>> from our studios in new york city, this is "charlie rose." >> bill and melinda gates are here. their foundation has donated more than 31 point $6 billion

globally since its inception 15 years ago. their primary goals are internationally improved health care into combat property poverty. their focus in the united states is to expand educational opportunities and access to technology. they say the progress we've seen so far is exciting. we are doubling down on the bet we made 15 years ago in picking ambitious goals for what's possible 15 years from now. our big bet that lives in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than in any other time in history and airlines will improve more than anyone else's. i'm pleased to have bill and melinda gates back on this program. i want to talk about the big bet , and i also want to bring in a remarkable -- this report is full of optimism. 40 years ago you had a big bet

that turned out to be successful, the idea that you could reduce inequity and you are doubling down on that bet now. why are you believing that this is doable? >> we've been lucky enough to get a chance to go out to the countries to meet with the scientists and understand the nature of the problems, how can we bring malaria down? how do you get teaching online so that it helps kids out? everything we predict is based on that experience. innovation is on our side, the fact that people care and will be able to inform them about progress in a better way and people should know it's really a great thing that we want them to join in with. >> are there also things that you have learned in the last 15 years that will improve the way you achieve your goals in the next 15 years?

>> absolutely. as an organization we continue to learn and hopefully iterate on everything we have learned. we have learned how to get vaccines out in a much reduced amount of time. it used to take 20-25 years when a vaccine would come out in the united states. with the specific strains for pneumonia for example, there are specific strains for different countries in africa. we learn to bring surprise of the vaccine down across the board. >> when you have failed to achieve what you thought you might, what has been the reason? >> i think sometimes maybe we have gone into an area and looked at the problem in slightly the wrong way. we thought one way was to build transitional housing, and we started down that path and built about 1700 units. but that's not really the way to end homelessness. how do you keep families from dropping into that situation?

can they move in with somebody else? can you keep them in that apartment longer and surround them with what they need? we need to ask the question a different way and come up with a different solution. we have learned from that. quick you said it is fair to ask whether the problems we are predicting we achieved, the results will be stifled by climate change. and you don't know. you have a 15 year window. >> the impact of climate change in the next 15 years fortunately, is not dramatic. what is dramatic is the effect over time if we don't invest and employee new ways of generating electricity and doing transport. it is not a near-term disaster. the rich world is to put more into rnd, put more into

conservation. in the meantime, we know that the co2 we have already emitted will cause warming. the biggest problem there is what that does to agriculture. inventing better feeds that can deal with drought and prodding -- and flooding that is the way to mitigate these things. we need two things. we invest in private companies that are energy innovators to reduce emissions, and then through the foundation, we invest in agriculture advances which give you the resilience so that even in the face of climate change farmers will have more nutrition, be able to feed their kids and escape poverty. >> knowing the two of you, we have talked about fertilizer it's how you have discovered this significance especially in africa of farming and fertilizing.

>> i grew up in the city, so i didn't understand much about different crops and harvest and seeds, all these things. yet if you're going to care about the poorest, you've got to learn about agriculture. over 60% of the poor people in the world are people who farm. most of what they eat is what they grow themselves. so you have to raise their productivity. every country that has come out of poverty started by getting their agricultural sector to be very productive. there are some good lessons about how to do that. how the green revolution health asia a lot. better seeds. africa has a lot of climate ecosystems, a lot of different crops. >> but can you adapt it for africa now? >> that's what we've gotten into now. it was very underfunded, so we have come in as one of the great funders there. our optimism comes from looking at what can be done with those

seeds, both with conventional breeding and gm breeding are giving us much better seats. in the meantime, we have seats that are better than what the farmers are using. our business is getting them out to them and fertilizer is too expensive in africa. not easy to get. fertilizer along will often double your output. it's really that lack of knowledge, lack of credit standing in the way of this. we predict africa will be able to feed itself. today it imports $50 billion of food a year. it's ironic, you have a continent where 60% of the people are farmers, importing food from a country where 2% of the people are farmers. x>> another thing you talk about is that it is agriculture and health.

