Melinda French Gates - ‘Just because you’re smart doesn’t mean you’re wise’

0:00Hello there. Did you know that you can hear all of the things that my guests might have failed to divulge in the main episode by joining us in our subscriber community. Failing With Friends. It's where you will hear really riveting pieces of information like Olivia Atwood's dream date location or Miranda Hart's advice on performing bodily functions in front of your partner. Just follow the link in the podcast notes and we will see you there.

0:36hello and welcome to how to fail with me elizabeth day this is the podcast that believes failure can be a nudge from the universe into a different kind of beginning i kept pushing it away but at some point I had to turn towards it and I just knew it and I knew it in my soul. And so I had to learn to say to them, just because I can, doesn't mean I should. We essentially knew the day we shipped the software that it was a dud.

1:11Raise the rudders, raise the sails, raise the sales. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over. Roger. Wait, is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title, and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started today at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply. Melinda French Gates was born in Dallas, Texas, the second of four children. Her father, Raymond, was an Apollo space engineer who taught his young daughter to code.

1:51Her mother, Elaine, instilled in her a belief in the power of education. French Gates excelled at school and university, where she studied computer science and economics and completed an MBA. In 1987, she joined a tech startup called Microsoft, rising through the ranks to become manager of information products and marrying the boss in 1994. His name was Bill Gates. Together, the couple founded and co-chaired the Gates Foundation, where for more than two decades, she set the direction and priorities of the world's largest philanthropic organization. Today, a divorced French Gates heads up Pivotal, which works to advance women's power and influence in the US and around the world.

2:37Along the way, she has raised three children and written two best-selling books, The Moment of Lift and her latest, The Next Day, Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward. It is an astonishing journey from the normality of a middle-class childhood to becoming one of the wealthiest women in the world and one of our most influential philanthropists. To me, there are absolutely common threads that connect us as humanity, French Gates says. And yes, wealth can shield you from some of it. You might not be worried about paying your mortgage or putting dinner on the table, but the emotions, the grief, the anger, the hurts, those all still happen.

3:23Melinda French-Gates, welcome to How to Fail. Thanks for having me, Elizabeth. It's such an honor. And that quote, I wanted to end on it because it's so powerful, because it also equates to what I believe about failure, that failures happen to us all. Nothing can insulate us. All of us. Right? That is life. Life has its ups and its downs, right? And I think it's what we take from those is if we allow them changes us right and that's where the growth happens yeah we all go through them i felt so calm reading your book the next day oh thank you it's really beautifully written thank you but i wondered if you felt calm writing it of parts i did but definitely a few parts i didn't like because i wrote i wrote both about my divorce, which was very hard to write about, but I felt necessary because people knew I'd been through it.

4:16This was a book about transitions. And it was also very hard to write the chapter about losing my best friend, John Nielsen, who he passed away. He was in his 30s and his wife was in her 30s and I was in my 30s. And so, that was also hard to write about, but also there's been enough time that I could write about it with reflection. But for the most part, I would say I wrote it, yeah, from a very, very calm place. I think you do a wonderful job in the chapter where you write about John of talking about how grief changes us through the power of the love that it represents. And I'm so sorry that you experienced that loss in your 30s.

4:58I wonder if you feel his spirit with you still. Absolutely. I feel it. I still can remember his smile. I can remember how he enunciated. I can remember his exuberance. We worked at Microsoft together for a long time. We were, you know, the same, roughly the same age. And when I see his adult children now, and I'm still very good friends with his wife, Emmy, I was just on text with her this morning. When I see them, I literally see characteristics of him in those three adult children, even though they were young when he passed away. And I know you were a wonderful friend when Emmy lost John and helped her through that process.

5:38And that she was also there for you when you were going through one of your major transitions post-divorce. And I wonder if you could speak about a little what that means with friendship, that you have to sort of show up and be vulnerable in order for someone to love you back. You do have to be vulnerable. And even when you don't want to be vulnerable sometimes, or we think, okay, I can be the strong one here. So, in the case of her losing John, I think I was the one that had more of the strength, because she was going through it deeply personal. That was her husband, right? He's my friend, but it's her husband, and she's being left behind with three children.

