Speaker 1: M what's hungover my the host of this podcast Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards, the podcast that's being recorded at the unreasonably
Speaker 1: early hour of Sophie, what is it? What time is
Speaker 1: it right now? Tom Jesus Christ? So like the crack
Speaker 1: of dawn, we're up doing this. I just hope you all,
Speaker 1: I hope you all respected. This is why we have
Speaker 1: too heavily. We have to. We have to sue anybody
Speaker 1: who distributes this podcast for free because if all of
Speaker 1: the backbreaking labor getting up at the crack of two
Speaker 1: pm to record this podcast after I was drinking last night,
Speaker 1: unbelievable dedication. I think we started around one, and yesterday
Speaker 1: you text me being like, what time are we starting?
Speaker 1: And I said one, you go, Jesus Sophie, that's so early.
Speaker 1: I know, I know. This is this is the dedication
Speaker 1: that I bring to my craft, which is why Well
Speaker 1: Andrew would consider me. I'm on the other side of things.
Speaker 1: I started waking up super early, so well Andrew, oh,
Speaker 1: Drew Drew in Yeah, yeah, T Drizzle. Do people call
Speaker 1: you T drizzle because it should I think they actually
Speaker 1: have on um fellow, I heart podcast The Daily Side
Speaker 1: Guys that feels like exactly the kind of ship they
Speaker 1: would say. I think it's t Drizzle is a good name.
Speaker 1: So we're just gonna roll forward with that. Yeah, Andrew,
Speaker 1: how are you? How are you feeling about Bill Gates
Speaker 1: so far? Have you learned anything new? We I feel
Speaker 1: like we have gotten. We haven't gotten as far as
Speaker 1: the bombshells so far. I'm feeling about the same as
Speaker 1: I did when I walked in, which is like yeah,
Speaker 1: but but not like seriously yea, yeah, that guy casual,
Speaker 1: just like causual, stoic. Yeah, I don't. I don't think
Speaker 1: he's gotten past. And again, it sounded like that was
Speaker 1: going to be a point of potential debate, but I
Speaker 1: would argue, he, I don't think he has eclipsed any
Speaker 1: given billionaire, any given tech billionaire in back at this point. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what happens next. When we last
Speaker 1: left Bill Gates, he just succeeded in burning tens of
Speaker 1: millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man hours
Speaker 1: fighting against a federal anti trust case. He won in
Speaker 1: the end, as billionaires nearly always do, but the whole
Speaker 1: process exhausted him emotionally. Microsoft's NASDAC value had been cut
Speaker 1: in half, which destroyed about two hundred billion dollars in
Speaker 1: fake money held by rich assholes like Gates. They made
Speaker 1: it all back, of course, because they didn't actually lose anything,
Speaker 1: but on paper they had less of an impossible fortune
Speaker 1: for a while. Now. One long term impact of the
Speaker 1: antitrust suit is that for all time Bill Gates will
Speaker 1: remain a convicted monopolist. The stink this put on him
Speaker 1: in Microsoft lasted longer than the actual charges. By September
Speaker 1: of nineteen six, a huge number of top executives had
Speaker 1: fled the company. This was the dot com boom, and
Speaker 1: sexy new e businesses were starting every day. A lot
Speaker 1: of opportunists figured as the antitrust case started spinning up
Speaker 1: that Microsoft's day in the sun was over and it
Speaker 1: was time to find the next big tech grift. Corey
Speaker 1: Doctor will argue that we owe Google's existence and part
Speaker 1: to the trauma Bill felt over the antitrust suit. Gates
Speaker 1: had noted in the past that lingering fear of the
Speaker 1: federal government is what stopped him from doing the same
Speaker 1: thing to Google that he'd done to Netscape in two
Speaker 1: thousand nineteen, but was asked by Kara Swisher why Microsoft
Speaker 1: hadn't bought Android before Google. This was just seven years
Speaker 1: after the anti trust action, and he claims that it
Speaker 1: was he was just too scared of the d O
Speaker 1: jay to risk it so again. Even though the government
Speaker 1: doesn't win this case, it is good to do this
Speaker 1: thing because it stops people like Bill Gates from sucking
Speaker 1: up as much things as and it sounds like enough
Speaker 1: of this was simply like on a personal level, he
Speaker 1: was scared of the humiliation. He didn't want to do
Speaker 1: another deposition. Now. The antitrust case had more of an
Speaker 1: immediate impact on Gates. It convinced him to step down
Speaker 1: from his position as at the head of Microsoft sort of.
Speaker 1: Steve Balmer had become President of Microsoft, taking over more
Speaker 1: of the day to day management of the company as
Speaker 1: Bill Gates began to pull back. In two thousand, Gates
Speaker 1: stepped down the CEO of Microsoft and Balmer took his place.
Speaker 1: Bill was forty four at the time, and he remained
Speaker 1: the chairman of the board in chief software architect at
Speaker 1: the time. This was built as a way for Gates,
Speaker 1: whose public image was of a genius programmer, to spend
Speaker 1: his time exploring new technology. Two thousand would also mark
Speaker 1: the point at which Gates increasingly got involved with philanthropy. Now,
Speaker 1: before we get into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
Speaker 1: we should probably step back and cover some of the
Speaker 1: developments in Bill's personal life during the late ninet nineties
Speaker 1: that we sort of missed while we were talking about
Speaker 1: business stuff. Last episode was obviously a big year for
Speaker 1: Microsoft the company and for the tech industry as a whole,
Speaker 1: but nine was an even more momentous year for Bill's
Speaker 1: personal life. On the positive side of things, it's the
Speaker 1: year he married Melinda French is now about to be
Speaker 1: former wife. At the time they started dating, Melinda was
Speaker 1: a Microsoft employee, a product manager. She started working there
Speaker 1: in nineteen eight seven, the year after she graduated from college. Today,
Speaker 1: this kind of relationship sets off immediate alarm belts for
Speaker 1: a lot of people, but for decades it was kind
Speaker 1: of framed in the media as like a Pam and
Speaker 1: Jim style office romance. Bill and Melinda both gave interviews
Speaker 1: over the years playing up how cute their beginnings were.
Speaker 1: He flirted at her when they sat together at a conference,
Speaker 1: which what is the chance Bill did not arranged to
Speaker 1: sit next to her. We know this man, but he
Speaker 1: absolutely made that happen. His actual EMO. Yeah that Later
Speaker 1: they act just happened to run into each other in
Speaker 1: a company parking lot. Again, he absolutely engineered that, and
Speaker 1: Bill asked her out on a on a date, and
Speaker 1: for a long time the story was they fell in
Speaker 1: love and became a billionaire power couple. The end reality was,
Speaker 1: of course, much grosser, but we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 1: Nineteen ninety four was also a year of tragedy for
Speaker 1: the Gates family. Bill had remained close with his parents.
Speaker 1: He moved Microsoft back to Seattle in parts so he
Speaker 1: could be near them. He had his dad's legal firm
Speaker 1: represent the company, and he and his parents maintained their
Speaker 1: tradition of Sunday dinner. He bought a house near them
Speaker 1: to facilitate this. Ever since the late nineteen eighties, when
Speaker 1: he got Fuck You Money, Bill's mom had advised him
Speaker 1: to get into philanthropy, and since Bill had some control
Speaker 1: issues with his mother, this became a source of tension
Speaker 1: between them. She would press him to give away his
Speaker 1: fortune and he'd snap, I'm just trying to run my company,
Speaker 1: Mommy Gates eventually harangued her boy into raising money for
Speaker 1: the United Way. This of course led other nonprofits to
Speaker 1: beg him for money, and soon he was overwhelmed by
Speaker 1: all the requests. He kept being too busy to deal
Speaker 1: with it, and his mom kept pressuring him until she
Speaker 1: was diagnosed with some horrible fucking cancer even rich people
Speaker 1: can't escape, and she died in nineteen ninety four. Bill
Speaker 1: Senior was as devastated by this as you'd expect, and
Speaker 1: for a time he struggled to find ways to fill
Speaker 1: his days. Eventually, he asked his son and daughter in
Speaker 1: law if he could start going through their stack of
Speaker 1: requests for philanthropy and give some of their money away. This,
Speaker 1: as has claimed in later interviews, was kind of the
Speaker 1: start of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and before
Speaker 1: the foundation itself existed, Like they just kind of gave
Speaker 1: him like a hundred million dollars to hand out. Basically,
Speaker 1: Um was like sure, like eighty bucks for them, you know,
Speaker 1: Um and uh so yeah. For for most of like
Speaker 1: the late nineties, it's just kind of his dad handling
Speaker 1: the Gates philanthropy. But then Bill quits being the secret
Speaker 1: of Microsoft, and like two thousand and Melinda and he
Speaker 1: start taking a more active role in philanthropy. The way
Speaker 1: this was generally framed in the media was Bill Gates
Speaker 1: leaves Microsoft behind to save the world, And there are
Speaker 1: a lot of articles even up to the present day
Speaker 1: with similar titles. Back in February of this year, there
Speaker 1: was an article titled Bill Gates has a plan to
Speaker 1: save the world in the Economists, which is like puffing
Speaker 1: up one of his books about climate change or some ship.
Speaker 1: But there's been bunch of pieces like that, right, yeah. Now.
