Best Of: Richard Kind / Melinda French Gates
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From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, actor Richard Kind. You've seen him on countless TV shows and films during his 40-year career. Only Murders in the Building, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Spin City, Mad About You, and A Serious Man, just to name a few. He's now the announcer and sidekick on Everybody's Live with John Mulaney. Plus, he knows how to tell a joke.

Oh, I got lots of them. Nobody tells a joke better than I do. He'll share one of his favorites.

Melinda French Gates also joins us to talk about her new book, The Next Day, which reflects on motherhood, grief, philanthropy, and life after divorce. Gates is the former co-chair of the Gates Foundation and founder of Pivotal Ventures, which focuses on advancing women and families. And Jon Powers reviews the new TV series, Your Friends and Neighbors, starring Jon Hamm. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

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That's my guest actor Richard Kind in his current role on the Netflix show Everybody's Live with John Mulaney as the announcer and Mulaney's sidekick. He does sketches, too.

The show conforms to the late-night format in the sense that there's an opening monologue, but then it becomes a panel discussion on a specific subject, like funerals, loaning people money, and getting fired, with guests like Pete Davidson, Michael Keaton, Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Henry Winkler, John Waters, and Wanda Sykes. Everybody's Live is live on Netflix Wednesday nights and streams after that.

Richard Kind has been in hundreds of movies and TV shows. In the series Only Murders in the Building, he was the neighbor Vince Fish, a.k.a. Stink-Eyed Joe, with a highly contagious case of pink eye. In the animated film Inside Out, he was the voice of the imaginary friend Bing Bong. In the Coen Brothers film A Serious Man, he was the deeply troubled brother.

Earlier in his career, he co-starred in the series Mad About You and was a cast member of the Carol Burnett show Carol and Company. His youthful ambition was to be in a Stephen Sondheim musical. He's been in two. He starred in a production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the Stephen Sondheim Center for the Performing Arts. And in the musical Bounce, he originated the role of Addison Meisner and got to work with Sondheim.

Kind was in the Michael J. Fox series Spin City. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, he was Larry David's cousin Andy. And I think he's still angry that a recent series he co-starred in, East New York, was canceled after one season. Angry because he thought it was really good.

Let's start with a clip from the latest episode of Everybody's Live with John Mulaney. Mulaney explains that Kind got hit on the head with a Kiss album, which left him with a traumatic brain injury, and now he thinks he's Gene Simmons. He's dressed like Simmons, his hair is like Simmons, and he talks like Simmons too. After he says something vulgar to Mulaney, Mulaney starts to apologize to the audience.

Okay, so normally I'd apologize for such a crass comment. Gentlemen, I crave ideas. And when an idea hits me, it grips me and it tortures me until I master it. Listen, Gene, I know you think you're Gene Simmons, man, but Richard, if you're in there somewhere, please just give me a sign. I didn't expect you to greet me with open arms, but I did expect open legs. All right.

Richard Kind, welcome to Fresh Air. I have to ask you, because this question is as much about me as it is about you. So when I interviewed Gene Simmons many years ago, he said to me, if you want to welcome me with open arms, you'll also have to welcome me with open legs. I don't know anything about Gene Simmons.

My reference about Gene Simmons is Kiss, seeing him with makeup. And then John sent me the very contentious interview you had with him. So I said, oh, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to be that contentious, very, very, I don't want to say stoic, but he was not even somber, but he was still. And he just talks these awful things. He was awful to you. He was terrible.

I got a lot of mileage out of that, though. Did you? Okay, well, a lot of time. Yeah, I got a lot of attention. Oh, good, good. Yeah. Insulting me was actually doing me a favor a lot.

Don't expect it from me. I'm not that kind of person. Okay. So, Everybody's Live, your new late-night talk show, is adapted from last year's Netflix series, Everybody's in L.A. How did Mulaney describe it to you when he asked you to be his sidekick? He didn't. I've got to say this about that show. We were supposed to do six last May, Friday and then Monday through Friday. And he said, even if we get moon landing ratings, we're not doing any more.

