-
Chris Anderson: So this is an
interview with a difference,
-
on the basis that a picture
is worth a thousand words.
-
What I did was, I asked Bill and Melinda
-
to dig out from their archive
-
some images that would help explain
-
some of what they've done,
-
and do a few things that way.
-
So we're going to start here.
-
Melinda, when and where was this,
-
and who is that handsome man next to you?
-
Melinda Gates: With those big glasses, huh?
-
This is in Africa, our very first trip,
-
the first time either of us had ever been to Africa,
-
in the fall of 1993.
-
We were already engaged to be married.
-
We married a few months later,
-
and this was the trip where we really went to see
-
the animals and to see the Savanna.
-
It was incredible. Bill had never taken that much time
-
off from work.
-
But what really touched us actually were the people,
-
and the extreme poverty.
-
We started asking ourselves questions.
-
Does it have to be like this?
-
And at the end of the trip,
-
we went out to Zanzibar,
-
and took some time to walk on the beach,
-
which is something we had done a lot
-
while we were dating.
-
And we'd already been talking about during that time
-
that the wealth that had come from Microsoft
-
would be given back to society,
-
but it was really on that beach walk
-
that we started to talk about, well,
-
what might we do and how might we go about it?
-
CA: So given that this vacation
-
led to the creation of, I guess,
-
the world's biggest private foundation,
-
it's pretty expensive as vacations go.
-
MG: I guess so. We enjoyed it.
-
CA: I mean, which of you
was the key instigator here,
-
or was it symmetrical?
-
Bill Gates: Well, I think we were excited
-
that there'd be a phase of our life
-
where we'd get to work together
-
and figure out how to give this money back.
-
At this stage, we were talking about the poorest,
-
and could you have a big impact on them?
-
Were there things that weren't being done?
-
There was a lot we didn't know.
-
Our naïveté is pretty incredible,
-
when we look back on it.
-
But we had a certain enthusiasm
-
that that would be the phase,
-
the post-Microsoft phase
-
would be our philanthropy.
-
MG: Which Bill always thought was going to come
-
after he was 60,
-
so he hasn't quite hit 60 yet,
-
so some things change along the way.
-
CA: So it started there, but it got accelerated.
-
So that was '93, and it was '97, really,
-
before the foundation itself started.
-
MA: Yeah, in '97, we read an article
-
about diarrheal diseases killing
so many kids around the world,
-
and we kept saying to ourselves,
-
"Well that can't be.
-
In the U.S., you just go down to the drug store."
-
And so we started gathering scientists
-
and started learning about population,
-
learning about vaccines,
-
learning about what had worked and what had failed,
-
and that was really when we got going,
-
was in late 1998, 1999.
-
CA: So you've got a big pot of money
-
and a world full of so many different issues.
-
How on earth do you decide what to focus on?
-
BG: Well, we decided that we'd pick two causes,
-
whatever the biggest inequity was globally,
-
and there we looked at children dying,
-
children not having enough nutrition to ever develop,
-
and countries that were really stuck,
-
because with that level of death,
-
and parents would have so many kids
-
that they'd get huge population growth,
-
and that the kids were so sick
-
that they really couldn't be educated
-
and lift themselves up.
-
So that was our global thing,
-
and then in the U.S.,
-
both of us have had amazing educations,
-
and we saw that as the way that the U.S.
-
could live up to its promise of equal opportunity
-
is by having a phenomenal education system,
-
and the more we learned, the more we realized
-
we're not really fulfilling that promise.
-
And so we picked those two things,
-
and everything the foundation does
-
are focused there.
-
CA: So I asked each of you to pick an image
-
that you like that illustrates you work,
-
and Melinda, this is what you picked.
-
What's this about?
-
MG: So I, one of the things I love to do when I travel
-
is to go out to the rural areas and talk to the women,
-
whether it's Bangladesh, India,
lots of countries in Africa,
-
and I go in as a Western woman without a name.
