Ezra Klein: Why don’t you describe for me as vividly as you can, what it is you’re worried about? What it is nightmare scenario looks like?
Bill Gates: Fortunately, there’s very few things and most of them are very low probability. Some big volcanic explosion, a giant earthquake, asteroid. At least in the nuclear case, you gotta say we take it quite seriously. We budget a lot of money, have a lot of people who think about nuclear deterrence.
I’m very glad that works being done and I rate the chance of a nuclear war in my lifetime has being fairly low. I rate the chance of a widespread epidemic far worse than Ebola in my lifetime as well over 50 percent.
If we look at the 20th Century, and we look at the death chart of the 20th Century, I think everybody would say “oh yeah there must be a spike from World War I”, and you know sure enough there it is like 25 million, and it must be a big spike for World War II, and there it is – like 65 million, but then you'll see this other spike that is as large as World War II, right after World War I – and most people, a lot of people say what? Wait a minute – what was that?
There's two kinds of flus: There's flus that spread between humans very effectively, and there's flus that kill lots of people. And those two properties have only been combined into a widespread flu, once in history. That is Spanish Flu. We have no idea where it came from – it's called the Spanish flu, because the Spanish press was the freest, they were the first to talk openly about it, and so in the annals of epidemic history that's the big event.
Phiêu Linh