David Kopec: Bill Gates is known as the aggressive businessman who brought us Microsoft and the controversial philanthropist whose money has touched our education and healthcare systems in profound ways. But in his recent memoir, Source Code, we discovered Trey, the kid with bad grades who resents his parents authority. Join us as we discuss the early years of Bill Gates.
Kevin Hudak: Foreign.
David Kopec: Welcome to Business Books and Company. Every month we read great business books and explore how they can help us navigate our careers. Read along with us so you can become a stronger leader within your company or a more adept entrepreneur. But before we get to the book, let's introduce ourselves.
David Short: I'm David Short, I'm a product manager.
Kevin Hudak: Hi, I'm Kevin Hudak, a chief research officer at a Washington D.C. based commercial real estate research and advisory firm.
David Kopec: And I'm David Kopeck, I'm an associate professor of computer science at a teaching college. Bill Gates, for many years the richest man in the world, is both a legendary and notorious businessman who more than anyone else was responsible for founding the modern software industry. His exploits in building Microsoft into a technology empire are well trodden fodder for authors for decades. But in his new memoir about his early childhood, we get the softer side of Bill Gates. From childhood misfit to rebellious teenager, we discover a young person who never quite fit in, but always had ambition. Source code takes us through Bill Gates childhood, early entrepreneurial ventures, schooling and the early years of Microsoft. And there's quite a lot of emotion along the way. Okay, Kevin and David, I thought we could start our discussion where Bill Gates starts it. Learning about his background, his parents and family heritage. So what were kind of the big elements of his family that stood out to you?
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, I think just to jump right in, he came from a family that afforded him some pretty good privilege in life. Born in Seattle area, I think that his mother was, you know, ultimately ended up heading up a bank but was prominent in numerous community service and volunteering endeavors, particularly the United Way of America and Junior League. She, she also came from a family with money as well because her father was head of a bank. His father was a prominent lawyer and ultimately rose to a partnership at his law firm. And one thing I found interesting was that Bill Gates's grandfather was actually involved in the gold rush. Or was it his great grandfather which kind of simulated or was a foreshadow to the tech boom I imagine. But either way though, you know, he acknowledges that he was born in privilege and that, you know, one of those privileges was being a white man in America at the time too. And you know, I think his family life was fairly pleasant from what we saw in the book. He was the only son. He had an older sister and a younger sister as well. They often did family trips to, you know, a nearby, almost like campsite. Called it Camp Cheerio at one point. And his father was the mayor of Camp Cheerio, where they would go and do a sack racing and, you know, eggs on a spoon contests and all manner of, you know, recreation. And they had 20 families that would join them. You know, I thought one thing that was interesting was when they would do these different trips with family, other families from the community, they would trade their kids for dinners every night. And that, you know, brought Bill into, you know, introducing himself and having adult conversations at an early age with other families as well. They were very organized and very well structured. And that was in part, you know, by Bill Gates mother, who seemed very, you know, type A and had a professional career, a volunteering career, but also ran her home in a very organized and structured way.
David Short: The book really gives us a ton of detail about the family life. I'd say it's. It's probably the, the bulk of what we hear about. There's a. There's a fair amount of school and a fair amount of Microsoft, but, like, it really is very focused on his early years with his family. We find out that his parents met in college. And so, you know, the fact that his mom had gone to college at that point was not a complete anomaly, but certainly not the norm in those days. Her mother, I believe, had not gone to college. So I think she was the first woman her grandfather had wanted his son to go, but not his daughter. I think the dynamic with the family really, you know, changes throughout. And it's really interesting to see, you know, all the privilege that he came from and, you know, the great schools that they end up sending him to, and a lot of that came from, you know, his family really, you know, valuing education. They. They really focused on that. And, you know, his parents had, you know, again, as I, as I'd mentioned, met in college. His dad had gone on the GI Bill. After having sort of avoided like, active duty service During World War II, he got sent over to Japan and the, the bombs dropped while he was literally en route. So he sort of dealt with the aftermath of World War II in Japan, but didn't have to actually fight in active duty service. And then after that was able to attend college. And ultimately it was some kind of program where you finished college and law school sort of simultaneously. So, yeah, the dynamic with the Family, I think, really does inspire Bill gives him all the opportunity he has to get access to computers at a very young age. And ultimately they gave him a lot of freedom that, you know, the average family probably wouldn't have.
Kevin Hudak: I love the fact that if you remember Dave Short, when his parents met his mom, kind of wrote correspondence, wrote a letter to the father, sort of arguing for what, why this is a very stable situation they could be creating, talking about how they would have a fruitful relationship. And you know, it was just very matter of fact and setting expectations. And I loved how throughout the book you also see some of the correspondence, some of it just produced right in the pages of the book of Bill Gates to his friends, you know, as a high schooler and then, you know, in professional worlds as well, kind of laying out those same expectations as well. So it was interesting to see how, like you said, Short, the, you know, early inspiration of his parents and family life bled into his personal life and his career.
David Kopec: And I think it's worth mentioning there was quite a divide between the two sides of his family. His mother's family was more the button down kind of old money, whereas his father's family, his grandfather was an entrepreneur who had a store, I think it was a furniture store. And they were more kind of the, you know, working their way up sort of background. So, and I think, I think there's elements of, of both of that in Bill Gates story. I also think one interesting aspect is how close Bill Gates was to his grandmother. That's his mother's mother. They, he called her Gammy and they had a really tight kind of game like relationship, playing a lot of card games together, her introducing him to a lot of fun things. And she seemed to be a major influence on him throughout his entire life. And that really touched my heart because I'm very close with my grandmother. So I thought that was a nice relationship in the book. Let's go on to talk a little bit about what Bill Gates early childhood was like. So what kind of activities was he involved in growing up? What was his early schooling like? And how was his dynamic within the household with his two parents?
David Short: So he really had an idyllic childhood, I would say. His father was working as a lawyer by the time he was born. They grew up in a nice house. They ended up moving to a nicer house in a nicer neighborhood. That was a little bit traumatic for him. I think he'd sort of formed some groups of friends and had to sort of start over. And actually it was so traumatic that for the sort of first year, they let him continue to go to the further away school because they didn't want to sort of uproot him both physically and from school. So they sort of eased him into that transition. But he, yeah, was, was with family a lot, I think. Yeah, as you mentioned, the, the relationship with Gammy was very important. They were playing a lot of games as, as a family. He was, you know, had all kinds of, of hobbies and interests and I mean he ultimately sort of describes himself as, you know, if, if he were born now, he would be, you know, on the autism spectrum. So, you know, probably some kind of, you know, what we, what we used to call Asperger's symptoms that led to his ability to hyper focus on certain kinds of things and get obsessed and go very deep, but also to, you know, not pick up on a lot of social cues, not necessarily, you know, interact with people in the most pleasant way. To kind of be a little bit of an asshole, frankly. Like even as a younger person, it was, yeah, very interesting to sort of see his, you know, self reflection on it, to see his awareness of how his behavior impacted those around him, his sisters, his parents, but also to, to sort of recognize that he didn't really see it at the time, that, you know, as that young child, he didn't necessarily care about the impact he was having on others until he did ultimately have a relationship with a therapist that I think we'll probably go into a little later.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, and I think it's notable that everything they did as a family or most things that he highlighted in the book were very task driven and then almost had like an assessment period. If you remember, his mom would prepare an incredible Christmas holiday for them and immediately after they finished cleaning on Christmas night, she would then be putting together a list of things to improve for the next Christmas. They had very deliberate Christmas cards, you know, the long letters informing everyone of what was going on. And you know, I think that. And when they went on trips, for example, she would use her typewriter to print out worksheets for each of the kids with seven different headers including population density, notable landmarks, culture that they would fill in when they traveled. And you know, my favorite part was when he did 167 page report on Delaware in school and he even had a wooden cover to that book. As to his report as well, delving into things, you know, beyond which a middle schooler would never really consider. I myself did a similar report in New York when I was in middle school doing a report on Utica, New York and Endicott, New York. So I sympathized with, with Bill digging in so deeply. But I think it really influenced his later life in terms of programming and coding being, you know, you're going back and assessing the code that you're writing, running the code, seeing how it works. Just like the Christmas events that they would do, right? That his mom would do, that period of reflection, assessment and improvement.
David Kopec: He describes himself as scrawny and awkward as sometimes getting bullied in school. We're talking about kind of in late elementary school. And for conte time, this is the 1960s. He's born in 1955. And a lot of this period that we're talking about is around the early 19 to mid-1960s. It was apparent to me that his mom was actively trying to fix each of what she saw as his issues. She was insisting that he join a football team, even though he's kind of a weak young person. At their camp events that they would have every summer that David, you mentioned earlier, the mom had him meet with different parents of other kids at the camp and have dinner with them. They actually did that for all the kids at the camp to improve their social skills. So the mom is, over time going out of her way to try to counterbalance whatever his weaknesses are with exposure, almost like exposure therapy to improving on them. It's a very directed childhood. And I would say kind of the nature of it and how organized it is and how there's so many different social aspects to it actually reminded me a lot of reading biographies of the Bushes. So like Bush Sr. And Bush Jr. They also had this kind of upper crust upbringing that offered a lot of opportunities to improve on whatever one's weaknesses are. And I think that's something that really became clear for me in reading this book is the divide we have in society between the opportunities that are afforded people in a wealthier station in life, not just because they're wealthy, but because they're well connected and kind of understand how to navigate society in a way that can really benefit their children. And I, I think we saw that his parents really did a great job in, in doing that for him. And at a time in the 1960s where people who were neurodivergent really weren't well understood. His parents were in some ways ahead of their time in, in trying to. Trying to help him. But even though he seems to have this kind of idyllic setting and at home, he starts to actually, through the end of elementary school, beginning of middle school, have real issues with his parents and becomes something of a rebel, saying that his dad shouldn't have authority over the home, that the authority is arbitrary. And this leads to serious conflict within the household to the point that the parents really don't know what to do. So what's kind of causing this rebellious streak in Bill Gates and how is it playing itself out with the parents and at school?
