Interview

BiBy JEFF GOODELL

March 13, 2014 9:00 AM ET

Bill Gates

Roberto Parada

At 58, Bill Gates is not only the richest man in the world, with a fortune that now exceeds $76

billion, but he may also be the most optimistic. In his view, the world is a giant operating system

that just needs to be debugged. Gates' driving idea – the idea that animates his life, that guides

his philanthropy, that keeps him late in his sleek book-lined office overlooking Lake

Washington, outside Seattle – is the hacker's notion that the code for these problems can be

rewritten, that errors can be fixed, that huge systems – whether it's Windows 8, global poverty or

climate change – can be improved if you have the right tools and the right skills. The Bill &

Melinda Gates Foundation, the philanthropic organization with a $36 billion endowment that he

runs with his wife, is like a giant startup whose target market is human civilization.

Bill Gates on how to stop global warming

Personally, Gates has very little Master of the Universe swagger and, given the scale of his

wealth, his possessions are modest: three houses, one plane, no yachts. He wears loafers and

khakis and V-neck sweaters. He often needs a haircut. His glasses haven't changed much in 40

years. For fun, he attends bridge tournaments.

But if his social ambitions are modest, his intellectual scope is mind-boggling: climate, energy,

agriculture, infectious diseases and education reform, to name a few. He has former nuclear

physicists helping cook up nutritional cookies to feed the developing world. A polio SWAT team

has already spent $1.5 billion (and is committed to another $1.8 billion through 2018) to

eradicate the virus. He's engineering better toilets and funding research into condoms made of

carbon nanotubes.

It's a long way from the early days of the digital revolution, when Gates was almost a caricature

of a greedy monopolist hell-bent on installing Windows on every computer in the galaxy ("The

trouble with Bill," Steve Jobs once told me, "is that he wants to take a nickel for himself out of

every dollar that passes through his hands"). But when Gates stepped down as Microsoft CEO in

2000, he found a way to transform his aggressive drive to conquer the desktop into an aggressive

drive to conquer poverty and disease.

Now he's returning to Microsoft as a "technology adviser" to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's new

CEO. "Satya has asked me to review the product plans and come in and help make some quick

decisions and pick some new directions," Gates told me as we talked in his office on a rainy day

a few weeks ago. He estimates that he'll devote a third of his time to Microsoft and two-thirds to

his foundation and other work. But the Microsoft of today is nothing like the world-dominating

behemoth of the Nineties. The company remained shackled to the desktop for too long, while

competitors – namely, Apple and Google – moved on to phones and tablets. And instead of

talking in visionary terms about the company's future, Gates talks of challenges that sound

almost mundane for a man of his ambitions, like reinventing Windows and Office for the era of

cloud computing. But in some ways, that's not unexpected: Unlike, say, Jobs, who returned to

Apple with a religious zeal, Gates clearly has bigger things on his mind than figuring out how to

make spreadsheets workable in the cloud.

When you started Microsoft, you had a crazy-sounding idea that someday there would be a

computer on every desktop. Now, as you return to Microsoft 40 years later, we have

computers not just on our desktops, but in our pockets – and everywhere else. What is the

biggest surprise to you in the way this has all played out?

Well, it's pretty amazing to go from a world where computers were unheard of and very complex

to where they're a tool of everyday life. That was the dream that I wanted to make come true, and

in a large part it's unfolded as I'd expected. You can argue about advertising business models or

which networking protocol would catch on or which screen sizes would be used for which

things. There are less robots now than I would have guessed. Vision and speech have come a

little later than I had guessed. But these are things that will probably emerge within five years,

and certainly within 10 years.

If there's a deal that symbolizes where Silicon Valley is today, it's Facebook's $19 billion

acquisition of WhatsApp. What does that say about the economics of Silicon Valley right

now?

It means that Mark Zuckerberg wants Facebook to be the next Facebook. Mark has the

credibility to say, "I'm going to spend $19 billion to buy something that has essentially no

revenue model." I think his aggressiveness is wise – although the price is higher than I would

have expected. It shows that user bases are extremely valuable. It's software; it can morph into a

broad set of things – once you're set up communicating with somebody, you're not just going to

do text. You're going to do photos, you're going to share documents, you're going to play games

together.

Apparently, Google was looking at it.

Yeah, yeah. Microsoft would have been willing to buy it, too. . . . I don't know for $19 billion,

but the company's extremely valuable.

You mentioned Mark Zuckerberg. When you look at what he's done, do you see some of

yourself in him?

Oh, sure. We're both Harvard dropouts, we both had strong, stubborn views of what software

could do. I give him more credit for shaping the user interface of his product. He's more of a

product manager than I was. I'm more of a coder, down in the bowels and the architecture, than

he is. But, you know, that's not that major of a difference. I start with architecture, and Mark

starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics.

What are the implications of the transition to mobile and the cloud for Microsoft?

Office and the other Microsoft assets that we built in the Nineties and kept tuning up have lasted

a long time. Now, they need more than a tuneup. But that's pretty exciting for the people inside

who say, "We need to take a little risk and do some new stuff" – Google, which is a very strong

company across a huge number of things right now.

Yeah, they were sort of born in the cloud.

The fact is, search generates a lot of money. And when you have a lot of money, it allows you to

go down a lot of dead ends. We had that luxury at Microsoft in the Nineties. You can pursue

things that are way out there. We did massive interactiveTV stuff, we did digital-wallet stuff. A

lot of it was ahead of its time, but we could afford it.

When people think about the cloud, it's not only the accessibility of information and their

documents that comes to mind, but also their privacy – or lack of it.

Should there be cameras everywhere in outdoor streets? My personal view is having cameras in

inner cities is a very good thing. In the case of London, petty crime has gone down. They catch

terrorists because of it. And if something really bad happens, most of the time you can figure out

who did it. There's a general view there that it's not used to invade privacy in some way. Yet in

an American city, in order to take advantage of that in the same way, you have to trust what this

information is going to be used for.

Do you think some of these concerns people have are overblown?

There's always been a lot of information about your activities. Every phone number you dial,

every credit-card charge you make. It's long since passed that a typical person doesn't leave

footprints. But we need explicit rules. If you were in a divorce lawsuit 20 years ago, is that a

public document on the Web that a nosy neighbor should be able to pull up with a Bing or

Google search? When I apply for a job, should my speeding tickets be available? Well, I'm a bus

driver, how about in that case? And society does have an overriding interest in some activities,

like, "Am I gathering nuclear-weapons plans, and am I going to kill millions of people?" If we

think there's an increasing chance of that, who do you trust? I actually wish we were having more

intense debates about these things.

