Bill Gates 2.0

The following is a script from "Bill Gates 2.0" which aired on May 12, 2013, and was rebroadcast on July 28, 2013. Charlie Rose is the correspondent. Denise Schrier Cetta, producer. Matt Danowski, editor.

You probably know Bill Gates as the founder of Microsoft, the hard-driving tech executive whose software fueled the personal computer revolution.

You might also know him as the long-time richest man in the world who left Microsoft five years ago so he could work fulltime, giving his money away.

As we first reported last spring, we had the chance to witness "Bill Gates 2.0," the man you don't know. He is driven as much as anyone we have ever met to make the world a better place.

Gates told us why he thinks inventions are the key to success, and just what he intends to accomplish with his time, intellect and $67 billion fortune, starting with his plans to knock out some of the world's deadliest diseases.

How Bill Gates' school launched his life's work

Charlie Rose: You're going to spend the next 20 years of your life trying to eradicate disease, yes?

Bill Gates: Yep.

Charlie Rose: That's your mission?

Bill Gates: That'll be the majority of my time.

Charlie Rose: Starting with polio?

Bill Gates: Get it done by 2018.

Charlie Rose: Tuberculosis?

Bill Gates: The current tools are not good enough to do an eradication. They're good enough to reduce the deaths very dramatically. But we'll we need a few better tools that'll take probably six or seven years.

Charlie Rose: Malaria?

Bill Gates: Malaria's the one that the tools are being invented now. Fifteen and perhaps even 20 years. But start to really shrink that map.

These are the people Gates wants to help. They are what he calls "the bottom two billion" - a third of the world's population that struggles on less than two dollars a day. They are poor, hungry, lack electricity and clean water.

Gates' most urgent goal: help the millions of children under five who die every year, one every 20 seconds from preventable diseases.

Charlie Rose: No one alive that I know of has said, "My goal is to eradicate a disease and then another disease and then another disease." This is somebody that dreams high.

Bill Gates: Yeah, because I'm excited about that. And it's doable.

Today, Gates spends most of his time here, at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle. He runs it with his father, Bill Sr., and his wife, Melinda, whom he credits with being a driving force behind the foundation.

There are over 1,100 employees to help them decide which programs to fund, but Gates still visits sites around the world to see what's working and what's not.

[Girl: I welcome Bill Gates to our school. The government of Ghana and all school age children are grateful for your support.

Bill Gates: Very well done. Great to be here.]

The grants here go towards school nutrition, improving agriculture and, most important to Gates, life-saving vaccines.

Bill Gates: Well, whenever you see a mother bringing a sick child into a facility, it's easy to relate to, "What if that was my child?" You realize, how crazy it is that with the world being rich enough to afford all sorts of frivolous things, that those basic things still aren't being provided.

But providing vaccines throughout the developing world is no simple task. So Gates has set up his foundation to run like Microsoft. He insists on strict accounting and, when a problem arises, he pulls in the best people to find solutions. We saw a good example of that when it comes to vaccines. To be effective, they need to be kept cold.

Bill Gates: So this is using electricity?

But that's tough in hard to reach areas where refrigerators are rare and unreliable. So back in Seattle, Gates turned to scientists at a company called Intellectual Ventures, where he is both an investor and an inventor.

They created a "super thermos" using the same technology that protects spacecraft from extreme heat. Using only a single batch of ice, it can keep vaccines cold for 50 days.

Charlie Rose: So here is the thermos?

Bill Gates: That's right. This holds vaccines for over 200 children. And it doesn't require any battery, any energy. Its walls have been designed to be such a good thermos that even in very, very hot days, inside it will stay cold enough to make the vaccines work. And when you want to take them out, you just go in here, and there's a whole tray of the vaccines--

Charlie Rose: Yeah.

Bill Gates: You take them out, it records everything you've done with it, the temperature. So it's a replacement for all those refrigerators that have been so unreliable.

Bill Gates: I mean, just look at this thing. When we take it out in the field, people go, "Oh, that's amazing. You can't do that."

Charlie Rose: No matter how perfect the vaccine, if you can't get it to the people who need it, it ain't doing no good.

Bill Gates: That's right. And now, you know, we need to get it to every child in the world.

Gates is betting technology will solve other age old problems like sanitation. Two and a half billion people around the world do not have adequate toilets. That means streams and rivers get clogged with debris and human waste -- becoming breeding grounds for disease.

Bill Gates: The toilet is one of those things that's like a vaccine, where it really would change the situation.

So Gates launched a global competition: design a toilet that works without plumbing.

Bill Gates: We had over 20 entrants. We gave four top prizes. Some of them used burning. Some of them used a laser approach. There were quite a few novel ideas of how you reinvent the toilet. And so this was one of the prototype designs of what a good-looking new toilet would look like. It actually processes everything down in here, and then recycles water. Over the next four or five years, we think we can have a toilet that's every bit as good as the flush toilet.

You can learn a lot about what motivates Bill Gates by visiting his private office.

He showed us why he draws inspiration from the Italian genius Leonardo da Vinci. In 1994, Gates bought da Vinci's 500-year-old notebook.

Bill Gates: He had an understanding of science that was more advanced than anybody of the time. The notebook we have here is one where he's thinking about water. And he's looking at how it flows when it hits barriers, and it goes around, comes back together. He's actually trying to understand turbulence. How should you build a dam, how does it erode away?

It cost $30 million at auction - making it the most valuable manuscript in the world. For Gates, it is priceless.

Bill Gates: It's an inspiration that one person off on their own, with no positive feedback, nobody ever told him, you know, it was right or wrong. That he kept pushing himself. You know, found knowledge in itself to be a beautiful thing.

