Hi, my name is Melinda French-Gates, and I feel like a bit of a newbie about being Conan O'Brien's friend.

A newbie in what way? Meaning you're new to this whole Conan mania that's sweeping the nation.

Fall is here, hear the yell, back to school, ring the bell, brand new shoes, walking blues, climb the fence, books and pens.

I can tell that we are going to be friends.

I can tell that we are going to be friends.

Hey, Konan here. Every now and then, instead of doing the normal Konan O'Brien needs a fan, we like to do something a little different, a little off the beaten path for us, whether it's a Halloween murder mystery game we're playing or talking to a notable person who's doing something cool or interesting in the world. Well, that's what we're doing today. My guest is a philanthropist and businesswoman and a global advocate for women and gender equality. I'm thrilled. She's here today. I've never met her before, but very glad she's in the studio. Melinda French-Gates. Welcome. I'm very careful never to say nice to meet you because I think I've met everybody. Whenever I I accidentally say that it turns out I've met the person and I get chewed out, especially when it's a relative. But I know that I haven't met you before. We haven't met. And we do have some connections because my wife is from Seattle, lives on Lake Washington. I've been part of that whole vibe where I've been indoctrinated into the Seattle vibe. I have a good friend that works at the Gates Foundation, and so I've been familiar for a long time with all the amazing stuff that you guys are doing.

We'll talk about that, but I like to start on the personal. Okay. Which is, what do you think of my appearance? No. Is the skin a little dry? Should I moisturize?

Give me time. This is a new friendship.

Okay, very well said. You and I have some things in common, which is we're both raised Catholic. How Catholic are we talking in your situation? There's Catholic, then there's Catholic.

That's true. I'm not from Boston. No. But no, my parents went. I went to Catholic school K through high school to a senior year, all the way through. Even in grade school, We went to church as part of the school's curriculum, I guess you'd say, two or three mornings a week, separate from Sunday.

I always think if there's a crucifix in every classroom, that's fairly Catholic.

That's true. That is very Catholic. You It's usually a statue of Mother Mary. Yes, right.

That actually is the water fountain as well. You turn a crank on the side. They just think of any way they can get Mary or Christ in there. Raised in a very Catholic family, And what's interesting, one of the things that was interesting to me because I was raised the same way, and then we diverge, you were interested in computer science. I believe we are almost exactly the same age. And what's interesting to me is that You became interested in computer science fairly young.

How old were you when you- I was probably 14, and I got very, very lucky because I was going to an all girls Catholic school. My math teacher, I was a math nerd. I knew I was pretty good at math. She selected, she asked about 10 of us girls, did we want to join a computer science class? She had just convinced the head nun of the school to bring computers into the school. I was part of her first computer science class.

I think when I was about the same age, 14, going to public schools just outside Boston, I remember they brought us one day to this room that at the time had what was considered a small computer. I think it was the size of a Buick sedan. It was punch cards. I knew immediately I had a visceral reaction that lives with me to this day. This is not for me. I've barely touched a computer since. But what fascinates me about your story is that I'm guessing highly unusual to be around other girls your age that are really interested in computers.

Definitely. I mean, it's still somewhat unusual. The fact that I was exposed, I had, first of all, a female teacher who knew math, had seen these computers at a conference, knew to bring them in. Then to just say to us girls, You can be good at this. She was learning to program at the same time we were, and she would let us even get ahead of her. But she just saw that it was this amazing opportunity. For me, I had no idea I'd be that interested in computers, but I was hooked. To me, it was like a game. It was like figuring things out. Then I went to college. I selected a university that had a new computer lab in it, which was Duke University. They had a big grant from IBM. Then who knew that from there I would go to business school and then get hired by Microsoft. It literally changed my life.

Okay, so this is interesting to me because you hit this fork in the road, and probably you were in rooms where you might have been the only woman.

Oh, for sure in college. You bet. My sophomore year, computer science, yes, one or two of us at most. Right.

Then you hit this fork in the road, which is it's time to go to work and you have a job offer from IBM, and there's an opening at Microsoft. Microsoft is Much smaller, making its way. Ibm is probably the- Well-established. Extremely well-established. It's the company. You decided not to go with IBM. Why is that?