Speaker 1: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started officially in the
Speaker 1: year two thousand. It began with I think a hundred
Speaker 1: million dollars, which was like the Bill Gates equivalent again,
Speaker 1: like eighty bucks. The foundation expanded massively in two thousand six,
Speaker 1: when Bill Gates convinced Warren Buffett to give most of
Speaker 1: his fortune away to the organization. He claimed that he
Speaker 1: felt Bill and Melinda could be trusted to use it
Speaker 1: for good. And if you just sort of watched by
Speaker 1: the sidelines, that probably looked like a defensive point, a
Speaker 1: defensible point for most of the public crusade uh from
Speaker 1: for years, the most public crusade of the Gates Foundation
Speaker 1: was their war against malaria. UM. By two thousand eighteen,
Speaker 1: they put almost four billion dollars towards fighting the deadly
Speaker 1: disease around the world, in a mix of aid programs
Speaker 1: to struggling nations, grants to researchers and scientists, all that stuff. Now,
Speaker 1: malaria has probably killed more human beings than any other
Speaker 1: single cause in history. It's like the number one killer
Speaker 1: of human beings across all time. So good, good thing
Speaker 1: to fight. I would I would have three like, yes,
Speaker 1: sounds good. Yeah. And Bill certainly can't be faulted for
Speaker 1: lack of ambition here. He has stated his goal is
Speaker 1: the total elimination of malaria, and scientists seem to suggest
Speaker 1: this is possible. Now, this is an ongoing struggle. I
Speaker 1: haven't found anything that suggests the Gates Foundation has been
Speaker 1: like ineffective and their struggle against malaria. Obviously they haven't
Speaker 1: bet in it. But that's you know, pretty big, pretty
Speaker 1: big task. Um. And it's probably fair to say that
Speaker 1: their advocacy and money has contributed to a lot of
Speaker 1: life saving programs and aided in the battle against one
Speaker 1: of mankind's death least foes. The Gates As have also
Speaker 1: pledged ten billion dollars over the next decade to provide
Speaker 1: free vaccines to the world's poor. Through its Global Alliance
Speaker 1: for Vaccines and Immunization or GAVY, the foundation has vaccinated
Speaker 1: millions of kids in impoverished countries against polio and other
Speaker 1: horrible ship. Bill and Melinda takes some credit for the
Speaker 1: fact that between nineteen nine and twelve, total deaths of
Speaker 1: children under five dropped from twelve point six million to
Speaker 1: six point six million. Now, there's no way to evaluate
Speaker 1: how much of an impact they had on that, but
Speaker 1: vaccinating it's absolutely saves lives. Here's the thing, though, The
Speaker 1: whole story is not just the cool. Question should not
Speaker 1: just be does this fat foundation's work save lives? Because
Speaker 1: that's not all we're talking about here um, and it's
Speaker 1: not as something you can answer that simply because the
Speaker 1: tens of billions of dollars in that foundation we're able
Speaker 1: to come from Gates and other plutocrats because they didn't
Speaker 1: pay that ship in taxes. It's wonderful to vaccinate kids,
Speaker 1: but the foundation brings more than free medicine. It spreads
Speaker 1: a specific ideology about who should have wealth and about
Speaker 1: how problems ought to be solved. In our society. I
Speaker 1: want to quote now from a book called The New
Speaker 1: Profits of Capital, which goes into some detail about what
Speaker 1: I find so unsettling in Gates's ideology. As Bill Gates
Speaker 1: has Riley noted, they are more interested in cures for
Speaker 1: baldness than in cures from malaria. Why. Melinda Gates argues
Speaker 1: that there is simply no rich world market for products
Speaker 1: like diarrhea or pneumonia vaccines. Their solution is to use
Speaker 1: the Gates Foundation to create such a market in poor countries.
Speaker 1: If we could stimulate the pharmaceutical companies through public private
Speaker 1: partnerships to create vaccines, if we could guarantee them the
Speaker 1: market of millions of children getting this vaccine and then
Speaker 1: being paid for it in the developing world, if we
Speaker 1: could commit to a market and knew that those that
Speaker 1: demand would be there, we could insent them with the
Speaker 1: right research dollars to actually create those vaccines. That's Bill now.
Speaker 1: Bill is, above all else a believer in the power
Speaker 1: of profit driven capitalism. He thinks the best way to
Speaker 1: do good is by providing profit incentives for corporations to
Speaker 1: carry out behavior that also helps suffering people. But this
Speaker 1: still means that those profits are valued more in his
Speaker 1: world than those lives. When Jonah Saul convented the polio vaccine,
Speaker 1: he was asked why he did not patent it, and
Speaker 1: he said, you might as well try to patent the sun.
Speaker 1: To Salk, a man whose contribution to our species is
Speaker 1: literally incalculable, the vaccine was not a commodity. It was health.
Speaker 1: It was millions of human lives not cut short, hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of cumulative years not lived in pain. The
Speaker 1: Gates Foundation has done things that save lives, but this
Speaker 1: is not a zero sum game. The question isn't free vaccine.
Speaker 1: It's vaccines or not. It's do we let individual men
Speaker 1: accumulate the wealth necessary to operate foundations like this, or
Speaker 1: do we build a world with less in equality, where
Speaker 1: human beings don't need a profit motive to vaccinate starving children. Yeah?
Speaker 1: Well yea. And also like where you know, philanthropy isn't
Speaker 1: at the whim of you know, a handful of white dudes, exactly,
Speaker 1: And and and that's that's kind of what we're building to.
Speaker 1: I assure you this becomes more than just an ideological argument.
Speaker 1: There's there's there's there's solid stuff to dig in. Here,
Speaker 1: but I want to quote again from that book, the
Speaker 1: new profits of capital. Turning something into a commodity means
Speaker 1: it is no longer a right or even potentially a right.
Speaker 1: It means that the commodity's value is now judged primarily
Speaker 1: on whether or not it will turn a profit, and
Speaker 1: people's access to the commodity hinges upon their ability to
Speaker 1: pay for it. In the United States, where health care
Speaker 1: is a commodity, the difference in lifespan between a poor
Speaker 1: black man and a wealthy white woman is fourteen years.
Speaker 1: We are forty six in the world for infant mortality,
Speaker 1: this being the wealthiest country on Earth. Babies in poor
Speaker 1: states like Alabama are twice as likely to die as
Speaker 1: infants and wealthy areas. This is part of why virtually
Speaker 1: all public health experts agree that universal health care is
Speaker 1: a good idea. But as Nicole ash Off rights quote,
Speaker 1: when we frame the problem of poor people in the
Speaker 1: Global South dying from preventable diseases as a market failure problem,
Speaker 1: we close off the possibility of building a health care
Speaker 1: system in which healthcare is a right and does not
Speaker 1: depend on one's ability to pay. And that's what's so
Speaker 1: toxic about the Gates Foundation. Yeah, it's his idea, his
Speaker 1: whole idea, like, yeah, it's wonderful to get vaccines to
Speaker 1: poor people. But the way he wants to do that
Speaker 1: is by creating a financial incentive to do that, rather
Speaker 1: than by saying, well, we all have a responsibility, even
Speaker 1: to people outside of our country, and maybe looking at
Speaker 1: the COVID nine team pandemic, we can say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: actually we all benefit in a purely selfish way from
Speaker 1: making sure that healthcare is available worldwide. Turns out we
Speaker 1: are all in this together and as opposed to let's
Speaker 1: make it profitable to save children um. In two thousand fifteen,
Speaker 1: the Gates Foundation funded to study in The Lancet and
Speaker 1: that study it was about like public health options worldwide,
Speaker 1: and that study called for universal healthcare. Despite this, in
Speaker 1: that year's Development Report, the Gates Foundation claimed that universal
Speaker 1: healthcare has quote limitations as a global development goal and
Speaker 1: that evidence as to whether or not it helps health
Speaker 1: outcomes is mixed. Bill Gates is on the side of
Speaker 1: intellectual property, the right of corporations to profit maxively from
Speaker 1: vaccines developed by scientists, often using public money. Millions and
Speaker 1: foundation funds go to pharmaceutical companies. In fact, shockingly large
Speaker 1: amounts of Gates Foundation money goes to big businesses, and
Speaker 1: a lot of times as gifts to those businesses. For example,
Speaker 1: in two thousand fourteen, the Gates Foundation announced an eleven
Speaker 1: million dollar grant to MasterCard so that they could build
Speaker 1: a financial inclusion lab in Kenya. The basic idea is
Speaker 1: Kenya needs foreign investments, but investing in Africa is risky,
Speaker 1: so you have to bribe MasterCard to take a chance
Speaker 1: on Kenya. Um and that that aid is not a
Speaker 1: loan or investment. It was a gift that we're giving
Speaker 1: fucking MasterCard eleven million dollars. And the Gates Foundation does
Speaker 1: this a lot. They give multimillion dollar gifts to mega
Speaker 1: corporations like Vodafone, who themselves pay no corporate tax in
Speaker 1: the UK. The Gates Foundation also gives gifts to the
Speaker 1: Monsanto corporation, who Bill argues should be bribed to take
Speaker 1: over more and more responsibility for agriculture in Africa. He
Speaker 1: there's all these articles we're Bill talking about, like how
Speaker 1: scary it is the population of Africa is set to explode.
Speaker 1: Um and number one, there's some uncomfortable racial undertones. His
Speaker 1: obsessive concern with the population of Africa. He always firms,
Speaker 1: is like, I'm just worried that there's not going to
Speaker 1: be enough food. They don't grow enough food to like
Speaker 1: support themselves there um. But his his solution is, let's
Speaker 1: pay him on Santo to like subsidize, or let's pay
Speaker 1: him on Santo to subsidize see that they have to
Speaker 1: buy that are genetically modified so that they can't share them. Right,
Speaker 1: it's this, it's this fucking thing capitalists have been doing
Speaker 1: since the seventeen hundreds. Right the seventeen seventies, a giant
Speaker 1: British corporation takes over most of North and eastern India
Speaker 1: and immediately are like, oh, all these farming villages have
Speaker 1: like arrangements with each other and like social welfare programs
Speaker 1: to take care of each other in the event of
Speaker 1: a drought or if like one one village is harvest
Speaker 1: is bad. Let's get rid of all that because we
Speaker 1: want to centralize all of our farming to make it
Speaker 1: more profitable. And then thirty million people starved to death.
Speaker 1: And it's the same basic you We're not gonna go
Speaker 1: into this nearly enough. But Gates is a lot of
Speaker 1: like he keeps talking about how his ideas to reform
Speaker 1: farming in Africa so that it can feed more people,
Speaker 1: none of which involved talking to people who have been
Speaker 1: farming in Africa for generation. Like it's just like, well,
Speaker 1: let's bring this mega corporate, let's make it profitable from Monsanto.