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, I think early on and really was influenced a bit by his school behavior and how he was positioning himself relative to his peers. So imagine to try to fill, you know, he was the scrawny kid with a high pitched voice. He was very smart. But to try to fit in, he noticed that he could get away by being sort of the court jester, the jokester, the rebel in school, sometimes even saying things that he was cringing at, writing this as an adult that were quite rude to teachers, to his classmates. And it seems like he brought some of that personality home a bit too much to the point where he was talking back to his parents, like you mentioned, Dave, that he was starting to kind of slip in some of his grades in school as well. He would focus very much on things like that Delaware report that I just mentioned. But they had a grading system in one of his schools. I can't remember if it was Lakeside or if it was the middle school that he was in, where you would get A's and then it would be a number after. So an A1 would be superior work and superior effort. A2 would be superior work with middle effort. A3 would be superior work with low effort. He came into this believing that a 3 as a child. He believed that a 3 was the optimal score, that you're doing great work with minimal effort. And he sort of brought that tone through his interactions with his parents and family, teachers and friends. And so that's where some of that conflict, I believe, was rooted in. And then ultimately, like you said, you know, it. It came home where his father would go down and spank him at his kind of mother's request almost. And he would be making some, you know, rude remarks to his mom as well, and to the rest of the family.
David Kopec: And ultimately they send him to a therapist. And this therapist has quite an extensive relationship with the young Gates. It's said that they were together for two and a half years of sessions and the therapist really had a big impact on him. What did the therapist help Gates realize and why was that a turning point?
David Short: Gates compares it to the movie Ordinary People, which is a great film if you haven't seen it. He really is able to see his parents perspective, I think to some degree through this therapist. And what the therapist really ultimately gets him to understand. And he says, he really never says anything to him. He just sort of asks questions and kind of like guides Gates through introspection by probing questions. Never like prescriptive answers for the most part. But one of the few things he does say is, you're a really lucky kid. I forget what the quote is exactly, but something along those lines. And I think that is fundamentally what Gates really understood through this relationship is how lucky he really was that like he did have loving parents who were, you know, sort of giving everything for him. And sure, he felt like he should have complete free reign to do whatever he wanted. You know, he was, he was an autonomous person. And even though his parents paid for everything, he didn't feel like they had any right to, to tell him what to do. But ultimately he recognized he was very lucky to be in the position that he was in. And I guess the other piece that the therapist focused on is you'll win also. So the answer there being you're going to leave, like you are going to get this freedom that you so desperately seek. You don't have it now. You've got a pretty great situation. And he ultimately actually convinced the parents of the same thing. So that was the part that I was a little bit surprised by, was that he apparently, to Gates, you know, whatever, hearing it through the door, telling of it, basically told his parents, you know, he's going to win also and sort of just like give him a little bit of slack, like do give him, you know, more, more free reign. So it sounds like the therapist did get his parents to calm down a little bit and give him a little bit more ability to guide and lead his life. But he also got Bill to understand that, you know, he was really, you know, blessed with the family that he had.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, I thought it was important too that the points that Dr. Cressy made to him. So one, you know, Bill Gates respected Dr. Cressy because he had a difficult childhood. He learned that after he was having sessions with him, but, you know, one filled with a lot of physical abuse. He had a lot of anger. He knew that he had fought in the war as well. And what Dr. Cressy said to him I thought was really helpful. You know, just as we grow up, as we, you know, for folks that have kids. Right. You know, he says that Dr. Cressy helped me see that, A, my parents loved me, B, I wouldn't be under their roof forever. C, they were actually my allies in terms of what really counted. And D, it was absurd to think that they had done anything wrong. And that's where Bill decides, well, rather than having this war at home with my parents, I should focus instead on gaining the skills, gaining the understanding that could help him in the real world. And I just thought those four points were so wonderfully put by Bill Gates, you know, channeling Dr. Cressy, that I wanted to share that.
David Kopec: So things actually seem like they're improving for the young Gates. When we get to about fifth or sixth grade, the end of sixth grade, it feels like things are, are starting to kind of turn around for him with this, this help from the therapist. And then his parents decide to send him to a, let's say, fairly exclusive private school in the Seattle area called the Lakeside School, which he begins in seventh grade. At that school, he goes back to having a lot of issues, especially in his first year. But he meets an incredible friend, Kent Evans. And this friendship will only last about three years, but it has a really profound impact on Gates. Evans is interested in business and technology just like Gates is. He's the type of friend that you talk to on the phone every night you come home and, you know, you can't wait to tell them about your day and talk about your future plans. And if you've ever had a friend like that, it can be really intense. It's. It's almost like they're soulmates. Not, of course, in a romantic way, but in a world outlook and in a, you know, excited about the future kind of way. Tell us a little bit about what reading about this friendship was like for you. Because for me, it was some of the most emotional parts of the book. And what was it about Ken Evans that made him such a good match for Bill Gates?
Kevin Hudak: So Bill was always kind of comparing himself to others. I'd mentioned that he was trying to always position himself or create a reputation for himself that would differentiate him from others in the school. He knew that he was the scrawny one. He knew that he had the high pitched voice. He was always comparing himself to others. I think he admired and respected Kent. So Kent came in, into his life. You know, he recognized that Kent had a cleft palate or a cleft lip. You know, from birth or early in his life, he was having surgery to, you know, work on that as well. But he was a bit of an outcast, right, based on his physical appearance and just based on the fact that he was more introverted at the start. And he saw in Kent someone who was not not part of the in crowd and did not want to be part of the in crowd while Bill was not in the in crowd. And he desperately wanted to be a part of the in crowd. So I think he admired and respected in Kent his independence, his self realization at such an early age. And their friendship, like you mentioned, Kopeck was just really built around that intense camaraderie and always hanging out with each other. Bill Gates in the epilogue, even recounts seeing Kent Evans father again, older in life, when he's 70 or 80, and remembering that Southern drawl that he had when he would be driving Kent and Bill all around town. You know, they got into a number of hijinks. We're going to get into the Lakeside programming group as well, you know. But Kent, at an early age, he was the type of guy, as Bill recounts, who showed up to school with a big briefcase stuffed with papers for him to reference, right? He was very professional, very keen and savvy. At an early age, my favorite anecdote was Kent had gotten his father a subscription to National Review. And Kent, when he got this for Father's Day for his dad, he sent a letter to William F. Buckley, Jr. Telling him what he was doing for his dad. William F. Buckley Jr. Actually got back to him and wrote a note saying how, you know, bright a young man he was for subscribing on behalf of his father. You know, Kent was the kind of guy that when something went awry or he sensed injustice in the world or injustice directed at him, he would write a letter, he would advocate. He was a great advocate for Bill Gates, he was a great advocate for himself. And so it was just clear that he, at an early age, he was fairly political. He knew the levers of power. He had big plans. And Bill really admired that in him. And they were essentially attached at the hip for that three year friendship that they had.
David Kopec: What really came across to me was the incredible ambition that the two of them had. They're already discussing, well, what job is going to allow us to do the most good or make the most money when we're to can you fit $15.
Kevin Hudak: Million in a car? Remember Kopeck, right?
David Kopec: Yeah, absolutely. And so they have this intellectual meeting of the minds, but also this personality meeting of the minds. I think a lot of people think when really ambitious people meet each other, they're always going to be rivals. But actually, sometimes when really ambitious people meet each other, they're really just excited to meet somebody else who wants to take on the world in the same way that they do. And that's what I really saw here. There were two people who were not only so aligned in their deep intellectuality, right? They would discuss politics or technology, it sounds like, deep into the night on the phone and be willing to go the extra mile to learn about something new and have that deep intellectual curiosity. But they also had that drive, that incredible drive that pushes them forward even when they're kind of these scrawny social outcasts who other people are kind of counting out. Right. And Ken Evans at this point at the early lakeside days, is actually getting very good grades. But Bill Gates is not even doing well in his classes. He's getting mixed, sometimes bad grades. And so even though he's kind of this nerd, he's this nerd that's not really succeeding in anything. And he sees Kent Evans as also a nerd, but a nerd who has this incredible ambition that he has, but has found a way to harness it despite some disadvantages. Like some physical disadvantages.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah. The way that he described it was he's the type of best friend who, you remember their phone number. And when he met his dad again, you know, back in I, I would imagine that would have been in the 80s or, you know, early 90s. He, Bill Gates was able to still recount their home phone number. And I have several friends, you know, who I still joke with that I remember their home phone numbers, including my Buddy John Gregory. 845279.
David Short: I hate to, I hate to take us here, but I think I have to. So Kopeck alluded to it earlier that the relationship only lasts three years. And so it's a really emotional portion of the book where Bill goes into. Kent ultimately becomes very passionate about mountaineering. While he's in high school, he starts taking a class in the local university in mountaineering, and he ultimately goes on a very advanced climbing trip and dies. And this is just a heart wrenching thing for Bill to go through. It's a heart wrenching thing to hear about. You know, you hear about all this promise of Kent, and we, we kind of haven't gotten into all of it, but, but honestly, I, I think it's one of the more interesting, like, sort of counterfactuals that comes out of this is Kent was really leading that group when they're in the lakeside programming group. And, and so like, would, would Bill Gates have been the CEO of Microsoft if Kent had survived? Like, they very well may have gone to Harvard together. They very well, may have started a business together and to a certain degree, like, I think Bill still may have ended up like, as he grew more into his shoes and, and frankly just, just in size, you know, he was, he, he was quite a small kid and, and did end up, you know, growing, growing up as an adult. But, you know, would, would Kent have been the. Continue to be the leader? Because it's, you know, Bill really needs to step up into those shoes once, once Kent passes away.
David Kopec: Yeah. And I think that you really hit the nail on the head, David. Like it's so obvious from the book that these two were going to start a company together, even just in, after the, by the end of those three years that they were together. In fact, they'd already done some entrepreneurial ventures together by the end of those three years and they were already all the time talking about, you know, the stock market. And Kent is actually the one who got Bill into like reading Fortune magazine and reading the Wall Street Journal and talking about the different ways that, that companies are successful and doing research on companies in their spare time. And so Kent is like this driving force pushing Bill Gates into business. And they also, as we're about to get into, had this shared passion for early computing. And this first exposure comes at the Lakeside School where they get a computer terminal which is kind of a philanthropic gift to the school that connects to a large mainframe computer outside of the school and allows them to do some basic programming and take some basic programming classes. Tell us a little bit about that. Lakeside, what became known as the Lakeside Programming Group and those early forays into programming for Bill Gates and Kent Evans.
