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00:00Why did your parents come to the United States. My father was a refugee from North Korea. Did you feel discrimination because you were Korean. The people were literally screaming at this race. Let's meet in the Harvard Medical School. PAUL FARMER We began talking about what's the nature of your responsibility to the rest of the world. You once led a protest against the World Bank. In fact you got it said the World Bank should be maybe shut down. Do you have any regrets about that. I just want everyone here and I'm very glad we lost that argument. Would you fix your time please. Well people wouldn't recognize me if my time was fixed but I'm just saying it's me . All right. I don't consider myself a journalist and nobody else would consider myself a journalist. I began to take on the life of being an interviewer even though I have a day job running a private equity firm. How do you define leadership. What is it that makes somebody tick . You became the president. Dartmouth. I think in 2009. You're there for a couple of years and you're a trained as a medical doctor and as a social anthropologist you have no finance background all of a sudden somebody says Would you like to be the president of the World Bank. What would make you think that would be a job you would be qualified for and why would you want to leave the academic setting that you spent much of your life in. Well it was a it's a question that a lot of people in the financial world asked as well. When I was nominated but you know we had always known in all of my years working in development that the World Bank was the most important institution for people who who wanted to help poor countries develop. And so I came to the interview with President Obama and he was asking me exactly the same question. He literally said to me why should I nominate you and not a macro economist. And so this is when I when I made the pitch probably the most important pitch I've made in my life I said Well you know the first question I asked him was Have you read your mother's dissertation. And he looked at me and he said Well yeah I have. And I said Well you know I'm an anthropologist like her. And so I said to him you know I haven't been in the finance world but I've been on the ground doing development work for most of my adult life. I'll be able to tell you how it's working on the ground. And he just looked at me and he said OK I get that. So was he surprised you actually read his mother's PHC thesis. He was he was and he later in we were together in a more informal setting and he said you know Jim that was one of the best ploys to get a job I've ever seen. All right. So did you feel intimidated by this job when you didn't have those kind of backgrounds or not. Well I certainly felt humbled about about it. And you know we have people here in the audience many of whom taught me a lot about how the World Bank works. And so I I felt like well you know learning finance and learning macroeconomics is gonna be a huge challenge for me but for the previous presidents coming in learning development must have been an even bigger challenge for them. And so I felt like I knew about what development was like what working in developing countries was like. And then I really worked hard to learn the other the other things that I needed to learn when I got here. When you show up at a meeting or something and you tell people you're the president World Bank today you're ise kind of open wider or their jaws drop it's a pretty good title. It depends on where you are right. So we went in Washington if you do that they'll say What do you guys have a branch in Alexandria. And do you have a team. I mean sec so some places you're extremely well known in other places you're not known at all but when you're let's say playing golf and you're a very good golfer you're like five handicap as I understand it. Very good golfer. I'll ask you about that later . Do people give you much more than they used to when you're your president World Bank. That doesn't happen. Not at all . Not at all. You know they have the mistaken impression that that I have access to cash myself. And so they're trying to get that from me. I see. Let's talk about your background. Why did your parents come to United States. Your father was a dentist and your mother was a professor a professor of philosophy. You know my father was a refugee from North Korea . He escaped from a random area to South Korea at the age of 19 . And so he went into the army as a dentist and because he had worked so hard on his English he became a translator for many of the Army dentists and became good friends with him. And so they gave him a scholarship to come to the United States. My mother was the top student in the Top High School in Korea because they ranked everybody literally in Korea in terms of your high school ranking. And so she got a scholarship and she she came to Tennessee by herself and at the time this was in the early 1950s there probably three or four hundred Koreans and all of the United States. And so she and my father were introduced to each other through friends. They met in New York City and they actually got married in New York City and like like all of the the Koreans the idea was that they would learn in the United States and they would go back to serve their country. And so they went back but but inescapably you know they saw how people live in the United States. And so their own aspirations for themselves and their children went up but did they have. Was it hard to get a visa to come over to live here permanently then so . So they My father was a fully trained dentist and was a professor but when he came back he had to complete the last two years of dental school again. So we were in Dallas and he was a he was a dental student at the same time I think working as a nurse in a hospital to