 Hi, Kofi, how are you? Hi, man. Very nice to see you. Hi. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being patient. I just want to begin by first welcoming you all, thanking you so much for coming, welcoming Bill and Melinda. This is now the ubiquitous sign of a modern way of actually participating in an event, which is that you take a video or a snapshot of it, which is all fine. But if you could please, no flashes and no phones and things like that, because this is now being taped for broadcast on my show. And so I'd be very grateful if you let the professionals actually do it. And you can then videotape it. And you'll have it in higher quality than you do right now. I thought what we do is we have this extraordinary opportunity to really talk about anything and everything with Bill and Melinda Gates. But what I want to do is focus in on their really superb annual letter this year and use it to talk about some of the big themes that they have been grappling with for the last several years. So when we think about the world and when we read about it and watch it, it feels like the world is going to hell in a handbasket. It feels like there's danger and terror and violence everywhere. And yet, if you look at the actual trend lines, there's some extraordinary good news out there that people have not focused on a lot. And what I'm going to try and talk about is that good news. So Bill, let me start with you. The most remarkable trend of the last several years to me is that the number of people who live in poverty is almost down by half, depending on how you measure it. It's down 40% or 50%. And I don't think I've ever seen an adequate explanation of why did this happen, what changed over the last 20 or 30 years that has allowed this extraordinary and rapid progress in the eradication of poverty. Yeah, the key thing that economists have always had a hard time with because it's exogenous is the innovation. So the world went up until the last 300 years or so with basically no GDP growth. And until you get things like energy intensification, modern materials, eventually deepening of education, infrastructure, that's where you start to see amazing economic growth. And following countries that have done it right is easier than being out in front. And that's why you have these economic miracles where people get their agricultural sector in great shape. They get education infrastructure in great shape. And then they participate in the world economy. So there's really two reasons why those numbers are so great. One is the China piece of it, which is a meaningful piece of it. What they did between 1989 and even to today, every year there's a headline saying the Chinese miracle will end because there's this imbalance or that imbalance. And in fact, yes, its growth is lower than it was, but it's still growth that we would love to have or the globe would love to have. And off a much higher base. So the growth is slowing, but off a much larger economy. That's right. They're a middle income country now. And everybody slows down once you get into that phase. But the economic miracle really does extend outside of China. And Charles Kinney has talked about how at any level of GDP life is better. That is, you wouldn't literacy, measles desk, life expectancy at every level of GDP is more now than it was. So not only did we get the economic growth, the basket of goods, the things, the fundamental basics have improved as well. And what we predict is that that wonderful thing of the fundamentals improving is going to accelerate in the next 15 years. But why has it happened? Have we just gotten smarter about how to eradicate poverty in the last 20 or so years? The ability to not mess up in the agriculture sector, to get the inputs, the latest seeds available, to educate the farmers, the information about when to plant, what the market prices are. All of those things are way easier to do now. So Ethiopia is kind of our poster child, both in health and agriculture. Because it was extremely poor and had socialistic policies. And Meles, now followed by Highly Miriam, has done a series of reform that meant their childhood health has improved dramatically. Their agriculture productivity has more than doubled. And it's not something where we look and say, oh, nobody ever did that before. There's a book called How Asia Works that really differentiates what the best Asian countries did. And agriculture reform to get the productivity up and free up the labor is step one. And Ethiopia is basically following that formula. The Green Revolution happened in India and Pakistan in the late 60s and 70s. And so none of those seeds were used in China until they did the reform. So those seeds were just sitting there for the 1990s. And that's why Chinese agricultural stuff goes up so fast. It's almost impossible. But the inputs were so out of date. And Africa faces a very similar situation where we haven't given them the latest seeds, partly because of their ecosystems or crops, partly because the farmer education, the credit system. And all that stuff is not that hard to fix. So Melinda, the other piece of this which Bill alluded to was health. I mean, in general, as you say, it's not just that we've gotten less poor. I prefer that to saying richer for people living in $1 or $2 a day. But their lives have gotten better. And most importantly, their health care has gotten better. So you make a prediction about cutting the number of children who die before the age of five. And it's astonishing that it used to be one out of every 10 children died before they hit five years of age. And you're hoping that it'll be one in 20. Why do you think health has improved so much? Again, is it that we've gotten smarter about what to do? Well, it's basically looking at the biggest childhood killers as a world and then tackling those. And making sure that this incredible miracle of vaccine, Bill and I both believe in innovation hugely, not just innovation in technology, but innovation in biotechnology. The vaccines that I think a lot of us take for granted in the United States or UK and France and other places in the world, those absolutely