And this happens to a lot of women. We know who we are, but we go into college or we go into the workplace or we go into that environment and people start to chip away at us and say, 'You can't be that. You can't do that.'
Did it take you more than a minute to learn to trust again because that had been broken in your marriage?
Of course. I of course I thought it might never happen again for me. And that was okay, too. For me, it's personally hard whenever those details come up, right? Because it brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage. But I have moved on from that.
I'm Rachel Martin and this is Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. My guest this week is Melinda French Gates. Melinda French Gates has lived through some very high-profile turning points, including ending her marriage to Bill Gates and starting her own separate philanthropic work. She wrote beautifully about all of it in a memoir that was published last year called The Next Day: Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward. And it is my great pleasure to welcome Melinda French Gates to Wild Card. Hi.
Hi. Thanks for having me, Rachel.
I'm so pleased that we could make this work.
We're going to do round one, memories. Are you ready?
Okay, let's go. Three cards. Three questions. You pick one, two, or three?
Three. What's a routine from your childhood that you miss?
Oh gosh. I guess getting ready in the morning with my sister. So, I have an older sister who's 22 months older than me, Susan, and then two much younger brothers. But we just even when we were in grade school, we shared a bathroom and we would get ready together in the morning and curl our hair and talk about the day ahead. And then when we were in high school, you know, the whole thing I grew up in Dallas, Texas, so the big whole big hair thing, you know, so there was some time. There was an investment happening. Oh, there was a lot of time maybe an hour before we went out and hairspray and so you had a lot of time to like talk about your day and visit and say, 'Well, what do you think of this color? What do you think of that ribbon? What should I do here?' And so I just we're still very close, but we live in different states and so I just miss that like that I had even thought about it, that sweet routine we had together.
Do you still I don't know if you ever have occasion to be in a hotel room with her? Like have you found yourself as adults falling back into that? That has happened to me with my sister where circumstances will mean we're in the same place with the same bathroom and all of a sudden we're getting ready together at the same time and I have a similar kind of nostalgic flashback.
Well, I'm not sure I can't think of a recent time where we've been in a hotel room doing that, but I will say that I have it with my daughters. So, I have two adult daughters now, 29 and 23. And as they were coming up, you know, I would go in their bathroom in the mornings when they're getting ready and sometimes just sit there while they're getting ready. And a lot of times they would come in my bathroom. And of course, girls borrow things. My sister and I borrowed things from each other, makeup, etc. But I also miss, so I've had that tradition also with my own girls. And when we're back together in a hotel room, the three of us, we get together and, you know, talk and get ready to go out and, oh, do these shoes work? I'm not sure, you know.
Yeah, I have boys, so it's just different. It's just they're just they don't care what hair product I'm using or if I'm going to curl my hair or not. So, I am envious of that. Three more cards still in memories. One, two, or three? Two. Two. What's a place that shaped you just as much as any person did?
I would say working at Microsoft in the early years. I worked there for nine years. I went I was computer science undergraduate went straight to business school and then boom straight to Microsoft and I was quite young when I started. There were very few women in tech and I because I had this computer science background and this business background it was a natural fit and I was a part of a class of MBAs. The first class that was there, there were 10 of us, nine guys and me.
Oh, yeah. And, you know, I learned a lot about how I didn't want to be in a work environment. Like, I loved the fast-paced nature of it. I love I very competitive even when I play games with my kids or at home. I love that competitive that we knew we were creating new products. It was I joined back in 1987. There were only, you know, there were like 1,800 employees. It was tiny still. We knew we were changing the world. And I loved all of that and that creativity and being around smart people. So, I learned that I like to work in that type of environment. But I also learned that I didn't like that sort of rough and tumble, elbow each other, be the smartest person in the room, the boys debate club. And so as I moved up, which because there weren't many women there, and I was a good manager, I had managed people in high school and in college and in business school. As I moved up the ranks, I realized I no longer wanted to play that game. I would leave work and at the end of the day I'd go to the grocery store and I just wasn't a very nice person anymore. And I thought that's not who I want to be.