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Thanks to Edward Snowden, who has leaked tens of thousands of NSA documents, we are.

Do you consider him a hero or a traitor? I think he broke the law, so I certainly wouldn't

characterize him as a hero. If he wanted to raise the issues and stay in the country and engage in

civil disobedience or something of that kind, or if he had been careful in terms of what he had

released, then it would fit more of the model of "OK, I'm really trying to improve things." You

won't find much admiration from me.

Even so, do you think it's better now that we know what we know about government

surveillance?

The government has such ability to do these things. There has to be a debate. But the specific

techniques they use become unavailable if they're discussed in detail. So the debate needs to be

about the general notion of under what circumstances should they be allowed to do things.

It's difficult, though, because no one knows really what's going on. We want safety, but we

also want privacy.

But even in abstract – let's say you knew nothing was going on. How would you feel? I mean,

seriously. I would be very worried. Technology arms the bad guys with orders of magnitude

more [power]. Not just bad guys. Crazy guys. Fertilizer wasn't too good for the federal building

in Oklahoma City, but there's stuff out there now that makes fertilizer look like a joke.

You mean like a dirty bomb?

Or biological [weapons]. In the U.S., at least it's going to take a lot of explaining about who was

in the surveillance videos. "You've told us things in the past that didn't turn out to be true, so can

we really trust that you're only going to use them in this way?"

Should surveillance be usable for petty crimes like jaywalking or minor drug possession? Or is

there a higher threshold for certain information? Those aren't easy questions. Should the rules be

different for U.S. citizens versus non-U.S. citizens? There is the question of terrorist interdiction

versus law-enforcement situations. If you think the state is overzealous in any of its activities,

even if you agree with its sort of anti-large-scale-terrorism efforts, you might say, "Well, I think

the abuse will outweigh the benefits. I'll just take the risk." But the people who say

that sometimes having this information is valuable – they're not being very articulate right now.

Let's talk about income inequality, which economist Paul Krugman and others have

written a lot about. As a person who's at the very top of the one percent, do you see this as

one of the great issues of our time?

Well, now you're getting into sort of complicated issues. In general, on taxation-type things,

you'd think of me as a Democrat. That is, when tax rates are below, say, 50 percent, I believe

there often is room for additional taxation. And I've been very upfront on the need to increase

estate taxes. Particularly given the medical obligations that the state is taking on and the costs

that those have over time. You can't have a rigid view that all new taxes are evil. Yes, they have

negative effects, but I'm like Krugman in that if you expect the state to do these things, they are

going to cost money.

Should the state be playing a greater role in helping people at the lowest end of the income scale?

Poverty today looks very different than poverty in the past. The real thing you want to look at is

consumption and use that as a metric and say, "Have you been worried about having enough to

eat? Do you have enough warmth, shelter? Do you think of yourself as having a place to go?"

The poor are better off than they were before, even though they're still in the bottom group in

terms of income.

The way we help the poor out today [is also a problem]. You have Section 8 housing, food

stamps, fuel programs, very complex medical programs. It's all high-overhead, capricious, not

well-designed. Its ability to distinguish between somebody who has family that could take care

of them versus someone who's really out on their own is not very good, either. It's a totally

gameable system – not everybody games it, but lots of people do. Why aren't the technocrats

taking the poverty programs, looking at them as a whole, and then redesigning them? Well, they

are afraid that if they do, their funding is going to be cut back, so they defend the thing that is

absolutely horrific. Just look at low-cost housing and the various forms, the wait lists, things like

that.

When we get things right, it benefits the entire world. The world's governments don't copy

everything we do. They see some things we do – like the way we run our postal service, or

Puerto Rico – are just wrong. But they look to us for so many things. And we can do better.

In the past, you have sounded cynical about the role that government can play in solving

complex problems like health care or reforming anti-poverty policies.

Not cynicism. You have to have a certain realism that government is a pretty blunt instrument

and without the constant attention of highly qualified people with the right metrics, it will fall

into not doing things very well. The U.S. government in general is one of the better governments

in the world. It's the best in many, many respects. Lack of corruption, for instance, and a

reasonable justice system.

If I could wave a wand and fix one thing, it'd be political deadlock, the education system or

health care costs. One of those three, I don't know which. But I see governments in very poor

countries that can't even get teachers to show up. So in countries like that, how can you get very

basic things to work? That's something I spend a lot of time on. And these things are all solvable.


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What did you make of the whole health care rollout debacle?

They should have done better. But that's a minor issue compared to the notion of "Will they get

enough people in the risk pool so that the pricing is OK?" And some of the price-rigging they've

done, where the young overpay relative to the old, is a problem. You know, it's all intended for a

good thing, which is access. But it's layered on top of a system that has huge pricing-capacity

problems. Which it basically did not address.

You'd normally want to be able to tune something of this complexity. But because you have a

political deadlock, you can't. Even the tuning that's being done – like delaying some of the

mandates – is claimed to be against the law. So we're doing something novel and complex in a

very rancorous environment, in an area where our achievements in the past have been pretty

weak.

Health care reform is one of the areas where there is a lot of discussion about the

corrupting role of money in politics. And as Washington becomes increasingly unable to

address big problems, you hear more and more about the corrosive role of special interests.

Do you agree?

Money has always been in politics. And I'm not sure you'd want money to be completely out of

politics. You know, I don't give a lot of political contributions, and I'm glad there are limits on

political contributions. I wish there were more limits. But our government wasn't designed to be

efficient. We've got a system with a lot of checks and balances. When you get into a period of

crisis where the overwhelming majority agrees on something, government can work amazingly

well, like during World War II.

But now you have people who are shrill about the size of government or how we're not doing

enough about climate change. But they don't have enough of a consensus, and they're looking at

a government system whose default answer is the status quo. Look at people who say, "I'm going

to shrink the government!" Well, show me when they actually did shrink the government. They

caused it not to grow as much, but shrink? When? You know, good luck on that. The principle of

shrinkage may be agreed on, but when they get into the particulars, it's not as easy as you might

think. Farm subsidies, yes or no? Research for medicine, yes or no? Loans for students, yes or

no? So you have this frustration. But to label that as coming from an increasing amount of

money in politics, that's only one of many things going on.

Well, there certainly is plenty of frustration with our political system.

But I do think, in most cases, when you get this negative view of the situation, you're forgetting

about the innovation that goes on outside of government. Thank God they actually do fund basic

research. That's part of the reason the U.S. is so good [at things like health care]. But innovation

can actually be your enemy in health care if you are not careful.