>> health is the precursor. if you don't grow up and lead a healthy life, you can't really participate in the economy. if a family is dealing with three or four cases of malaria in their family a year, it takes you out of the work horse. we look at, do they reach their -- takes you out of the workforce. do the children reach their fifth birthday? is the mother not dying in childbirth? then you can go on to give them seed and fertilizer and training so they are getting more income off of their farm. a 20-30% increase in yield is huge because not only are they healthy and they can feed their family, they can put that crop on the market and get that income. they can then deal with the help shocks that come and they can educate their kids. >> you also talk about polio malaria, and hiv.

are we expecting breakthroughs in the next 15 years? >> absolutely. we are saying we will get polio done, and we had a good year last year, everywhere except pakistan. pakistan we have a lot of cases but knowing that the focus is on their now, the government is starting to do the right thing. the army and the government have a lot of distractions therebetween -- between floods political things, and really going into the area where the taliban were preventing vaccination from being done that really meant we couldn't succeed. now that the army has gone in there, they are controlling those territories. we need their cooperation to get primary health care working. the dialogue, the resources -- i predict they will get into line. nigeria, now that we gone six

months, it's likely we won't have more cases. we will get other diseases in the next 15 years. all we can say for the big killers, malaria hiv, is that is when we will build the breakthrough tools. >> is it still 600,000 deaths per year? >> yes, from malaria. we have a pipeline of better diagnostics, drugs, and vaccines. 15 years from now, the roadmap for eradication will be clear. we will have gone to local areas and shown how to do it. we will need the next 15 years to be sure we get that one completely finished. >> you have to be not dealing with an episode of malaria to be able to participate in the economy. but think about a mom or dad who are dealing with malaria and having to get their child to a clinic. they are not out working their farm or participating in the

economy in the local area. x another breakthrough is in banking. tell me what you hope will happen there. clearly that is a technology issue. >> we are seeing hundreds of millions of cell phones all over africa in places like bangladesh. we are seeing mobile banking coming to the forefront in huge scale. the philippines bangladesh, tanzania, people are using their cell phone to save small amounts of money. then they don't have to take the a transport fees to go into the city. they don't have to go into the bank or they will tell you they are unwelcome. they can stay out on the farm and save one dollar a day or two dollars a day. if there is a health shock in the family, then they have the money to deal with it. they have actually saved it on their phone. then they can use their phone for all kinds of other things.

is it worth me going to the market today to take my farm goods in? they are participating in the economy by having that banking on the phone. >> and education is the final breakthrough we talked about here in this report. >> the key is the software. 15 years ago, people said we can take great -- tape great lectures, video them and put them out on the web for free. but that didn't have much impact. it wasn't connected to a degree. if you got confused, you have no way of getting straightened out. so the last 15 years, people have been playing around with it. the biggest funder of these online courses, they are improving a lot. quizzes, personalized learning you have coaches. imagine that other people are doing all the other subjects

over the next 5-10 years, they will put out free learning soft wear. even a young kid who you want to learn the apple that or a little bit of math, the mother can hand the kids the phone, it will work at their level and personalize it to exactly the case they want to go. in terms of being a supplement for families of kids that are motivated, it makes the idea of having a library available. it is way beyond that. it is the software and the fact that the phone or at biggers green tablet device will be pretty pervasive in the timeframe we are talking about. >> where are we on to as the projects that are not so much a part of the report, the big history project? explain what it is. >> big history is a way of teaching science and history so that it's all integrated. you start at the beginning of time and see how planets got formed, single cell life

farming. it's a way of creating a knowledge map so that instead of thinking these things are not very connected, or how much is there? it gives you the framework that all your knowledge fits in. here is why the egyptians were interesting. here is why the dinosaurs were interesting. it all is in your understanding. >> are you getting any pushback on this at all? >> we have it now in a few thousand schools. it is quite novel, new courses being taught in high school are coming along. there are coding courses catching on, and there is big history. it is a pretty big investment and of course is all free to whoever wants to use it. i predict that this will be a widely used course.

