Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (2019) s01e02 Episode Script
Part 2
[racingelectronic instrumentals.]
[director.]
Bill is on a mission.
He needs to unlock the mysteries of the PDP-10 computer.
But the adults won't share the source code with 13-year-old Bill.
[dumpster lid creaks.]
So he enlists his older friend Paul Allen.
Together they boldly go where no one has gone before.
If they find the source code, Bill and Paul will finally be able - to master the computer.
- [cans rattle against concrete.]
[racing electronic music continues.]
The two friends are in business.
- [crescendo to silence.]
- [paper rustles.]
[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.]
The smartest person Iâve 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? Theyâre 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 trill.]
[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.]
[director.]
So the series is called Inside Bill's Brain.
- Yes.
[laughs.]
- And I'm asking - Why is that funny? - It just is! I don't think of it being that interesting to be in my husband's brain, right? - [laughs.]
- That's very - Sorry.
- [laughing.]
How would you describe his brain? [laughs.]
I'm sorry, I'm just not gonna be able to not laugh through this part.
- Okay, look - [stammers.]
Why are you laughing? 'Cause it's chaos! [strained.]
There's so much complexity in there! It's chaos! All right, here's why I laugh.
I wouldn't wanna be in that brain, right? Why? There is so much going on all the time.
It's moving, moving, moving, moving? Yeah.
Yeah, it's unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
[Melinda.]
Bill can deal with a lot of complexity.
And he likes complexity, and he thrives on complexity.
So when Bill stills and quiets himself, all these incredibly complex thoughts that he's had, and these ways he can see the world and he can pull ideas together that other people can't see, he thinks his best.
Why did he go on Think Week? He stilled himself and he had time to distill and slow down, and then write and lead in the way he wanted to lead.
[director.]
Bill started to take Think Weeks back in the 90s, when he was still running Microsoft.
He would travel the Hood Canal and spend one week there alone, reading and thinking.
He'd absorb stacks of books and technical papers, anything that could help him understand the future.
[Bill.]
That's CPU time.
It's time that you get to think about things.
[director.]
A CPU is a central processing unit, which carries out the instructions of a computer program.
Without one, a computer can't make calculations or decide how to function.
[technical beeping.]
[Bill.]
When you write down these things to think about, that's like the code, you know, when will low interest rates end? Why isn't the clinic working better? Okay, the private sector is good at this, do they have capacity? How many cities is this going to get into? How do we do the safety tests? Have we really underestimated this? What is in human sewage? [chuckles.]
Then you think, okay, do I need to read some books about that? Who do I need to talk to about that? And some things, I say to myself, "Hey, I just need to think.
" [director.]
Your brain is a CPU? Yes.
[tranquil instrumentals.]
[director.]
As I've gotten to know Bill in this new phase of his life, it seems like he's turned his whole life into one long, continuous Think Week.
Only, today, he's focused on other things.
[tense instrumentals.]
For more than a decade, Bill and his partner Melinda have been pouring billions of dollars into eradicating polio.
[ethereal instrumentals.]
But they underestimated just how hard it would be.
[no audible dialogue.]
[mellow instrumentals.]
For the Western world, polio is now a distant memory.
[mechanical pumping and hissing.]
We forget the terror.
And the suffering.
In 1955, when the Salk vaccine was introduced, we were able to stop polio in the developed world.
But kids in poor countries are still getting the disease, which is very contagious, and spreads as a result of poor sanitation.
[Sue.]
It's terrible to have polio.
It's terrible to be paralyzed.
It is especially terrible if you're in a poor country.
You may not have crutches.
If you do, they're homemade, and so the degree to which you cannot participate in society if you've had serious polio and you're paralyzed in a poor country, it's a really terrible disease.
[Bill.]
I see a life that is going to be super, super limited.
You know, it's an incredible tragedy for the whole family.
[director.]
You grew up in a comfortable world.
[Bill.]
Very.
- You didn't need anything.
- No, my parents were well off.
My dad did well as a lawyer.
Took us on great trips.
We had a really nice house.
[Bill.]
And I've had so much luck in terms of all of these opportunities.
[director.]
So where are we? [Bill.]
Uh, this is Lakeside.
This is where I spent, uh, most of 7th grade through 12th grade.
I was in public school through 6th grade, and my parents decided I should go to a private school.
And I remember thinking, did I want to go to this school? It was a boys school, and I'd been kind of a class clown and I didn't know if that niche existed in this school I was going to, because it looked very disciplinarian.
I remember thinking when I took the exam, should I pass this exam or not? And I just couldn't help myself, but try and do the best I could [laughs.]
[director.]
But it crossed your mind to sandbag? Right, to not do well on the test, uh but I didn't.
I - You couldn't help yourself.
- I couldn't help myself.
[laughs.]
[uplifting acoustic string music playing.]
[director.]
Bill is often seen as a singular figure, but his life, in fact, has been defined by a series of partnerships.
At Lakeside, Bill's first true friendships were forged in the computer lab.
[childhood classroom chatter.]
[man.]
There was a little room just off the entrance to the building and that was the computer room.
- [typing.]
- [dings.]
[director.]
The Lakeside Programmers Group was founded by two sophomores: Paul Allen and Ric Weiland.
- So, this is Paul Allen here.
- Yeah.
There I am looking very, very mature.
[laughs.]
[director.]
He looks 20 years older than you.
[Bill.]
Absolutely.
He's two grades ahead of me.
[director.]
Bill and his friend Kent Evans joined the club when they were only 8th graders.
[Bill.]
Paul actually sought me out because Iâd done super well on this nationwide math test.
I thought that was really cool.
Paul was certainly cooler than I was.
[Marc.]
He had a corduroy kinda jacket and then a black leather jacket, that was the cool jacket.
[director.]
Paul captivated the middle schoolers with computers and coding.
[Bill.]
He was the one who came to me and explained to me about chips and the magic of putting more and more capability on chips.
[director.]
The boys were so good at coding that a local company hired them to program its payroll.
But the older kids didn't know what to do with the younger Bill and Kent.
You know, I'm sure their friends thought it was weird that we were coming around at all.
- And - So they were getting shit - for working with the middle schoolers? - Yeah.
And then they decide they just wanna do it.
- Paul and Ric? - Paul and Ric.
[chirpy instrumentals.]
And so, they kicked both Kent and I off the project.
And I said, "I think you're underestimating how hard this is.
If you ask me to come back, I am going to be totally in charge of this and anything you ever ask me to do again.
" [director.]
After weeks of work, Paul realized Bill was right.
So he asked for his help, and Bill took over.
[Bill.]
It was just more natural for me to be in charge.
But wait, at this point, Kent, not Paul, - was your best friend, right? - [Bill.]
Yes.
Yeah.
[director.]
And you're hanging out at each other's houses? [Bill.]
Uh, and talking on the phone ridiculous amounts.
Now, I still know Kent's phone number.
Uh - What's his phone number? - 525-7851.
Kent always had the big briefcase, you know, more like a lawyer's briefcase with tons of stuff in it magazines and different things.
He was the best student in our class.
He was clever, he read different things.
We're always scheming about, okay, what we'd be doing five, six years from then, and everybody else was like, "Why aren't you just hanging out at the dance?" [chewing.]
[wavering electronic instrumentals.]
[Bill.]
Kent had an interest in business and so he got me reading Fortune Magazine.
And thinking about, if you went into the civil service, what did you make? Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors? - [wavering instrumentals continue.]
- [faint military calls over intercom.]
[pages flipping.]
And this idea that some people were super successful, that was interesting.
I mean, what did they know? What did they do? What drove those kinds of successes? And why did some industries have few big companies and other industries have lots of small companies? [director.]
The two best friends believed that someday they would do extraordinary things together.
Okay, Bill and I have not discussed what system.
- Well, we'll play your system, Warren.
- [laughs.]
Okay, well [director.]
Tell me about bridge, - and why you and him love it.
- [Warren.]
I consider it the ultimate game.
[light, plucky instrumentals.]
[Warren.]
It's a partnership game, which is unlike a great many games, so you have to work with another person.
For one reason or another, if you don't connect well with him or her, you know, it isn't gonna work.
You can't do it by yourself.
- One spade.
- [Bill.]
Pass.
[director.]
Bridge partners must communicate without even speaking.