Speaker 1: Like fucking still, that's the only way to right, And
Speaker 1: it is just like that. That is how people like
Speaker 1: that view of the world and view solutions. Oh god,
Speaker 1: yeah yeah. Darryl Ray is an agricultural expert from the
Speaker 1: University of Tennessee, and he fears the consequences of these
Speaker 1: investments for small farmers. Quote, we need to take farmers
Speaker 1: exactly where they are at the moment and help them
Speaker 1: be more productive using their knowledge and technology that would
Speaker 1: be appropriate to add to it, and then gradually move
Speaker 1: them into a higher rate of production, rather than talking
Speaker 1: about them buying on Santo products or other kinds of
Speaker 1: products they can't afford to have to buy every year,
Speaker 1: as is the case with hybrid seed. So again, not
Speaker 1: just me saying this is bad. Other people are saying
Speaker 1: there's a lot of scary and it's again, you're not
Speaker 1: a farmer, Bill, you don't know anything about farming. And
Speaker 1: you don't know enough to know if the experts you're
Speaker 1: paying because in a lot of cases you're paying them
Speaker 1: to justify things you already believe. Like you're not. You're
Speaker 1: not just saying here's billions of dollars for the best idea.
Speaker 1: You're saying, I'm pretty sure we need to use modern
Speaker 1: Western agricultural corporations, that this is the best way to
Speaker 1: do it. Who can I hire it? Exactly backwards, It's
Speaker 1: exactly backwards, exactly how you don't do this? Um and again,
Speaker 1: this is one of those things like people talk about
Speaker 1: state communism versus state capitalism. Fucking the like Russia and
Speaker 1: China did versions of this that led to the great
Speaker 1: famines of the twentieth century in parts of the world.
Speaker 1: This is like, this is the sparrows. Yeah, exactly the
Speaker 1: same thing. Because of my this new idea, in this
Speaker 1: new technology, I know better than people who have been
Speaker 1: making food to feed this place for forever, So let's
Speaker 1: just change everything. It's just it's the incredible hubris of man. Go.
Speaker 1: Anybody who wants to reform global agriculture like this should
Speaker 1: have to work on a farm somewhere for ten fucking years,
Speaker 1: um like just just fucking work on a like gross,
Speaker 1: some goddamn potatoes, Bill Gates, like Jesus Christ, Um, I
Speaker 1: say that, but then Mark Zuckerberg did that, went up
Speaker 1: murdering goats with lasers or some ships. Maybe not, Yeah
Speaker 1: he killed a goat with a laser. It's a whole thing.
Speaker 1: Um well. But I mean that's the I think the
Speaker 1: addition to what you're saying is they should have to
Speaker 1: do it and do it successfully, to do it and
Speaker 1: see what they do and then yeah, sure, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say like a guy who's capable of running
Speaker 1: a giant corporation wouldn't have any insights that are useful,
Speaker 1: but probably not certainly not at his current level of
Speaker 1: knowledge about fucking farming. Um well. And also like at
Speaker 1: the like it shows who he values and who you know,
Speaker 1: every every farmer is expendable, clearly, but like you know,
Speaker 1: no corporation is expendable. It's this It's a version of
Speaker 1: the same problem that like social media has, like where
Speaker 1: if you're if you're famous and rich and prominent, um,
Speaker 1: you have to have a stance to take on everything right.
Speaker 1: One way this goes is like every Hollywood celebrity, you know,
Speaker 1: has to have a take on everything happening in the world, right, Um.
Speaker 1: And the other way this goes is, you know, the
Speaker 1: most toxic version of this is a billionaire deciding to
Speaker 1: change how agriculture works in Africa because he got rich
Speaker 1: in the nineties. Like, um, it's it's just but you
Speaker 1: know who else got rich in the nineties. Andrew t
Speaker 1: hit me the product of services that support this podcast.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, all nineties babies gotta be a good. Ah,
Speaker 1: We're back, Andrew, Andrew. You see the new you see
Speaker 1: the new they did. They made a new rug Rats,
Speaker 1: but they made it all c g I and it's
Speaker 1: so weird. I don't like it. It looked so good.
Speaker 1: Just just rerun rug Rats. It's perfect. It doesn't need
Speaker 1: anything else. Kids will still like it. They made Tommy
Speaker 1: Pickles head scary. Yeah, I just like the old art
Speaker 1: was just so classic and charming. The lady who did
Speaker 1: the lady who did Tommy Pickles voice lived behind my
Speaker 1: childhood home. Oh really, Yeah, that's that's rad um, because
Speaker 1: that was a great show. I just don't get it.
Speaker 1: I don't get this at all. Um. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's horrible. People should stop making things. I don't know
Speaker 1: why we need to ruin a good thing. I'm saying
Speaker 1: speaking of good things ruined, speaking of ruining good things.
Speaker 1: So Bill's friendly gifts to the Monsanto Corporation, MasterCard, and
Speaker 1: Vodaphone are part of a massive global trend that the
Speaker 1: Gates Foundation has largely driven. That the Walton Foundation, the
Speaker 1: Walmart people have a big part of this too. There's
Speaker 1: a couple of big ones. I'm gonna quote from a
Speaker 1: write up in Jacobin about this trend. More and more,
Speaker 1: corporate philanthropy is not about corporations giving money to charity.
Speaker 1: Companies actually do remarkably little of that, As a two
Speaker 1: thousand two Harvard Business Review article pointed out, over the
Speaker 1: past fifteen year period, charity by US companies as a
Speaker 1: percentage of profits fell by More recently, Slate reported that
Speaker 1: corporate giving had nosedive from a high of two point
Speaker 1: one percent of pre tax profits during the mid nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties to just point eight percent in two thousand twelve.
Speaker 1: Corporate philanthropy today is about private tax exempt donors such
Speaker 1: as the Gates Foundation, giving their charity to corporations. Now,
Speaker 1: this kind of charity is not just profoundly undemocratic. Exkews
Speaker 1: global attitudes towards public health and filters them through the
Speaker 1: lenses of a handful of billionaires who, like Gates, have
Speaker 1: never had to struggle a single moment of their lives.
Speaker 1: Gates Foundation donations to the UN Health Agency outweigh even
Speaker 1: the US government's contributions to that body. As a result,
Speaker 1: people at the u N who disagree with Gates quickly
Speaker 1: find themselves out on their asses. The same is often
Speaker 1: true of the WHO, the World Health Organization, which is
Speaker 1: also heavily subsidized by Gates. As Lorie Garrett wrote in
Speaker 1: Foreign Affairs, few policy initiatives or normative standards set by
Speaker 1: the WHO are announced before they have been casually unofficially
Speaker 1: vetted by Gates Foundations staff. In two thousand eleven, Oxford
Speaker 1: health economist David Stuckler argued, quote, global health is ruled
Speaker 1: by a few private donors who make decisions in secret.
Speaker 1: The capacity to decide what is relevant and how it
Speaker 1: will be addressed is in the hands of very few,
Speaker 1: who ultimately are accountable to their own interests. So that's rad.
Speaker 1: That's good, yeah, And it is like right as you
Speaker 1: get further into it. It is like the global health
Speaker 1: of it. We just lived through. This is why, like
Speaker 1: the value of uh really only caring about human beings
Speaker 1: or at least like trying to do something outside of
Speaker 1: a profit motive. Like every everything that we did during
Speaker 1: COVID that was profit driven caused death and suffering and
Speaker 1: loss of business, which is the craziest part, Like it's
Speaker 1: business can't even be trusted to make business go. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's all you need to know about the difference between
Speaker 1: when healthcare is primarily about profit and when it's primarily
Speaker 1: about people is to look at Cuba. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: Cuba a little later. Not a government that's without flaws.
Speaker 1: You can look at a lot of horrible ship. They
Speaker 1: did LGBT people back in like the nineties during the
Speaker 1: AIDS epidemic and stuff. But as a rule, they put
Speaker 1: make up. They public health is like the number one
Speaker 1: thing that they worry about over there, and so they
Speaker 1: have like a lung cancer vaccine, and they have a
Speaker 1: COVID vaccine and now they're giving it away for free
Speaker 1: to a bunch of countries. Like it's yeah, like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's just different. When the goal of healthcare is
Speaker 1: not to make some dude who lives in Mountain View richer. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: since Gates doesn't like the idea of universal health care,
Speaker 1: he's resisted supporting the w h o S nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: eight Alma Alta declar aation. This is essentially an international
Speaker 1: commitment to strengthen primary care systems and move towards universal
Speaker 1: healthcare and more nations. It's basically saying the best way
Speaker 1: to support public health worldwide is to strengthen the primary
Speaker 1: care systems in those countries to make them more independent
Speaker 1: and more capable of caring for people, rather than them
Speaker 1: needing to rely on foreign NGOs and stuff to provide healthcare.
Speaker 1: Right makes sense, you know? Um. The Gates Foundation, though,
Speaker 1: pursues market based solutions and as a result, according to
Speaker 1: the Lancet, grants made by the Foundation often quote do
Speaker 1: not reflect the burden of disease endured by those in
Speaker 1: deepest poverty. Let's discuss a practical example of how this looks.
Speaker 1: If you google Bill Gates in Africa, you will come
Speaker 1: across an awful lot of articles where Gates expresses is
Speaker 1: worry that there might soon be too many Africans. This
Speaker 1: is always framed in humanitarian terms. Um, here's a feminine
Speaker 1: climate change. But I don't know, yo is that racist?
Speaker 1: I mean, there's definitely too many Europeans, said, yet way
Speaker 1: too many Italians. The birthrate has been following for years,
Speaker 1: but not by enough. When I'm president, that's gonna be
Speaker 1: my number one goal. Get getting Megan. There'll be less
Speaker 1: Italians or anti Mussolini. If you will, Yeah, do a
Speaker 1: reverse Mussolini, h reverse Alini if you will. I mean,
Speaker 1: you know what, some very cool people in Milan in
Speaker 1: the forties reverse to Mussolini and that worked out pretty well.
Speaker 1: That's sort of the way to do it. That is
Speaker 1: the path you're on. I slip them upside down. One
Speaker 1: less Italian? Okay, good times. So again Gates is concerned
Speaker 1: about there being too many Africans. It's always framed as like, no,
Speaker 1: I'm worried about like famine and climate change and all
Speaker 1: that stuff. But it's hard to ignore how often he
Speaker 1: thinks about reproduction in sects among black Africans. He thinks
Speaker 1: about out it a lot, and maybe he shouldn't be here,
Speaker 1: everybody Robert Evans here um. The initial version of this
Speaker 1: episode included a pretty long critique of HIV program, an
Speaker 1: HIV mitigation program Bill Gates had had UH supported heavily
Speaker 1: in Africa that was based on circumcision critique that based
Speaker 1: largely on an article I'd found in the Journal of
Speaker 1: Future HIV Therapy from two thousand and eight titled male
Speaker 1: circumcision is not the HIV vaccine we were looking for.
