A Conversation with Bill Gates

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 114 recordings of Bill Gates →

1. 2008

   Farewell event on his last full-time day

   Gates’s send-off before more than 800 employees, former colleagues and family, webcast to cafeterias and offices worldwide: Ballmer presented a scrapbook and, in tears, said ‘Bill gave us that opportunity’; Gates, also tearful, said ‘my life’s work really is about software and working with incredible people’.

2. 2008

   An hour with Bill Gates

   Rose’s first full-hour sit-down with Gates after he left day-to-day work at Microsoft, covering the foundation’s early priorities, the financial crisis and the transition itself.

3. 2009

   Mosquitos, malaria and education

   Gates’s first talk as a full-time philanthropist, in which he opened a jar of mosquitoes on the TED audience (‘there’s no reason only poor people should have the experience’) and laid out his two big bets: eradicating malaria and fixing American teaching.

4. 2009

   Keeping America Great

   A joint student Q&A with Buffett taped the afternoon of November 12, 2009 and broadcast that night, a year after the financial crisis. The two friends defended American capitalism and foreign aid and fielded career questions from Columbia Business School students.

5. 2010

   Innovating to zero!

   Gates’s first major climate statement: the world needs ‘energy miracles’ to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050, and he explained why he was backing TerraPower’s traveling-wave nuclear reactor. The CO2 = P × S × E × C equation introduced here reappears in his 2021 book.

6. 2010

   Testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on global health

   Gates’s only congressional testimony of the foundation era (as of 2026), urging the Senate to fund the Obama administration’s Global Health Initiative and arguing that vaccines and maternal health were the highest-return uses of aid money.

7. 2010

   A Conversation with Bill Gates

   Isaacson, then Aspen Institute president, interviewed Gates about his optimism on health, education, women’s rights and the human development index, and pressed him on education reform: teacher evaluation, teaching to the test, state budgets and technology in classrooms.

8. 2010

   Giving Pledge roundtable on This Week

   The pledge’s founders sat for a joint Sunday-morning roundtable with Amanpour and Ted Turner (whose 1997 UN gift was a model for the pledge), the main network-television appearance of the Giving Pledge’s first year; the broadcast also featured hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer calling for higher taxes on the rich.

9. 2011

   How state budgets are breaking US schools

   A ten-minute argument that rising state health-care and pension costs were squeezing K-12 funding, using California’s budget as the example and calling state accounting ‘tricks’ that Enron would envy.

10. 2011

    Bill Gates (2011)

    One of Rose’s 2011 conversations with Gates on the foundation’s vaccine decade and polio push.

11. 2012

    Bill Gates on the Gates Foundation

    A 53-minute Rose conversation surveying the foundation’s work in mid-2012 (polio eradication, vaccines, agriculture and US education), with a brief detour into tablets and Microsoft’s Surface, announced two weeks earlier.

12. 2013

    Teachers need real feedback

    Gates argued that American teachers get almost no useful feedback (‘Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: satisfactory’) and showed the foundation’s video-based classroom observation work.

13. 2013

    Bill Gates 2.0

    Rose’s 60 Minutes profile of Gates five years into philanthropy: the reinvented toilet, a vaccine cooler that keeps 200 doses cold for 50 days, his reading habits (the famous bag of books) and, most quoted, his tearful recollection of his last visits with Steve Jobs.