make enough money and then we went he finished his dental education at Baylor dental school in Dallas and then for some reason that we're still trying to figure out we moved to Iowa though we grew up in Iowa at the time you did not speak English. So when I came at the age of five I didn't speak a word of English. So you moved to Muscatine Iowa then in high school. This is what I couldn't understand. How did you manage to be the quarterback of the football team the guard on the basketball team. Class president as well and also valedictorian was that like hard to do were. Well well you know before you get too impressed with that our football team had the longest losing streak in the nation at the time. Fifty six defeats in a row and I very proudly say I kept that streak going during my recruited to play at the University of Ise. Oh no . Did you feel discrimination because you were Korean or Asian or there wasn't just you know there was one town that I went to play basketball where there were two African-American teammates and me and the people were literally screaming at us racial texts. You know I can I can't repeat them on television but they were screaming and they threw things at us and even spit at us as we were coming out to play. So I've had that experience as a quarterback you're looking across and they're looking in your eyes and you know every racial slur you could imagine was was staring at me. So I grew up with. I grew up with it and it's it it it. I think it taught me a lot. It made me understand what that part of the world can be like at least you know years ago. OK so you're in Iowa. You do very well in high school and you go to Brown and you apply to and I guess get in the hardest medical school to probably get in Harvard Medical School. So were you surprised you got in and was that your first choice. Well I was really surprised to get in and in fact it was not my first choice because I actually I was trying to convince my father that I was not going to go to medical school but I was gonna go and study political science and philosophy . I came home from Brown one summer and he asked me So what do you study. And I said well dad you know I think I'm gonna study political science and philosophy and I think I'm going to get into politics. And he literally pull the car over to the side of the road. We're coming back from the airport tiny little town. And he said hey when you finish your internship and residency you can study anything you want. And so for him and he used to talk like that. He said look you know you. And for him of course it was very clear who we were in this country. We were in Iowa. He said you're a Chinaman. He used to say this to your Chinaman. You think people are gonna pay you to hear your ideas about political science and philosophy get a skill . And it turned out that it was really great advice. I mean there's so many things that I've learned and have happened because I had this notion that I needed to contribute something concrete in order to to make it in the world. And then you decide to go into another program we got a PHC in anthropology . Now did your parents say look a medical school degree is all you need. Why do you need a PHC as well. Well this was the great compromise and my my father felt that as long as I was in medical school that it's OK to loosen up a little bit. Our responsibility was to commit to the poorest most most marginalized most outcast people and then do everything we can to provide them the best possible health care education social protection. We said we're going to stay and we're gonna. We're going to work and continue to work on the losing side . So you get your degrees and you meet in the Harvard Medical School. Paul Farmer and the two of you with a few others started something called Partners in Health. Can you describe what that is. Paul and I began talking. Gosh it was 1983 and 1984. We began talking about if you have what we call these ridiculously elaborate educations. That's what Paul called it . What's the nature of your responsibility to the rest of the world. And so we thought and thought and and we tried to keep asking the question so if we have these kinds of backgrounds what's the nature of our responsibility to the world and we came to the conclusion that our responsibility was to to commit to the poorest most most marginalized most outcast people and then do everything we can to provide them the best possible health care education social protection. And that we would that we weren't going to win we weren't going to have some sort of victorious story because at the time that we started this there was very little money available in terms of global health or education we thought. But you know we're going to continue to to write about and talk about the situation of these very poor people and we're going to do that for the rest of our lives without any hope of being on the winning side. We will get we chose at that time we said we're going to stay and we're gonna we're going to win work and continue to work on the losing side . You ran partners health for a number of years. It was focused initially on Haiti. Later in Peru and my other work when you were in Peru you once led a protest against the World Bank. In fact you got to chair the World Bank should be maybe shut down . Yes. Do you have any regrets about that. I just want everyone here and I'm very glad we lost that argument and we did at that time what we were arguing was that the World Bank Group was too focused on GDP growth and that the kinds of investments that it was making was not focused enough on things like health and education and that this was this was an argument that was that was going on in development economics. You were an expert initially on tuberculosis. I had been working on drug resistant tuberculosis and had done a lot of work and trying to just get the global health community