david: this is, uh, my kitchen table, and it is also my filing system. over much of the past three decades, i've been an investor.

[applause] the highest calling of mankind, i've often thought, was private equity. [laughter] and then i started interviewing. i watched your interviews, so i know how to do some interviewing. [laughter] i've learned from doing my interviews how leaders make it to the top. jeff: i asked him how much he wanted. he said 250. i said fine. i didn't negotiate with him. and i did no due diligence. david: i have something i would like to sell. [laughter] and how they stay there. you don't feel inadequate now because being only the second wealthiest man in the world, is that right? [laughter] david: one of the most interesting and significant philanthropists today in the united states is laurene powell jobs. the widow of apple founder steve jobs, she is using her considerable fortune today to remake the world through philanthropy in areas such as immigration reform, education access, climate change, and health care. i sat down with her in her offices in washington, d.c. to see what approaches she is using to each of these philanthropic endeavors. so, in recent years, you've become one of the largest uh

philanthropists in the united states, but you have done largely this by anonymity. it's not well-known what you are supporting generally, and you try to stay in the background, i think. so why do you try to do your philanthropy this way? laurene: often, as you know, david, with philanthropy, there's a lot of power that accrues to the giver and not as much to the organizations and the leaders that are doing the work on the ground. and so, i wanted to make sure that we were not the story.

that we were supporting people who were the story. that the leaders and the incredible workers who were doing day-to-day work to improve the lives of other humans were actually in the front, and we were in the back. and i didn't ever want there to be the emphasis on me as a donor, or on emerson collective as a donor, as much as the work that is being done on the ground. so we started off as almost entirely anonymous donors and givers. over time, at the behest of the organization or the leaders, sometimes we will be in the front. of course, if you're supporting nonprofit journalism, that has to be publicly acknowledged. so, there are plenty of times where we are happy to acknowledge that we have made a gift or a donation or support over a long period of time. but that is not how we want to lead. david: so, you do your philanthropy largely through emerson collective, llc. laurene: yes. that's right. david: why do you use an llc rather than a foundation or a

nonprofit foundation, which is what people typically do? laurene: yeah, it's true. from the beginning, i always felt that i didn't want to be encumbered by a foundational constraint. my intent was always to deploy capital as smartly and usefully as i possibly could. so, to find the highest and best use of the next dollar. and so, i thought i could always hold off and form a foundation, if it turned out we were only going to be philanthropists as a group. but i also wanted to use other methodologies for positive social change, like investing in entrepreneurs and in companies. and perhaps using advocacy, and artists, and supporting

movements and practices, and perhaps um young, emerging leaders who did not have a c3 yet. and so, i had -- i kept that level of ultimate flexibility and nimbleness. and it has served us really well. i think the other issue that is really important to note is i came into philanthropy and and emerson collective as a broader practice from the vantage point of not wanting to accumulate wealth. and, and so, my intention is to deploy resources and assets as effectively as i can. and not, so, i didn't need any kind of tax preference for the dollars. david: so, a number of the areas that you focus your own philanthropy on are i think worth talking about for a moment, why you're interested in them. uh, one of them, for example, is immigration. what makes you so interested in immigration reform, and why are you uh spending so much of your time on that issue? laurene: i will back up for a

second. the organization that i founded and was running in the beginning is called college track. and i started college track in east palo alto, right next to palo alto, california, because i had visited a high school class. i had been invited to speak to seniors who were first-generation college-bound seniors. and the entire class was from east palo alto. and despite the fact that they were intending to go to college, i found very quickly that none of them had taken the sat's. very few had ever been on a college campus. we were in the fall of their senior year, and they had not received any guidance. so, rather than have a one-time visit, i promised to the class, at the end of the hour, that i would come back every friday afternoon, and i would be their college counselor. and that realization, that experience, changed my life. so i started then with freshmen

in high school. and by their senior year, i discovered that many of them didn't have a social security number. and these were students who were were fully american, they were raised as american, but they were brought here as toddlers and very young, and they didn't know that they were undocumented. this was in the early 2000's, before people were talking about the dream act and before people were talking about undocumented students. so, i immediately started learning about immigration law and immigration standings, so that i could serve the students and their families properly. and we started advocating for the passage of the dream act because what i learned was, this was not an isolated, rare case. so, i, we built out at emerson collective a bit of a much deeper understanding of the issue, but a bit of a muscle around, um, how do we actually work with municipal, state, and federal government to try to clarify this, to try to bring some common sense solutions to this?