And so I thought I'll leave. I'll go get another job. But maybe before I do that, I'll just try being myself. I knew I'd fall flat on my face, whatever. And as I started to be more myself and because I was managing large teams, people started flocking to my groups around the company. And others would say to me, how did you get that developer, that hard charging developer, you know, from that other project to come work in the consumer division? And I started to realize it was the culture I was creating, which is so interesting because you learned, the question was, what place shaped you more than any person. Your answer was your experience at Microsoft, but it was almost in opposition to that culture. You learned and were shaped by that place as you developed in opposition to the mainstream culture which is so interesting and this is one thing I've learned about myself over the many years is that I work against the nots. The nots, who do I not want to be? So and it's true when I go back and look at who were I who was I friends with in college and I would see some of these I went to Duke University I came from a very middle class family in Dallas, Texas. But as I would see some of these kids who were more of wealth and of means and sort of acted like they were all that because of coming from a family with a name or wealth, I thought, I do not ever want to act like that. And if I'm ever lucky enough to be in that situation, absolutely not. I would never want to raise kids that way. So I learned over time, I work against that opposition to see it helps shape who I don't want to be.
The last thing I'll say about this is just I also work against the knots in life. The K-N-O-T-S. So sometimes when something's really hard and gnarly and you can't figure it out and it's bothering you and stuff, that's where the biggest growth is. And I need to look at that and sort of try and relax the pressure on myself and say, 'This is tough, but I'm going to figure out my way through it.' And that's where I've grown and learned also the most.
You know what I love about the idea of defining yourself in opposition to what or based on what you don't want to be? It's like a sculpture. It's like you're handed this big block called life and the people in it and you're just like chipping away. You don't know what you're sculpting even. You don't know who you are actually. But what happens is when you take away all the other stuff, you know, I don't want to be this. I don't want to be this. I don't want to be this. And then Melinda showed up. Then there you were as a result of that and you find out who your essence is.
And a lot of those things for me were baked in in high school. I went to an amazing all girls Catholic high school and just a few nuns but amazing lay teachers and the values they put in us and taught us and how they taught us to learn. And that's where I first back in the day when they were hardly anywhere had had computers. We had computers. It's where I learned I wanted I could be good in computer science, good in math. So I knew who I was when I went out in the world. And I think that I've learned this happens to a lot of women. We know who we are, but we go into college or we go into the workplace or we go into that environment and people start to chip away at us and say, 'You can't be that. You can't do that.' And at least for me, I sort of built up almost forgetting who I was in my core and my essence. But as I would see these different groups, I could remember not that, not that, not that. And so maybe to your point, I was able to chisel my way back to who I am in my essence. And it was always there. And I always held on to it. I didn't let go of it, but I had to see other things to go, not that.
Yeah. Okay, let's move. We're moving. Last one in this round. Memory still. One, two, or three.
Okay. What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore?
My freshman advisor, who was also the college counselor for our all girls school, I won't say her name. When I went in to start talking to her about colleges and where I wanted to go and what my dreams were and she said, 'Oh, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Those aren't for you.' You know, when I said things like Notre Dame and Stanford or Duke, 'Oh, no. Huh? I mean, maybe we should consider, you know, maybe like a local community college or maybe we should think about Texas Tech.' And again, talk about that oppositional. So I can also rise up. Sometimes I have to have something to work against. And I left and I was so angry. I was like, 'She sees me like that? Who is she to see me like that? Are you kidding? I'm going to show her.' And I went back once she said that, I went back and looked at the transcripts of the girls from our school who preceded me. And I realized the only ones who ever got into the colleges I wanted to get into were the valedictorians. And I was like, 'Oh boy, I've got to be valedictorian.'
Mhm. And so I had to then get A's in all my classes, even the honors. So I put a lot of pressure on myself, but ultimately I went to Duke and I had a at a time when they had a brand two new brand new computer labs. I had very good classes. Yeah, it ended up being fantastic.
