My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman (2018) s02e05 Episode Script

1
[audience cheering]
Thank you.
Thank you so much.
Hi. Hi.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
That's very nice of you.
You know, I don't want to go on and on
about this, but this is
This experience of working this show,
and it's on Netflix,
and you have to have your own computer,
and it has something to do with gamma rays
and I wouldn't look at it.
But I had another show
and on the other show,
we would have guests on every night
because we could.
The guests that we have on
this show are here
because we want them to be here,
so there's a big, big difference and
[laughing]
The important thing is that we learn
things as we grow.
And so, anything that I can learn now,
I regard as precious,
honest to God,
because, you know,
you still have time to learn
throughout your entire life
and when you leave here,
I think you will be thankful
for the experience
and for the time
you've shared with us here tonight.
I'm going to introduce our guest now.
Are you excited? I'm a little excited.
[audience cheers]
All right.
I want you now to say hello
to the co-chair
of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
Melinda Gates, ladies and gentlemen.
[audience cheers and applauds]
Oh, my gosh.
Very nice to meet you.
I'm very happy to meet you.
Please have a seat.
Thank you very much for being here.
I'm very excited about this
Me too.
for a wide variety of reasons.
And I guess the first question
I would ask you is:
Why me? What are you doing here with me?
[laughs] Well, first of all,
thanks for having me and asking me.
And I love what you said earlier
-about being a continuous learner.
-Yeah.
And I think
Bill and I have a foundation.
We think of ourselves
as being on a learning journey.
And I've recently written a book
called The Moment of Lift,
about gender equality
and I wanted to chat with you about that.
I have I'll tell you something.
Do I call you?
Melinda, please.
-You can call me Dave.
-Okay, great.
This book, The Moment of Lift,
and the title means so many things.
And as you work your way
through this book,
a lot of these experiences
are certainly educational,
overwhelmingly educational,
and jaw-dropping.
I mean, oh, my goodness.
But first,
I have to ask you some questions
that my family wanted me to ask you.
Go for it. [laughs]
My wife, she wants to know
if there is an historical model
for your foundation.
Well, not sort of exactly
the way we run ours now,
but certainly, when we got into this work,
we looked back to learn the lessons,
particularly
from the Rockefeller Foundation
and the Carnegie Foundation.
They helped us understand
by reading about them,
what's philanthropy's role in society
and I think Bill and I came to understand
that, really, what philanthropy can do
that a government can't do
with taxpayer funding
is to take some risks
and if they prove out, then it's up to us
to get government to really scale them up.
In terms of endowment, where do we stand?
Well, Bill's and my foundation
is the largest.
-The largest private, yeah.
-Foundation, right.
We're talking about over $50 billion
in wealth.
-$50 billion? Wow.
-Yeah.
Our foundation really thinks
about where can we uniquely act
in the world?
So, a lot of the work that we do
in the developing world is around health.
If you don't start with great health,
you can't go on to get a great education
-and then live your full potential.
-Yeah.
The absence of polio from the planet.
-That's you, right?
-That's Bill and me. Mm-hmm.
-That's remarkable.
-[audience cheers]
Just to be clear,
we haven't gotten polio yet,
but we are on the verge of getting it.
-Close.
-We are this close.
We are less than 30 cases of polio
in the world
and the places
where the pockets still exist
are where you have incredible violence
and you can't get in,
so on that Afghanistan-Pakistan border
and up.
Sometimes it breaks out in Northern
Nigeria where there's a lot of terrorists.
If you're going into a country
that needs help,
of any description,
in the world of health,
you've got to let them know you're coming,
right? They know you're coming.
-Definitely.
-And they'll meet you
and they'll become your partners
in the project?
Definitely. So, one of the best pieces
of advice I got early in the foundation,
Bill was still working at Microsoft,
former President Carter had come
to visit the foundation in Seattle,
and I said, “President Carter,
what should we know now
that we won't have to relearn,
that you wish
you'd known at the beginning?"
And he said: "Melinda,
every single thing that you do
in another country,
the locals have to own it.
If they don't see it as theirs,
and they don't own it,
you can come in and do some good
for five, ten years, whatever,
but as soon as you leave,
it's gonna go away.
So, when we go in,
we work very closely
with the country government
on their goals,
we see where we have shared priorities,
we work on those things
with the government,
or we work through the nonprofit sector
that exists
Yeah. Now, what if there were tax changes
that heavily burdened
people of great wealth.
Would that cut into the endowment
that was applied
in humanitarian fashion?
Well, one of the things Bill and I have
spoken out actually about before is
we're actually in favor
of progressive taxes.
And we're also in favor of an estate tax,
because we feel like
if you have great wealth,
let's say just as an American,
you have come by that wealth in a way
that you likely could not have done
in another country,
just literally
by being born in this country.
And so we feel like we don't want to live
under a huge inherited system
like in Europe.
Those resources should basically go
back to society,
either through some form of taxation
and/or some form of philanthropy.
Now, my mother-in-law wants to know
[laughs]
Did you do a phone survey before this?
Of family?
-A bit of one, yeah.
-Okay, good.
Wants to know what kind of music you,
your husband and your family listen to.
[laughs] That would be very different
depending on
who you speak with in our family.
So, my 16-year-old probably listens a lot
to Cardi B.
-[audience laughs]
-Yeah.
