2015 年 Charlie Rose：The Giving Pledge

The Giving Pledge

Friday 07/17/2015

https://charlierose.com/videos/22114

A conversation with philanthropists Bill Gates, Melinda Gates, and Warren Buffett about The Giving Pledge, which is a request for the very wealthy to pledge to give away at least fifty percent of their wealth to charitable causes before they die.

Charlie Rose: 15 years ago, in the year 2000, Bill and Melinda Gates created the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 9 years ago, in 2006, Warren Buffet pledged part of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Gates Foundation has since become a leader in fighting global issues such as hunger, poverty, infectious diseases, and education. In 2010, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and Melinda Gates joined forces one more time. They created the Giving Pledge. It is a request for the very wealthy to pledge to give away at least 50% of their wealth to charitable causes before they die. That effort has grown to include 137 contributors from 14 countries. Last week in Sun Valley, Idaho, I talked to Warren and Bill and Melinda about their lives and how the Giving Pledge came about.

Bill Gates: Well, it really grew out of Warren's idea that we should meet with other people who'd been serious about philanthropy and learn from them. Why were they engaged? How were they thinking about it? Through those dinners, the idea that we'd actually create a group emerged and it's really been amazing to us. We have a yearly gathering. People who have common interests will meet separately. I've learned a lot. I look forward to those gatherings. It's not people pitching each other, but there's so much in common that we can learn and sometimes people do end up working together.

Charlie Rose: We'll come back to what you've learned. Where did the idea come from and what were you thinking about it?

Warren Buffet: I'm not exactly really sure where it came from. Like Bill says, we had a dinner that David Rockefeller hosted and I would say it sort of evolved out of that. We had 15 or so people there, counting couples as two, and we went around the table and we just asked people to sort of explain where their giving philosophy came from. Not to make a pitch to anybody. How their thinking went. They talked about their families and they talked about their parents' influence and it took at least 2 hours to get around the table. People were really interested in talking sort of peer to peer about it. There was so much. We clearly hit a chord someplace. Then the three of us talked later on, and the Giving Pledge evolved out of that.

Charlie Rose: I remember you talking to me about it at the time. You said you were surprised, there was an emotional connection between people because they thought and they found themselves listening to other people and feeling like, This is exactly the way I feel.

Warren Buffet: Yeah, they didn't feel awkward in talking about themselves. I think we're a little lucky, perhaps, in who we called on first, even. The first couple, their degree of candor, I think, was contagious as we went around the table. Nobody engaged in any posturing or anything of the sort, which you might get sometimes in a group, particularly where some of the people don't know each other well, they're acquainted. Instead of that, we got this very candid discussion by really everyone there. They talked about their children sometimes, and sometimes their disappointments, or sometimes how they felt good about what happened with them. It became clear that if a bunch of people somewhat similarly situated would get together, we'd learn from each other and perhaps have a lot of other good things come out of it. So it just sort of evolved out of that first dinner, I would say.

Charlie Rose: Melinda, how's it growing?

Melinda Gates: It's been growing substantially. We have 137 pledgers now, in 14 countries. I think one of the neatest things now is when we get together for these annual gatherings and the first night that you sit down at dinner, you realize you're amongst friends. That all these people we've met over time, not only are we getting to know them but they're getting to know each other. They look forward to the event, I think because of the candor of the conversations we can have about, "What do you do about your children? What about the next generation? How do you think about a leader? How do you even start a foundation if you're just beginning?" Those are the conversations you want to have in private in a small group and I think that's what our gathering affords.

Warren Buffet: There's no one-upmanship or anything like that. Some of these people are quite capable of that in different situations. I would say it brings out the best in everybody. They're not trying to impress the other person or anything. They're genuinely interested in successes, failures, family situations, whatever it may be. There's a level of candor that's really impressive.

Charlie Rose: You now have an international dimension. Was that bridge hard, to get people who were not as familiar with philanthropy as Americans are?

Bill Gates: One of the things the U.S. should be proud of is that it is the leader, the most engaged to philanthropy and most of the really strong historical examples, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford Foundation, were American foundations. Other countries are interested in it because, whether it's helping universities or research or trying out new ways of doing education, philanthropy has proven, even though it's a small part even of the U.S. economy, it's been a very innovative part where people show new pilot programs that then really influence a lot of other activity. Most of our members are from the United States. We've done a slightly better job of reaching out to people in the United States, but the international pieces is going to grow. We'd like to see philanthropy strengthen on a global basis. We always like to see people getting involved when they're younger, a bit more collaboratively, and hopefully with even more of their resources.

Charlie Rose: That's one of the tenets. Trying to tell people to think about this early in your life rather than think about it at the end of your life, because you're better equipped to make decisions at this time.

Melinda Gates: Definitely. I think by having people come together once they've decided that they're going to pledge, even if they're pledging to give it away at the end of their life, if they come to a gathering they start to learn from one another about what's even possible in maybe the field they're interested in, "How did you get going?" Yeah, we're trying to get people to learn from one another and hopefully to get started a bit earlier, because if they put their brains against these problems, whatever they've done in their business life against the problems of inequity of whatever they choose, they can have a huge effect. They're learning that from one another.