save lives. So getting that vaccine system really working and then getting new vaccines for the two biggest childhood killers, the two biggest killers of children today are diarrhea and pneumonia. We actually now have new vaccines called rotavirus for diarrhea, pneumococcus for the pneumonia disease. And we are getting those out and starting to get them out at scale in the developing world. We still have some countries to get. These are two vaccines also that we have the specific strains, the clads that go after the ones that are actually in Kenya or in Tanzania. So what used to take us in the developed world 20 or 25 years to get a vaccine that came out in the US or the UK out to a place in Africa, that lag time has now been cut down to between one and three years. And we have the right strains. We also have a mechanism, this Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations, where private funding and largely government funding has gone together to create a pool of resources that can pull the vaccines through so we can go to manufacturers, guarantee a market. We've brought the prices down by about 37%. And so now we're bringing down rotavirus deaths, pneumococcus deaths, and also we've made progress quite honestly on malaria. So vaccines are the miracle cure for about $30. You can buy a basic set of vaccines for kids. As Hans Rosling pointed out, that's why we're seeing eight out of 10 kids are getting these vaccines. And that is saving lives. It's part of the magic of a vaccine that local politics can't screw it up, by which I mean, you know, if you think about a vaccine, you go in, you poke somebody's arm, you give it to them, it's done. Compare that with something where you have to provide a treatment through a healthcare system that has to be well functioning, that has to be part of a government that is well functioning, that's honest and competent. Whereas a vaccine, you know, once you've poked the person, you're done. Well, often on these indicators, looking at any level of wealth are their outliers. People are doing way better than the average for that level of wealth is informative. So running the primary healthcare system that deals with delivery and vaccines, there are countries like Vietnam, Rwanda, now Ethiopia, Ghana, even before that, that are getting to over 90% because they have the measurement system in place, they do it well. There are some countries that do pretty poorly in the north of India, till a few years ago was way worse than it should be. The north of Nigeria is only about 30% vaccination coverage, and they're not the poorest country in Africa. In fact, Somalia, just with NGO coverage, beats the bad parts up in the north of Nigeria. So we see some variants, but as you say, it's not as hard as training a bunch of doctors. You can really look at how Ethiopia did it or Rwanda did it, and you can expect every country at that level of wealth to get up to that 90% achievement with a bit of a feedback system. And there's some innovation there too, where you have to keep the vaccines cold. Now we're shipping into these countries a device that keeps it cold without any energy. It's just a thermos. So the reliance on propane or electricity is eliminated that in like the far region of Somalia, you see these things being carried on camels out to all these health posts. But as Bill says, it is absolutely the vaccines, but they're bolstering this primary healthcare system. And the countries now that are committed to doing it are learning from one another. So Ethiopia's gone out and built 15,000 of these healthcare posts. They're tiny, they're about the size of a container ship. They staff them with two trained workers from the community who are health workers, 30,000 army of those now around the country. That's the first place people go. So if a woman needs prenatal visits, if they need vaccination, if they need contraceptives, you go there and then it moves you up in the system if you have other problems. Rwanda has had the steepest decline in childhood mortality in the history of the world. And it's because they've gotten vaccination up and they've built out this primary healthcare system that goes all the way up to tertiary care. When thinking about how to handle these diseases and why in some cases they're reaching a tipping point, I thought in your letter, the example of AIDS was really interesting. So why is it that we have reached a kind of tipping point in the treatment of AIDS? Well, the world has been incredibly generous. On that particular issue, the United States has taken a strong lead between PEPFAR and their leadership role in the global fund. As you get people on treatment, their viral levels, the amount of virus they have is dramatically reduced and so they're less infectious and so that reduces the spread of the disease. We do over time need two miracles in HIV. We need a vaccine to stop people from being susceptible but then we'll still have over 30 million people who have been infected. And what we need to get is some approach where you have such intense therapy that after say a year, you no longer need to keep treating them because lifelong treatment is hard, raising the money for that and it's more and more people. So both of those things were pretty optimistic in this 15 year period, we'll get those two new tools. So we won't see the end of AIDS, unlike polio and a few other diseases we mentioned but both for malaria and AIDS, we're saying that the tools that let us do 95 to 100% reduction, those tools will be invented during this 15 year period. One of your predictions is that Africa will be able to feed itself. Now to explain why this is a bold prediction, if Africa is in a kind of strange position where it sits on some of the most arable land in the world and yet cannot feed itself, has chronic problems of food shortages and stuff. Why is that and why is it gonna get fixed? Well, seven out of 10 adults in Africa are farmers and they farm a plot of land that's usually less than two hectares. So they have these small family farms and they wanna not only obviously grow what they, to feed their family, but their goal is to actually put crop