Did you send a little letter to that high school guidance counselor being like, 'Greetings from Duke University, period. Love Melinda.'
She knew where I ended up. And luckily, luckily she was the only one that saw me that way. Like my math teacher saw the potential. And boy was my math teacher phenomenal for me, you know, or my English teacher. And again, I say this often to people now. I've seen, you know, using my own experience. The difference one person can make in someone else's life. And people have to remember that because it's not just the positive stuff you say that can have a positive impact. It's the negative stuff that might eat out of you that can have a detrimental effect on the kids, the young people in your care under your tutelage.
Absolutely. Yeah. And you know I there's a saying I think in the meditation and spiritual community that you know our brains are like teflon and velcro that the beautiful things people say or the inspiring things they're kind of like teflon. If you get a compliment you kind of like let it go. But the velcro is like the sticky ones. The ones that aren't so nice. Those stick and you got to work through those, right? And I certainly have some of those in my life too. I want to pull back from the game and talk about Pivotal Ventures, which is your foundation that works on social issues for women, including women's health. Can you just talk to me a little bit about how you focus there? Because you, Melinda French Gates, could have focused your money and effort and bandwidth anywhere.
Well, I was lucky enough to form the Gates Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and I traveled for over 25 years to so many different countries in Africa and Southeast Asia. And what I came to see is we don't focus on women's health. We just we as a world like if you I started to look at the data about women and women's lives and what do we collect you know because the foundation we often worked off of data and I realized the data on women's health was very sparse we knew a little bit about their reproductive health and we knew a little bit about their maternal mortality at the time they gave birth or died in childbirth but we knew very little and if less than 1% of all global health and research funding goes towards women's health and yet we're 50% of the population. There's a problem there, right? And so I started to say to myself, wow, as I form Pivotal Ventures, which I did in 2015, I really studied the barriers of what holds women back in our own country, the United States, and around the world. And it's because where we've done research and where we have funded around health, we've assumed the man's body as the default body and then hers kind of comes next. But now we're learning that when you invest in women's health, our bodies work very differently than men, right? And so I'm really investing in lots of ways now in women's health to make sure we can find good solutions, break through the barriers for women.
But it's so big, Melinda. Women's health is what I mean, it's everything from like menopause to birth control. Like where where education, how do you begin to focus your resources so that they make the biggest impact?
Yeah. So, I know from longstanding health research, when I was at the Gates Foundation is that reproductive health is the number one most important thing. You have to at least do that because when a woman has access to a contraceptive, a contraceptive of her choice, she will space the births of her children, she is healthier. She doesn't lose her life. She doesn't get a fistula. And the babies are healthier because they need to be spaced so she has enough time and energy to feed them and they get what they need. So we know that is a bare minimum but way above that when I now am focusing on health because I feel like the foundation's doing that. I'm doing some of that at Pivotal but I'm now looking at what are the biggest killers of women. Well, here's the biggest one. Cardiovascular disease. 35% of women's death is from cardiovascular disease. And yet a woman goes into the health system, even in our own country, and the chance she is diagnosed with having a heart attack is very low. 50% of cases for women are missed. And it's because we think of cardiovascular disease as a man's disease. So I'm putting in we're together putting in a hundred million to study cardiovascular disease in women and where should we intervene sooner what should we look at what are the biomarkers and what can we bring forward more quickly for women's cardiovascular disease. At the end of 2026 we will pick another very large topic and we're looking at potentially either mental health for women or autoimmune diseases because those are the two that really disproportionate amount of autoimmune diseases are women are affected by compared to men. So that's where I'm starting. Then I'm finding partners to partner with me who believe in putting in money for women's health.
So I want to pivot to talk about your book which came out last year and you detail how important obviously your philanthropic work has been especially in your later life but I mean you have lived this exceptional life right in so many ways what is profound about the book is that money doesn't protect you fully from grief and pain and profound disappointment. And I wonder if you could share what hesitations, if any, you had about putting all that stuff out into the public domain.