Speaker 1: That article included a lot of the critiques I made
Speaker 1: in the episode, UM the name of the fact that
Speaker 1: while circumcision kind of a perfect environment can reduce the
Speaker 1: spread of HIV, it didn't seem to actually do it
Speaker 1: when when implemented in a large scale for a variety
Speaker 1: of reasons, including it led to other kind of risky
Speaker 1: behaviors and whatnot. People didn't understand um, you know, they
Speaker 1: were still supposed to wear con is. There are a
Speaker 1: number of things that we we brought up in the episode,
Speaker 1: but a concerned fan reached out to me after that
Speaker 1: UH and made me aware of a number of things
Speaker 1: that I had gotten wrong, and also made me aware
Speaker 1: of an article in the lance at Journal of Global
Speaker 1: Health from JEE which was a systematic review and meta
Speaker 1: analysis of a bunch of different studies into exactly this thing.
Speaker 1: Like whether or not these circumcistion programs can reduce the
Speaker 1: risk of spreading hi v UM, and I'm just going
Speaker 1: to quote from UM a section of the of the
Speaker 1: conclusion here UM, which reads, quote, our systematic review and
Speaker 1: meta analysis found that, you know, the circumcition campaigns were
Speaker 1: not associated with increased conom lest sex, or multiple sexual
Speaker 1: partners among heterosexual men. This lack of association persisted across
Speaker 1: a wide variety of subgroups. UM. These findings might help
Speaker 1: alleviate concerns that widespread MMC programs could lead to risk
Speaker 1: compensation and therefore reduced the benefit of MMC. UM. So
Speaker 1: it seems like I was wrong on that. There's still
Speaker 1: I have some concerns about it. But also I'm willing
Speaker 1: to admit that I did not understand this as well
Speaker 1: as I should have, So I apologize for that. If
Speaker 1: you want to read more, that meta analysis is in
Speaker 1: the Lancet UM and we will put up a couple
Speaker 1: of other sources that were sent to me on our
Speaker 1: website to update the source section. So UM, I have
Speaker 1: cut out that chunk of the episode. There will be
Speaker 1: a couple of references to it later on. But you know,
Speaker 1: there's nothing we can do about that. But yeah, here's
Speaker 1: the here's the correction. I'm sorry for being a hack
Speaker 1: and a fraud. The charity of the Gates Foundation is
Speaker 1: all too often it'sself a form of imperialism, one that
Speaker 1: has harmful, unforeseen impacts on local populations. The good news
Speaker 1: is that, since Gates is a billionaire narcissist his he
Speaker 1: gets to do imperialism on the people of his own
Speaker 1: country too, which brings us to the very fun story
Speaker 1: of the Gates Foundation's war on public education. It's some
Speaker 1: good ship, Andrew, it's some good ship. Now. It's probably
Speaker 1: not gonna surprise you to learn that Bill and Melinda
Speaker 1: also think the market can fix public education. Hilariously, he
Speaker 1: diagnoses the problem with public education as a result of
Speaker 1: the quote top down government man polie provider a k a.
Speaker 1: The state. Now we could talk about how funny it
Speaker 1: is that he's complaining education is bad because it's a monopoly,
Speaker 1: and he's Bill Gates. He could laugh about that a lot,
Speaker 1: and we will for a second. Yeah, oh god, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's also just like you had unlimited resources to have
Speaker 1: your fucking horrible dork public school, and like our private
Speaker 1: school sorry, but it's just like like thinking that that
Speaker 1: is the norm, even for private education. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: it's it's interesting perspective because his the lesson from Bill
Speaker 1: Gates's childhood is that number one, having more money going
Speaker 1: to a school makes it a better school. Because he
Speaker 1: was in a rich kids school and the moms were
Speaker 1: able to raise money for a computer, which fucking nobody
Speaker 1: had back then. He became a billionaire. Um. But his lesson,
Speaker 1: the lesson he takes is not well, we should you know,
Speaker 1: I mean he does. The Bill in mid Gates Foundation
Speaker 1: does give computers to schools like they have. That's one
Speaker 1: of the things that do. But their primary lesson isn't.
Speaker 1: The primary lesson they take out of it isn't. And
Speaker 1: like the other big thing it's not just that they
Speaker 1: had the money, is that he got freedom. They altered
Speaker 1: his education plan, bespoke to him and his interests to
Speaker 1: make it work better for him, which I think is
Speaker 1: the reasonable lesson to take, is like, oh, we should
Speaker 1: taylor the kinds of educations kids receive to the kids
Speaker 1: in their interests, because not only will that make them
Speaker 1: more engage students, it will help them be more successful people.
Speaker 1: That's not the lesson he gets out of this. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But also the competitive version of education that involves driving
Speaker 1: cost down, you know, so that you can be the
Speaker 1: winner of the school education providing game is the opposite
Speaker 1: of what happened. Yes, he his education was involved tons
Speaker 1: of resources being ship loads of resources thrown at him. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's the best way to educate a yeah, and
Speaker 1: all that and freedom like yeah, yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: mix of it. Um. But he wants to bring market logic.
Speaker 1: He doesn't know. To his credit, he does not want to.
Speaker 1: He's not one of these guys that says we should
Speaker 1: just privatize the whole education system. But he does want
Speaker 1: to bring market logic to education, and that means that
Speaker 1: schools should compete with each other or be shut down
Speaker 1: and replaced if they don't perform well. During the early aughts,
Speaker 1: the Gates Foundations started pouring tens of millions of dollars
Speaker 1: into things like the Knowledge Is Power Program or KIP,
Speaker 1: a chain of charter schools that Gates once described as
Speaker 1: one of the very few places where great teachers are
Speaker 1: being made. I'm gonna quote from the New Profits of
Speaker 1: Capital to explain how these wonderful schools work. The KIP
Speaker 1: schools follow an extended day strict disciplinary regime. Students learn
Speaker 1: how to walk, get off the bus, and use the
Speaker 1: restroom in the Kip way. Students are not allowed to
Speaker 1: talk at school except to answer questions, and they have
Speaker 1: to earn their desks. At some KIP school, students who
Speaker 1: break minor rules are isolated and forced to wear signs
Speaker 1: around their next that read miscreant or cretan. Again the
Speaker 1: opposite of what made you successful. They didn't put you
Speaker 1: in a room when you were a They made you
Speaker 1: stop taking matt so you could do the thing you
Speaker 1: were interested in, Like fucking hell Bill. It's also like
Speaker 1: why why are all like billionaires or equivalent? Why do
Speaker 1: they only have the same ideas about Like this is
Speaker 1: some guilded age, it is some gilded ship. What is
Speaker 1: wrong with you? We gotta make up? We got torture
Speaker 1: sucking asshole. Keep schools are based on the work of
Speaker 1: Martin Seligman, a psychologist whose work on learned helplessness has
Speaker 1: also been adopted by the CIA, and they're enhanced interrogation
Speaker 1: slash torture program when you're When your charter school has
Speaker 1: a lot of the same intellectual DNA as the CIA
Speaker 1: torture program. There might be a problem there. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't know. Maybe maybe the guys at Guantanama recoding all
Speaker 1: sorts of rad software we just haven't seen. That's actually
Speaker 1: where zoom came from. You that you can tell they
Speaker 1: put a dude in a boo box and he made zoom. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: Advocates of this system will point out that KIP schools
Speaker 1: have much higher test scores than normal schools. However, this
Speaker 1: comes at the loss of many of their students. Kids
Speaker 1: who don't get with the program are counseled out or expelled.
Speaker 1: Only of them graduate. So the reason why KIP schools
Speaker 1: have high test scores is they kick out the kids
Speaker 1: who aren't good at that particular kind of school. This
Speaker 1: is how charter schools work across the country, which isn't
Speaker 1: to say there are an excellent I know some people
Speaker 1: who went to very good charter schools and they're very
Speaker 1: grateful for the educations that they got. We're not talking
Speaker 1: about individual charter schools here. I'm sure there are a
Speaker 1: number of people listening with good experiences. We're talking about
Speaker 1: the trend, the national trend of how this program. The
Speaker 1: programs work, um and this is a major trend among
Speaker 1: charter schools, some of which suspend as many of half
Speaker 1: of their students in a year, low performing students, kids
Speaker 1: with emotional or psychological disabilities. These kids are denied admission
Speaker 1: or purged. This is why in two thousand and fourteen
Speaker 1: the Department of Education had to issue a guidance reminding
Speaker 1: charter schools, but they had to obey civil rights loss.
Speaker 1: That's a good thing to have their mind. Kids. Yeah,
Speaker 1: all this like clase like libertarians. Yeah, it always is
Speaker 1: like hey, but also you have to evade basic decent.
Speaker 1: It's amazing because in twenty years there's going to be
Speaker 1: a billionaire who fucking played BioShock as a kid, and
Speaker 1: it's going to be like, I'm gonna give the schools
Speaker 1: four million dollars to make rapture, but the high school
Speaker 1: oh god, uh depressingly. I want to quote now from
Speaker 1: a section of Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error, which
Speaker 1: is a pretty good title for a book about, you know,
Speaker 1: problems in the education system. Many studies show that charters
Speaker 1: enroll a disproportionately small share of students who are English
Speaker 1: language learners or who have disabilities as compared with their
Speaker 1: home district. A survey of expulsion rates in the District
Speaker 1: of Columbia found that the charters, which enroll nearly half
Speaker 1: of the student population of the district, expel large numbers
Speaker 1: of children. The charter's expulsion rate is seventy two times
Speaker 1: the expulsion rate in public schools. As the charters shun
Speaker 1: those students, the local district gets a disproportionately large number
Speaker 1: of the students who are most expensive and most challenging
Speaker 1: to educate. When public students leave for charters, the budget
Speaker 1: of the public school shrinks, leaving them less able to
Speaker 1: provide a quality education to the vast majority of students.