onto the market, have market access to be able to get extra income. So there's several issues there that were very large issues that need to be solved. One is making sure they have access to the latest seeds. We have fantastic seed technology in the developed world and there are specific crop varieties of those that need to get adapted to African regions. And so that we're opening up that seed system, we're getting those created and getting them out to farmers. You need to get them not only into the hands of male farmers, but also female farmers, quite a few of the farmers in Africa are female. But then they also, besides seeds, they need training and how to plant, how to rotate the crops, how to do no-till farming, how to apply fertilizer, all of those things, even if they just get the right seed, like a drought-resistant maize. Corn is the predominant thing grown in Africa, the predominant crop. A drought-resistant maize will get them one and a half times the yield off of their farm. So then they feed their family and if they have access to a market and with the vast urbanization that's happening, you meet families even in Tanzania who live two hours outside of Arusha, but they're starting to grow not only staple crops, but they're saying, well, strawberries are desired in Arusha. I'm gonna grow strawberries and link up to that market. So we need to give them access to market and then, again, with the hundreds of millions of cell phones that are out there now, they can start to get a simple text message that tells them the price at market. So if they don't take the crop to market themselves, particularly a woman, instead of selling at her farm gate, she can give it to a middleman, know that she's actually getting a fair price. She's not getting taken if he sells it for $10 a bushel, she actually knows that that's the price. That information is so key to her. So if we get all of those things done and the road systems are key, we talk about that as well in the annual letter, we do think Africa will be able to do the right things to be able to put extra crop onto the market and to trade within country, in intra-country. Do you accept what I think has now become a kind of received wisdom that if you give money in the form of aid to women, it is a much better use of the money that basically, I suppose the simple way to put it would be, if you give the money to the man, he will go to the local tavern. If you give the money to the woman, she will put it into her child's education. The research suggests that every marginal dollar a woman gets in her hand, she's 90% likely to plow it back into her family. So my sense is that if you empower that woman, you're empowering everybody else. And so there are so many things we need to do. We work very much, as you know, on health, maternal health, family planning, making sure that she can time and space the births of her children so that she's healthier, kids are healthier. But I think of the women's empowerment in kind of three areas. I think of it in health. I think of it, it does a woman have the ability to make a decision in her household and does she have economic opportunity. And quite frankly, as Hans Rowling and others talk about this, education is absolutely fundamental in this because education helps her not only be able to do decision making and to have some economic opportunity, the whole way she accesses the health system changes if she has an education. And that goes back to her family. So we know that if she's educated, she's more likely to marry later. She's likely to have children later. For a literate woman, her child is 50% more likely to make it to their fifth birthday. And if she's educated, she's twice as likely to educate her daughter. That has profound effects for the family, the community, whole societies, and I think whole geographies. And it's why we start to talk about then, okay, if you can get labor force participation of women, you could raise some of the GDPs in Africa by 12% or in India by 10%. So to me, the female piece of this is just absolutely fundamental. I won't ask how the division of resources goes in your family. I'm assuming Bill and you share the joint checkbooks and things like that. Bill, let me ask you about mobile technology. Because again, that's in the letter. And it strikes me this is the next big wave that's gonna course through the world, particularly the third world. I look at India where I grew up, most Indians don't have access to the internet because the infrastructure is bad. Well, people haven't run fiber optic cable. But when you get 4G, and when you get cheap smartphones, which are already happening, they're selling them for $30, you could imagine, I think the estimates are, within five or seven years, 800 million Indians will then be connected to the internet, which is up from really about 100 million. Talk about this, what does it change? Why is it important? Yeah, that cell phone is enabling. Now today, the cell phone doesn't give you banking and the online courses are not good enough, they don't connect to what you need to learn. But in parallel over the 15 year period, we'll be getting the coverage up, the price down, hopefully more gender equity in terms of who has those phones. And the software, the online software will be flourishing. Now for banking to have these digital payments with low transaction fees, you have to get the regulatory authority to do the right thing. We've seen that happen in a few countries, but we've got to go get the rest. And you have to get it up to scale and you've got to make it a very secure and very competitive framework. So we're very optimistic about that. Nigeria and India, the phenomena hasn't started yet, but both those governments are moving even in the next year or two, we'll think we'll start the launch. In education, you should be able to hand that cell phone to a child and have fun learning the alphabet and have it be very personalized for the pace they want to go at. And have the teacher be able to connect up and see what they're learning and have the parent see what they're learning. So all of that curriculum software is going from basically