Philanthropy can be innovative | Bill Gates and Melinda Gates | Code Conference 2016

so um first of all thank you for being here I know you're really busy particularly we're always really busy but particularly now you have an event or in Seattle and I can't and I kind of campaign you're doing a called The Giving Pledge and I wonder if we maybe we could start by you talking about what that is and what it means and what's new this week about it was about seven years ago Warren Buffett said to us that we should sit down and talk to other philanthropist and so we had a dinner and hosted by David Rockefeller with a lot of the people who are doing serious giving him and talked about what their journey had been like and what have been hard for them and so then after we've done about three of those dinners Warren's idea was that we actually create a group that could learn from each other hopefully get better and get sooner and so The Giving Pledge is now six years old today's a big milestone we're announcing seventeen new members which brings two hundred fifty-four people worldwide who committed the majority their wealth to philanthropy and we don't pool money but we share experiences we find ways that we can collaborate it's been an amazing thing that we're headed later today to the day and a half annual meeting of that group of people which is all the more reason I'm grateful that you're here Melinda these people have to be billionaires mm-hmm they have to be billionaires to join this Giving Pledge the stubbing pledge okay yeah so I can't join hey we'd love to have you give money away no probably joining this group you're gonna have to raise your ticket prices I think thanks Bill people don't know this but but but I have to say first of all both of them have spoken before and bill was it was a headline speaker at the the D headline speaker at the very first D conference and we owe him a lot and because of him we have been able to raise ticket prices I'm sorry but but not enough apparently not enough yet so you have 17 and you're new people and I don't want you necessarily list all them but he can you give us a few highlights of who some of the more interesting ones are who signed out sure well just recently it's fantastic Scott cook I think he's actually here his wife Sydney have joined The Giving Pledge with this round of pleasures Scott who founded into into it right and Marc Benioff and Lynne also joined the giving away from Salesforce and the three founders of Airbnb and one of their wives have just joined the giving but when they sign what does it mean that they're gonna give most of their money away or the majority and none of the people who belong you know a lot of are gonna give ninety ninety percent away but the only thing we ask for is a commitment that you're going to give the majority way and then we ask people to write a lover letter which goes up on the Giving Pledge website about why they are inspired to give what things they're working on and then a lot of people come both to the Annual Meeting and then we'll have meetings and people who are working in a particular area like charter schools or scientific research or developing cuddled like-minded like mine exactly so there's a probably the best known or the best known self-proclaimed billionaire running around the country today is Donald J Trump has Donald J Trump signed The Giving Pledge you have not no he has not has he been approached about something giving pledge no we have it approaches wait a minute we haven't approached all the billionaires yet I mean eventually we will Linda Linda how many are there well I mean I know there's not none or 20 but there's not we go baby basically the Forbes list the Forbes it's now more than 500 but we go Bob J Trump is on that I think might be okay all right are you planning to approach him we don't have any immediate plans to approach him okay um I think we should probably let this cycle play itself out before we do anything related to that he hasn't been known for his philanthropy he's been known for other things well maybe does it quietly okay bill good you know Bill you're always the diplomat always so what now you've been doing this for a while now it's quite extraordinary and I think it's the kind of thing that everybody at every income level or to aspire to and I want to get back to that also but what have you learned what what mistakes have you made you obviously had money and you got other people's money I know you got Warren Buffett's money involved in it and other are the people's money so it isn't a question that you didn't have resources but how applying the resources and in a effective and smart way what have you learned that just give me a couple of examples of why the big lessons that you feel you've learned that we've learned first of all it has really grabbed us in a way that this is how we've now as you've seen we've both oriented our lives to it because we are enjoying it immensely we're finding places that innovation makes an enormous difference and I think if I had one message to leave behind everyone in the room is sometimes people underestimate that what they've done in their business can also be applied to philanthropy they underestimate that the brains and the way they thought through that that systems change or that disruption of an industry or that way of innovative thinking and taking a problem apart you take that and apply it to other areas of the world and you can create amazing change so so you can be innovative in philanthropy absolutely we can can use technology and yeah I'll give you just one example multiplier I'll give you just one example in the financial services area one of the things that makes an enormous difference for the poor just like in the u.s. if we if they can save small amounts of money and you can get that banking system really working for them they're not welcomed in banks they don't want to travel the distance to banks their money is stolen but if you can get there they have phones now out billions of phones in rural areas in Bangladesh today now that the policy has been laid down and the technical rails have been laid down a billion dollars are flowing a month of small payments micro payments that people are savings so when people can save and have money for school fees or when there's not a crop they can go buy some on the market that has a profound effect