-
I don't tell them who I am. Pair of khakis.
-
And I kept hearing from women,
-
over and over and over, the more I travelled,
-
"I want to be able to use this shot."
-
I would be there to talk to them
about childhood vaccines,
-
and they would bring the conversation around to
-
"But what about the shot I get?"
-
which is an injection they were
getting called Depo-Provera,
-
which is a contraceptive.
-
And I would come back and
talk to global health experts,
-
and they'd say, "Oh no, contraceptives
-
are stocked in in the developing world."
-
Well, you had to dig deeper into the reports,
-
and this is what the team came to me with,
-
which is, to have the number one thing
-
that women tell you in Africa they want to use
-
stocked out more than 200 days a year
-
explains why women were saying to me,
-
"I walked 10 kilometers without
my husband knowing it,
-
and I got to the clinic, and there was nothing there."
-
And so condoms were stocked in in Africa
-
because of all the AIDS work that the U.S.
-
and others supported.
-
But women will tell you over and over again,
-
"I can't negotiate a condom with my husband.
-
I'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I have AIDS,
-
and I need that tool because then I can space
-
the births of my children, and I can feed them
-
and have a chance of educating them."
-
CA: Melinda, you're Roman Catholic,
-
and you've often been embroiled
-
in controversy over this issue,
-
and on the abortion question,
-
on both sides, really.
-
How do you navigate that?
-
MG: Yeah, so I think that's a really important point,
-
which is, we had backed away from contraceptives
-
as a global community.
-
We knew that 210 million women
-
were saying they wanted access to contraceptives,
-
even the contraceptives we have
here in the United States,
-
and we weren't providing them
-
because of the political controversy in our country,
-
and to me that was just a crime,
-
and I kept looking around trying to find the person
-
that would get this back on the global stage,
-
and I finally realized I just had to do it.
-
And even though I'm Catholic,
-
I believe in contraceptives
-
just like most of the Catholic
women in the United States
-
who report using contraceptives,
-
and I shouldn't let that controversy
-
be the thing that holds us back.
-
We used to have consensus in the United States
-
around contraceptives,
-
and so we got back to that global consensus,
-
and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars
-
around exactly this issue for women.
-
(Applause)
-
CA: Bill, this is your graph. What's this about?
-
BG: Well, my graph has numbers on it.
-
(Laughter)
-
I really like this graph.
-
This is the number of children
-
who die before the age of five every year.
-
And what you find is really
-
a phenomenal success story
-
which is not widely known,
-
that we are making incredible progress.
-
We go from 20 million
-
not long after I was born
-
to now we're down to about six million.
-
So this is a story
-
largely of vaccines.
-
Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year.
-
That was eradicated, so that got down to zero.
-
Measles was killing a couple million a year.
-
That's down to a few hundred thousand.
-
Anyway, this is a chart
-
where you want to get that number to continue,
-
and it's going to be possible,
-
using the science of new vaccines,
-
getting the vaccines out to kids.
-
We can actually accelerate the progress.
-
The last decade,
-
that number has dropped faster
-
than ever in history,
-
and so I just love the fact that
-
you can say, okay, if we can invent new vaccines,
-
we can get them out there,
-
use the very latest understanding of these things,
-
and get the delivery right, that
we can perform a miracle.
-
CA: I mean, you do the math on this,
-
and it works out I think literally
-
to thousands of kids' lives saved every day
-
compared to the prior year.
-
It's not reported.
-
An airliner with 200-plus deaths
-
is a far, far bigger story than that.
-
Does that drive you crazy?
-
BG: Yeah, because it's a silent thing going on.
-
It's a kid, one kid at a time.
-
Ninety-eight percent of this
-
has nothing to do with natural disasters,
-
and yet, people's charity,
-
when they see a natural disaster, are wonderful.
-
It's incredible how people think, okay,
-
that could be me, and the money flows.