How's that?

If you accelerate certain things but aren't careful about whether you want to make those

innovations available to everyone, then you're intensifying the cost in such a way that you'll

overwhelm all the resources.

Like million-dollar chemotherapy treatments.

Yeah, or organ transplants for people in their seventies from new artificial organs being grown.

There is a lot of medical technology for which, unless you can make judgments about who

should buy it, you will have to invade other government functions to find the money. Joint

replacement is another example. There are four or five of these innovations down the pipe that

are huge, huge things.

Yeah, but when people start talking about these issues, we start hearing loaded phrases like

"death panels" and suggestions that government bureaucrats are going to decide when it's

time to pull the plug on Grandma.

The idea that there aren't trade-offs is an outrageous thing. Most countries know that there are

trade-offs, but here, we manage to have the notion that there aren't any. So that's unfortunate, to

not have people think, "Hey, there are finite resources here."

Let's change the subject and talk about your foundation. How do you make the moral

judgment between, say, spending your time and energy on polio eradication versus, say,

climate change?

I want to focus on things where I think my experience working with innovation gives me an

opportunity to do something unique. The majority of the foundation's money goes to a finite

number of things that focus on health inequity – why a person from a poor country is so much

worse off than somebody from a country that's well-off. It's mostly infectious diseases. There's

about 15 of those we're focusing on – polio is the single thing I work on the most. And then,

because of the importance of nutrition and because most poor people are farmers, we're in

agriculture as well.

Agriculture is hugely important, especially in a rapidly warming world, and especially with

the Earth's population projected to reach 9.6 billion by 2050. How are we going to feed

them all?

In the 1960s, there was this thing called the Green Revolution, where new seeds and other

improvements drove up agricultural productivity in Asia and Latin America. It saved millions of

lives and lifted many people out of poverty. But it basically bypassed sub-Saharan Africa.

Today, the average farmer there is only about a third as productive as an American farmer. If we

can get that number up, and I think we can, it will help a lot.

There is also this problem where as people get richer and join the global middle class, they want

to eat more protein. It's a nice problem to have that people are getting richer. But eating meat is

hard on the environment – it demands a lot of land and water. And yet we can't go around telling

everyone they have to be vegetarians. So coming up with affordable plant-based proteins,

basically meat substitutes, that really taste like meat is another area that can make a big

difference. I've tasted a few of them, and I really couldn't tell the difference between them and

the real thing.

In your annual letter from the foundation, you argued that there will essentially be no poor

countries in the world by 2035. Why do you believe that?

We made really unbelievable progress in international development. Countries like Brazil,

Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia – there's an unbelievable number of success stories. The places that

haven't done well are clustered in Africa, and we still have Haiti, where I was last week, as well

as Yemen, Afghanistan and North Korea, which is kind of a special case. But assuming there's

no war or anything, we ought to be able to take even the coastal African countries and get them

up to a reasonable situation over the next 20 years. You get more leverage because the number of

countries that need aid is going down, and countries like China and India will still have

problems, but they're self-sufficient. And over the next 20 years, you get better tools, new

vaccines, a better understanding of diseases and, hopefully, cheaper ways of making energy. So

time is very much on your side in terms of raising the human condition. Even things like decent

toilets, which is a particular project of the foundation, can make a big difference.

Progress depends on such simple things – like functioning toilets.

We take things like TV or Internet or a microwave or a refrigerator for granted, but moving

people from basic lives to decent lives requires a lot less than that. You know, development

sometimes is viewed as a project in which you give people things and nothing much happens,

which is perfectly valid, but if you just focus on that, then you'd also have to say that venture

capital is pretty stupid, too. Its hit rate is pathetic. But occasionally, you get successes, you fund

a Google or something, and suddenly venture capital is vaunted as the most amazing field of all

time. Our hit rate in development is better than theirs, but we should strive to make it better.


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Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook Polio eradication is a big

focus of yours. The eradication program has made remarkable progress; India is now free

of the virus. But it's hanging on in a few places, including remote regions of Pakistan,

Afghanistan and northern Nigeria, where vaccines are viewed suspiciously and vaccinators

have been attacked. In some ways, it seems that wiping out the disease is now more of a

political problem than a logistical problem. Would you agree?

That's only partially correct. Those last three countries are, by definition, the toughest countries.

We've improved the vaccine and are using disease modeling to understand when to use which

flavors of the vaccine in different regions. We're using satellite maps to figure out the population

counts. We use GPS to track where the people are going. So the tools are improving. But it is

true that we'd be done in Pakistan if it wasn't for politics – the intentional spread of

misinformation about the vaccine and its benefits, as well as attacks on the people doing the

work.

So are you as much of an optimist about being able to eradicate this virus as you were a

couple of years ago?

Yeah, I'd say I'm more optimistic now, even though there have been some setbacks this year. We

could get lucky and get access into Waziristan [a remote region of Pakistan where the vaccine

has been banned by the Taliban], or we could get unlucky and not. We also had two re-infections

last year – one in Somalia and one in Syria, and usually we have one of those a year, so to have

two is not good luck. Syria was doing fine; it was just that because of the war, the vaccination

system broke down, so very young kids there were getting paralyzed. In Somalia, the vaccination

system has never been that good.

In the world of viruses, polio is a devil we know. Newly emerging viruses are potentially

more frightening. How concerned are you about global pandemics?

It's a serious risk, and it's something the world could be smarter about. The worst pandemic in

modern history was the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed tens of millions of people. Today, with

how interconnected the world is, it would spread faster. But we are most worried about outbreaks

where you don't show symptoms for a long time. AIDS is kind of the extreme case where you

typically don't show symptoms for more than six years after you're infected. Viruses that stay

latent create the huge problems – you literally can get hundreds of millions of people infected

before you understand what is happening.

Let's talk about climate change. Many scientists and politicians see it as the biggest

challenge humanity has ever faced.

It's a big challenge, but I'm not sure I would put it above everything. One of the reasons it's hard

is that by the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely

limited. Like with viruses, the problem is latency. The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect

is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means

that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

Right . . . we're not virtuous yet, are we?

We're not even close – we're emitting more CO2 every year. In order to get a 90 percent

reduction of carbon, which is what we need, the first thing you might want to get is a year of

global reduction, and we have not had that. U.S. emissions are down right now, partly because

we buy more goods from overseas. But even if you invented some zero-carbon energy source

today, the deployment of that magic device would take a long time.

Are you hopeful that global climate talks will lead to a solution?