on their families on on society and that we are part of a group that's really laying those technical rails in a host of countries and getting policy changes those guys I mean you know Bill is historically famous technologist I happen to know you a long time just on your own and you're pretty good too so the point is you know a lot about technology is that a is that a truly disruptive force in philanthropy or not yeah people probably heard about microfinance and the benefits there but is it's really been studied the impacts pretty small because of the interest rates they have to charge in managing small amounts of money the cellphones thing that Melinda was talking about the normal progression would have been that that happens in the rich and middle-income countries and then 15 years later happens in the developing countries in fact what's happened because of our foundationless others is the inverse of that that is in Kenya today there's more digital money used than there is cash money and so the transaction fees the ability to save and borrow is actually better more efficient in Kenya than it is in the United States and for people with small amounts of money it's it's quite revolutionary India just finally the payment banks which we were for five years to get authorized they are now in business and so that same thing is going to happen in a big way there so technology that helps the poorest whether it's vaccines or seeds or savings or sanitation we're running an organization that's a all about innovation we spend of the five billion a year that we're giving away over two billion of that is pure R&D building these new is not so different than people out in this room maybe who have companies where it's for-profit and they're absolutely and they're trying to do something maybe not as lofty I don't know a $700 Wi-Fi juice mixer stuff like that but this some of the principles are the same yeah the the bottom line is different you know we're measuring women's access to contraception a primary metric we look at is reducing the number of children who die before the age of five and that there's been great progress it's that's down from 12 million a year now down to about 6 million a year and over the next 15 years with new vaccines and better delivery systems we we should be able to get that down below 3 million a year so that's the that's the bottom line for a foundation so do you each the two of you have a particular passion or a particular thing that you've you personally focus on well we we both run the foundation together and we both approve all the strategies of the foundation along with sue Desmond Hellman who spoke last was terrific yeah we were very happy she's with us the CEO of the foundation so together we said and approve the strategies then within that we certainly have particular areas of interest so for me I have really gone all-in on family planning because if a woman has access to a contraceptive voluntary access to a contraceptive it changes the trajectory of her life you don't commit her then to a life of poverty if she can space and time the births of her children she can only feed them but she can educate them an education it is about is everything if she can educate those children if the mom herself has educated her child is more likely to make it to their fifth birthday twice as likely to make it to their fifth birthday so if she can feed an educator children she can also get a job so she starts to lift her family out of poverty but if you don't give her access to contraceptives and she has child after child after child she's gonna have a life of poverty that's just the the fate of the world and yet because of the political when I started to study this and look at it because of the political repercussions of really what had happened in the United States the global health community had backed away from family planning a lot of coerced hours about say a lot of this is us but if the US doesn't set the agenda it comes off and so we had right but I mean as we're sitting here there are state legislators in this country not necessarily affecting people as poor as there are in a lot of other places but nevertheless saying we want to make it harder for you to get contraception and that shouldn't be because what we do in our country actually affects the global world and when when I got into this work the thing that shocked me was I I spent a lot of time in villages in slum these days that's just the truth I'm out at least four times a year in the developing world and women were asking me for contraceptives it was the strangest thing I was thinking wow they know about them they want them they're saying why don't I have access I used to go down to this clinic you know it's 12 kilometers away I walk my husband doesn't know I go and I would get the shot in my arm and I went and it's not available and so when I started to learn about this 210 million women today are telling us they want access to contraceptives and we're not delivering them and that's gotta change and so our foundation has gotten very committed to this with a global set of partners putting this back on the agenda in 2012 and what I'm trying to do is bend the curve what would have happened by maybe if we were lucky 20 35 I'm trying to bend the curve and get it to happen in by 2020 which is to give 110 million women access to what Melinda you talk about women what about men men are important very important I know at all levels thank you so much no I really mean that thank you I just do men don't men have a responsibility for contraception as well they do but at the end of the day the woman has to be able to take and make that decision if her husband won't take and make that decision with her and if it's you're kind of implying you're not even you're kind of not counting on the husband at all your baseball heroes I need to tell you what what truly research tells us mean you have to research these things to understand it this is one of the things that I think in philanthropy that again if people could think about their own businesses you don't make decisions without good data and research so one of the things we do is the foundation is we make sure that we actually do research and collect good data the world isn't collecting great data on women we're starting to change that too but what the data tells you is that in a setting like in many places