we have already gotten over 50,000 students to give us their feedback. one brilliant teacher led a bunch of people pulling it all together. he goes around the world and explains, and he has done an amazing job. >> common core. >> what you're hearing from teachers -- >> jeb bush is supporting it. >> he is very much an outspoken supporter of common core. it is basically a set of standards against which we know if a student is learning math and second-grader fourth-grader 10th grade, that a are learning the right things to advance them to the next grade level. that means if a student news from vermont to new york or texas, they are learning everything they need to learn at each place. it also means it's instead of standards, you can teach from the english curriculum, you can

use the scarlet letter, madame bovary, but you are teaching things that kids need to know in english language arts. it opens up the possibility that a lot of additional people can come in with great digital lessons. teachers can use those and personalize those around the things they want to learn about but they are learning the right inc. and are then prepared to go on to college. >> wise the american federation of teachers opposed to this -- why is the american federation of teachers opposed to this? >> to have looked at various things and said have you given the teachers enough training, or you are trying to roll this out too quickly. there are a lot of concerns about the personnel system. they're coming in to give teachers more feedback. if you're changing the

curriculum, should you be putting in the personnel system at the same time? those are two important things, and it will be decided locally what those rollouts will look like. overall, it's more of the implementation issues where from time to time, they have said let's slow down or fine-tune it. >> the ones that have had time to work with the common core and build out their lesson plans they are saying it's -- they see the difference it makes in their classroom. they are saying, i was nervous when i came in, i did know about have enough time to plan it, but i am seeing the difference in outcomes. we have one hundred 27 millionaires signed up now to the giving pledge. we are almost at the five year anniversary. the neatest thing about it has been the learning coming from one another. whether it's how you measure and figure out whether your money is having impact everybody is

benefiting from the conversations we get to have a private about what things we are learning and how we are going about doing the work. it has been beneficial to us, as other people introduce us to areas they are thinking about that are different from ours. >> u2 gave the speech together and you began saying i love optimism on the stanford campus. you two are more optimistic now than ever. optimism is essential, you make that point. and you talk about the fact -- about going to africa in 1997. in order to talk about the digital divide and to see if you can minimize the digital divide, right? >> right. >> what happened in soweto? >> the idea that a computer is

relevant to the problems they were dealing with, where getting enough food, having decent health, even any electricity reasonable place to live. i thought it was neat and kid should have access, but they had to rig up a special generator just to do this one demo, and they borrowed that generator. the idea that there was a hierarchy of need and our next focus together that we would get at those very basic issues while in addition to still believing in digital empowerment, but not at the top of the list. that was pretty eye-opening to me. i kind of got that -- >> i need to get -- drill down to it. this was the first sort of

searing impact of poverty on you. >> that's right. touring through africa, simply as a vacation, and we got to see people really dealing with the basics. so it has been a learning process ever since. >> we often call each other when we are on the road, almost every day. but it was a different call because bill was really quite choked up on the phone. he had seen firsthand how awful it is to have that disease. it is a death sentence to go into that hospital because of the amount of tb that they just were not able to treat in there. he said this just cannot be. he knew the difference, if you

lived in the united states, how the health care system would be dealing with it. when you see those moments of heart rate, that is what propels the work. how can i help not just the 100 people in the hospital, but how can i help thousands and millions? >> you said in the speech i told her i had been somewhere i had never been before. >> this particular hospital is called king george the fifth. you only win in if you had drug-resistant tb. the few drugs that work at that point had horrific side effects eerie there is one that gets rid of your hearing. there is one that makes you a little crazy. -- horrific side effects. the hospital is not well staffed. there are young kids in there. there was thinking that, do we educate them or not, because they are going to die? the staff themselves were getting infected, so not many wanted to work there. it was just as bad as it could be.

there are those people were, and i knew that most of them would never, ever come out of it. how did we get to the point where in parts of the world, if that was a problem -- new york city actually had a drug-resistant tb problem about 15 years ago, put a lot of money into it, and solved it. but here, it's just going on, and unless innovation and delivery money shows up, it's going to stay as kind of a piece of hell. >> i get from this, especially the sense that to accomplish, to eliminate poverty which you say can be done, and disease which you say can be done, it's going to take a combination of brainpower -- you have often talked of putting enough iq on the problem -- but also part. -- also heart.

