YouSaid · the spoken record

Melinda Gates

lines on the record: 38
first: 2019-04-29
most recent: 2019-04-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Exactly. And I think, but as I have seen all the ways women have been held back, and I talk about my book Ways I Was Held Back as a Woman, and I start to think about lifting up women, I go, well, wait a minute, we got to do that, but it's a yes, and we have to do that and at the same time lift up people of color. Then you'll write society.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably in the last maybe five years, it really has been watching other people and hearing what they're saying. And I listen, I listen really carefully to what individuals say.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at moments for equality for yourself in your own marriage or your own relationship, you look for equality in your community, you look and push for quality in your workplace, and you also, if you're lucky enough to have some privilege, which even if you're born in the United States, you've already got privilege, you open up your networks. Like I have to look at myself and say, am I sponsoring other women and people of color for jobs? Am I holding a job open to make sure we have diversity of resumes, diversity of interview candidates? You open your networks. I have networks because of just being white, right? And so am I making sure other people of color have access to those networks? When did you get woke like that?”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, and I have to say, it feels very vulnerable to share this because until last year I hadn't shared that I had a word or what it was. My word this year that came to me is shine. Yeah, no, but it's not about me, and that's why I was a little bit, again, I was kind of resistant when the word came kind of in November. It usually comes sometime in November, December, January. But for me, what shine really means is that I believe every single person has a light inside of them, every single person. And if we can turn those lights on on behalf of women, on behalf of people who don't have as much, on behalf of minorities in our own country, we all turn our lights on and we stand up for what's right. We will break through all these barriers. And guess what? We will all shine. The world will shine.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my youngest daughter and I, the most recent store we've been in, she's 16, and she's spending her allowance. We were in Nordstrom Rack the other day, and we found, which was, you know, their lower price. And we found a lot of things for both her and I bought a few things. It was pretty great. You want good value. I don't care how much money you have”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you look at the rest of the world Depends on what it is. My husband actually memorizes the prices. If we go out to dinner and I'm taking a long time to order and I'm like, oh, am I going to have the chicken or the fish or the steak, and he'll go $19.99 at five for the chicken, you know, $39.95 for the steak. Not that he cares how much we spend on it, but he'll memorize the prices. So I sometimes just count on him. Really?”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know? But I think our kids see Bill and I work very hard. We don't have to work anymore. I mean, but we do. We work hard every single day. I mean, we take some vacations, so we take time off, but we work hard. And I think the other thing our kids see is they have been fortunate to travel a lot, both really nice travel, but they have been in and out of the developing world a lot too. And so they see, I mean, even from age 10, I started taking them out, they see how lucky they are. Lucky not just to be in our family, lucky to have grown shaking your head there, right? Yeah, right?”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got that message from my parents too because we couldn't afford something. Yes. But just because you can doesn't mean you should. So, just because I could buy my daughter, whatever, doesn't mean I should. Like she doesn't learn if I just buy it from her or my son. And so our kids have always had an allowance growing up and then bigger things that they wanted that their allowance wouldn't pay for, they put on their Christmas list and birthday list and they might get it off their wish list from us or a relative or they might not get it. But they started to learn the responsibility of money. And they know that our hope and our dream for them is to”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I would say it's purposeful over time. And again, I believe in putting lots of drops in the bucket, and I wouldn't say I've gotten it right. My daughter, Jen, my oldest who's here, would tell you I've made mistakes too. But I think you constantly go back to your values and all do you.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You keep changing. You keep changing out. You keep listening more. You keep learning. You keep iterating. There are some things we have done that have helped in pockets, but they haven't been scaled up yet. And so you keep learning. It's like it is a bit like running a business, which is you have a strategy. My strategy is great teacher in front of every kid in the United States. You do that, you will really start to change the school system, but you have to tack on course when you don't get there. And we're learning about, we're learning even more locally about what it takes to build consensus and what the people in the school building think they need. And once you support what they need, then you start to grow and change a system.