It's Bill Gates's birthday. When I interviewed him, he showed me how his brain works so differently than anyone else I've ever met.
- Bill Gates turned 64 on Monday.
- The author interviewed Bill Gates for Business Insider in 2016.
- Gates displayed vast knowledge.
- And he showed how to combine different themes to arrive at takeaways.
- This is part of what it means to be an expert generalist.
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I had 20 minutes, to the second, to interview Bill Gates.
This was in the spring of 2016, and he was in New York for the press rounds supporting his Annual Letter for the Gates Foundation, which was centered around clean energy.
It was at 2 p.m. when I met him in a super-lux midtown Manhattan hotel. I shook hands with Gates and a handler who would be tracking the time.
In person, he was much like you'd imagine from the endless reports on him: appreciably geeky, pleasantly courteous, and intensely intelligent.
When he spoke, Gates made broad gestures with his hands, seemingly sculpting clean-energy solutions with his hands while reeling off global development statistics, like how tiny China's philanthropic class is (under .1% of the overall economy), how huge the energy market is ($3 trillion a year), and how humanity went from 33% of children dying by age 5 to below 5%.
That was what was so spectacular about talking to the man, now freshly 64 years old. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of so many things, appropriate for a guy who plowed through the entirety of "World Book Encyclopedia" as a teen, and he holds in mind the way fields interact with one another.
Let's consider, in its lengthy entirety, his response to my first question, What are the most exciting things happening right now in clean energy?
His reply:
The first thing you notice is that those are ready-to-be published paragraphs coming out of his mouth; it's a Sunday op-ed coming off the top of his head. But consider the many threads interwoven in his comment, which reveal one of the unique forms of genius he has.
First, Gates runs through the state of energy storage, which has lots of potential but is very hard to pull off. (The national capacity has quadrupled over the past five years, however.) Then battery technology. Then the role of government in innovation, and with that, private capital. Then nuclear fission. Then carbon capture. Then how that new market would begin to mature.
And then, the bit I find especially charming, regarding the intellectual humility needed in a revolution, since you don't know how a revolution is going to pan out. People thought the electric car was going to be the killer app, and then the steam car, and gasoline was the actual dark horse. And that itself was powered by the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania and Texas. So, adding to the state of many arts in the technological race for clean energy, Gates delivered a bite-sized lesson in how technological shifts actually happen and the nature of innovation.
That brings us back to the encyclopedias that Gates gobbled up as a Seattle-area adolescent. The word "encyclopedia" has a rather poetic etymology, "enkuklios paideia," or all-around education. This is what Gates displays in conversation, a stunning understanding of how everything relates to everything else.
Gates is the billionaire version of what University of Texas psychologist Art Markman calls an "expert generalist." Someone who doesn't just know a little about a lot, but a lot about a lot. Like Picasso getting into African art and initiating cubism. Gates has studied energy and materials and public health and a thousand other things. He is such an evangelist of intersectional knowledge that he's pushed the discipline of so-called "Big History," which seeks to tell "the story of the universe from the big bang to the first signs of life to today's complex societies," per a 2018 Gates blog post.
Thanks to Gates and his peers, we live in a world of information, as the cliché goes. You can ask Siri or Alexa for just about any particular fact, and they'll give it to you without you even needing to look at your phone. But what Gates has is more powerful than information - he possesses knowledge. A breadth of it.
Research on learning suggests that the more you know, the easier it is to find and retain new knowledge, in a process called elaboration - you're tying the new thing to what you already know. So if you already have a ton of nodes to tie things to, it'll probably be easier to get new insights about material science, or whatever, to actually stick. It's compounding interest but for knowing stuff.
"The more you learn," Gates said in another profile, "the more you have a framework that the knowledge fits into."
This post extensively expands on an earlier piece.