because every single one of us is either a direct or a descendant of an immigrant. and the whole nature of the american dream is to come here for economic and social mobility and to activate our own potential. and so, for us to be blocking that for people right now in our lifetime seems like something we need to all devote our time and attention to. david: another area that you're interested in is climate change. and uh that is an area that many people are focused on. what do you do in climate change that tries to bring your particular expertise and interests to the subject? laurene: uh, we have, we have invested in what is called the elemental accelerator, which is an accelerator for young companies who are typically

between their seed and a-round, sometimes between their a- and who need who need the type of capacity building and organizational support that will allow them to dig in, have further proof of concept, and and raise further capital. we have had over 170 companies go through the accelerator, and they've attracted more than $7 billion in follow-on investment. uh, in addition to that, we have our own funding practice around companies that are leaning into the new green economy and the transition economy. but then we also have a philanthropic practice that focuses on environmental justice and local communities who need to have, perhaps, a bridge between the state or federal policies that don't often reach local communities, and who are

the ones most impacted by the toxicity of their community's air, water, and soil and also are having deleterious health effects as a result of it. we have a full, kind of holistic focus around what does the changing climate mean for individuals everywhere? david: when steve became ill, eventually, he decided to step back a bit. did you talk very much about him in those days about philanthropy? laurene: having resources and information and knowledge available and accessible to people was, for him, the most important thing. ♪

♪ ♪ the biggest ideas inspire new ones. 30 years ago, state street created an etf

that inspired the world to invest differently. it still does. what can you do with spy? ♪ ♪ david: let's talk about your youth, your teenage years, and where you spent them. you grew up in upstate -- laurene: new jersey. david: new jersey. laurene: my father died in a

plane crash when i was three. david: he was a marine? laurene: he was, he was a military pilot. and uh, this was during inactive duty. he was training other pilots, he was training other pilots, and he died during um during this training session. and my mother was 29 years old at the time, with four children under the age of six. and she had been a history high school teacher before she had children. and what she ended up doing within about six months was uh starting a nursery school. it was a really smart pivot for her. she had some family and friends supporting her, but she needed to also take care of her children and support us as a family. david: so, uh, you went to college at university of

pennsylvania at wharton. why did you pick wharton? it is a great school, but were you interested in business at that time? laurene: well, i started at university of pennsylvania as premed. and i had in my mind that i was going to be a doctor. and so, i -- in addition to work-study and doing my schoolwork, and doing waitressing on the side for pocket money, i also volunteered at the hospital of the university of pennsylvania. and the doctors there were really generous with me and allowed me to scrub in on surgeries, and i was in labor and delivery, and i had all sorts of jobs. and what i noticed, however, was the degree of commitment that is required and the narrowing that must happen to be great at that discipline. and so, i questioned whether that was the right field for me to pursue. at the same time, in my work-study job, i was working

for penn student agencies. and a few months in, i had an idea for an agency. so, i proposed it to the man who was running it, who was a wharton grad student. and he told me to go write a business plan. he said, "it is a good idea, but you need to write a business plan." so, i wrote up a business plan for what we called parent services agency, which was to market to parents the ability to send birthday cakes and care packages to students while they were going through midterms and finals, and, obviously, for all of their birthdays. and and the business ended up flourishing and we added more and more services. uh, what i didn't count on was, of course, we were working around the clock during midterms and finals on our business. but it it gave me that bug. i didn't know about about this, the field of entrepreneurism. and so, i became an entrepreneur when i was at penn and i loved it. and so so perhaps, sophomore

year, i decided to -- i stayed at the college of arts and sciences, but then i added in a degree at wharton. so, i ended up getting both degrees. david: and so you got your degrees. and then what did you do after you graduated? laurene: i had to answer the need to pay off significant student loans. so, i ended up going to merrill lynch asset management for about six months. i loved the work. but within a few months, merrill lynch asset management had moved from new york city to plainsboro, right near princeton, new jersey, which made everyone except me very happy. and i was doing a reverse commute to princeton, and i decided that i needed to find a job in new york city. and i uh knew someone at goldman sachs who immediately said i should come to join them. so, i interviewed and i started

working pretty swiftly on the fixed income trading floor. david: you decided at some point to go to business school? laurene: mm-hmm. david: and why did you decide to go across the country to stanford, a great business school, but a lot of people in the east coast often stay in the east coast. laurene: mm-hmm. david: so what prompted you to go to stanford? laurene: i wanted to go and study further. and so, i did. and i went to stanford because that was the place where exciting new things were happening. and that was what i understood. uh, it was in a golden age of entrepreneurship. david: i see. all right, so you went to stanford. and um you met steve jobs then? laurene: i did. david: and how did you meet him? laurene: it was my first week of school, first year, and he came and spoke to the business school during a speaker series called "view from the top," where there are several leaders that come throughout the year. and and steve spoke to the business school, and he was electrifying and compelling and

funny and delightful. and afterwards, he asked me out to dinner, and we went to dinner, and we were together ever since. david: so, uh, at the time, he was not at apple, but he rejoined apple. laurene: he was at next. david: next. laurene: mm-hmm. david: so when he rejoined apple, did you tell him it was a good idea to rejoin the company he had been at before? because usually when you go to back to the previous place of employment, it doesn't always work out. laurene: we had a very long talk about it, because it was the first time that, in probably -- certainly in our married life, that we had a little bit of a reprieve.