Speaker 1: It's fucking segregation dressed up as fixing the education system
Speaker 1: by removing black and white kids from each other and
Speaker 1: then defunding the schools that black kids go to because
Speaker 1: they got kicked out of the kids the schools the
Speaker 1: white kids are going to. Um, it's cool, it's cool.
Speaker 1: It always his wines on that way, just so happens. Gosh, Gee, chucks,
Speaker 1: How does this country founded on white supremacy and genocide
Speaker 1: keep doing white supremacy and genocide? Gosh? Darn would who
Speaker 1: would have thought? Uh? In two thousand eight, Gates embarked
Speaker 1: on another program to apply his market logic to education.
Speaker 1: He put more than a billion dollars into reforming low
Speaker 1: income and minority schools. The basic idea was that they
Speaker 1: develop a set of metrics to evaluate teachers with the
Speaker 1: goal of retaining good ones and reshaping or removing bad
Speaker 1: ones over the course of seven years. There was no
Speaker 1: evidence that this program helped schools higher better teachers. They
Speaker 1: just Burt's a billion dollars not doing anything. A rand
Speaker 1: study showed no evidence of impact on student outcomes. From
Speaker 1: a write up in Business Insider quote, the study concluded
Speaker 1: that the initiative fared poorly because the school's got better
Speaker 1: over time at implementing measures of teacher effectiveness, rather than
Speaker 1: using those measures to actually improve student outcomes. It's they
Speaker 1: taught to the test but for teachers. In his view,
Speaker 1: the Gates Foundation initiative appears to have generally done more
Speaker 1: harm than good. It cost a fortune green rights, it
Speaker 1: produced significant political turmoil, and distracted from other more promising efforts.
Speaker 1: And when it comes to the Gates Foundation, that right
Speaker 1: there is often the issue as much as any sort
Speaker 1: of like mustache twirling evil Like. Sometimes it is like
Speaker 1: I'm gonna circumcise all the black people, But a lot
Speaker 1: of times it's just like, oh, well, let's well, let's
Speaker 1: let's let's make like provide incentives to make teachers better,
Speaker 1: and then huge amounts of resources go into making teachers
Speaker 1: pass a test that a guy who doesn't know anything
Speaker 1: about teaching help design, and so a lot of effort
Speaker 1: is wasted that could have gone to actually helping kids,
Speaker 1: but instead has gone to making things making it yeah anyway, um,
Speaker 1: and yeah, it's because Gates pour so much money into
Speaker 1: public health and education. His opinion is often the only
Speaker 1: opinion that matters. So if he has a bad idea,
Speaker 1: that bad idea gets a huge as it has to
Speaker 1: be taken seriously. Better ideas get ignored, and effort gets wasted.
Speaker 1: Here's another example of that. Starting in two thousand when
Speaker 1: his foundation, when his foundation was new, Bill Gates decided
Speaker 1: the big program with American education was that our schools
Speaker 1: were too big. The whole system needed to be disrupted.
Speaker 1: Large schools had to be broken up, more smaller schools
Speaker 1: had to be created. He poured two billion dollars into
Speaker 1: this program over the next nine years, which impacted fully
Speaker 1: eight percent of the nation's public high schools from a
Speaker 1: right up in Politico. So without a great deal of thought,
Speaker 1: one school district after another signed onto the notion that
Speaker 1: large public high school should be broken up and new
Speaker 1: smaller school should be created. This was an inherently messy process.
Speaker 1: The smaller schools proponents sometimes called them academies, would often
Speaker 1: be shoehorned into premises into the premises of larger schools,
Speaker 1: so you'd end up with two or three or more
Speaker 1: schools competing for space and resources in one building. That
Speaker 1: cost all sorts of headaches. Which schools would get to
Speaker 1: use the science labs or the gym's, how would the
Speaker 1: cafeterias be utilized? And who was responsible for policing the
Speaker 1: brawls amongst students from high rival schools. The program, it's
Speaker 1: just such a dumb idea. And like I went to
Speaker 1: I graduated in two thousand and six. The year I graduated,
Speaker 1: my school was the largest graduating class in US history,
Speaker 1: and it was the largest the next year two and
Speaker 1: the next. Plano schools are massive, they're some of the
Speaker 1: largest schools in the world. Like high schools like two
Speaker 1: thousand people was my graduating class something like that. Um,
Speaker 1: they're really good schools, Like they're like, nationally some of
Speaker 1: the best schools in the country. Obviously, plan it was
Speaker 1: a lot of money part of why. But like, it
Speaker 1: doesn't the fact that they're huge does not make them
Speaker 1: worse schools. It's simply it's simply irrelevant. Now you can
Speaker 1: argue class size might matter, but you can have small
Speaker 1: classes in a huge school. It's it's fine. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just fucking and yeah. Gates himself admitted in two
Speaker 1: thousand eight that this program was a huge failure. Tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of US students had their educations disrupted because
Speaker 1: a billionaire had a bad idea, and basically no one
Speaker 1: in the media covered the fact that this had flopped.
Speaker 1: Why would you. The Gates Foundation was doing another dozen
Speaker 1: dazzling things that they were going to cover, not the
Speaker 1: fact that, like, boy, it seems like a lot of
Speaker 1: their stuff doesn't work. Also, they're circumcising millions of black
Speaker 1: people and it's causing AIDS to get more deadly. But
Speaker 1: also they underwrite n P but they do underwrite NPR. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so it's like right, yeah, that's a significant chunk of
Speaker 1: the media. Yep. Yeah. Now the sheer amount of ship
Speaker 1: Bill and Melinda Gates have gotten up to over the
Speaker 1: last years, we're leaving out a lot um. We could
Speaker 1: talk more about standardized testing. We could talk more about
Speaker 1: his agricultural reform in Africa, which really we ought to um,
Speaker 1: but we've still got to talk about COVID vaccines and
Speaker 1: Jeffrey Epstein. So we're moving on. Let's talk about Bill
Speaker 1: Gates Is sex life next? First? But first let's ask
Speaker 1: the question on everyone's mind. Is he a grower or
Speaker 1: a shower? I look, Sophie, I get paid the big
Speaker 1: bucks to ask the hard questions, Okay, like how hard?
Speaker 1: How hard does he get? Like? And I don't get
Speaker 1: paid enough to listen to that. Honestly, Bill Gates doesn't
Speaker 1: get paid enough to have to listen to that. Uh
Speaker 1: products all right, So we're back and we're talking about
Speaker 1: Bill Gates. Is Bill Gates's chungus I think is the
Speaker 1: technical term for what he has. Yeah, anyway, it's probably
Speaker 1: not going to surprise anybody to learn that Bill never
Speaker 1: got better at flirting despite being one of the wealthiest
Speaker 1: people to ever exist. He did grow more successful at
Speaker 1: having sex, largely because he was one of the wealthiest
Speaker 1: people to ever exist. His primary horning ground was Microsoft
Speaker 1: and the Gates Foundation. Now earlier we discussed how he
Speaker 1: met his wife while he was her boss. Well, he
Speaker 1: met a lot of women in that way, in the
Speaker 1: biblical way, while he was her their boss. In the
Speaker 1: eight Windy Goldman Rome wrote a book titled The Microsoft File,
Speaker 1: where she claimed Gates had frequent affairs with employees. She
Speaker 1: alleged he'd started dating a sales manager in their German
Speaker 1: office before he even started seeing Melinda. Gates met this
Speaker 1: woman at a Microsoft corporate meeting in Monte Carlo. He
Speaker 1: sent her an email after saying that seeing her energized him,
Speaker 1: and adding I hope I didn't stare or anything. Gates
Speaker 1: canceled his flight back to the US to flirt with her.
Speaker 1: He sent her love letters, and the two embarked on
Speaker 1: a brief affair, even though this one was by her
Speaker 1: own admission, uncomfortable sleeping with her boss. Now we now
Speaker 1: know this was a pattern for Bill. In two thousand six,
Speaker 1: he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. When
Speaker 1: he left the meeting, he emailed the woman to ask
Speaker 1: her out to dinner, writing, if this makes you uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: pretend it never happened. But okay, I mean yeah, I
Speaker 1: just don't understand it is simply a power. I mean,
Speaker 1: why why do you need to do that? I don't know.
Speaker 1: To your he's not it's not it's not a Weinstein thing.
Speaker 1: He's not doing that because we have not heard any
Speaker 1: evidence that he Obviously there's a power and balance to
Speaker 1: discuss here, but I have an any of it. He's
Speaker 1: not like he's not raping employees. I've never heard any
Speaker 1: allegations of that. Um And in this case, he since
Speaker 1: this ladies letters saying like, hey, let's go to dinner.
Speaker 1: I'm a married billionaire. Uh but if I this makes
Speaker 1: you uncomfortable, let's just pretend it never happened. And she did.
Speaker 1: She decided she was uncomfortable, she ignored the email, and
Speaker 1: Gates did not pursue her further. I haven't her dad
Speaker 1: allegations that he harmed her career in any way. I
Speaker 1: don't think he's doing that. Like I don't think he's
Speaker 1: penalizing women who don't get with him. That said, I
Speaker 1: think it's pop. You could argue that like this woman
Speaker 1: in Germany may have gotten with him because she was like,
Speaker 1: maybe it'll hurt my career to not get with him. Right,
Speaker 1: he doesn't matter as much if he did it, as
Speaker 1: he's the CEO. Yeah. A year or so later, Gates
Speaker 1: was on a business trip on behalf of the Gates Foundation.
Speaker 1: This isn't like two seven two eight. He was traveling
Speaker 1: with a female employee. During a cocktail party, he whispered
Speaker 1: to her, I want to see you. Will you have
Speaker 1: dinner with me? The woman says she felt uncomfortable and
Speaker 1: laughed to avoid responding. From a write up in The
Speaker 1: New York Times, quote six current and former employees of Microsoft,
Speaker 1: the Foundation, and the firm that manages gates Fortune, said
Speaker 1: those incidents and others more recently, at times created an
Speaker 1: uncomfortable workplace environment. Mr Gates was known for making clumsy
Speaker 1: approaches to women in and out of the office. His
Speaker 1: behavior fueled widespread chatter among employees about his personal life.
