Subtitles section Play video
-
Chris Anderson: So, this is an
-
On the basis that a picture
-
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
-
the world's biggest private foundation,
-
it's pretty expensive as vacations go. (Laughter)
-
MG: I guess so. We enjoyed it.
-
CA: 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
-
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's 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
-
is focused there.
-
CA: So, I asked each of you to pick an image
-
that you like that illustrates your 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,
-
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 traveled,
-
"I want to be able to use this shot."
-
I would be there to talk to them
-
and they would bring the conversation around to
-
"But what about the shot I get?"
-
which is an injection they were
-
which is a contraceptive.
-
And I would come back and
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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 --