Melinda French Gates

Hi, my name is Melinda French-Gates and I feel like a bit of a newbie about being Conan O'Brien's friend.

A newbie in what way? Meaning you're new to this whole Conan mania that's sweeping the nation.

Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell, brand new shoes, walking blues, climb the fence, books and pens. I can tell that we are gonna be friends, I can tell that we are gonna be friends.

Hey, Conan, here, every now and then, instead of doing the normal, Conan O'Brien needs a fan. We like to do something a little different, a little off the beaten path for us. Whether it's a Halloween murder mystery game we're playing or talking to a notable person who's doing something kind of cool or interesting in the world. Well, that's what we're doing today. My guest is a philanthropist and businesswoman and a global advocate for women and gender equality. And I'm thrilled she's here today, I've never met her before, but I'm very glad she's in the studio.

We haven't met.

And we do have some connections because my wife is from Seattle, lives on Lake Washington. And so I've been part of that whole vibe, where I've been indoctrinated into the Seattle vibe. And I have a good friend that works at the Gates Foundation. And so I've been familiar for a long time with all the amazing stuff that you guys are doing, and we'll talk about that.

Give me time. This is a new friendship.

Okay, very, very well said. You and I have some things in common, which is we're both raised Catholic. How Catholic are we talking in your situation? Like, there's Catholic, then there's Catholic?

That's true, and I'm not from Boston. No, but no, my parents went. I went to school, Catholic school K, through high school to a senior year, all the way through, and even in grade school, we went to church as part of the school's curriculum. I guess you'd say two or three mornings a week, separate from Sunday.

I always think, if there's a crucifix in every classroom, that's fairly Catholic.

That's true, that is very Catholic and usually a statue of Mother Mary, yes.

Yeah, right, and that actually is the water fountain as well. You turn a crank on the side. They just think of any way they can get Mary or Christ in there.

I was probably 14.

I think when I was about the same age, 14, going to public schools in just outside Boston. I remember. They brought us one day to this room that at the time had what was considered a small computer. I think it was the size of a Buick sedan and it was punch cards. And I knew immediately I had a visceral reaction that lives with me to this day. This is not for me.

Definitely, I mean, it's still somewhat unusual and the fact that I was exposed, I had. First of all, a female teacher who knew math, had seen these computers at a conference, knew to bring them in. And then to just say to us, girls, you can be good at this. And she was learning to program at the same time we were, and she would let us even get ahead of her.

Okay, so this is interesting to me because you hit this fork in the road and probably you were in rooms where you might've been the only woman.

Oh, for sure, in college, okay, you bet, my sophomore year computer science.

Right, and then you hit this fork in the road, which is you. It's time to go to work and you have a job offer from IBM and there's an opening at Microsoft. Microsoft is much smaller sort of making its way. IBM is probably the-.

Well established.

Well, extremely well established. It's the company you decided not to go with. IBM. Why is that?

Well, I had worked two summers for IBM back in Dallas, where I grew up, and it was great, I enjoyed it immensely. We were working more, as you talked about earlier, on a buick-sized computer, we're working more on a mainframe. But I had a job standing offer coming out of business school from IBM, but I went to meet my hiring manager at IBM in Dallas. And she said, Are you ready to accept?

It's interesting to me because I've seen this with my own daughter. She was always encouraged by her teachers and by my wife. That, yeah, math, calculus, computers.

I hope so. We have absolutely made progress for women and girls in this country. But there is a lot of it that's also being rolled back, so just as we go forward, we sort of roll back. I mean, even in computer science when I was graduating, about, you could say, back then, about 37 percent of the class was women.

It's funny because I was encouraged, you know, in some areas, and then it turned out that no. I shouldn't have been encouraged. I should not have been encouraged to be a long-distance runner, I should not have been. You know that people were, but you really were.

Definitely, and it's surprising to me, quite frankly, even in today's world, that that is the truth of where we are. And I think, to your point, I mean, I do think we encourage young boys that they can be anything, anything they want to be in society. Whereas I think girls for so long have gotten other messages, and I think we finally are giving girls messages they can be anything in society.

There are some parts of your story that are, I mean. It's quite remarkable with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that I believe as of last year, the foundation I think you've taken. I don't want to say it's 59, but close to $60 billion has gone into the foundation, that's right. This raised all kinds of questions for me. The first came from catholicism, which is, you did not come from money, you weren't raised in an affluent home.

There's definitely guilt that comes with that upbringing. For me, I wouldn't say it was around money, though, per se. And maybe that's because the high school my parents sent me to was an all-girls Catholic school run by these very liberal Ursula nuns. And their motto was servium that is to serve, and so we went out into the community.

This is okay. This gets into something that's in society right now just a huge topic, which is we find ourself in this age. It's a little somewhat akin to the late 19th century, where there's incredible fortunes, just massive fortunes. And sometimes it's not even clear how the money was made. I'm not always, you know, sometimes someone says, Yeah, I'm in Centech and that's why I have $700 billion and they go, What's Centech?

I'm crushing biocoin.