>> at think you have to go to these places and let your heart break. you have to say, what if i was born in these circumstances? what if i was born in a rural remote place in tanzania. what would life be like for me as a mother or father? what linked when i go to to feed my children? when you can put yourself on the other side of the map, when you talk with local villagers if i was in those circumstances, what would i want the west to do? but what i tell them? when you let your heart break and consider what it would be like to have a child dying of malaria, you have to say, we have to save not just that child but 600 million. you let your heart break and you come home and you see what the great innovations are coming and you start to figure out, how do i deliver those means to these

difficult, remote settings. not just how to do the great science, but also how to deliver it in these remote, rural settings. >> you tell the story of a woman who said, please take my two children. then she said, please take one. >> i could see she had a tiny little house. i could see her husband inside. he had been injured. she said he has no job anymore. you can see the land, we have no farm. how am i going to feed my children? she is pushing these little boys under the age of four, take my two boys home with you. and when i couldn't, she said ok, please just take one of them. she doesn't know who i am, she just knows i am a woman from the united states. she knows the chance for those two children to grow up and

reach their potential is so much higher in the united states than in her village in africa. >> like all mothers, her first idea is the best they can happen for her children and >> absolutely. i was out with a group of u.s. senators in africa a couple of years ago. we were visiting ethiopia and tanzania. we talked to a female farmer and she was talking about this new corn seed she got. she was getting 30% more yield all her farm. she was talking about the extra income she was getting at market. she was walking four kilometers every day to get water. she would go to kilometers to recharge her cell phone. when we asked what she wanted for her future, she said she wanted all five of her kids to be educated. the first thing she wanted for herself was what she wanted for her children. that is the story i hear over

and over again in the developing world. >> you say optimism drives innovation. meaning what? you have to be optimism in order to see the fruition of innovation? >> it's hard to tell people to immerse themselves in how life is in poor countries unless you are telling them we want you to see that so it can change them. it is a key element. if you just look at the headlines, you don't see the improvement. bad things happen all at once and make headlines. as we are improving the world as we are saving one life at a time, as the vaccines are getting out to more kids, there is almost never a moment where you see that over. of course we often talk about what is still not there and i know that these are solvable wobbles. -- problems.

name a disease, give us enough time scientists, and resources, and that thing can be conquered. one by one, starting with smallpox in the polio, we will either eradicator bring to extremely low levels all these diseases. >> we know and the president speaks to this in his state of the union address, the idea of any quality. -- inequality people are saying my life, even in the west, i worry my children will not have that kind of life. and they are pessimistic. and you say to them -- >> i believe the u.s. education system will be better 10, 15 years from now, than it is today. i think that is of critical importance. if we really believe in evil opportunity, that is the system that enables it.

i believe the people are wrong to be pessimistic. i think we can make that education system better. partly as the economy gets better, that mood will improve, as they see the innovation. they will have to have a sense that there is broad-based in a fit here, that we are really taking these things neglected we have a consensus in this country about those things? or are we engaged in a kind of gridlock that does not allow us to fully mobilize all of the potential of our innovation and creativity? >> there is a basic belief in funding and education system. the idea of how you get the highest quality teaching there is lots to debate about that. what type of system should we have, and does the school board system lead to the kind of excellence that we want to get

out of these things? i think there's a healthy debate , and nobody feels good about where we are today. the commitment to education, i would not say that fundamental principle is what is at question. i think the execution, what does the measures look like, do you just trust that things go well, or do you actually have a system in place? >> even a decade ago, we were even having the right conversation as a nation about are we graduating kids are paired to go on to college? we know -- prepare to go on to college? we were not even discussing the fact that only one third of the kids coming out of high school were even prepared to go. why was there that gap? how can you have high schools that are so bad you are graduating kids with straight a's and b's and they get to college and they are completely not ready. we are finally having that