Charlie Rose: What's the pitch to somebody?

Melinda Gates: He's the best at it.

Charlie Rose: I know, that's why I directed at him.

Warren Buffet: Oh, I'm not!

Charlie Rose: You call them up and you say what?

Warren Buffet: I usually send them some material on it first, because there might be some misconceptions about it. I ask them whether they've gotten the material, if they've got any questions.

Charlie Rose: "Have you read it?"

Warren Buffet: Yeah. What you want to do is get them talking. There are some people that aren't interested, but a very significant percentage are. I've been amazed at, frankly, how well it's gone. I would have said if we 50 by now, I would-

Charlie Rose: And now we have 130.

Melinda Gates: 137.

Warren Buffet: 137, yeah. I had the dinner here some months ago and one of the people that came had misconceptions about, they had to do this or that. By the end of the evening, this particular person was ready to join and will give 99% in this particular case.

Charlie Rose: What's the transaction?

Warren Buffet: The transaction is simply that they write a letter making a pledge to give at least 50%, although a lot of them name a larger number, but give at least 50% during their lifetime or at death to philanthropy. I encourage them to explain how they got to that decision. Is it from their parents, from the examples around them, and why they're doing it. We get some magnificent letters. I tell the people I talk to that the letters are enormously important because somebody 10, 20, 50 years from now is going to read that like maybe Bill or Melinda or I have read about Carnegie or Rockefeller or Rosenwald or you name it, and you never know what's going to strike a chord. It's like a lawyer making an argument, you try to name 20 reasons why your client isn't guilty, you know, it may only 1 or 2 if you're really that good!

Charlie Rose: You want to make sure you got the one covered that people might respond to.

Warren Buffet: All you got to do is hit a chord on one of them.

Charlie Rose: Do you all make the calls? I mean, the three of you are engaged in a real personal way, in terms of recruiting. Or is there a system?

Bill Gates: The thing that has worked the best is to just to invite people to a dinner that's about philanthropy. That's not a recruiting dinner. When I'm traveling around, I always look at my schedule. Do I have time for a dinner? Even outside the U.S.. You have anywhere from 6 to as many as 15, which is almost too many, and you talk about philanthropy. Afterwards, if you get a sense that it might be a fit for them, I can follow up by sending the material and making a call. A lot of the people who are joining already have the intention to give every dollar, but they do find the idea of being part of the group, that it'll help them engage and make sure that it's a fun thing for them. We love the impact and diversity of philanthropy, but we also feel like people, it's a voluntary thing. It can be one of the most fun things you've ever done, and yet hiring staff or picking exactly what cause, or it forces you to think about death and how your kids may be involved, some in different ways than others. These are complex issues and even somebody who's successful at business, it doesn't necessarily prepare you for answering these questions.

Melinda Gates: Sometimes they have to have a family conversion. They'll say, "We're in favor of it in general. We kind of had an initial conversation over the years with our kids but we've never committed like this, so give us some time." And then they'll say, "We'll call you back in 3 months or 4 months," and we do. The neat thing is if they'll share with you sometimes the conversations they had with their kids, because they're so proud of how their kids responded.

Warren Buffet: I know one case where the kids actually talked one of the parents into doing it. When that parent was initially not inclined to do it.

Charlie Rose: What are the resistances to doing it?

Warren Buffet: They don't want to. They don't want to give away the money. When I call them and they say, "I'm actually planning to have all my money put in my coffin with me," I do not have much of a chance. I tell them there's no force for it under the graveyard.

Charlie Rose: How about people who say, "I want to pass it to my family? That's what I want to do."

Warren Buffet: That's what they want to do, that's their business.

Melinda Gates: That's their business. Definitely.

Bill Gates: If they want to pass it all, they're not a fit for the group. We particularly see that if the bulk of it was passed down to them, because then it's like breaking a machine.

Charlie Rose: Ah, inherited wealth is more likely to be-

Bill Gates: Why should they break the chain? First generation fortunes tend to be more philanthropic than inherited fortunes.

Charlie Rose: The interesting thing, you have young members, too.

Warren Buffet: That's huge.

Melinda Gates: 31 years old, yeah.

Warren Buffet: That's huge. 20 years from now, there's going to be dozens and dozens and dozens of billionaires. Hundreds that have come up whose heroes are the Steve Jobs or the Mark Zuckerbergs or you name it.

Melinda Gates: I'm really particularly excited to see what Mark and Priscilla do. They're already learning a lot about philanthropy. Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, how they will come at it, because she's so embedded in health and he's so embedded in education and Facebook, and yet the way they see things together? I think they will totally inspire a group of people.

Warren Buffet: We're having a session for the younger members of the family of people who've signed up here in a short period. I think 35, I know 35 are coming, probably more will come. Their attitude towards life. Some of them are maybe beneficiaries of trusts their grandfather's signed up for or something, but it's the influence on future giving that I think will be very, very substantial. I think it's having an effect currently, but it'll be bigger over the years.

Melinda Gates: That's a group we call the next generation group. They're getting together on their own. I think their next meeting is actually in Omaha, right?