The only way to win is to mind-meld with your partner.
[director.]
Are you and Bill partners? [Warren.]
Oh yeah, weâre partners.
Well, weâre partners in a big way, in philanthropy and weâre actually, in a certain sense, partners in business because the fate of Berkshire is an important part of the resources of the Gates Foundation over time.
If Berkshire does well, the Foundation does well? Gonna do better, yeah! [laughs.]
[director.]
In 1991, when Billâs mother said he should meet Warren Buffet, the worldâs most successful stock trader, Bill told her he was too busy.
His mother insisted.
So I said, "Okay, I'll take a helicopter, come out there, but after like 90 minutes, I have to go work on software.
" [director.]
When the two men eventually did sit down, they talked for hours.
[Bill.]
He was asking me questions about why couldn't IBM beat Microsoft? What were the economics of Microsoft? How did we find smart people in the things we did? How did we price our stuff? I always expected to run into people who would ask me those questions, but he was the first one.
[director.]
Bill has only met a handful of people in his life with minds that operate like his own.
[Warren.]
It's enormously important that you do have the right friends.
If they make you a better person than you otherwise would be, that's the ultimate gift.
[director.]
After decades amassing one of the largest fortunes ever, Warren pledged more than half of it, 31 billion dollars, to Bill and Melinda's Foundation.
[director.]
Warren, how'd you come to the decision to give all this money to Bill and Melinda? Well, once you have the premise that every human life is of equal value [stammers.]
I mean that directs lot of what you, both your money and your efforts, and the people you attract, and all sorts of things involved in that.
Bill, do you feel pressure to do right by Warren's gift? [Bill.]
Oh, absolutely.
In some ways, messing up with my own money, uh I'd feel less guilty about than if I mess up with Warren's money.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[children playing in the distance.]
[Bill.]
A few years ago, I showed my daughter a polio video 'cause I wanted her to understand, you know, this was this big risky thing we were doing to help lead polio eradication.
And the video ends with a girl who's got the paralysis limping down the road with the, you know, crummy wood crutch.
And so my daughter said to me, "Well, what did you do?" And I said, "Well, we're gonna eradicate it.
" She says, "No, what did you do for her?" [children laughing, screaming.]
Melinda and I often, you know, just find it very tough when you're seeing a few kids dying.
[child chattering.]
But then there's millions like that.
It should be a million times more emotional, but, you know, nobody can be a million times more sad than when you're sitting there seeing that one case.
But the emotional connection is always retail.
Even though, if you really wanna make a dent in this thing, you better think wholesale in, you know, ten to the sixth, ten to the seventh type magnitudes.
[director.]
Hearing you say you're getting into this because there's more bang for your buck is not inspiring, Bill.
Well, that's too bad.
I'm the You know, it's not my goal to be inspiring.
- [director laughs.]
- The world has limited resources.
So if you're not doing things to be inspiring, what are you doing things for? Optimization.
[Bill.]
With, uh, disease eradication, if you get to zero, that's magic.
Because then, for all the years after that, you don't have any of the prevention costs.
You don't have any of the treatment.
You don't have the tragedy at all.
But if you try to eradicate and fail, that's very bad because you tarnish the entire reputation and credibility of the whole global health effort.
[director.]
Smallpox is the only disease that has ever been eradicated.
After it was wiped off the face of the planet in 1980, a group of organizations decided polio would be next.
When Bill and Melinda's foundation joined the fight, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to save hundreds of thousands of lives.
But progress flatlined, and in Nigeria, the number of polio cases had nearly tripled in just one year.
So there was a fork in the road of do we just say this isn't gonna succeed? [director.]
At the foundation's next budget meeting, the polio team asked Bill to double his spending.
And I said, "I think you just asked for the most you thought you could ask for, you didn't ask for what it's really going to take to have a high probability of success.
" [director.]
They asked for 200 million.
Bill raised it to 400, but said he wanted to see the program for himself.
[low droning instrumentals.]
[man.]
Religious leaders had been stirring up rumors that vaccines were a plot by Western nations to sterilize kids, calling the people supporting polio modern-day Hitlers.
And the campaigns were halted.
[director.]
When Bill arrived at the Sultan of Sokoto's palace, he sat with leaders from across the region.
He listened and answered questions.
[low droning continues.]
Hours later, they agreed to help.
- [children crying in distance.]
- But there was another problem.
Even in areas where vaccinators were allowed to go, kids were still getting polio.
Bill wanted to find out why.
Some settlements, he learned, had been completely missed by vaccinators for years.
[Bill.]
And that was definitely shocking to me.
[stammers.]
The campaign was very much off track.
[director.]
When Bill and Kent were juniors, Lakeside's principal called them with a problem no one could solve.
- Lakeside had just merged - [students laughing.]
with a local all-girls school.
With a bigger student body spread out across two different campuses, no one could figure out how to make the class schedules work.
I've been in schools in my early career where it was done by hand.
It would take a couple of guys the entire summer just working through it.
[director.]
So they asked Bill and Kent, two teenagers, to sort the schedules of more than 400 students.
The number ofconstraints was unbelievable.
[plucky acoustic instrumentals.]
You've got whatever number of courses that the school offers in both middle and upper school.
[indistinct chatter echoing through hallway.]
[Bill.]
You couldn't have drum upstairs when you had choir downstairs because the soundproofing wasn't good enough.
[Bernie.]
Everyone wants their first choice.
The kids are taking between five and seven classes.
[Bill.]
They'll tell you: don't put this kid in the same section with this kid Or a teacher never teaching four classes in a row.
[Bernie.]
There has to be lunch in there.
- [bell rings.]
- They have to be done at 3:15.
[rushing footsteps.]
[Bill.]
They would put 48 people into a three-section class and guarantee the parents that there were never more than 16.
Kent and I were worried we'd be going back to them and instead of telling them, "Hey, this guy can't take drums," I'd be saying, "This guy can't take physics, 'cause I can't figure out how to get him into a physics class, and the graduation requirements require he take physics.
" And I thought about it for a few weeks, and I said, "No, uh, that's a really hard problem.
" So, how come you and Kent didn't keep working together? Well, we would've kept working together.
Uh, you know, I'm sure we would have gone to college together.
You know, Kent was, even, you know, less oriented towards athletics, more geeky.
And then he took a mountain climbing course.
It was kind of this classic Kent thing, where heâd he'd broaden his world view and decided that, you know, being a little bit physical was something that, you know, was valuable.
So he goes and he signs up for, uh, a mountain climbing course.
And as part of that when they were practicing, he he fell down the hill and was killed.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[director.]
That must've just been shattering.
It was, it was so unexpected, so, you know, unusual.
[church bell rings.]
People didn't know what to say to me or to Kent's parents.
I remember crying at the chapel, and the art teacher at the school, guy named Bob Fulghum, was incredibly eloquent.
And so I remember being [clears throat.]
consoled by him in front of the chapel.
[director.]
But you and Kent had big plans.
You had You had dreams.
Did it make you wanna throw up your hands and just quit? No, I I sorta thought, hey, okay, now I'm gonna do these things Kent and I talked about but I'll do it without Kent.
[exhales.]
[mellow instrumentals continue.]
[Marc.]
It was this big hole, I think, for him.
But, uh, Bill could be very, um focused.
So I suppose in that way he could hide it.
[woman.]
I've heard him talk about his thinking sometimes, and moving things around in his mind and pulling things out of different compartments.
[Melinda.]
He's curious about lots of topics, but then what he does is, he makes a framework in his mind and then he starts slotting in the information.
[man.]
In Nigeria, you would find polio in one place, respond aggressively there.
It would appear to get rid of it in that location, but then polio would appear several districts over.
There was almost a whack-a-mole problem.
[frantic scratching.]
[Bill.]
For any pair of classes, is there a common student? It's all about conflicts.
[man 2.]
In many places, the most recent map you could find of Northern Nigeria was something made by the British back in 1945.
[Bill.]
What's the optimal algorithm? Or the schedule? [man 2.]
These vaccinators, they've gotta get to every house where there are children, and the only maps they had were hand-drawn.
[Bill.]
I could build the conflict matrix one time.
You can see, "Is there a common student?" [man 2.]
There's only so many vaccinators, so you have to make sure that we get them at exactly to where they're needed the most.