David Short: Yeah, so as you mentioned, they were really just very lucky. This is sort of one of those like lightning bolt things. Again, unlike Bill Gates, his life of, you know, would he have been as successful as he was if he just hadn't have happened to be, you know, sent to this fancy school in Seattle that was probably one of the first, you know, few thousand places where you had access to these kind of computing resources. I actually don't remember the details of how they got the connection, but I think it was some kind of effort by a math teacher at the school that was very passionate about computing and basically just spent a bunch of time advocating for it. And then there was like costs associated with it. And I think he think he ultimately got like the PTA to do some kind of a fundraiser where they sold, I forget, cakes or something like that and focused the funds on ultimately funding the computer. But so, yeah, they bought shared time and the school was very unique in that they gave them a lot of freedom. Most schools have very strict schedules and very strict programming. The Lakeside School was very focused on allowing students to pursue their interests. And as long as there was kind of a faculty member who was willing to sign off on interests that they had, they were able to get a lot of freedom to work on things. And so Bill and Kent and ultimately Paul Allen and I think Rick is one of the other characters. They were able to spend just tons of time in this space and ultimately learn how to program. And so just having that opportunity at that young age was, was incredibly important. And they didn't just, you know, program for fun. Obviously they started out doing that. You know, I think Bill says his first program was like a tic tac toe game. So certainly they went through those, those efforts of, you know, simple games and, you know, text based games. And I think Bill created a recipe app for, you know, put his mom's set of recipes in. So if you said meatloaf, it would, you know, spit back her recipes. But very quickly they turned to actual real world stuff, as they like to say. So they weren't just writing software for themselves, but they were ultimately getting clients to actually write software for real production use cases.
David Kopec: And I think it's worth providing some context of the computing of the time. So this is before personal computers. This is the late 1960s. We've had mainframe computers for a couple of decades by then. And the computer that they're connecting to is a PDP 10, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, which is a minicomputer developed by DEC Corporation, which is from Massachusetts, which was really upending the computing industry. The computing industry was dominated by IBM. There were the so called seven Dwarfs, who were other companies that were smaller but were competing with IBM. And DEC was making many computers that were relatively inexpensive compared to the computers that came before them. And certainly the mainframes from IBM. And these mini computers were in the same way that personal computers would later make computing accessible to everybody, were making computing accessible to many more people where even a school could afford to connect to one. Because instead of these computers costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars, they cost tens of thousands of dollars. And the computer they were connecting to was facilitated by something called Computer Center Corp. Up in Seattle, which was a group of entrepreneurs who had decided, we're going to buy or lease a DEC minicomputer and then we're going to provide computing time, which is people connecting remotely from corporations or educational institutions. To the computer over the phone line. So actually you can almost. It's an early form of networking, really. Right. But these are dumb terminals that are in the actual school. They're not the computer itself. They're just a computer that can not even, I shouldn't say computer. They're just a terminal that can connect to the larger computer, the DEC computer at the Computer Center Corp. Headquarters. And then people can type in some programs, run those programs remotely. It's called timesharing, where multiple people are sharing time on the same single computer. And that was the current state of the art in the late 1960s and timesharing was kind of taking over the country. And it was allowing more and more companies and schools and other institutions and government too, to computerize more and more systems. And so this was an exciting era in computing. But not yet personal computers, these are still these behemoths that people need to connect to. These are not yet everyone has a computer. And so it was still kind of difficult to get access. So it was very unique that the Lakeside School had this access. And it was also something where I think, like you said, David, the right people were there at the right time. There were teachers there who understood enough about computing to understand how we could introduce this to students. And there were teachers that were passionate enough about this new field to say, well, you know what, we really need to let the students have even more time, even instead of some of their other academic requirements, to do more of this computing. So it was the right teachers at the right time, the right startup company in the right place to, to connect to, and also the right group of students. Ken Evans and Bill Gates find really quickly, not only are they passionate about programming, but they're pretty good at it as well. As then later on, Paul Allen and Rick come into the story as well. So it's the right students, the right teachers, the right company. It's serendipitous. If he hadn't gone to the Lakeside School, it's possible none of this would have happened. And so we have to also say what an incredible thing it is to have a forward looking educational institute in somebody's life and how much that can change the trajectory of somebody's life. I think that's a real side story in the book.
Kevin Hudak: It seems like Bill Gates really attributes a lot of his early success to the beneficence of adults. Right. And I think one theme that we see in this first of three planned memoirs of Bill Gates is this idea of the beneficence of adults and smart Enterprising adults enabling Bill and his friends to achieve these things. The difference, I think, is that Bill, part of the rebelliousness that we were talking about, he also knew that the adults were missing something. Right. That he was a bit smarter in certain areas than the adults and that he had some extra value that he can add with fresh eyes. And then one other thing too, I thought that was interesting about the Lakeside programming group was also this idea that they were always competing for scarce resources. They were always trying another angle to get more terminal time, to get more computing time. At one point they were welcomed into the labs at University of Washington and then kicked out. They then set up this arrangement with Computer Center Corp. Cubed that we'll talk about where they were debugging programs for them. Right. It was always a constant fight to try to get computer time, terminal time.
David Short: You know, Kopeck, that description you just gave reminded me of something, which is that Melinda Gates went to a school in Dallas called Ursuline. And I remember while I was there, while I was in high school in Dallas, Bill and Melinda donated money, so every girl at the school got a laptop. And so I think Bill remembered the time that he'd had with a computer early on in his life. And so I'm sure he did that with a lot of schools. I doubt this was the only one, but, you know, yeah, just. Just gave away computers to, to kids because he knew how impactful that could be.
David Kopec: Spoiler alert. He'll later go to Harvard. But I would actually say that his time at Lakeside was much more impactful on him. So this is seventh grade through 12th grade than even his time at Harvard was in terms of forming who he was as a person, in terms of exposing him to what would later become his chief interest in life, in terms of kind of being a little tough on him. Some of the teachers, you know, kind of were. Were a little bit like, who is this misfit and why does he think he's kind of above the rules? And they found ways to cater to that and help him grow instead of just clamping down on it. And so I think the book could almost be a big testament to this incredible school and the set of teachers. I think it's, it's almost as big a part of the story as a lot of what happens when he founds Microsoft.
Kevin Hudak: And don't forget too, this is the 60s and 70s where the culture was also challenging norms. And so just the timeline that we're looking at was also helpful for what they were doing.
David Kopec: Yeah. And that's covered a bit where the school's actually integrating. When he gets to the school, it's an all boys school and they integrate with the local all girls school and become co ed and they relax the dress code and they become a lot more informal. And that's part of this culture that is kind of shaping the young Bill Gates. And later on in the book we'll see a little bit more of that when he kind of encounters hippies in the early free software movement. But we'll come back to that a little bit later. So they start this programming group, the Lakeside Programming Group. And they've been using this terminal that's connected to a DEC PDP10 at Computer Center Corp. And pretty soon, as you mentioned, they start to actually get a job working for Computer Center Corp. Because programming has become an obsession for them. And these four kids, Ken Evans, Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Rick actually then are employees almost of Computer Center Corp. But instead of getting paid in money, they get paid in more computer time. And computer time is very expensive at that time. So we're talking about significant amounts of computer time that would run in the thousands of dollars then if you just for inflation now, it'd be tens and tens of thousands of dollars of this computer time. But why are they paying them and why does this kind of go bad later on?
David Short: Yeah, so you, you kind of alluded to it already, but Cubed Computer Center Corp. Ends up allowing them to continue to use their computer as long as they keep reporting bugs. And so these four kids are just hammering away, doing whatever they can think of in order to try and break this new system that C3 has just started to sell to other customers or they're at least planning on doing it soon. And so they, they effectively are their, their QA team. They really bring in these kids, let them work, you know, late night and really do whatever they want in order as long as they keep finding bugs. And so you know, Bill and Paul and Rick and, and Kent are all, yeah, coding away, being able to do, you know, their own little projects as long as along the way they're also finding, you know, real bugs that they can report to the, the cube engineers in order to get the, the things fixed and you know, find those things before real customers find them. And in exchange for that, yeah, they, they don't just have to do the debugging and focus on the software, they can also write their own code.
David Kopec: So that's really their first venture as a group working together for a company. So more than just an academic project, and then they get a more, even more serious job. How does that happen?
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, so at one point, it sounds like C3 essentially went out of business. And while they were testing all the hardware and software, they were kind of getting their taste of programming for the first time. And so eventually they started working with a company in Portland, Oregon, called Information Sciences Incorporated. And this opportunity versus CQube charged a lot more for the computing time that they were using. And so they essentially worked with ISI to negotiate a time for coding project involving payroll. Right. So essentially, Bill Gates and the other students at Lakeside and in the Lakeside programming group learned everything they could about the U.S. treasury, about taxes, Social Security deductions, payroll, and shift scheduling. And, you know, isi, they were actually a maker of pipe organs, and the ISI client was a maker of pipe organs that wanted to automate their payroll system. And so they endeavored to create this system, learning everything they could about payroll, coding it themselves. And what was interesting about this scenario was again, going back to how scarce and expensive coding computer time was. They ascent, they developed a successful program, but it cost about $25,000 worth of computing time to complete this, the arrangement with isi. The executives thought they were just helping out some kids, giving them an education in business and giving them some coding time, and they were exchanging free computing time with the Lakeside programming group. Ultimately, though, they weren't getting that free computing time. The ISI executives had said, well, you used $25,000 worth of time already. We're not going to be giving you more time on top of that. And that's when Bill's father got involved, jumped on a phone call with the ISI executives. It was an interesting phone call. They spoke for about 40 minutes, Bill Gates recounts. And at the end, his father only said, I hear you. You know, basically acknowledging that he heard but did not agree. And he said it in such a manner that was intimidating enough where the ISI executives decided to give them another $5,000 worth of free computing time to work on their own endeavors. Kent Evans, being the entrepreneur he was, ended up proposing that they sell some of that computing time to ISI's competitors. And one of my favorite points in the book was when they mentioned that in Kent's report card, it actually came back and said that not everything that Lakeside Programming Group is doing is above board. And they wanted to make the parents aware of that. But that just gives you a sense of, you know, how not just ambitious, but also how creative the Lakeside Programming Group and Bill and his friends were in this crusade to get more computing time and also one of their first really successful programs.