Many climate-change discussions are off-target because they've focused on things like the $100

billion per year that some people believe should be spent by the rich world to help the

developing world, which is not really addressing the problem. At the same time, discussion about

how to increase funding of research-and-development budgets to accelerate innovation is

surprisingly missing. We haven't increased R&D spending, we haven't put a price signal [like a

carbon tax] in, and this is certainly very disappointing. I think it's a real test of the boundary of

science and politics – and an acid test of people's time horizons. Before the economic downturn,

attitudes in the U.S. about climate change had become quite enlightened, and then there was a

big reversal, which I believe was a result of people's worries about their immediate economic

situation. Talking about problems that will have a significant effect 30 or 40 years out just gets

off the agenda, and there's this shrill political debate that is distracting people. So we've made

some progress, but you can't take the progress we've made and linearize it – if you do, you really

are going to find out how bad climate change can be.

Let's say climate change was delayed 100 years. If that were the case, science would take care of

this one. We wouldn't have to double the Department of Energy budget, because there's five or

six different paths to go down. And 100 years, at the current rate and speed of science, is a long

time.

We're heading for big trouble, right?

Absolutely. That's why I happen to think we should explore geo-engineering. But one of the

complaints people have against that is that if it looks like an easy out, it'll reduce the political

will to cut emissions. If that's the case, then, hey, we should take away heart surgery so that

people know not to overeat. I happened to be having dinner with Charles Koch last Saturday, and

we talked a little bit about climate change.

And what was the conversation like?

He's a very nice person, and he has this incredible business track record. He was pointing out that

the U.S. alone can't solve the problem, and that's factually correct. But you have to view the U.S.

doing something as a catalyst for getting China and others to do things. The atmosphere is the

ultimate commons. We all benefit from it, and we're all polluting it. It's amazing how few

problems there are in terms of the atmosphere. . . . There's just this one crazy thing that CO2

hangs around for a long, long time, and the oceans absorb it, which acidifies them, which is itself

a huge problem we should do something about.

Like cut carbon emissions fast.

Yes, but people need energy. It's a gigantic business. The main thing that's missing in energy is

an incentive to create things that are zero-CO2-emitting and that have the right scale and

reliability characteristics.

It leads to your interest in nuclear power, right?

If you could make nuclear really, really safe, and deal with the economics, deal with waste, then

it becomes the nirvana you want: a cheaper solution with very little CO2 emissions. If we don't

get that, you've got a problem. Because you are not going to reduce the amount of energy used.

For each year between now and 2100, the globe will use more energy. So that means more CO2

emissions every year. TerraPower, which is the nuclear-energy company that I'm backing,

required a very long time to get the right people together, it required computer modeling to get

the right technology together, and even now it's going to require the U.S. government to work

with whatever country decides to build a pilot project – China, maybe. In a normal sort of private

market, that project probably wouldn't have emerged. It took a fascination with science, concern

about climate change and a very long-term view. Now, I'm not saying it's guaranteed to be

successful, although it's going super, super well, but it's an example of an innovation that might

not happen without the proper support.

Nuclear power has failed to fulfill its promises for a variety of economic and technical

reasons for 40 years. Why continue investing in nuclear power instead of, say, cheap solar

and energy storage?

Well, we have a real problem, and so we should pursue many solutions to the problem. Even the

Manhattan Project pursued both the plutonium bomb and the uranium bomb – and both worked!

Intermittent energy sources [like wind and solar] . . . yeah, you can crank those up, depending on

the quality of the grid and the nature of your demand. You can scale that up 20 percent, 30

percent and, in some cases, even 40 percent. But when it comes to climate change, that's not

interesting. You're talking about needing factors of, like, 90 percent.

But you can't just dismiss renewables, can you?

Solar is much, much harder than people think it is. When the sun shines, electricity is going to be

worth zero, so all the money will be reserved for the guy who brings you power when there's no

wind and no sun. There are some interesting things on the horizon along those lines. There's one

called solar chemical. It's very nascent, but it comes with a built-in storage solution, because you

actually secrete hydrocarbons. We're investing probably one-twentieth of what we should in that.

There's another form of solar called solar thermal, which is cool because you can store heat.

Heat's not easy to store, but it's a lot easier to store than electricity.

Given the scale of problems like climate change and the slow economic recovery and

political gridlock and rising health care costs, it's easy for people to feel pessimistic about

the way the world is going.

Really? That's too bad. I think that's overly focusing on the negatives. I think it's a pretty bright

picture, myself. But that doesn't mean I think, because we've always gotten through problems in

the past, "just chill out, relax, someone else will worry about it." I don't see it that way.


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When you look on the horizon over the next 50 years, what is your biggest fear?

I think we will get our act together on climate change. That's very important. I hope we get our

act together on large-scale terrorism and avoid that being a huge setback for the world. On health

equity, we can reduce the number of poor children who die from more than 6 million down to 2

million, eventually 1 million. Will the U.S. political system right itself in terms of how it focuses

on complex problems? Will the medical costs overwhelm the sense of what people expect

government to do?

I do worry about things like the war in Syria and what that means. You wouldn't have predicted

that that country in particular would fall into horrific civil war where the suffering is just

unbelievable, and it is not obvious to anybody what can be done to stop it. It raises questions for

somebody who thinks they can fix Africa overnight. I understand how every healthy child, every

new road, puts a country on a better path, but instability and war will arise from time to time, and

I'm not an expert on how you get out of those things. I wish there was an invention or advance to

fix that. So there'll be some really bad things that'll happen in the next 50 or 100 years, but

hopefully none of them on the scale of, say, a million people that you didn't expect to die from a

pandemic, or nuclear or bioterrorism.

What do you say to people who argue that America's best days are behind us?

That's almost laughable. The only definition by which America's best days are behind it is on a

purely relative basis. That is, in 1946, when we made up about six percent of humanity, but we

dominated everything. But America's way better today than it's ever been. Say you're a woman in

America, would you go back 50 years? Say you're gay in America, would you go back 50 years?

Say you're sick in America, do you want to go back 50 years? I mean, who are we kidding?

Does bad politics kill innovation? Immigration reform, for example, is a big issue in Silicon

Valley right now.

Yes, the U.S. immigration laws are bad – really, really bad. I'd say treatment of immigrants is

one of the greatest injustices done in our government's name. Well, our bad education system

might top it – but immigration is pretty insane. You've got 12 million people living in fear of

arbitrary things that can happen to them. But you can't argue that all innovation has seized up

because of the problem – I'm sorry. Innovation in California is at its absolute peak right now.

Sure, half of the companies are silly, and you know two-thirds of them are going to go bankrupt,

but the dozen or so ideas that emerge out of that are going to be really important.

