Melinda Gates on The David Rubenstein Show

[Music] what is the moment of this prefer to but if we can help lift up all women we will change the world then you find sometimes a woman would say take my child it is heartbreaking and that's the story of women many many women and families around the world when somebody called you and said guess what I'm giving you 50 or 60 billion you didn't expect what did you say no I took a walk and we both cried when did you first meet bill he sort of said a bunch of us are going out dancing tonight why don't you come see a big dance he likes to okay okay would you fix your time please well people wouldn't recognize me if my tie was fixable okay just steam it this way all right I [Music] don't consider myself a journalist and nobody else would consider myself a journalist I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though I have a day job running a private equity firm [Music] how do you define leadership what is it that makes somebody tick you have a new book called the moment of lift what is the moment of this referred to the phrase lift well so for me moment of lift I grew up in a family in Dallas Texas and my dad was an Apollo engineer on the Apollo missions and it was when we would go watch that rocket launching and the earth would be shaking and the rocket was rumbling and it finally pushed against the forces of gravity and went to the moon to me that's the same thing I've seen with 20 years of work through the foundation for women that if we can help lift up all women we will change the world but there's a lot of forces pushing women down today it's the largest foundation in the world it has assets of how much now now we have assets of about 50 billion dollars you created the foundation from the wealth created by Microsoft and then one day Warren Buffett called you and Bill and said guess what I don't know what to do with my wealth but I want to give it to you because I like what you're doing is that essentially it that's essentially at Warren's plan was that his wife Suzy was very involved in philanthropy and his plan had been to give it away through the foundation that he and she had but she passed away early unexpectedly and so then yes he came in surprise Villa 9 said that the vast majority would go through our foundation and then 3 that his children had and the Susan T Buffett foundation so when somebody called you and said guess what I'm giving you 50 or 60 billion you didn't expect what did you say thank you or I can't believe this or I can honestly tell you the Bill Nye took a walk after that discussion and we were alone and we both cried and I think we cried both of us because to know Warren's generosity and that we would be able to do even so much more than we were already doing for people around the world it was just unbelievably touching moment and touching moment of friendship ok so when you're doing the work of the foundation the two of you you're going to sub-saharan Africa among other places a lot of travel eventually you decided that you wanted to focus a little bit more on women's issues and one of the first ones you thought about was contraception now you are a committed Catholic and was it difficult for you to say we should focus more of the Foundation's efforts on contraception what was bills review and did you get a lot of flack from people in the Catholic hierarchy yeah so bill was a hundred percent supportive of this decision and he knew that I had learned so much in the developing world from talking to women he knew I'd looked at the data I looked at where we didn't have data and I was able to talk to him about and he knew this is the greatest anti-poverty tool we have the greatest and if you make sure that women have access all over the world two hundred million women were asking the world to have this tool and we weren't delivering it as a world so I knew when I decided to take this on it that the reason we weren't delivering it was political controversy in our own country and religious issues so it was a difficult decision for me because of my Catholic roots I am still Catholic but when I met so many women around the world and they would discuss with me that this was literally a life and death crisis for them as a mom they would say if I have another baby too soon I'll die in childbirth or I have five children it's not fair to my last child or the others to have another one when I can't feed them and so I had to wrestle with my Catholic faith and say what do I believe in I believe in saving lives and so this was the right thing to do and did you find sometimes a woman would say take my child because I can't raise this child more than once so I would be often I learned from Warren's wife Susie as she told me early if you can go in anonymously so I'll go in too many rural settings a woman from the West para khaki pants and a t-shirt I'll give you an example I was in northern India and I'd visited a health clinic so I went into a village to talk to a woman and by the time I was finished speaking with her I asked her could I had one last question I said so what hope do you have her name was Meena what hope do you have and she looked down for a long time she cast her eyes down I thought oh no I've asked something inappropriate and she finally looked up at me and she said the truth is I have no hope I have no hope for feeding this child or that one or educating them please take them home with you and when that happens it was not the first time it had happened to me it is heartbreaking to see a woman who loves her clearly loves her sons that much but to know they would be better off going home with a stranger that's heartbreaking and that's the story of women many many women and families around the world so annually you have a letter that is written to the found a by the foundation heads you and Bill originally was written by Bill and then when you said Bill I want to get some of the women's issues in what did he say yes so first of all the idea for the annual letter came from Warren and Bill and I both thought that was a really good idea however we had three very young children at the time and I was on