mediocre today with a few outliers like Khan Academy that are kind of pioneering the path. We're saying that stuff will be super good, it'll be localized, it'll connect to job credentials in a strong way. And it is kind of this first class thing. If you wanted to pick one thing in an economy to fix, education raises productivity in every other sector, including education. So it's kind of a master switch of economic improvement. And in China, you have seen smart phones and things like that. What is the effect? Or are there other countries that we can learn from? Yeah, you don't, because all these things are happening in parallel, it's hard to say, okay, as the agriculture sector's gotten better, how do we attribute that to seeds, education, credit, cell phone? As you talk to people, you hear common sense examples like the one Melinda gave, where the middleman isn't as much of a problem in taking that profit away. Even things about deciding what to plant, when to plant. The more advanced scenarios that we may achieve in the next 15 years include things like micro insurance. And I wouldn't guarantee that's gonna happen, but why don't you get those digital rails open and available, making sure you're saving for education? There's a lot that can be done. When you look at this issue, because a lot of the things you talk about in terms of empowering women is about giving them knowledge. Giving them the knowledge about markets, about products, about prices. Do you think that this could be a game changer, this rise of cheap smart phones, I guess? Absolutely. I mean, we're even seeing, even before the smart phones, just the fact that a woman can save money on her basic plastic phone out in a remote area. Kenya's had mobile money now for a while, M-Pesa, which is mobile money. 90% of households use it in Kenya. It's a pretty closed system right now, but what women are talking about is the fact that it's so cheap now that what they can do is they can save a dollar a day, $2 a day. If their husband goes into Nairobi and gets a job, she can ask for remittances back, and women will tell you, I'm in charge of the household finances in the sense that if there's a health shock, I have to have the money when the child has malaria or when I have to take them to the health clinic. So when you start to see these things going to scale, at Tanzania, 46% of households are using mobile money. We're seeing it start to go to scale at Bangladesh. You're seeing it go to scale in places like the Philippines. For women, that's transformative. And as they learn the benefits of having mobile money and saving money, the whole family then, all the families that I talk to talk about their dream is to educate their children. And so they say the biggest thing is when the school fees come due, do we have the money? Well, if you can say, we take so for granted in our countries, the fact that we have a savings mechanism, we don't hide it in the mattress, the relatives don't come ask us for money, which is what happens to women in Africa. And if you save that money when the time comes due, you have the school fees then to pay. And the women will also tell you once they learn about their cell phone, they do all kinds of other things. They learn about, people send out text messages about, oh, there's a new spigot open with clean water. Oh, come for your anti-natal visits. If you have a smartphone, women are saying that it's bringing down violence because they will give six people they trust if they have a smartphone, their phone number. And they have a one button push that if they feel there's some violent situation in the slum they're in, they push the button, and they know immediately six people know about it, that hey, I'm in trouble in some way. That is a change. What's fascinating about all this, about what the evolution of the phone is that nobody uses it to make phone calls anymore. Bill, when you think about this, is this the case of reverse innovation where the West will learn something from the ubiquitous use of phones? I put on your technologist hat and tell me, what does 4G and smartphones mean for the West? Will we have banks anymore 25 years from now? Well, I don't think we'll have the kind of branch infrastructure or ATMs or personnel in those branches that we have today because it'll be outcompeted. That is, you'll be able to get an equivalent service for a far smaller fee and so people will have to defund all of that. And the barriers to entry then become a lot less. Frictional cost, changing, everything gets a lot better there. This is a case where the West is kind of happy with the way it does things. And it's hard to switch because the new system has to get to critical mass because say India will never have checking or debit cards at the scale that the US did, this digital money will just be the way that you move away from currency. It'll be the currency alternative. The government payments will go through this using the Indian identification system cutting down the corruption a little bit there. So absolutely, in some areas like controlling medical costs, certain ways of taking sludge and processing it, financial systems, the middle income and low income countries have such demands that they will pioneer approaches that them will trickle up. And when you look at this mobile space, what do you think, what are the next things we should be watching? Is it tablets, is it, paint a picture of this new world? Well, the tech companies keep doing amazing work and today you kind of think of working on that one device and then you have to think about switching to the other device. Basically the cloud will know how to hear you speak, it'll know your handwriting. And so the idea of helping you remember things, remind you of things, tracking your schedule, there's some pretty unbelievable scenarios that this pervasiveness and natural user interface brings. We're seeing a small sense of it with things like Cortana, Google Now, Siri. But I'd say the pace of those improvements are faster today than ever. I just spent the whole day with some brilliant people, including Max Levchin who was involved in PayPal and some other