So you can imagine my surprise when I read he's doing 12 more. It didn't even say whether or not I was coming back. Then when I spoke to him, I said, listen, John, you don't have to ask me to do it. You know, it was six and out. And he goes, I go, I won't be insulted. He goes, I'd be very insulted. But he didn't even call me. And then, oh, my gosh.

Then I find out we're doing 12. This is not what I was born to do. It was a lark when I did the first six. It was fun. Oh, my gosh. Now it's a job. Now it's I better be good. We're on live all over the world on Netflix, all over the world. What if I say something that's so unfunny or, God forbid, something I would regret saying? I can't take it back.

It's live. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. Somebody asked, is this the largest audience you've ever played to? I said, yes, the world is the largest audience I've ever played to. So you're an actor and you've been in so many things, but you're not a big celebrity. Like everybody's seen you in at least one thing. So many people know who you are.

But you're not famous in the way that your good friend George Clooney is famous. That is correct. And you've said you like it that way. I didn't know I would like it that way because my brain, much less my career, has gone through different permutations over the years. When I was a kid, you know, a kid lies in bed and dreams of being center fielder for the Yankees or, you know, being an astronaut, being a rock star.

I wanted to be a movie star. I wanted to be up on the big screen. The funny thing is when I was angry at my parents, I wasn't going to write them a note that I'm running away. I was going to make a film and show it in the theater. That's how I was going to tell them I'm running away. Put a film about them? Yeah, and go, I'll show you. I'm going to go make it big, and you'll see. You'll see. You'll be sorry that you didn't let me go see that movie. And that's what I thought about.

So, you know, it was on. That's what it was. And I had a dream. My grandparents used to take me to Broadway because they lived in New York. We lived near. We lived in Pennsylvania and Bucks County. And so I would come where I was from. My joke is you either went to the spectrum to see the Rolling Stones or you went to Madison Square Garden. I went to Madison Square Garden. All my friends went to the spectrum and still live in Philly. I went to New York because that's what I knew. My grandparents showed me the city.

And I wanted to be Zero Mostel. Zero Mostel and Robert Preston. That's who I wanted to be. Oh, you got to be Zero Mostel. I did. You've been in his role in two shows. And a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. I did. And the producers. Listen, your intro was really good because you pointed out things I'm very proud of.

OK, a lot of people just look at the IMDb page and and, you know, like like and give some little credit of a movie that I don't even remember doing. But I liked what you mentioned. You know, the thing is, when you look me up, you see a lot of the movies and TV shows. But like I did an opera at New York City Opera.

I want to play a clip from the series Girls 5 Ever about a girl group that reunites. You really did your work. Yeah, that's a good one. And this clip seems almost like a self-parody. So the girl group that Dawn, the Sara Bareilles character, is in has a show at Radio City Music Hall. But they're having trouble selling tickets. So she's running around the streets of Manhattan looking for a famous person for the show who could help.

And she sees a film or a TV show is being shot and notices you at the crafts table. Here's the clip. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. You got a list of problems longer than a wizard's beard. Man, I said that already. What else is long?

CBS receipt? CBS receipt. That's funny. Pretend I said that. Can you do something at our show? Really use someone who can move the needle. No, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not a needle mover. And that's by design. I've spent the past 40 years striking the perfect balance between constantly working and never getting bugged in a deli. And another thing. Why would you say and another thing and then take a big bite? I mistimed it. You overshot it.

Never chase the big time. The big time is bad news. That's when the fighting starts. People get desperate. Friends turn on each other. What you want is the medium time. Never above number five on the call sheet of life. That's happiness. Look at me. I work every day of my life doing what I love.

Well, not today. Today I had a doctor's appointment. I'm fine. And then I walk by here, I see the spread, I put some tissue in my collar, and I pretend like I'm working here. What is this, anyway? Euphoria. Did I guest on this show? Eh, it doesn't matter. The important thing is... I don't have time for this! Zendaya! Maude Apatow! Oh, my gosh. That conversation was longer than a CVS receipt. That's funny. I just made that up.

That's a great scene. I love that scene. It's a great scene. Was that supposed to be a parody of you? Sure. And it was. And it's hilarious and I'm mortified. You know. Yeah. But it's hilarious. It is a parody. I say yes to a lot of things. I'm in so many things. You know, I'll go back to the question you asked because you addressed George, who is my dear friend. And remember, I came up in the business with him.