in Africa a woman cannot negotiate a condom with her husband condoms are available because of PEPFAR because of the Global Fund but women will tell you over and over again I can't negotiate that with my husband because I'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I'm telling him I have AIDS that's a non-starter and so they have to be able to use contraceptives whether their husband and will allow them to or not because and they will they will take that decision on themselves because they know that saying if it's over their lives if it's available and Bill what's your what's your thing that you're more much more passionate about well vaccinations been a big error for the foundation and so understanding the science they're who to get behind what the new approaches are how to make those super cheap and then how to get them delivered one of the monumental thing the thing this thing I'd spent the most time on is polar eradication and we have not the world eradicated one disease in all of history which is smallpox certified back in 1980 polio was almost failing about seven years ago we couldn't get out of India couldn't get it out of Africa and so we've really intensified using satellite photos to find the villages using GPS to track improving the vaccine itself and so with any luck we'll have the last case of polio sometime next year we're down to two countries just Pakistan and Afghanistan we haven't had a case in Africa for a year and a half now in India for over three years now so we'll add that it'll become the second disease have eradicated and based on the success there we'll go after hazel's and malaria I'm sort of amazed about polio and I guess it just shows my ignorance about what's going on in the rest of world because I'm old enough to remember the big polio scaring the United States and the 1950s when they lined us all up as kids and gave us shots on mass and I mean you were there was a couple of years there where you were told not to go swim I don't remember what it was but it was a whole thing in summer camps and everything and so it seemed to like be conquered in the u.s. that may I may be sorry about that by 1965 polio was essentially gone from the US because of Jonas Salk's I I P V vaccine and so the world in 1988 so I just assumed that that then spread throughout the whole world right now no there's there's a lot of things like measles and malaria that were once huge problems in the u.s. even yellow fever that because of our wealth and because we're not equatorial we're more of a temperate climate it's been possible to get rid of these infectious diseases whereas they're still dragon entik you know killing over half a million children a year in the case of malaria that there's this huge market failure which is that the people who have the malaria problem have no money and so there's no natural incentive to create a vaccine there so only philanthropy and governments are coming in and taking on polio ratico the market the commercial khorinis your voice in the marketplace when you're poor if you need something like the life-saving medicine you you have no volume in terms of the resources of the world and that's a known shortcoming of capitalism which you know I'm a huge fan of but it needs to be leavened by some degree of philanthropy where you say ok research and education let's do more and understand what's really working there likewise for seeds making those more productive so that we can feed the world even in the face of worse weather so you go ahead I was a I think one of the things that surprised us the most when we got into this work over 15 years ago was that you know vaccines that we do all take for granted we go and get our kids these vaccinations you've had vaccinations over your lifetime that there's a there when we came into this work that there was a 25 year lag between ona vaccine came out in the United States and it got to a place like Kenya or God to certain places of an idea and even if they got there they didn't have the right strains and so we started to say okay what's the role you have to always ask yourself as a philanthropist what's our role what's the role of philanthropy and what we saw was this market failure and we said okay there's R&D work to be done we're gonna work on that but there's also let's create a pull mechanism for vaccines so we pulled money with government's huge pool of money this vaccine alliance that we keep raising money for and we can go now to the manufacturers and guarantee your market for their vaccines so they're the pharmaceutical companies are then incentive to work on it and that pull mechanism so I think that's another thing that if you've been in business you think about data you think about markets you think about your unique leverage you start to think about what tools exist and need to be created and that kind of thinking that everybody in this room does is huge beneficial to society and in philanthropy philanthropies role we see it as this catalytic wedge that is to fill in the place between governments and private sector to sort of push and push along the way where markets fail so that the society works for everyone around the world not just the select few that happened to be lucky enough to be born in the United States or the UK or Japan so bill you were one of the first people in tech to become very wealthy but but a huge amount of wealth has been has been created by the by the tech business in the valley and Seattle and in other places as well I don't know whether you have all this data but is that is that wealth being spent on philanthropy to the degree you would have expected or that in other areas other kinds of wealth have been spent on philanthropy but I would love to see a lot more done so we're nowhere near at the potential but compared to other industries the successful people in technology are the most generous there's no other industry area that's as generous you know you know you know take Facebook Mark Zuckerberg shel hammered you know super generous most the leaders in the industry not all have have made the commitment on our getting involved in philanthropy even at a young age and so you know I didn't get involved in philanthropy seriously until I was in my 50s a lot of these people are thinking about it learning about it at a younger age than I did and and what what should they be doing with their money that sounds