Speaker 1: Some of the employees said that while they disapproved of Mr.
Speaker 1: Gates's behavior, they did not perceive it to be predatory.
Speaker 1: They said he did not pressure women to submit to
Speaker 1: his advances for the sake of their careers. And he
Speaker 1: seemed to feel that he was giving the women's space
Speaker 1: to refuse his advances. So again, we're not taught like technically,
Speaker 1: technically yes, it's not a Weinstein thing, but it's not okay,
Speaker 1: right like you you can you cannot be as bad
Speaker 1: as Harvey right Weinstein industrial rapist, and your behavior is
Speaker 1: still unacceptable. Um, because all, like, a work place is
Speaker 1: not a fucking nightclub. If if Bill Gates had a
Speaker 1: history of hitting on women awkwardly in nightclubs whatever, Like fine,
Speaker 1: everyone has the right to be like to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: you want to fun and then be told no if
Speaker 1: you're not being you know, bad about it. But this
Speaker 1: is a workplace. These are his employees. He runs the company. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not okay. Um again it's yeah so um. He
Speaker 1: was also noted by his employees to be dismissive towards
Speaker 1: his wife, Melinda, sometimes speaking to her during foundation meetings
Speaker 1: in ways that made employees cringe. Um on its own.
Speaker 1: I don't know if all of this would have merited
Speaker 1: an inclusion in an episode is Packed as this one, right,
Speaker 1: Compared to circumcising twelve million people and making an AIDS
Speaker 1: epidemic course it's not on that level, but it all
Speaker 1: helps set the stage that leads us, as all things
Speaker 1: eventually lead Andrew to Jeffrey Epstein. Ye, Jepstein, Carly Ray Jeffstein.
Speaker 1: That's a mash up of Jeffrey. I mean he did
Speaker 1: say call me maybe, but then he also sexually trafficked teenagers.
Speaker 1: Yeah it was it's the maybe that was taken out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm so sorry. Hey, I just met you and this
Speaker 1: is crazy, but get in the car or I will
Speaker 1: have your life systematically destroyed. It's time for you to
Speaker 1: be sexually traffics to the wealthiest men on the planet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not as not as catchy as as the original, but
Speaker 1: I think it but not as I think. It's got weights.
Speaker 1: It's something there work well. Workshop this a whole album
Speaker 1: of Jeffrey Epstein themed pop song. I mean you could,
Speaker 1: you could, you could like what is it that? What
Speaker 1: is that? What's her name? That? The lady who wrote
Speaker 1: the song monster? That one will work? Um? Yeah, the
Speaker 1: red Corvette Jeffrey Epstein's jet Um babies grow up too
Speaker 1: fast because of the child sex trafficking. That was the joke.
Speaker 1: I just want to make sure so by the mid
Speaker 1: odds Bill Gates was clearly frustrated by in his marriage.
Speaker 1: He was wealthy and powerful, but he had never enjoyed
Speaker 1: the kind of success with young women that other billionaires
Speaker 1: seemed to exhibit. You know, you've got Richard Branson like
Speaker 1: regularly jet skiing naked with supermodels, which seems to be
Speaker 1: his hobby. Um, Bill Gates doesn't do that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: And I think this frustrates him. Um, and he doesn't
Speaker 1: like he's clearly he's not personally like he's not like
Speaker 1: enough of a predator or anything to like take it.
Speaker 1: And for whatever reason, I don't know, it's weird, Like
Speaker 1: you think, just Bill, just just pay sex workers to
Speaker 1: hang out with you. You have the money. They'll be
Speaker 1: happy too. You can find some very nice sex workers
Speaker 1: who would love to make you look like you're cool
Speaker 1: and sexy all the time. You'd feel great and nobody
Speaker 1: would nobody reasonable would complain about it. Um. Yeah, anyway, Um,
Speaker 1: he gets frustrated, and I think that his sexual frustration
Speaker 1: is like that's like the bat signal to Jeffrey Epstein,
Speaker 1: a billionaire who isn't getting laid as much as he wants.
Speaker 1: Like Epstein could smell that ship from a mile away.
Speaker 1: He's like a shark um. Now the two met. Epstein
Speaker 1: and Gates meet in two thousand eleven, which is three
Speaker 1: years after Epstein pled guilty to celesity soliciting sex from
Speaker 1: a child. So you can't argue I had no idea
Speaker 1: very public. Yeah, I'm going to quote from the New
Speaker 1: York Times here. Mr Epstein and Mr Gates first met
Speaker 1: face to face on the evening of January thirty one,
Speaker 1: two thousand eleven, at Mr Epstein's town house on the
Speaker 1: Upper East Side. They were joined by Dr Eva Anderson Dubin,
Speaker 1: a former Miss Sweden who Mr Epstein had once dated,
Speaker 1: and her fifteen year old daughter. Dr Anderson Dubin's husband,
Speaker 1: the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, was a friend in
Speaker 1: business associate of Mr Epstein's. The gathering started at eight
Speaker 1: and lasted several hours, according to Miss Arnold, Mr gates
Speaker 1: is spokes woman. Mr Epstein subsequently boasted about the meeting
Speaker 1: and emails to friends and associates. Bill's great, he wrote
Speaker 1: in one reviewed by The Times. Mr Gates, in turn,
Speaker 1: praised Mr Epstein's charm and intelligence. Emailed in colleagues the
Speaker 1: next day, he said, a very attractive Swedish woman and
Speaker 1: her daughter dropped by, and I ended up staying there
Speaker 1: until quite late. Which why would why would you mention that?
Speaker 1: Why would you phrase it that way? Bill, that's your work?
Speaker 1: Email Christ to Epstein. Bill was the ultimate whale, a
Speaker 1: wealthy man child who could be separated from some of
Speaker 1: his money in exchange for access to women. Epstein pitched
Speaker 1: Gates an idea for a charitable fund seated by Gates
Speaker 1: Foundation money and donations by other rich guys he knew.
Speaker 1: So Epstein's like, you put in a bunch of money
Speaker 1: I can get we could make, like we can make
Speaker 1: like tens of billions of dollars we could raise to
Speaker 1: do to make a huge charity fund. And of course
Speaker 1: Epstein's proposal included a suggestion that he be paid point
Speaker 1: three percent of whatever money he raised, which would of
Speaker 1: course be tens of millions of dollars for him. Now,
Speaker 1: the good news is that Bill hires smart people. Uh,
Speaker 1: and the people who run his foundation that he sent
Speaker 1: to meet with Epstein spotted him as a con man. Immediately, Um,
Speaker 1: They're like, well this guy is full of ship. Nick Grifter, Like,
Speaker 1: we shouldn't get involved with him, but Bill remained fascinated
Speaker 1: with Epstein. He visited Epstein's mansion at least three times.
Speaker 1: He's on his plane. I think he went to the island.
Speaker 1: At one point, he emailed colleagues, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe I don't. I could probably have looked that up,
Speaker 1: but I'm a hack and a fraud. Um. But at
Speaker 1: one point Epstein emailed colleagues his lifestyle is very different
Speaker 1: and kind of intriguing, although it would not work for me.
Speaker 1: When questioned about what this meant after Epstein's death, Gates
Speaker 1: claimed he was referring to the decor of Jeffrey's mansion.
Speaker 1: J Yeah, that's that's what you meant, buddy. Yeah. Bill
Speaker 1: apparently talked about his unhappiness in his marriage with Epstein,
Speaker 1: and to be frank, we don't know the precise dimensions
Speaker 1: of their relationship. We don't know what Bill did or
Speaker 1: did not get up to Depstein. We don't have conclusive
Speaker 1: information about any of that, which is why it's probably
Speaker 1: going to get us in trouble. To title this podcast,
Speaker 1: Bill Gates sex offender and also sex offender um for sure,
Speaker 1: Bill Gates, the dick chopping sex offender of Epstein's Island, Um,
Speaker 1: something like that. In that one business affairs is ears
Speaker 1: are perking up now you're The actual fact of the
Speaker 1: matter is, we cannot ever include circumcision in a title
Speaker 1: because that immediately makes it a hot spot for the
Speaker 1: kind of arguments you do not want to get involved in. Um,
Speaker 1: don't ever say circumcision on the internet. That's all I'm
Speaker 1: gonna say on the matter. Um. It immediately goes off
Speaker 1: the rails, like like it's like it's it's like talking
Speaker 1: about Palestine, like yeah, so um yeah. Again, we don't
Speaker 1: know exactly what Bill did with Epstein. We know Melinda
Speaker 1: did meet with Epstein and Bill on one occasion, like
Speaker 1: she and Bill met Epstein um, And she has claimed
Speaker 1: that this like event still haunts her. I think it
Speaker 1: was in two thousand thirteen, And she seems to have
Speaker 1: gotten increasingly furious about Bill's relationship with Epstein after two thirteen.