conversation and figuring out what is going to take to fix the high school system. their differences on implementation of how to do that, but having the right conversation that it needs to be done, i think we are past that difficult conversation that needs to come forward. >> back to africa, you said if we don't have optimism, we don't have empathy. then it doesn't matter how much we master the secret of science, we are not really solving problems, we are just working out puzzles. >> we don't need to distract a huge percentage of the scientific community just to work on the diseases of the poor. if we had 10% of the effort then we could make these breakthroughs. the funny thing we found was, if you look at something like malaria, there was almost no effort at all. so the last 15 years have been fantastic.

the usa budget on aids and malaria has gone up substantially. the research money in those areas that's coming from us and others has meant that smart people are going into those areas. we would like to see it increase some, but fortunately, there are enough more people that we can keep working on cancer alzheimer's, and parkinson's. still, with the 10% allocation do a fantastic job on these diseases. that's true of the eight budget as well. norway, the most generous company in the world, puts 2% of their government spending and 1% of their economy into their eight budget. -- aid budget. it is measurable, but those dollars are very dramatic, now that we have good programs.

>> you don't accept the argument in articles i've read that there may be the risk of private philanthropy, meaning that government does not give on the large scale it should be delivering on. >> philanthropy has a pretty narrow role. the private market has the biggest role, and you use that wherever you can. then government comes in, making sure everybody gets education. those basic needs for everybody. government has to step up to that. philanthropy is more about pilot programs, innovation, some of the research things that are so risky that it would not get done otherwise. as a percentage of the dollars of the other role -- overall economy philanthropy is less than 2%. we have to be careful to only do those things that it is uniquely

able to do. saying that every child should get an education, philanthropy is not every year for every student going to be the one that steps up to that. that's got to be the government commitment. >> a perfect cute -- perfect example, the alliance for vaccines is going to come up on its five-year renewal. the vast majority of the funding is government funding. over $5.5 billion of it will be from government. that fund alone has allowed us to create a full mechanism to pull the vaccine through. whether private philanthropy peas can do is make sure new vaccines are created, make sure we get lower price vaccines for something like cervical cancer for women. we can bring down the prices and get new vaccines created, and that huge amount of government funding will pull them through.

and get them delivered out to the countries. >> most people think that the two of you and the foundation have done more than anything they ever imagined might be possible. you also initiated 10 years ago the grand challenge project. what is your 10 year assessment of that, and what do you learn from it? >> grand challenge was early in the life of the foundation. we thought, boy, can't we get pretty quickly, tools for hiv and malaria and tb? we feel great about the money we spent there. we have learned how tough it is to get close to those diseases. even though that was 10 years ago, it will be another 15 before we have that full set of tools. quick so you need more time to get more tools to achieve everything you want. >> we were a bit naïve about all

the scientific difficulties in getting those trials done. >> what would you say about the grand challenge? >> there are some pieces we wanted to add onto. we didn't think about gender initially. now the foundation is starting to think more about girls and women. the last grand challenge announcement, we have a particular gender lens, look out there and come up with your most creative ideas around growth in women. young women scientist working in africa she has figured out how to create with local agricultural products a very cheap menstrual pad that means that girls are not out of school for eight or 10 days a month. just by focusing on girls now

there is a local product that is cheap. >> because it is essential to perceive what the possibilities were of these grand projects? >> the world benefits immensely that the u.s. government funds basic medical science. the nih budget of $30 billion a gear has driven so much new knowledge. we try not to duplicate that. we have a lot less money than that, so we tried to build on that. we have a very good partnership with them. we have some areas like nutrition or early delivery that the signs is not understood. so we've had to go down to fairly basic levels. we wish other funders would develop those understandings

and yet because they haven't, now some of the very basic nutrition studies, that is the scientific landscape. it's got to be done. >> you talk about agriculture. tell me about the issue of water. water is in a sense always being renewed by rain. sometimes you have much, and sometimes you have too little. there are parts of backup where they wait until the reins, and you will have years where very little rain comes. that is tough, because unlike in the u.s. where if you get a bad year, you have savings account you have storage you can get through year without malnutrition. in africa, they are always right on the edge. a little bit of change in the weather and they won't have enough crop to feed their own family.