6:18So, I think I was part of her circle of strength at that time. But then, when I went through a divorce that I never expected in My whole life I was going to ask for a divorce, but it was necessary then, I felt. She showed up as an absolute pillar of strength for me. Absolute. And I was in the venerable position. And I would say now what my friends and I talk about, my closest friends, is that we never know in life whether we're going to be the one who's the supporter or the one who's needing the support. and the truth is we're all going to need both at different times and you just you just give from love you just give and you don't know if it's going to come back but generally it ends up over the course of your life it does will you tell us about the title the next day and its meaning sometimes we think when you're going through a big transition or change that it's like it's right now it's it's now is when this is going to happen or the growth is going to happen but the truth is let's say you leave a job or you leave a marriage or someone passes away, it's really the next day that the huge transition starts and that the growth starts.

7:34And what I encourage readers to do in the book is not to just rush to the next thing. I think so often in our own anxiety, we rush to the next job or we rush to the, okay, I'm done with my grief, I'm all done grieving. no you don't know grief comes in waves and so if you can stay in that place and really process some that you know the next days if you have enough time the week a month longer um there is so much growth and resilience that comes and honestly that to me is where the beauty is is in the growth of who do you become afterwards, after some of that loss or change. Beautifully put. And I don't want to dwell on this because you are so much more than the man you were married to.

8:23But that idea of growth sometimes coming quietly and over a long period of time, I could completely relate to. I mentioned before we started recording that I also went through a divorce, albeit not to one of the world's wealthiest men and nowhere near as long. We were together for seven years. But I'm often asked how I knew that it was over. And actually, it's a difficult question to answer because it was almost like my body and my instinct took over. And I just primarily knew somewhere deep in my soul. Could you talk a bit about how you knew? Yeah. And I think, let me just say something. I'm also sorry you went through a divorce.

9:07because it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter who it is. It's a very painful thing to go to, because as I say to people, you know, it's two people who've come together, hopefully in love, right? And in my case, I would definitely say that. So, then the pulling it apart later is really hard, and you've sewn something together. And I think in my case, I would say I kept pushing away that inner voice, because I did have three children, and we were raising, I was raising three children, we, you know, and we had a foundation, and that was big, and I believed in that work, I still believe in the work of the foundation.

9:46And so, when that voice would come, and it would come at different times because of things that had happened outside the marriage that I would later come to learn about, I kept pushing it away. But at some point, I had to turn towards it, and I just knew it and I knew it in my soul. And so, again, I had to take time, time in quiet, time with myself, time to ask myself, why am I staying? What would it be like if I left? And that's, for me, it's a long process because, you know, I took marriage and I still do very, very seriously and it wasn't just two of us involved, it was five of us. We had three children.

10:28So, but I think when you know, when you have an inner knowing, and I do talk about this in the book, it is really important to listen to it and to follow it. Someone that I admire, Oprah Winfrey, who's well known, even outside the United States, she has a way of saying that those moments come in a whisper, but if you don't listen to them, boom, they come thumping you on the head. Like you've got a much bigger problem down the line, right? So true. Do you have Oprah Winfrey in your mobile phone? No, put it this way. We know each other, but it's not like she's not somebody I text, right? Before we get onto your failures, I'd love to just touch on your childhood and your amazing sounding parents.

11:14And particularly the idea that your parents made you feel, I think, that anything was possible? Anything. How important has that belief been to you? Fundamental. Fundamental. My parents said, you can be anybody you want to be in life, and we want you to go to college. And so, I am, there were four of us in the household. I'm the second. It was two girls and then two boys. It was a little bit of a gap between because my mom had trouble having children, and they said to us, you will, it wasn't a question of if, you will go to college, and they, in our very middle-class household, took on the debt.