Well, I had worked two summers for IBM back in Dallas, where I grew up, and it was great. I enjoyed it immensely. We were working more, as you talked about earlier, on a Buick-size computer. We were working more on a mainframe. But I had a job-standing offer coming out of business school from IBM. But I went to meet my hiring manager at IBM in Dallas, and she said, Are you ready to accept? I said, Well, I'm not quite. You knew I was going to interview other places. I have one last interview to do, and then I'll come back and let you know. And she said, Would you mind asking me where? I said, Well, it's this little company up in Seattle you might have heard of called Microsoft. And she said to me, she stopped me dead in my tracks. And she said, Do you want a piece of advice? I said, Sure. And she said, If you get a job offer for there, go. I was absolutely shocked. And I said, Why? And she said, because as a woman, I think you would do quite well at IBM, but you're going to have to move up the ranks.

And that takes a long time to get in a managerial position. And she just said, a young company like that that's growing so quickly, I think your chances of accelerating your career are huge. And so at the time, I then went to Microsoft. I interviewed all males on my interview schedule, which wasn't unusual coming out of computer science. And then they did make me a job offer. And the company about 1,100, slightly more employees than that when I joined in four buildings. It was almost like a little college campus. I knew no one when I moved to Seattle, other than a great aunt who was in her late '80s. I was really moving across the country. I'd moved from Dallas to then Duke, and then after Duke, I moved to Seattle to take this amazing job offer.

It's interesting to me because I've seen this with my own daughter. She was always encouraged by her teachers and by my wife that, yeah, math, calculus, computers. There was no sense that someone would be instructed, would be telling a daughter that maybe that's not the right way to go. I think that was, strangely enough, a prevalent attitude, like so many things with women. It was a prevalent attitude that maybe that's not for you. I mean, I'm in comedy, and I think I was aware growing up that when a guy was being really funny, adults were really laughing. If a woman was being really funny, sometimes the mom would be like, Oh, please just try and be a little more ladylike. It's just like, Well, these are conditioning things that I think are, fortunately, dissolving, going away, I hope.

I hope so. We have absolutely made progress for women and girls in this country, but there is a lot of it that's also being rolled roll back. Just as we go forward, we roll back. I mean, even in computer science, when I was graduating, you could say back then, about 37% of the class were women. We thought we were on our way up, like medicine and law, that's now 50% of graduates are women. But quite honestly, those numbers came down for a long time, and they're just now beginning to tick back up. We do have to do special things to make sure girls know you can be good in math, you be good in computer science, and so that it feels welcoming to them because it has been a very male-dominated industry. And yet, I believe women have a lot of creative talent they could add to things or to create products.

It's funny because I was encouraged in some areas, and then it turned out that, no, I shouldn't have been encouraged. I should not have been encouraged to be a long distance runner. I shouldn't have been. But you really were. No, I was terrible. But you were encouraged encouraged. No, no. Yes, actually, just because I have long legs. But I'm saying sometimes the other thing is true. And this wasn't gender-based, but it was just people saying... They were looking at me saying, well, you're a very lean guy with long legs. You can be a great distance runner. And it turned out that I had the respiratory system of a very sick three-year-old boy as a 19-year-old. So no, that was not true. But I think your larger point is well taken that a lot A lot of this is there's a lot of probably two steps forward, one step back, or three steps forward, one step back.

Definitely. It's surprising to me, quite frankly, even in today's world, that that is the truth of where we are. I think to your point, I do think we encourage young boys that they can be anything, anything they want to be in society, whereas I think girls for so long have gotten other messages. I think we finally We are giving girls messages. They can be anything in society. But then when we send them out into the world, the world inadvertently has been set up for white males. So they reach these roadblocks and these barriers that are hard to push through.

There are some parts of your story that are... I mean, it's quite remarkable with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that I believe as of last year, the foundation, I think you've taken, I don't want to say it's 59, but close to billion has gone into the foundation. That's right. This raised all kinds of questions to me. The first came from Catholicism, which is you did not come from money. You weren't raised in an affluent home. Then you find yourself in this position with this money in the most rarefied world that you can imagine. But you're Catholic, which means, I'm guessing, guilt, conflicted feelings about what is my role? If we have this money, what am I supposed to do with this? How do I reconcile this? Because there's so much guilt that comes with that upbringing. Is that any of that resonate with you?