Our modern lifestyle is not a political creation. Before 1700, everybody was poor as hell. Life

was short and brutish. It wasn't because we didn't have good politicians; we had some really

good politicians. But then we started inventing – electricity, steam engines, microprocessors,

understanding genetics and medicine and things like that. Yes, stability and education are

important – I'm not taking anything away from that – but innovation is the real driver of

progress.

Speaking of innovation, I want to ask you about Steve Jobs. When was the last time you

talked to him?

It was two or three months before he passed away. And then I wrote a long letter to him after

that, which he had by his bedside. Steve and I actually stayed in touch fairly well, and we had a

couple of good, long conversations in the last year, about our wives, about life, about what

technology achieved or had not achieved.

Steve and I were very different. But we were both good at picking people. We were both

hyperenergetic and worked superhard. We were close partners in doing the original Mac

software, and that was an amazing thing, because we had more people working on it than Apple

did. But we were very naive. Steve promised us this was going to be this $499 machine, and next

thing we knew, it was $1,999. Anyway, the Mac project was an incredible experience. The team

that worked on the Mac side completely and totally burned out. Within two years, none of them

were still there. But it was a mythic thing that we did together. Steve was a genius.

You're a technologist, but a lot of your work now with the foundation has a moral

dimension. Has your thinking about the value of religion changed over the years?

The moral systems of religion, I think, are superimportant. We've raised our kids in a religious

way; they've gone to the Catholic church that Melinda goes to and I participate in. I've been very

lucky, and therefore I owe it to try and reduce the inequity in the world. And that's kind of a

religious belief. I mean, it's at least a moral belief.

Do you believe in God?

I agree with people like Richard Dawkins that mankind felt the need for creation myths. Before

we really began to understand disease and the weather and things like that, we sought false

explanations for them. Now science has filled in some of the realm – not all – that religion used

to fill. But the mystery and the beauty of the world is overwhelmingly amazing, and there's no

scientific explanation of how it came about. To say that it was generated by random numbers,

that does seem, you know, sort of an uncharitable view [laughs]. I think it makes sense to believe

in God, but exactly what decision in your life you make differently because of it, I don't know.

This story is from the March 27th, 2014 issue of Rolling Stone.

Related

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20140313#ixzz30wLtcXNt


http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/bill-gates-the-rolling-stone-interview-20140313?

page=5

he Ultimate O Interview: Oprah Answers All YourQuestions

After more than three decades as an interviewer, I've asked questions of everyone from

rock 'n' roll singers to politicians, movie stars to convicted felons. But as O's tenth

anniversary approached, the editors had a brainstorm: Wouldn't it be interesting to turn

the tables and have someone interview me for a change? "Sure," I said. "Who do you have

in mind?" And that's when I had my brainstorm: It should be a group of readers.

Photo: Rob Howard

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Which is how, during a snowy week in February, ten women from across the country found

themselves flying to Chicago to join me for a taping of the show and some lively

conversation in my Harpo office. Ranging in age from 25 to 54, the women included a

professor, a writer, a psychiatry resident and a research analyst. They came from as far as

Kirkland, Washington, and as close as Urbana, Illinois, and along with their suitcases, they

brought a long list of questions—everything from whether I'm planning to write an

autobiography to who's on my iPod to how I know whether I've had a good day.

The morning of the interview had been filled to overflowing. I'd already taped the show

and done an hour-long radio program with Gayle King. So by the time Gayle and I—and

my cocker spaniel, Sadie!—joined the women in my office, I couldn't have been more ready

to kick off my shoes, let down my hair and dish.

Oprah: This is so exciting—I'm glad you're all here, especially since it usually feels like

there are only about five people left in the world who I haven't already chatted with. You

can ask anything—it's impossible to embarrass me, and there's no wrong question. So who

wants to start us off?

Ellyn Shull: I'll start, if I can go back to what you just said. After interviewing so many

people, are there any who got away, and who are the ones you still want to talk to?

Oprah: Who got away was Elvis Presley. When I was a kid, I always wanted to talk to

Elvis. Another was Jackie Onassis. I had the pleasure and honor of meeting her—I actually

ate her clam chowder at my friend Maria Shriver's wedding shower. There's a picture

from the shower where I'm wearing one of those appliquéd sweaters and Jackie's wearing a

cashmere sweater and an Hermès scarf—classic, classic, classic. I look like 1985, and she

looks like Jackie O. Later, because she was a book editor, she called and asked if I would

write a book. As much as I loved Jackie O, I said no, I was not ready to do a book. But I

said, "If youever want to do an interview..." and she said, "I probably will never do an

interview." So that was another one who got away. As far as who I'd still like to talk to, I

really want to interview O.J. Simpson's daughter, Sydney Simpson. And Susan Smith, the

South Carolina woman who drowned her children by buckling them into her car and

letting it roll into a lake. Not because of the horrific-ness of what she did, but because she

changed the way we look at parents in this country. When somebody comes forward and

says, "My child is missing," we now suspect the parents first. She changed the paradigm.

Barbara Raymond: When you're interviewing someone like Susan Smith, how are you able

to remain objective?

Oprah: I approach every interview by asking, "What is my intention? What do I really

want to accomplish?" You can't accomplish anything if you're judging. I believe that all

pain is the same, that all of us have had difficulties and challenges, and that our pain is in

inverse proportion to how much we were loved as a child. If you didn't receive love, then

you have a lot of dysfunction that you're forever trying to work out. For me, it shows up as

eating and food. For somebody else it might show up as drugs. But for some women it

might be more like, "Well, I don't know how to handle my life, so I'm going to put my child

in the freezer." That seems extreme, but I really do believe we're all on a spectrum. And

knowing that, I can talk to anybody.

Kelli Coleman: Most people don't have that gift of being nonjudgmental.

Oprah: Well, I'm nonjudgmental in an interview. Out of an interview, there's a whole

other side of me!

elli: But the world is always watching and judging you. How has the public scrutiny you've

had to endure affected your life?

Oprah: Years ago, it made me cry a lot because I'm such a pleaser. I would say that's my

single greatest character flaw: the importance I put on wanting to be liked. That comes

from having been abused as a child—being beaten and not even being able to be angry or

to have any emotions about it. I was trained to believe that other people's feelings were

more important than my own, and that only through pleasing somebody could I be loved. It

has taken me 56 years to overcome that. And by the way, in all those 56 years I have never

once called my parents to share anything with them. Not "I got a job," "I met a guy," "I

made a million dollars"—not once, ever. I'm in awe of people who felt their parents' love

every day of their lives. They start out in the world with a full cup. The rest of us go

through life trying to fill ours.