Yeah. So, I wrote a book that came out last year called The Next Day. And it's about transitions in life. You don't get to age 60 without having made all of us lots of transitions in life. Some you wanted to make, some you didn't expect, some that were easy, some that were really hard. And so I decided to put this book out because what I realized was in those transitions are the biggest moments of growth. And if you can look at them that way and you can have the courage to go through them, you can pick these lessons out for yourself. And so it felt extraordinarily vulnerable to do that book. I am I live have lived an incredible just a very privileged life you know I don't I don't take that for granted at all. But in the end of the day it life is about the relationships you have and the family and the friends and what you make of it. How you make meaning out of it. So, I've tried to take this unbelievable wealth I never thought I would have and plow it back into society in ways to make it better. So, yeah, that's what the book is about is growth in transitions.
So, you talk about knots and how that's where we learn things about ourselves as we untangle them. I wonder if you are in one of those moments again. Now, I have to acknowledge the elephant in the room at this moment. Your ex-husband, Bill, is named in the newest tranche of Epstein files. And there are new alleged details about his past behavior, and I want to give you the opportunity to respond in whatever way you want to.
Well, let me say this. I think we're having a reckoning as a society, right? No girl, no girl should ever be put in the situation that they were put in by Epstein and whatever was going on with all of the various people around him. No girl, I mean, it's just it's beyond heartbreaking, right? I remember being those ages those girls were. I remember my daughters being those ages, right? So, for me it's personally hard whenever those details come up, right? Because it brings back memories of some very, very painful times in my marriage. But I have moved on from that. I purposely pushed it away and I moved on. And I'm in I'm actually not in a knot in my life anymore. I'm in a really unexpected beautiful place in my life. So whatever questions remain there of what I don't can't even begin to know all of it. Those questions are for those people and for even my ex-husband. They need to answer to those things, not me. And I am so happy to be away from all the muck that was there.
I have to put more words to the muck for context for our listeners. The emails in the files suggest that Bill Gates had additional affairs and that he tried to get medication to treat a sexually transmitted infection and that he was going to give you the medicine without you knowing. His representative has said all of this is false. It is not on you to have to respond to the details of that alleged behavior. But I wonder what your dominant emotion is when you read these news articles with these details.
Sad. Just unbelievable sadness. Unbelievable sadness. Right. And again, I'm able to take my own sadness and look at those young girls and say, 'My god, how did that happen to those girls?' Right? And so for me, it's just sadness. Sadness for, you know, I've left I had to I left my marriage. I had to leave my marriage. I wanted to leave my marriage. I had to leave the I felt I needed to eventually leave the foundation. So, it's just sad. That's the truth, right? And it's kind of like at least for me, I've been able to move on in life. And I hope there's some justice for those now women, right? We see them standing up in front of microphones in DC. What they went through is just unimaginable, I think.
Thank you for that. In the book, you talk about a new practice you started a few years ago where you designate a word to define your year instead of resolutions, which I think is a lovely thing. So what's your word for 2026, if I can ask?
Sure. It's build. Build. Yeah, I'm building the life I want to have. I've been doing that the last few years. But you know, again, to this topic of women's health, you know, I'm thinking about my own health. I'm post 60 now. I've always been a big exerciser, etc. I, you know, I had a ski accident that many people have had who ski. I have an ACL injury. I'm rebuilding from that. And so, I'm like three weeks away from being able to get back on my spin bike, right? And I'm just chomping at the bits and but I want to use it as an opportunity to build the strength and healthy body that I would like to have and luckily I was healthy coming into it for the rest of my life but also just build my life in the way I want it. I have three adult children now who are all out of the house. They're 29, 26, and 23, right? And how do I want my relationships to continue to grow and be with them? So, yeah, I get to build this beautiful life that I'm part of and build my philanthropy that I'm doing at Pivotal Ventures and build the right team around me who can carry out this work in the world.
Good for you, lady. You don't need me to tell you that, but good for you.
Okay, round two. You ready to keep going?
Okay, round two. Insights. Insights. Three new cards. One, two, or three?