several boards and working at the foundation as an executive I said bill I don't have time to put pen to paper I just can't do it and Bill said that's okay I'll do it and so bill started writing it and he did a great job but he got very used to writing it alone so when this contraceptive initiative that I was leading came out I said bill I really want to write about this in the annual letter and he felt like the annual letter was going quite well from his perspective and so we had some difficult discussions at home and I finally wrote a sidebar in the annual letter the next year we discussed it again before pen was put to paper and I wrote a piece of the annual letter about a third and the next year we had another discussion and I wrote half and now I always write half of the annual letter we have to sometimes have those uncomfortable conversations bill and I believe in equality but did we really have it in our voice not yet and so we've worked on that systematically over time and now I can tell you my husband is a hundred percent committed to making sure I have my voice fully in the world okay so like most married couples you have disagreements from time to time sure sure I think every marriage does and I think I believe in marriage you should have a little bit of healthy grist because that's how you move forward another one you talk about is abusive relationships the reason I even write a page in the book about having been in an abusive relationship is that I want people to know it can happen to anyone it silences your voice and millions of women are being either harassed or abused in all kinds of places we can go in and name it and recognize it and all commit to changing it everywhere in the world talk about your beginning of your life you grew up in Dallas and you went to an all-girls Catholic school you went to Duke did you where else did you think of going well actually the first place I thought I wanted to go to was Notre Dom because many of my girlfriends and high-schools dads had gone there but when I went my dad and I went to visit Notre Dame they were phasing out computer science they thought it was a fad I knew I wanted to study computer science in college then I saw Duke they just had a big grant from IBM to great computer labs and I said this is where I'm going you were not on the basketball team right everybody at Duke doesn't play basketball not everybody I went to the games though I love them now you pointed out in your book that interestingly women were more involved in computer science years ago than maybe today why was that yes so at the time I was in college late 1980s we had about 37% of college undergrads and computer science for women so we were on our way up we thought like law and medicine and that has since dropped down to about 17 or 18 percent now it's on a slight uptick to 19 percent we don't actually know why women have dropped out of computer science but there's some theories looking at the data we do have and that is that personal computers were really promoted to boys as a home gaming device and women and girls said I'm out and then it became this self-referential circle you want a special program as a 5 year program where you get an undergraduate degree and an MBA right so after five years you have your degree or about to have your degree so you are interviewing at computer companies there was a small company that was interviewing guests at Duke as well called Microsoft I was part of the first hiring class of MBAs at Microsoft and there were nine men and meet so you go to Microsoft and is it as good as you think well we were changing the world I love that I love the innovative nature I love creating products I did consider leaving Microsoft though within about two years because I was the culture was abrasive quite honestly and I didn't and I could play that game I knew how to do the debate I knew how to stand up for my ideas stand up for my team's ideas but I didn't like myself and I didn't like how he's treating other people when I'd go to the grocery store out in the world or interact with other people and so I thought about leaving and then I thought no I'm just I don't think this will work but I'll try being myself in this culture and just see if it works and if not I'll go take some other job and I started to be myself and I started to build teams that were collaborative and that worked together more and were less abrasive and it turned out I could recruit people from all over the company to my surprise to work on these teams so when did you first meet bill so I actually first met Bill so three weeks into my job I'd never been to New York City I'd never hailed a cab Microsoft sent me to New York for a business meeting and so my female roommate Microsoft used to make you have another roommate when you went traveling on the road my female roommate said hey when you're done with your business meeting across town why don't you come to this dinner and I said great came from across town sat down at a dinner there were two chairs open cuz I came late from this meeting that I was at and I sat down next chair was empty ten minutes later bill came in sat down next to me and so that's when I first met bill about three weeks into the job and he said wow how about getting to know me better he didn't say that then he sort of said a bunch of us are going out dancing tonight why don't you come and I said well I actually have some other plans from somebody I knew from business school tonight and then back at Microsoft a few months later everybody back then used to work late on Friday nights quite late on Saturday you'd work till about 3:00 or 4:00 o'clock and so my car was parked next to his in a parking lot and he struck up a conversation and we talked for a while and then he said he asked me if I would go out with him eventually to this was a Saturday two weeks from Friday night and I said two weeks from Friday night like I was 22 years old you know I was like I have no idea what I'm doing two weeks from Friday night I said that's not quite spontaneous enough for me and he said okay well we give me can I take your phone number so he did called me