to change its perspective on it. And then when I went to to the World Health Organization is the same thing. I mean they were the the overwhelming consensus like ninety nine point nine percent of all the HIV physicians in the world were saying impossible to treat HIV in developing countries and with 25 million people in Africa who were living with HIV. And the global health community was about to issue a death sentence on all 25 million people living with HIV in Africa. And so that's that was what I did. So you're you leave the World Health Organization after a couple of years heading their HIV program . You then go to Harvard Medical School and teach there and then somebody calls you and says Would you like to be president of Dartmouth. Why did you decide to do that . It's a great question. And sometimes I wonder myself why and I said to them you know my work for my entire life has been focusing on the lives of the poorest. And I said I don't think I can do this because it feels to me like you're asking me to turn my back on the poor and somebody on the the the committee was in a in a in what was really a brilliant recruitment technique said no no no we're not asking you to turn your back on the poor . We're asking you to turn the faces of Dartmouth students to the poor. So I thought wow that sounds great right. That's great but turns out that's not actually the job of being president of a university which David you know very well. So one of the things you focused on when you're president Dartmouth was trying to reduce the enormous alcohol consumption that undergraduates have. I think you know for hundreds of years university president to try to do that with very little success . How did you find your effort. Let's see. You know what we tried at Dartmouth was the was bring what I had learned in medicine and what had learned in medicine is that the things we do should be evidence based. So I looked around and I said Are there things that we can do in the things we tackled we're drinking but also sexual assault. We did a major effort on sexual assault and we tried to ask the question. So what has worked in reducing harm from drinking and what has worked in reducing sexual assault. And so we we brought 30 universities together including including your alma mater Duke. And we over a period of two years we had them meet on a regular basis and share insights on programs that had been effective. And so I think I think we reduced harm from alcohol consumption but it's very hard to reduce consumption overall. Came into the world bank was her resistance. Like an organ transplant resistance to somebody who didn't have the same background that others had had . Well so you know to be fair I think the resistance is not was not just to me. There is there is resistance here to the way the place is governed as a whole. So we have people here 10 15 20 30 years who have just deep knowledge and every few years someone new comes in and they're supposed to run the institution. So I think there's someone put it to me this way that you know World Bank Group staff have always been skeptical about the way the place is governed from the perspective of the presidency. But you know when I came in I I tried to honestly look at how the place was functioning and and where it could go what it could be. And I brought in great people Alan Mulally the former CEO of Ford Alan came and spent quite a bit of time with us looking at the overall structure . And I asked Alan so what would you do if you saw an organization like this and know I brought in a lot of people and you know what they said was wow this is an incredibly complex institution . And so there were a whole bunch of things that needed to be done. And I you know having done change processes before I knew it was going to be painful but I just felt like you know it's my it's my moral responsibility to just give it my best shot to to set up the institution so that it could it could function as effectively as it possibly could. Let's talk about the World Bank. There's going to be no way to buffer yourself from two billion people living in Africa by 2050 who are going to have aspirations are every bit as high as Europeans as Americans . And so we have no choice but to make this system work for everybody let's talk about the World Bank. So we have one hundred eighty nine member countries and we were founded actually before the end of World War 2. They wanted to stabilize currency exchange rates after the war but they also wanted an organization that would help to rebuild Europe. But then of course the Marshall Plan came soon after that and we expanded. Where does it actually get its money where does that money come from. You have how much money do you have. You know we have a total portfolio almost 400 billion dollars that means loans. Equity investments that we that we have right now. And so the the great innovation of the World Bank was that countries gave US capital . So there's paid in capital. We have a very very good credit rating. So we our credit rating is Triple-A but it's probably one of the strongest triple ace in the world. What we've been able to do is whatever equity we have we use it to go to the capital markets and then borrow at a very low rate and pass that on to to our client countries. What's the difference when the World Bank and the and the International Monetary Fund the IMF what the IMF does is it comes in in a situation where countries are in trouble gives them a short term infusion that is paid back in a relatively short period of time. And it's really cash related to policy changes. We actually do things like help countries build roads. We provide specific loans for roads. We need the private sector side. We give loans directly to private sector companies who working in in poor countries . We have another part of the organization that literally invented political risk insurance. There's