Gates scoffs at any comparison to the great Leonardo, but a look around his private office reveals a man equally obsessed with understanding his world.

Charlie Rose: Can I look at these?

Bill Gates: Sure. This is the weather one, "Meteorology." My very first course that I watched was this geology course.

Charlie Rose: This is a whole series on the joy of science? "Mathematics." "Philosophy in the Real World."

Gates' collection of DVDs contains hundreds of hours of college lectures that this famous Harvard drop-out has watched.

Bill Gates: The more you learn, the more you have a framework that the knowledge fits into.

When he's on the road, Gates - who's a speed-reader -- lugs around what he calls his "reading bag." When he finishes a book, he posts his thoughts on his website, "Gates Notes."

Bill Gates: What I'll do is, I'm reading these books.

Charlie Rose: Oh, look at that.

Bill Gates: I'll take notes.

Charlie Rose: Oh these are your notes already?

Bill Gates: Right.

Charlie Rose: Look at this.

Bill Gates: I love to take notes on books. So I just haven't written it up yet.

Charlie Rose: How long will it take to read all of this?

Bill Gates: Oh, a long time. Thank goodness for vacations. I read a lot.

But Gates isn't just reading books for pleasure, he is determined to use his knowledge to back groundbreaking innovations. Take this high-tech zapper. It is a laser designed to shoot down malaria-infected mosquitoes in mid-flight.

And Gates showed us one of his boldest, and he says most important, ventures -- a new kind of nuclear reactor. It would burn depleted uranium, making it cleaner, safer and cheaper than today's reactors.

Bill Gates: And your fuel will last for 60 years. So during that entire time, you don't need to open it up, refuel it. You don't need to buy more fuel. So there's a certain simplicity that comes with this design.

Charlie Rose: And when could it come on stream?

Bill Gates: Best case would be to have a prototype around 2022.

Bill Gates calls himself an "impatient optimist" - a description his wife Melinda says was accurate even when they met over 20 years ago.

Charlie Rose: Melinda, what did you like about him?

Melinda Gates: Just his curiosity and his optimism about life and this belief that, you know, that you can change things. I mean he believed that clearly in Microsoft. He was changing the world with software and he knew it.

Charlie Rose: Is the curiosity a shared curiosity, or are there different curiosities?

Melinda Gates: Well, we both have curiosity for lots of things. Bill, at this stage in our life, also gets more time to read than I do, quite honestly, with three kids in the house.

Charlie Rose: Yeah.

Melinda Gates: But the great thing is Bill will go read an entire book about fertilizer. And I can tell you even without three kids in the house, I'm not going to read a book about fertilizer.

Charlie Rose: Yeah.

Melinda Gates: But he loves to teach. And so as long as--I have time, we'll spend time talking about that.

Charlie Rose: So what is it about a book about fertilizer? I mean seriously?

Bill Gates: Well, fertilizers are very interesting.

Bill Gates: We couldn't feed-- a few peop-- billion people would have to die if we hadn't come up with fertilizer.

Charlie Rose: How do you find a balance in all this? Father, chairman of a major company, a foundation, and then all these other ventures? How does the balance come to you?

Bill Gates: I don't mow the lawn.

Charlie Rose: You found somebody to do that?

Bill Gates: Absolutely.

He has come a long way from that teenage prodigy obsessed with writing computer code. Over nearly four decades we've watched Bill Gates help lead the digital revolution with what he now admits was a fanatic and relentless determination.

[Bill Gates from 1990s meeting: You guys never understood, you never understood the first thing about this. I'm not using this thing.]

Charlie Rose: In the early years, there was a demanding guy, there was a driven guy, there was an obsessed guy. There was, some say, an arrogant guy. Have you changed?

Bill Gates: I've certainly learned. When I make a mistake, you know, and my thinking is sloppy, I like to be very hard on myself. Like, that is so stupid. How could you not see how those pieces fit together? And that way that you're, you know, very disciplined yourself, and careful about your thinking, you don't want it to extend out to when other people may not get something quite as quickly. It's like, uh, how come you don't get this thing?

Charlie Rose: Has he mellowed at all?

Melinda Gates: I hope any of us in life mature, right? We all mature. But look, I wouldn't have married Bill if there wasn't a huge heart. With all of the adjectives you just used about how he drove his career, which was very successful for Microsoft, there was an enormous heart always there.

No question Gates has softened with age - just listen to how he reflected on his often tumultuous relationship with the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Bill Gates: He and I-- in a sense, grew up together. We were within a year of the same age. And, you know, we were kind of naively optimistic and built big companies. We achieved all of it. And most of it as rivals. But we always retained-- a certain respect, communication, including even when he was sick. I got to go down and spend time with him.

Charlie Rose: And talk about what?

Bill Gates: Oh, about what we'd learned, about families, anything.

Today Gates says he gets advice on patience and generosity from his friend Warren Buffett - who seven years ago entrusted the majority of his fortune to the Gates Foundation. And from his father Bill Sr., a lawyer who prodded his son into giving his money away.

Charlie Rose: You've said before, this is your hero. Why?

Bill Gates: Well, my dad has integrity, he's got a humble approach to things, he's calm and wise about things. It's just a huge influence to always, you know, want to live up to a great example.

Charlie Rose: Someone said to me, "Your son may be the most influential person in the 21st century.

Bill Gates, Sr.: I can only say yes.

Charlie Rose: He's determined, as he already has proven, that he can dramatically reduce the number of kids under five who die--

Bill Gates, Sr.: That's right.

Charlie Rose: You can't do any better than that, can you--

Bill Gates, Sr.: That's right. That's right. There's no way to be unimpressed about that.

Charlie Rose: You couldn't be more proud.

Bill Gates, Sr.: I couldn't be more proud. That is exactly true.