11:55I mean, what a gift. But they said they believed that college was the launching pad, that if you went to university and just what you would learn and the contacts you would make, that that was a launching pad to whoever you wanted to be in life. and boy that belief and that belief in me and you mentioned it in the introduction and my dad both of my parents believing we could be anything we wanted to be and supporting that but then my dad believing and knowing that women could be good in math and science and saying it to us if you want to pursue that as a career I know you have it in you that was huge.

12:34Mm-hmm. And he famously had women in his team because he noticed that the results were so much better. Right. If the gender was mixed. Yeah, he worked on the early, very early Apollo missions. So cool. It was so cool. We thought it was cool. And he would come home and talk to us about, back then it wasn't necessarily women engineers, it was female mathematicians. And he says, my teams are better off when these females are on the team. I just, I know it. The work they do is phenomenal, the way we interact with each other. And then not only that, he would take us, our whole family would go to the company picnic, and he would make sure that my sister and I met these women.

13:15So, I not only heard of them, I knew who they were. So, talk about role models, but girls still don't have enough role models in society. I say that boys can look up, and let's say they want to be an entrepreneur. they can see three dozen archetypes of male entrepreneurs and go, I don't want to be like those six guys, but maybe those three. They look up and say they see a lot of male politicians. I don't want to be like those, but maybe these. Women look up and we don't have three dozen archetypes in every single field. And that's why I think anyone who does make it in their career role modeling that or using that platform on behalf of girls or for boys, men, using on behalf of boys and role modeling who they can be in society with good values, I think that matters a lot.

14:10I think that's such a good point because it's also about having enough to identify, as you say, the ones that you don't want to be like. Totally. I've never heard that before and it's so true. I often say that I work against the knots in society, the N-O-T-S, what do I not want to be, or the K-N-O-T-S in society, the knots, the hard things. But like, when I went to university, again, I was very middle class, very hard for my parents to take on the debt. There were wealthy kids at my university, and I remember being around them and thinking, if I ever have money, I don't want to be like them. And if I ever am lucky enough to have children, I don't want my kids to grow up like that.

14:51So, I had that in me when later, lo and behold, I end up having substantial wealth. I knew I did not want to act like some of those people I saw at university and I absolutely wasn't going to allow my children to act like that. Your first failure is rushing to repair conflict in parenting. So, there's one specific story that you had in mind here with your daughter. What's that story? Yes, it's my youngest daughter. So, I have a daughter and then a son and then another daughter. And you would think by the time the third one came along, you would have learned something and parenting, but she was by far the one who was, I would say, the toughest.

15:37So, you set a rule, and she, my oldest would come in, my oldest wouldn't run through a rule. My second would sort of check with you before they ran through the rule, and my third one just ran right through the rule. And she'll listen to this, she won't even mind me saying it. She's almost 23 now, and she's an entrepreneur herself. She has that risk-taking. I know who she is. Phoebe Gates. Phoebe. I love her. I love her. I mean, and I never wanted to take that out of her, but she was tough as a middle schooler in a high school. So, I had set a boundary one day about something, and I think it was a party she wanted to go to or something in high school.

16:16And again, I was just, she was not going. It was not the right time or place for her at that age to go to this particular party. And she was really mad about it, kept pushing and pushing and pushing on me, and finally, she pushed me over the edge, and I lost my temper with her. And, you know, as a parent, you don't ever want to lose your temper if you can help it, right? Now, we're all human, but I really lost my temper in a way I just shouldn't have. And she was really angry at me, and for good reason then, especially. So, she marches upstairs to her room. We're downstairs in the living room, and I realize I've overdone it, you know, that I really, I'm still not going to go to the party, but I shouldn't have lost my temper.

16:56And I go up to repair with her because I want the repair, and I believe in rupture and repair. And she wanted nothing to do with me. She put her hand up and said, she just said, and I said, no, no, can I just at least have a hug? I know you're mad at me. I said I was sorry. She said, I know you're sorry. I'm not ready. And I was like, well, can I just have a hug? No, I'm not ready. And I had to learn that no from her that putting her hand up saying, no, mom, is that she needed longer till she was ready to repair. And maybe what I wanted, she wasn't ready for. And it was such a good lesson for me, both about parenting and even friendships.