like a dumb question but I mean you've learned a lot about it with with your money should they be is there some resource they can use the the does your Foundation offer that to them I mean what yeah our vision we have somebody in the audience here who maybe has I'm not even talking about billions dollars maybe they have half a million dollarsí that they can give how will they know that what they're gonna do with it is gonna be not wasted and it's gonna have the highest impact yeah in our case we have a a staff heavy approach to doing things fairly substantially we have 1500 people who work for us and so it's it's an institution whose understanding of these diseases or the u.s. education system the kind of an analysis the kind of thinking we have is as good as Microsoft at its very best a large number of those people are available to brains from another philanthropist and facilitate their work you know good example is I sat down just like a month ago with Scott cook and signe and you know they really care about education so I shared where we're working what's working what's not worked they'll cut their own path they'll do their own thing but understanding where we've had problems and what we're excited about some people to go see and meet and partner with you know I hope that kind of collaboration is there some way they can find out people with still a lot but not as much as you nearly two to give can go and find out they're not gonna get a meeting with you necessarily or you but maybe with these really smart staff people that you have is there some place they can find that information out sure I mean they you know are on the web we have a team that listed on the website that's glad to brainstorm with people and you know I think a lot we're not where we probably do more of that than anyone but other members of The Giving Pledge who people may know you know just sitting down and talking with them talking through you know how you think about it do you do it with your spouse do you eventually involve your kids there's a lot of complex things and it does involve getting into a new domain that you're not going to be as familiar with some of it involves thinking about your finite life and you know where the resources end up going and so some people tend to put it off and that's partly what we think that's a mistake when you're young and energetic learning so that as you can put more of your time into it you know the this the sooner the better and and so yes there is a lot of people who were willing to brainstorm and people pick causes and that's what's amazing you you know there's how you end up picking what you pick it's very individual it's very personal there's no one right thing to give to but there are a lot of lessons about ways to go about it okay so I can't let go without asking and I warned your people I am gonna ask you a tech question great not a philanthropy question yes but you used to come here and just kind of talk about the agenda of tech and I'm not going to make trying to make you do that now because now I feel like everything in tech is less important than what you guys just talk but one of the big things we're talking about here this year is AI it's been around for a while but it's kind of exploding now what do you think about it do you do do you think it's the big new thing and is there any danger to it well certainly it's the most exciting thing going on and it's the holy grail it's the big dream that anybody who's ever been computer science has been thinking about you know how hard is this and very specific problems like speech recognition and vision we now have systems that are better than human level of capability and so that progress in the last five years has been dramatically faster than in any time in history some of these techniques around deep learning really are very profound in our there's a recent book by pedro domingo called the master algorithm which i highly recommend if somebody wants to understand the sort of different types of learning machines that are out there and what they're good at what their limitations are it's it's very well done there's no doubt that in say a 10 year time frame we will have four physical tasks driving warehouse work you know cleaning up rooms will have robots that are way less expensive than than human labor for doing those things and for various types of expertise we'll have better and better machines and so it's an amazing thing it's a very positive thing it's you know supply of goods that we can meet it will challenge us in two ways one that when you get that excess labor in certain places how do you retrain it and apply it to other things it's not like there's zero demand for labor until every you know class size is ten and vacation policies are way more generous every old person is taken care of you know just go out into the developing world if you ever think there's too many people in the labor labor house non-value so if we redirect it that's very good then in the long run there really is the question about purpose and control the books like boss from super intelligence another book that I highly recommend so the the dream is finally arriving this is what it was all leading up to his machines that are as capable and more capable than than human intelligence and I want to put a cap on this is what well one thing I'll just tell you about Bill which is when we sum we go on vacation bills somewhat moving to Kindle but he still takes a huge bag of books and I can always tell it's on his mind by what's in his bag of books and there have been a lot of AI books so while you think he's working on philanthropy the side of his brain is also oh you know that guy he was actually thinking about this a long time has been for a long time but the other thing I want to say to everybody in the room is we ought to care about women being in computer science because yeah because it you know when you think about the u.s. being on the forefront a lot of this technology and when I was in college I studied computer science and economics we thought we were on the way up of women in tech so when I graduated 34 percent of undergraduates of computer science for women the peak was 37 percent and we're now down to 17 percent of computer science graduates or women so when bill talks about where AI is going and I care a lot about where AI is going I think it's it's gonna