Keisha Sutton-James: Have you reconsidered writing an autobiography?

Oprah: It just so happens that there's a new biography, which I did not approve, and I

hear that 850 people were interviewed for it. I don't know 850 people! My circle is tight,

tight, tight. If there are 850 people talking about you, it can't all be good. But to answer

your question, yes, I did consider writing my own story, back in 1993. At the time, I had a

lawyer-agent-manager who said, "You know, you're turning 40 next year—I think you

should do an autobiography." I said, "Really. Forty—okay." Because, you know, 40 used

to be a big deal. Now it's 50 is the new 40 and 40 is the new 30, but back then... Anyway, I

got led into doing this book. And I worked on it for a year, and then when it came time to

release it, I didn't want to. I brought my little cabinet together—Stedman, Gayle, a couple

of other friends—and Stedman was really opposed to it, though not because of anything I

was saying about him. He thought I shouldn't speak of my family as candidly as I did. He

also kept saying, "It's not going to help anybody just to tell the story." He thought the story

of my life should be an example to other people, rather than just "I did this, I did this, I did

this." I listened to that. I was in the middle of a huge learning curve at that time. I was

learning that your life really just begins at 40. You shouldn't be trying to write your life

story then! But calling the publisher to say I wasn't going to do the book was the hardest

thing I'd ever done. They'd had a big Oprah-is-going-to-write-a-book party, and all I could

remember was the shrimp they'd served—how big those shrimp were. I was thinking, "Oh

my God, they must have spent so much money on those shrimp!"

Several years ago, Nelson Mandela told me I should do my autobiography, just for the

record. I don't feel compelled to do that. And I don't know how I could write it all down.

Or what I would write. I remember when I opened my school, I said to Maya Angelou, who

is like a mother to me, "This will be my legacy—this school." And Maya, in her Maya-like

way, said, "You have no idea what your legacy will be."

Michelle Hankey: I've heard you say that you thought you'd grow up to be a teacher. Is

that why you set up the school in South Africa—because school was so important to you?

Oprah: I started the school because I'd been searching for how I could best be used. My

hope for the show and the magazine has always been that they will have meaning, that they

will be worthy of people's time. In the elevator before I go out to do a show, my prayer is

that I am used for something greater than myself. That it's not just chatter. I don't get up

every morning to come here and just have a little chatty talk. I have always been searching

for how I can best be used. And education was my solace growing up. It was my bright and

shining moment, my savior. I wanted to give that to other girls. I wanted to do for the girls

in South Africa what my teachers had done for me. I wanted them to be able to go to school

for free and thrive there.

PAGE 3

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Vanessa Greenberg:But sometimes when we try to help others, we fail. I'm a psychiatry

resident in the Bronx, and I have patients who can't make it to their appointment because

they're in the process of getting evicted—or they make it to the appointment, but then their

kids don't make it to school. It's frustrating. How do you not become cynical?

Oprah: There's no room for cynicism in the world. I'm not cynical because I know that if

one person isn't ready to be reached, somebody else is. But I have learned that I'm not good

with children who are delinquents. I tried working with kids like that, and then I said, "I'm

going to get arrested for popping somebody upside the head." What I'm really good at is,

"If you want the opportunity, I'll provide it."

Kate O'Halloran: My favorite Oprah-ism is that the universe talks to you first in a

whisper, and then gets louder and louder until you get the message. Can you share a time

when you experienced that?

Oprah: It happens every day. Not like Moses and the burning bush, but the universe is

speaking to us all the time. Just recently somebody called me, wanting me to help them out.

I don't loan money, but if you need something and I decide that you're not going to keep

coming back to ask for more, I'll just give it to you. This person was about to lose their

house. And I said, "Okay, maybe."

Kate: A stranger?

Oprah: No, somebody who'd worked here a long time ago and who'd fallen on hard times.

And then, in the middle of a conversation yesterday, that person's name came up in some

other context—and that person's name hadn't come up in 15 years. That was the universe

saying, "Go back to that thought and see what you can do."

Lisa Torain: Is there anything you can't do? Anything that's not attainable for you?

Oprah: I would like to have a little more balance. In the makeup room before coming out

here, I was saying to Gayle that I think I've lost sight of my best life. The other day when I

was cleaning out a drawer, I found an old gratitude journal and started looking through it,

and at some point I just stopped and said, "God, I was so happy then." I was happy over

little things: mango sorbet, and running, and the way my feet felt touching the ground

when I ran. Back then, I didn't appreciate the time I got to spend with myself. Now I do—

it's why I'm bringing the show to a close. My obligations have become my life.

Lisa: Would you ever consider paring way down? If you had to pare down to nothing,

would it be okay?

Oprah: You mean give up my worldly possessions? I'm not crazy! No, no, no. But there are

obligations I would pare back. I love everything that I do. I love it. But I keep saying yes to

everything, and managing it all gets to be overwhelming. A typical day for me starts here

with a 6:30 workout; by 7:30 I'm in the makeup chair. And then I don't usually get in the

car to leave until 9, 10 o'clock at night. Get home just in time to breathe, get the damn

puppy thing done—I don't know what I was thinking, getting a puppy—then go to bed, get

up, and start the whole process all over again. It's too much. Today is lovely I get to sit and

talk with you guys. This is a restful day. I had only one show to do today. Yesterday I did

three. The day before, I did three. In between doing three, I'm trying to talk to South

Africa, because the girls are taking their PSATs. So I'm doing school. I'm on the phone

about the magazine. I'm doing a full-hour radio show. I'm doing everything that goes with

starting a new television network. So it really was time to end the show.

Violet Harris: Are you going to act again?

Oprah: You know, I'm thinking about it. There's a part of me that says, "Don't take on

another thing. But I love acting, because it's a vacation from myself. I get to suspend being

myself and become somebody else.

Does Oprah regret never having experienced marriage or motherhood?

The Ultimate O Interview: Oprah Answers All YourQuestions

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Barbara: Speaking of different roles, with all the focus that the show and the magazine

have had on marriage and motherhood, how do you feel about never having experienced

either?

Oprah: I used to get that question all the time: Why haven't you married Stedman?

Actually, Stedman asked me to marry him, and at first I said "Yes!" but it turned out that

I wanted to beasked to be married more than I wanted to be married. Had it not been for

big-mouth Gayle King over there, it wouldn't have become the big public thing that it

became. Gayle was there when he asked me, and then she went on TV—she was anchoring

the news back then—and told everybody. And it became this big hoo-da-ha-da thing.

