Rachel Martin

I'll go for one.

Okay.

What's a piece of advice you were smart to ignore?

Did you send a little letter to that high school guidance counselor being like, greetings from Duke University, period.

Love, Melinda.

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 eep out of you that can have a detrimental effect on the kids, the young people in your care or under your tutelage.

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.

Mm-hmm.

But it's so big, Melinda.

Women's health is, I mean, it's everything from like menopause to birth control, like education.

How do you begin to focus your resources so that they make the biggest impact?

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.