'Bill Gates: Then and Now' lesson video transcript

Transcript to the video 'Bill Gates: Impatient Optimist':

Tom Post: So, Matt, you had an unusual opportunity to meet with Bill Gates, who is number 5 on our most powerful people list. Everybody knows him for the 59 billion dollars that he is worth, but you had a very different interest in him.

Matthew Herper: People also know about his charitable efforts, but I really went there, went to talk to him about one particular charitable effort that really has taken his heart and is one of his biggest areas of investment, and that's the vaccine. Bill Gates has become one of the biggest proponents for a technology that a lot of people take for granted in fighting infectious disease, and he's got amazing goals.

Bill Gates: The number of deaths caused by infectious disease should be down, the rate of that should be down over 80% in the next quarter century or else, you know, we're just not doing our job very well.

Post: There has never been an effort, anything like that before.

Herper: No, we've only eradicated one disease. There's a Glaxo-Smith-Kline vaccine for malaria that just had some very encouraging results and it probably wouldn't have gotten to the market without Gates. There's a vaccine for meningitis in Africa, that, that certainly wouldn't have even been developed without the Gates Foundation. He really has a big picture view of how it might be possible, if we could get the shots that kids get in the U.S. to the rest of the world more effectively, we could, uh, save millions and millions of lives.

Post: You produced a great story, but it obviously isn't the first time readers have read about Bill Gates, uh, nor is it the first time that people have come across his Foundation, it's been around for a dozen years. What's different about your approach here in this story, this cover story?

Herper: First, is the focus on the vaccine. I'd called the Gates Foundation to get Bill Gates into a, uh, broader story I was working on on vaccines. There are a lot of problems with the pharmaceutical industry, this is one of the things that they do right. It seemed like a great story, but it was searching for a character, and I realized that this guy, who most people still think of as, you know, Mr. Microsoft, had turned out to be the biggest advocate for these technologies, which we really take for granted. I mean, people really forget, uh, how foundational to our civilization vaccines are.

Bill Gates: You know in a sense we had to give, we had to choose what the most impactful thing to give the money would be, and not just the money, give our time, energy, voice. So, what was that going to be? And in a sense, you know, picking health, in retrospect, was pretty obvious because of the...you know, if you say to say to a mother, “What counts to you? Well, I'd like my children to live.” Probably'd be pretty high on the list. “I'd like my child to develop their brain. I'd like them not to be handicapped.” It's a pretty clear human need. And, so, that became the dominant thing. You know, the great global inequity. And fortunately with a magic solution, most of which relates to inventing new vaccines, or getting vaccines that are rich-world available broadly to every kid.

Herper: He and Melinda both think in terms of the way they can save the most lives, uh, with their money, which winds up being kind of systematic and not the way most of us think about being humane, but actually does wind up being hugely humane: that a baby in Africa is worth every much, every bit as much as one in the U.S. or Europe.

Post: One of the striking things in your story that I think that's quite different, you talk about the way he has created a market for these vaccines that never existed before.

Herber: Well, really it was as simple as creating a market, but the problem is that's very hard to do. You had to figure out to have enough money that the aide groups would be buying a steady enough stream of vaccines that the drug companies could make them, and how to constantly involve new players, developing world companies, in that effort to drive down costs further. Between the humanitarian impetus and good old Adam Smith style competition, uh, really has dramatically reduced the cost of those vaccines and the cheaper they are, the easier they are to deliver.

Post: Now, here's a guy who's bringing to bear incredible resources, incredible drive, incredible focus, some of the same kinds of skills that, uh, he applied as a software engineer. The kid who, uh, really managed to get distributed, personal computing, to millions of people around the world.

Gates: Comparing my two areas of work, you know, it's a little tough. It, you know, feels great to me that the resources I, and things I learned at Microsoft all apply so well in this second phase, and some of my visibility there is partly why these presidents will sit and talk with me and it gets health issues higher on the agenda of those countries. You know, I love, I love this work, and, you know, there's some incredible people I get to work with in this stuff. You know, the, the similarities are stronger than you might expect.

Herber: What's different I think is that a lot of time to the rest of us the effort, those efforts, when it came to the personal computer seemed cold and aggressive. Uhm, here, he's still super numeric. I mean, he tends to talk, he'll tell some stories about the kids, but he tends to talk a lot about the numbers, and about the numbers of lives that can be saved for certain amounts of money. That still seems very numeric, but here you really are talking about people's lives and about a pretty wonderful way of changing the world.

Gates: Fortunately, people are making money on vaccines right now, so it's great for us that vaccines are doing well, so that, you know, that means the amount of innovative research going on is, is higher today and the rich-world companies do more, and that means the, the Chinese and Indian companies see that and they do more. You know, so it’s a pretty good virtuous cycle right now in terms of focus on vaccines.

Post: He brings a particular approach to these dollars that really is groundbreaking in a way.

Herber: Yeah, oh, it definitely is. I mean, the constant thinking of how do we save, looking for projects where you can get the most leverage, where you can save the most lives, for the smallest investment really is a, a rigorous and a pretty powerful way to do this.

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