Bill Gates (2011)

Around this recording

The recordings either side of it, in order.

All 114 recordings of Bill Gates →

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 2011

   Bill Gates (2011)

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

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 2013

    The Giving Pledge

    Three years after the pledge’s launch, Rose interviewed its three founders and signatories including Pete Peterson, Sara Blakely, Steve and Jean Case and Jeffrey Skoll about how the campaign recruits billionaires and what it has changed.

12. 2014

    From Poverty to Prosperity: A Conversation with Bill Gates

    In a 70-minute conversation at the conservative think tank, Gates made the case that foreign aid works, that capitalism and philanthropy are complementary, and that software will reshape jobs (‘software substitution’) within 20 years; he also defended the Common Core standards.

13. 2014

    Why giving away our wealth has been the most satisfying thing we’ve done

    The couple’s first joint TED appearance, interviewed by Chris Anderson about how they decided to give away their fortune, the division of labor in the foundation, and raising children with great wealth. Melinda discusses the early Africa trip that shaped the foundation’s priorities.