David Kopec: Thank you to our friends at Audible for sponsoring this episode. You can find Source Code by Bill Gates on Audible. It's great to listen to in the car, on the subway or anytime that you can't sit down and read yourself. You know, you can get a great trial of Audible by going to our special link, audibletrial.com biz. That's audibletrial.com biz. You'll also find that special URL in our show notes. With our trial, you'll get 30 days free of Audible as well as credits towards a book like Source Code by Bill Gates. Thank you again to our friends at Audible. I want to know two things here. One, how many like 14, 15 year olds are getting the opportunity to work on payroll software software for large corporations at this time? Basically none. So this is a really unique life experience that probably shapes them for their whole trajectory going on to, you know, later on start Microsoft. Another thing I want to point out, the father, and we didn't give a ton of context about this, but Gates Sr. Is a pretty high powered lawyer in the Seattle area and he's very well connected. He's connected to people like governors and heads of corporations. And so he probably was intimidating when he calls up some company and says, I hear you at the end of listening to them and doesn't give any response back. There's an implicit kind of almost like threat there. I would say that I'm somebody and I don't think Gates makes that explicit in the book. But that's my reading of it. My reading of it is here's a really high powered attorney who's like, you did something wrong to my kid and you know, be careful. That's how I read it.
David Short: My other favorite part of that anecdote is that Gates senior billed them for the time.
David Kopec: Yeah, so they've had some now real kind of jobs. They've been bug testers, now they've been payroll software creators and then they get another job actually.
Kevin Hudak: So this one was one of Bill Gates's mentors at Lakeside or teacher that he was close with was charged with taking the paper and you know, handwriting scheduling system for classes at Lakeside and digitalizing that. And this was, it's interesting that despite doing the payroll software at this point in the book, you know, Bill talks about how this is now the real world because their ability to succeed in this lakeside scheduling software had very real implications for their peers, for the school. It had a real deadline and this was, you know, at this point probably the highest pressure job that they were working on. Unfortunately that teacher who was initially, or the administrator who was initially doing the scheduling system passed away. And that's when the school turned to them almost as equals at this point. Right. They had been known as the kids, the Lakeside programming group, but turned to them as equals, as consultants, as programmers to really build this scheduling software from the ground up. And again it ended up being a success. It was something that they still had, I believe going into the Microsoft days. They still had this as, you know, one of their, you know, small projects that they were maintaining. But again this is again where the adults are putting a lot of trust and confidence in Bill and the Lakeside Programming group to get this job done.
David Kopec: And for anyone who thinks that that sounds like something pretty normal, it's not. Scheduling is actually a really hard problem. It continues to be an active area of research in compute science. I've worked on some scheduling software prototypes myself in the past. This is not easy stuff scheduling hundreds and hundreds of students amongst many different classes and many different preferences amongst both the students and the teachers and different classrooms that are available. It's actually a hard mathematical problem. And again, remember who's working on it. These are like 15 year olds. Paul Allen and Rick we should mention are a couple years older than Bill and Kent. So I think they're two years ahead of them in school. And that dynamic of Paul being older than Bill will be something that's a repeated theme in the rest of the book. But the point is these are teenagers working on very serious stuff. They're not. And given a lot of responsibility and being trusted. A lot of trust is being placed in them by these adults in their ability to actually do something that's mission critical. Getting the software working is required for the school to function. It's around the same time that that teacher dies. That actually is also when Ken Evans dies. And so there's, there's a lot of sadness in Bill Gates life at this time. And it seems like he's kind of drowning his sadness into this work in some sense. And they are so passionate about doing this work. They will. It's some various of these different entrepreneurial ventures that they're doing as teenagers. Bill Gates will sneak out at night like at 2am in the morning. He'll like go out his or come back at 2am but he'll, he'll go out when he goes to bed through his bedroom window, take a bus down to somewhere where he can get access to A computer and come back at 2am Even if he has to walk 45 minutes. So it's, it's really like an overwhelming passion, this entrepreneurship and computer programming for him.
Kevin Hudak: And remember, at this point, Kopeck, Bill and the Lakeside programming group had already formed Trafo Data. And so what they were doing is working with a company that was studying traffic patterns across the Pacific Northwest. And they would use like rubber hoses going across the street and each time a car passed over, because this was so manual and this was just before you had, you know, intel creating microprocessors, they would have thousands of feet of rolls of punch cards and punch tape that would need to be tabulated. So with Trafo Data, they were trying to digitalize this. And this is when Bill was actually allowed to hire some seventh and eighth graders from the lower school at Lakeside. So imagine if folks ask you about Bill Gates's first company, it would be Traffic Data. And his first formal employees would have been these seventh and eighth graders running around Lakeside School tabulating the traffic punch cards for them.
David Kopec: Yeah, very unusual. Let's also talk a little bit about what his life was like outside of these ventures and outside of programming. So he gets in the drama club. He has a crush on a fellow lead in a play during his high school times. What did he seem like socially as a high schooler?
Kevin Hudak: So, funny enough, I had mentioned before that he tended to kind of try to define himself relative to others. He was looking for ways to differentiate himself. You know, he mentions having his set of outfits for going out at night. One thing that he did was when the schools were combined and there were now women at Lakeside, they started a drama club. And he figured that this was his best way to talk to women at that time, because in a play or in a musical, he would be forced to talk to them by virtue of performing. So that was his sort of early inclination to join the drama club. And he ended up thriving in that role as well. So I remember in the book he recounts one of the productions that he did was very. It was quick dialogues back and forth. It was well timed comedy. His parents came and saw it and were just amazed at his development in the drama club, you know, and of course, on the side, it was always what Kopeck mentioned with the Lakeside programming group and, you know, working all hours of the night but maintaining a healthy social life as well. It was sad as well that he had asked that first girl that he had a crush on to the prom and she told him to wait because she was waiting to hear from another gentleman at the school who ultimately did take her to the prom. So Bill did not land a date with that first crush of his.
David Kopec: So there's a story that's not in the book that Bill didn't include, but I've read in multiple other books. Maybe it's just a legend, maybe it's not because it is covered by multiple other authors, that when he was working on the scheduling software, he scheduled a class for himself with all girls. So it was basically him in the class and all the other people in the class were girls. Now, since I've read it in multiple sources, I'm going to guess it's probably true. And this is just a random thing. I realized as an adult when I read these other biographies of Bill Gates. When I was like teen, not a teenager. I was like in third or fourth grade, I read a young adult fiction, not a young adult like fiction book for, I don't know, whatever that age group is when you're like 10 years old, 11 years old. A fiction book about a kid who was really good at computers who ended up working on scheduling software at his school and ended up scheduling a class with all girls. And then I realized as an adult reading about that Bill Gates did this, that obviously the person who wrote that book knew this story. And that book was from like the early 90s when I was a kid. So it's probably true. And somebody wrote a young adult fiction book or young again, I don't know what it's called. Fiction book for 10 year olds based on the early life of Bill Gates. And I'm going to assume this person must have either known Bill Gates because at that time there weren't that many biographies of Bill Gates yet, or, I don't know, just an interesting anecdote.
Kevin Hudak: I mean, it makes him almost seem like Ferris Bueller. Right. Hacking into the school's grading system to change the report card grades of his dates.
David Kopec: Yeah, pretty crazy. So I mean, he was pretty girl driven, it seems like outside of, you know, his, his time with computers. And I think that's something that if you read other biographies, you'll see kind of was throughout his life, not just as a teenager anyway. Let's also talk about the Boy Scouts and the hiking group because he actually starts the book not just talking about what everyone expected him to talk, which is his early forays into computer programming, but he starts the preface of the book also talking about his time as a hiker. So what was his involvement with hiking like? And the boy Scouts.
David Short: Yeah. So this was another group of friends that he kept throughout sort of his young adult life. So while we've really focused on the lakeside group, Boy Scouts was another area where he'd made a friend group. And that group ultimately became very intense hikers. So they went beyond just what their, their Boy Scout troop would do. They would go on their own ventures. And these were, you know, kid led. So I think they had an older friend who was maybe 15 at the time that he started leading these things, but I think bill was maybe 12. And they would go on, you know, seven day backpacking treks for, you know, hundreds of miles out in the wilderness, essentially, you know, just with a compass and a map and a few sets of rations. He doesn't describe himself as being a particularly adept hiker. He kind of says he was pulling up the rear a lot of the time, but he was very determined. And when they wanted to do some very intense hikes, he was always up for it. Even if he tended to vote for taking maybe the easier route. The group would kind of act democratically and generally the group was intense and would push themselves. And so they went on some pretty crazy hikes, which I grew up in the Boy Scouts and did some intense hiking. And they talked about 20 mile days, which is the furthest I've ever done. That was actually on my Dartmouth outing club trip. I signed up similar to Bill. I was kind of like, I did a lot of hiking, but I pulled up the rear a lot of the time. So when I signed up for the freshman trip, I said I wanted to do medium hiking, but they asked if you have any hiking experience. And I'd been on multiple eight day plus treks, which is obviously not, not the norm for the average student. So they ended up putting me in psycho hiking. It was me. And then like everyone else was like on the cross country team and stuff like that. So we had, yeah, like a 20 mile day at the, the end of the trek to, to make it to Moosiloch.
David Kopec: I'm sure that was very character building and I think these experiences for Gates were very character building too. And I want to again point something out about the parenting, right. They're letting their kid be incredibly independent, even though he seems to have some, you know, social issues. He seems to be, as he self describes, kind of scrawny, not, not particularly strong. They're letting him go on these super intense trips. And so I would not describe the parents as helicopter parents, even though they're also pushing him into activities like the football team like the social events that they're constantly insisting that he participate in. So they're finding this good balance, the parents of both affording him independence and also pushing him in the right areas.
David Short: One other interesting hiking anecdote was just that there was this one day where there was like deep snow and they kept like coming across a cabin and it was already full of people. And so they just had to keep going, keep going. And so during that time he was trying to write a basic program to understand Pemdas basically to, you know, go through the order of operations. But because he had so much time, he was able to just keep thinking through more and more efficient ways to actually write that program. And then that ultimately helped them to write the basic interpreter for the Altair as we'll get to soon, I'm sure. So it's a fun little story that years earlier, while it was on a hiking trip, he wrote something that ended up being a core piece of the software that would ultimately create Microsoft.