Warren Buffet: Yeah, right.

Charlie Rose: What do you learn at these sessions?

Bill Gates: We have people get up for an almost Ted-like thing and give a 6 minute explanation of something they're excited about or something that's gone well or something that didn't go well so they think they're smart-

Charlie Rose: A sharing of experiences.

Bill Gates: Then we'll have breakouts. Things like, "Can you do investments that advance your philanthropic things?" We have giving international, we have scientific research, education. We had four breakouts this time and people's main complaint was that they had to pick one of the four because they saw several that they were interested in.

Charlie Rose: I should make this before we start talking about the foundation in general, there is no legal commitment made.

Melinda Gates: That's right.

Charlie Rose: There is an ethical, moral commitment.

Warren Buffet: That's right.

Charlie Rose: But that's it.

Warren Buffet: Yup.

Charlie Rose: When you set up the foundation, the two of you, what was the idea?

Bill Gates: We talked about it even before we got married. That was about 6 years into our marriage, I was seeing that I could spend a little more time on it. I had turned the CEO title over just that year. We made a pretty big set of gifts $20 billion that particular year. That kind of forced you to get going. Fortunately, my dad and I--

Warren Buffet: That's a start.

Charlie Rose: It's even a big number to you. It is.

Bill Gates: It's a minimum pay off, 5%.

Warren Buffet: I didn't know there were that many Euros.

Bill Gates: Both my dad and a great person who had been a Microsoft executive, Patty Stonesifer partnered to create the organization, even though between children and work we weren't able to give as much time as we have now. We got started. We can look back on that now and say that was the start of a learning curve. We did a lot of reproductive health. We learned about that. We thought, "Okay, let's do some science." We weren't working with governments as much. We've learned that's super important. It was great that by the time we both got more time, the foundation was already going. It had a core team of people. A bit of expertise. Made some mistakes. Done some things well. By 2008, when we're both increasingly engaged, there's a lot there to build on.

Charlie Rose: What were the principles that you began with?

Melinda Gates: That all lives, all lives have equal value, no matter where they're lived on the planet. And yet, as Bill and I would travel and read and look out, you'd realize we don't treat all lives as if they're equal. What we spend, for instance, the United States to save one adult or one child from death, it takes $30 to save a child's life with basic packets of vaccines in developing worlds, and yet we weren't doing that. We weren't making those investments as a world. We said to ourselves there has to be something we can do about it. We decided to invest in health outside of the United States. We thought that's where we could have the most impact. In the United States, we felt like not all kids were having an equal chance at a great education. Our predominant investments in the United States have been around the US education system.

Charlie Rose: Has that changed, in terms of where you see the focus for this foundation?

Bill Gates: Those 2 big themes will be our focus for our entire lives. Those are big enough problems that if you went to relieve polio, which looks good, we'll move onto malaria. There's enough diseases for our lifetime. We'd love if the foundation in our lifetime really could conquer a lot of that, and so people then later could focus on other problems. Education has been I'd say the one where we've seen less progress, but we're still totally committed to it. It's the right cause. The United States created this amazing framework that allowed Microsoft and Berkshire and amazing educations that we were both had the opportunity to have. We wish we could have the same type of impact in US education as we feel quite sure we'll have on global health.

Melinda Gates: I think the other thing to say is that--

Charlie Rose: You wish, but you're not sure you'll be able to achieve that?

Bill Gates: No, we're not sure. It's the -- Of all the things we're doing, it is the riskiest. We spend on education broadly about $800 million a year. That money has not in some dramatic way, neither our money nor the other philanthropists, and there's some great partners in this. Michael Bloomberg, Eli Grode, a ton of people who do amazing work.

Charlie Rose: On education?

Bill Gates: Focused on charter school. Yeah, on US education. As a group we can 't say that the educational scores have moved up a lot. Dropout rates have come down some. There's a few points of light in terms of some good charter schools.

Charlie Rose: Warren, you're watching this from a place of friendship as they did this. You obviously, I think it got accelerated after Susie's death, began to say what should I do. Did you have evolving thoughts about philanthropy?

Warren Buffet: No. I thought fairly vast about what I wanted to do. I don't go into a trance over the sale. I had a well thought out report in terms of before Susie died. Then, I had to make a change. It was obvious what I should do actually.

Charlie Rose: Obvious that you should give your money away? Or obvious that you knew where to give it?

Warren Buffet: I was going to give it away under any circumstances. There really isn't any other option Charlie.

Charlie Rose: You can't take it with you.

Warren Buffet: Out of everything in life, I wanted the money would buy. I mean, gone long ago. Money had utility to other people, it had no utility to me. Then, the fact -- The approach that all lives are of equal value. That -- I wouldn't change a word of that. I mean, that is exactly how I feel. Then, the question is is what's the best way to translate a bunch of little paper stock certificates into something that is consistent with the belief that all lives have equal value? Here I had the perfect situation, in that an entity was already in existence. It was run by 2 extremely bright, energetic people who were going to devote their lives to it. Young by my standards anyway. Spending their own money, which is a real factor. It wasn't play money. It was very natural. Of course, I did it in conjunction with 4 other foundations too that were smaller. They weren't in scale the same way.