[Bill.]
It's a resource constraint problem.
[papers rustling.]
[Melinda.]
It's like Bill has a giant Excel spreadsheet in his head, and everything has a spot.
[tense instrumentals.]
[man 2.]
He tends to look at problems with some very unusual angles.
[director.]
Bill thought he'd found a way to crack the class schedule problem.
But he knew he couldn't do it alone.
[Bill.]
And so I called Paul and say, "Hey, I need your help.
" [racing plucky instrumentals.]
[director.]
He and Paul didn't have much time.
School's starting in just two weeks.
It turned out to be a little harder than I expected.
[director.]
They moved cots into the computer lab and started working around the clock.
[racing plucky instrumentals continue.]
[man 3.]
He's an amazing programmer.
There were times where he would fall asleep, literally put his head on the keyboard and fall asleep.
And then he'd kind of groggily wake up and look at the screen and then he'd start typing right where he left off.
[man 4.]
Paul would be changing Bill's code.
Bill would be changing Paul's code.
They had a very collaborative relationship.
[director.]
With just hours to spare, they got their program running.
- [machine whirring.]
- The schedules were finished.
[papers rustle.]
["Three Tough Guys" theme song playing.]
[director.]
Soon other schools wanted help with their schedules.
[technical beeping.]
We had a lot of fun.
I'd never gotten drunk and Paul got me drunk, and all sorts of, uh - And it was - Wait, let's talk about that.
- Why does he wanna get you drunk? - Well, Paul was into Jimi Hendrix, and so, you know, there was the song "Are You Experienced?" Paul always sorta wanted to see, okay, here's Bill drunk, here's Bill on pot.
[director.]
They wrote software to analyze traffic patterns.
[Bill.]
The night that he got me drunk on scotch, I didn't want to go home, so I just slept in the chapel at Lakeside School.
[director.]
When a hydroelectric company couldn't computerize its system Somebody said, "Well, there's Gates and Allen.
" Weâd come in to interview and theyâre like, "Wait! These are children!" [director.]
Bill left school for a semester and moved with Paul to Vancouver, Washington to program the computer for the water and power company.
[Bill.]
There was a black neighborhood, Alameda, where weâd go to the theater there.
And weâd often be the only white guys in the theater, and watch films like Super Fly.
I can't imagine two whiter guys watching Super Oh, we were the whitest guys ever.
We went to see Taxi Driver together.
- "Who? You talking to me?" - [laughs.]
"Who the you think you're talking to?" - [rustling.]
- [pistol cocks.]
Is he like the corrupting older brother? Oh yeah, there's definitely an element of that.
I was good friends with Paul.
Before that, you know, I'd been to his house, gone to movies with him, but the real intensification of our relationship was through this summer, Paul became my best friend.
[director.]
Bill knew polio eradication would fail without additional volunteers, but they needed accurate maps.
[enigmatic instrumental music.]
Using high-resolution satellite imagery, algorithms, and increased computing power, Bills team helps create detailed maps of Nigeria.
[typing.]
Finally, they could see what the country looked like.
[Bill.]
We realized that the people who lived on the boundaries of these districts were being missed because this district thought the other guy was doing that place and this guy thought they were doing it.
We actually saw your chance of getting paralyzed was high if you lived on one of these political borders.
[director.]
On the ground, vaccinators were now armed with precise micro plans.
Bill kept pushing for more efficiencies.
Targeting high-risk areas first would save lives.
[enigmatic instrumentals continue.]
[man.]
One of the big questions was, how can we use quantitative analysis to understand how to get from low polio to zero polio? [director.]
Bill asked the team if they could predict future outbreaks.
So they crunched massive amounts of data - [technical beeping.]
- vaccination rates and shifts in population.
to pinpoint areas where healthcare workers should go first.
And it was very accurate.
[news anchor.]
Still to come on Eyewitness News, Benjamin Franklin never dreamed a typewriter keyboard would do this.
[young Bill.]
There's a lot of people who are, uh, forecasting that there'll be software stores just like there are record stores today, and that there'll be thousands and thousands of those, and I think I'd have to agree with that.
[bass strumming.]
[director.]
It was Bill's sophomore year at Harvard when Paul handed him a copy of Popular Electronics magazine.
On the cover, it featured a now legendary computer.
It looks like the revolution is starting without us.
Bill and Paul set out to write software for the new machine.
[typing.]
[Bill.]
And so, we work day and night, and then a few months later, we punch it out on a paper tape.
[director.]
When Paul flew to Albuquerque to demo the new software to the makers of the Altair, he realized there was a problem.
They had forgotten to write a bootstrap loader.
Without one, he couldn't upload the software to the new computer.
[Bill.]
So he writes that on the plane.
Paul sits down, keys in all these instructions.
If we'd made any mistake, it wouldn't have worked.
[mechanical whirring.]
[director.]
Everyone watched as Paul loaded the code into the Altair.
He then typed "two plus two," a simple command to test the software.
[mechanical whirring.]
The printer wrote four.
Worked perfectly.
It worked perfectly the very first time.
[director.]
No one had ever successfully run commercial software on a personal computer.
Microsoft was born.
Bill dropped out of Harvard, and he and Paul moved to Albuquerque.
We get an apartment, which is a crummy apartment.
Then, you know, we squeeze a couple more people in there.
That was not a good idea.
[mellow guitar riffing.]
[Marc.]
It was pretty much a flophouse, really.
Well, I don't remember doing any laundry.
[laughs.]
I don't think anybody did any laundry.
[man.]
Bill had a bedroom.
Paul had a bedroom.
And guess what? I got the couch.
Paul had his little electric guitar.
Bill would kinda get sick of all the Jimi Hendrix music [laughs.]
and want anything but Hendrix.
[mellow guitar riffing continues.]
We were bursting with excitement.
We barely slept.
We would take breaks off for fast food and go back to work until 3:00 in the morning.
[Bill.]
We were hardcore about, hey, if you're working on a piece of code, just get it done.
Don't Don't worry about sleep.
[upbeat electronic instrumentals.]
Back then, some amount of adrenaline or something I would buy a bottle of Tang, which is a orange sugary drink that they took to the moon that you know, instead of going to meals, I would just pour orange Tang in my hand and lick it off my hand as I was working on things.
And so my face would be covered in this orange stuff, and Youâre supposed to put it in a cup with water and stir it around and drink it.
But you can just skip the water âcause your body already has water in it, and just lick it off your hands.
And these keys didn't get all orange? Uh, that's a problem.
Yeah.
[Bill.]
I love going into work and, you know, that work is my whole life.
[director.]
But Paul had other interests.
[man.]
Paul loved all these things that fell so far outside of, you know, where the company was focused.
I mean, he was deep into science fiction.
He read obsessively.
Very into Shakespeare.
And he was an accomplished guitarist.
I mean, he played at all hours.
[Bill.]
A key advantage I had was being fanatical, that is, taking all my capabilities, day and night, and just focusing on, okay, how do you write good software? I loved being fanatic.
Eventually I reveled in it.
I didn't believe in weekends.
I didn't believe in vacation.
Bill had more intensity and drive than anybody I know.
[Bill.]
For a lot of people it wasn't an ideal place to work.
We were pretty frantic and demanding.
If you said it would take a week to do something, "I can do that in a day.
Why aren't you working as much as I am?" No, no, no, no, somebody's confused.
Somebody's just not thinking.
[Bill.]
I was famous for saying, "That's the stupidest idea - I've ever heard.
" - [laughing.]
And, you know, of course, people were like, but how could it be? It was only two hours ago, he heard this other one.
Is this one really stupider than all those other ideas he heard before? That ridiculous.
I'm not using this thing.
Bill used to say, you know, the best thing about Microsoft is, is everyone can work part time.
And you get to choose which 12 hours youâre in the office.
- No, you donât understand.
You didnât - [overlapping chatter.]
- You guys never understood.
- [groaning.]
You never understood the first thing about this.
[Bill.]
I could just be so, so extreme.
[laughs.]
You know, it was like, I knew everybodyâs license plate, so I could walk through the parking lot and say, okay, whoâs here and whoâs not here? [director.]
In April 1981, as America awaited the launch of the very first space shuttle, Bill and Paul were writing software for IBM, the world's largest computer company.
Things were definitely getting big.