David Kopec: Yeah, that's a great anecdote. Let's go back to their entrepreneurial ventures because they're continuing, they're continuing to work on the scheduling software for the school. And then they see, you know what, we could actually get jobs as basically full time programmers even while Gates is still in high school. And they get invited to work on something even more serious than payroll software or than scheduling software, but actually at a company that's creating software for power distribution. Tell us a little bit about that venture.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, so for this one it was a company called trw, Thompson Ramo Woolridge and essentially they were involved in all sorts of automotive manufacturing, aerospace applications, credit reporting and systems engineering projects of all types. For this one they were looking at power grids in the Pacific Northwest and essentially trying to create a program that could balance supply and demand and make split second decisions around what power sources to turn on and off react to spikes in demand or lulls in demand. And this was something, I love this concept that they introduced of when they were brought down into the control room. There were so many monitors, different status, status indicators, and it felt like he was in a bunker. And he loved that, based on one of his favorite TV shows I believe was Time Tunnelers at that point. And essentially the program had to shift through or sift through multitudes of data sources to strike this balance. And the balance was so important because it dealt with people and the power they were receiving, whether it was hospitals, daycare, schools or homes. And one of the engineers mentioned that we're looking for Five nines here. And Bill didn't really understand what he was talking about. What he said was, we need to assure that this program makes sure the power would be running 99.999% of the time. Five nines. And what that meant was essentially through the course of a year, the only tolerable downtime was at most 5.26 minutes. And so the weight of that was now on their shoulders as the Lakeside programming group and TRAFO Data to design a program that could actually succeed in hitting those five nines. And this also gave him great exposure to more mature adult coders as well, because also at this company, via their connections at ISI and others, were older coders that some famous who would come in and revise and pick apart Bill's coding and make him a better programmer and software visionary as a result. But again, very significant responsibilities for, for kids who are essentially 16 through 18 at the time.
David Short: And I wonder how much this has inspired Bill's interest in energy now. You know, a lot of the philanthropic and business efforts he focuses on now relate to nuclear power. I think having this, this early exposure to what was, I think, largely a hydroelectric system. But really understanding, you know, baseload energy and peak and the way that, you know, energy demand plays out has probably been inspirational to his later interest in the space.
David Kopec: And again, we have these adults who take them seriously and give them opportunities. There's this one particular programmer who is kind of legendary, it sounds like, at the company. And instead of taking Bill Gates code, which he doesn't think is so great, he goes and writes all kinds of notes all over it. Now, Bill Gates says in the book, you know, if that had been one of his teachers or his peers back at Lakeside, he would have just been angry. But he respected this guy and he actually took the notes seriously and saw, oh, you know, he actually is a better programmer than me. He knows some better ways of structuring the code. So not, we're not just talking about simple things, but fundamental ideas about the code that could have been organized in a better fashion. So again, we see adult mentors to teenagers who are allowing them to become them best their best selves. And so it's nice that we're not just seeing that at school, we're not just seeing that at home. We're seeing that in the corporate world as well. Again, it's a testament to, I think, Kevin, you put it as beneficent adults. Right?
Kevin Hudak: Exactly. And I think that one of the adults that was probably important to him was John Norton, who you were mentioning, Kopeck, who was a famous programmer that, you know, TRW had sort of deployed to the project alongside Bill and the team to look at the code. And I think that it was an example for Bill of how real this could get. Like John Norton in the past had overseen the software that helped the 1962 Mariner 1 space probe. And as a result of, you know, an errant hyphen in the computer code, there was a glitch that basically scrubbed the mission because its radar systems weren't working. And so, you know, from an early the trw, you know, managing the balance and power supply for the Pacific Northwest or the power grid and then having this example of John Norton and what happened with, you know, Mariner one. I think it shows Bill that there's real world responsibilities, accountabilities and potential catastrophic failure if this isn't done right.
David Kopec: And again, in this scenario we're seeing that incredible work ethic. So I don't know if we stressed it enough in some of the earlier projects that the team of four, and then later on three after Ken Evans unfortunately dies, is working on. But they'll work through the night. You know, we talked about Gates escaping from his bedroom to get more computer time. There's an anecdote here when he's at TRW about spending four days straight in the office just programming non stop, barely eating, living on like Tang and just being a machine in terms of the amount of work he's doing. And I don't think that's for the pay, I think that's because he's so passionate about the work. Alan is also kind of in that ballpark, it sounds like as well. And they're living together in an apartment. And you know, Alan during this period is kind of taking on the role that Evans had before as Gates main kind of partner in entrepreneurship and in programming.
David Short: And he wasn't even making the tank, he was just eating the powder straight out of the can.
David Kopec: So, you know, he seriously thinks about it. Some of the guys at TRW are like, you could go right to graduate school because you're such a good programmer or you know, you could just go and get a job now and be a successful programmer. And remember again, this is the late 1960s, early 1970s now and that's not like a typical career path. So it's pretty unique when somebody has that ability. And probably that's true. He could have just skipped college and gone and been a very successful software engineer. But his parents are kind of like you got to go to college. And he really wanted to go to college. It sounded like he wanted to broaden himself by being able to take a wide variety of different classes. And he gets into Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, and he chooses Harvard, and with the thought that he'll probably eventually go into business or law. But at first, he's also intrigued by math, and he'd always been very good at math. He got a perfect 800 on his math score on the SAT. And when he gets to Harvard, he takes a really intense math course, a math course that they really warn folks against taking unless they're really, really well prepared. And it starts, I think, he says, with 95 students, and they lose, like, half of them in the first month, and then they lose some more. And there's this kind of core group of Gates and two other freshmen who become really close friends and are really into theoretical math. And the course is being taught by a math professor who was, like, a young prodigy who, like, went to college when he was, like, 16 and already got his PhD when he was in his mid-20s and is now this kind of hotshot theoretical mathematician. And this teacher or professor is so good at math that it's inspiring to the young kind of acolytes that are taking the class with him, but it's also intimidating. And his experience during that first year at Harvard really makes Gates think about, could he even be successful in any field, or could he be the best in any field, or are there specific fields where he should focus his time and energy? And believe it or not, it's not obvious to him that that should necessarily be computing. So he is thinking at some point he'd love to maybe be a mathematician. But he has this realization at Harvard, which he didn't have at Lakeside, that he's not necessarily the smartest person in the world. Obviously, Bill Gates is a very, very intelligent person, but he says he couldn't be the kind of theoretical mathematician that his professor is. And some of the other students in the class make that same realization. And, you know, I. I found that interesting because the three of us went to a good school, not quite Harvard, but we went to Dartmouth together. And I think everyone has that realization when you go to kind of a top school during that first year, unless you actually are the smartest person in the world, but you previously are in a high school where you're probably one of the top students. That's how you get into, like, a Harvard, right? And then you go to a school where everybody is amalgamated from being the Top students all over the country and you realize, oh, I'm just one of many and I might not even be. I might not even be in the middle of the pack. Right. In fact, Gates takes an organic chemistry class and he thinks, like, in high school, he can just cram at the end and, you know, and get a good grade. And he ends up getting a C because he can't just learn it on his own and he's not necessarily especially talented in it. Right.
David Short: Although to be fair, cramming Orgo is a pretty impressive feat. Like passing that class with a C is. Is. Is reasonable. Although this is. This is an earlier time as well.
David Kopec: Right. It could be a gentleman C, but yeah, no, the.
David Short: The math55 thing is, is interesting. It continues to exist to this day. And like, I think the way I've heard it is, like, it's basically a full math degree in a year. And so it really is like setting you up to, like, essentially start doing graduate level coursework after your freshman year.
David Kopec: Yeah.
Kevin Hudak: And it was the classic big fish in a small pond. Moving to be a small fish in a big pond. Right. And he was even afforded. The book talks about how he was afforded access to the Harvard computer lab that really only graduates would be typically receiving. So he was still getting some of that enablement from adults and mentors, but he was definitely getting that feeling of being a smaller fish in a bigger pond. And Kopeck, I do resent your Dartmouth vs. Harvard comparison. If you think back, a lot of this book might not have taken place, or this transition of Bill Gates might not have been as quick if not for Kemeny and Kurt's at Dartmouth with the time sharing system or even with the invention of the basic programming language. So I think in this one, on the tech side, even Bill Gates shouts out Dartmouth early in the book.
David Kopec: And I did a great episode on my other podcast about Dartmouth and the founding of BASIC and timesharing. I'll link to it in the show notes. But okay, so he's at Harvard and he's not just struggling in this math class, not just struggling in organic chemistry, but he also takes on a project to build a baseball simulator in the computing lab with the encouragement of the director of the computing lab, who's also the one who gave him access in the first place to the lab. And also it's not quite a success. He makes some progress on it, but he realizes it's a much harder problem than he might have realized. And all of these experiences lead him with some conversations with some of his friends to realize maybe the obvious thing I should do with my life is right in front of me. It's this computing thing that I've already had significant success in for somebody my age. And he's all this time still having conversations with Paul Allen, who's back going to school in Washington State and is also kind of frustrated with the direction his life is going in a little bit and realizing that this entrepreneurial technology venture that I was doing before with Gates, maybe that's really what I was meant to do. And in really, what I would say is kind of a audacious thing for a friend to say to another friend. Even if you're close to best friends or best friends, he says, why don't you just move out to Boston? We've always wanted to do this entrepreneurial stuff together. We're doing traffic data. They're still doing traffic data this whole time. And they're actually working with another individual on building their own little computerized system for taking the traffic data so they wouldn't anymore be just interpreting the other company's data. So they're working on this entrepreneurial venture kind of long distance, but it's not like the center of their lives anymore. But it could be again, right? They could be doing something entrepreneurial together again. And Gates has the audaciousness to say to Paul Allen, why don't you drop out of college so my close friend, you can be near me and we can maybe figure out what that next entrepreneurial thing is. And they apply for jobs at various computing companies, and eventually they get offered jobs at Honeywell, and Gates actually decides to keep going to Harvard, and he lets Allen take the job at Honeywell and move across the country, dragging his girlfriend Rita along with him. And so, kind of by Gates machinations, he totally upends two other people's lives and brings them across the country. But he doesn't put it that way in his book. Yeah.