Speaker 1: In two thousand nineteen, she started talking to advisors about
Speaker 1: divorcing her husband. And that's more or less where we
Speaker 1: are now. Just a few weeks before this episode was recorded,
Speaker 1: Microsoft corporate board members decided Bill Gates needed to step
Speaker 1: down from the board. While they pursued an investigation into
Speaker 1: an inappropriate relationship he may have had with a female
Speaker 1: Microsoft employee. Gates claims the decision to transition off the
Speaker 1: board was purely due to his desire to spend more
Speaker 1: time with on philanthropy um And this I think brings
Speaker 1: us to the last bit of our journey through the
Speaker 1: life of Billiam Gates, his role in the COVID nineteen
Speaker 1: pandemic and the current intellectual property status of its most
Speaker 1: successful vaccines. So this is that part of it, right
Speaker 1: is nineteen pages to get to nineteen plages and a
Speaker 1: surprising number of circumcisions right, way, way more circumcisions than
Speaker 1: I anticipated. Initiative. I was gonna if you'd if you'd
Speaker 1: asked me to wager the start, how many millions of
Speaker 1: circumcisions do you think you're going to be involved in
Speaker 1: this story? You probably would not have said twelve. I
Speaker 1: think that's fair now. The first Gates Foundation initiative geared
Speaker 1: towards fighting the plague was actually rather modest. On March eleven,
Speaker 1: two days before the who declared a pandemic, the Foundation
Speaker 1: started what they called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative
Speaker 1: with MasterCard and a charity called the Welcome Trust to
Speaker 1: identify and develop treatments to the virus. And again, as
Speaker 1: far as I could tell, I think Mastercard's only role
Speaker 1: in this is because it will make them look good,
Speaker 1: right like that, Well, we'll have Macrosoft involved, that will
Speaker 1: be good for their image, like MasterCard, MasterCard, Like well,
Speaker 1: you know know you've we've all been seen, like a
Speaker 1: car accident happened, and the first thing an injured person
Speaker 1: cries out for his MasterCard. You know, sometimes Visa shows
Speaker 1: up and it's just a real tragedy. Um, I always
Speaker 1: gave a MasterCard and my emergency kit. The fuck. But
Speaker 1: what this means is that from the beginning, Gates placed
Speaker 1: burnishing the public image of a finance company on equal
Speaker 1: footing with actual virology. In April, with the entire country
Speaker 1: locked the funk down and the virus just beginning to bite,
Speaker 1: Bill Gates launched the COVID nineteen Act Accelerator. This program
Speaker 1: was geared towards organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution
Speaker 1: of treatments and vaccines. Like everything the Gates Foundation funds,
Speaker 1: this was a public private partnership based around using charity
Speaker 1: to entice corporations to do the right thing by making
Speaker 1: it profitable. This was one of a number of programs
Speaker 1: all geared at funding vaccine research, but unlike most of those,
Speaker 1: the Accelerator was from the start focused on respecting the
Speaker 1: exclusive intellect actual property claims of whoever won the vaccine
Speaker 1: race from a right up a new republic. It's explicit
Speaker 1: arguments that intellectual property rights won't present problems for meeting
Speaker 1: global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must
Speaker 1: be protected even during a pandemic carry it the enormous
Speaker 1: weight of Gates's reputation as a wise, beneficent and prophetic leader.
Speaker 1: As vaccine research proceeded, a lot of people suggested that
Speaker 1: when one was developed, the recipe should basically be open source,
Speaker 1: so that any country with the capacity could make it
Speaker 1: without paying to license it. Gates fought against this. COVACS,
Speaker 1: which is the largest arm of his COVID Response organization,
Speaker 1: proposed instead that poor countries should have vaccines donated to
Speaker 1: them by rich countries who would fund this through vaccine
Speaker 1: sales and wealthier countries. It was hoped that this would vaccine.
Speaker 1: This was not to vaccinite all of them this was
Speaker 1: to vaccinate about twenty percent of people in load of
Speaker 1: middle income countries. After that, those governments would have to
Speaker 1: bid and compete on the open market for access to vaccines.
Speaker 1: So one side of this is saying the vaccine should
Speaker 1: be open so is and equally available to everybody, to
Speaker 1: be manufactured everywhere for as close to free as humanly possible.
Speaker 1: And Bill Gates says, what if instead we do it
Speaker 1: for money and we donate of the necessary vaccines to
Speaker 1: poor people. Yeah, they'll they'll never learn, they'll they'll never
Speaker 1: learn how to teach themselves how to stay alive unless
Speaker 1: we make them work for it. It's like an e
Speaker 1: m T stay alive. You have like three gunshot wounds,
Speaker 1: and e MT like shows up and like bandages one
Speaker 1: of them and then says, well, if I if I
Speaker 1: handle the rest for you, you're never gonna learn how
Speaker 1: to bandage your own gun shot wounds. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: if you if you can pay for the gauss like,
Speaker 1: I'll let you mix yourself again. You take his big
Speaker 1: picture logic about healthcare and apply it to an actual
Speaker 1: health problem, and it's immediately nonsense. Like, it's just very
Speaker 1: clearly a bad idea. But because you're talking about the
Speaker 1: big picture, people think he's smarter. Now. Many people wore
Speaker 1: that his ideas were horrible and that by fighting against
Speaker 1: the idea of a people's vaccine, he was essentially saying
Speaker 1: it was fine for people to die to protect the
Speaker 1: concept of intellectual property. Manuel Martin, a policy advisor for
Speaker 1: Doctors Without Porters, has since said that people in the
Speaker 1: Gates administration we're central in pushing a global line that
Speaker 1: quote i P is not an access barrier in vaccines.
Speaker 1: Of course, the only reason to have i P is
Speaker 1: to make an access barriers. Of i P is about
Speaker 1: reducing access. That's the only reason for it to exist. Like,
Speaker 1: which is not to say there's zero thing like obviously,
Speaker 1: like I'm a I'm not gonna like, but it's like
Speaker 1: there's zero reason for the kind of i P that
Speaker 1: he wants to exist, like obviously like and it's obviously
Speaker 1: it always winds up like it's it's one of it
Speaker 1: would be one of those things if like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: the people who invented the Avengers and Superman and stuff
Speaker 1: got to make money off of their things instead of
Speaker 1: these gigantic syndicates using IP law to anyway, Well, everything
Speaker 1: Disney does, like funk all of this ship is what
Speaker 1: I'm saying. Like I I believe in the ability of
Speaker 1: an artist to have control over their art obviously, um
Speaker 1: and for the record, I think that if you're I
Speaker 1: think for I think, for example, one of the things
Speaker 1: we as a society could do is when we have
Speaker 1: a global pandemic and an international team of heroic researchers
Speaker 1: creates vaccines in record time, maybe we should make sure
Speaker 1: none of them ever have to worry about anything financial
Speaker 1: for the rest of their lives. Like, yeah, maybe that's
Speaker 1: the thing we could do is the planet. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: actual Tony Stark happened, and yet we couldn't manage to
Speaker 1: do anything good. It's because the people who did the
Speaker 1: amazing thing weren't Tony Stark's. They were international teams of
Speaker 1: of of very dedicated researchers whose names most people will
Speaker 1: never know and also should know because they will get
Speaker 1: assassinated by lunatics like you think. And there is no
Speaker 1: Tony Well. Tony Stark is the one saying this thing
Speaker 1: other people invented, uh should be profitable to a group
Speaker 1: of people separate from the people who invented it, um
Speaker 1: and other it's worth human death for this to be
Speaker 1: the way it works. Um. And again, when it comes
Speaker 1: to i P, if you're talking about like a novel
Speaker 1: or like Mickey Mouse or whatever, right, we can argue
Speaker 1: about how like bad it is culturally, but it's at
Speaker 1: it worst modest harm because again you're talking about Mickey Mouse.
Speaker 1: When we're talking about vaccines, you're literally talking about restricting
Speaker 1: who gets life saving medicine. That's what i P protections
Speaker 1: are for vaccines is a restriction on whose life gets saved.
Speaker 1: James Love is the founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International,
Speaker 1: a think tank that studies the pharmaceutical industry in i P.
Speaker 1: He's been involved in global public health policy as long
Speaker 1: as Bill Gates and has analyzed his impact for quite
Speaker 1: a while. He points out that at the start there
Speaker 1: was a fight between a pooling approach advised by groups
Speaker 1: like the w h o C TAP, which basically what
Speaker 1: have said, we should pool research. Any research done anywhere
Speaker 1: in the world should be available to all researchers working
Speaker 1: on this program. We should open source the entire process
Speaker 1: of research, the vaccine process, all of the studies into
Speaker 1: its effect, all of this should be pulled together. We
Speaker 1: should pool knowledge. You may recognize this is exactly the
Speaker 1: same thing computer nerds were doing in the nineteen seventies
Speaker 1: when Bill Gates wrote an angry open letter at them.
Speaker 1: They were pooling their knowledge to improve a thing. Bill
Speaker 1: Gates got really fucking angry. And of course, when this
Speaker 1: happened with a vaccine, Bill Gates fought like a devil
Speaker 1: against it. Quote. Things could have gone either way, says Love,
Speaker 1: but Gates wanted exclusive rights, maintained. He acted fast to
Speaker 1: stop the push for sharing the knowledge needed to make
Speaker 1: the products, the know how, the data, the cell lines,
Speaker 1: the tech transfer, the transparency that is critically important in
Speaker 1: a dozen ways. The pooling approach represented by c TAP
Speaker 1: included all of that. Instead of backing those early discussions,
Speaker 1: he raced ahead and signaled support for business as usual
Speaker 1: on intellectual property by announcing the ACT Accelerator in March.
Speaker 1: And how did Gates's public private partnership work? One year later?
Speaker 1: His ACT Accelerator has completely failed in its goal of
Speaker 1: providing discounted vaccines to the Priority five of the world's
Speaker 1: poorest people. The drug companies and wealthy nations that supported
Speaker 1: his plan have all made bilateral agreements that basically said
Speaker 1: fuck poor countries. As Peter Hoton's, dean of the National
Speaker 1: School of Tropical Medicine, said, the low and middle income
Speaker 1: countries are pretty much on their own and there's just
Speaker 1: not much out there. Despite their best efforts, the Gates
Speaker 1: model and its intent and its institutions are still industry dependent. Now.
Speaker 1: The ACT Accelerator is also technically part of the w
Speaker 1: h O, but it is funded, managed, and staffed mostly
Speaker 1: by Gates Foundation people. It has ensured that globally rich
Speaker 1: countries and respect for intellectual property have been prioritized over
Speaker 1: human lives. From New Republic quote companies partnering with Kovacs
Speaker 1: are allowed to set their own tiered prices. They are
Speaker 1: subject to almost no transparency requirements and to toothless contractual
Speaker 1: nods to equitable access that have never been enforced. Crucially,
Speaker 1: the companies retain exclusive rights to their electoral property. If
Speaker 1: they stray from their Gates Foundation line on exclusive rights,
Speaker 1: they're quickly brought to heal. When the director of Oxford's
Speaker 1: Jenner Institute had funny ideas about placing the rights to
Speaker 1: it's KOVAC supported vaccine candidate in the public domain, Gates intervened,
Speaker 1: As reported by Kaiser Health News. A few weeks later, Oxford,
Speaker 1: urged on by the Billy Melinda Gates Foundation, reversed course
Speaker 1: and signed an exclusive vaccine deal with Astra Zeneca that
Speaker 1: gave the pharmaceutical giant soul rights to know and no
Speaker 1: guarantee of low prices. So, yeah, it's so weird to
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess that's how you control the market
Speaker 1: is make sure everyone thinks that the same, like, by
Speaker 1: the same rules you want. But it's like who gives
Speaker 1: a ship if someone else gives away their property, Yeah,
Speaker 1: their intellectual property, but obviously it's it's you know again,
Speaker 1: I keep going back to Jonah Salk, one of the
Speaker 1: human kind's greatest heroes, who, when asked if he was
Speaker 1: going to patent the polio vaccine, said you might as
Speaker 1: well patent the sun, to which Bill Gates responded, that's
Speaker 1: actually a pretty good idea. Yeah, can you did you
Speaker 1: are working? Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's exactly the kind
Speaker 1: of thing. So he would have strong armed Jonas Salk
Speaker 1: into not do Yeah, he would have. He would have.