about an hour later at my apartment and said well is this spontaneous enough for you how about tonight but then he said but I have a user group meeting and a dinner I have to go to so how about a glass of wine downtown I thought a user group meeting on a Saturday night but I agreed to meet him for a glass of wine that was our first date and was it hard to work at the company while people knew that you were dating the CEO founder yeah so I so the first date with Bill I thought I would go out with him once maybe twice and I just thought it will be interesting obviously he's running this company that's doing all these amazing things in the world then when I realized we were gonna start dating more after the first two dates I thought this is tricky and I'm not sure I want to do this because I worked really hard I mean computer science to get my MBA I studied economics and I thought this I'm not sure this is gonna go well for me and I remember talking to my parents on the phone particularly my mom she's like this is not a good idea and I said yeah but he's really interesting and he actually has a big heart that I think a lot of people don't see and I don't know why I've sort of gotten to see that side of him and so what I decided to do was that I would date him but I made it known in the company I didn't try to hide it and I made it incredibly clear to the teams that I was managing that I had these very bright lines and that I did not go home from Microsoft and talk to Bill about work because I'm preparing teams to go into meetings with senior leadership including Bill and they're nervous right and I'm having to prepare them prepare myself and the last thing I could do is go home and talk to him they had to know I had their there back in the meeting and so I just had to have very bright lines around that and we made that work not worked out it did work out it's hard to believe though in the first night that you met him that I can't see Bill going out and being a dancer is he a big dancer I wouldn't have pictured he'd be going out dancing at night he likes to okay okay you decided when your children came that you wanted to spend more time with them and you left Microsoft I surprised Bill told him I wanted to leave Microsoft yes and his reaction was really because he knew I loved working and I loved working at Microsoft and he also knew I had that piece of my brain that loved to be be on the working side so he was quite surprised when I told him I was going to leave did you then go to the foundation full-time after your children were a little bit older my whole issue about how much I was going to work at the foundation is I had it timed for when our kids would get older so I knew until our last daughter went off to preschool I was was not going to be full-time once I knew she was going to be in preschool my plan always then was to work full-time let's talk about the issues of women in sub-saharan Africa and some of the other things you dress in your book you point out that in sub-saharan Africa and other places there are child marriages women are forced to marry at six seven eight years old why is why does that happen quite often a family will marry their daughter off because one they then don't have to feed her so that's less resources from their family and two they also want to protect the family's honors and that is a cultural barrier that is horrible for girls because they then often don't go to secondary school or if they're in secondary school they're pulled out of school they're moved to a village often where they know no one it's not even close to their home it's a horrific thing for a girl she basically becomes the property of her husband's family or her mother-in-law so what have you tried to do to prevent some of this will occur the only way you can overcome cultural barriers is first you go in in very sensitive ways with partners but then the community has to commit to it another area you've talked about in the book is a situation where you have female cutting genital cutting what is the purpose of that and how frequent is that done with young women around the world that is still a tradition particularly in a lot of northern Africa and it is horrific for a young girl young girls bleed to death it is trauma a traumatic event in their lives villagers do it for a different reason they believe it protects the girl's honor they believe that they if they love their daughter they will do it but what I have known is that when education comes in I talked to a village leader an elder and a group of women who used to cut their daughters and no longer do and a group of women who are the cutters who no longer do and they said you know when people bring in education from outside and they talk to us about things how people view this in other places in the world it starts to change our mind and we start to question our past and then we create change another one you talk about is abusive relationships and husbands are very abusive to their spouses in many different ways and you point out in the book and must have been difficult to write about this that you had an abusive relationship as well before you were married yeah so the reason I even write a page in the book about having been in an abusive relationship is that I want people to know it can happen to anyone it's silence is your voice it is a way of silencing a woman's voice in a marriage or in her workplace or her community and for me I lost my self-confidence and millions of women are being either harassed or abused in all kinds of places and again it's silence as women and so we have to talk about this barrier and we have to lift it up and what we can do is collect data about it the world doesn't actually collect data on abuse and then we can go in and name it and recognize it and all commit to changing it everywhere in the world Jackie Kennedy once famously said that if you mess up raising your children nothing else in life really matters when you have great means you don't have money as a buffer my kids have always had an allowance when they wanted something they either had to use their allowance to buy it or put it on their wish