people, saying how we use the cell phone to block corruption because whenever you're doing transactions you can insist that there be a photo that's created in real time. Some pretty simple ways that will make it far more difficult to misdirect money. And that's a pretty big deal for a lot of these poor countries. Melinda, what about education and technology? Because the other big focus of the Gates Foundation is education and I know the two of you spend a lot of time on it. Where do you see its role in transforming education? Yeah, so today we predominantly focus on education in the United States and that's because the bulk of our philanthropy outside the United States really is focused on health and economic development because we feel like there's so many people outside the US that if you don't have, in the developing world, that health is a precursor to everything else and if you don't have that, you basically can't go on to get a great education and participate in the economy. In the United States, we feel like the biggest inequity is still our education system. It is fundamentally broken. The fact that only a third of the kids who graduate high school are really prepared to go on to college, you just can't have a public education system like that and have a great democracy. But the key, key thing in education is having access to a fantastic teacher. We know that a fantastic teacher gets more learning to gain from the kids, but what we're finding is in the US, getting a great teacher in front of every kid, if you have the digital tools that go along with that, he or she then can then personalize the lesson and that really draws kids in. And so we're seeing, as Bill said, some of these digital tools have come along, they're gonna be a lot more that get better and I think over time in the developing world, if you're a kid living in a rural area and let's say you have a good teacher up to maybe fourth grade, but you just don't have access to a great high school teacher in science or a college professor, if you're actually a motivated kid, eventually you'll be able to get a lot of that online and that's when I think it will be even more transformative in the rest of the world and it may be some fantastic professor in India or somebody that's a great professor in China or some teacher that you hear about in the UK. That's when you start to get kids motivated and learning together and we're starting to see kids get online together to have a global discussion about a topic. If you wanna discuss the climate, don't just discuss it about in your region, talk to other kids who are focusing on this in their parts of the world too. That's when it starts to get more interesting and I think that's still a little bit of a time off and so for now we're focused on really the pieces in the United States and the digital tools in the US. So when you think about education and technology, it seems to me that this has to be the hope that technology is gonna have a huge transforming effect that will produce a much more productive system because as you know Bill, there is this debate among economists about whether the technological inventions of the world we're living in are as significant as the ones from say the 1880s, 1890s. Robert Gordon at Northwestern says the toilet was a much more important invention and clean running water and drinking water were much more important inventions than some of the things going on today. Even somebody like Peter Thiel that the entrepreneur says we wanted flying cars and instead we got 140 characters meaning Twitter. But if technology could be used to transform education and I would say healthcare, that might provide for a kind of systemic transformation of the kind that we haven't seen for a long time. Yeah, I agree with that but the fact that people can say they don't see the acceleration and innovation including on fundamental issues, to me it takes almost a willful blindness. Our understanding of biology and tools that can help and what that means for childhood death rate. Nutrition, we are finally beginning to understand nutrition and therefore malnutrition and that unlocks so much potential because about 40% of the kids in Africa simply don't have the diet to be fully physically or mentally developed. And it is strange you have the people who are afraid we're innovating too fast and you have the people who are afraid we're not innovating. Well the truth is we're innovating at a wonderful speed that for the basic things we think everybody should get we will be reducing that inequity far faster than ever before and so it's a far more positive picture than either the people who say it's coming too fast or too slow would point out. What about the issue of the inequity when you're talking about education or health within the United States? What do you think when you look at education one can't help but noticing that so much of your educational opportunities depends on what zip code you were in because education is funded with local property taxes and then you have this growing inequality. What are your thoughts about it? There's been a lot of discussion at Davos about inequality is there anything to be done about it? Well it is why we focus on the US education system because to tackle inequality you've got to make sure all kids are educated and educated well and in the US I think there are some points of light. One of the nice things about the charter school movement is taking public funding and using less dollars than are spent in the normal public school and educating kids for less expensive but getting a much higher quality of education. They're doing all kinds of innovations in the charter schools and it gives us ideas and examples of what then can be taken to the public schools. The tricky part about the public schools though as you know is they're governed by a school board and so you can have the most phenomenal superintendent doing incredible work and yet if they get turned over by the school board then sometimes you're starting all over again. But again our key thing about the US schools is how do you make sure you have a personnel system? Given that it is today