-
These causes have been a bit invisible.
-
Now that the Millennium Development Goals
-
and various things are getting out there,
-
we are seeing some increased generosity,
-
so the goal is to get this well below a million,
-
which should be possible in our lifetime.
-
CA: Maybe it needed someone
-
who is turned on by numbers and graphs
-
rather than just the big, sad face
-
to get engaged.
-
I mean, you've used it in your letter this year,
-
you used basically this argument to say that aid,
-
contrary to the current meme
-
that aid is kind of worthless and broken,
-
that actually it has been effective.
-
BG: Yeah, well people can take,
-
there is some aid that was well-meaning
-
and didn't go well.
-
There's some venture capital investments
-
that were well-meaning and didn't go well.
-
You shouldn't just say, okay, because of that,
-
because we don't have a perfect record,
-
this is a bad endeavor.
-
You should look at, what was your goal?
-
How are you trying to uplift nutrition
-
and survival and literacy
-
so these countries can take care of themselves,
-
and say wow, this is going well,
-
and be smarter.
-
We can spend aid smarter.
-
It is not all a panacea.
-
We can do better than venture capital, I think,
-
including big hits like this.
-
CA: Traditional wisdom is that
-
it's pretty hard for married couples to work together.
-
How have you guys managed it?
-
MG: Yeah, I've had a lot of women say to me,
-
"I really don't think I could work with my husband.
-
That just wouldn't work out."
-
You know, we enjoy it, and we don't,
-
this foundation has been a coming to for both of us
-
in its continuous learning journey,
-
and we don't travel together as much
-
for the foundation actually as we used to
-
when Bill was working at Microsoft.
-
We have more trips where
we're traveling separately,
-
but I always know when I come home,
-
Bill's going to be interested in what I learned,
-
whether it's about women or girls
-
or something new about the vaccine delivery chain,
-
or this person that is a great leader.
-
He's going to listen and be really interested.
-
And he knows when he comes home,
-
even if it's to talk about the speech he did
-
or the data or what he's learned,
-
I'm really interested,
-
and I think we have a really
collaborative relationship.
-
But we don't every minute together, that's for sure.
-
(Laughter)
-
CA: But now you are. I'm very happy you are.
-
Melinda, early on, you were basically
-
largely running the show.
-
Six years ago, I guess,
-
Bill came on full time, so moved from Microsoft
-
and became full time.
-
That must have been hard,
-
adjusting to that. No?
-
MG: Yeah. I think actually,
-
for the foundation employees,
-
there was way more angst for them
-
than there was for them than
there was for me about Bill coming.
-
I was actually really excited.
-
I mean, Bill made this decision
-
even obviously before it got announced in 2006,
-
and it was really his decision,
-
but again, it was a beach vacation
-
where we were walking on the beach
-
and he was starting to think of this idea.
-
And for me, the excitement of Bill
-
putting his brain and his heart
-
against these huge global problems,
-
these inequities, to me that was exciting.
-
Yes, the foundation employees had angst about that.
-
(Applause)
-
CA: That's cool.
-
MG: But that went away within three months,
-
once that was there.
-
BG: Including some of the employees.
-
MG: That's what I said, the employees,
-
it went away for them three
months after you were there.
-
BG: No, I'm kidding.
MG: Oh, you mean, the employees didn't go away.
-
BG: A few of them did, but—
-
(Laughter)
-
CA: So what do you guys argue about?
-
Like, you know, Sunday, 11 o'clock,
-
you're away from work,
-
what comes up? What's the argument?
-
BG: You know, because we built this thing
-
together from the beginning,
-
it's this great partnership.
-
You know, I had that with Paul Allen
-
in the early days of Microsoft.
-
I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger,
-
and now Melinda, and in even stronger,
-
equal ways, is the partner,
-
so we talk a lot about
-
which things should we give more to,
-
which groups are working well?
-
You know, she's got a lot of insight.