list for Christmas and hope their grandparents or we would give it and if they had something they saw in a store they just had to have I'd say well just because I can doesn't mean that I should you now a few years ago you bill and Warren decided to launch the Giving Pledge now what was the purpose of The Giving Pledge and how many people have now signed it yes so the purpose this was Warren's big idea which was the Giving Pledge was to say if you have great wealth if you're a billionaire in our country or anywhere in the world you can afford to give half away and that is the right thing for society bill and Warren are really clear that they could not have founded their businesses if it had been say in Malawi or Mozambique and so we benefit from what society gives us the infrastructure and so those resources at least half should go back to society you've been a big help to us that in this David we now have a hundred and ninety families who've committed to The Giving Pledge in 22 different countries around the world there's a bit of a reaction against wealthy people saying let's put our money here put our money there how do you respond to that I think so what I know to be true is that Bill and Warren and I believe that we should not have this inequity that exists in the United States we need to do something about that but we are lucky I meet so many people around the world who would like to live in our country who would like to live in our democracy in our capitalistic system but we do have gaps in it and we need to do things to fix those gaps the thing that bill and I try to be most cognizant of is what's the role of philanthropy all philanthropy can be is that catalytic wedge we can try things we can experiment with our own money where you wouldn't want a government to experiment with taxpayer money but then we have to prove it out and then it's up to government to scale up so we feel that philanthropy with government with a private sector with a non-governmental organization at that set of partnerships in that ecosystem can do the best for the world so many people are probably wondering what it's like to be for quite some time the richest couple in the world is it make it possible for you to go to a restaurant can you go to a movie well first of all we are incredibly privileged and lucky to have the resources we have from Microsoft that is that full stop we do give up some privacy by that but I have to say most people are incredibly respectful Seattle is a lovely place to live they'll grew up there and so the people who come up it's more because they're proud of what he's built with Microsoft and that's being carried on or what we're doing with the foundation so I we try to look at those I try to look at those as moments of grace and we try to be out in the world bill and I still love to go out to movies we like to go out to restaurants so you told me a couple of stories about your life together and I might ask you about them you told me once when you drop your first your oldest daughter off in college like anybody that drops their kids off in school in college the first they say well you need this you need that so you decided you'd go to Lowe's I think it was to get some additional things to help your daughter's room look better I can't picture Bill Gates going through Lowe's shopping but it was actually really sweet moment we're looking for an extension cord which wasn't the easiest thing to find it turns out at Lowe's but when bill goes into a store like that it's like he's in a big laboratory he's just curious about everything and so Jen and I kept having to drag him and Satan come on we got to find the extension cord stay focused and he mostly wasn't recognized until we got in the cashiers line but you know he just plays along with it and it's fine Jackie Kennedy once famously said that if you mess up raising your children nothing else in life really matters absolutely and as parents we know that the hardest thing to do is raise children so you've had to shield three children from the enormous wealth and publicity I have tried with our children to always to first have them know that they are loved most importantly they are loved no matter what and that their job in life is to find their talents and whatever those talents are we will support that and we and it's up to them to bring those talents in the world no matter what they want to be I also when the children were young have always taken them out first in the seattle community even when they were kindergarten age and then at age appropriate times when they got to be about 10 or 11 out into the developing world to not only do a beautiful safari but to actually see what life is like on the ground and the and the last thing I will say is because when you have great means you don't have as a buffer my kids have always had an allowance and we've always had an agreement they're not allowed to tell other people their allowance neither am i because some people would say that's all the gates kids get another person would say whoa that's too much money that they get in a week but since they were young they've always had an allowance that grew over time and when they wanted something they either had to use their allowance to buy it or put it on their wish list for Christmas and hope their grandparents or we would give it and I would be and I could say to them if they had something they saw in a store they just had to have I'd say well just because I can doesn't mean that I should what would you like your legacy to be ultimately you and Bill together for what you've done on the face of the earth that we helped other people lift themselves up to help everybody advance into society to advance and I hope people say about me that I helped lift up other women thank you very much and again it's a very good book and I highly recommend at the moment of lift thank you very much Linda thanks David great conversation

Channel: David Rubenstein

Views: 46,111

Keywords: finance, news, Bloomberg, philanthropy, women, women in business, equality, gender issues

Id: 7qhoEF0LwF4

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 04 2019