17:39Like, we all repair or get over emotions at different rates. And just because I'm ready doesn't mean she's ready, right? And of course, as I look back, Heck, I was also the one in the position of power, right? Yeah. In that situation. So, I learned a lot about myself through parenting, and particularly the things I didn't parent well around. Fascinating. I wonder if you've reflected why you felt the need to repair that conflict quickly. Is it something about feeling uneasy that someone else is mad at you? I don't mind people being mad at me. I was used to that. I worked at Microsoft for nine years.

18:18People were mad all the time. But like, okay, whatever. And I was like, fine, take it on. Like, I actually don't mind conflict. Conflict for me is not actually hard to do. Some people don't like conflict. But it was more because I knew I had overstepped as a parent, right? I had not just a little bit raised my voice. I'd really raised my voice. And I knew I was in the wrong. And that's why I so much wanted the repair, right? and, you know, and she came back around. It didn't take as long as I thought it would. And we had another rupture, I remember, over something even larger a couple of years later.

18:56And I didn't raise my voice, but it was a different situation. And she needed almost two days to repair with me. She was so angry at me. But again, we learned from that and she also learned boundaries. Like, that was what I needed to teach her was strong boundaries too, right? You mentioned earlier that insistence that you did not want your children to become like the entitled, brash, wealthy kids that you had encountered at college. How did you manage that? it wasn't easy I will say that because also they were raised in a very large house that was underway even before I got married but I did choose to move into it so I accepted that we moved in how did I manage it I think through a lot of good boundaries a lot of talking openly and honestly about what my values were and what I expected of them.

19:59I had high expectations of them. But also money, like money in that situation, there's not a gate. So, you know, like when I was growing up, I couldn't get the second pair of shoes because there wasn't the money in the house for them. We're there four kids, right? My dad were on his engineering salary. But growing up, when I'm raising kids, there are three kids in there. We could have bought as many shoes, essentially as any of them wanted. And so, I had to learn to say to them, just because I can doesn't mean I should. And I thought that would also serve them well in life that if they eventually had some money of their own.

20:36I remember my oldest daughter when she was in middle school, we were passing a store, we were on a trip, we're passing a store and, you know, the window's beautiful and we all look at those store windows and of course you want the thing that's in the window and she just had to have this designer purse. She was 12. Had to have it. And I know if she gets a designer purse, she's going to go to school. And of course, at 12, you want to show it off, right? And I said, no, I'm not going to do that. And she said, but you have the money. Why wouldn't you? You have a designer purse. Why wouldn't you buy it for me?

21:04And I learned to say, just because I can, doesn't mean I should. And so, she was allowed then to earn an allowance. She got an allowance. They could put on their Christmas wishlist or their birthday wishlist that maybe their grandparents or their parents might buy them the thing they wanted. But I also knew, you know, it was going to send the wrong message if I bought her that and she showed up at school with it. Yeah.

21:31Ford Blue Cruise Hands-Free Highway Driving takes the work out of being behind the wheel, allowing you to relax and reconnect while also staying in control. Enjoy the drive in Blue Cruise-enabled vehicles like the F-150, Explorer, and Mustang Mach-E. Available feature on equipped vehicles. Terms apply. Does not replace safe driving. See Ford.com slash Blue Cruise for more details.

22:02When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp. The secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans. Send event invites and pin messages so no one forgets mom's 60th. And never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end-to-end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp. Message privately with everyone. Learn more at whatsapp.com. This child that you talk about having had this conflict with, Phoebe, is now a podcaster in her own right. She's part of the Unwell Network with Alex Cooper. Is it kind of amazing? I mean, I'm not a parent, sadly, but is it kind of amazing seeing your children out and about in the world being successful and fully realized?

22:49Do you feel very proud of them? So proud of them. So proud of them. I mean, my oldest daughter has two young children, and she's just finishing up her first year in residency in medical school, her intern year, the hardest year. And she's got two young daughters. My son is out working on his PhD and working full time. And then my youngest, she's a podcaster and she's an entrepreneur. consumer and so I'm immensely proud of them. I'm immensely proud of them at finding their own talents. I always used to say to them when they were young, I don't care what you choose to be in the world, right? But choose something that matches your talents.