happen if we don't have women in that let me think about about health care artificial intelligence in health care just as one example I mean you want women participating in all of these things because you want a rich set of a diverse environment creating AI and tech tools and everything we're gonna use so boy I would also say to people in this room we got to figure out how to get more we don't just want it all written and programmed and run by dudes but it has a woman's voice coming out of I really don't know I Scarlett Johansson is great but I think there should be others there as well where I these guys have a hard stop it was very generous to for them to come down because they do have this Giving Pledge thing they talked about so we'll take one or two questions tops go ahead thanks Walt everyone in the room and the vast majority of people benefit from vaccines and there are a few people that suffer from vaccines and the side effects like maybe an MMR shot and a very chair on the same day if they're not well or thimerosal related or mercury related preservative issues are you're studying like a test that can figure out if a kid's gonna suffer from the vaccinations yeah unfortunately the there are rumors about vaccines doing negative things that in fact they don't do like the time aerosol thing you know we have countries that use thimerosal and did not use thimerosal you know literally billions of shots given in both cases and we're able to compare it is fair to say that there are fortunately very rare cases and the US has a compensation fund and we always look at the net benefits that is does the benefit of using the vaccine far far outweigh any of the fairly rare side effects one of the one of the vaccines that actually can Emma negative in fact is one of the two polio vaccines the one that's cheap and it's used mostly the so called oral vaccine actually in one out of a million cases cause this disease and that's why right at the end of this disease we're doing this very complicated thing to switch from that the oral vaccine to the which is the Sabin vaccine back to the original Salk vaccine so getting that down in price it's not as easy to administer because it's a shot but the back we have to really be hyper careful about the safety of vaccines because anything that affects their reputation causes people vast number of people to shy away from them and then you get diseases that are incredibly infectious like measles and pertussis that you know negative rumors about vaccines have killed literally thousands of people in the rich world who never should have died because their parents were were afraid of things that they'd heard so you got to make sure they're safe and and get get the word out again land last oh do we have another question oh yes hi Hadi partovi from code org first I wanted to thank both of you personally in the foundation for your at generosity in supporting computer science education and putting your money where your mouth is for getting more women into computer science my question is whether with you or with Susan yesterday all the talk about the foundation focused on effectively the the eradication of diseases and the work in places like Africa are you pulling back from education in the US or their comments you can share about how the efforts in terms of education in the US are going for the foundation broadly yes so education in the u.s. is the number one thing we work on in the u.s. in the u.s. because we feel like every kid getting a chance at a great education is really what what forms a phenomenal democracy and that the truth is today a third of kids are actually prepared to go to college and we just shouldn't have a public school system that exists in that way so we have billions of dollars of investments in the education system in the United States because of that belief and sometimes Bill and I feel that the hardest work even though there's disease eradication that we're talking about is very hard the u.s. education system is proving the hardest to work on and I think the thing that we have come to learn is the most important thing in a kid's education is the teacher front of the classroom that if a child has an effective teacher it makes all the difference in their learning gains and so we are working very hard to have an effective teaching system and an evaluation system that's not punitive but have helped teachers rise up and then we're working on tools the computer tools and there's a lot of disruption coming there alongside the teacher for blended and really a personalized learning plan for kids that helps keep them on the path to college so we're working very deeply I know you yeah I'm really glad you asked that because I think as people think about their philanthropy they'll probably start in their community and understand the social service needs homelessness various things right in the city they work in but then the next step hopefully will be the u.s. education system we need all of you to you know pick charter schools pick public schools get involved and see what's not happening because we have this huge problem in that the lead are mostly sending their children to private schools and so the idea of what's going on in these particularly in the inner-city schools there isn't this awareness to think about how do we get help those teachers be better how do we get technology into those things and education is one of these things whenever you think it's easy you can go to one of these Center City Schools be reminded how tough it is if you ever despair you can go to one in these great charter schools and I was at a summit school just two weeks ago up up in Seattle and it's so incredible to see and there are lots of people in the tech industry like Reed hasty and many others who've gotten involved in this stuff so I I really encourage people to consider that as one of the areas that they they died in too well thank you thank you so much

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Keywords: donald trump, giving pledge, donations, charity, bill gates, mark zuckerberg, the bill and melinda gates foundation, what is the giving pledge, melinda gates, richest people in the world, billionares, how much do billionares donate to charity, recode, code conferece, silicon valley

Id: YxNW47_YsmM

Length: 33min 48sec (2028 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 07 2016