Charlie Rose: Of your foundations?

Warren Buffet: Yeah. All five -- I mean, I couldn't feel better about it.

Charlie Rose: What was your response?

Melinda Gates: Tears.

Bill Gates: Tears.

Melinda Gates: Both of us, yeah. We took a walk, and we were both in shock.

Charlie Rose: You and Bill took a walk? Who was on the walk?

Melinda Gates: The two of us.

Bill Gates: We just walked and said wow.

Melinda Gates: Unbelievable.

Bill Gates: Wow. What a sense of responsibility. We benefited so much from our friendship with Warren, even independent of this. The whole idea of giving it away, I read the fortune article, it was about giving it away, even before we met Warren. That had greatly influenced my thinking. Then, as we've been going about the foundation, I've been talking to Warren one on one and he had a group of friends together. When within a few months of us being really inspired about okay global health. We can have so much impact. I was just electrified to share my enthusiasm in front of Warren and a group of his friends early in the life of the foundation. He was an advisor. A helper. A mentor. Every step of the way. The idea that wow, we were going to be able to magnify this and our sense of responsibility back to him would be even greater than it had been. It was very touching.

Charlie Rose: What role do you have?

Warren Buffet: Just a couple days every July I make a -- 5% of a number. It's still -- I may be poor, but it still well within my capabilities to do that. That's about the limits.

Charlie Rose: It's not a small number is it?

Bill Gates: He gives 1% to the 5 foundations. I think 2.48--

Warren Buffet: 2.8 billion

Bill Gates: 2.8 billion worth of Berkshire stock. In shares of Berkshire stock. He's named an amount which -- Then, he takes 5% of that, of the remainder every year. Berkshire stock has gone up enough even though the number of shares goes down, this is a record gift. Really incredible. All 5 foundations got this amazing check. I hope we sent a thank you note. I'll have to check on that.

Warren Buffet: The thank you note is what they do. Thank you is what they do.

Charlie Rose: What is it that brings you the most satisfaction from being engaged with them in this work?

Warren Buffet: It's the satisfaction of knowing what I built up over a lot of years is going to get used to improve other people's lives.

Charlie Rose: Have the ambitions of the foundation changed? Because clearly I have read the annual report. Read his annual report and now read your report. Clearly, you have talked about things, about measurement. You've talked about the importance of government, in terms of partnerships. How has it evolved in terms of the ideas that permeate the work of you 3?

Bill Gates: Well, we're on a learning curve. From the year 2000 to the year 2015, the cause of global health had some great achievements. Some governments, and we came together for a vaccine fund Gobi. Likewise, a similar set of partners for the global fund, which was about HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. Those funds were established and set very ambitious goals. They ran into some corruption and the prices didn't go down as much as they wanted. Some countries weren't getting the stuff out as much as they wanted. How did you build the management of those organizations? Overall, they were phenomenally successful. We probably put that at the top of the list of things that we really can point to that we, with partners, feel incredibly proud of. I can rank, of all the years we work, those would be at the front. The education stuff, although we remain committed, we haven't moved the dial on the average math capability, or reading and writing capability of particularly the inner city schools. But we have enough successes to really be energized and really get a pattern of okay, how do you work in very poor countries? How do you engage the best scientists in the world to come up with new tools? I'm more enthused about the work today, than even the very beginning.

Charlie Rose: And so are you?

Melinda Gates: Absolutely. I think one of the things, one of the premises we have about how we work has to do with innovation. That we believe in innovations. Whether it's an innovation in a vaccine. A malaria vaccine. Or an innovation that comes along technologically. Those innovations allow us to push forward on behalf of the poor. Great example is polio eradication. We couldn't really be talking about polio eradication if we didn't have the right vaccines, the right tools, but also the mapping that's come along is what's allowed us to get down to the village level to know if we're making progress. We believe in innovations. Making sure those come out of the labs from all over the world. China, India, the United States, UK. Get them out on behalf of the poor, but then it's up to governments to scale up. Even though we've put in billions of dollars into vaccines, they're tens of billions put in by governments to scale it up so we can have--

Charlie Rose: So you're saying you do some of the groundbreaking work in the beginning? Almost pilot projects that give people in government who have the ability to scale up, to scale up?

Melinda Gates: Every single thing we're in requires government scale up. Whether it's reducing tobacco usage. Whether it's eliminating malaria. Whether it's US education system. We could spend down our resources on the US education system in less than a year if we were just putting all of our resources into US education.

Warren Buffet: But that's one extra value they bring. Both Bill and Melinda have the ability to bring others along with them. Both governments and individuals. There's not only the funds of the 3 of us combined, but they have the stature, the eloquence, the experience, to talk with maybe governments. Maybe very wealthy individuals, and corral hundreds of millions, maybe billions of dollars additionally on this. There's a multiplier effect.

Charlie Rose: You would know better about this, and probably better to speak about it than they are. Their participation on the ground makes a difference. To see them in a village in India--

Warren Buffet: Yeah. It's unmatched. I mean, Rockefeller and Carnegie and Roosevelt, they did wonderful things. They spent a certain amount of time, but they did not -- They were not working 50 and 60 hour weeks all over the globe and going to some very -- Places I don't want to go to.