Gayle: I was so excited!

Barbara: How long ago was that?

Oprah: 1993. My friends were going togive me a party. Remember that, Gayle? Everybody

was going to give me a—what do you call those?

Gayle: An engagement party. A shower.

Oprah: It was a shower. And I was saying, "I don't want this, I don't want this." And

Gayle says, "Oh, everybody gets cold feet." And I say, "I don't have cold feet—my feet are

stuck in a cement block surrounded by ice!" It just felt like the wrong thing for me. This

was at the same time that I was supposed to have the book coming out. We were in Miami,

in the back of a limousine, coming back from the party with the big shrimp, and Stedman

asks, "So when is the book coming out?" The book was coming out September 14 or

something, and our wedding had been scheduled for September 8. We had a date and

everything. So Stedman says, "Well, I don't want to have my wedding in competition with

your book." And I remember thinking, "Yes! Really? Okay, great! I ended up canceling

both, and we have not discussed it since that day.

Barbara: But you're still together.

Oprah: Still together. And what we have discussed is the fact that had we gotten married,

we would definitely not still be together. Because instinctively, I understood that to do what

I do every day is so nontraditional that it would have been difficult to try to conform to a

traditional way of being. And Stedman's a pretty traditional man. You know, the show

became my life. It became my children. And I knew I was not the kind of woman who could

get home and make sure dinner was on the table. I do that when I feel like it, and if I don't

feel like it, there's some Raisin Bran in there, get yourself a banana, and that's it.

Barbara: How do you feel about not having children?

Oprah: Really good. No regrets whatsoever. Gayle grew up writing the names of her

would-be children, making little hearts and putting children's names in them. Never

occurred to me to do that. I never had a desire. And I don't think I could have this

life and have children. One of the lessons I've learned from doing the show is just how

much sacrifice and attention is required to do the job of mothering well. Nothing in my

background prepared or trained me to do that. So I don't have any regrets about it at all.

And I do feel like I am a mother in a broader sense—to a generation of viewers who've

grown up with me.

Kristy Nicholas: You are.

Oprah: I have deep, deep love and affection for the people who've grown up watching. And

when the show ends, it will not just be about my ending. I feel like it will almost be the end

of an era for people who were 10 years old when the show started and are now 35—the kids

who used to come home from school and watch with their mothers. We've been on longer

than Bonanza was! It's a relationship.

Kristy: What will you do the morning after your last show?

Oprah: Sleep in. Because that's going to be a really big party.

The one show Oprah wishes she hadn ' t done

Lisa: Looking back over the years, was there ever a show where you felt, "I shouldn't have

done that?"

Oprah: There was certainly some bad hair and bad choices. The '80s were tough on

everybody! But yes, there were some things I did that, today, I'm embarrassed to say I did.

Years ago I did a show about women whose husbands had cheated on them. At the time we

thought, "What a great booking—you've got the mistress, you've got the wife, you've got

the husband—they all agreed to come on. But at one point, one of the husbands said to his

wife—and this was live television—that his girlfriend was pregnant. And I saw the pain in

his wife's face, and thought, "I'm responsible for that. I didn't know her husband was

going to say it, but I was responsible. I thought, "That is not what this platform is supposed

to be for. You're not supposed to do that to anybody, ever." The whole audience did what

you all just did—everybody went "Oooh!" And the wife did what she could to hold on to

herself. But in her eyes I saw the humiliation. There's nothing worse than being humiliated.

There's nothing worse that you can do to a person than to make them feel worthless.

The flip side is, the greatest thing you can do is to make somebody feel that they matter. So

that is my secret to interviewing: How do I find the common denominator that allows a

person to know that I hear them, and that what they say means something to me? If you

can do that in all your relationships, whether it's with your children, your boss, your

girlfriends, or your spouse—if you can be present enough to really emit that energy, that's

all anybody is looking for.

Violet: That's the book you should write.

Oprah: It would take too much time to write, though. That's a lot of time.

Keisha: After you pare down?

Oprah: After my party.

Keisha: Yes! Okay, next question: I think most would agree that you've transcended race.

How do you balance your identity as a black woman with your need to reach a broader

audience? Do you ever feel a conflict of conscience?

Oprah: Being a black woman has never been an issue for me. It's just always been what is.

This is who I am. I have never given it a moment's thought, because it's so integrated into

who I am. I am, first, a child born of God. I really do believe that of myself. I am spirit in a

body, and I have incarnated as a female who is black in the United States of America. No

better place to be born in the world. Earlier this year when the moviePrecious got all its

Oscar nominations, Gabby Sidibe, who was nominated—she'd never acted before in her

life, was raised in Harlem—her name was called in the same breath as Meryl Streep's.

Only in America can that happen. On the other hand, I understand that I carry the energy

of every single person who came before me and didn't have the opportunity to do what I

do. I think about that. I carry that with me. It's not like I'm sitting there with Tom Cruise

thinking, "The ancestors are here—"

Gayle: Come on, Harriet!

Oprah: Exactly. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth—come on, everybody, come meet Tom

Cruise! No, I'm not thinking that. But I am aware of the people who came before.

Ellyn: Is there anything else you want to say about your relationship with God?

Oprah: Is there anything more you want to ask me? We can talk all day about my

relationship with God. That's the big one. My favorite Bible verse is Psalms 37:4. "Delight

thyself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart." To me, the Lord is all

that is good, all that is great, all that is love, all that is timeless, all that is peace. Delight

thyself in all those things, and you will have the desires of your heart. And what I've

realized is that all my issues—my health problems, weight problems, all that—are deeply

related to my getting so consumed with my schedule. For years I told people to keep a

gratitude journal, but the last few years I've been too busy to keep one myself. I'd be so

tired when I got home that it was like, "Okay, I'm grateful for..."

Ellyn: This bed!

Oprah: Right. When I was a kid, my grandmother said, "Pray on your knees." And that's

how I always prayed. But the last few years it's been like, "I'm too tired. Can I just pray

lying down? Okay, God, thank you." So I've been crowding out the space that allows me to

connect with God, with the source. Some people get that connection from going to church. I

don't go to church unless I happen to be in a town where there's a really great service.