There's definitely guilt that comes with that upbringing. For me, I wouldn't say it was around money, though, per se. Maybe that's because the high school my parents sent me to was an all girls Catholic school run by these very liberal Ursula Nuns. Their motto was Serviam, that is to serve. We went out into the community. I saw the public school two miles down the road and was there tutoring in the classroom, helping the teacher who's trying to teach 30 students, half of whom don't speak English. Then I was out at the Dallas County Courthouse. They sent us out to serve. Their point was, even one person can make a difference in somebody's life. I I literally came out of high school with this notion in my head that, well, okay, whatever I do with whatever career I have, I want to have a career. I want to be a working woman and have a family for sure. But also I should give back, even me as one person. So then, yes, when I come into this unbelievable wealth that I never could have imagined, I thought, okay, well, it's not about helping one person. It's about how do we help hundreds or thousands or ultimately millions, and how do we do that in a way that is true to our values, but that it should be done.

Nobody needs to have wealth of that level. Nobody.

I promise you. Okay, this gets into something that's in society right now, just a huge topic, which is we find ourselves in this age. It's a little somewhat akin to the late 19th century where there's incredible fortunes, just massive fortunes. Sometimes it's not even clear how the money was made. Sometimes someone says, Yeah, I'm in Sentec, and that's why I have $700 billion. And they go, What's Sentec? And they say, Well, what we do is we take a percentage of the nodule. What's the nodule? Well, of course, it's a percentage of the gross of what you don't have multiplied with what someone else could have. And it's just I'm lost in this miasma.

I'm crushing biocoin.

Yeah. Is that the same thing as Bitcoin? No, completely different, you idiot. But I think You can get lost because I understand when someone finds a mountain and gets copper out of it. I don't know. But my understanding starts to go away after that. I certainly understand how Microsoft made that money. But we live in this world where there's these massive fortunes. People are wondering, well, how does this work in a world where so many people don't have much? You and Bill made this decision, we're going to give away the vast majority of this money and try and put it to work in ways that will help society. Not everybody does that.

Not everybody does that. I think we were both fortunate that we both came from families that believed in giving back. Give back your time, give back your energy, give back your wealth. We actually made that decision before we got married, that the vast majority of the wealth would go back to society. Then we met Warren Buffet, again, before we got married, and he really influenced us. He had this belief that we shouldn't have a society like you saw happen in Europe, where you had the aristocrats and then you had the money handed down generation after generation. He had the idea that we would form something called the Giving Pledge, which is to go around and get wealthy people in the United States and ultimately around the world to pledge to give away at least half of their wealth. I think his influence on us on that piece was also just enormous.

A question that comes to mind is, what would you say to someone in that position of having tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars who isn't giving? What would you say to them privately in a conversation that might influence them to give that money away?

Well, I try to understand where they're coming from, and certainly not judging or shaming in any way, but just to try and help explain how giving back has changed my life or our lives. I mean, you can't believe what you learn through it, what you learn about other people, what you learn about yourself, situations that you'll end up getting to be in. I never thought I would travel the world the way I've gotten to or to be in so many rural communities. I've had so many amazing conversations, for instance, on the continent of Africa in Southeast Asia. We try to motivate them by saying, Look, you can have a second career, and you have no idea how much you're going to get back by giving this money away.

Then I guess the question becomes, there are so many problems. I think to myself, just being in my position, which is I've been extremely fortunate, and my wife and I believe in giving back. But what I've noticed is the volume volume of problems in the world, you can get stymied by just... Because everyone has a very legitimate reason why money for their cause will help the world more than anybody else. It's sorting that out. I understand the Gates Foundation, there's a lot of research that goes into this disease. By doing this, we could really help the world in an important way. Then someone else is saying, I need help with my used car lot. It's probably really interesting.

We get those requests, too. Do you?

Really? Do you have people ever come in to you and saying, My restaurant needs a little help?

We get a lot of requests.

By the way, I'd like to just apologize for my request about 15 years ago. I wanted a new pool, and so I wrote the Gates Foundation and got a very curt letter back. I could have afforded it myself. I just thought, Hey, I'll get a Gates grant. The answer, I mean, you were in the right, and I apologize.

We get those requests, but this is what I would say.

Again, Warren Buffett influenced us greatly. He said, Pick your target. Once you know what's in your bullseye and you focus on that, you will keep getting better and better and better at it, and you will feel better about the pieces that you don't go after. So we We're also, we still and then, too, I remember, we're getting just heartbreaking letters, a child with leukemia or cancer. But as we looked out, there were a number of Americans who were working on those problems with research institutes. But so once we picked our bullseye, then it felt better to let things go. And so I tell most people, Start in your backyard. Pick something you're passionate about, something that you feel like you could get your hands around, start to just learn about, and you'll find to what you're passionate about. I think the more people find something they're passionate about working on, the more they put their intellect, their money, their muscle behind it. And quite frankly, a lot of people ask me these days about raising children in great wealth because it is not easy. I'm sure even in your situation, it's not easy.