Charlie Rose: No.

Warren Buffet: It's hands on to an extraordinary degree. That not only gets results, but it attracts other people to go along with them because they know it's for real. It's big.

Charlie Rose: But you don't do it because you know it'll make a difference. You do it because you want to be there. You want to see it with your own eyes and feel it with your own hands.

Melinda Gates: You have to.

Bill Gates: Yeah. Trips -- There's a mix of things. Some trips are purely learning trips where you don't go and see the government. You don't go and see the press. You just go out and see okay, what's up with malaria? What's up with farming? We didn't grow up knowing much about even virtual farming. Poor old farming is quite unique. Then, there's the trips where you really are sitting down with the president saying your vaccination rate compared to other countries is far lower. The way you get the vaccines out, you can do a lot better.

Charlie Rose: Yeah, and we're here to help.

Bill Gates: Yeah. We'll put money behind it as a measurement system so you will know what parts of your country or what parts of the ministry are really doing the job well. Let's get engaged in this. The willingness of those leaders to sit down with us and talk about these things has been a positive surprise for us. There's a number of countries, Ethiopia would be the top of the list where they really changed a lot of policies. Although it took some of our resources, they made permanent changes to the health and agricultural sectors.

Charlie Rose: What kind of resources, what kind of people, what kind of institution are you creating?

Melinda Gates: We work with so many partners.

Charlie Rose: Are these all come together for the foundation or are they sort of on hoc basis?

Melinda Gates: Well it depends on what you're working on. We have different gatherings and different settings, so for instance in polio is a great example. We have Unicef, Gavi, World Health Organization all working together on polio. On the ground you have different partners with different expertise and then back in the UK or back in the US you may be using a partner who's using the mapping and the modeling and the disease surveillance. Some of it happens on the ground and some it happens back home.

Charlie Rose: The foundation is coordinating all of this?

Bill Gates: We have about 1,500 people in total. Most in Seattle, with offices in Africa and India and China. Also an office in Europe. We use grantees as much as we can but in a field like malaria, we have a group of around twenty people who are experts. They can go out to the vaccine experts, the drug experts, the mosquito experts, the modeling experts and orchestrate those skillsets together. Then take that and say okay, which countries are we going to get rid of malaria in and how are we going to reduce that map. In many cases, we are helping to convene different silos of expertise with people at the foundation.

Charlie Rose: Talk about expectations. Polio, 2020, eradicated?

Bill Gates: The best case, which is actually a possible case, I'm so close to it-

Warren Buffett: Don't make stock market predictions--

Bill Gates: I'm so close to saying I can have a positive bias.

Charlie Rose: So close to polio eradication?

Bill Gates: It's gone very well the last year. We haven't had a case in Africa since last August.

Charlie Rose: For almost a year, not one single case of Polio in Africa.

Bill Gates: Polio in Africa.

Melinda Gates: In the whole continent.

Bill Gates: The only two countries that we've had wild polio cases are Pakistan and Afghanistan and even there, the two regimens including the army people there and the various political parties there is a step forward to improve the quality of the campaigns. We are now reaching almost enough children that we feel there's a good chance of the last polio case being in Pakistan sometime in 2016, which they you would start a three year clock to make sure that you're looking and there's not some hidden pocket of the disease, which is a very appropriate time period. Then that would lead to a certification. The best case by 2019. That's so exciting.

Charlie Rose: You're living this aren't you.

Bill Gates: It's so exciting because it has been hard. It's been delayed from what's expected when the whole thing got started but a lot of brilliant ideas came along in the process, and those ideas will apply to improving world health and going after other disease eradications once we're successful on this one.

Charlie Rose: When was the last time humanity eradicated a disease?

Bill Gates: Only one disease has ever been eradicated and that was smallpox.

Charlie Rose: Smallpox.

Bill Gates: Last case was '77 and the certification was in 1980.

Warren Buffett: Think how important that was.

Charlie Rose: Absolutely.

Bill Gates: It killed millions a year and the US took the lead and we did it. They didn't even have internet and modeling now. They had some amazing people but that was inspirational.

Melinda Gates: I think that-

Warren Buffett: Go ahead.

Melinda Gates: I was going to say that I think the other thing besides the modeling now is is this expectation, you asked earlier about ambitions of the foundation. It's not necessarily ambitions, it's expectations. When Bill and I came into philanthropy, one of the things that was shocking to us, when we were at Microsoft both of us, you could get a report on your desk about sales any day of the week. You clicked on it, right? You couldn't get it. If you're trying to eliminate malaria in certain countries or eradicate polio, those datasystems didn't exist. Now, every thirty days we get a report on polio that says exactly which villages it's in in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria up until last year.

Charlie Rose: One more example of significance of data in the data revolution

Melinda Gates: You have to have to have data. It allows you to know you're making progress, but it's also starting to allow us as a world to know how and where to act on some of these problems at a much deeper level.

Charlie Rose: If you can eradicate polio, you want to give an inspiration to people that it is possible to do these things-

Melinda Gates: Definitely.