Kevin Hudak: And I think at this point, this is when you start seeing the transition towards Microsoft as well. And, you know, I think that at this point, you know, I wanted to point out that, you know, Paul Allen had already kind of fired Bill Gates twice, right when they had started their early friendship, he recommended and wrote a letter to Bill Gates saying that they should probably not see each other anymore. And then there was a second time at one point when, when Paul Allen had sort of left the partnership. But at this point, we start moving more into Microsoft. And what really is the inflection point for this is a company called mits. Coming out with their Altair almost like a personal hobbyist computer. And at this point the Intel 8008 had already debuted. They were using that chip in the Trafo Data readers. There was this great anecdote where Paul Allen and Bill Gates go and buy their first Intel 8008 processor. And they open it up almost like it's the holy grail. And they're just shocked to see that it's really just a, a chewing gum slice sized piece of machinery with the 18 prongs on it. Right. But really the revolution for them was the idea that you could have a cheap, for 375 or $475 at the time, personal computer. And that's when things kind of kick into high gear. And you see Bill Gates starts in the book sharing what his vision was for the software versus hardware, right? There was this conversation, this debate over where is the money? Where is the future of, you know, personal and business computing? Is it on the hardware side where IBM and Big Blue has been ruling things? Is it on the software side, which is where Bill was sort of firmly fixing towards you then had this company called MTSI and its founder Ed Roberts, who were making computing more accessible to the hobbyist and to the layman. And that sort of opens up the second half of Bill Gates Harvard career and ultimately the formation of Microsoft from Trafo Data.
David Kopec: And they're anticipating this. So Paul Allen especially is kind of waiting for this moment. He realizes that the microprocessor is going to completely change computing. For context, these minicomputers and these mainframes that came before personal computers were built out of several components for their central processing unit. So it wasn't a single chip that powered the central processing unit. When the microprocessor comes out in the early 1970s, like the Intel 404, it's for calculators and they're not quite advanced enough to power an entire computer. But this is really when we get the really exciting moment is as you mentioned, Kevin, this Altair, it's the first time that there's going to be a cheap, mass produced computer that basically almost anybody could afford. I think the price was $400. There had been attempts at desktop computers going back to the early 1970s, but it wasn't until 1975 that everything kind of came together in a way. And this relied on that microprocessor technology that it could be affordable by anybody. And Paul Allen anticipated this and Bill Gates did too. They saw that as microprocessors got more Advanced. It was going to enable this moment. And when the moment actually happens, it's them finding, I think it was Popular Electronics or Popular Mechanics magazine had a cover story about the Altair coming out, and they bought it at some magazine shop in Harvard Square. And right away they knew this is our moment. In fact, they were afraid that they had even missed their moment already because they're like, oh, I think one of them said to the other, they're already starting the revolution without us. But they knew they had to get in on the ground floor somehow, because this was the point where computing was and building software was going to go from being something that was accessible to tens of thousands of people to hundreds of thousands, then millions of people.
Kevin Hudak: And it was funny, too, that Ed Roberts was more of an idea man. And when you think about the aha moment, as, you know, told by Bill Gates, looking at that Popular Electronics, Popular Mechanics magazine, it was actually a cardboard facade of the Altair hobbyist computer that they had in that because they really only had a prototype. And so MITS was already struggling to meet just the demand generated by that magazine article.
David Kopec: So then what happens next is an incredibly famous story. It's really well captured in the movie that all three of us have seen, actually called Pirates of Silicon Valley. So if you're interested, you should definitely check it out. But basically, they call up MITS and they say, hey, we can build a basic. And basic, as we talked about earlier, was the most common programming language for the general public to use on a computer at that time. And they said, we can build a basic, or they actually said, we already have a basic, that we're ready to launch on your Altair. And the folks at MITS say back to them, we're getting calls from people all the time saying that if you really have something, you know, you can prove it to us, right? The thing is, they don't have a BASIC for the Altair. Gates had earlier worked on building a BASIC years earlier, as we discussed when he was hiking, he was figuring out some components of it. So they had to go do this now and prove to MITS that we actually can build the software so that they could get a contract and etc. Etc. They had to at least build a prototype of the basic. Here's the problem. They don't have an Altair. In fact, they don't even have an Intel 8080 chip available to them. Instead, what they have are these mainframes and these minicomputers at Harvard and nearby at MIT that they can get access to. And so what they do, and this is quite innovative for the time, is Paul Allen builds an emulator for the Intel 8080 processor for one of these minicomputers so they can simulate having an Altair and write software for that simulated machine without actually having access to one. For those of you who are into, like, video game emulators, it's exactly like that. It's like if you've ever played an NES game on your PC, you have an emulator of the Nintendo Entertainment System hardware. Basically, you have a piece of software that pretends to be the Nintendo hardware. Well, Paul Allen, without a lot of precedent and without a lot of, like, schematics, even writes an emulator for the Altair on one of the minicomputers so that Gates can program a BASIC interpreter for that emulator that they can later then show off to MITs. And the incredible thing is, they do this in six weeks. Not only do they do this in six weeks, but it ends up actually working. And there's this incredible moment where Paul Allen has to get on a plane to go show it to MITs, and they realize, Paul Allen realizes on the plane we didn't build the part of it that will load up the machine initially, the bootloader that kickstarts the machine, because they didn't think of that, because their emulator didn't need to be Kickstarted, because it already goes right into functioning like the Altair. And so on the plane, he writes it by hand, on paper, not knowing if it's actually going to work when he gets there. And in fact, they've never tested any of their program on a real Altair. Everything's been on the emulator. And as much as they try to be sure, you can't really be 100% sure with that kind of situation. As somebody who's written emulators before, I can tell you you can't be sure until you tried it on the real hardware. So the emulator is a great environment, and if you've done it really, really well, it's just like the real thing, but it's never perfect. And so Paul Allen gets out there, and at first in the Gates book, they don't go into this in detail, but if you read Paul Allen's autobiography, it actually doesn't work right away, and they have to type it in a couple times or whatever. But amazingly, in the end, it does work. And the first thing he runs on it is a basic command, print 2, 2, and they get 4 out of 10, and as soon as that happens, it's a moment of quite a bit of elation, not only for Alan, and Gates is not there with him, so he has to tell him about it later that day on the phone. Right. But it's actually for the MITS team as well, because their computer, the Altair, has no software for it. So they're selling a computer that basically you can't really do very much with. The MITS Altair when it first comes out, it doesn't even have an attached disk drive or even the Teletype is like a peripheral that you have to buy extra and get software that will load it and make it work. So the machine basically doesn't do anything until they have software that will actually enable people to use it. In fact, the way you use the Altera without a Teletype is to flip a bunch of switches, each of those switches representing a 0 or 1, depending on if it's up or down. It's incredibly primitive, and it blinks a bunch of lights to tell you what the response is, which is, again, a response in binary code in ones and zeros. So only with the combination of a teletype and, as importantly, this basic interpreter that actually lets people write programs into the machine through that teletype, do you actually have a useful computer. So the Altair needs what Bill Gates and Paul Allen have amazingly developed in six weeks, along with a friend of theirs who they meet at Harvard, Davidoff. I forgot his first name. Who develops the floating point part of the basic software. So the three of them in six weeks have developed this critical component of the early personal computer revolution.
David Short: It really is just such a cinematic story. From the beginning with January 1975, popular electronics to. Yeah, we didn't tell it this way before, but yeah. Paul Allen literally sprints from the newsstand to Gates's dorm and pounds on the door because, you know, you told me to keep an eye out for this. Like, it happened. Like it's. It's such a. Such a great story.
David Kopec: Sometimes in life you just know, right? You have this moment where, you know, like, this is my moment, and this is when I need to, like, go all out to achieve it. And that was the moment for the two of them. And they. During those six weeks, it sounds like they were basically working nonstop. You know, that's a theme, I think of the book as well, is putting the hard work in at the right times. Right. Seizing opportunities. Yes. These adults are affording to them all kinds of opportunities that not everyone gets, but they're also seizing Everyone. And not only do they seize them, but they seize them with an incredible amount of work ethic, an incredible amount of gumption, an incredible amount of keeping themselves focused and not getting diverted from their goals. And this is the critical moment, I would say, almost in their lives. They've been leading up to this, and then when it happens, they don't let it pass them by.
Kevin Hudak: And as I teased earlier, this essentially becomes the impetus for transforming Trafo Data into a legitimate company. Right? Because as they're entering this partnership with MITs, they have signed a licensing agreement where their basic software coding will be the core of Altair's offering. They're having the software versus hardware discussion as well. And now they're starting to pitch prospective customers on their software to feature it in their systems. And so this is where, you know, we have the conversation between, you know, Paul Allen and Bill Gates about actually separating the work that we do on the traffic systems from what we'll ultimately be doing with, you know, with MITS and other prospective customers as well. They thought they needed a better name that represented what they do. At one point, a little trivia item, they had considered Allen and Gates Consulting, but they thought it sounded too lawyerly, and I would trust that coming from someone with a family of lawyers. But ultimately, they settled on Microsoft, and it was actually Microsoft, the idea being that they were the creators of software for microcomputers, hence Microsoft. So essentially, post that MITS partnership, this is where Microsoft is essentially founded. They go on to, you know, pitch numerous prospective customers, including at one point, Steve Jobs and Wozniak as well, and they start actually getting business through Microsoft. Right? Like in some instances, they would be designing software for another, you know, hobbyist computer, that startup that's, that's selling computers. And imagine they would make $100,000, but in this instance, because they had that licensing agreement through Mitsubish, you know, $50,000 of that would be going to MITs, and they would then be, you know, recouping the profit of $50,000. And so there starts to be a little bit of tension with MITS as they're developing programs that might be sold to potential competitors right in the hardware space. There's also this idea that software, particularly in the 70s, was seen as an open market, right? It was more of a hobbyist community at that point. In fact, you know, MITS and the Altair was sort of designed for hobbyists. They had newsletters that engaged them. And, you know, at one point, Bill Gates says that essentially 90% of our software users who are using the different tiers of BASIC for their Altairs are not paying for it. So Bill Gates kind of does this shot around the world, shot heard around the world moment when he pens an open letter to the hobbyist community on software where he essentially accuses some of these MITS customers of stealing their software and not paying for it. And his point is a good one in that to encourage innovation and to ensure that personal and business computing with hardware other than enormous mainframes like IBM is producing, in order for this to survive, there needs to be a culture of incentive and innovation for software developers. And so already with mits, while the partnership was fruitful, you start seeing some tensions. And in fact, Ed Roberts, who was CEO of MITS and the creator of MITs, you know, he was almost more focused on the hardware as well. So this tension starts boiling up, and then we move into sort of the independence of Microsoft later in the book.