these are not irrigated farms. there is a factor of five difference between african productivity and american productivity. we can bring it up from one to 1.5. part of it is they just cannot afford the mechanization and irrigation. they will still be dependent on the reins. there are areas where the population growth is such that you won't be able to grow enough food. people have to leave and go to other areas. that is always very difficult to achieve. >> i have forgotten the name of it -- rolled tape. take a look at this. >> i'm very impressed with the solution we are seeing here. it generates electricity and clean water. it will grow to every corner of the earth that needs it because it makes money every day. >> tell me what i just saw.

five minutes ago, before you took that drink, that was sewage. >> right. in african cities, when you have a field up latrine, where does that stuff go? well, unfortunately, the cost of processing it has been so high that you have to pay somebody to process it. that means you often will just take it and dump it somewhere. that causes not just smell but also lots of disease in that islam environment -- slum environment. if we could make it where we don't charge you when you comment into the latrine, you're using it to generate clean water and electricity, then it changes the whole behavior. pretty soon that sewage is going to that processing center, so you get a clean city. you will get a lot less diarrhea. that is the challenge we gave to

engineers, to go and build a system like that. the system we just saw theirre, they will be watching over to see what the reaction is and they eventually hope to build thousands of those. >> if you don't have access to clean water, we know children get more diarrheal episodes and actually affects their gut function. we don't know all the signs of what happens to their gut, but we know they cannot then take the proper nutrition out of food. it has a profound effect on children. the other thing i will say is that it affects girls and women hugely in the developing world. both in terms of going to find a latrine. they will tell you about standing in line for hours.

there are girls that carry the clean water. they will spend hours a day to go to areas of clean water to bring back to their family. i cannot believe when the wife of one couple described she used to go 20 kilometers to get water. she had to go twice a week. she said finally win their first son was born, she got to choose her marriage her husband came home one day and she packed her back. she was going to leave. he was distraught and said why are you going to leave? she said there was no water. he said, what could i go -- what can i do to help? she said go in get the water. when he went the 20 kilometers and got the water, he realized he had to take a bicycle to go. the men decided to build water pens all around the villages so

they only had to go one kilometer. >> both in terms of banking, mobile banking, in terms of the change in culture, you see it in hiv? quick absolutely. you have to empower women. you will change the gdp of a country. we actually know that. the way you think of empowerment is in three areas, health, decision-making, and economic opportunity. start them on a healthy life make sure they can participate in things like mobile banking so they can't participate in the economy, and you get them into school. -- so they can purchase of a in the economy. if a girl is in school, she can get married later, she has children later in life, she doesn't die in childbirth and her children are healthier, she is likely then to send her own daughter to school, twice as

likely. and her child is more than two times likelier to live through its fifth birthday if she is educated. the whole way she then accesses the health system if she has literacy, if she is used to being in that teacher-learning role, she can bring stories home to her family and know what medicines they have to give. education transforms everything for a girl, and we are not there yet. ♪

>> two things that tied together what you said at stanford and what you said in this annual letter, it is -- the last part of it is asking people to be global citizen. meaning what? >> we think everybody feels like they are part of humanity. that is, they're caring is not just about their family or just their country. in particular, as the world is better off, that yes you want to have a great career, but you like to be connected with something with real moral value where you are uplifting people's lives. we like people to sign up, they

get e-mails every month about different things going on. we expect they will pick one of those and really engage with it. we would like to see more them get out to the developing world. we give them opportunities to not only see the fun stuff out there, but they will see where we need to do a better job. once you have actually gone, that draws you in. getting another 10,000, 20,000 out there, they would come back and say the same type of things we do. so it is a special year. it is adopting the goals for the next 15 years. we would like people to sign up and they will see a few things that will spark their interest and give them a chance to engage in this grand project. >> is there something you believe you could do that you couldn't do when you set out with all the goals of the foundation? because for a while, you were

