Bill Gates on Cyberattack Risks and US-China Cooperation

Those put together. And so without, you know, gathering in all the best thinkers, particularly, you know, policy thinkers outside the industry, you can despair that we will get there.

I do despair that we'll get there. Well, but one thing that's clear is if you have a big cyber attack that caused a lot of problems, then people will say, "Okay, they were right.

The people who are talking about that were right."

So it may be that we have to suffer a few of the negatives, uh, before we'll, we'll respond as fully as we should.

Fortunately, though, you know, those aren't civilization ending.

They're, they're bad. Uh- I mean, if you hack, if you hack Fidelity or Vanguard and much of the world's trillion dollar retirement nest egg, that would be a pretty big event.

Well, you could create uncertainty in, in cases like that.

And so being ready, trying to make sure we do the things and avoid any negative incidents, but assuming we fall short of that, then when some of the negatives start to emerge, you have very concrete ideas in place so people say, "Okay, you're right.

We don't want that to happen again." So I know that getting people into this dialogue is worthwhile, even though the risks that will allow a few events to happen, uh, is, is very high.

So in other words, what it's gonna take for us as a country and a world to tackle this is not just a 12-page essay from Bill Gates, it could be a catastrophe.

That's fair. Wow. China and the US are gonna have to cooperate on some level for this to work.