Video2014

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.

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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.
2011
Bill Gates (2011)
One of Rose’s 2011 conversations with Gates on the foundation’s vaccine decade and polio push.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2014
Stanford commencement address
Bill and Melinda alternated at the podium, urging graduates to pair optimism with empathy: Bill recalled the soft-drink-can-sized ambitions of early Microsoft and the Soweto hospital visit that reset his priorities; Melinda described a Calcutta sex worker named Mina.
2014
Bill Gates on the Ebola outbreak
An hour-long Politico conversation during the West African Ebola epidemic, in which Gates discussed the foundation’s $50 million response and what the outbreak revealed about global preparedness, themes he would turn into the 2015 TED talk.
2015
Drinking water made from sewage on The Tonight Show
Gates brought Fallon water produced by the Janicki Omniprocessor, a foundation-funded sewage-to-water plant, and drank it on air; the clip went viral and became the public face of the foundation’s sanitation program.
2015
The next outbreak? We’re not ready
Gates warned that the world had invested in nuclear deterrence but not in epidemic preparedness, modeled a Spanish-flu-scale outbreak and called for a standing response corps, germ games and vaccine platforms. Five years later it became the most-cited prediction of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2015
Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates
A 55-minute three-way Charlie Rose conversation with Buffett and both Gateses about philanthropy and their work with the Giving Pledge, broadcast July 17, 2015.