And when I first met Bill,
I was surprised how much
In fact, one of the ways
I fell in love with him was I'd tease him
about his music collection.
He really likes Frank Sinatra
so we still listen to that quite a bit.
-Nothing wrong with that, by the way.
-I agree.
Absolutely nothing wrong with that.
And now I have a question.
My brother-in-law
[laughing]
is just a flat-out genius,
and so, one day,
I made the mistake of asking him
how computers work.
And he said "It's really simple,"
and I thought, "Thank God,
something really simple,"
and he said, "It's binary,"
and I said, "Uh-huh."
And he said, "It's all ones and twos."
An hour later,
I thought I was gonna have an aneurysm.
[laughs] And it's zeroes and ones.
-Well, okay.
-Sorry, just gotta say it.
Well, see
[audience cheers]
Sorry.
So maybe he's not the genius I thought.
No, that's my mistake.
This gives you an idea how much of this
I was able to retain,
It's zeros and ones. Zero and ones what?
Well
They're bits. They're bits of information.
And then you can think of it
as packets of information
that gets spread between registers
on a silicon board.
We all get that?
[audience applauds]
So, just one little quick aside.
So, when I first met Bill
and when I told him about a certain
kind of a computer back then,
a mainframe, that I had to simulate
on a personal computer,
I saw his jaw kind of go
kind of dropping like,
"She actually knows her chops."
I might have fallen in love with him
for his music,
he might've fallen in love with me
'cause of the bits. I'm not sure. [laughs]
What is it like, as a young woman,
studying computer science?
Was it unusual then for a woman
to be hired in the computer industry?
[Melinda Gates]
After I got my MBA at Duke,
because I'd worked for IBM two summers,
I had kind of a standing offer.
So, when I went to IBM in Dallas,
I went to meet with my hiring manager
at IBM, it was a woman,
and she said,
"Are you ready to accept our offer?"
"I've turned everything else down,
but I have one more interview.
It's with this little software company
at the time, Microsoft, in Seattle."
And she said,
"Do you want a piece of advice?"
I was like, "Sure."
And she said,
"If I were you
and you get an offer from Microsoft,
you should take it."
And she floored me,
and I said, "Why do you say that?"
And she said, "Because if you're
as good as I think you are,
your chance for advancement,
particularly as a woman
who has a tech degree,
in a small company, a startup,
you will advance really fast."
And so, in fact
when I got a job offer from Microsoft,
I decided to take it.
I got an offer from Xerox. [clears throat]
[audience laughs]
What about women then
in the computer science
and the computer industry,
have we reached
a level of empowering women
to pursue these as careers?
-Yes? You're shaking your head no.
-No.
When I was in college in the late 1980s,
we thought women were on the rise
in computer science,
just like medicine and law.
Computer science was on the rise,
and we got as high as 37%.
It peaked right around the time
I was in school,
and then it took a precipitous drop
and we're now at 19% of
computer science graduates are women.
And I started to use my voice
a few years ago
to speak out about this in the US
because I think it is so vitally important
that women and people of color have
a seat at the table
and are designing our future.
When I think about how pervasive
technology already is in society,
I mean, we never dreamed,
when I was at Microsoft, back then,
you know, of having
that much computing power in our pockets.
We can't even imagine, honestly,
where it's going in 30 years.
And so if women and people
of color don't have a seat
at the table of designing our future,
we are baking into our systems bias
without even realizing it.
So I could name for you
the women who are
in artificial intelligence right now
on two hands in the United States
and yet, that's going to be our system
by which we are passing information
and making judgments,
even about people or their health.
Doesn't make any sense.
But in the tech world, what can be done
to make a change,
to bring more women into it,
to make them comfortable,
to make them want to be in the tech world?
Yeah, I think we have to think
about multiple pathways into tech,
whether it's in middle school,
whether it's in high school,
whether it's in college.
There isn't just one way to go.
It's not just that guy programming,
young, under his hoodie.
And so one of the things--
-I'm sorry. Doing what?
-[laughs]
A guy who's programming under his hoodie,
you know.
They put their sweatshirt up
with their hood on.
-They're in there coding.
-Yeah.
And that's the sort of culture
that is embodied in Silicon Valley,
honestly,
is that you have to be that guy
in the hoodie
who codes all night and all day.
Your zeros and ones, right?
That's right. The zeros and ones.
And yet,
I know a lot of amazing programmers,
women, who don't look anything like that,
you know?
They dress well, they have a life,
they have a social life.
You know, so one of the places I started
to look a little bit more closely at
is how do we help young women get
that first bit of experience?
If we can get them started
with meaningful internships,
we'll build their resumé,
so then all the networks of power
open up to them.
[David Letterman]
You know where we are now.
[Gates] We're at the Cornell Tech campus.
-On Roosevelt Island.
-On Roosevelt Island.
What fascinates me about this place is,
I haven't been here in 20 years,
it's delightful.
And it and it used to be,
as you gazed out,
you would see,
bobbing up and down in the current,
corpses of mob informants.
-And that was fun.
-[gasps]
This wasn't here before,
and this is why we're here,
is this unbelievable edifice
and we're gonna see the intern, Yasmin.
[Gates]
Yeah. She's part of this WiTNY program,
which is Women in Technology
and Entrepreneurship in New York,
that I and others help fund.
She's from City University
here in New York,
and she got an amazing internship here
that she's gonna tell us about.