-
She'll sit down with the employees a lot.
-
We'll take the different trips she described.
-
So there's a lot of collaboration.
-
I can't think of anything where one of us
-
had a super-strong opinion
-
about one thing or another?
-
CA: How about you, Melinda?
-
You never know. (Laughter)
-
MG: Well, here's the thing.
-
We come at things from different angles,
-
and I actually think that's really good.
-
So Bill can look at the big data
-
and say, "I want to act based
on these global statistics."
-
For me, I come at it from intuition.
-
I meet with lots of people on the ground
-
and Bill's taught me to take that
-
and read up to the global data and see if they match,
-
and I think what I've taught him
-
is to take that data
-
and meet with people on the ground to understand,
-
can you actually deliver that vaccine?
-
Can you get a woman to accept those polio drops
-
in her child's mouth?
-
Because the delivery piece
-
is every bit as important as the science.
-
So I think it's been more a coming to over time
-
towards each other's point of view,
-
and quite frankly, the work is better because of it.
-
CA: So I mean, in vaccines, and polio and so forth,
-
you've had some amazing successes.
-
What about failure, though?
-
Can you talk about a failure
-
and maybe what you've learned from it?
-
BG: Yeah. Fortunately, we can afford a few failures,
-
because we've certainly had them.
-
We do a lot of drug work or vaccine work
-
that you know you're going to have different failures.
-
Like, we put out one that got a lot of publicity,
-
was asking for a better condom.
-
Well, we got hundreds of ideas.
-
Maybe a few of those will work out.
-
We were very naïve, certainly I was, about a drug
-
for a disease in India, visceral leishmaniasis,
-
that I thought, once I got this drug,
-
we can just go wipe out the disease.
-
Well, turns out it took an injection
-
every day for 10 days.
-
It took three more years to get it than we expected,
-
and then there was no way
-
it was going to get out there.
-
Fortunately, we found out
-
that if you go kill the sand flies,
-
you probably can have success there,
-
but we spent five years,
-
you could say wasted five years,
-
and about 60 million,
-
on a path that turned out to have
-
very modest benefit when we got there.
-
CA: You're spending, like, a billion dollars a year
-
in education, I think, something like that.
-
Is anything, the story of what's gone right there
-
is quite a long and complex one.
-
Are there any failures you can talk about?
-
MG: Well I would say a huge lesson for us
-
out of the early work is we thought
-
that these small schools were the answer,
-
and small schools definitely help.
-
They bring down the dropout rate.
-
They have less violence and crime in those schools.
-
But the thing that we learned from that work,
-
and what turned out to be the fundamental key,
-
is a great teacher in front of the classroom.
-
If you don't have an effective teacher
-
in the front of the classroom,
-
I don't care how big or small the building is,
-
you're not going to change the trajectory
-
of whether that student will be ready for college.
-
(Applause)
-
CA: So Melinda, this is you and
-
your eldest daughter, Jenny.
-
And just taken about three weeks ago, I think,
-
three or four weeks ago. Where was this?
-
MG: So we went to Tanzania.
-
Jen's been to Tanzania.
-
All our kids have been to Africa quite a bit, actually.
-
And we did something very different,
-
which is, we decided to go spend
-
two nights and three days with a family.
-
Ana and Sanari are the parents.
-
They invited us to come and stay in their boma.
-
Actually, the goats had been there, I think,
-
living in that particular little hut
-
on their little compound before we got there.
-
And we stayed with their family,
-
and we really, really learned
-
what life is like in rural Tanzania.
-
And the difference between just going
-
and visiting for half a day
-
or three quarters of a day
-
versus staying overnight was profound,
-
and so let me just give you one explanation of that.
-
They had six children, and as I talked to Ana
-
in the kitchen, we cooked for about five hours
-
in the cooking hut that day,
-
and as I talked to her, she had absolutely planned
-
and spaced with her husband
-
the births of their children.
-
It was a very loving relationship.