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you can apply those in any amounts you want, tiny amounts, big amounts. But what I tell people is just get connected. Understand what the issues are. Read about them. Connect with somebody else who's working on them. Decide you're going to volunteer time. Even in your own community, you'll see the difference that education makes in your own community for a girl. And whether it's even working in your community, look, our U.S. school system is pretty broken. I'm out in the U.S. school system a lot. You've been out quite a bit too. Yes. But when you start to do that work and you put drops in the bucket of connecting with people and understanding other people's lives, you start to see how you have personal talents that you can contribute.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first of all, you're absolute. I believe in connection, connection between human beings, and that connection creates empathy and we start to understand and we learn and we grow through that. And so if you hear this global problem and it sounds, oh, it's far away, it's huge, these big numbers, you have to remember we all have our hearts, our inner, our time, and our resources.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, and that they have to be willing to invest some resources in that. They have to be willing to change. I mean, let's be honest. It is still men still hold the keys to power, even in the United States. Yes. And so men and boys, and there are many enlightened men and boys. I work with a lot of them. I enjoy them. I love them. They have to be part of this conversation. They have to be willing to give up some power. But if you talk to men about their children, men and women, whenever I ask them in these villages, what are your hopes and dreams for you? They always answer about their children. So when men start to understand that their children will be better off if their wife has less At home and more a little bit more resources and a little bit more voice, they'll be willing to start making that change.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is changing. So it has a long way to go. You have to kind of go country by country. But when I see Male leaders, whether it's a traditional leader of a village, whether it's a local religious leader, whether it's Prime Minister Trudeau or President Macron, talking about women and being willing to fund it or being willing to make cultural change or to learn. I talked to a religious leader in a village actually in Senegal, and he said to me, you know, when you all come here and listen to us over many, many, many years, which a local NGO been doing, but then you also listen to what we need and you bring in some knowledge. He said, we learn and grow. And that's how we change.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there's that, but again, I could spend down the foundation very quickly $2.6 billion doesn't go as far as you'd think, right? So even with our own resources, but I'll tell you what's hard to raise money on behalf of is to go in and talk to a male government leader, which I do all the time about why women's issues are important. And so now we've come around as a globe, but when I would go show up at the UN 10 years ago, if you showed up at the UN, people weren't talking about girls, they were talking about women some women, maternal mortality. They weren't talking about girls. They weren't talking about girls' education. And they certainly weren't talking about contraceptives for women. And so you have to help these global leaders understand how it will help these nations lift out of poverty.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it helped me wrestle with that. And then I finally had to face my own sense of where do I have doubt in my life as a woman? What is that about? And then courage. And I finally came to this point of which if I'm telling my kids to use their voice eventually in the world, to use whatever talents they have, am I using my voice in the world? Am I using it on behalf of women? And so I had to really look at that and say I need to do this. And so in 2012, I helped build, again, a global coalition to raise money. We raised, and I'd never done this before, it was totally new to me, raised $2.6 billion on behalf of contraception. We put something for that. Is it hard to raise money?”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I did. I can explain that if you want. But the other, the person who helped me wrestle with my Catholicism was Father Richard Rohr, listening to many, many, many of his lectures. I know you have. And I've watched”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I spent a lot of time in quiet during those two years. And not to say I don't go to the foundation, didn't work, didn't travel, didn't have kids, but a lot of time and quiet. And reading a lot of spiritual leaders who”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guess what? I have sex with my husband. I have three kids. But you have to be vulnerable and do that to have the courage on behalf of other women.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. And, you know, and I grow up, I am a Catholic, my family's Catholic, my parents, and so I had to wrestle with my own faith, what I had been taught growing up, and what I believe in what I use. And I had to say to myself, no, wait a minute, my kids are spaced three years apart, obviously. I'm using contraceptives. And I started to look at some data and say, okay, 90%, 90 plus percent of Catholic U.S. women use contraceptives. And women all over are asking me for this. Why would I really let people die because of a religion I grew up in? And so it became a wrestling with what do I actually believe of my Catholicism and what do I need to let go of? And then, okay, how do I summon the courage? Because I did not want to stand on stage and say, guess what? I use contraceptives.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think in a certain way, it's the only way. I mean, I have to say, it took me two years, two years to find the courage. To answer the call of women asking me for contraceptives two years, I had to wrestle, I mean, after I'd heard it a lot, I had to wrestle, look at the data, but I had to wrestle with my conscience. I grew up Catholic. The Catholic Church tells you thou shalt not use contraceptives.