[director.]
But when it was time to deliver, they missed their first deadline.
I'd been pushing Paul to work harder.
[director.]
But Paul kept going on and on about the shuttle launch.
I knew guys were talking about, "Oh, that would be very fun to watch.
" Well, Paul did not come and ask me whether he could disappear for three days and go and watch it.
'Cause I would have said no.
But Paul went off and watched the shuttle launch.
[technical beeping.]
[director.]
After long nights coding, Bill delivered to IBM.
[man over intercom.]
two one [director.]
The launch was a success.
MS-DOS became a blockbuster for Microsoft, reaching millions and millions of people.
Vaccinators were reaching critical areas across Nigeria.
The work of Bill and his team was making a real difference.
[Bill.]
Itâs amazing how willing and brave the local people, which is mostly women, had been to join these teams.
[director.]
In 2010, eradication was so close.
[racing electronic beats.]
Soon, India, a country with more than a billion people, a region everyone said was impossible to tackle, would be polio free.
- [racing electronic beats continue.]
- [technical beeping.]
And in Nigeria, the number of kids getting the disease was plummeting.
[technical beeping quickening.]
[distant rapid gunfire.]
[director.]
That September, fifty armed militants raided Bauchi Prison in Northern Nigeria.
- [distant gunfire.]
- [droning instrumentals.]
They freed nearly 150 members of the terrorist organization, Boko Haram.
A new wave of terrorism swept through Nigeria.
[Nicholas.]
In Northern Nigeria, there can be Boko Haram guys at a checkpoint who will kill you.
[ethereal instrumentals.]
[director.]
Boko Haram had seized control of villages and roads, restricting access, and more importantly, information.
So then one of the things we would estimate is, well, what was the size of the total population that was effectively in this bubble? And the answer is it could have been as many as two million people.
[director.]
Despite all the systems Bill put into place, outbreaks of polio were still happening.
They just didn't see it.
[insects trilling.]
We should have predicted it's these terrorist controlled, unstable places would be the last places on earth that you'd have polio.
[director.]
And it wasn't just Nigeria.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the resurgent Taliban threatened the effort.
In much of the world, people view outsiders through this prism of suspicion.
The polio vaccination is just so much more difficult, unless one can get full buy-in from these communities.
It was conflict that enabled polio to persist.
[director.]
Bill watched as the unimaginable began to unfold.
[droning instrumentals.]
A roadside bombing killed vaccinators.
A policeman guarding polio workers was gunned down.
Two men used a four-year-old as a decoy to track down and kill volunteers.
A mother of eight was killed while going door-to-door to administer the vaccine.
People were telling Bill it wasn't worth it, that polio would never be eradicated.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[Bernie.]
Bill takes chances.
He dislocated his shoulder surfing down a volcano in Ecuador.
When riding bikes with him, he will go full-on down some incredible hill, no fear whatsoever.
Same with skiing.
He is fearless.
He will do the most extreme thing.
[director.]
In 2013, just when people were warning Bill that polio was a lost cause, he flew to Abu Dhabi to make a big announcement.
We decided that, you know, weâd step up uh, to an even new level in terms of our commitment.
[director.]
It was called âthe endgame strategic plan.
" Bill and a partnership of organizations planned to eradicate polio in just six years.
To do that, they would spend nearly six billion dollars.
With all the different demands of the foundation's spending, Bill would have to reach out to his friends.
Wow, great.
[Warren.]
Thank you.
Perfect.
- [server.]
Napkins.
- Okay.
Now I really found what I like to eat when I was - by the time I was six.
- [Bill laughs.]
Iâve saved a lot of experimenting since then.
[laughs.]
Continuing to put a lot of salt on hamburgers and go to it.
But does your doctor give you a hard time about salt? They've learned to give up.
- My daughter keeps taking pictures of me.
- [laughs.]
She took a picture of me the other day with a ton of mayonnaise on some thing and she emails it to all my doctors, there are about four of 'em, and they all immediately respond.
[laughing.]
Sheâs always taking pictures of potatoes with a lot of gravy all over âem.
[laughs.]
I like to I like to size things.
[laughs.]
I started out as a horse handicapper, so what are the odds with polio, getting the job done? You know, I sort of, in a sense, put the foundation reputation on the line, that weâre gonna get smart and do whatever it takes.
So [stammers.]
Iâm very optimistic.
If somethingâs the thing to do, you do it, you know? [Bill.]
It's a position of gigantic responsibility.
I mean, just think about it in terms of Warren Buffett.
He has taken a huge percentage of his wealth and said, "I'm counting on you, Bill, to make sure this money has a phenomenal impact.
" [director.]
If it fails, someone might say, "Bill just held on.
He put this big bet down and didn't want to fold.
" - Well - "Because he's relentlessly optimistic.
" And you let down your friends who've given you money.
- You've put a lot - If we fail.
No, but only if we fail.
Bill was 110% committed to Microsoft, 365 days a year.
Paul may have initially been that way, but was becoming much less so.
Bill felt that Paul was no longer carrying his weight.
[Bill.]
As the company got larger the job became broader than just turning out the code.
[tranquil instrumentals.]
And I was having to, you know, work with customers and figuring out how to work in Japan and Europe.
[Chris.]
Bill took on this awesome responsibility of this little company.
He's always worried.
"I'm employing these people.
I am paying their salary.
Are we going to be able to make payroll next month?" [Bill.]
I wanted to have enough money in the bank that, even if nobody paid us for a year, I could pay all the salaries.
The other people in the company would see me scribbling on the back of an envelope, doing that calculation of how much cash do we have in the bank.
[Chris.]
Paul didn't have a desire to run a big company, and Microsoft was clearly becoming a big company.
Bill and I were yin and yang.
There was a stylistic difference in terms of intensity.
[tranquil instrumentals continue.]
Paul got tired of working all night all the time.
[Bill.]
There were times I was tough on Paul.
Thereâs many years there Iâm his boss and Iâm calling him up saying, "Hey, work hard.
" [Marc.]
There would be some arguments, you could hear it through the walls.
It was just Bill had his point, Paul had his point, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Itâs this dichotomy with small startups like Microsoft, where, you know, we knew each other in high school.
It starts out as kind of a family.
And then you find some people are more equal than others.
[Chris.]
Bill decide he wanted to hire a president of Microsoft.
Well, the president takes over Paul's office.
That kind of built a little separation from Bill and Paul.
Where Paul was kind of going off and doing his thing, while Bill was busy running the company.
[director.]
In the fall of 1982, Paul was diagnosed with early-stage Hodgkin's lymphoma.
The next year, he left Microsoft.
[tranquil instrumentals continuing.]
There were periods of time in which Bill and Paul were closer, and which they were less close.
That tension ebbed and flowed over the years.
[Melinda.]
Paul would be distant.
You couldnât figure out why and then Paul would tell him.
But then he wouldnât let Bill near to repair, and it would just take time.
And eventually they would figure out their way to repair.
You know, we had times with Paul where we would sit for hours.
They were like two little boys laughing together over these old stories.
And then when Bill's mom Mary passed away, one of the first people to show up at Bill's dad's house was Paul.
[Larry.]
The last couple years were rough for the both of them.
This book is the reason why Paul got angry.
Bill had said some things that I think Paul felt were inaccurate and mean.
And Paul said some things that Bill felt was inaccurate and mean.
And both of them let too much time go by.
[tranquil instrumentals continuing.]
[typing.]
[director.]
You have any regrets with Paul? [director.]
In 2018, Paul's cancer returned.
[Larry.]
Before Bill knew Paul was sick, there were attempts to reach out to one another, but it never happened.
And then when Paul announced that he was ill again, Bill reached out and finally let all of the emotion out.
Bill was very honest about how he felt about Paul, and how he loved Paul, and how the friendship is more important than any of the things that may have caused either one of them to be angry.
Love lasts.
[stammers.]
And anger tends to fade.
And that was sort of a breakthrough and they were on a path to, you know, be together again, but - Did Bill get to see him before he died? - No.
No.
- [somber instrumentals.]
- [rapid typing.]
[director.]
In 2018, there were 33 new cases of polio reported throughout the world but Bill has no intention of quitting.
No matter the cost.
[cheery electronic instrumentals.]
[director.]
Bill is on a mission.