I think great wealth is an exaggeration in my case. Remember, I have a gambling problem.

Okay, well, there's that.

We lost a lot of it. I also invested very poorly in a theme restaurant, but I I agree with you. There have been all these studies, and just anecdotally, you know that children that think they don't have to work do not thrive. It's a terrible track record. I'm looking at you, Gourly, because I know that you were raised in great wealth.

I'm also not paid for this job, so we need to talk.

He's here as a volunteer. I'm serving. Yeah, he's serving. But no, it raises a really good question about how children can be almost disabled or neutered at an early stage if they feel they never have to work. Literally just my wife will say to me, I want our children to be happy. I want them to be nice to other people, and I want them to be able to pay their rent. I think that's actually just keeping it simple like that. But as you know, there are a lot You have children of very wealthy people who don't feel that there's any encumbrance on them at all, which is devastating. Yeah.

I felt like I would rob my children of an opportunity if they didn't grow up feeling they had a contribution to make to society. We really, even amongst the great wealth, try to really encapsulate more of a, inside the house, more of a middle class, which is what I grew up in as did Bill then, middle class household. I will say this is the thing about giving back. When people ask me about raising their children in wealth is if you're giving back and you take your kids out to see things in their community, homelessness, the place that's giving out meals or repackaging things, or I took my kids out early and often to Africa after they were 10 and took them into age-appropriate places. But it instilled in them that they would have their own career. They should figure out what good at and contribute to society in whatever way they wanted to, but they should also give something back. They got to see a side of the world, a different lens that they weren't growing up in. I think it really shaped who they have become?

I'm curious because one of the best answers a parent can give if you're out with your little kids and they want something is to say, We can't afford that. You're not going to get away with that. Even, I If my kids wanted a Porsche, I could say, Yeah, we can't afford that. But because they knew I was doing well, I knew that that was something my parents could tell me, that shut it down immediately. We can't afford it. But if you're walking around with your kids at a young age and they point to something, you can't say that. You can't say, We can't afford it. It has to be a different message, which is, That's not for right now, or- Just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Again, I remember my oldest daughter, when she became a teenager, wanting some really fancy purse that she'd seen in a window of somewhere. She kept saying, Why won't you buy it for me? I said, Because you don't need to be walking around with a purse that costs that much money in your all girls Catholic school when other girls don't have it. Just because I can doesn't mean I should.

I heard a story that really made me laugh once. I don't know if it might be apocryphal, but Jackie Onassis was walking down the street with JFK Jr. When he was a boy, and maybe he's 10 years old or 11 or something, and she's married to Aristotle Onassis, and he sees something, and he says, Mom, can I have that? And she says, No, no, no. We can't. No, no, no, we're not going to buy that. That's very expensive. And he stops and had a meltdown in the middle of the street and went, You're the richest woman in the world. You're married to Aristotle Onassis. That always cracked me up. A kid who was very aware. It says here in Forbes. I don't know. Just having access to, I have records. I have statements. Your Jack's returned. Our kids certainly keep us grounded. Yeah, but I think that's something that is important, obviously, very important. Then the bigger question is, I think we're both, I think a couple of months older than you, we're about the same age. I remember turning 60 was a, What am I doing? Moment where it wasn't bad. I'm happy. This is actually the happiest phase of my life.

But I started to weigh things differently. Also, I'm facing being an empty nester soon, and I know that you are an empty nester. I guess I'm asking you, what's going to happen? I'm really freaked out. And can I have a Gates grant?

For the second pool in your backyard?

I think a second pool would really help me handle being an empty nester and '61. So just think about it. I don't know if the paperwork I have to fill out. But when you and Bill were together and working on the Gates Foundation, you had certain priorities. Have what you wanted to focus on now changed since you guys divorced, since your life has changed so much? Have your priorities changed or things that you want to focus on?

Yeah, I would say this. Certainly, I feel like I'm in a bit of a transition. I did go through a very public divorce a few years ago, but the foundation's mission, I had really brought in back in around 2012, really a focus on women. That just as I would be out in the developing world, seeing that women were not far enough, didn't have any power often in their lives. I really started to bring that into the foundation, and we have continued that, and we continue that work at the Gates Foundation. I'm still there. I'm still working a lot. But really, I realized that out of our grant giving, we weren't getting as much if we didn't focus on women because they are the center of the family, and they often are the ones deciding who eats in what order, can the kids get educated or not? I I also formed, though, in 2015, a company called Pivotal Ventures, which is my own separate work, separate from the foundation. That's really focused on the US. How do we help women and people of color step into their power in this country? At the foundation, we do work on the US education system because we believe every child should have a great education, and they don't.

