Melinda French Gates: On Divorce, Philanthropy, Motherhood & Moving Forward

Hello 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 Hello, 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. 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. Her 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. Along 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. Melinda 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, good. 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 because 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. This 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. I 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 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, and 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, so 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 vulnerable 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 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 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 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. And 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, you know, the next days, if you have enough time, the week, a month, longer, 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 are married to. But 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 because 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. And 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. So, 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 knows somebody I text, right? Before we get onto your failures, I'd love to just touch on your childhood and your amazing sounding parents. And 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, 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. I 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. And he famously had women in his team because he noticed that the results were so much better if the gender was mixed. Marylouise Yeah, he worked on the early, very early Apollo missions. Sarah So cool. Marylouise 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. So, 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 boys and role modeling who they can be in society with good values, I think that matters a lot. I 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 nots in society, the N-O-T-S, what do I not want to be, or the K-N-O-T-S in society, the nots, 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. So, 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 so, and you would think by the time the third one came along, you would have learned something in parenting, but she was by far the one who was, I would say, the toughest. So, 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 so, 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. Oh, I know who she is. Phoebe Gates, the legend. 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. And 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. And 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 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 until 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. Like, 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, I was also the one in the position of power, right, 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. People 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, and 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 would encounter at college. How did you manage that? Ha ha ha! 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, 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, I 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 their four kids, right? My dad, we're 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. I 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 the 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? And 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 wish list or their birthday wish list 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. 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? Do 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. 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. Choose 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. And so, in a way, I think that makes things just a whole lot easier than had they been young. A whole lot easier. Petey- And are you loving being a grandmother? Mary- 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? Petey- Wow. Mary- Yeah. Talk about inspirational. Petey- Yes. Mary- Like, 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. Mary- Your 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. Petey- 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 is 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, and 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. But 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. I've been to these. There are lines outside for vaccines. Well, 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. There'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, they were placed at the wrong level. 