And, uh, my joke was, is that, uh, at the time that we worked together, I was the handsome one. Uh, and then our careers went a different way. Uh, so he can't go out like I can go out. He can't even go to a bar the way that I can go to a bar. He's going to get, he's going to get bothered. You get tired of that. And you realize that.

Dare I say it? You don't deserve it. You're a little bit of a fraud. Is that how you feel, that you're a little bit of a fraud? Oh, every day I feel like a fraud. Every single day. I'm waiting for the world to say, I'm not that talented. I don't have that. I'm not that good. Every day I wake up like that. Every day. But a flip side of that, a friend of mine said,

I may not always be great anymore, but I think I'm good enough to never stink. You know what I mean? I'm not going to be bad. I'll be fine. There are parts that I hope I'm great in, and I always yearn not just to be great, but to be better than everybody else in a scene. I want to be great.

But if you're playing tennis with a better tennis player, it's just not going to happen. So there were some times when I say, you know what? You're not going to win an Academy Award for this role. Just do it correctly. Don't try and stand out. Don't try and steal. Just do it. Just do the part. And that's a very different way to come to set.

We're listening to Terry's interview with Richard Kind. He's currently in the Netflix series Everybody's Live with John Mulaney as Mulaney's sidekick. We'll hear more of their conversation after a break. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

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So you had a significant role in a film I really love, A Serious Man, that was made by the Coen brothers. And Michael Stuhlbarg plays a man whose wife is leaving him. He might be losing his teaching job. A student is kind of blackmailing him. His whole life is falling apart. And he's also wrestling with the concept of God and with his Judaism. You play his brother. You're a gambler. You're broke, right?

You have a sebaceous cyst that's become a big problem. You're in misery. And it's a kind of modern-day version of the Book of Job. At least that's how I think of it. And I'm wondering if you thought of it that way and if you read or re-read the Book of Job to do the role and if people talked about it on the set. Not at all. I'm glad I asked. I had a teacher who said...

Every answer you need is in the script. Just read the script. You don't have to do any research. Certainly the book of Job wouldn't have done anything. I didn't think that was telling the book of Job. I thought I was talking about this guy named Arthur Gopnik, and these were his circumstances. And you play pretend.

If it meshes into what you think is the book of Job and you interpret all of that, God bless you. But no, no, no, that's not what I did at all. I just played the scene. What are my circumstances? How do I feel? And you just play pretend. That's what it is. What was a Coen Brothers approach to directing you from your point of view as an actor? What was it like to work with them?

They're great. I love them. You're always at the height of your game. I was surprised at how word perfect they like their script, but they should because they're great writers. Sometimes Joel would take a physical position that sort of told me everything about what he wanted in the scene.

The scene where the police are at the door. He sat down in a chair and he leaned back. And Joel is a long, lanky man. And his face almost looked five inches longer than it is. And that's what I saw in when I leaned back in the chair. Dare I say he almost looked like a horse when he was looking back. And that's what I saw.

The movie A Serious Man is also about struggling with your faith. Yes. Because the Michael Stubar character has conversations with rabbis and...

He's kind of losing his faith because everything's going wrong in his life. Right. I know you were on Finding Your Roots, and you found out that some of your ancestors were religious leaders in the Pale of Settlement. Right, right. And the Pale of Settlement was during the Russian Empire. It was a large area of what we now call Eastern Europe that was basically...

ghetto for Jews, like Jews had to live within this expanse of land. And so, so many American Jews, their grandparents or ancestors lived in the Pale of Settlement. What did it do to your own faith or religious practice, if you had any? I know you're born Jewish, I have no idea how observant you are. But what did it do to your level of observance to find out about people on your family tree being religious leaders?

I know what God is to me. I don't believe in a Jewish God. I believe in God. I believe there is a power, and I believe that he encompasses all religions. I believe that religion is just something that we go to to make us feel better or to give us some sort of foundation because the world is so full of chaos and we can't really find ourselves.