He needs to unlock the mysteries of the PDP-10 computer.
But the adults won't share the source code with 13-year-old Bill.
[dumpster lid creaks.]
So he enlists his older friend Paul Allen.
Together they boldly go where no one has gone before.
If they find the source code, Bill and Paul will finally be able - to master the computer.
- [cans rattle against concrete.]
[racing electronic music continues.]
The two friends are in business.
- [crescendo to silence.]
- [paper rustles.]
[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.]
The smartest person Iâve 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? Theyâre 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 trill.]
[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.]
[director.]
So the series is called Inside Bill's Brain.
- Yes.
[laughs.]
- And I'm asking - Why is that funny? - It just is! I don't think of it being that interesting to be in my husband's brain, right? - [laughs.]
- That's very - Sorry.
- [laughing.]
How would you describe his brain? [laughs.]
I'm sorry, I'm just not gonna be able to not laugh through this part.
- Okay, look - [stammers.]
Why are you laughing? 'Cause it's chaos! [strained.]
There's so much complexity in there! It's chaos! All right, here's why I laugh.
I wouldn't wanna be in that brain, right? Why? There is so much going on all the time.
It's moving, moving, moving, moving? Yeah.
Yeah, it's unbelievable.
It's unbelievable.
[Melinda.]
Bill can deal with a lot of complexity.
And he likes complexity, and he thrives on complexity.
So when Bill stills and quiets himself, all these incredibly complex thoughts that he's had, and these ways he can see the world and he can pull ideas together that other people can't see, he thinks his best.
Why did he go on Think Week? He stilled himself and he had time to distill and slow down, and then write and lead in the way he wanted to lead.
[director.]
Bill started to take Think Weeks back in the 90s, when he was still running Microsoft.
He would travel the Hood Canal and spend one week there alone, reading and thinking.
He'd absorb stacks of books and technical papers, anything that could help him understand the future.
[Bill.]
That's CPU time.
It's time that you get to think about things.
[director.]
A CPU is a central processing unit, which carries out the instructions of a computer program.
Without one, a computer can't make calculations or decide how to function.
[technical beeping.]
[Bill.]
When you write down these things to think about, that's like the code, you know, when will low interest rates end? Why isn't the clinic working better? Okay, the private sector is good at this, do they have capacity? How many cities is this going to get into? How do we do the safety tests? Have we really underestimated this? What is in human sewage? [chuckles.]
Then you think, okay, do I need to read some books about that? Who do I need to talk to about that? And some things, I say to myself, "Hey, I just need to think.
" [director.]
Your brain is a CPU? Yes.
[tranquil instrumentals.]
[director.]
As I've gotten to know Bill in this new phase of his life, it seems like he's turned his whole life into one long, continuous Think Week.
Only, today, he's focused on other things.
[tense instrumentals.]
For more than a decade, Bill and his partner Melinda have been pouring billions of dollars into eradicating polio.
[ethereal instrumentals.]
But they underestimated just how hard it would be.
[no audible dialogue.]
[mellow instrumentals.]
For the Western world, polio is now a distant memory.
[mechanical pumping and hissing.]
We forget the terror.
And the suffering.
In 1955, when the Salk vaccine was introduced, we were able to stop polio in the developed world.
But kids in poor countries are still getting the disease, which is very contagious, and spreads as a result of poor sanitation.
[Sue.]
It's terrible to have polio.
It's terrible to be paralyzed.
It is especially terrible if you're in a poor country.
You may not have crutches.
If you do, they're homemade, and so the degree to which you cannot participate in society if you've had serious polio and you're paralyzed in a poor country, it's a really terrible disease.
[Bill.]
I see a life that is going to be super, super limited.
You know, it's an incredible tragedy for the whole family.
[director.]
You grew up in a comfortable world.
[Bill.]
Very.
- You didn't need anything.
- No, my parents were well off.
My dad did well as a lawyer.
Took us on great trips.
We had a really nice house.
[Bill.]
And I've had so much luck in terms of all of these opportunities.
[director.]
So where are we? [Bill.]
Uh, this is Lakeside.
This is where I spent, uh, most of 7th grade through 12th grade.
I was in public school through 6th grade, and my parents decided I should go to a private school.
And I remember thinking, did I want to go to this school? It was a boys school, and I'd been kind of a class clown and I didn't know if that niche existed in this school I was going to, because it looked very disciplinarian.
I remember thinking when I took the exam, should I pass this exam or not? And I just couldn't help myself, but try and do the best I could [laughs.]
[director.]
But it crossed your mind to sandbag? Right, to not do well on the test, uh but I didn't.
I - You couldn't help yourself.
- I couldn't help myself.
[laughs.]
[uplifting acoustic string music playing.]
[director.]
Bill is often seen as a singular figure, but his life, in fact, has been defined by a series of partnerships.
At Lakeside, Bill's first true friendships were forged in the computer lab.
[childhood classroom chatter.]
[man.]
There was a little room just off the entrance to the building and that was the computer room.
- [typing.]
- [dings.]
[director.]
The Lakeside Programmers Group was founded by two sophomores: Paul Allen and Ric Weiland.
- So, this is Paul Allen here.
- Yeah.
There I am looking very, very mature.
[laughs.]
[director.]
He looks 20 years older than you.
[Bill.]
Absolutely.
He's two grades ahead of me.
[director.]
Bill and his friend Kent Evans joined the club when they were only 8th graders.
[Bill.]
Paul actually sought me out because Iâd done super well on this nationwide math test.
I thought that was really cool.
Paul was certainly cooler than I was.
[Marc.]
He had a corduroy kinda jacket and then a black leather jacket, that was the cool jacket.
[director.]
Paul captivated the middle schoolers with computers and coding.
[Bill.]
He was the one who came to me and explained to me about chips and the magic of putting more and more capability on chips.
[director.]
The boys were so good at coding that a local company hired them to program its payroll.
But the older kids didn't know what to do with the younger Bill and Kent.
You know, I'm sure their friends thought it was weird that we were coming around at all.
- And - So they were getting shit - for working with the middle schoolers? - Yeah.
And then they decide they just wanna do it.
- Paul and Ric? - Paul and Ric.
[chirpy instrumentals.]
And so, they kicked both Kent and I off the project.
And I said, "I think you're underestimating how hard this is.
If you ask me to come back, I am going to be totally in charge of this and anything you ever ask me to do again.
" [director.]
After weeks of work, Paul realized Bill was right.
So he asked for his help, and Bill took over.
[Bill.]
It was just more natural for me to be in charge.
But wait, at this point, Kent, not Paul, - was your best friend, right? - [Bill.]
Yes.
Yeah.
[director.]
And you're hanging out at each other's houses? [Bill.]
Uh, and talking on the phone ridiculous amounts.
Now, I still know Kent's phone number.
Uh - What's his phone number? - 525-7851.
Kent always had the big briefcase, you know, more like a lawyer's briefcase with tons of stuff in it magazines and different things.
He was the best student in our class.
He was clever, he read different things.
We're always scheming about, okay, what we'd be doing five, six years from then, and everybody else was like, "Why aren't you just hanging out at the dance?" [chewing.]
[wavering electronic instrumentals.]
[Bill.]
Kent had an interest in business and so he got me reading Fortune Magazine.
And thinking about, if you went into the civil service, what did you make? Should we go be CEOs? What kind of impact could you have? Should we go be generals? Should we go be ambassadors? - [wavering instrumentals continue.]
- [faint military calls over intercom.]
[pages flipping.]
And this idea that some people were super successful, that was interesting.
I mean, what did they know? What did they do? What drove those kinds of successes? And why did some industries have few big companies and other industries have lots of small companies? [director.]
The two best friends believed that someday they would do extraordinary things together.
Okay, Bill and I have not discussed what system.
- Well, we'll play your system, Warren.
- [laughs.]
Okay, well [director.]
Tell me about bridge, - and why you and him love it.
- [Warren.]
I consider it the ultimate game.
[light, plucky instrumentals.]
[Warren.]
It's a partnership game, which is unlike a great many games, so you have to work with another person.
For one reason or another, if you don't connect well with him or her, you know, it isn't gonna work.
You can't do it by yourself.
- One spade.
- [Bill.]
Pass.
[director.]
Bridge partners must communicate without even speaking.