Charlie Rose: If you bring enough resources, will-

Melinda Gates: Focus, talent.

Charlie Rose: Focus and talent.

Bill Gates: After smallpox got done, the head of Unicef, Jim Grant, a brilliant person who's responsible for saving tens of millions of lives said, "Okay, our next phase is going to raise vaccination coverage from 30% to 80%." He took the 1980's and '90s and got us very close to that percentage. That's another miracle. Really, the second other big miracle other than small pox in global health up to this point. It was all driven off of the kind of confidence and energy and resources that came because smallpox worked.

Charlie Rose: Warren, you've got to look at this and say, "My God, I couldn't be spending my money any better."

Warren Buffett: No, exactly. It's gratifying because to be able to translate an accumulation of wealth, it basically has no meaning in terms of your life unless it gets translated into something that really does save lives. One thing that is worth emphasizing is when you get into large scale philanthropy like this, take the eradication of polio, it's not a cinch. In the field of philanthropy, big scale philanthropy, it's not the batting average that counts, it's the slugging percentage. It measures. If you do nothing in life but bunt and get singles, that's fine, you'll have a high batting average. The best slugging percentages-

Charlie Rose: I've got you.

Warren Buffett: A big foundation should be shooting for a high slugging percentage, not a high batting average.

Melinda Gates: That is so reassuring. That, what Warren said to us and the other foundations that he put his money into is swing for the fences. You've got to take risk. Particularly, we're working on problems that society has left behind. That rings in your ears when you're doing really hard days. There are hard days where you feel like you're not making progress or you feel like, "What haven't we seen, how did we not go about this right?" We have to remember that it's these hard problems. That keeps you going. That and meeting the people in the field, the amazing partners that we work with but also the families who are lifting themselves up under unbelievable circumstances.

Charlie Rose: A couple quick things too. One, malaria, you're hopeful that by 2050, perhaps? If lots of things come together?

Bill Gates: We've got to be able to do better than that. We're in this period where we need some new tools. In the drug pipeline, the vaccine pipeline, the killing mosquitoes pipeline, there's some really good stuff. We expect that sometime between 2030 and 2050, it can be eradicated. The actionable thing at this point is to take that map of where malaria is and pick a few areas and do regional eliminations. Southeast Asia, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, there's quite a bit of malaria there. That's one of the first regions that we've gotten all those governments together. Australia is helping. US, UK. We're going to prove that even with today's tools, we can do it there. We have about four or five shrinkages before we'll have the confidence and all the experts will align and say, "Okay, let's go after it in the heart of Africa." That will be the last place. Nigeria, Tanzania, Democratic Republic of Congo. Equatorial Africa is the toughest. We're going to corner malaria there and learn as we go and then have that final push.

Charlie Rose: Childhood fatalities. Nothing could more important.

Melinda Gates: Nothing could be more important. The thing that is amazing about it is the world has made huge progress. Childhood deaths have been cut in half since 1990. Cut in half. Part of that is because the UN with the millennium development goals set a road map that said, "We have a goal of cutting childhood mortality by two thirds." Now, we got it by half, but what happened was all of the NGOs and the partners and the governments, we started saying, "What investments do we need to make? What investments in vaccines? What investments in malaria? How do we get malaria bed nets out and get them used? What do we need to do about women's education, because a child is 50% less likely to die if his or her mother is educated." Every change she then makes in terms of accessing the healthcare system or what she invests in her own child. The world started to make those investments, and now we actually have a roadmap for what works, it's just a matter of scaling those things up more and more and more. Some are innovations like vaccines. Some are very basic things like breastfeeding and keeping your baby warm and clean cord card. Things we do in the United States you can do very inexpensively and it's just cultural change for women.

Charlie Rose: Malnutrition.

Melinda Gates: That attributes to almost half the deaths. I think the saddest thing about malnutrition is that if a child isn't fed properly in what we call the first thousand days, while the mother is pregnant and then after birth for those first two years, they are not cognitively able to learn in school the way that they were meant to learn.

Bill Gates: For every child who dies, there's four children who don't develop physically or mentally. It's only in the last three or four years that the incredible problem that is has become evident to us. Even today, understanding exactly which interventions saw malnutrition, we're doing a lot of pilot studies. It looks like helping the women have chickens in an area so they'll be more eggs or getting cows so there'll be more milk, that is going to be an element of the strategy. That's a nice one because it advances the economic well-being of the livestock owners as well as the nutrition of the community that they're in. There's a lot that we are just learning and we're trying to put some of the micro nutrients into the salt and why hasn't that worked in the past and you need to cook with it. I will be smarter about malnutrition when you see me a year from now, two years from now, five years from now.