What I do believe is in my ancestors, and I believe that Judaism, that form of foundation, must survive because these people gave their lives, and they sacrificed, and they believed in

and in the Jewish religion and in the State of Israel and let them have a foundation that they believe in called Judaism. So it's very important that I know what my roots are and what my heritage is and to serve my heritage. Do you practice any, do you observe the holidays and the Sabbath and all that? Like how far do you go? No, I don't observe the Sabbath. What I do observe is the High Holy Days.

Because that God who I believe in and I live my life daily by, I hope, acting correctly to my fellow man, which is a form of prayer to me and a form of going to church or going to temple. Wow, I can't believe I just said going to church. I believe that is my way of serving God. I believe I'm a good person.

And I try and do, I really do try and do unto others as I would myself. So I do go to Rosh Hashanah and I do go to Yom Kippur and I am very observant about that. Part of it's karma,

Part of it is, hey, don't tilt the boat. You know, don't don't don't rock the boat right now. Just keep going. And it's also the acknowledgement of my parents, my grandparents and all those heritage. But I can't believe that my hair. No. How am I genetically?

have just dissipated over the years so that they started out as rabbis in the 1600s, and this is what we end up with? Me, Richard Kind? That's horrible. But I do try and study as much as I can and read and try and be up on news and be as responsible a citizen as I can to serve those rabbis who were there at the time.

What you're saying reminds me of something that you've told another interviewer, which is you said, I have a huge ego with no confidence. You want to explain? Yeah. Being an actor, it's abnormal. It's an anomaly. It's unnatural.

for a man to get up on a stage in front of people. It's unnatural to be in front of a camera while 50 to 100 people are behind the camera.

and pretend that you're somebody else and just lay bare your emotions or pretend you're somebody else. It's unnatural. You know how people are scared of getting attention, and I'm waving my arms going, look at me, look at me, look at me. And yet with that look at me, look at me, look at me comes a fear of what I said earlier, I'm a fraud.

Am I good enough? I can't, I don't know whether or not what I'm doing. And I think any actor worth his salt would like to be better and give a better performance than what they gave. There's, oh my gosh, did I do it correctly? Should I do it again? I need affirmation all the time. It's why I like live theater.

Even if it's a drama, I can feel the audience listening to me, liking me. There's no bottom to the urn of love that I need. That is lack of confidence. And yet my ego says, go out and do it and do it and do it louder than everybody else.

It's who I am. I'm oversized in my voice. I'm loud in my opinions. When I'm opinionated, I'm really loud. And even my acting by a funny line that my friend Craig Bierko said in a toast once he goes, the astronauts were up in space and they saw two things, the Great Wall of China and every acting choice Richard Kind ever made.

I love that line so much. It's so funny. It's so funny. Is it how I chose to live my life? No, I wouldn't choose it, but it's what I'm saddled with. Do you tell jokes? I mean, you obviously have a great sense of humor, but do you actually tell joke jokes? Terry, nobody tells a joke better than I do. Oh, great. Do you want to tell us one that you love? Sure.

So this mother is making her teenage son's bed and she's tucking in the sheets and she reaches underneath and she pulls out a magazine of bondage, of like handcuffs and whips. And she goes, oh, my God. So the husband comes home. She goes, honey, honey, honey, look what I found under Timmy's bed. He goes, oh, my God. She goes, what are we going to do? He goes, well, we're certainly not going to spank him.

That's great. Oh, I got lots of them. Nobody tells a joke better than I do. Well, Richard Kind, thank you so much for talking with us. Oh, thank you. Terry, this was fun. I enjoyed it. You're great. You're great. Richard Kind is currently in the Netflix series Everybody's Live with John Mulaney, and he spoke with Terry Gross.

And the new TV series Your Friends and Neighbors, Jon Hamm, stars as a rich hedge fund guy who loses his job and turns to crime to pay for his exceedingly high bills. The show, which also stars Amanda Peet, has already been renewed for a second season by Apple TV+. Our critic-at-large, Jon Powers, calls it a sharply entertaining series that harkens back to earlier portraits of suburban life but gives things an up-to-date spin.