23:35Choose what you want to do in the world. Don't worry about what your dad does or I do or what the world thinks. choose to bring out your best talents and be whoever you want to be and so to see them you know one on her way to being a full-time doctor one you know working and getting his PhD which is so him and then Phoebe being an entrepreneur she was my little risk taker I knew the day that kid was born she was a risk taker I was like oh no what am I going to do with this one right how is co-parenting being well our kids luckily are older so there isn't much co-parenting There really isn't, you know, there are weddings and graduations now.

24:13And so, in a way, I think that makes things just a whole lot easier than had they been young. A whole lot easier. And are you loving being a grandmother? Love. Absolutely love. And my mom is still very healthy. Both my parents are still healthy and alive and together. They're 84 and 86. Do you know my mother last Christmas got down on the ground on her knees and is crawling around with me and one of my granddaughters? Wow. Yeah. Talk about inspirational. I want to be doing that when I'm not 84 and 94, right? And that's her great-granddaughter. Circle of life. It's beautiful. Yeah, it's beautiful.

24:50Your second failure is your failure to fully consider the cultural context when you were designing solutions at the Gates Foundation. Such an interesting one. So, tell me about this. Sure. So, you can have the best life-saving technology in the world, but if you can't get a person to accept it or you can't deliver it to where they are, it is a failure. So, I'll give you an example. We were involved in creating a new vaccine for something called rotavirus, which was one of the biggest respiratory diseases that kills children in low-income countries. So we and our partners worked on this vaccine, we finally got one available.

25:36And do you know, we didn't think about the context of what a refrigerator is like in a low income country. So, these vaccines, these particular ones needed a cold chain, which exists in low-income countries. Literally, vaccinators carry a cold box, like an igloo cooler, on their shoulder. Or if you go into a small health clinic, maybe about the size of your podcasting studio, there's a refrigerator in the corner. Well, you have to think about the size of that refrigerator box that's carried on the shoulder or the refrigerator in the healthcare unit and what happens if the power goes off and it needs to be stayed refrigerated.

26:21But the vaccine vials were teeny tiny, but the packaging that was created, they were put in these very large boxes. So, in these refrigerators, you might be able to store eight vaccines. Well, guess what? When it's vaccine day at the clinic, moms walk for miles with their children. And I've been to these. There are lines outside for vaccines. But what if they've shown up, they've walked an hour for a vaccine, and there are only eight of them available? You're going to turn away 50-something people in line. And just literally because of a failure about thinking about the space of a refrigerator in the low-income countries, that mistake was made at the beginning.

27:02There's another mistake about, have I pronounced this properly? Treadle pumps? Treadle pumps Treadle pumps, okay So treadle pumps, they sit on top of wells, is that right? They sit, often they can, yeah, they can be on top of a well or they can be in a field with a long hose back to something that's pumping out Yeah Okay, and it was, it was, they were placed at the wrong level Mm-hmm Is that right? So women felt uncomfortable using them They felt uncomfortable using them because a treadle pump, you go like this and so when you go like this you put your feet on them they're a little like pedals and you stand on it well guess what your hips move and sway and in these places that wasn't culturally acceptable because it was as if the women were trying to seduce men right so incredibly unusable by women right versus had it been a single push pump where it's like one leg on the ground and just push with your foot on the other one you would have been just fine but because it was designed to be like this, women were swaying their hips and that was considered to be culturally completely unacceptable.

28:07So, they couldn't use them, period. And when something like this happens, does it feel like a very personal failure? Do you feel responsible? You feel not smart. You feel dumb. Like, how is that not thought about, right? Either by us, our partners, why did we not ask the right questions? And so, it became a learning about human-centered design that you better be out in the field. You better be out in these cultural contexts to understand what people's lives are like, to understand the lengths they're going to get something. I finally came to realize it's also a sense of hubris. The fact that we think we can design something they want without going out and asking them, but boy, you better think about, you know, how are you delivering it?