Bill Gates & President Bill Clinton: Changing the World Through Philanthropy-Exclusive Interview
For more from Bill Gates and President Clinton, check out the December 2013 issue of WIRED.
Released on 11/12/2013
(light piano music)
(soft electronic music)
Both of you are embarked on your next careers,
helping to change the world.
I'm curious what the process is when you decide
what to focus on. There's so many things there.
Well, when I left the White House, I decided to focus
on things that I had cared about when I was there
where I could still make a difference.
One is Health Access Initiative, thanks largely to funding
from the Gates Foundation, where we've been able
to drive down the price of AIDS and Malaria drugs.
Melinda and I always knew we'd have the responsibility
and enjoyment of giving the resources away,
so it was an exploration process
and really traveling throughout the world.
When you see the poorest and you see
what we take for granted in terms of our children surviving,
our children's health, that became the thing to go after.
Speaking of that, I know you have traveled together there,
so I'm curious of a couple things.
One is because both of you are so famous,
how do you get past the bubble
to really connect with people there?
We go to a lot of places where people have no televisions,
so we're not all that famous.
Yeah (laughing).
You just have to go to these places and ask questions.
When Bill and I went, Melinda was with us,
and she asked better questions than we did on some of these
HIV/AIDS Prevention efforts. I was very impressed.
Well there was Microbicide, which is a thing
a woman can use to protect herself from getting HIV,
and it was a trial. And understanding was it something
that the woman, was the experience okay for her?
What about her partner? Neither Bill or I were willing
to ask that in a very direct way,
We were sort of hinting at it. But Melinda was able
to ask very directly, both the male and female.
And it was good, it's important feedback.
One of the things that I respected
about what Bill and Melinda were doing
is they were willing to work in Lesotho.
Lesotho had, when we were there, the third or fourth highest
AIDS infection rate in the world.
But it had the only government at the time
that was willing to say, Look, we're gonna test everybody
12 years old or over, unless they opt out.
And we had gone out, our Health Access Group,
and found people who were HIV Positive,
who were willing to go up into these villages,
a third of the people live in the mountains so high
that you can't get there except on pack animals or foot.
All they knew was we were showing up trying to help them.
I was just there in Malawi and one of our farm projects,
and the woman that we were helping there
was farming an acre with a hoe,
and she had learned new planting techniques.
She looked at me and she said, You think you can do this?
(laughing)
She said, Well do it, then.
And I got a hoe, and we were planting together.
She said, How did you learn to do this?
And I explained to her when I was six,
I lived on a little farm like this,
and that's much more important that we can help them
live their lives, than who we used to be.
Do you agree with that?
Sure.
(soft piano music)
Starring: Bill Gates, President Bill Clinton
Photography and video courtesy of:
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Prashant Panjiar
Frederic Courbet
Michael Hanson
Kepler
Clinton Foundation/Max W. Orenstein
www.clintonfoundation.org
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