In the decades after World War II, America was flooded with novels, movies, and hot-button studies pondering the nature of suburbia, its comfort in consumerism, its safety and soullessness. Nobody explored these themes any better than John Cheever, whose elegantly devastating stories captured suburban life in both its sunlit splendor and shadowy desolation. Take, for instance, his famous 1956 story, The Housebreaker of Shady Hill.

Its hero, Johnny Hake, loses his prosperous job and, needing dough, begins robbing his friends' houses. You get a 2025 riff on that same idea in the new Apple TV Plus series Your Friends and Neighbors. Created by Jonathan Tropper, who made his name with a series of novels in the Tom Parada, Nick Hornby vein, this comic drama stars John Hamm as a hedge fund hotshot whose cushy suburban existence goes kerflooey.

Yet the show isn't merely about the flamboyant crisis of a handsome, privileged guy, but about a culture in which wealth comes lined with rage and melancholy. Ham plays our hero and narrator Andrew Cooper, known as Coop, who gets canned for a sexual indiscretion and finds his career in ruins. He's already lost his family, which happened when he caught his wife Mel, that's Amanda Peet, in bed with one of his friends, an ex-NBA player.

Outwardly, Coop pretends that nothing has happened, but internally he's changed. Where he once thought of his luxurious town of Westmont Village as paradise, he's now cynical about its values. He starts breaking into his friends' houses, stealing things like Patek Philippe watches worth $250,000, and in the process, discovering their secrets.

From there, the show expands outwards, introducing many other characters, such as Coop's sometime lover Sam, that's Olivia Munn, who's caught in a nasty divorce, his money manager Barney, played by Hoon Lee, his wife's Dominican house cleaner Elena, played by Aimee Carrero, and his musician sister Allie, that's Tony winner Lena Hall, whom Coop has taken in after her breakdown.

They all figure in a storyline chock full of betrayal, theft, infidelity, and murder. Juicy stuff. Not to mention Coop's sardonic voiceover, mocking the country club fees and fetishized brands of scotch that define the suburban enclave he now disdains. The show's emotional center is Coop's struggle to cope with his ex-wife and disaffected teenage children.

Here he's just dropped his son off after school when Mill rebukes him because this isn't one of the days he's supposed to see the kids. What are you doing here? I took Connor for some ice cream. That's not Tuesday. So I've been told. Is Tori here? She's not home yet. What? What? What is the look? I don't give him any look. You are giving me the look that there's the look where you're trying not to give me a look, so what's the problem?

I think it's a little tricky when you show up on a day that isn't your day. I took him out for ice cream. My God. What do you think for him? Boundaries are there for a reason. Boundaries? You mean, like, monogamy? Oh!

Really, Coop? It's been almost two years. When are you going to stop playing that card? I don't know. What is the statute of limitations on adultery? If you were even remotely self-aware, you'd realize these things don't happen in a vacuum. And you could maybe take a little portion of responsibility for your side of it. Okay, I'm sorry, but you sleep with Nick. You kick me out of this place. I'm forced to pay for this entire mess, and I'm the one that's not being responsible. I'm not doing this right now. Oh, well, it's really no fun doing it alone.

In recent years, we've grown used to shows in which alpha males like Coop all but wear a tattoo that reads, Toxic Masculinity. I'm pleased that Tropper takes the show someplace subtler, juggling the truth that his hero can be at once a wounded soul with whom one often identifies, and a self-centered man who oozes entitlement, from his Princeton degree in Maserati to his discovery that the world's unfair, only after it's been unfair to him.

It's a perfect role for Ham, who carries with him our memories of Don Draper's dark-souled charisma, then takes this sort of character in a new direction, funnier, sadder, and more sympathetic. He's never been better. Although his coup starts out as a self-described jerk, his character grows wiser and more self-aware as the episodes unfold. Trouble is, robbery is a risky business that requires expertise more than self-knowledge.

As his fence Lou warns him, nothing is so dangerous as somebody who doesn't know what they don't know. Watching your friends and neighbors, I found myself thinking that in some huge ways, today's suburbs are undeniably better than they once were. They're less exclusively white, and the wives have fulfilling careers. But in other ways, they feel worse. Tropper offers little of the tender lyricism that makes Cheever's suburbs so seductive.