-
This was a Masai warrior and his wife,
-
but they had decided to get married,
-
they clearly had respect and love in the relationship.
-
Their children, their six children,
-
the two in the middle were twins, 13,
-
a boy and a girl named Grace.
-
And then, when we'd go out to chop wood
-
and do all the things that Grace
and her mother would do,
-
Grace was not a child, she was an adolescent,
-
but she wasn't an adult.
-
She was very, very shy.
-
So she kept wanting to talk to me and Jen.
-
We kept trying to engage her, but she was shy.
-
And at night, though,
-
when all the lights went out in rural Tanzania,
-
and there was no moon that night,
-
the first night, and no stars,
-
and Jen came out of our hut
-
with her REI little headlamp on,
-
Grace went immediately,
-
and got the translator,
-
came straight up to my Jen and said,
-
"When you go home,
-
can I have your headlamp
-
so I can study at night?"
-
CA: Oh, wow.
-
MG: And her dad had told me
-
how afraid he was that unlike the son,
-
who had passed his secondary exams,
-
because of her chores,
-
she'd not done so well
-
and wasn't in the government school yet.
-
He said, "I don't know how I'm
going to pay for her education.
-
I can't pay for private school,
-
and she may end up on this farm like my wife."
-
So they know the difference
-
that an education can make
-
in a huge, profound way.
-
CA: I mean, this is another picture
-
of your other two kids, Rory and Phoebe,
-
along with Paul Farmer.
-
Bringing up three children
-
when you're the world's richest family
-
seems like a social experiment
-
without much prior art.
-
How have you managed it?
-
What's been your approach?
-
BG: Well, I'd say yeah, overall,
-
the kids get a great education,
-
but you've got to make sure
-
they have a sense of their own ability
-
and what they're going to and do,
-
and our philosophy has been, you know,
-
to be very clear with them:
-
most of the money's going to the foundation,
-
and help them find something they're excited about.
-
We want to strike a balance where they have
-
the freedom to do anything
-
but not, sort of, a lot of money showered on them
-
so they could go out and do nothing.
-
And so far, they're fairly diligent,
-
excited to pick their own direction.
-
CA: I mean, you've obviously
-
guarded their privacy carefully for obvious reasons.
-
I'm curious why you've given me permission
-
to show this picture now here at TED.
-
MG: Well, it's interesting.
-
As they get older, they so know
-
that our family belief is about responsibility,
-
that we are in an unbelievable situation
-
just to live in the United States
-
and have a great education,
-
and we have a responsibility
to give back to the world.
-
And so as they get older
-
and we are teaching them
-
— they have been to so many
countries around the world —
-
they're saying, you know,
-
we do want people to know that we believe
-
in what you're doing, mom and dad,
-
and it is okay to show us more.
-
So we have their permission to show this picture,
-
and I think Paul Farmer is probably going to put it
-
eventually in some of his work.
-
But they really care deeply
-
about the mission of the foundation, too.
-
CA: I mean, you've easily got enough money
-
despite your vast contributions to the foundation
-
to make them all billionaires.
-
Is that your plan for them?
-
BG: Nope. No. They won't have anything like that.
-
They need to have a sense
-
that their own work is meaningful and important.
-
We read an article long, actually,
before we got married,
-
where Warren Buffett talked about that,
-
and we're quite convinced that it wasn't a favor
-
either to society or to the kids.
-
CA: Well speaking of Warren Buffett,
-
something really amazing happened in 2006,
-
when somehow your only real rival
-
for richest person in America
-
suddenly turned around and agreed to give
-
80 percent of his fortune
-
to your foundation.
-
How on Earth did that happen?
-
I guess there's a long version
and a short version of that.
-
We've got time for the short version.
-
BG: All right. Well Warren was a close friend,
-
and he was going to have his wife Suzie
-
give it all away.