I was born and raised in Queens.
Did your parents come from Yemen?
My mother was born here,
my father, he came when he was
about 23 years old.
The path that usually Yemeni woman pursue
is after high school,
you settle down, you get married
and have children.
I just knew in my heart that, you know,
this wasn't the path
that I wanted to take.
I always loved school.
I always loved math.
I had a passion and an eagerness to learn,
but I needed the approval from my father
to really pursue college.
That must've just driven you crazy.
It was difficult,but,after three years,
I'd really just had enough,
and I really decided that I want
to be honest with my parents,
you know, and tell them
that I really want to continue college
and just take on a different path
for myself.
-[Letterman] What convinced him?
-There was finally one debate
where I just spoke up and I said,
"Listen. Although the Yemeni
tradition forbids me to go to college,
my religion actually commands me
to seek education."
In Islam, you know,
women are encouraged to pursue college.
Everyone really is, all Muslims, right?
What was that day like when he said,
"You know what? You're right"?
That was all I needed to hear.
That same day, I looked for any colleges
that were open for applicants.
I got accepted and that was the beginning
of my educational training.
And these internships give women ways
to start taking their college education,
but then building their skills
and their resumés
so that companies see them
and say, "I wouldn't have normally
been able to even look for a Yemeni woman
or somebody who's as diverse,"
but then they pull them into these roles.
So, this is Avery.
[Letterman] This is Avery. Now
I did silly things when I was in college,
but I never brought a car up
to my dorm room.
But it's not really a car in a room.
-This is a laboratory, isn't it?
-Yes.The purpose of this project is
to see how different people interact
with the self-driving car.
Avery is doing the work, right?
Avery is actually not a self-driving car.
They think the car
is taking commands from them,
but I'm actually the one in control.
We wanted to see how would they react
when the car did or didn't listen to
their instructions.
[sniffs] It's got that
autonomous car smell.
Does it?
How fast will Avery go?
Depending on how fast you want to go.
[laughing]
How fast do you want to go, Melinda?
What should I know
about your driving skills?
We've got to
-How about the seat belts?
-Seat belts, please.
Ow! My hand! Jeez! God!
Whew! Wow, that's gonna hurt.
[Yasmin] Enjoy the ride.
-Okay, thank you.
-[Gates] Are we on?
Yes.
All right, so, head east on Market Street.
East on Market.
[Gates] Okay.
-[Letterman] This is cool.
-We are creeping along.
I already love it. It's fantastic.
Now, do I have an accelerator,
or I can't do anything, can I?
You can do anything.
Turn right on Montgomery.
-All right.
-[Letterman laughs] This is a little
-Yeah. Hello!
-Okay.
-Turn left on Mission Street.
-As fast as you can.
-Make the turn as fast
-[Gates] Really?
-You want to bank the turn?
-Make it at 100 miles an hour.
-Oh, there it went. Ooh! Okay. Whoa, whoa.
-That didn't go 100.
Okay, turn left onto Fremont.
[Letterman] Boy, it must be a holiday.
There's nobody out.
-This is like ghost town San Francisco.
-I know.
-Don't you wish the traffic was like this?
-Do you suppose something happened?
Look out, there's a guy!
-Whoa!
-Whoa! About tapped a guy.
That'll get you points.
[Gates] He's a bit robotic, too.
I think he just came from the gym.
[laughs] I don't know.
Oh, we're gonna go left on Mission, okay.
I think we're gonna get there. Okay.
Turn right onto Main Street.
Here comes a dog.
Whoa! He's not moving very fast.
-That's I think that's an elk.
-[laughs]
Almost four years later,
my father couldn't be more proud.
My younger sister, who's graduating
with her associate's this May,
I cannot wait to attend her graduation,
I'm her biggest fan.
Is that right? That's lovely.
That's just lovely.
And actually, last September,
I attended my first aerospace
technical conference.
-Aerospace technical conference?
-Yep.I learned all about space.
They're the best, aren't they?
I go every year.
It was-- Oh, you do?
No.
[laughing]
-All I want is to see how fast we can go.
-Okay, Dave wants to go faster.
Okay, go as fast as you can go
on Spear Street.
Punch it.
-Punch it.
-Okay, here we go.
-[Gates] Punch it.
-[Letterman] Yeah, now.
Ooh, look at that. 66!
-[Letterman] Great.
-Whoa! We skid around the curb! Oh!
-[Gates] Oh!
-This is fantastic. I mean, if this
[laughs] Now you like it!
I love it now.
Ooh,
the back end's coming out a little bit.
-Whoa!
-[Gates] We are fishtailing. 85, 87.
-[screams, laughs] Whoa!
-This is not bad.
We're slowing down.
Brick wall. Take a right.
No! [imitates crashing]
[Letterman] Now, this is gonna
I think the airbags would've deployed.
Yeah, this is gonna
screw up our insurance. Nice job.
[Gates] Thank you. High five.
-That was exciting.
-It was.
Especially the fishtail around the turns.
The fishtails, yeah,
and then the tank-slapper.
Was that you or was that the program?
That was actually me,
so if you saw moments where Melinda was
giving a particular instruction,
and Avery did not listen,
I was actually antagonizing,
and I took over the scene, yes.
[Gates] You must be crossing disciplines
between computer science and what else?
Psychology?