It's not just that Coop's world is more grossly materialistic than before, with Rolls Royces and 40 grand bottles of wine, but that its denizens are far more cut off from one another and from any sense of nobler values. In The Housebreaker of Shady Hill, Johnny Hakes steals $900 from a friend and spends the story feeling guilty and ashamed that he's become a thief. In the far flashier Your Friends and Neighbors, Coop suffers little such remorse.

Not in the first six episodes, anyway. Nor does the show judge him harshly for his thefts. He's got an expensive life to pay for, after all. And besides, his victims are just rich jerks, like him.

John Powers reviewed Your Friends and Neighbors, which is now streaming on Apple TV+. Coming up, Melinda French-Gates talks about her new book, The Next Day, which reflects on motherhood, grief, philanthropy, and life after divorce. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.

When Malcolm Gladwell presented NPR's ThruLine podcast with a Peabody Award, he praised it for its historical and moral clarity. On ThruLine, we take you back in time to the origins of what's in the news, like presidential power, aging, and evangelicalism. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

Our next guest is Melinda French-Gates.

Five years ago, she stood at a crossroads. After 27 years of marriage to Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, she decided to walk away, not only from the relationship that had defined much of her adult life, but eventually from the philanthropic empire they built together. Last spring, Melinda left the Gates Foundation, the organization that had become the heartbeat of her professional identity.

In her new book, The Next Day, Transitions Change and Moving Forward, Gates reflects on these seismic shifts, not just the end of her marriage or the reinvention of her public life, but the deeply personal evolution that came with those transitions. She takes us inside the moments that have defined her, becoming a mother, grieving the loss of one of her best friends, and grappling with the hard-earned lessons of philanthropy.

Melinda French-Gates is the co-founder and former co-chair of the Gates Foundation, the world's largest private charitable organization. She's also the founder of Pivotal Ventures, which focuses on social progress for women and families in the United States. Melinda French-Gates, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me, Tanya.

Melinda, I want to talk for a moment about your philanthropic work, because we all have been hearing about the ripple effects of the Trump administration's funding cuts. And I know that philanthropy is such a tightly interwoven web that often works in collaboration with the government to fund initiatives. How are these cuts affecting the work that you do?

Well, the cuts of things like USAID are absolutely devastating for families all over the world. I mean, let's be honest. Women will not have access to maternal health services because of these cuts anymore.

Everything, you know, that philanthropy does is we try and find catalytic wedges and ways to work. We take risk where a government can't with taxpayer money and shouldn't. But then once we know something works, it's really up to government to scale it up. So to see that women won't have health services or there'll be more cases of malaria next year is

It's just it's almost unimaginable to me, especially given that, you know, both Republican and Democratic administrations really fight.

relied on USAID and not only saw the good work that it was doing, but started to scale it up even more. It's why we actually have less death and disease in the world. So it just makes no sense to me. How are you thinking about where to focus your energy? I know that over the last few years with Pivotal Ventures, you've really been focusing on women's health and reproductive rights. And so this has to have an impact on the ways that you all are able to make impact.

To know right now in the United States that my two beautiful little granddaughters will have fewer rights than I had growing up, that just doesn't make any sense to me. And so in some ways it makes my work all the more pressing sometimes.

And I'm still doing what I have been doing. I'm putting more money, though, now into women's health. I made a billion-dollar commitment when I came out of the foundation that through Pivotal Ventures, we would try and really work on some of these places where...

Organizations, for instance, in the United States had been playing defense in terms of women's issues to help put them on the offense. But also we announced 250 million of that is for a women's health fund. And we're taking proposals from all over the world to figure out what are ways that we can really advance women's health across the world.

Is it a chaotic line of work in this moment because you're dealing with new information that's coming out, laws that are passed, changes, cuts, all of these things put so much of your work in flux? You know, where it's the most chaotic and devastating is when you go out on the ground. So I was down in Louisiana about a month ago.

And to hear that doctors don't even know which services they can provide women, you know, what can they counsel on? What can they not counsel on? Women who are very concerned about their health saying, I can't have another baby, but, you know, where am I going to get birth control? Or, wow, I show up at the system and the bias in the system, they're not even listening to what I know about my own body.