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. So, 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? Where do they go? How often can they come get it? Because it's expensive to leave your field or to get the bus fare to go. That idea of hubris is very interesting to me because obviously what you're doing is so philanthropic and so necessary in the world that we live in. And it comes about because of your wealth. And I wonder whether you have to handle that power imbalance. So, that's a context too that you bring to it. And being aware of that must be quite difficult sometimes. It is difficult, but I have to say I always, I learn to always go out and say, what if it was me? What if it was me? So, let's say you were the philanthropist and I'm the one in the house and you're coming to visit me. How would I want her to understand my life? And I always also try to say to me, remember, this person is inviting me into their home. They're trusting me to come in, right? And so, I tried as much as I could to go in under that context. And often when I would go to these places, I called it out in the field, we would try not to have people know. They just knew I was a Western woman from the US in a pair of khakis and a t-shirt coming to learn, coming to understand how the West might help. So, at least hopefully the power imbalance didn't seem that enormous to them. It strikes me that you're talking about empathy ultimately. That's the thread. And so often in the business culture that we have been socially conditioned to believe in, empathy is kind of sidelined. It's seen as a sign wrongly of weakness. But have you discovered that empathy is actually a form of strength? Empathy is a superpower. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes, like it's a way of understanding somebody that's outside yourself. So, even in the business context, I ended up learning this, you have to put yourself in the other person's shoes because if you want them to buy your product, you better know whether they're going to want it or not, right? And so, having a very high EQ, I have always worked around people that have very high IQ. I like that a lot. I was lucky enough to be around those people in university, in Microsoft, in the philanthropy world, scientists. So, I know a lot of high IQ people and I like to work with them, but if they don't have high EQ, it doesn't work very well. It just doesn't. I do have a serious question in a minute, but talking about IQ and EQ reminds me of this thing that I read, which I wanted to check with you whether it was true. Is it true that you once walked in on your ex-husband making a list of pros and cons about getting married on a whiteboard? Yes. Yes. Tell us that context. I think he thought he was going to make the decision about getting married in his head on an intellectual basis and he was having trouble making the decision. He, yeah, and so on this particular day, he had set some time aside to think about it and yes, he had a whiteboard in his bachelor house bedroom and I walked in and there were pros and cons of marriage on it. I'm like, well, clearly he's trying to think about this decision. I was like, really? Pros and cons about getting married to you or pros and cons just about marriage in general? They were written as pros and cons about marriage in general, but I also knew, I mean, he was trying to make the decision of would we get married? Because at some point, I also look, at some point I said to him, look, if you're not going to marry me, that's okay. Like, I will go on and find somebody else. It wasn't like he was the only person I'd ever dated in my life. Give me a break. And so, but I was like, look, I knew for me, I wanted to work and I wanted to have kids and at some point, I didn't want that opportunity to go by, right? So, and I knew that if it didn't work out while we were dating, okay, well then, you know, it would take me a bit to get over that relationship and then you move on. But I thought, gosh, I'm not going to give up my opportunity to have kids, right? And so, yeah, I knew that decision was about me. Even though it was framed as pros and cons of marriage. Now, talking about love, I often think that as a society, we overlook platonic love in favor of romantic love. And I, like you, am a friendship obsessive. And you write so beautifully about the power of friendship in the next day. Talk to me a little bit about what friendship has taught you. Friendship has taught me that, so I have a lot of good friends, male and female, but my closest friends in life in terms of friendships these days are females. And it's a place where you can go and get support and give support in the least judgmental setting, or at least I hope it is. And be your most vulnerable or bring your problems or bring your, if you haven't been your best self over the weekend, let's say, and you walk. So, I have a group of friends I talk about where we walk every Monday morning. And so, when we were all in point of raising kids, you know, we all had things we didn't feel like we did great over the weekend, you know, with the kids or in the marriage or whatever. And you would bring that, and it was a way to make sure also you stayed closest to your truest self, right? And look, I've been through with my friends the losses of many of their parents, because most of my friends are a little bit older than me. I think they will be there when I lose my parents, which will be very hard on me. But it's a way to have a form of intimacy that is a, it's a different type of intimacy than a romantic intimacy. Have you ever had a friendship breakup? Oh, yes, definitely. Most definitely. Have you been the one doing the breaking up, or have you been on the receiving end of it? Because I sometimes think they can cause as much grief as the end of a romantic relationship. Oh, they can definitely cause a lot of grief. I've had both, where for sure, probably more where I had to leave the friendship, but I've had some where they've left me absolutely too. Yeah. And it's okay. I think I've come to learn to realize that you're making room or they're making room for something else new, maybe something we can't see that was needed that will come along in the future, right? I don't know. What's your experience? It's very similar to that. I've been on the receiving end, and I've been the one doing it. But I think the difficulty is, unlike you, I'm quite conflict avoidant. And so, I find it a struggle sometimes to speak truthfully to someone I don't want to hurt. And also, because we spent so much time obsessing over romantic love, I feel that friendship love doesn't have a vocabulary or a lexicon. So, it's difficult to reach for