Yeah, yeah, is that the same thing as Bitcoin? No, completely different, you idiot, but I think, you know, you can get lost. Because I understand when someone finds a mountain and gets copper out of it, I don't know, but then, but my understanding starts to go away after that.

Not everybody does that, and I think we were both fortunate that we both came from families that believed in giving back, give back your time, give back your energy, give back your wealth. And so we actually made that decision before we got married, that the vast majority of the wealth would go back to society. And then we met Warren Buffett again before we got married, and he really influenced us. He had this belief that we shouldn't have a society. Like you saw happen in Europe, where you had the aristocrats and then you had the money handed down generation after generation.

A question that comes to mind is, what would you say to someone in that position of having tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars who isn't giving? What would you say to them privately in a conversation that might influence them to give that money away?

Well, I try to understand where they're coming from, and certainly not judging or shaming in any way. But just to try and help explain how giving back has changed my life or our lives. I mean, you can't believe what you learn through it, what you learn about other people, what you learn about yourself, situations that you'll end up getting to be in. I never thought I would travel the world the way. I've gotten to, or to be in so many rural communities and I've had so many amazing conversations. For instance, on the continent of Africa or in Southeast Asia. And so we try to motivate them by saying, Look, you can have a second career and you have no idea how much you're gonna get back by giving this money away.

And then, I guess the question becomes, There are so many problems.

Yes.

And I think to myself just being in my position, which is, I've been extremely fortunate and my wife and I believe in giving back. But what I've noticed is the volume of problems in the world you can get stymied by. Just because everyone has a very legitimate reason why money for their cause will help the world more than anybody else, and it's sorting that out. I understand the Gates Foundation, there's a lot of research that goes into this person, this disease. By doing this, we could really help the world in an important way. And then someone else is saying, I need help with my used car lot, you know, and it's probably really interesting, you know, probably simple.

We get those requests too. Do you really?

Do you have people ever coming to you and saying, you know, my restaurant needs a little help, or?

We get a lot of requests.

And by the way, I'd like to just apologize for my request. About 15 years ago, I wanted a new pool and so I wrote the Gates Foundation and got a very curt letter back. And I could have afforded it myself.

You know, we get those requests, but this is what I would say again. Warren Buffett influenced us greatly, he said. Pick your target once you know what's in your bullseye and you focus on that. You will keep getting better and better and better at it, and you will feel better about the pieces that you don't go after.

I think great wealth is an exaggeration in my case. And remember, I have a gambling problem.

Okay, well, there is that.

We lost a lot of it. I also invested very poorly in a theme restaurant. But I agree with you, this is a. There've been all these studies, and just anecdotally, you know, that children that think they don't have to work do not thrive. It's a terrible track record.

I'm also not paid for this job, so we need to talk.

He's here as a volunteer, I'm serving. Yeah, he's serving.

Yeah, and I felt like I would rob my children of an opportunity if they didn't grow up feeling they had a contribution to make to society. And so we really, even amongst the great wealth, try to really encapsulate. More of a inside the house. More of a middle class, which is what I grew up in, as did Bill, then middle class household. And I will say, this is the thing about giving back when people ask me about raising their children in wealth is if you're giving back and you take your kids out to see things in their community. Homelessness, the place that's giving out meals or repackaging things. Or I took my kids out early and often to Africa after they were 10 and took them into age appropriate places. But it instilled in them that they would have their own career. They should figure out what they're good at and contribute to society in whatever way they wanted to, but they should also give something back. And they got to see a side of the world, a different lens that they weren't growing up in.

I'm curious because one of the best answers a parent can give if you're out with your little kids. And they want something is to say, we can't afford that, you're not gonna get away with that, you know? And even I mean, if my kids wanted a Porsche, I could say, yeah, we can't afford that. But because they knew I was doing well, I knew that that was something my parents could tell me. That shut it down immediately. We can't afford it. But if you're walking around with your kids at a young age and they point to something, you can't say that.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. So again, I remember my oldest daughter, when she became a teenager, wanting some really fancy purse that she'd seen in a window of somewhere. And she kept saying, Why won't you buy it for me? And I said, Because you don't need to be walking around with a purse that costs that much money in your all-girls Catholic school, when other girls don't have it. And just because I can, doesn't mean I should.

I heard a story that really made me laugh. Once. It might be apocryphal, but Jackie Onassis was walking down the street with J.F.K. Jr. when he was a boy. And maybe he's like 10 years old or 11 or something. And she's married to Aristotle Onassis.

Your tax returns. Our kids certainly keep us grounded.

Yeah, but I think that's something that is important, obviously very important. And then the bigger question is, I think we're both. I'm, I think, a couple of months older than you are, about the same age. And I remember turning 60 was kind of a huh, what am I doing?

For the second pool in your backyard.

I think a second pool would really help me handle being an empty nester and 61.