I improved my writing skills
through this internship,
I learned public speaking,
I took on the role of being a researcher,
right now just being tech-savvy
and writing code.
It wasn't just software engineering.
So, all these different fields really gave
me a skill set
that'll prepare me for the real world,
the real workforce.
So, in your computer activities,
your classes,
and your work here with Avery,
how is that relationship with you
and men who are in the same programs?
Yes, well, at times, during my classes,
I do sense off these vibes
and kind of these looks
from the other male students, right?
Maybe I'm pressing over their territory
or something in the particular field.
But why do they feel
that it's their territory?
How did it become territorial?
[Yasmin] I feel as though this has been
the cultural norm.
-It's more of an inherent bias we have.
-Yeah.
And it's both men and women
who have this bias against
"Well, maybe she wouldn't be
a good engineer, a good scientist,
or a good computer scientist,
or good at math."
And so we have just overcome those biases.
We know women can be great engineers.
When you were in college,
did you consider yourself a feminist?
No.
No, I did not.
Was that?
Did that movement not land near you?
Did it go around you?
How did you not?
[audience laughs]
[laughs] It must have gone around me.
I was just this girl trying
to get through college.
When you do computer science,
you kind of got your head down,
focused on zeros and ones, to be honest.
Tell me about it!
[laughs] I spent a lot of time in
the computer lab,
and, honestly, it wasn't until
my oldest daughter Jen was born,
and she was about three
and there was a nun in Seattle
who I'd gotten to know
and she asked me to come speak
at the school,
and I did a talk, and I did a Q&A,
and she asked me on stage
if I was a feminist.
I didn't know how to answer the question.
It literally kind of took my breath away.
And I realized I hadn't really wrestled
with that myself
and now, I can 100% tell you
I'm an ardent feminist.
-I
-[audience cheers and applauds]
But I have to be honest,
I kind of came at this with the lens,
for the the United States,
of I was traveling so much
in the developing world
on behalf of the foundation,
you know, Kenya, Tanzania,
Bangladesh, Malawi,
and I would meet these women
in these villages
and I would think, "Oh, but if they just
had a little more power,
if they had their voice
a little bit more"
And it wasn't until I was flying home
on one of those trips
that I turned the question back on myself
and I said,
"We're so lucky in the United States,"
and then I thought,
"How far are we really?"
You know, 5% of CEOs of Fortune 500 are
women here.
2% of venture capital funding
goes to women.
You know, women in Congress,
we just crossed slightly over 23%.
So, I think we have to, as a society,
say, "Okay, what can we do about it?"
You know, how can we make sure
we get equality in our homes,
-in our community, in our places of work?
-Well, let me interrupt you.
How can we? What is the key there?
I mean, you say that, yes,
we know we all should be doing it.
I think you have to start in your home.
Let's be honest, Bill was the top of
the biggest, at the time, you know,
software company in the world.
And so, of course,
he was used to being "The" CEO.
So, we had to, when he retired,
really look at that and say,
"Okay, well,
why am I driving the kids to school more?"
"Why am I, you know,
who's getting them ready for school?"
"Who's participating in what roles?"
Unless you have those uncomfortable
conversations in your marriage
and you make sure you have equality there,
at least for me, I didn't feel
like I could be out in the community
talking about equality
and then in my workplace.
It's, I think, like all forms of change,
until you get the right prescription
in your glasses,
you're not seeing it correctly.
Yeah.
It's true.
[audience applauds]
Optometrists in the audience, thank you.
I can give you an example, actually.
Our oldest daughter, Jen,
we have three children,
she was about to go to preschool,
and Bill and I completely agreed
where we wanted her to go
for preschool through fifth grade,
this one school.
It was not close to our house.
We were really wrestling with this
and he finally said, "Melinda, I get it.
I will drive two days a week."
And so he started doing it
and he loved the conversations
with her in the car, etc, etc.
About two or three weeks
into the school year,
a couple of moms kind of sidled up to me,
they said, "See what's going on
in the classroom?"
And I said, "Well, it's funny,
I see more dads driving,"
and they all said, "We went home
and said to our husbands,
"If Bill Gates can drive his kids,
so can you."
-[audience laughs and applauds]
-That's a delightful story.
That's about what it is, though, isn't it?
You wrestle with it and then you live it
and then it turns out, accidentally,
you're role modeling it.
But to see an example, large or small,
left or right, up or down, is
how knowledge or awareness is transmitted.
And so I think you start in your home,
then you look at where you have equality
in your community,
equality in your workplace,
and you use your voice.
You speak up and you decide
you're going to change things.
For instance,
the money in the venture capital firms
is held in the hands by men.
Only 6% of VC partners are women.
So, when I talk to women,
and I've talked to many
who've run the gauntlet
of the venture capital community,
to try and raise funds for a business idea
that they have,
they don't succeed.
For example, a person of color
ran the gauntlet
on what they call Sand Hill Road,
to get venture capital funding.
This person had a great idea
about bringing together
women's hair braiding,
which is done a lot
in the African-American community
and making it easier
and dropping the price.
And none of the guys on
Sand Hill Road understood it.
They'd say, "We went home
and talked to our wives.
They don't get that."
They're white women, right?
They don't braid their hair very much.
Turns out, it's an enormous business
and finally, a woman got funded
and it's a great success.
I happen to be privileged.
I happen to be a white woman
who has capital.