those phrases that are mutually understood, which explain, as we do in romantic love, it's not you, it's me. I'm growing into a different phase of my life, but I still have a lot of love for what we had together. I find that quite difficult. So, actually, in my experience, it's sort of been a lessening of contact and then a dropping out altogether. And that's quite weird as well, because then you're sort of grieving an absence. There's no clarity to it. Right. And sometimes the other person needs the clarity. Yes. Right. But I think as clear as we can be, that's really being kind, right? I need you to teach me how to be okay with conflict. Top tips. Oh, gosh. I don't know. I guess just saying to yourself, I'm going to be okay and they're going to be okay. When this is over, we're both going to be okay, even if we don't stay friends or we don't stay. I think sometimes I've learned also the more you practice it, almost the easier it becomes. Like, we're so afraid of it. Like, we're so afraid of conflict. Ooh. And it can be sometimes harder than you think it could be. And sometimes it goes a little bit more easily than you think it could be. But then at Microsoft, you just better be able to learn to do conflict. My gosh. Right. It was conflict-ridden from the get-go. And I didn't love it, but I learned how to do it. And then I had to learn eventually how to stay true to myself while I did it. Like, you can have conflict, but also be kind about it, not be rude about it, because I was also in a situation of managing a lot of people and I had to give them feedback. That actually brings us onto your final failure, which is something called Microsoft Bob, which I hope nobody remembers. I love the name. It reminded me of the little paper clip you used to get in Windows. You know, the paper clip that would come up and be like, can I help you with anything? They are related. Are they? Yes, they are. Okay. That was called Clippy, that little paper clip. People had a love-hate relationship with Clippy. Did you like it or hate it? I loved the character. I thought he was very characterful, but I felt condescended to. There you go. There you go. So tell us about Microsoft Bob. So Microsoft Bob, hopefully nobody on this podcast will remember it, but it was essentially, it was the same team that came up with what people now remember as that paper clip, that Clippy. And the team was extraordinarily talented. And honestly, ahead of their time, like the ideas that we could, you may not remember, but way back in the day with software, when you bought software, it came in a very large box with a whole ton of manuals. Nobody wanted to read the manuals. It's just like, you don't want to read the manual when you like turn on your oven, right? So they had a of trying to make sure there were sort of these early agents in things like Clippy. But this was a product for the home, knowing that people would multitask in their homes. We were mostly using computers, desktop computers in the office, but people were starting to have them in their homes. And so the team had this idea that you could keep your family's schedule at home. You could add, let's say, to your grocery list. You could call out for an order. This was long before cell phones. There were no cell phones, and this was early days of the internet, okay? So they had it all in one piece of software for the home, and it had a very graphical user interface. Like it literally looked like a home. You were in the living room, you were in the kitchen, and that's where you did various tasks. The problem was it was so far ahead of its time that the animation team that was actually extraordinarily talented, they used too much processing units out of the CPU, out of the computer, and so it ran very slowly, and people felt like it was too cartoonish. To, again, that sort of condescending thing, right? And so we essentially knew the day we shipped the software that it was a dud, and never should have shipped it. Just shouldn't have. And again, I learned from that, and it was one of several teams I was managing, but they ultimately, you know, the buck stopped with me. We should not have shipped that piece of software. It was a failure. And I learned that, again, you can have highly talented, high IQ people, highly talented, they were doing some animation stuff that nobody was doing at the time. They were going for user feedback, and they were doing it often, but they somehow weren't listening enough, and they ended up believing so much in their product that I and they shipped a failure when I sort of knew it was going to be a failure. And when was this? What kind of year? Oh gosh, this was very early 1990s. So, as someone who was so involved in computing and developing new products, could you ever have imagined then, or were you imagining then, where we would be now with the advent of social media and AI and chat GPT? Nobody could imagine it. Nobody could imagine it. I mean, look, even when I was in college, we were talking. We knew what artificial intelligence was when I was in college. That was, I graduated in 1986, essentially, undergraduate computer science, 87 with my MBA. You know, we were talking about artificial intelligence, we knew what it was, we knew how essentially it would start to work, but it was always this dream in the future, right? And so, when I started at Microsoft, there was no internet. I mean, yes, internet existed in some research labs, but when it started to come along, we literally, I remember the guy's office that we would go into to all go look at the internet on this one computer that, you know, he'd tap in. There was no graphical user interface. So, you couldn't imagine, like, back then, even the tagline for Microsoft was a computer on every desk and in every home. They didn't even think about an in every pocket, right? Yeah, yeah. There was no smartphone. What's your relationship