The only way to win is to mind-meld with your partner.
[director.]
Are you and Bill partners? [Warren.]
Oh yeah, weâre partners.
Well, weâre partners in a big way, in philanthropy and weâre actually, in a certain sense, partners in business because the fate of Berkshire is an important part of the resources of the Gates Foundation over time.
If Berkshire does well, the Foundation does well? Gonna do better, yeah! [laughs.]
[director.]
In 1991, when Billâs mother said he should meet Warren Buffet, the worldâs most successful stock trader, Bill told her he was too busy.
His mother insisted.
So I said, "Okay, I'll take a helicopter, come out there, but after like 90 minutes, I have to go work on software.
" [director.]
When the two men eventually did sit down, they talked for hours.
[Bill.]
He was asking me questions about why couldn't IBM beat Microsoft? What were the economics of Microsoft? How did we find smart people in the things we did? How did we price our stuff? I always expected to run into people who would ask me those questions, but he was the first one.
[director.]
Bill has only met a handful of people in his life with minds that operate like his own.
[Warren.]
It's enormously important that you do have the right friends.
If they make you a better person than you otherwise would be, that's the ultimate gift.
[director.]
After decades amassing one of the largest fortunes ever, Warren pledged more than half of it, 31 billion dollars, to Bill and Melinda's Foundation.
[director.]
Warren, how'd you come to the decision to give all this money to Bill and Melinda? Well, once you have the premise that every human life is of equal value [stammers.]
I mean that directs lot of what you, both your money and your efforts, and the people you attract, and all sorts of things involved in that.
Bill, do you feel pressure to do right by Warren's gift? [Bill.]
Oh, absolutely.
In some ways, messing up with my own money, uh I'd feel less guilty about than if I mess up with Warren's money.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[children playing in the distance.]
[Bill.]
A few years ago, I showed my daughter a polio video 'cause I wanted her to understand, you know, this was this big risky thing we were doing to help lead polio eradication.
And the video ends with a girl who's got the paralysis limping down the road with the, you know, crummy wood crutch.
And so my daughter said to me, "Well, what did you do?" And I said, "Well, we're gonna eradicate it.
" She says, "No, what did you do for her?" [children laughing, screaming.]
Melinda and I often, you know, just find it very tough when you're seeing a few kids dying.
[child chattering.]
But then there's millions like that.
It should be a million times more emotional, but, you know, nobody can be a million times more sad than when you're sitting there seeing that one case.
But the emotional connection is always retail.
Even though, if you really wanna make a dent in this thing, you better think wholesale in, you know, ten to the sixth, ten to the seventh type magnitudes.
[director.]
Hearing you say you're getting into this because there's more bang for your buck is not inspiring, Bill.
Well, that's too bad.
I'm the You know, it's not my goal to be inspiring.
- [director laughs.]
- The world has limited resources.
So if you're not doing things to be inspiring, what are you doing things for? Optimization.
[Bill.]
With, uh, disease eradication, if you get to zero, that's magic.
Because then, for all the years after that, you don't have any of the prevention costs.
You don't have any of the treatment.
You don't have the tragedy at all.
But if you try to eradicate and fail, that's very bad because you tarnish the entire reputation and credibility of the whole global health effort.
[director.]
Smallpox is the only disease that has ever been eradicated.
After it was wiped off the face of the planet in 1980, a group of organizations decided polio would be next.
When Bill and Melinda's foundation joined the fight, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to save hundreds of thousands of lives.
But progress flatlined, and in Nigeria, the number of polio cases had nearly tripled in just one year.
So there was a fork in the road of do we just say this isn't gonna succeed? [director.]
At the foundation's next budget meeting, the polio team asked Bill to double his spending.
And I said, "I think you just asked for the most you thought you could ask for, you didn't ask for what it's really going to take to have a high probability of success.
" [director.]
They asked for 200 million.
Bill raised it to 400, but said he wanted to see the program for himself.
[low droning instrumentals.]
[man.]
Religious leaders had been stirring up rumors that vaccines were a plot by Western nations to sterilize kids, calling the people supporting polio modern-day Hitlers.
And the campaigns were halted.
[director.]
When Bill arrived at the Sultan of Sokoto's palace, he sat with leaders from across the region.
He listened and answered questions.
[low droning continues.]
Hours later, they agreed to help.
- [children crying in distance.]
- But there was another problem.
Even in areas where vaccinators were allowed to go, kids were still getting polio.
Bill wanted to find out why.
Some settlements, he learned, had been completely missed by vaccinators for years.
[Bill.]
And that was definitely shocking to me.
[stammers.]
The campaign was very much off track.
[director.]
When Bill and Kent were juniors, Lakeside's principal called them with a problem no one could solve.
- Lakeside had just merged - [students laughing.]
with a local all-girls school.
With a bigger student body spread out across two different campuses, no one could figure out how to make the class schedules work.
I've been in schools in my early career where it was done by hand.
It would take a couple of guys the entire summer just working through it.
[director.]
So they asked Bill and Kent, two teenagers, to sort the schedules of more than 400 students.
The number ofconstraints was unbelievable.
[plucky acoustic instrumentals.]
You've got whatever number of courses that the school offers in both middle and upper school.
[indistinct chatter echoing through hallway.]
[Bill.]
You couldn't have drum upstairs when you had choir downstairs because the soundproofing wasn't good enough.
[Bernie.]
Everyone wants their first choice.
The kids are taking between five and seven classes.
[Bill.]
They'll tell you: don't put this kid in the same section with this kid Or a teacher never teaching four classes in a row.
[Bernie.]
There has to be lunch in there.
- [bell rings.]
- They have to be done at 3:15.
[rushing footsteps.]
[Bill.]
They would put 48 people into a three-section class and guarantee the parents that there were never more than 16.
Kent and I were worried we'd be going back to them and instead of telling them, "Hey, this guy can't take drums," I'd be saying, "This guy can't take physics, 'cause I can't figure out how to get him into a physics class, and the graduation requirements require he take physics.
" And I thought about it for a few weeks, and I said, "No, uh, that's a really hard problem.
" So, how come you and Kent didn't keep working together? Well, we would've kept working together.
Uh, you know, I'm sure we would have gone to college together.
You know, Kent was, even, you know, less oriented towards athletics, more geeky.
And then he took a mountain climbing course.
It was kind of this classic Kent thing, where heâd he'd broaden his world view and decided that, you know, being a little bit physical was something that, you know, was valuable.
So he goes and he signs up for, uh, a mountain climbing course.
And as part of that when they were practicing, he he fell down the hill and was killed.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[director.]
That must've just been shattering.
It was, it was so unexpected, so, you know, unusual.
[church bell rings.]
People didn't know what to say to me or to Kent's parents.
I remember crying at the chapel, and the art teacher at the school, guy named Bob Fulghum, was incredibly eloquent.
And so I remember being [clears throat.]
consoled by him in front of the chapel.
[director.]
But you and Kent had big plans.
You had You had dreams.
Did it make you wanna throw up your hands and just quit? No, I I sorta thought, hey, okay, now I'm gonna do these things Kent and I talked about but I'll do it without Kent.
[exhales.]
[mellow instrumentals continue.]
[Marc.]
It was this big hole, I think, for him.
But, uh, Bill could be very, um focused.
So I suppose in that way he could hide it.
[woman.]
I've heard him talk about his thinking sometimes, and moving things around in his mind and pulling things out of different compartments.
[Melinda.]
He's curious about lots of topics, but then what he does is, he makes a framework in his mind and then he starts slotting in the information.
[man.]
In Nigeria, you would find polio in one place, respond aggressively there.
It would appear to get rid of it in that location, but then polio would appear several districts over.
There was almost a whack-a-mole problem.
[frantic scratching.]
[Bill.]
For any pair of classes, is there a common student? It's all about conflicts.
[man 2.]
In many places, the most recent map you could find of Northern Nigeria was something made by the British back in 1945.
[Bill.]
What's the optimal algorithm? Or the schedule? [man 2.]
These vaccinators, they've gotta get to every house where there are children, and the only maps they had were hand-drawn.
[Bill.]
I could build the conflict matrix one time.
You can see, "Is there a common student?" [man 2.]
There's only so many vaccinators, so you have to make sure that we get them at exactly to where they're needed the most.
[Bill.]