So, I finally decided it wasn't enough
for me to talk about this.
I have capital.
I should move some there,
and I should try this.
And I'm willing to take that risk
and to try it.
Just like Bill and I take risks
and try things in science with innovation.
Some of them, we get a negative return on
and some, we get a 20% return on.
I should be willing to take risks
on other types of businesses.
-[Letterman] Bill, nice to see you.
-[Bill Gates] Hey, how are you?
-[Letterman] I'm good, thank you.
-You look great.
-How have you been?
-Great. I'm having fun.
Did that Microsoft thing ever take off?
It finally did. Took a little while.
Do you remember the last time I saw you,
we put you in a lab coat and a hard hat,
and we discussed the viability and future
of the internet.
What about this internet thing?
Know anything about that?
Sure.
What the hell is that exactly?
Everybody can have their own homepage,
companies are there.
The latest information.
It's wild, what's going on.
Knowing me the little you know me now,
what am I missing here?
What do I need?
Well, you could find other people who have
the same unusual interests you do.
-And
-[audience laughs and applauds]
Do you mean the troubled loner chat room
on the internet?
I was skeptical.
Yeah, well, it's taken people by surprise.
How busy are you today, honestly?
I choose to work long hours
because I love my work at the foundation.
Yeah, I've had two careers.
This one's in partnership with Melinda.
It really was thrilling
to talk to your wife.
Not because she's your wife.
Because she's a person who will have made
an improvement on this planet.
And I know you're a big part of that
as well.
-Let's eat something.
-Okay.
Do you still eat peanut butter and jelly?
Sure.
When's the last time you had one?
Actually, I eat a lot of hamburgers,
so peanut butter and jelly,
maybe if we're on a picnic or something.
Not as often as when I was growing up.
When I was a kid, my mom used to make
peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
And then I realized that my problem
with those sandwiches was the jelly.
-You make one, a typical jelly sandwich.
-Okay.
I'll make one of mine.
It's peanut butter
and Worcestershire sauce.
That, I've never heard of.
I'm going to make one
and then we'll split them.
It'll be like a little taste test.
How are the kids?
Actually, really doing really well.
They ever ask about me?
-[laughs] Not really.
-No, of course they don't.
All right, now, here.
That's a lot.
Oh, come on, Bill.
I think there's salt in there.
So what?
Put enough on there
so it looks like a head wound.
Okay.
Now, you can just do it this way,
that's the cafe cut,
or you can do it this way,
this is the country club.
What do you want to do?
-Perpendicular?
-Okay.
Now, I'm going to go with the jelly.
All right, we're going with the jelly.
Oh, God!
Classic. Reminds me of my happy childhood.
-All right, have you cleansed your palate?
-Completely.
-Give it a try.
-Yeah, all right.
Ooh!
Huh?
Huh. I'm used to that on meat.
-Says hello, doesn't it?
-Yeah.
It's got that Whoa!
I don't pretend to know
what to tell you to do with your money.
See if you can't get Warren Buffett
into that.
Honestly, I think it's an acquired taste.
No, but you love it, right?
No, I think it's novel.
And I think you're used to it,
and I'm not.
Okay.
You kind of just tossed that off
with disdain.
Well, I think I'm full.
When I was speaking with Melinda,
we we both agreed
that you're a man of vision.
You cut that out.
Yes. I am. Definitely.
So, I have a list of things,
just ideas, to think about, to ruminate.
Okay.
-I wrote them down.
-Okay.
You got more than one.
[laughs] How dumb do you think I am
Just one idea? Oh, no.
-We hear a lot about solar power.
-We do.
What about lunar power?
Yeah, the magnitudes are not huge,
but it's good point.
Television that watches you.
You know, it sees if you're there,
turns on and off.
More outer space stuff.
-More.
-More. Yeah.
Like satellites?
I don't know. You're the genius.
You figure it out.
What about special glasses
that allow you to see in the dark?
Yeah.
Internet app that will screw up elections.
[both laugh]
Yeah, there are people working on that.
Here, jet packs.
Where are the damn jet packs?
Getting the energy density
and the control
There's still people working on it.
Have you thought about
a Microsoft jet pack division?
Well, if we knew how to do it
we would go for it.
What about this?
How about a shirt
that looks good tucked in?
You think shirts look better
not tucked in?
I didn't realize this was an issue
until two years ago
When you tucked your shirt in?
[both laugh]
No. When all of a sudden,
a guy shows up on television,
saying, "If you're anything like me,
you spend hours and hours
looking for shirts
that look good tucked in
and not tucked in.
Well, guess what.
I've solved your problem.
I've created a shirt
that looks good untucked,"
and I think, "Who is this brainless putz?"
I always tuck my shirt in.
-Hey, you want another sandwich?
-No.
You have three children.
One's here with us tonight.
I believe Jennifer is here.
-Jennifer's here, my oldest.
-Can we get a look at Jennifer?
Jen, are you here? There's Jen.
Hi. Nice to meet you.
All right, and Jennifer is in college,
out of college?
Just out of college.
What does Jennifer want to do?
Without embarrassing her.
-What would she like to do?
-[audience laughs]
I think Jen's planning to go on
to medical school.
Medical school. Good for her.
[Gates] And then we have Rory,
who's 19, and he's in college.
And our youngest, Phoebe,
who's still at home.
She's a sophomore in high school.
And do we know which direction
those two will head?