So to think that we are doing things from the highest level right now in the United States that are making things worse on the ground for moms and babies, it just, it's almost incomprehensible. I mean, to have a child, two children now die of measles, measles in the United States. Wow. When that is completely preventable, do you know how devastating that is for those families? Yeah.

That's where the chaos is. And that's where the saddest part of what's going on is happening. One of the things that is very clear in this book is that

It's a reminder that really no amount of wealth can really protect us from the human experiences of grief and divorce. And I'm sure you often encounter people who treat you like your money shields you from those life's hardships. I've just always wondered, how do you navigate that tension of what to share and what to withhold, knowing that someone like you is viewed that way? Well, I think we all want authentic wealth.

real connection with other human beings, right? And we can't really know more than, I don't know, they say maybe 100 people, some people say 150. But I know who my closest family and friends are. I treasure them, they treasure me. I know who's kind of in my next ring and my ring beyond that.

But I do want audiences to see that, you know, great wealth does not shield you. I have an absurd amount of wealth and I'm doing my very best to give it away in the way that I think can benefit society from my lens on society. But what I want people to know is that I'm a human being and I

And they may put a label on me, but that label doesn't really define who I am. I know who I am. And so by being my authentic self, I hope they can see, OK, she's gone through struggles and hardship, too, but come out the other side. And so maybe I can as well. You grew up in a middle class family in Dallas, Texas. Your dad died.

What a role model for you. He was an aerospace engineer. Your mom stayed home to care for you and your siblings. Your father really had an influence on your career aspirations. You write about how this wasn't just conceptual. You all would get to see and hear conversations about his work through visitors who would come to your house. What memory sticks out to you the most?

Well, my dad would often talk at the dinner table about how his teams, he was working on the Apollo mission, and how his teams were better when they had females on them, female mathematicians. And so as the teams would change and be reconstructed, he was always trying to get women onto his team. And so for me, this played out because we would go in the summer to the company picnics.

And my dad would make sure my sister and I met those women. So we met not only the men on his teams, but we met the women. And I could see, literally see women in these roles, smart women that I admired and who I could talk to. And I would say, oh, okay, I guess my dad's right here. And so that played out for me as an influence of, oh, I could be like her if I wanted to be. And that was having

that role model, having both a father who believed in me and parents who were both determined that their children would all go to college and that they would take on the debt, which was, you know, a huge gift to us as siblings. But then to have these role models specifically in front of my eyes, that really had a huge influence on me. Your father...

He showed you all role models, of course, but he also, he really invested in you and your sister's dreams in a way that, I mean, it really is somewhat novel for that timeframe in the 60s and 70s. What do you think was different about your dad and his outlook on what women do and what they could do? I think, again, because he had lived experience, he could see that, okay,

okay, this engineering project, like putting a man on the moon, that is audacious. And he was a piece of it, right? But this see that his teens literally were better because these women were on that, he had a lived experience to say, this could be great for my daughters and for society. And my dad wasn't afraid to speak up. He encouraged us to speak up, even when he didn't necessarily agree with him.

But he also believed in us. And I think that I cannot stress enough the importance a father's imprint makes on a daughter. Like my dad, literally, we were walking as a family. We would often go out to lunch on a Sunday and then take a walk. And we were literally walking by this new IBM building at this sort of beautiful office park.

And my dad, as we walked by, literally said, Melinda, you should put your resume up on that door. You should tape it up on the door. And I said, Dad, what are you talking about? He said, they would be silly not to hire you. And he could see in me and my sister what I couldn't see myself, which was, okay, you're in college, you're getting a computer science degree. There aren't very many of you. And so they should want to hire you. And guess what? He was right. I eventually did get hired by IBM.

Your mom never got to go to college, but she wanted to. She did. And her parents just, she grew up at a day and age where her parents had two girls and they just didn't see the need for her to go to college. She certainly could have gone. And, you know, and she ended up regretting that. She took some college classes later. My mom is

plenty smart. And later my parents start a family real estate business. And my mom is the one, I mean, they're both running it at night, but it's my mom running it during the day and making sure all the pieces come together of all the various properties they have and tenants and laws and all of that. So, but she and my dad were determined that both their two girls and their two boys would go through college because they just thought it really was a ticket in life to go where you wanted. Yeah.