It's a resource constraint problem.
[papers rustling.]
[Melinda.]
It's like Bill has a giant Excel spreadsheet in his head, and everything has a spot.
[tense instrumentals.]
[man 2.]
He tends to look at problems with some very unusual angles.
[director.]
Bill thought he'd found a way to crack the class schedule problem.
But he knew he couldn't do it alone.
[Bill.]
And so I called Paul and say, "Hey, I need your help.
" [racing plucky instrumentals.]
[director.]
He and Paul didn't have much time.
School's starting in just two weeks.
It turned out to be a little harder than I expected.
[director.]
They moved cots into the computer lab and started working around the clock.
[racing plucky instrumentals continue.]
[man 3.]
He's an amazing programmer.
There were times where he would fall asleep, literally put his head on the keyboard and fall asleep.
And then he'd kind of groggily wake up and look at the screen and then he'd start typing right where he left off.
[man 4.]
Paul would be changing Bill's code.
Bill would be changing Paul's code.
They had a very collaborative relationship.
[director.]
With just hours to spare, they got their program running.
- [machine whirring.]
- The schedules were finished.
[papers rustle.]
["Three Tough Guys" theme song playing.]
[director.]
Soon other schools wanted help with their schedules.
[technical beeping.]
We had a lot of fun.
I'd never gotten drunk and Paul got me drunk, and all sorts of, uh - And it was - Wait, let's talk about that.
- Why does he wanna get you drunk? - Well, Paul was into Jimi Hendrix, and so, you know, there was the song "Are You Experienced?" Paul always sorta wanted to see, okay, here's Bill drunk, here's Bill on pot.
[director.]
They wrote software to analyze traffic patterns.
[Bill.]
The night that he got me drunk on scotch, I didn't want to go home, so I just slept in the chapel at Lakeside School.
[director.]
When a hydroelectric company couldn't computerize its system Somebody said, "Well, there's Gates and Allen.
" Weâd come in to interview and theyâre like, "Wait! These are children!" [director.]
Bill left school for a semester and moved with Paul to Vancouver, Washington to program the computer for the water and power company.
[Bill.]
There was a black neighborhood, Alameda, where weâd go to the theater there.
And weâd often be the only white guys in the theater, and watch films like Super Fly.
I can't imagine two whiter guys watching Super Oh, we were the whitest guys ever.
We went to see Taxi Driver together.
- "Who? You talking to me?" - [laughs.]
"Who the you think you're talking to?" - [rustling.]
- [pistol cocks.]
Is he like the corrupting older brother? Oh yeah, there's definitely an element of that.
I was good friends with Paul.
Before that, you know, I'd been to his house, gone to movies with him, but the real intensification of our relationship was through this summer, Paul became my best friend.
[director.]
Bill knew polio eradication would fail without additional volunteers, but they needed accurate maps.
[enigmatic instrumental music.]
Using high-resolution satellite imagery, algorithms, and increased computing power, Bills team helps create detailed maps of Nigeria.
[typing.]
Finally, they could see what the country looked like.
[Bill.]
We realized that the people who lived on the boundaries of these districts were being missed because this district thought the other guy was doing that place and this guy thought they were doing it.
We actually saw your chance of getting paralyzed was high if you lived on one of these political borders.
[director.]
On the ground, vaccinators were now armed with precise micro plans.
Bill kept pushing for more efficiencies.
Targeting high-risk areas first would save lives.
[enigmatic instrumentals continue.]
[man.]
One of the big questions was, how can we use quantitative analysis to understand how to get from low polio to zero polio? [director.]
Bill asked the team if they could predict future outbreaks.
So they crunched massive amounts of data - [technical beeping.]
- vaccination rates and shifts in population.
to pinpoint areas where healthcare workers should go first.
And it was very accurate.
[news anchor.]
Still to come on Eyewitness News, Benjamin Franklin never dreamed a typewriter keyboard would do this.
[young Bill.]
There's a lot of people who are, uh, forecasting that there'll be software stores just like there are record stores today, and that there'll be thousands and thousands of those, and I think I'd have to agree with that.
[bass strumming.]
[director.]
It was Bill's sophomore year at Harvard when Paul handed him a copy of Popular Electronics magazine.
On the cover, it featured a now legendary computer.
It looks like the revolution is starting without us.
Bill and Paul set out to write software for the new machine.
[typing.]
[Bill.]
And so, we work day and night, and then a few months later, we punch it out on a paper tape.
[director.]
When Paul flew to Albuquerque to demo the new software to the makers of the Altair, he realized there was a problem.
They had forgotten to write a bootstrap loader.
Without one, he couldn't upload the software to the new computer.
[Bill.]
So he writes that on the plane.
Paul sits down, keys in all these instructions.
If we'd made any mistake, it wouldn't have worked.
[mechanical whirring.]
[director.]
Everyone watched as Paul loaded the code into the Altair.
He then typed "two plus two," a simple command to test the software.
[mechanical whirring.]
The printer wrote four.
Worked perfectly.
It worked perfectly the very first time.
[director.]
No one had ever successfully run commercial software on a personal computer.
Microsoft was born.
Bill dropped out of Harvard, and he and Paul moved to Albuquerque.
We get an apartment, which is a crummy apartment.
Then, you know, we squeeze a couple more people in there.
That was not a good idea.
[mellow guitar riffing.]
[Marc.]
It was pretty much a flophouse, really.
Well, I don't remember doing any laundry.
[laughs.]
I don't think anybody did any laundry.
[man.]
Bill had a bedroom.
Paul had a bedroom.
And guess what? I got the couch.
Paul had his little electric guitar.
Bill would kinda get sick of all the Jimi Hendrix music [laughs.]
and want anything but Hendrix.
[mellow guitar riffing continues.]
We were bursting with excitement.
We barely slept.
We would take breaks off for fast food and go back to work until 3:00 in the morning.
[Bill.]
We were hardcore about, hey, if you're working on a piece of code, just get it done.
Don't Don't worry about sleep.
[upbeat electronic instrumentals.]
Back then, some amount of adrenaline or something I would buy a bottle of Tang, which is a orange sugary drink that they took to the moon that you know, instead of going to meals, I would just pour orange Tang in my hand and lick it off my hand as I was working on things.
And so my face would be covered in this orange stuff, and Youâre supposed to put it in a cup with water and stir it around and drink it.
But you can just skip the water âcause your body already has water in it, and just lick it off your hands.
And these keys didn't get all orange? Uh, that's a problem.
Yeah.
[Bill.]
I love going into work and, you know, that work is my whole life.
[director.]
But Paul had other interests.
[man.]
Paul loved all these things that fell so far outside of, you know, where the company was focused.
I mean, he was deep into science fiction.
He read obsessively.
Very into Shakespeare.
And he was an accomplished guitarist.
I mean, he played at all hours.
[Bill.]
A key advantage I had was being fanatical, that is, taking all my capabilities, day and night, and just focusing on, okay, how do you write good software? I loved being fanatic.
Eventually I reveled in it.
I didn't believe in weekends.
I didn't believe in vacation.
Bill had more intensity and drive than anybody I know.
[Bill.]
For a lot of people it wasn't an ideal place to work.
We were pretty frantic and demanding.
If you said it would take a week to do something, "I can do that in a day.
Why aren't you working as much as I am?" No, no, no, no, somebody's confused.
Somebody's just not thinking.
[Bill.]
I was famous for saying, "That's the stupidest idea - I've ever heard.
" - [laughing.]
And, you know, of course, people were like, but how could it be? It was only two hours ago, he heard this other one.
Is this one really stupider than all those other ideas he heard before? That ridiculous.
I'm not using this thing.
Bill used to say, you know, the best thing about Microsoft is, is everyone can work part time.
And you get to choose which 12 hours youâre in the office.
- No, you donât understand.
You didnât - [overlapping chatter.]
- You guys never understood.
- [groaning.]
You never understood the first thing about this.
[Bill.]
I could just be so, so extreme.
[laughs.]
You know, it was like, I knew everybodyâs license plate, so I could walk through the parking lot and say, okay, whoâs here and whoâs not here? [director.]
In April 1981, as America awaited the launch of the very first space shuttle, Bill and Paul were writing software for IBM, the world's largest computer company.
Things were definitely getting big.
[director.]