They're still figuring it out.
Rory seems quite interested in the law,
so we'll see,
and Phoebe, I wouldn't be surprised
if Phoebe doesn't do something in Africa
long term, but we'll see.
I have to ask you about Warren Buffett.
I have no idea what this guy
All I know is he owns Dairy Queen.
[laughs]
And I believe,
through the research I've done,
that he invented the Blizzard.
-That's all I can tell you.
-[laughs] He eats the Blizzard.
But I don't know, where did he get
billions and billions of dollars?
He's the smartest investor of our time
by a long shot.
He built this company, Berkshire Hathaway,
that's a huge number of companies,
including Dairy Queen and many others,
and it's that incredible investing,
not for the short-term,
but over the long-term.
Have you been to Dairy Queen?
I've been to Dairy Queen, yeah.
What do you get at Dairy Queen?
I like the one that is the cone
and then the ice cream
that's both the chocolate
and the vanilla together,
that comes out of the machine.You know,
you pull it [imitates machine]
I don't think there's a special name
for it.
Yeah. When I was a kid, Dairy Queen,
you'd get one of two things.
You'd either just get
the plain vanilla cone
-with the little thing on the top
-That swirly thing.
Yeah. Or they would dunk it in chocolate.
Yeah, I didn't like that as much.
What?
Sorry.
You don't like the chocolate-dipped cone?
Not so much.
I like chocolate,
not the chocolate-dipped.
You're gonna hear from Warren.
I'll especially hear from Warren
'cause his favorite thing is
actually a Dilly Bar.
The Dilly Bar is I'll just say this.
-[laughs]
-Get yourself an Eskimo Pie
and then have a Dilly Bar and call me.
Okay.
Go into Dairy Queen,
get the chocolate dip,
and you can thank me later.
Okay. [laughs]
I'm glad we got that cleared up.
Let me first say a couple of other things
about Warren, if I can, if that's okay.
Warren's had an incredible effect
on Bill's and my life. Incredible.
And Warren, for Bill and me,
has just been this North Star of values.
Values, values, values.
The way he lives is the way he talks
is the way he is,
and Warren had planned
that this vast fortune
that had been amassed
from Berkshire Hathaway,
from all of his investing,
he had planned to give it away
through his own foundation,
The Susan T. Buffett Foundation,
that he'd started with his wife Susie,
and then she unfortunately passed away
in 2004.
So Warren came to us in 2006
and surprised us
when he said that
because we had such similar values
and and our mission statement,
he believed in,
that he would give these resources away
through our foundation.
But it is almost indescribable for me
to tell you the effect Warren has had on
our marriage, as a couple,
his effect on me,
on when I'm afraid to do something,
like coming out with this book.
He's like this champion.
He's like the wind beneath your wings,
and he just has a moral compass
that has kept Bill and me, over the years,
on the straight and narrow,
and that's Warren.
-That's lovely.
-Yeah.
I believe I have this correct,
that you, rightly so,
feel that the single most
empowering aspect for women
is contraception.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
[Gates] As I would be out traveling
to all these countries,
I would be there to talk to women
in the clinic line about vaccines.
That is the shot they would get in the arm
for their children,
and women and men will tell you,
around the world,
about how important vaccines are.
They will line up,
they'll walk for hours to get them.
So, I would be there to talk about that,
but as I stayed longer
or as I interviewed women
a little bit more in line,
they would get me aside
and they'd say, "But what about my shot?"
"What about my shot?"
Well, in Africa, in various countries,
the predominant form of birth control,
contraceptives that women use,
is a shot called Depo-Provera.
You get it once a quarter
and they would say,
"I came to this clinic,
I walked for 10 kilometers
with my kids in the heat.
It's not here.
Don't you understand?
This is a life-and-death crisis.
If I have another child, I can't feed it.
I can't feed the ones I have."
And so, as I came back home
and would look at the data,
I realized, oh, my gosh,
yes, we were stocking in condoms
in the developing world
because of HIV/AIDS,
but over and over, women would tell me,
if I was alone with them,
"I can't negotiate a condom
in my marriage.
I'm either suggesting
he was unfaithful and has AIDS
or I'm suggesting I have AIDS,"
and so it turns out, those stories
It turns out there are
over 200 million women
that want contraceptives today
that don't have access,
and it is the greatest anti-poverty tool
we have.
No single country in the world has lifted
themselves out of poverty
without first making sure women have
access to contraceptives.
Right. Yeah, I think the statistic
in the book that reflects this is
the single largest killer of teenage girls
-is childbirth.
-Is childbirth.
And yet, if they can space the births
three years apart,
she's more likely to survive
and her child's more likely to survive.
Her child is twice as likely to make
it to their next birthday
if they're spaced three years apart.
It's soul-crushing
and then the numbers are,
like you say, it's not like half a dozen,
it's millions and millions.
I mean, what chance do we have numerically
against this?
Well, here's how we know it's possible,
is that in every country in the world
where you've given access
to modern contraceptives,
it only takes one generation
for them to be fully uptake
and to start to see
the birth rate decline.
Every single country in the world,
I don't care if you're talking about Peru
or Colombia
or the United States or Europe,
once they have consistent access,
women will use it
and what they'll also do is
they'll do it covertly
without their husband knowing it.
That's what I was going to ask.
How is
Is it an easy sell
for the male in the relationship?
