Welcome to season five of Clear and Vivid.

This special episode with Melinda Gates is brought to you by a presenting sponsor, Discovery.

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I'm Alan Alda, and this is Clear and Vivid, Conversations about Connecting and Communicating.

We believe in philanthropy that we want to try and show what's possible when we came into this field 20 years ago.

So many people would say, oh, but you know, it's just an enormous problem, it's a whole nothing can be done.

No, you have to imagine the future you want, and then start to work backwards to break down the problem into manageable pieces and to come up with solutions.

And believe me, we do not always get it right. We've had so many mistakes and failures along the way, but we learn from those, and we tack, and we pivot, and we keep going towards our goals.

That's Melinda Gates. She's the Melinda in the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's largest philanthropy.

When someone wants to make the world a better place and actually has the means to do it, you wonder, how do they go about it? What are their guiding principles?

What works and what doesn't? We linked up between Melinda's offices in Seattle and our studio in New York, and I found her to be both candid and inspiring.

Melinda, this is such a treat to be able to be talking with you today, because on this show, we talk a lot about relating and communicating and being aware of the person you're communicating with.

And I get the impression from everything I've seen and read about you and about you and about you, that that's sort of a fundamental concern of the way you work to help the world be a better place, to be personal, to gather information firsthand from the people you're helping. Am I right about that?

Yes, I think you have to speak with people and really, really listen and listen carefully to both what they're saying and how they're saying it, what they're trying to communicate if you want to understand someone's life, and then try to help them lift themselves up.

And so I spend a lot of time in villages all over the world, in townships and cities, really talking to people to understand their lives.

I get the impression, you don't just listen once, you have to keep listening and adapting to different versions of the same need.

I'm thinking of that story where I think you were in India and you were working with sex workers and wanting to get them contraceptives so that they wouldn't get STDs and that kind of thing.

And then they said, no, that's not what we need.

Yes, we had a goal, a shared goal with the Indian government of trying to make sure that HIV AIDS didn't spread into the majority of the population.

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