But when it was time to deliver, they missed their first deadline.
I'd been pushing Paul to work harder.
[director.]
But Paul kept going on and on about the shuttle launch.
I knew guys were talking about, "Oh, that would be very fun to watch.
" Well, Paul did not come and ask me whether he could disappear for three days and go and watch it.
'Cause I would have said no.
But Paul went off and watched the shuttle launch.
[technical beeping.]
[director.]
After long nights coding, Bill delivered to IBM.
[man over intercom.]
two one [director.]
The launch was a success.
MS-DOS became a blockbuster for Microsoft, reaching millions and millions of people.
Vaccinators were reaching critical areas across Nigeria.
The work of Bill and his team was making a real difference.
[Bill.]
Itâs amazing how willing and brave the local people, which is mostly women, had been to join these teams.
[director.]
In 2010, eradication was so close.
[racing electronic beats.]
Soon, India, a country with more than a billion people, a region everyone said was impossible to tackle, would be polio free.
- [racing electronic beats continue.]
- [technical beeping.]
And in Nigeria, the number of kids getting the disease was plummeting.
[technical beeping quickening.]
[distant rapid gunfire.]
[director.]
That September, fifty armed militants raided Bauchi Prison in Northern Nigeria.
- [distant gunfire.]
- [droning instrumentals.]
They freed nearly 150 members of the terrorist organization, Boko Haram.
A new wave of terrorism swept through Nigeria.
[Nicholas.]
In Northern Nigeria, there can be Boko Haram guys at a checkpoint who will kill you.
[ethereal instrumentals.]
[director.]
Boko Haram had seized control of villages and roads, restricting access, and more importantly, information.
So then one of the things we would estimate is, well, what was the size of the total population that was effectively in this bubble? And the answer is it could have been as many as two million people.
[director.]
Despite all the systems Bill put into place, outbreaks of polio were still happening.
They just didn't see it.
[insects trilling.]
We should have predicted it's these terrorist controlled, unstable places would be the last places on earth that you'd have polio.
[director.]
And it wasn't just Nigeria.
In Pakistan and Afghanistan, the resurgent Taliban threatened the effort.
In much of the world, people view outsiders through this prism of suspicion.
The polio vaccination is just so much more difficult, unless one can get full buy-in from these communities.
It was conflict that enabled polio to persist.
[director.]
Bill watched as the unimaginable began to unfold.
[droning instrumentals.]
A roadside bombing killed vaccinators.
A policeman guarding polio workers was gunned down.
Two men used a four-year-old as a decoy to track down and kill volunteers.
A mother of eight was killed while going door-to-door to administer the vaccine.
People were telling Bill it wasn't worth it, that polio would never be eradicated.
[mellow instrumentals.]
[Bernie.]
Bill takes chances.
He dislocated his shoulder surfing down a volcano in Ecuador.
When riding bikes with him, he will go full-on down some incredible hill, no fear whatsoever.
Same with skiing.
He is fearless.
He will do the most extreme thing.
[director.]
In 2013, just when people were warning Bill that polio was a lost cause, he flew to Abu Dhabi to make a big announcement.
We decided that, you know, weâd step up uh, to an even new level in terms of our commitment.
[director.]
It was called âthe endgame strategic plan.
" Bill and a partnership of organizations planned to eradicate polio in just six years.
To do that, they would spend nearly six billion dollars.
With all the different demands of the foundation's spending, Bill would have to reach out to his friends.
Wow, great.
[Warren.]
Thank you.
Perfect.
- [server.]
Napkins.
- Okay.
Now I really found what I like to eat when I was - by the time I was six.
- [Bill laughs.]
Iâve saved a lot of experimenting since then.
[laughs.]
Continuing to put a lot of salt on hamburgers and go to it.
But does your doctor give you a hard time about salt? They've learned to give up.
- My daughter keeps taking pictures of me.
- [laughs.]
She took a picture of me the other day with a ton of mayonnaise on some thing and she emails it to all my doctors, there are about four of 'em, and they all immediately respond.
[laughing.]
Sheâs always taking pictures of potatoes with a lot of gravy all over âem.
[laughs.]
I like to I like to size things.
[laughs.]
I started out as a horse handicapper, so what are the odds with polio, getting the job done? You know, I sort of, in a sense, put the foundation reputation on the line, that weâre gonna get smart and do whatever it takes.
So [stammers.]
Iâm very optimistic.
If somethingâs the thing to do, you do it, you know? [Bill.]
It's a position of gigantic responsibility.
I mean, just think about it in terms of Warren Buffett.
He has taken a huge percentage of his wealth and said, "I'm counting on you, Bill, to make sure this money has a phenomenal impact.
" [director.]
If it fails, someone might say, "Bill just held on.
He put this big bet down and didn't want to fold.
" - Well - "Because he's relentlessly optimistic.
" And you let down your friends who've given you money.
- You've put a lot - If we fail.
No, but only if we fail.
Bill was 110% committed to Microsoft, 365 days a year.
Paul may have initially been that way, but was becoming much less so.
Bill felt that Paul was no longer carrying his weight.
[Bill.]
As the company got larger the job became broader than just turning out the code.
[tranquil instrumentals.]
And I was having to, you know, work with customers and figuring out how to work in Japan and Europe.
[Chris.]
Bill took on this awesome responsibility of this little company.
He's always worried.
"I'm employing these people.
I am paying their salary.
Are we going to be able to make payroll next month?" [Bill.]
I wanted to have enough money in the bank that, even if nobody paid us for a year, I could pay all the salaries.
The other people in the company would see me scribbling on the back of an envelope, doing that calculation of how much cash do we have in the bank.
[Chris.]
Paul didn't have a desire to run a big company, and Microsoft was clearly becoming a big company.
Bill and I were yin and yang.
There was a stylistic difference in terms of intensity.
[tranquil instrumentals continue.]
Paul got tired of working all night all the time.
[Bill.]
There were times I was tough on Paul.
Thereâs many years there Iâm his boss and Iâm calling him up saying, "Hey, work hard.
" [Marc.]
There would be some arguments, you could hear it through the walls.
It was just Bill had his point, Paul had his point, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Itâs this dichotomy with small startups like Microsoft, where, you know, we knew each other in high school.
It starts out as kind of a family.
And then you find some people are more equal than others.
[Chris.]
Bill decide he wanted to hire a president of Microsoft.
Well, the president takes over Paul's office.
That kind of built a little separation from Bill and Paul.
Where Paul was kind of going off and doing his thing, while Bill was busy running the company.
[director.]
In the fall of 1982, Paul was diagnosed with early-stage Hodgkin's lymphoma.
The next year, he left Microsoft.
[tranquil instrumentals continuing.]
There were periods of time in which Bill and Paul were closer, and which they were less close.
That tension ebbed and flowed over the years.
[Melinda.]
Paul would be distant.
You couldnât figure out why and then Paul would tell him.
But then he wouldnât let Bill near to repair, and it would just take time.
And eventually they would figure out their way to repair.
You know, we had times with Paul where we would sit for hours.
They were like two little boys laughing together over these old stories.
And then when Bill's mom Mary passed away, one of the first people to show up at Bill's dad's house was Paul.
[Larry.]
The last couple years were rough for the both of them.
This book is the reason why Paul got angry.
Bill had said some things that I think Paul felt were inaccurate and mean.
And Paul said some things that Bill felt was inaccurate and mean.
And both of them let too much time go by.
[tranquil instrumentals continuing.]
[typing.]
[director.]
You have any regrets with Paul? [director.]
In 2018, Paul's cancer returned.
[Larry.]
Before Bill knew Paul was sick, there were attempts to reach out to one another, but it never happened.
And then when Paul announced that he was ill again, Bill reached out and finally let all of the emotion out.
Bill was very honest about how he felt about Paul, and how he loved Paul, and how the friendship is more important than any of the things that may have caused either one of them to be angry.
Love lasts.
[stammers.]
And anger tends to fade.
And that was sort of a breakthrough and they were on a path to, you know, be together again, but - Did Bill get to see him before he died? - No.
No.
- [somber instrumentals.]
- [rapid typing.]
[director.]
In 2018, there were 33 new cases of polio reported throughout the world but Bill has no intention of quitting.
No matter the cost.
[cheery electronic instrumentals.]