a much broader range of things that we do at the World Bank. But of course we're much smaller than the IMF. So you focus on developing markets. But now the developing markets have so much capital coming in from private equity firm sovereign wealth funds. Is there a real need for the World Bank anymore. I don't think that they necessarily need our capital but they certainly need our advice and they certainly need the capital in the form that we can provide it. So for a middle income country if we can provide them a 25 or 30 year loan at two and a half or 3 percent there are not many middle income countries who are going to be able to go to the capital markets themselves and get a loan and they also are not going to be able to get one. Where we come in and say OK we're going to give you this loan whether it's for a particular project or for you know we give it right to the government budget but then the government has to make policy changes. There are very few organizations that will come to them and say we're not going to charge you we're not gonna try to get the after work we're coming in and we're going to give you the benefit of our experience and the experience of our client countries all over the world. We're gonna give you 10 experiences in the world in how this problem that you're trying to solve is solved and we're going to bring the people who actually know those cases and you know as part of the loan we're going to provide that to you for free. Not a lot of countries can do that but also you know there are some countries that are getting you know access to private equity in capital but the vast majority of low and low middle income countries are not getting that. And so what we're now trying to do is to use the financing we have to help those countries become much more attractive for the flow of private capital. So after you leave the World Bank whenever you leave what would you like to do. Well you know I in in in trying to look at the evidence for for development what what do we need to do certain things are very striking to me one is that if by 2025 Indeed everyone in the world a billion people have access to broadband then the experience that my parents had of coming to the United saying wow this is what the world could look like everyone will have that on smartphones as more people get online their aspirations grow. So there's absolutely no way we're going to meet the aspirations of all 8 billion people without massive new investments coming from the private sector. And so you know if I were to do anything after this I would somehow work on that problem. How did your parents live to see you become the president of World Bank. Not my father but but my mother my father passed away early when he was 57. But my mother has and she must be pretty proud that I've been proud to see her to be president World Bank. Yeah yeah. And then and soon after you soon after I was named she learned what the World Bank was . So I don't play golf because I don't think I'd be very good at it. You're obviously a very good golfer. When did you have time to learn golf. So I grew up in in Iowa and we live right near the local golf course. So I played it competitively all through high school. So you've played with President Obama . Yes. And you've played with President Trump. Yes I have . Who's better G so you know let me just put it this way so President Obama started late in life. And so for someone who started late in life he's very very good. President Trump's complaint from most of his life and he is extremely good. He's an extremely good golfer. He he can hit all the shots. So it's it's a it's it's there are two different kinds of golfers completely does that. All right. That's a very diplomatic answer now. What would you say is the greatest pleasure of your professional life . For me I think that the thing that I'm most grateful for is that I have been able to learn new things throughout every stage of my professional career. And so as long as you stay open to it I think that's the key. And if I would give advice to anyone . I mean what we now know is that the jobs of the future will require that people are ready to continue to learn throughout their lives. When the old days the advice was plastics but now plastics you know if you ever want to get into private equity when you leave the word bank let me know what you did say that that the highest human calling is private equity is I have to tell you that people who are willing to put risk capital into developing countries. That's the key. That's going to be the key and unfortunately there's not enough of it right now. And so if you it making economies work for for everybody this is essentially what I say now to everybody here . The World Bank Group. Our job is to make the global market system work for everybody and the planet. And whether you like it or not whether you like it or not it really we really have to do that there's not there's going to be no way to buffer yourself from two billion people living in Africa by 2050 who are going to have aspirations that are every bit as high as Europeans as Americans. And so we have no choice but to make this system work for everybody. Dr. Kim thank you very much for what you've done. The World Bank. Thank you David .

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The David Rubenstein Show: Dr. Jim Yong Kim

World Bank President Dr. Jim Yong Kim talks with David Rubenstein about how he landed his job from President Barack Obama, the sense of moral responsibility that led him to co-found a nonprofit health-care organization, and how he views his leadership at the World Bank. Kim speaks in the latest episode of "The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations." The interview was taped on August 6 at the World Bank headquarters in Washington. (Source: Bloomberg)

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