Melinda Gates: The last two weeks our son, who's sixteen, and I stayed in Malawian household. This couple was amazing to let us live with them for a couple of days. They just knew we were friends of the NGO that was there and we wanted to learn. It was amazing to see because they were diversifying their diet. They have learned that they needed to eat something more than maize. They'd taken their little bit of money and invested in their chickens. That was allowing not only protein for the family but they were selling chickens on the market, selling eggs to the their neighbors and getting a little more income. Then, they were starting to diversify into pigs, and had by this point three small pigs. I said, "What are you going to do with the pigs?" I thought maybe they were going to eat them. They said, "Oh, no, that's a high school education right there for our daughter. That's part of the school feels, and that one? That's part of the school fees for our son." When they can start to make those diversification it not only helps nutrition but it helps their livelihood which then helps their family. There's not a family I have not met around the globe where when you ask them what their hopes and dreams are, they say, "I want to educate my children."

Charlie Rose: They believe that is the ticket for them.

Melinda Gates: They know it's the ticket. They don't believe it, they know it.

Charlie Rose: You watch this, you must be on a learning curve yourself. To understand how much there needs to be done in the world, but how there are these solutions and these ideas that are coming out of this.

Warren Buffett: I've always been a great one for letting other people do the work, Charlie. What you've just gotten through hearing. The difference between having two very small people working partly with our own funds committed who care obviously about it. Compared to running some organization where it got set up twenty years earlier and is just gets handed to one person to the next. It's night and day. This is the way to make a difference.

Charlie Rose: Do you think you're having an influence in terms of other people who want to engage in philanthropy exactly the way you have engaged in philanthropy? You made a dramatic shift in your life. You lead the way, then you joined full time. This has been, the way you spend twenty four hours now is very different from the way you spent twenty four hours in 1995.

Bill Gates: Absolutely. The goals are very different. Some of the ideas, the meeting with scientists-

Charlie Rose: The process of acquiring information.

Bill Gates: I was well trained. The Microsoft work was like an idea preparation. I say if we can share two things, one, that philanthropy can be fun and be living examples of that, and on some of the riskier causes that we can get people to feel like, okay, it's a little bit less risky. Maybe they'll do it in a different country or different way.

Charlie Rose: What does risk mean?

Bill Gates: Risk? Taking philanthropic money and spending it in Africa is very daunting.

Charlie Rose: Because it may not be successful or daunting because-

Bill Gates: The idea of, okay, don't these governments always take this and it's corrupt or even if they make progress then there'll be instability and whatever you've done will be wiped out. Could I look foolish, where do I start in Africa? Who do I trust? It took us many years and mistakes before we felt any confidence there. I think everyone in philanthropy kind of encourages other people to take a bit more risk, try something a bit more on the frontier. There are some great causes and Endowing universities. That's a fantastic thing, the scientists there do very good work.

Charlie Rose: Let me talk a bit about women and development. That's become a focus of yours.

Melinda Gates: Definitely. The reason for that is because women are agents of change. I think for too long the community looked at them as somebody we should do something to instead of saying, "They are the agents of change and if you unlock their potential, that is, if you make sure they're healthy and their children are healthy, and you make sure they can have some decision making capability in economic opportunity and you invest in them, they invest in everybody else." Every marginal dollar a woman in a developing world gets in her hands she puts 90% back into her family. She's often the one who is making the decision about what the kids eat, who gets to go to the healthcare clinic when they're sick, who eats first in the family. We have to invest in them if we want to get huge wide scale impact. I think we weren't as a community really looking at investing in women at scale which we need to do and are starting to do. Secondly, how do you look at your programming? You can't just assume if you do something you create a new seed. We have now a drought resistant maze which is great, a corn seed. If we assume that the agriculture dealers in Africa would get it out to all the farmers, that's a false assumption. They don't reach women. You have to go the extra mile and actually reach the women and make sure they get the crop, they get the seed in their hand, they understand the planting technique, and they can keep the income.

Charlie Rose: This must resonate with you a lot.

Warren Buffett: If you believe every life has equal value, you've got to be doing something for women. The truth is, in many cultures and in our own, and going back for thousands of years in many cases, it has not been the case that society has said that women's lives have equal value to those of males. Our own constitution, when it talks about the qualifications for presidency, it has a whole bunch of male pronouns in there. We wrong that thirteen years or so after say, men are all created equal, but just read article two section one.

Melinda Gates: The thing is, we can measure it. That's the other thing. I think, in the past, it's funny, so much of this has to be and it should be about data so we know where to invest. First of all, we didn't collect the data about women. When we did household surveys, literally, the household surveys in the Bangladesh and Africa and India, the only question they ask is who is the main bread winner in the family. As soon as they learn that, and it's the man, they go down that path. They don't even ask about secondary income. There are so many places where we haven't had good data about women, we haven't collected it, but it turns out when you start to collect it, you can actually measure empowerment. You can actually measure when a woman starts acting differently, making different decisions. When she gets that economic need. We're going to do that, because that's when you get prime ministers and presidents to act differently even in their own countries and make investments.

Charlie Rose: There's this thing you have called 'no ceiling report'. What is that?

Melinda Gates: We partnered in 2013 with the Clinton Foundation to really figure out where as a world do we have data on women. We use the Economist economic unit and UCLA to partner and collect all the data we have around the world in every country we have about women. Childhood marriage, where they were in the work force, labor force participation, do they have the chance to go to school? We looked at that and we also visualized it so that people could go up and read it and now we're going to fill in the gaps where we don't have the right data. The childhood marriage data that we all use and we all quote around the world, it's not very deep. It's really not. If you want to know how to act in childhood marriage, we need a lot better data to know how and where to act.