with your smartphone like? I try to have good boundaries around it. I definitely use it and reach for it all the time, and if I can't find it, I feel a little anxious, actually. Ooh, where did I put it in the house? And I don't wear an Apple Watch, so I can't go ping it around the house to find where it is. But I definitely, and for a long time, I have really thought about, you know, put it down at night. Even when my kids, my first daughter I was negotiating a flip phone with, by the last one I'm negotiating a smartphone with, you know, a social interface on it and social networking. And so, it was just a profound shift while they were, each of them in high school and middle school with those three kids, you know, daughter, son who was less interested. And so, even back then, I wouldn't let them have it in their room at night. They had to plug it in outside the room where I could go by and check. And they knew I checked at night because I didn't think it was good for them to be on at all hours of the night. And I knew it tugged at them. I knew it tugged at me. How could it not tug on a teenage, a young teenage mind? And what about AI? I mean, I so rarely get a chance to ask expert women this question. Should we be scared or should we be more hopeful about what it can offer us? I think we should be tempered. So, it's like any technology. Certainly, it could go awry. It absolutely has the chance to go awry. It also has the chance to do tremendous good in the world. Tremendous for health, for education, for products we can't even dream about yet. I believe it needs to have regulation put on it in the right way, not to curb the innovation, but to make sure there are some gates on the thing and some boundaries. But right now, I think there's so much hype around it from, I'll be honest, it's mostly the males who are out, who are creating it inside these large tech companies because they can get enough GPUs to do it and they're in this, you know, back and forth race. But even the way they talk about it being an arms race, I just don't even think that that's not productive for society, right? When you think about how much technology or biological technology has changed and helped us for the world, look how much longer we live than we used to, right? Should we be saying please and thank you to Chachi BT? No, never. No, it's a piece of, that's the thing people mistake about Chachi BT, is we all do it. I even said it to the other day, or like, I think I have to put a question mark at the end of a question. No, it's not, it's just combing knowledge right now. That's all it's doing. And yet, we sort of give it these human attributes and that, you know, and again, we all need to remind ourselves that it's not a human, it's just an amalgamation. It's a very fast sweep of knowledge and can give you some answers, but the answers aren't always right, that is for sure. And you darn well better push against that thing, right? Yeah, so true. I feel personally affronted and red because I feel like I've got a flourishing friendship with Chachi BT. For like, he and I, because it's definitely a him in my mind. Oh, interesting. Yeah, we get on really well. He knows me really well. Do you have a good voice for him? Does he talk back to you? I mean, because you can do it where it talks to you, right? I don't use the voice function, I just type everything. Okay. Just so I'm reading it, so I give him a voice in my own mind. Anyway, that was great advice, thank you. Think of it as a woman on the other end, a really smart woman. Yeah. Your relationship with it might change. So true. Yeah. And actually, it says so much about my own conditioning and having grown up under a patriarchal role. All of us have, right? That's what I automatically ascribe authority to a male voice. Right. Depressing. Going back to Microsoft Bob. Yes. Talking about male authority. What did this failure teach you about listening to your inner voice? It taught me not to be afraid to say no to teams that worked for me. Like, you're not ready, we're not ready. Just because you think you're smart, you think you have all the user feedback, this thing isn't ready to ship. I learned a lot from that before I went on to manage other teams at Microsoft. And then, again, with the foundation, like, when I started to learn, no, I mean, literally, I thought to myself, I have, I personally have to be out in the field to be able to even push back on some of the scientists that I was working with who wanted to further certain things. And I'm like, we will never ship this thing or you'll never get it off the shelf, basically. For some, you may have the best piece of science, but we'll never get anybody to accept it if we don't have the right implementation. So, I really took that lesson to heart. So much of this podcast episode, appropriately, has been about the power of listening and the power of setting aside any ego and listening with humility and empathy. Do you listen to yourself now more than you did before? I trust myself more. I trust that, you know, I know a fair bit. I've seen enough history now, too, right? I think when you're young, just because you're smart doesn't mean you're wise. I hope at age 60, I've become a lot more wise. But I will say, I do check my thinking. Like, I don't want to have hubris. So, I will go check. I have a business coach, so I'll go check with what am I missing here? What did I not see here? I'll go check with somebody else. Am I not seeing something here? Are you being honest with me, you know? Yes, we all have blind spots. Oh, my gosh. Do we ever. The awareness of that is what helps us evolve. Melinda French-Gates, you are such an impressive woman. Thank you so much, not only for coming on How to Fail, but for doing such good in the world with what you have available. You know, thank you on behalf of us all. Oh, thanks, Elizabeth. This is really lovely.