But then to do this specific work in the US, I really have done that through Pivotal Ventures. Again, now that I have more time because I have three children who are now, as you said, out of the house, I'm spending even more time on that because to see things like the Dobbs decision happen in this country just breaks my heart. Should not be happening in this day and age.

Or the Alabama Court Or the Alabama Court ruling. Then you read the judge's decision and it's invoking the Wrath of God and fertilized eggs, and you just... I don't know. It's quite shocking It's unbelievable.

I believe that if we had more women in positions of power, more female politicians in the state houses, there's 7,000 positions there, more women in Congress, more women on benches in these key places, more women governors, we wouldn't be making these policies. We just wouldn't. That's the truth. And yet we haven't gotten women far enough, fast enough in politics, in their financial lives. Even culturally, it's still very hard to get movies made about what's actually happening in society. We're starting to like to go for these big ticket models. And again, I believe if more women were fully could step into their power, we'd be telling other stories in this society because we have a different lens on society. But the world is not there yet. As we worked on this, the Gates Foundation, through the lens of low-income countries, I realized there was so much more work to be done in our own country as well.

Again, this goes to the point of how many problems there are in the world. But the state of public education in the United States, I always find particularly- It's atrocious. Upsetting that we are the richest nation in the world. We're capable of doing anything, and somehow educating our children became the lowest priority is a mind-blower. I was very fortunate to go to public schools because there were great public schools where I was going, and I think that was an amazing experience for me. Then it is not a great place to get an education if the school doesn't have any resources. Then you have... It's It's a difficult situation here in California, here in Los Angeles.

Absolutely. Every child deserves a great teacher, and yet it's become very much a system about the adults in the system. I do think after COVID, it became even harder to be a teacher or to be a nurse in society. We have a lot to really look at in the US to figure out how can we change this. Because I do believe education, this from my parents, education can be a fantastic equalizer. But if you don't start with a good education in our country, it just gets harder along the way.

There's an amazing statistic that clearly shows the correlation, direct correlation between the more education a woman has, the longer she delays having children starting a family because she wants to make sure that she's autonomous. It's pretty amazing. It's like a one-to-one. The graph is shockingly simple.

That fact is true all over the world. You educate a girl and she becomes a woman, she delays the birth of her first child. She will also, if she can, space the births and have fewer because she knows then she has economic means to put into raising those children. There is literally no country in the world also that hasn't gone from low to middle income without also making sure women had access to contraceptives. Because when you can space those births and have fewer children, it makes the family wealthier, it makes the family healthier, and then you can educate them. Education changes everything, just everything.

I've seen the statistics. I completely believe it's true, yet my upbringing flies in the face of that, which is my mother, extremely well-educated, my father, brilliant, extremely well-educated, and I'm one of 75 kids. But I think that has something to do with the Vatican more than anything else. But no, it is true that it's very simple. Educating women, well, first of all, educating all children, but specifically, educating women is a very important goal, and that's a very clear fix. I don't want to say it fixes everything, but as you said, I think it's all about autonomy. If you're uneducated in your teens and having kids, your chances of being autonomous and being able to educate your kids and give them what they need, it just starts to drop very quickly.

Very quickly. In many countries, a woman is basically destined for poverty. She starts having children in her teen years. And yet there are many places where that is still the norm. An older man takes a young teenage girl as his bride. And so there are a lot of norms that have to be broken through so that girls can be fully educated.

I know you have traveled to Africa with Michelle Obama, Amal Clooney. Were you working on a specific problem there? Was there a specific issue that you were focusing on?

We were really focusing on child marriage. How do you keep girls from being married before the age of 18? Looking at the entire system, all the way from the legal system, which is a mall's piece of it, to how do you educate girls in schools to know not to be married, which is Michelle's piece. My piece is all the pieces in between, like what connects those systems and how do you break through the norm? Because no child, no girl should be married before age 18. Again, her chance of having any autonomy in life is minuscule. We sat down and talked with many girls while we were there about both how they were trying to break through the cycle, but also ones who had been locked into that cycle. How did they get themselves out and what else could be done? It was quite an informative and eye-opening trip, I think, for all three of us.