Years ago I went faithfully, 8 o'clock service, 12 o'clock service. I was a tither. I was

making 227 dollars a week, and I tithed 22 dollars and 70 cents every week. But after Jim

Jones led the mass suicide in Guyana, I started to feel differently. The church I went to had

a really charismatic pastor—you had to show up early to get a seat—and I remember

sitting there one Sunday while he was preaching about how "the Lord thy God is a jealous

God, the Lord thy God will punish you for your sins." I looked around and thought, "Why

would God be jealous? What does that even mean?" And I'm looking at the people in the

church, and everybody's up, shouting. And I started wondering how many of these people

—including myself—would be led to do whatever this preacher said. That's when I started

exploring taking God out of the box, out of the pew. And eventually I got to where I was

able to see God in other people and in all things—in graciousness and kindness and

generosity and the spirit of things. Okay? Okay, let's do a few more questions.

Oprah reveals the origin of her name and the advice she would give to her younger self

Kristy: You know you've had a good day when...

Oprah: I know I've had a good day when, after all the work I put into creating a show that

goes out to ten million people around the world, somebody e-mails back and says, "What

you said really mattered to me." That's a good day.

Kate: Your name's so unique. What's the origin?

Oprah: From the Bible. Ruth, first chapter. It's misspelled. It's supposed to be Orpah.

Kate: Was that on purpose?

Oprah: No. The p got put before the r on my birth certificate.

Gayle: Who's your favorite musician on your iPod right now?

Oprah: Gaga.

Vanessa: If you could sing any karaoke song, would it be Lady Gaga?

Oprah: It would definitely be a Tina Turner song. Because if I see myself as anybody, I

can't be Gaga but I can be Tina. I have the wig to prove it! I actually got to sing "Simply

the Best" onstage with her. Now I would wear a short dress and do "Steamy Windows." To

me, nobody stands up to Tina Turner, because she just turned 70 and she's still rocking it

out.

Gayle: What advice would you give a young Oprah?

Oprah: I would say, "Hold on to yourself, 'cause it's all going to be all right." When I was

28 years old in Baltimore, I was doing an event, and the gospel singer Wintley Phipps was

performing there. Wintley Phipps, who I did not then know at all, came up to me backstage

and said, "God has impressed me to tell you that He holds you in His hand. And that He

has shown great favor to you. And that you will speak to millions of people in the world in

and through His name."

Gayle: And you were just a local news anchor then.

Oprah: I said, "Who are you? What? In Baltimore?" He said, "I don't know. God has just

impressed me to tell you that." And it was one of those eerie, crazy moments, because I had

always believed those things myself, even before that conversation. In the time just before I

left Nashville for Baltimore, I was speaking in churches a lot. I remember speaking at a

women's day service—I had my red Cutlass outside, packed and ready to drive to

Baltimore. And my sermon was, "I don't know what the future holds, but I know who

holds the future." I have no fear about the future. I have no fear about anything, because I

really do understand that I am God's child and that He has guided me through everything

and will continue to until the end.

Vanessa: In your best-case scenario, how would you balance your time?

Oprah: Still trying to figure that one out. If I knew the answer, I'd have managed to open

my Christmas presents by now. I'm not kidding. I left California and came in a day early

this week because I wanted to get through my Christmas presents here in the office—it's

February and I haven't opened them yet. But I ended up getting stuck with all the requests

that were on the desk: Will you do this, will you do that, will you speak here, will you go

there? The thing is, when you're on TV, you're in people's homes every day. You are

familiar. So it's like, "Oprah, come on over here! Stay right here while I get my camera—

and hold on, my sister wants to get a picture with you, too!" You wouldn't say that to

Angelina Jolie.

Keisha: You've sacrificed a lot to live the life you have.

Oprah: Actually, I've had a great time. But I would have to say that at this particular time

in my life, I look forward to being able to take a rest. I was just saying to someone the other

day, "What do women do when they wake up in the morning?" One of my favorite lines

from Beloved—the movie nobody went to see, and thank you if you did, since as you can tell

[laughs], I still carry a little pain about it—is spoken by the character Sethe. She says,

"Twenty-eight days, 28 good days of a free life... I'd wake up in the morning and decide for

myself what to do with the day.... Twenty-eight days of freedom. And on the 29th day, it

was over." I can't imagine what it's going to be like to wake up in the morning and decide

for myself what to do with the day. I don't know what it is to have free time. I really don't

know. If I get to leave here and be home early, I won't know what to do. What do people

do?

Lisa: Watch Oprah.

See how Oprah answered a lightning round of readers ' most frequently asked questions

The Analysis of Non Observance Maxims of Conversation in the Interview Videos in

Rolling Stone Search Online Magazine → bagaimana cara merespon pertanyaan dgn baik dan

benar

-quality--> JUJUR

-quantity → sudah cukup memberikan informasi blm? (a: arep nandi? B: arep ngidul, kudune B:

arep ning pasar)

-manner → singkat, padat, jelas

-relevant → nyambung (a: hai gmana kabarnya? B: oh ya silahkan masuk, Kudune B: aku baik2

saja)

The Analysis of Politeness Strategies used by the participants of the conversation on

Interview Videos in Rolling Stone Search Online Magazine → bagaimana cara bertutur yg sopan

kepada orang lain.

Positive → posisi lg garap ujian, (aku pinjem bolpen dong!) → mau pinjem/ minta tolong

sesuatu ke orang lain tanpa memperhatikan keadaan orang lain. (ganggu)

negative → sopan. Tahu akan mengganggu, jadi ngomongnya disopan2in (bolehkan aku pinjem

tipe x?)

Bald on record → ngomong secara langsung/ terus terang (aku ora seneng coklat, aku emoh

nyilehi pulpen)

off record → aku hakok pensile ilang. (kudune: aku mbok nyileh pensile)

Data: rolling stone search video interview → bill gates, Oprah

Bill gate krn pencipta microsoft office dan peduli terhadap dunia pendidikan krn menyediakan

beasiswa untuk siswa miskin di seluruh dunia

Oprah → jiwa kemanusiaannya tinggi dan memiliki yayasan pendidikan, terutama di Afrika/

negara miskin dunia

Rollingstone adalah nama band terkenal, skrg sdh tua.. krn legendaris, maka dijadikan nama

majalah tentang musik. Tp skrg semakin mengikuti perkembangan jaman dan isi dari majalah

tersebut tidak selalu tentang musik, melainkan hal2 yg berkaitan dengan kehgidupan sehari2

seperti pendidikan, ekonomi, sosial, dan isu2 sosial lain.

Cara meneliti maxim/polite

nonton video

menulis tanskip percakapan

memeliti ulang

memahami isi

memberi nomor untuk memisahkan utterance dengan turn nya

meneliti locutionnary dan illocutionary

meneliti speech act nya

meneliti maxims of conversation / politeness

Interview

Documents

Transcript of Interview