-
Tragically, she passed away before he did,
-
and he's big on delegation, and
-
— (Laughter) —
-
he said—
-
CA: Tweet that.
-
BG: — you know, if he's got somebody
who is doing something well,
-
and is willing to do it at no charge,
-
maybe that's okay. But we were stunned.
-
MG: Totally stunned.
BG: We had never expected it,
-
and it has been unbelievable.
-
It's allowed us to increase our ambition
-
in what the foundation is to do quite dramatically.
-
Half the resources we have
-
come from Warren's mind-blowing generosity.
-
CA: And I think you've pledged that
-
by the time you're done,
-
more than, or 95 percent of your wealth,
-
will be given to the foundation.
-
BG: Yes.
-
CA: And since this relationship, it's amazing—
-
(Applause)
-
And recently, you and Warren
-
have been going around trying to persuade
-
other billionaires and successful people
-
to pledge to give, what,
-
more than half of their assets for philanthropy.
-
How is that going?
-
BG: Well, we've got about 120 people
-
who have now taken this giving pledge.
-
The thing that's great is that we get together
-
yearly and talk about, okay,
-
do you hire staff and give to them?
-
We're not trying to homogenize it.
-
I mean, the beauty of philanthropy
-
is this mind-blowing diversity.
-
People give to some things.
-
We look and go, "Wow."
-
But that's great.
-
That's the role of philanthropy
-
is to pick different approaches,
-
including even in one space, like education.
-
We need more experimentation.
-
But it's been wonderful, meeting those people,
-
sharing their journey to philanthropy,
-
-
how they involve their kids
-
where they're doing it differently,
-
and it's been way more successful than we expected.
-
Now it looks like it'll just keep growing in size
-
in the years ahead.
-
MG: And having people see that other people
-
are making change with philanthropy,
-
I mean, these are people who have
-
created their own businesses,
-
put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas.
-
If they put their ideas and their brain
-
behind philanthropy, they can change the world.
-
And they start to see others doing it, and saying,
-
"Wow, I want to do that with my own money."
-
To me, that's the piece that's incredible.
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CA: It seems to me, it's actually really hard
-
for some people to figure out
-
even how to remotely spend that much money
-
on something else.
-
There are probably some billionaires in the room
-
and certainly some successful people.
-
I'm curious, can you make the pitch?
-
What's the pitch?
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BG: Well, it's the most fulfilling thing
-
we've ever done,
-
and you can't take it with you,
-
and if it's not good for your kids,
-
let's get together and brainstorm
-
about what we can be done.
-
The world is a far better place
-
because of the philanthropists of the past,
-
and the U.S. tradition here, which is the strongest,
-
is the envy of the world.
-
And part of the reason I'm so optimistic
-
is because I do think philanthropy
-
is going to grow
-
and take some of these things
-
government's not just good at
working on and discovering
-
and shine some light in the right direction.
-
CA: The world's got this terrible inequality,
-
growing inequality problem
-
that seems structural.
-
It does seem to me that if more of your peers
-
took the approach that you two have made,
-
it would make a dent
-
both in that problem and certainly
-
in the perception of that problem.
-
Is that a fair comment?
-
BG: Oh yeah. If you take from the most wealthy
-
and give to the least wealthy, it's good.
-
It tries to balance out, and that's just.
-
MG: But you change systems.
-
In the U.S., we're trying to
change the education system
-
so it's just for everybody
-
and it works for all students.
-
I mean that, to me, really changes
-
the inequality balance.
-
BG: That's the most important.
-
(Applause)
-
CA: Well, I really think that most people here
-
and many millions around the world
-
are just in awe of the trajectory
-
your lives have taken
-
and the spectacular degree to which
-
you have shaped the future.
-
Thank you so much for coming to TED
-
and for sharing with us and for all you do.
-
BG: Thank you.
MG: Thank you.
-
(Applause)
-
BG: Thank you.
MG: Thank you very much.
-
BG: All right, good job. (Applause)