Most of the time, no,
especially in West Africa,
and that's why women in Africa will tell
you they like this shot,
this Depo-Provera,
because she walks to the clinic
when he's off at the field,
she gets her shot,
and he doesn't know that she's had it.
Catholic family, raised Catholic.
You got a call from the pope
on birth control.
"What's going on?"
-[audience laughs]
-Yeah.
So, I would say it was about 2009 or 2010.
I'd already been doing this
for almost a decade.
And I had to really wrestle with my faith
because I am a practicing Catholic
and, you know, the Catholic Church says
contraceptives are not okay.
And yet, I know I use them.
My children
I was lucky to get pregnant,
but my kids are spaced three years apart.
There's no coincidence in that.
I just kept thinking we cannot
I cannot stand by and let these women die.
I can't stand by and let babies die.
I just can't.
And yet my religion that I grew up in is
saying this other thing to me
and I finally decided that, for me,
social justice is taking my spirituality,
which, now, I would say is
a blended spirituality,
and putting that in practice in the world.
And I believe, morally,
we need to deliver access
to contraceptives.
And so I decided to go against
my Catholic Church teaching.
I led a very broad coalition of
governments and private citizens,
but mostly governments, in 2012,
to raise money.
We raised $2.6 billion
on behalf of contraceptives
for women around the world.
And I just thought, at the end of the day,
it was the right thing to do.
Now, you tell me
I don't care what you have in Seattle.
-What is it, the Puget Sound?
-Puget Sound.
-But how about this?
-This is pretty great.
Not bad at all.
Missing a few seals and eagles.
-We'll get them.
-Okay.
And then they had the smallpox sanitarium.
[Gates] Oh.
Smallpox is
The only disease eradicated
from the planet.
-Is that right?
-The only.
If we get polio eradicated,
it'll only be the second human disease
ever eradicated
from the face of the planet.
Well, you know, that's remarkable
because when I was a kid,
I was of that era when it was like
you went to bed scared to death.
And what about people in this country
who choose,
and I guess it's their decision,
not to not to vaccinate kids, loved ones?
I tell those people
they are making a huge mistake.
I fully vaccinate my kids
because I think people forget some
of the scares of polio.
I had an aunt, who I'm very close to,
who had polio as a child
and people were scared of these diseases
and we forget there's herd immunity
by vaccinating our children.
Yeah, that's the thing.
It's not just you and your kids, it's--
-You are endangering
-Others.
Yeah, untold numbers, really.
Yeah, like you see these measles outbreaks
that come up in the United States.
Children die of measles,
so to not vaccinate your kid
against measles,
that doesn't make any sense.
Right now, I have a dose of hydrophobia.
What is hydrophobia?
-Rabies.
-Oh.
-[laughing]
-Okay.
But I think it's just the 24-hour kind.
[both laugh]
I keep thinking of things from the book
that I feel,
in fact, when we're finished here,
there's no real reason to buy.
[audience laughs]
No, no, no. That's not true.
We want everybody to buy it. [laughs]
There's a story about a poor girl
and everybody's excited.
"We're gonna have a party tomorrow,
so we have to clean up the house,"
and the little girl is ten years old
and excited, to a degree,
and then she finds out
why they're having a party,
and the party
for this ten-year-old girl is
To marry her off to somebody else.
And many girls are tricked
by their families into child marriage.
That is condemning a girl
to a life of a poverty.
You know, one in three girls
are married off before age 15,
one in nine before age 18.
And when you marry her off,
she basically becomes a slave
in the other person's house,
and she leaves her community,
and she goes where she knows nobody.
And sometimes, blindfolded
when they're taken to the new communities.
Often blindfolded.
-For the purpose of
-Not knowing how to come back home
-'cause they'll run away if they can.
-Oh, my God.
They will run away.
They try to run away all the time.
I mean, that girl that you described,
she was a child.
I mean, when I talked to her,
she was like a little baby bird.
She could hardly even speak.
Right, you want to talk about
one of the most disempowering things
you can do to a girl,
marry her off or harass her,
either abusively with your voice
or sexually.
I mean, you want to shut a girl
or a woman up, you do those things.
Can I tell a story? Do you mind?
Please.
I was in India,
on a train from New Delhi to Lucknow.
And along the train route,
I observed piles and piles of refuse,
like you had not seen anywhere,
not even here in New York,
and it was just
And then you would see people in
these piles of garbage and trash,
and it was not a little bit here
and a little bit there.
It was mile after mile after mile.
These people could not be farther out
on the margins.
Tell what you talk about in the book
about those people.
So, I'm sure most people have heard
that there's a group of people in India
called the untouchables,
but the lowest of the low in India are
the Musahar, which are the rat-eaters,
and they literally eat rats.
And they are often the garbage-pickers
and sometimes,
they'll actually live in the garbage.
So, the story that I tell is
about Sister Sudha.
She's an amazing woman who I met.
She started a girl's school,
just for girls,
and she goes to local villages
and finds girls
and then she brings them
and gives them uniforms,
helps them clean up, to her school,
and they are these Musahar girls,
and she talks about when they come in,
their eyes are completely cast down
because everywhere they've gone,
in their home, in their village,
when they walk around,
they're told they're the worst.
They're told
they're the lowliest of the low.
And this speaks to self-esteem,
how fragile that is
and how significant it is to one's life.