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decompress and be out in nature, usually walk on a beach, just be alone because I write about this in the book, it's so important to let the pain in, to let my heart actually break, to not resist that pain. There's part of me that wants to go, oh, I didn't hear that, no. But no, you have to let your heart break and you have to let it move through you and hopefully eventually metabolize so I don't put it on somebody else or my anger because I'm outraged usually after these trips. I also go through these moments of outrage and anger. But then by the time I come home, I need to come home and obviously tend to my family. But when I walk through the doors of the foundation, I have to think about what action is this calling me to? What action do I want to take on behalf of the world when I walk through these doors?”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I've learned, I know I've learned over time, that you have to spend time and quiet. You just have to. And for me, after I've had one of these trips, I always, not sometimes, I always spend at least 24 hours in the place I've been or very nearby where I can be alone.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so these resources that Bill and I have, we have to put them to the best use to lift up hundreds of millions of men, women, and children, not just the one. And so in those situations, I often will go back to the NGO, the non-governmental organization who's working there, and I will make sure the family gets a bit more resources, but I can't support them over their lifetime of what they need. I can hopefully give them enough that they can start to lift their family up a little bit.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everybody's tempted to do that. Believe me, I would love to give her right there a thousand, ten thousand rupees, right? But if I only lift up, we have to lift up everybody. I have to lift up individuals, but we also have to lift up millions of women Nina's story that she had the courage to share with me is the story of hundreds of millions of women.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She cast her eyes down for the longest time and she wouldn't look at me. And I thought, okay, I've either made a social faux pas or she doesn't understand. And eventually, after a very long pause, she looked up at me and she said. I can't have any more children. She said, I don't have any hope for these two children. I have no hope. I can't hardly feed these kids. My only hope is if you take my two boys home with you. And that conversation crushed me.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in northern India. I was visiting a local health clinic that we had partly funded in northern India. And a woman, a young woman named Mina, she had two little boys. She had a newborn baby boy. She had gone to the health clinic, delivered the baby safely, and I was home back in her village to talk with her about that delivery and see how it went. We talked at length about her delivery, it went well. She was breastfeeding her baby boys. She clearly loved him. I was just there as a Western woman, which I often am in a pair of khaki pants and a white t-shirt. She didn't know who I was, where I was from, just from the West. And she knows there to learn about what else could be done. And eventually I turn the conversation to, I wanted to ask about contraceptism, what she knew. And when I asked her, I started with, would you like to have another child? And we'd have this gorgeous conversation. And all of a sudden,”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What women are truly telling me. And I also had to go look at the data because when they were first telling me this, my husband is very data-oriented, which has been a huge gift. But he'd say, Melinda, contraceptives are stocked in. Well, sure enough, at the highest level, when you read the reports, contraceptives are stocked in because of HIV AIDS, but condoms are stocked in. And women all over the developing world have told me, I cannot negotiate a condom even in my own marriage because I'm either suggesting my husband has HIV AIDS and has been unfaithful, or I'm suggesting I might have HIV AIDS and I've been unfaithful. And so we weren't delivering the types of tools that women want and can use and sometimes need to use covertly from their husbands. The biggest thing women use in Africa is a shot, which is why when I would bring up vaccines, a shot in a child's arm, they'd say, what about my shot deproduction?”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You understand? I had this one woman in Niger, Sadie, who was her name. She had five children and she had her youngest next to her, beautiful children. And she said to me, don't you understand? Don't you see? You see my small arid plot of land. It is not fair for me to have another child with these other children. I can hardly feed these children. And so this is a matter of life and death. And I have to be honest when they first started telling me this I almost it broke my heart for one thing, but one I kind of wanted to turn away from it. I go, no, no, no, I'm here to talk about vaccines. I'm going to go home and think about vaccines or some other things. But then I thought, no, no, no, wait a minute. If I, for whatever reason, am in this situation where with Bill, we're getting to help put things on the global health agenda to try and help partners and the world and governments move forward, I have to face.