Yeah, I would say this, it certainly I feel like I'm in a bit of a transition, right? Like I did go through a very public divorce a few years ago. But the foundation's mission, I had really brought in back in around 2012, really a focus on women. That just as I would be out in the developing world, seeing that women were not far enough, were not, didn't have any power often in their lives. I really started to bring that into the foundation, and we have continued that and we continue that work at the Gates Foundation.

Or the Alabama Court ruling?

Or the Alabama Court ruling?

And then you read the judge's decision and it's invoking the wrath of God and fertilized eggs, and you just, I don't know. It's quite shocking, it's unbelievable.

And I believe that if we had more women in positions of power, more female politicians in the state houses, there's 7,000 positions there. More women in Congress, more women on benches in these key places, more women governors. We wouldn't be making these kind of policies, we just wouldn't. That's the truth. And yet we haven't gotten women far enough, fast enough in politics, in their financial lives, and even culturally. It's still very hard to get movies made about what's actually happening in society.

Again, this goes to the point of how many problems there are in the world. But the state of public education in the United States, I always find particularly upsetting that we are the richest nation in the world, we're capable of doing anything. And somehow, educating our children became the lowest priority is a mind blower.

Absolutely every child deserves a great teacher, and yet it's become very much a system about the adults in the system. And I do think after Covid, it became even harder to be a teacher or to be a nurse in society, right? And so we have a lot to really look at in the U.S to figure out, you know, how can we change this?

There's an amazing statistic.

And it's all. That fact is true all over the world. You educate a girl and she becomes a woman, she delays the birth of her first child. She will also, if she can space the births and have fewer because she knows, then she has economic means to put into raising those children. And that there is literally no country in the world also that hasn't gone from low to middle income without also making sure women had access to contraceptives.

I've seen the statistics, I completely believe it's true. Yet my upbringing flies in the face of that. Which is my mother extremely well-educated, my father brilliant, extremely well-educated, and I'm one of 75 kids.

Very quickly, and in many countries, a woman is basically destined for poverty if she starts having children in her teen years. And yet there are many places where that is still the norm. An older man takes a young, teenage girl as his bride. And so there are a lot of norms that have to be broken through so that girls can be fully educated.

I know you have traveled to Africa with Michelle Obama. Amal Clooney, what were you? Were you working on a specific problem? There was there a specific issue that you were focusing on?

We were really focusing on child marriage, how do you keep girls from being married before the age of 18? Looking at the entire system, all the way from the legal system, which is Amal's piece of it, to how do you educate girls in schools to know not to marry, to be married? Which is kind of Michelle's piece, and my piece is kind of all the pieces in between. Like, what connects those systems and how do you break through the norm?

I would think it would be probably the greatest tool is seeing. So if a child sees a manifestation of an adult living a different way and succeeding, that might be the most powerful educational tool. So it's seeing examples, and again, to relate it to my field. I've talked to so many young women comedians who say it took them seeing Ellen DeGeneres or Elaine Boozler. Or, I mean, seeing and on and on and on, seeing over and over Amy Schumer, seeing these other comedians. And saying, Hey, she looks like me, that's something I wanna do, and she's doing it.

Yeah, that role modeling, I always say this, that in society, I think men can look up in society, in almost any industry and see three dozen different archetypes. And say, well, I don't wanna be like that guy or that guy, but I might be interested in being like any of those three. Young girls can't yet look up in society and say, wow. Of all the female politicians, there's so many I'd like to be like that one, or of all the female comedians. I don't think I'm like her, but I'd like to be like her. Every industry, we should have at least three dozen archetypes of women, and until we get there, it's difficult.

How cool was that amazing? And your family? You grew up in Texas? You would go to the Launches, for sure, you would go to the Apollo Launches.

Yeah, well, we would watch them, let's be clear, we would watch them on TV, on an old black and white TV. But at the other engineers houses, we would all get together as a family and watch the Apollo launches. Because it was such a big deal to my dad, who worked on these.

I thought you went there in person. Forget it, this podcast isn't going to air now.

Road trip to Houston.

I mean, come on, I watch those things on TV too.

And it didn't make you want to be a mathematician.

No, no, I just I wanted the outfit, I wanted the astronaut suit, but I wanted to stay here on Earth and be a comedian. I don't know why that makes sense.

You wanted Planet of the Apes?

I wanted Planet of the Apes, I wanted to be an earthbound astronaut who had gone back in time, actually forward in time. Apologies and spoiler alert to a world that's dominated all by apes. And we're here.

Not sure I'd want to see that, just gotta be honest.

Hey, I thought we were friends.

I was just about to say, why don't you and your wife come visit me in Seattle?

But I'm a little less sure now. Listen, the naked thing is aspirational. I've never been naked up to this point. I shower in a three-piece suit. I'm just saying, someday down the road, you know?

Oh, thanks for having me, Conan.

Conan O'Brien needs a friend with Conan O'Brien. Sona Movsesian and Matt Gourley Produced by Me Matt Gourley executive produced by Adam Sachs. Nick Liao and Jeff Ross at Team Coco and Colin Anderson and Cody Fisher at Earwolf. Theme song by the White Stripes. Incidental music by Jimmy Vivino.