a personnel system how do you have a phenomenal teacher for every kid in the front of the classroom? And we don't feel you can really do that unless you have an open, fair, accurate evaluation system. Not just a principal coming in one time a year and checking a few boxes over one lesson but having real peer evaluators. Other teachers come in and evaluate that teacher and know whether and then measure whether we're getting also great observations but learning outcome gains at the end of the year. You have to have both of those pieces of feedback and quite honestly some schools that are putting in student surveys the thing that's most indicative about whether a teacher is actually a high quality teacher and whether the kid will have learned what they should learn by the end of the year the student surveys are the most indicative of that. But evaluation system that has all of those components or at least two of them great observation and test scores and really evaluating a teacher and saying are they good and then how do you make them better? We feel like that's the way to make the system better. Bill, you have in the end of your annual letter a new campaign you wanna start up. Explain what it is because I think the audience would be interested. Well it's fascinating when there's a disaster in the world that we see an incredible response. People can see what went wrong. They know they wouldn't wanna be in that bad situation so the generosity is incredible. But in fact of the children that died the bad things that go on 98% of it is the chronic not the acute and so how do you engage people in knowing that those problems are out there but knowing that they're solvable problems. In fact more solvable than once the hurricane's gone that the money that's donated can't undo the hurricane. And so we have a sense that if we're creative about how we bring together the nonprofit organizations and use digital approaches that we could draw people in to be what we call global citizens. And so at the end of the letter we make an appeal we say well if you've read this letter you probably are a global citizen. Somebody who cares about things broadly would like to stay informed. If you sign up we'll be sending you four emails a month and those will give you opportunities for deeper engagement in different areas. And so in the year 2015 is the UN adopts these new goals. We think it's kind of a unique time to have people step back and kind of say hey they're committed they wanna have some involvement some awareness of how this is going. They're part of humanity. So we'll see so far it looks like a lot of people find it as an exciting concept. Melinda you have an early supporter of this program whom I am going to confidently say I can say it's possibly smarter than Bill Gates and Bill will not mind my saying. Yeah. And one of the things about not just the individual who video will show is that we wanna take all that individual caring that we hear about and help create some action for the world. And I think it's individuals that also hold governments accountable for these big goals and that's really important. So we asked a friend to do a video somebody that knows a lot about global challenges and we ask you after you see the video to sign up and share your voice and your stories. Thanks. With the release of the theory of everything I thought I should put in a personal appearance or people will think I actually am Eddie Redmayne and he's not quite as good looking as me. The reason I am talking to you today is to add my voice to those who want immediate action on the key challenges that face our global community. I hope that in 2015 people with power can show creativity, courage and leadership. Let them rise to the challenge of the sustainable development goals and act not out of self-interest but of common interest. I am very aware of the preciousness of time. See the moment. Act now. I have spent my life traveling across the universe inside my mind. Through theoretical physics I have sought to answer some of the great questions. At one point I thought I would see the end of physics as we know it but now I think the wonder of discovery will continue long after I am gone. We are close to some of these answers but we are not there yet. This is exciting. It means there is plenty for a new generation to work on. How did the universe begin? How did life start on earth? Is there anyone out there? One day I hope we will know. But there are other challenges other big questions which must be answered and these will also need a new generation who are interested, engaged and with an understanding of science. How will we feed an ever-growing population? Provide clean water, generate renewable energy prevent your disease and slow down global climate change. I hope that science and technology will provide the answers to these questions but it will take people, human beings with knowledge and understanding to implement these solutions. One of the great revelations of the space age has been the perspective it has given humanity on ourselves. When we see the earth from space we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity and not the divisions. It is such a simple image. With a compelling message, one planet, one human race we are here together and we need to live together with tolerance and respect. We must become global citizens. Our only boundaries are the way we see ourselves the only borders, the way we see each other. I have been enormously privileged through my work to be able to contribute to our understanding of the universe. But it would be an empty universe indeed if it were not for the people I love and who love me. Without them, the wonder of it all would be lost on me. Let us fight for every woman and every man to have the opportunity to live healthy, secure lives full of opportunity and love. We are all time travelers journeying together into the future. But let us work together to make that future a place we want to visit. Be brave, be determined, overcome the odds. It can be done. Thank you for listening. This works like a hand to you. And thank you Melinda and Bill Gates. Thank you all. Pleasure.