One of the things that you really admired about your mom, of course, is that she was a great mother, but she, through example, taught you also how to be a great mother. So you have these two big examples in your life of how to be as you move through the world. But one of the best pieces of advice you write that your mother gave you was to set your own agenda or someone else will do it for you. And I was wondering, what is a time when you had to really put that advice to the test?

Well, I'll say when I was working at the foundation, you know, I started to see through all my travels the difference that when a woman could space the births of her children, it made an enormous difference in the children's health and being able to go to school and then ultimately the wealth of the family. And yet I would meet so many women around the world who knew about contraceptives but didn't have access.

And as I started to learn and study about it and think, is this the right thing for us to do as a foundation?

I learned the history of contraceptives and when women had had them and under what circumstances and when they hadn't. And I realized we needed to do something about this as a foundation. And so I decided on the global stage, I'm going to set the agenda because for whatever reason, this has fallen off the global health agenda. And yet it's vital for women and for babies. We were losing control.

We still are. Too many moms in childbirth because their babies were coming too close and too often, particularly in these low-income countries. And then the babies were dying as well.

It's really interesting in this moment that what was seen as a soft issue is now almost the opposite of that. You're fighting against many headwinds as divestment and women's issues is really like at the center of government funding cuts and lots of other cuts and laws. Yes. And I always say, you know, what is it that we value as society? Don't we value our children and our babies? Yes.

If you value our children and our babies, don't their mothers need to be healthy? We know a mom is healthier when she can space the births of her children. So to me, it's that, you know, we are getting some of our values measured.

are misaligned right now. And they aren't the values that I hold dear. And I don't think they're the values that most families hold dear. To me, we need to really think about our value and values and align our government funding with those values. And we seem to be headed in the wrong direction in my point of view on those issues right now.

Speaking of values, earlier when you said you've been trying your best to give your money away, I chuckled at that. But I only chuckled because it just sounds funny, you know. But when you're a billionaire, right, you can't really ever give all your money away. And just a few days ago, Abigail Disney, she's the granddaughter of Walt Disney, she said in an interview that anyone who can't live off of $999 million is a sociopath. And

Of course, I thought about you because you've been saying this in not so many words for a really long time, that it's important to give your wealth away, that you could never really spend it in your lifetime, you or your family. But here's a question. You've been trying to convince other billionaires to give away the majority of their wealth for many years now. And I always wanted to know how successful has that been? Well, it's interesting.

It's, you know, when we started out with the Giving Pledge, which was Warren Buffett's big idea, that for society, it was right that if you had earned a billion dollars, which I completely agree, if you have a billion dollars, you have an absurd amount of wealth.

And so you should give at least half of it back to society because you have benefited from society. You've benefited from those laws or those roads or the people that helped you along the way to get that scholarship into the college you wanted to go to. You have benefited from that society.

And so we set out to role model for society with the Giving Pledge founded by Warren Buffett, my ex-husband Bill Gates, and myself to say, if you're of this level of wealth, join us and commit to giving half away. Neither of us, none of the three of us would have thought that we would have

you know, over 240 families now that are part of the Giving Pledge. And we have not just first-generation givers, but now we have second and some third-generation givers.

And so they're also in countries, I think it's over 30 countries now from around the world. So we just didn't expect that it would grow that large. And I will tell you, there are ripple effects and knock-on effects where they are also convincing others, even others who aren't of age.

as substantial means, right? And what I always say to people is no matter who you are, the nuns in my high school taught us this as girls, you have something to give back. You know, they sent us out in society to volunteer our time. My only point is we all have things to give back, our time, our energy, our intellect, and or our money. And I think that we should all look for ways to do that. And guess what?

The funny thing is you also benefit from it. It's just an unbelievable kind of side benefit. Melinda, I really appreciate your time in this book. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me, Tanya. Melinda Fritsch-Gates' new book is The Next Day, Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward. ♪

Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Yakundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley.

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