really there is the principal driver of the foundation. >> i believed we could make better all over the world for women and children. >> hasn't been slower than you thought? >> childhood death coming down being cut in half in the last 20 years, that part has gone really well. the peas we did not get into for a while, is making sure that women have contraceptives. it is transforming to their lives. if they can space and time there children, if they choose not to have six or five children, if they make the decision to have two or three it changes everything about being able to keep those kids healthy and get them into school. women all over the world, i would go into talk about back scenes, and they want to talk about access to contraceptives. >> how has this changed your

lives? it's an investment in the world this investment in trying to cure disease and poverty. >> in some ways it's not that different because you are working with smart people and you have some things that work and some that fail. it's very different in terms of the types of problems you work on. my partners at microsoft, now my full-time partner is melinda. warren is our cotrustee and he gives us good advice. in terms of having a sense of ok, let's do better. let's make this move faster. the things i learned in my career were super helpful to be able to do this job. >> in terms of business models,

metrics, those kinds of things. >> do you get more out of it than you give to it? >> so much more. >> you are back at microsoft for one third of your time? >> yes, about 30% of my time. the new ceo is taking it some new directions. whatever help he asked for, i am there. they have an announcement this week. >> are you optimistic about it? >> i am helping get the new strategy in place. there are some really bright people there full-time. i am in the that they has stepped back -- enthused that they have stepped back. there are so many key trends they need to get ahead of. they have brilliant people. >> primarily mobile?

>> mobile cloud, machine learning. mapping it into the office product changing quickly, or the way you work across multiple devices, changing quickly giving you new ways of interacting with information. >> the question was raised about, we ought to see more women involved. >> the transparency is the first step. i think they are all committed, they know it would be better for them if they can get more women in computer science. it's a problem that you have to go all the way back to elementary and middle school and look at why you lose girls in middle school and high school. what is it about teachers teaching computer science that keeps girls engaged so they don't step back?

a lot of things have come forward that will help. having transparency, and more women role models to not only mentor but sponsor earls and pulled them up. all those things will help. all the things that sheryl sandberg has brought forward in the conversations in her book. all those things will change and help over time, but we need to keep doing more. >> what is the most exciting thing on the front tier in the technology world? or artificial intelligence, or biomedicine. what is it that in the end matches your excitement about the world we have been talking about all this hour? the possibilities of extraordinary improvements in the lives of people around the world. >> the memo i wrote for microsoft was about this agent that will perfect your memory

and remind you to do things at the right time. whenever you are using the -- the computer, it will help you do the input. software, there is still a lot that can be done there. hopefully that inspires microsoft to do things. earlier this week i spent a day with medical scientists. that was so amazing, because despite what you see in how many new drugs have come out the last three years, medical science is really on the verge of some very big breakthroughs. not just for the belt -- developing world diseases. the various ways of attacking cancer, stem cell, immunotherapy this period will be so incredible in terms of those medical advances.

i am optimistic about a lot of areas, but those two i get a front seat on, the medical breakthroughs and these i.t. breakthroughs, really do generate a lot of things. the i.t. piece is the enabler. you have to go out to the great teachers and learn from them but it's wonderful that that is not anywhere near its final work, nor are biological advances. >> the one thing he would always say to me on vacation is that he wished he would rather -- be able to spend more time with scientists and labs. now he is doing a lot of that. >> my take away from news is that this is really a remarkable time in terms of the tools that we are developing, and at the same time, we can not for a

moment forget that it is not only about optimism and innovation. it is also about caring and heart and actually experience in and feeling the reality around you. thank you. >> thank you, charlie. >> bill and melinda gates for the hour. thank you for joining us. see you next time. ♪

>> i am mark halperin. >> i am john heilemann. "with all due respect." ♪ >> happy national blonde brownie day, sports fans. bibi, bandages, and balls. jeb bush and mitt romney are set to meet awkwardly in utah. among those most instructed -- interested, rand paul, who just fired off a series