and he was a little torn about going back into a company, of course, that he was deeply devoted to and loved, but also, he knew that they were not in good shape. and he knew deeply what it was going to take in order to turn things around. and that meant a lot of time away from family. david: so the company became, after steve went back, the most valuable company in the world. and steve helped to invent this little product that is the greatest consumer product, i guess, of all time, the iphone. and uh, most valuable, probably. so, did he come home one day say, guess what, i got this iphone, it is going to be the greatest thing of all time, or did he -- he kept it from you? laurene: what do you think? uh, well, i'll tell you. he didn't keep it from me. he didn't ever predict that anything that apple created was going to be the biggest thing of all time. in fact, uh, he was quite accustomed to apple being the david to the rest of the industry's goliath. and they they have -- or had a beautiful ethos and culture of being rebels and thinking about

things differently and differentially. so, i did have the great fortune of seeing some of the products. he didn't really bring them home, but i could go visit them, under the cloak of darkness, in some of the design studios every now and then, yes. but we we talked about business and the business of apple most every night. and it was, that was a great joy for me. david: so, when steve became ill, eventually he decided to step back a bit, shortly before he passed away. um, but did you talk very much about him in those days about philanthropy? because he had not been that actively involved in philanthropy, compared to what you have done. laurene: he thought about his work in the way that artists often think about their work. and it is, so, in his body of work, he felt that he was giving some service to humanity. steve greatly esteemed what

andrew carnegie did. he thought the creation of the libraries across the united states was the greatest act of philanthropy, because it allowed people to use their own determination and resolve and motivation to further educate themselves. so, having resources and and information and knowledge available and accessible to people was, was for him, the most important thing. he himself was an autodidact, he was immensely curious. i am also immensely curious. i think humans are immensely curious creatures. and so, giving everyone the

ability to improve their area of interest, to improve their situation, in an accessible, equal way, was what he thought we should be doing. david: suppose president obama had said, or president biden said, i would like to appoint you to a senior cabinet position. any interest in doing anything like that in the government? laurene: to stop doing what i am doing around service would require a great deal of deliberation. the first time your sales reached 100k with godaddy was also the first time your profits left you speechless. at the counter or on the go, save 20% with the lowest transaction fees and keep more of what you make. start saving today at godaddy.com 76% of 23andme health customers surveyed reported taking healthier actions. and keep more of what you make. because they know health isn't just a future state. health happens now.

start your dna-powered health journey today with personalized insights from 23andme. david: when you do philanthropy, or when you do business through emerson, you have metrics. in the business world, when you make an investment, you're typically are looking for profitability or some kind of internal rate of return. in philanthropy, there is not an

easily agreed-upon metric to measure success. so, how do you measure success in your philanthropic undertakings? laurene: yeah -- david: and how do you measure success in your investment undertakings? laurene: oh, well, there are a lot of ways to measure success in philanthropy. i actually disagree with you. there are plenty of metrics. it depends on what the goal is. uh so, for example, if you have an education organization, you can measure student learning, you can measure students served. you can see if there is economic and social mobility over the course of a decade. so there are a lot of quantifiable measurements. and we look at all of them. there's a lot of data to collect. there's also qualitative data, where we can, and do, talk to people directly. we're in communities and we ask people about how they are feeling about their lives and their opportunities and the possibilities. and so, we collect both qualitative and quantitative

metrics. david: so, you collect this data. do you ever say, well, it is not really working and we should try something else? or do you -- laurene: yes. david: -- typically tend to support the projects you initially start with? laurene: well, that's a good question. sometimes the arc of change happens slower than one would like. so, there are indicators that could be positive indicators that don't quite reach the goal. and so, we sometimes double down, and sometimes we stick with it. and other times we often make exit grants, and in same way you exit investments, we exit investments and grants. david: so, when you are a well-known philanthropist, as you are, how do you avoid people coming up to you at every cocktail party or every event and say, i have a great idea for you? and you must have a process for filtering these things.

but how do you avoid all that? laurene: i don't avoid -- well, i avoid it by not going to cocktail parties. but otherwise i don't avoid it, because i know great ideas come from everywhere. and i read all of my email, even though there could be several hundred a day. i'm always sending ideas on to different team members or responding. we say no an awful lot. every now and then, we find someone who is doing something remarkable. and i never want to correct for that. i will happily go through hours and hours of people pitching me on ideas for that one gem. david: so, you were close to president obama. i think you knew him reasonably well. suppose president obama had said, or president biden said, i would like to appoint you to a senior cabinet position, or somebody said to you should run for governor or senator, any interest in doing anything like that? laurene: i do live a life of service now. and i feel like i am getting good at it, better and better

each day, learning a ton. uh, i love what i do. to to stop doing what i am doing for a different realm of service would require a great deal of deliberation. it's not my intention. but i would not necessarily shy away from another opportunity, if i thought this was the highest and best use of my time. i think what i am doing right now is the highest and best use of my time, and it took me a while to get here, so i am very happily doing it. ♪

i don't want you to move. i'm gonna miss you so much. you realize we'll have internet waiting for us at the new place, right? oh, we know. we just like making a scene. transferring your services has never been easier. get connected on the day of your move with the xfinity app. can i sleep over at your new place? can katie sleep over tonight? sure, honey! this generation is so dramatic! move with the xfinity 10g network.

not reflect those of berg lp, its affiliates, or its employees.