Charlie Rose: How does technology affect all of this? For better or worse?

Bill Gates: Technology is very helpful. If you're not careful, technology responds to the large markets. The middle income and rich people will drive what applications get written, how it gets used. Piggy backing on the amazing cellphone, the amazing internet connectivity and saying, okay, what about a farmer who wants to learn when to plant their crop, what seeds to pick. What about a primary healthcare clinic and making sure the supply chain really gets everything there. We know is that worker there and are they doing what they should do. We can take that digital foundation and with a little bit of extra money make sure that financial services, health, quality tracking, even budget tracking, although we haven't done this yet we're in the early stage of braining storming it, how can you follow money and gather evidence of when the money is used appropriately so that donors have more confidence so the auditing is really built in a low cost way. That digital platform allows us to be way more ambitious, starting with satellite photography that's told us the population for these polio activities all the way down to reaching somebody so that their savings account is literally on their cell phone.

Melinda Gates: When you go in the developing world today, cell phones are pervasive. I don't care what rural village you're in, there are cell phones. They're the old plastic ones we used to use. What that's allowing is those digital platforms as Bill says, mobile money. In Kenya, 87% of the GDP runs through a mobile payment system today. Phones.

Charlie Rose: In Kenya, 87%?

Melinda Gates: 87% GDP-

Bill Gates: They're the leaders.

Melinda Gates: Runs through. But we've got them in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Tanzania. These are happening at scale. A remote woman of a remote area, if her husband goes into Nairobi let's say to get a job, he can send digital money back to her on her phone. Meanwhile, she can be saving a dollar a day from the eggs she's selling at market. When it comes time for the school fees, they've got the money. Not only that, as the cell phones get better, which we're putting, agricultural crop prices at market. When she gives her crop to a middleman, she now knows what the market price is, so when he comes back and says, "I only got $10 a bushel", she says, "Well the market price was $20." What that's going to happen when those start to become smart phones, women will tell you all over Southeast Asia, we know that one in three women experience violence around the world. There's no an application that I can give six people on my smart phone network my cell phone number. If a woman gets in a violent situation in India, she can press one button and six people immediately know she's in trouble. Eventually, we'll know her GPS location. That changes things for women.

Warren Buffett: If you improve agricultural techniques though, you're going to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Just look at what it's done in this country in a couple of hundred years. It was innovation when the planter came along, when the tractor came along. If you look at how primitive agriculture is in so much of the world, you're really talking about hundreds of millions of lives that can be improved if you enable them to get more out of the agent then they've been getting before.

Charlie Rose: I just want to touch on, because I've seen, what you've learned about Ebola and other possible diseases and how this global community can do something that they hadn't done before to be able to make sure that the worst doesn't come.

Bill Gates: Ebola, we're still in the final efforts to get the numbers down to zero. The numbers are down quite a bit. Even once they do get to zero, the three effected countries will need a lot to rebuild back to decent health systems and get their economies going. It's also a lesson globally. We were lucky that it stayed in the three countries and didn't get more widespread. There are diseases other than Ebola that will come in the future.

Charlie Rose: You were concerned about an early warning system and the capacity to respond early with the maximum.

Bill Gates: Right. What you need is a reasonable healthcare system and then surveillance sights that are gathering data from them. The foundation is reaching out to other people to say, "Let's get this early system going." There's a lot of reports being written about how to strengthen the WHO that kind of has a central role here. The contrast I've drawn is that when it comes to military activities, we have people on reserve, we do training, we plan ahead. For an epidemic, which could be a natural epidemic or even worse intentionally bio-terrorism epidemic, we're not as ready. We don't have the volunteers and the supplies and the training. The only good thing that could come out of Ebola is if it's used as a wakeup call and those resources are put into place so that we'd be a lot faster. That will be very important, and it's a very infectious agent then Ebola.

Charlie Rose: Warren, sitting and listening to these two people must make you enormously proud because of their enthusiasm and because of the commitment to be there, but also as they live this experience, they like you, could be doing a lot of other things. Something brings the three of you to this table, to a table wherever you are, whether it's Seattle or Omaha, wherever it might be. India. The driving compassion, and the driving will to make a difference.

Warren Buffett: What you hope is somebody listening to just like we through leading or whatever it may have been experience, Bill had parents that were very involved in philanthropy. They just think it through a little bit as to what they can be doing and a lot of people do things individually that I admire a lot more than what I'm just doing with money. They pour themselves into it every day in terms of helping. My older sister does that. She spends every day at age 87 helping other people. She's giving up far more than I'm giving up. I'm giving up some money but I'm not giving up time. I've had two people come ten thousand miles just to talk to me for an hour, hour and a half, about philanthropy and the giving pledge. It's fascinating. Remote part of the world, I won't identify where they're from. If it strikes a chord, who knows where the ripples go.

Charlie Rose: Thank you for coming. Thank you.

Bill Gates: Thank you.

Melinda Gates: Thank you Charlie.

Charlie Rose: Thank you Bill, thank you for joining us, see