The following podcast contains explicit language.

Welcome to another episode of The Ezra Kahn Show from Vox.com and Panoply.

I am, you know, come on, you heard the show title.

But I've got a really exciting discussion that I got a chance to sit down with Bill Gates.

I think he's one of the people who really needs no introduction.

But in case he does, for you, he is the founder of Microsoft, Man change personal computing,

the force behind both financially and conceptually.

The Gates Foundation, which is the largest and most important foundation in the world,

we talk in this interview about something he's been thinking a lot about this year.

How do we create breakthrough innovations in clean energy?

How are we going to power the world? His annual letter on behalf of his foundation is on this subject.

And he really talks there in some detail about the dual problem we have.

On the one hand, there are a tremendous number of people in developing countries,

including seven in ten in sub-Saharan Africa.

We don't even have electricity.

And on the other hand, we have a terrible problem with greenhouse gas emissions.

We're warming our planet. We're facing a serious climate problem in the coming decades.

We talk a lot about his optimism around a technological breakthrough.

And we discuss more broadly what is happening across a wide variety of technological frontiers.

He's sort of a polymath, I think it's fair to say, and has some pretty deep knowledge of machine learning,

of material science, of medical breakthroughs.

I've been really fascinated by this debate that has taken hold recently about whether technological innovation is actually slowing down across the world.

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