David Kopec: Two interesting nuances with that great caption of the story you just told us, Kevin. One is that actually Alan takes a job with MITs, so not only is he selling them software in his Microsoft partnership with Gates, but he's also their director of software at MITs. And so that makes for kind of a complicated relationship between Alan and Ed Roberts, which eventually leads to loggerheads. Another important fact is that they licensed to them the version of basic for the 8080, which is the intel microprocessor in the Altair. But they quickly develop ports of their BASIC to other microprocessor architectures. So on those ports, they don't have to give part of the royalties to MITs, but on the 8080, they do. And that starts to make Roberts nervous about competitors in the 8080 space. And eventually, when MITS starts to talk about being acquired by Pertek, they completely shut down. And they're like, you know, we don't want to license this out to our competitors anymore because these are other companies that are producing computers with the same microprocessor, potentially even with compatible software. And actually, that's one little nuance that's not in the book, probably because it's too technical. But there's actually a standard called the S100 bus that becomes a standard for kind of personal computers in the mid to late 1970s. And a lot of these computers then have compatible software with one another. So you can actually take software that was written for one and with not a lot of porting, get it to work on another. And so Roberts is really concerned about these Competitors kind of using the software that was originally developed for the Altair against them. Whereas he can't do anything about the ports to other microprocessor architectures because that's not what Gates and Allen had originally licensed to them. During this time, there's an interesting side story about their friend Rick, who was one of their friends from that original Lakeside programming group. He actually comes on temporarily as a partner at Microsoft with Allen and Gates, and then later on he's kind of wishy washy, decides he doesn't want to be a partner, but he stays on as a business manager and then after a year, he ends up leaving. So again, he's one of that, like, original group that, you know, for kind of life reasons it doesn't work out. He. I think he comes out. David? Yeah. You want to go into the story some more?
David Short: Sure, I'll. I'll share a little bit on that one. So, yeah, Rick comes out as gay. And they are apparently very understanding about it at the time. And it doesn't seem like any of them are really having any success in their love lives, to be honest. Once Rita had left Paul. Yeah. Ultimately, Rick leaves for California for just like sort of a better, better lifestyle for a gay man than the Albuquerque scene of the 70s. I think the other really interesting anecdote that I'd heard a little bit about, but I didn't fully understand until reading this book was that. And actually as I was reading it, I was thinking this, they are writing this basic interpreter on Harvard equipment largely. And so I was thinking at the time, oh, I want, like, does Harvard end up getting a piece of this or something? Because, like, I was aware that, you know, if you're using, you know, university resources for certain things, they may have, you know, certain claims on intellectual property, et cetera. And this ultimately becomes a very, you know, big deal for Bill, which is essentially the Harvard Computing Lab had been run in a very laissez faire way. There was one, you know, longtime lead who'd been there and there was supposed to be sort of like a technical person that was, you know, running things below him. But that role had not been filled for many years. And essentially they just kind of let the students work together to figure out how, you know, time would be allotted and sort of like, you know, if someone had a thesis that was due soon, people would give them a lot more space. And, you know, outside of that, you know, Bill is like, you know, one of the younger people, would work at night and things like that. But there was no understanding that there was any, like, concerns about, you know, for profit work being done on it because there was not really a real set of rules. New person comes into that role, finds out that Bill has been writing this for profit software and becomes irate about it. The government had donated this computer to Harvard. It's supposed to be being used for academic purposes. And this guy is sort of claiming that what Bill has done potentially risks the government taking the computer away from Harvard. And so he ultimately needs to go before the disciplinary board. And that means he is effectively being threat, threatened with expulsion. That's the most extreme thing that the disciplinary board can do. And so he writes this long letter. He explains that he didn't really understand what was happening, but he also takes the ownership over it because there was a younger Harvard student who was also supporting him in this work. And Bill had given his access code to the computer to the other student. And so effectively, that student was hacking into the system from Harvard's perspective. So Bill takes it all on himself. And ultimately he just gets like a reprimand. Like, literally, it's just a, you know, you've been reprimanded. There's no actual formal action that he needs to take. But he does not really end up completing his Harvard career after this.
David Kopec: So. But a weird thing about this, right, is that he is back at Harvard. So they originally develop it while they're in Boston, but then they move to Albuquerque, and Alan kind of moves there permanently. But Bill Gates eventually goes back to Harvard to do another semester. And so he's working on Microsoft kind of remotely flying back to Albuquerque sometimes. And Alan is really the one who's there on the ground. Yet at the same time that all this is going on and they're forming Microsoft, Gates insists and writes this letter to Alan saying, I should be the 60, 40 partner, that I should have 60% of the company and Alan should have 40% of the company. This is despite the fact that Alan seems the more committed one now. Alan has the job at MITs, and he's also doing Microsoft on the side. So you could say that Alan also is not fully committed because he also has the job at MITs. But Gates is actually going all the way out of Albuquerque back to Boston. He's still working on stuff remotely from there, but he's also taking classes full time. So I think it's kind of, again, audacious that he's saying to Alan, well, hey, you should be the 40% partner when he's the one who's kind of, you know, hedging his bets by still continuing his career at Harvard. And so I. There's this pattern where Gates gets Alan to a greater things. Like, Alan is the one who drops out of college and moves across the country. Alan is the one who, you know, is there on the ground, yet is only getting 40%. That I think is kind of a repeated pattern. And this, this happens again a little bit later in the book where he decides, you know what, I'm really the mastermind, and I have a lot more of the ability to lead this company going forward. And so you should actually drop your share from 40% to 36% and my share should be 64%. So they've already had. At that point, they've already had the partnership for, it sounds like a couple of years. And he's, you know, he's pushing him again to make a concession to do something that obviously no one wants to give up a share of their company. So I think I would almost classify it as almost like a bullying relationship. It's interesting that in the book, Gates repeatedly says that Alan goads him into doing things, that when they first met at the Lakeside Programming Group, that it was Alan who was kind of like, can you really do this? Can you do that? And trying to get him to do something new. And he also got him into trying out drugs. Like, at one point, Alan gets him to try pot, and he, like, tempts him with lsd. And then Gates kind of later does it on his own. So he kind of presents it as if, oh, Alan is this older guy who, you know, I thought was cool, and he's kind of getting me to do all kinds of things and uses the word go throughout the book. But you could also read a lot of the book as Gates bullying Alan. And I've also read Paul Allen's autobiography. It's called Idea man, and I recommend it as well. And you get a very different perspective on the relationship between the two of them from that autobiography. One thing I found strange about the book is how little time is actually spent on Alan. Alan is obviously there at every juncture and every important decision in Microsoft. But if you think about the amount of time that, let's say Ken Evans got, who I think was a seminal figure in Gates life, compared to the amount of time that there was spent personally describing Alan, there's a couple small anecdotes, like when he first meets him, we learn a little bit about what Alan's interests are, and there's an anecdote where we learn a tiny bit about Alan's parents, but this is his partner in this company and this is the person that he's working most closely with for basically like 10 years of his life. And we get relatively little kind of personal backstory about Alan compared to some of the other characters in the book. And I found that very strange. And the way I read that, as somebody who's reading a lot of books in the sphere, is that there's still some kind of. Even Alan's unfortunately passed away now, but I feel like there's still some kind of tension in that relationship and that, you know, the way that the relationship is presented is significantly different than it is presented in Allen's autobiography. And I. I think that's very conscious in this book that Alan is not gone into maybe the detail that he deserves. I would say as a computer science person. Alan's technical achievements, like building that emulator, for example, are every bit as large as Gates technical achievements, at least when they're building that initial version of basic.
David Short: I agree. I was surprised there wasn't more on Alan. One thing that came to mind for me on why that might be to give Gates a little bit of grace is he is planning to write two additional memoirs. So this is supposed to be the first of a three part series and it could be that the second one he'll dive deeper into the Allen relationship. He wanted to sort of have one person for each of them that he went deeper on. So who knows, because Steve Ballmer is about 10 of the picture. And so that could certainly take over a lot of the second book as well. But that was one thing that occurred to me as I was reading the epilogue, I think, where he refers to his plans to write one about his time at Microsoft and then a final one about his philanthropy after Microsoft.
Kevin Hudak: Yeah, it seems like short. That's a great point. He wraps a bow on his relationship with Ed Roberts by the end of this book. He does not necessarily wrap a bow on his relationship with Paul Allen because that will still be evolving in the second book, I imagine. But I thought it was notable agreeing with you, Kopeck, that there was more ink on Ed Roberts than really Paul Allen in some ways in this book.
David Kopec: Yeah, and it's really not giving Alan enough of his due because Alan was just as instrumental as Gates in forming Microsoft and was just as much a, you know, a visionary and kind of a talented programmer. So, you know, again, if you want to get the other perspective, Alan wrote his own autobiography. And it's interesting, you kind of compare and contrast the two. Anyway, this relationship with MITS ends badly, as I think we've already discussed, and they end up having their lawsuit and MITS ends up losing. That goes to arbitration and MITS loses, which basically gives the full rights to the 8080 version of basic back to Microsoft. And then we end the book with a decision about what's going to happen next. And basically Gates could go back to Harvard. Even at this point, even now, he could decide to kind of go back to Harvard, but he decides to start the company afresh in Seattle. And all the meanwhile, we didn't get into this. It's a bit of a detail, but a lot of these lakeside buddies are actually joining Microsoft. So they're starting to have other employees. It's not just Gates and Allen. By, I think where the book ends, where it's about 1979, they have about 10 employees at Microsoft or a dozen employees, and they take a famous photo in Albuquerque and then the book ends with them starting out in Seattle. And by this point they have now licensed their BASIC to several other early personal computer companies. Actually all the notable personal computer companies at the time, including Commodore and Apple and Tandy, which is part of Radio Shack, and Texas Instruments. So basically every major personal computer manufacturer in the United States is using a form of Microsoft basic. So those six weeks paid off in a big way. Now, the BASIC was not done in those six weeks. It was really a prototype for the Altair. And that's what they were refining over those next couple of years, is making it better and porting it to other microprocessor systems. But that's how Microsoft got its start in making languages for early personal computers. A lot of people know Microsoft as the creator of Windows and Office, of course, and before that the creator of dos. But actually it was programming languages and they created several others. They created versions of Fortran and APL and Pascal, but it was really basic, which ended up being the de facto standard language on all personal computers of the late 1970s and early 1980s that gave Microsoft its start. So as we look back on the book, I thought maybe we could discuss a couple of the themes. One thing for me throughout the book was really, as Kevin, as you've put it, the beneficence of the adults towards these young people throughout his life, starting with his parents, going to his teachers, going to corporate executives and even folks who Microsoft had business relationships with, giving these young people and then young adults enough leash to really do something exciting without necessarily letting them go way off into the hinterlands. What were some themes for the two of you?