To everyone's life.
And so, to be told over and over again,
"You're untouchable,"
-society telling you you're untouchable.
-A rat-eater.
A rat-eater.
So, she brings these girls in
and she gives them an education.
She actually teaches them karate, too,
so that they can defend themselves
'cause she knows they'll need that
when they go back to their communities,
and she touches them a lot.
She make sure she hugs them.
When we would walk around,
she'd hold somebody's hand,
the girls would come up and touch me.
But over time,
when they get more and more educated,
they start to lift up,
and their gaze lifts up.
And they start to see themselves
as something
society never saw them before.
And she took a group of these girls
to a local karate competition,
actually in New Delhi,
and they won, they did quite well,
and then did well at the national level
and she decided she needed to raise money
to take them to a global competition.
When they went to a global competition
and saw how other people treated them
with respect
and with grace and with dignity,
what Sister was proving out in the school,
and I've seen it over and over again,
is you educate a girl,
it lifts up her eyes,
and she can question
what she's told in her home.
She can question what society tells her.
She can start to use her voice
and start to say,
"Wait a minute, I'm equal here.
I deserve to have my voice heard.
I deserve to have this service.
I deserve to be able to make a decision
about who I marry."
That's why girls' education is
so incredibly powerful.
You know-- Yes.
Everything
It's interesting, to me,
the equation of these stories,
that you've experienced and witnessed
and know of,
is the same.
It starts out, it couldn't be darker,
it couldn't be uglier,
it couldn't be
just the absence of humanity
and yet, a solution just seems so simple.
For something so complicated
and so crushing,
the solution is not complicated.
That's why I try to bring
so many stories forward in the book,
is there is no one single thing,
there's no one silver bullet.
You just have to start somewhere
and then you keep going,
and I think the reason
I have so many different stories
from different places in the earth
is I want people to understand
how similar we actually all are.
If we connect over our humanity
and we see that in one another,
we want the same things,
then we start to help think
about solutions
or bring resources in or knowledge
to help people lift themselves up.
We all have contributions to make.
We all have to look at ourselves
and say,
"How do we connect over our humanity
and then how do we right society
and create equality?"
How many people like you are
in that situation?
Are there, I don't know, a thousand people
seeing this and doing something about it?
Are there 100,000 people helping?
There are certainly thousands of people
in the developing world
working on this, absolutely,
in various nongovernmental organizations
or in governments.
There's heroes everywhere.
And what I tell people back
in the United States is
that you can connect
with one of those people,
you can go online
and give $1,000 loan, $100 loan,
to a woman through an organization.
For $10, you can buy a bed net online
and guess what.
That saves a mom and saves a young child
from getting malaria
and malaria's a life-and-death crisis
for children.
So we can do things if we listen
and we connect
and because there are great organizations
doing this work on the ground,
you give money through them
because they're there working in
culturally appropriate ways,
living with these communities.
I don't know what you've heard,
but I don't have billions of dollars.
[laughs]
Nonetheless,
I would like to participate somehow.
How does a person like me participate?
I say to people, you know,
you have a lot of resources.
Besides just your money,
you have your time,
your intellect, your energy, your heart.
Use any of those things to help lift up
somebody in your community.
Whether it's a child struggling
to get an education,
that needs to be tutored,
whether it's
I've worked with my kids
at a local food bank.
Just get started in some way.
Even if you only give an hour a month,
you've got to just start
and over time,
those drops will add up for people
and over time, it moves you to do more.
You know what? It occurs to me,
I live my life as a father.
Every second of my life,
I think, like most parents,
anxiety and fear
for the welfare and benefit of our kids.
We want everything good every second
or we're not right every second.
So that's me.
But you must be inured to some of that,
having seen the world
the way it actually can be.
A woman, actually,
in Nairobi said to me one time
She had a beautiful baby girl
in her arms,
and she said,
"I want every good thing for this child."
"Every good thing,"
and I thought that's universal.
-That's how we feel as parents, right?
-Yes.
And I always say, when I hear this,
why doesn't that keep people
from killing one another?
That love is automatic, irreversible,
universal.
Why doesn't that transcend
to other aspects of life?
I think, sometimes,
we forget about one another's humanity.
I think, sometimes, we forget
that that person that you're angry at,
maybe it's a grown man or a grown woman
who doesn't look like you,
we forget they're somebody's child.
-They were somebody's child.
-Yep.
-They are somebody's child.
-Yep.
And I think when we connect
with one another on a human level
and we see where we're the same,
it's harder then
to look at our differences,
but I think a lot of times,
we resist that humanity.
It's hard to take in.
and we instead go towards the differences
and then we split one another.
I will say I have great envy for you
because the cliché
that everyone offers up is
the key to a successful life is:
did you make a difference
while you were alive on the planet?
And I'm talking to a person
who is making a difference.
Thank you so much.
-[audience applauding, cheering]
-Thank you so much. Wow.
Thank you so much.
Now, let me see
if I have any more of these.
Put another "O" in Google.
Can you do that?
That'd be good. Or another "G."
Yeah. Edible cell phones.
-Okay.
-Edible software.
Edible computers.
Edible plastic.
No, that's nice.
You're combining "edible,"
which is a good thing,
with a lot of different words.
-You want me to leave, don't you?
-No! If you can
But the ideas are not the hard part.
Okay. Well, let me just continue.
[theme music playing]