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, I was lucky to be able to get pregnant, which some women aren't. But this ability to space the births of each of our children so that I could have time with each one. And I'm incredibly lucky. Look, I was born in the United States. I'm a white Caucasian woman with wealth, right? But there are women all over the world who will tell you it is a life and death crisis. I would be out in these villages and I'd say I'd literally be out and I'd have maybe 60 women around me. The men would be there first and they'd go back to the field. I've learned to let the men go back to the field eventually after we've talked and work. And talking then to the women and I'd say if there's 60 women, so how many of you know somebody that's child and childbirth and like three quarters of the hands would go up? How many of you know somebody or have lost a child in childbirth and all the hands would go up? And women would say to me, don't”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got to figure this out It turns out there are 220 million women telling us they want access to contraceptives. The basic tools we use here in the United States. And we don't deliver those to those women. That's a crime.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, probably I had been out traveling, so I travel a lot for the foundation to Southeast Asia, all these different countries in Africa, and I would often be out to talk to women about vaccines, women and men, about the difference of vaccines in their children's lives. But when I stayed long enough, To have a real conversation in the village, women started bringing up me over and over about contraceptives. And I was surprised, A knew so much about them. And B, they were outraged. I mean, angry at me for good reason. They'd say that clinic, that clinic right there, you can see it. I can get a child vaccine there, my child's vaccine. I cannot get my contraceptives anymore. And so I just kept going to all these places in the world. And then this line. And so it was probably in about 2009, 2010, it just really dawned on me recently.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Millions were dying from needless things that we vaccinate our kids from. And so we started there with that simple idea. And once we felt like we could get going and start to make a difference there, we started to add on other pieces in global health over time because we have this belief that all, first of all, that all lives, all lives, no matter where they're lived in the world, have equal value. And if you can't start with great health, you don't even get to go on and have an education and reach your full potential.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and Africa, as you well know. Is many, many, many different countries with many cultures inside every country. But as we started to learn, we started to gather experts around us. We started to think about, okay, first of all, what's the role of philanthropy? So all philanthropy can be is this catalytic wedge. We are not government. We cannot scale things up, even with our billions of dollars. You can't scale things up. at that level, but we knew we could take risks and try things and we knew that Bill and I coming out of the tech sector believed in the power of science and innovation to change the world. And so we very early hit on vaccines that they would be one of the very best investments that if you got a vaccine in a child's arm in Africa, it literally would save their life. And when we started to learn about the vaccine system and that it was 20 to 25 years from when a vaccine came out in the United States or Europe till it got to Africa,”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so we knew, so we committed at the end of the trip we had a beach walk some time off the coast in Africa, and we just, the more we talked, we knew we were going to give the resources, the vast majority of the resources away. And so we committed ourselves that at some point we would get going on doing that.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and we both, because we both came from families who believed in giving back, my parents gave a lot of community service through the church. Bill's family was very involved in philanthropy in Seattle. And we both just knew, so we'd never been to Africa before in the fall of 1993. We were going to get married subsequently in January of 1994. We both went on our first trip to Africa. And we went because we were going to do, you know, which we did, a beautiful Safari with other couples. We saw the animals, the planes, we loved it. But it really was something about the people that just touched us. And we just, I kept, we kept saying, you know, how can it be? How can it be that we can be in this nice vehicle or take a commercial flight home? And yet people don't have basic things we have in the United States, clean water, a road.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that social justice grounding I got in high school, it just helped me really wrestle with my values early. And then I would say lastly, having three children, you constantly have to be thinking, what are my teaching my children that I want them to live out in the world? And am I living my life that way by what I say and I do? And so it always, always, always goes back to your values. And so I just don't see myself as any different than anybody else. I'm this young girl who grew up in middle class family in Dallas, Texas.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it probably comes from the fact that I grew up in a very middle class family in Dallas, Texas, and we were working very hard. My parents were and us as siblings, me and my three siblings, to have enough money to send the four of us kids to college. And we knew my dad's engineer salary wasn't going to pay for all of it. And so we had, they had a property, a real estate business, and we were cleaning ovens and cleaning out people's messes when they left over and running the finances. I kept the books. And I think growing up in that sort of middle class family with this dream of going to college, you remember how important it is to get a great education. Like my parents were determined I would get a good education, but it set my values. I mean, that and my parents sent me to an all-girls Catholic high school. I kind of wanted to go to a different all-girls school that was more academic.”
2019-04-29 · Oprah's Super Soul · Melinda Gates: The Moment of Lift · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source