Kevin Hudak: I think, Kopeck, I agree with you completely on the beneficence of the adults, but I also think one theme was the forward looking. So looking at the baby boomer generation of which Paul Allen and Bill Gates both are members of, they respected that charity and that enablement and empowerment from the adults in their lives. But they also had this sense that they were smarter than the rest and smarter than the adults and that's why they were more focused on software versus hardware. That permeated the book for me as well, that it's seizing every opportunity, like you so rightly mentioned, Kopeck, but also having that vision and being a bit smarter than the adults that are giving you that, that rope in the beginning as well.
David Short: I think the part that I really enjoyed was just the focus on the importance of family. He really does just hammer that through over and over again. And while as a young child he doesn't appreciate it necessarily that much, by the time he gets through the relationship with the therapist, he really does value his family, value his grandparents. And he talks a lot about the family trips that they continue to take back to, I forget the name of the island they go to. But, you know, his family continues to, you know, have, you know, a compound together where they get together every 4th of July and Thanksgiving. And that, you know, the most important thing for him is, you know, whatever the wealth is, you know, for others, et cetera, the importance of his mother and then ultimately the real focus on the family.
David Kopec: Right. You really get a sense that his parents did a great job with him, given kind of his personality limitations and the fact that he wasn't somebody of great physical prowess and even somebody who in his early schooling was not even getting good grades. So he was in many ways a misfit that his parents found a way to really nurture. I do want to point out one troubling theme I had in the book, and not troubling in the sense that any, anybody did anything wrong, but something that made me really reflect on how society is structured. Gates points out kind of three points in his life where his father really came through for him with his law background. One of them was that time with the dispute about the computer time. One of them was his troubles at Harvard and another one of them was when he had the lawsuit with MITs. And really Microsoft was a fledgling company at that time. If the lawsuit had gone badly or Microsoft had owed MITS damages, the company could have gone out of business. So these were all Very significant points in Gates life and his father's kind of legal background. And I would say network, especially in the case of the Harvard situation, as well as the situation with the time sharing, probably had a big impact on the outcome of how those disputes ended. And I think that just really speaks to how powerful, first of all, lawyers are in our country. I think that's one thing. And how much some people have access to the power of the law and some people don't. Because I could imagine somebody who, you know, grew up without a lawyer father and let's say a working class or lower middle class backgrounds who wouldn't know how to navigate those situations and could get into serious trouble. Like Gates was borderline being considered to be kicked out of Harvard potentially. Right. Or they could have been. They could have had a really bad. You could be an early entrepreneur and you have a bad lawsuit and you go worse than bankrupt, but go into debt. Right. But the power of the law and the power of his dad to kind of save him, not quite save him, but really give a big push towards saving him in several of these situations was very apparent to me reading the book. And I think that speaks to the divide we have in America between rich and poor. Well connected, not well connected everywhere in the world, not just in America. People sometimes criticize Gates, saying he came from a privileged background. And it's true he did. And he came from a privileged background, and he did a lot with it. He did incredible things with it that most people would not have been able to do, probably almost anybody else would not have been able to do. But that doesn't mean we can't acknowledge that he probably would not have been successful if he had not come from that background in those particular situations.
Kevin Hudak: It's also one of the reasons why I started our episode by talking about the privilege that he grew up with in his family legacy and his family life. And he inoculates on it right from the start and just says that it's why I let off that way. He references all of the major upheavals happening in the 60s and 70s and the revolutions happening in the 60s and 70s. He references how sad he was to see the projects in his neighborhood getting torn down. You know, I imagine in the third book when he gets into the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, we're going to see him, you know, again acknowledging that background of privilege and talking about all the, you know, the good things that the organization has done throughout the world. But definitely agree with you, Kopeck, that I saw that theme Throughout.
David Kopec: Again, not that anybody did anything wrong, but it's just, it is a significant part of the story. It's really not the same story without that. Okay, well, now, thinking about the book as a whole, do the two of you recommend this book? And if so, who should read Source Code?
Kevin Hudak: So I would definitely recommend the book to a certain set of folks, right? Our traditional listener to this podcast who's looking for business help, career help, personal realization. You might not find that in this first segment of Bill Gates's memoirs. Right. This is designed for those who are going to read all three. If you were just going to read this one, I definitely recommend it to educators. I recommend it to parents and those who influence the lives of nieces and nephews around them. I think that this book really gave a great perspective into how a, as his mom said, a precocious young mind works and what some of the structure, organization, what some of the inspirations you could provide to that precocious young learner to help them excel and even one day be one of the richest people in the world. So I would recommend it for folks on that basis. I think I particularly enjoyed it. And at one point, Bill Gates mentions that one of his favorite books growing up was a separate piece by John Knowles. And I really love that book as well. And I saw some of the themes from a separate piece in his relationship with Kent Evans and ultimately losing Kent Evans and Kent inspiring him in some of the major inflection points in his life. Right when they stood up to Mitsubishi. And Bill Gates mentioned that typically in school, he would, you know, buy two sets of textbooks, one to keep at school, one to keep at home. So it didn't look like he was preparing for the work that lay ahead because he wanted to seem cool and super smart, that he didn't have to study, right? By the end, he's taking a, you know, he's taking the monstrosity, the briefcase that Kent Evans would bring to school every day or bring to their business meetings, Bill Gates is bringing into that arbitration with MITs, a full briefcase of documents and briefings to look prepared. And he was prepared. And just like in a separate piece where you have the main character who sort of lives on with the lessons of Phineas, Bill Gates sort of lives on with those lessons from Kent Evans. And I thought that this was a very cinematic book. We know listeners to this podcast know I like cinematic books. David Short mentioned one of the most cinematic moments of this book, and so I thoroughly enjoyed it and I would recommend it.
David Short: I would also Recommend it. I would echo a lot of what Kevin said. I had the same thought about the separate piece references. But anyway, to add a little bit beyond what he suggested, I think it's just an interesting technical snapshot. Also, I think he does a good job of talking through this sort of period of time, transitioning between mainframe to minicomputer, to ultimately the Altair and then the future of personal computing. So I found, and like, I think people who are just interested in the history of Microsoft, interested in the history of computing, would also find while that's not like the core focus of it, there's a lot of interesting anecdotes around that.
David Kopec: It's a good book, it's well written. Nobody should have better writing support than Bill Gates. So I hope all of his books are really well written. It's not really as insightful a business book as many of the others that we've read. It's a good entrepreneurship story. I think you can get most of the story from that film Pirates of Silicon Valley. I think you can also get it from some other biographies of Bill Gates that maybe talk more about the business side. Like the book Hard Drive was one I enjoyed, that went into this period in a lot of detail. Paul Allen's autobiography also covers this whole period pretty well. But I think it's a really interesting character story. I think Gates does not come across as particularly arrogant, which is how he's often described by other people as, as being quite arrogant. But I don't think he comes across that way in this book. I think he's very reflective. I think he really realizes some important themes in his early life in a way that not everybody could put their finger on. So I think it's very insightful. I think it's almost like Kevin said, a better book for somebody looking for something with some parenting anecdotes, some kind of growing up stories about a famous person than it is about even the entrepreneurship side. The entrepreneurship side of it is great. It does have those cinematic moments, but it's not probably why I would pick up this book because it's actually also a relatively small part of the book. Even though there's these entrepreneurial ventures they have in high school. Even that starts about 40% of the way into the book when he first gets into computers and they're first starting those first ventures. So this is really a personal book about Bill Gates upbringing and how his experience has shaped him more than it is a story about how Microsoft was formed. Although obviously that's an important element of what shaped him, in my opinion. But I would recommend it to most people who are interested in Bill Gates or people who are interested in how you deal with a misfit kid who's kind of precocious as their parent. Okay, David, tell us about what we're going to be reading next month.
David Short: Yeah, so I'm excited to read Free Trade Under Fire with y' all. This is written by Dartmouth economics professor Doug Irwin, and as it sounds, it's really focused on free trade and tariff policy and the history of, you know, tariffs within the United States, the impact that that has had across the globe. And this fifth edition that we'll read is really focused to some degree on the actions that Trump took in the first administration. So obviously it is not covering the most recent actions that we've all seen in the headlines, but it really does take a look at how Trump approached tariffs the first time around. And Doug, as an economist, has a very skeptical posture towards tariffs and is definitely going to be a very adamant advocate for free trade. So I think it'll be a really exciting time to read this and really try to understand better free trade.
David Kopec: Okay, thanks for that, David. Is there anything that the two of you want to plug and how can listeners get in touch with you?
David Short: You can follow me on X at.
Kevin Hudak: Davidg Short you can follow me on X at Hudak's basement. H U D A K S basement.
David Kopec: And you can follow me on X. I'm Ave Kopek. D A V E K O P E C thanks so much for listening to us this month. We always do interesting episodes, so you're gonna wanna subscribe. Hit that follow button. Hit that subscribe button. If you enjoy the podcast, don't forget to leave us a review. We read every comment on Spotify too. So we see some of your Spotify comments. We're on YouTube now, too, and we see your YouTube comments too. So leave us a comment and tell us what you like and what you don't like and we'll see you next month. Sa.