I would think it would be probably the greatest tool is seeing. If a child sees a manifestation of an adult living a different way and succeeding, that might be the most powerful educational tool. It's seeing examples. Again, related to my field, I've talked to so many young women comedians who say it took them seeing Ellen Degenera or Elaine Buzler. I mean, seeing and on and on and on, seeing over and over, Amy Schumer, seeing these other comedians and saying, Hey, she looks like me. It's something I want to do, and she's doing it, and she has her own special. That might be the most powerful tool of all, is show them that it's- Possible.

Yeah. That role modeling. I always say this, that in society, I think men can look up in society, in almost any industry, and see three dozen different archetypes and say, Well, I don't want to be like that guy or that guy, but I might be interested in being like any of those three. Young girls can't yet look up in society and say, Wow, of all the female politicians, there are so many. I'd like to be like that one, or of all the female comedians, I don't think I'm like her, but I'd like to be like her. Every industry, we should have at least three dozen archetypes of women. Until we get there, it's just it's difficult. Society often will tell girls they can't be something or they won't see. You can't really be what you can't see. The reason I knew I could be good at math, not only do I have a great math teacher, but my father worked on these Apollo missions, and he talked about often that having women mathematicians on his teams made them better. I would go to the company picnics with my parents every summer, and Yes, he'd introduce me to the female mathematicians, and I could say, Oh, I could be like that woman.

How cool was that? Amazing. And your family, you grew up in Texas, you would go to the launches. For sure. You would go to the Apollo launches.

Yeah. Well, we would We would watch them. Let's be clear, we would watch them on TV, on an old black and white TV. But at the other engineer's houses, we would all get together as a family and watch the Apollo launches because it was such a big deal to my dad who worked on these.

I thought you went there in person. Forget it. This podcast isn't going to air now.

Road trip to Houston.

I mean, come on. I watch those things on TV, too.

It didn't make you want to be a mathematician?

No. I wanted the outfit. I I wanted the astronaut suit, but I wanted to stay here on Earth and be a comedian. I don't know why that makes sense. You wanted Planet of the Apes. I wanted Planet of the Apes. I wanted to be an Earthbound astronaut who had gone back in time, actually, forward in time. Apologies. And spoiler alert to a world that's dominated all by apes.

And we're here.

See, the magic of this podcast is you were talking about such important, lofty, and brilliant ways to try and help the world. We got us to Planet of the Apes very quickly. That's really the magic here, is that we can ruin anyone's mission in life to make it a better world. Well, Melinda, it's very nice to meet you. I think it's very cool that you're taking what many people, including myself, if I had that money, I'd just be in Vegas living in a gold house and walking around naked. I would just lose my mind.

Not sure I'd want to see that. Just got to be honest.

Hey, I thought we were friends.

I was just about to say, why don't you and your wife come visit me in Seattle? But I'm a little less sure now.

Listen, the naked thing is aspirational. I've never been naked up to this point. I shower in a three-piece suit. I'm just saying, someday down the road. No, no, no. But it's very cool to meet you, and I very much admire how seriously you're taking... Some people might look at this situation you're in very differently, and you've clearly have a very big conscience and you are working very hard to do the right thing. So my hat's off to you, and I'm not wearing a hat. That's what I need a grant for. I need a Gates grant for that. It'll be a reasonable hat. I'll give you that. No, I want a really nice hat. Anyway, Milinda, thank you very much for being here.

Oh, thanks for having me, Konan.

Konan O'Brien needs a friend. With Konan O'Brien, Sonam Ofsessian, and Matt Gourley. Produced by me, Matt Gourley. Executive produced by Adam Sacks nick Clio, and Jeff Ross at Team Coco, and Colin Anderson, and Cody Fisher at EarWolf. Theme song by the White Stripes. Incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Take it away, Jimmy. Our supervising producer is Aaron and our associate talent producer is Jennifer Samples. Engineering and Mixing by Eduardo Perez and Brenda Burns. Additional production support by Mars Melnick. Talent Booking by Paula Davis, Gina Batista, and Brit Kohn. You can rate and review this show on Apple podcasts, and you might find your review read on a future episode. Got a question for Konan? Call the Team Coco Hotline at 669-587-2847 and leave a message. It, too, could be featured on a future episode. If you haven't already, please subscribe to Konan O'Brien Needs a Friend wherever fine podcasts are downloaded.