blindsides? What are the moments that you feel like, "Oh, this is what I'm not so good at"? Well, innovation-based businesses are the only ones that I bring anything to it all.
[steam hissing.]
[Bill.]
I like to push the level of risk of doing things that wouldn't happen without leadership and vision.
[director.]
In only 18 months, Peter and his team were able to build a working prototype of a stand-alone treatment plant.
They called it the Omni Processor.
And the machine worked exactly the way they imagined it would.
[Peter.]
So this is the solution when, you empty pit latrines, and instead of dumping all this stuff in the river, you bring it to a centralized Omni Processor.
It evaporates the water, solids go into a fire, we burn them, we boil more steam, and drive a steam engine to make electricity to drive the whole process.
[director.]
It requires no external power and no outside water.
- [metal clatters.]
- And in the end, the only byproducts are electricity, ash, and clean, drinkable water.
We're, you know, looking at all these water samples coming out of the Omni Processor.
[faint truck beeping.]
[Peter.]
You know where it came from, you can see the pile of shit that it came from five minutes ago.
He just grabs a glass and he takes a look at it - and boom! Just tastes like water.
- [Bill speaks indistinctly.]
[director.]
But building a prototype in just 18 months wasn't enough.
Bill pushed Peter to get this machine up and running where people needed it.
[Peter.]
I have access to hundreds of mechanics and engineers and electricians, and getting it to run every day is a piece of cake.
But sending it to Dakar and getting it up and running but to actually do that is kind of a big deal.
[Kristi.]
Early on at Microsoft, my mom became sort of his right-hand person.
[Libby.]
When he bought a house, making sure he actually had a house cleaner, helping him have a wardrobe when he was getting a photograph taken for some magazine.
[Kristi.]
I think he was very happy with that 'cause as a 25, 26-year-old guy, he, that was great, "I don't have to worry about all this stuff.
" She made him be really thoughtful early in his life at Microsoft about what it meant to be a community contributor and the importance of that.
She introduced him back into the community, she, you know, got him involved in United Way.
She was his guidepost.
I never thought that he, you know, at that point, that he'd get anybody to marry him.
[soft piano notes.]
Melinda and my mom got along really well.
I think my mom did a great job of sort of realizing that she needed to step back a little bit.
[director.]
Do you think he knew how serious her cancer was? Yeah.
Yeah.
- [somber instrumentals.]
- [Bill.]
She was becoming very frail.
It was pretty clear she had at most a year to live.
[Kristi.]
He did everything he could and he looked into trials and what the different options were for treatment, and it was just a little too early in the progression of cancer research to really help her.
My mom loved Melinda and thought that she was a great addition to the family and perfect for my brother.
Right around the time that Bill and Melinda we're getting married, she was quite ill.
[somber music continues.]
She died the June after they got married.
She died of breast cancer.
[director.]
What was the worst day in your life? Mmm, like the day my mother died.
[faint thumps of windshield wipers.]
[rain pattering.]
[Bill.]
My mom had been fading quite a bit.
And so I'm driving to the house I grew up in.
- And I'm speeding - [engine revs.]
- [police siren whoops.]
- and I get pulled over.
- [footsteps approaching.]
- The officer walks up and I was just sobbing.
And I say, "My mom died and I'm going home.
" Even though we had expected it and here it was.
Mom was gone.
[tranquil instrumentals.]
[Libby.]
When things are difficult emotionally, he goes to his safe space, which is intellect.
It's hard for him to feel pain.
I think it was an extraordinary loss for him.
And I kind of wonder, you know, whether there was some um some things that were left undone for him.
She would be so prou I mean, it's a shame she's not here 'cause she would be so proud of him.
But she Yeah.
Um [stammers.]
It's a shame she's not here.
[director.]
If she could see you today, you think she'd be proud of you? I think so.
Uh She never thought my table manners were perfect.
I don't think I've, uh solved that.
So she'd have, you know, still things that uh, she'd encourage me to do better on.
[mellow piano instrumentals.]
[Kristi.]
Taking his brain and putting it in our family with my mom pushing him to do the social stuff that's all stuff that got him sort of to focus his brain not just on the learning and the educational part, but more on the doing part.
[mellow piano instrumentals continue.]
[director.]
Today in Dakar, the Omni Processor is treating one-third of the city's fecal sludge and providing clean, drinkable water.
[Nicholas.]
In journalism we tend to cover what happened today.
We're all over a press conference, an explosion.
We don't cover things that happen every day.
We tend to miss those stories about the everyday suffering.
And we miss the story about everyday improvement in living conditions.
Because things that happen every day are never quite news.
[birds squawking.]
There's this battle for eyeballs in the journalism world.
And covering global health is not a way to get eyeballs.
[Nicholas.]
This article was quickly forgotten except that it had a couple of important readers in Seattle.
[director.]
In November 2018, Lixil, one of the world's largest manufacturers, announced it would develop one of Bill's toilets.
[mellow piano instrumentals continuing.]
[cheerful electronic instrumentals.]