Bill Gates, co-chairman of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, during a Bloomberg Television interview in London, UK, on Wednesday, June 26, 2024.
Bill Gates is constantly asked for his thoughts on big topics like artificial intelligence, climate change and pandemics.
But there are other topics the Microsoft co-founder and billionaire philanthropist finds just as interesting and important — and he's "surprised" more people aren't asking about them.
"When I first said, 'What do kids die of?' I had a hard time finding out, and I would have thought, 'Shouldn't we all be asking that kind of thing?'" Gates, 69, told LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman during an episode of the "Possible" podcast that published on Wednesday. "It's more important than GDP."
Similarly, Gates said, he often thinks about questions like "How does malnutrition work?" and "What's the best way to understand diseases?" — even though those types of topics aren't always top of mind for most Americans.
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Gates is a longtime advocate for improving global health, particularly on issues like malnutrition. Nearly three decades ago, he read a New York Times article about unsafe drinking water contributing to millions of deaths annually, mostly of children — and he's thought about the question of why children die "literally every day since," he wrote in a 2022 blog post.
Low infant mortality rates are often regarded as a key indicator of the overall health of any society, according to the CDC, since they're a sign of economic strength and available resources. And poor nutrition costs the global economy $3.5 trillion a year in lost productivity, the World Health Organization says.
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It's "one of the most important questions ever," Gates wrote, adding: "It is hard to think of a measure of how a society is doing that reveals more than whether it is protecting its children, and especially its most vulnerable children," Gates wrote.
Malnutrition probably isn't a top concern for the average person living in an area that's relatively unaffected by the issue, Gates told Hoffman. And it's addressable with just 1% to 2% of the budgets of wealthy nations, meaning it's the exact kind of "boring" issue that should get solved without everyday Americans needing to care about it, he added.
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Still, Gates said: "I'm surprised people aren't more curious."
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