Speaker 1: He would not have not a listened to Jonas about
Speaker 1: that ship. Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the
Speaker 1: growing interest in intellectual property barriers. In recent months, as
Speaker 1: the debate has shifted from the w h O to
Speaker 1: the w t O, reporters have drawn testy responses from
Speaker 1: Gates that hearkened back to his prickly performances before Congressional
Speaker 1: anti trust hearings a quarter century ago. When a Fast
Speaker 1: Company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates
Speaker 1: raising his voice slightly and laughing and frustration before snapping,
Speaker 1: it's irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn't
Speaker 1: about i P, but it is about i P. There
Speaker 1: is very little, really little, real disagreement among epidemiologists here.
Speaker 1: Gates's own arguments have been petulant and childish. He has suggested,
Speaker 1: for example, that India, which makes more vaccines than any
Speaker 1: other country, can't be trusted to safely manufacture it's COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen vaccines. He has called advocates of poor countries spoiled,
Speaker 1: telling Reuters, it's the classic situation in global health where
Speaker 1: advocates all of a sudden want the vaccine for zero dollars,
Speaker 1: and right away we paid for this with public money.
Speaker 1: Bill it should be free because the plague sucks, like
Speaker 1: god damn it. Like hello, Bill, this is the only
Speaker 1: way this comes to a stop. Yeah, you don't even
Speaker 1: have to have the fucking like anarchist, altruist, you know,
Speaker 1: human positive at it. You should be like, well, I
Speaker 1: wanted to be free because I want to go back
Speaker 1: to bars, like I want to be able to drink
Speaker 1: in a bar. Give away the vaccine. I want to
Speaker 1: go on vacation in Mexico. Give everyone the vaccine for free.
Speaker 1: Like there's a selfish way to justify this too, but
Speaker 1: it's it's it's amazing. Um. When he has been challenged
Speaker 1: that his capitalist approach to vaccinating the world is dumb
Speaker 1: and evil, especially since the vaccines were developed largely with
Speaker 1: public money, including ten years have publicly funded m R
Speaker 1: and A vaccine research that made up the entire underpinning
Speaker 1: of these vaccines, he has responded with snide comments about socialism,
Speaker 1: saying North Korea doesn't have that many vaccines. As far
Speaker 1: as we can tell, this is true. I think James
Speaker 1: Love probably put it best if you said to an
Speaker 1: ordinary person, we're in a pandemic. Let's figure out everyone
Speaker 1: who can make vaccines and give them everything they need
Speaker 1: to get online as fast as possible. It would be
Speaker 1: a no brainer. But Gates won't go there, neither will
Speaker 1: the people dependent on his funding. He has immense power.
Speaker 1: He can get you fired from a u win job.
Speaker 1: He knows that if you want to work in global
Speaker 1: public health, you'd better not make an enemy of the
Speaker 1: Gates Foundation by questioning its positions on IPM monopolies. And
Speaker 1: there are a lot of advantages to being on his team.
Speaker 1: It's a sweet, comfortable ride for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: The good news is that it does look like Bill
Speaker 1: Gates is more on the losing side of this issue
Speaker 1: than the winning one. Biden has recently somewhat reluctantly committed
Speaker 1: to a more open approach to sharing vaccines and vaccine ingredients.
Speaker 1: Gates himself has partly walked back his own commitment to
Speaker 1: an ip focused vaccine rollout after massive backlash. But for
Speaker 1: a lot of dead people, the damage is done already.
Speaker 1: No one should be surprised about the toxic impact Gates
Speaker 1: has had on the COVID nineteen rollout in public health
Speaker 1: in general. He has been extremely consistent his entire life,
Speaker 1: from his first letter to the Computer hobbyist community to
Speaker 1: the corpse fires burning in the streets of the global South.
Speaker 1: This is what you get when you let one man
Speaker 1: born to the most inconceivable privilege of perhaps any human
Speaker 1: in history, make life and death decisions for billions of strangers. Anyway,
Speaker 1: I don't like Bill Gates a lot. Yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: not into it. It's so common though. I will just
Speaker 1: say I think this is this is as far as
Speaker 1: the planet goes, and you know, his peers go, this
Speaker 1: might be the least bastardy bastard we've done, in spite
Speaker 1: of on some of the most past I mean, to
Speaker 1: be fair, King Leopold, yeah you've done. He's definitely mean.
Speaker 1: But it's also a question of um King Leopold's death toll. Well.
Speaker 1: I mean, you can argue to a degree, like the
Speaker 1: violence that's ongoing in the Congo someone side to him,
Speaker 1: but the numbers, you don't know how many people Bill
Speaker 1: gates Is impact are going to die as a result
Speaker 1: of the impact he's had on global health. And it
Speaker 1: might be in that live safe to be honest, because
Speaker 1: of the fucking malarious ship. But like it's it's it's hard.
Speaker 1: He's done so much. It's really difficult for parts out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's I I think though it is it is a
Speaker 1: little bit that history of you know, is a great
Speaker 1: manner is it forces thing? Because I will say the
Speaker 1: evil Bill Gates has done would easily have been done
Speaker 1: by someone else. In fact, actively there are other people
Speaker 1: pursuing you know, that's sort of like benevolent but market driven,
Speaker 1: just like any American billionaire. Yeah, I mean is a
Speaker 1: candidate to do cisely one, but Bill Gates is the
Speaker 1: one who did it. Yeah, And it's it's the So
Speaker 1: it's a kind of thing where um, yes, this is
Speaker 1: a system problem. The system failure is that he accumulated
Speaker 1: enough money to be able to do this, um as
Speaker 1: opposed to that money going into taxes and then maybe
Speaker 1: us deciding as a nation, well let's provide aid to
Speaker 1: other countries to build up their health vote on it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I would just say any American billionaire would
Speaker 1: almost by definition have the lack of perspective in a
Speaker 1: very similar way to build absolutely that that his his
Speaker 1: actions I guess seemed inevitable had had he been hit
Speaker 1: by a bus, had he fallen off the mountain, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the other would have done this the fucking briefcase boy
Speaker 1: would have would have been this person it hadn't have
Speaker 1: been built. I guess that's what I What I mean
Speaker 1: is it's like this, this feel it's like less like
Speaker 1: specifically Bill unique bastardom. That's gonna be my argument on this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're all yeah, I mean, yes, yes. The the answer
Speaker 1: is the actual bastard Here is a system that lets
Speaker 1: individuals accumulate billions of dollars by by modifying every single thing,
Speaker 1: even though the only reason they were able to make
Speaker 1: those money that money is because a lot of nicer
Speaker 1: people didn't co modify cool shit in order to make
Speaker 1: it better. Yum and yeah, it's it's it's truly this
Speaker 1: like thinking they did it on their own. Um that like,
Speaker 1: that's the lack of perspective. I think what's important about
Speaker 1: the Bill Gates story is covering things like okay, well,
Speaker 1: because people are sharing and trading software for free, first off,
Speaker 1: it helps, it creates the industry he succeeds in, and
Speaker 1: then using his product for free and sharing, it creates
Speaker 1: the demand that allows him to get rich in the
Speaker 1: first place, and he then makes what made him He
Speaker 1: makes this thing a legal Basically um. And he does
Speaker 1: that with everything his whole life. This um. You know,
Speaker 1: he he benefits fundamentally from the public sector, from pooled
Speaker 1: resources of the community being invested in him, and he
Speaker 1: takes that and turns that into personal wealth and turns
Speaker 1: that into When he does give that away, he only
Speaker 1: does it in whatever way he personally thinks is best.
Speaker 1: Because all that matters is what Bill thinks, and it is.
Speaker 1: It makes it clear covering this guy's story, covering the
Speaker 1: story of the Homebrew Computer Club, those are the guys,
Speaker 1: and talking about you know, the scientists using public money
Speaker 1: who developed these vaccines that then became an engine for profit.
Speaker 1: It makes it clear. And what's important about this story
Speaker 1: because it's not just Bill. These people are parasites. These
Speaker 1: people are parasites. That's what that's what is happening here.
Speaker 1: This is the story of a parasite who got fat
Speaker 1: off of public investments that gave him an incredible opportunity
Speaker 1: which he then used to pull the rug out from
Speaker 1: under the circumcised twelve million people. Yeah, and then and
Speaker 1: then it's like, why you mad at me for sucking
Speaker 1: all this blood? Yeah yeah, yeah, nobody else gets blood. Um,
Speaker 1: but I'll give some away for free to MasterCard. Uh god,
Speaker 1: damn it, God, this is cool. Yeah, it's it's fucking rad, dude.
Speaker 1: You love to see it, well, Andrew, Yeah, you gotta
Speaker 1: got a puble maybe two plug doubles. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: just uh, you know it's this racist. We went independent
Speaker 1: as a podcast, so you can go to suboptimal pods
Speaker 1: dot com and find out how to get some of
Speaker 1: the premium content. By the way I should pitch my
Speaker 1: favorite piece of premium content is I'm a person who
Speaker 1: I've like blocked by hand. This is not with a
Speaker 1: blocklist like over people. That's amazing, Andrew, that's incredible. One
Speaker 1: I will consider unblocked. We stand a blocking king. That's
Speaker 1: self care. I recently turned off notifications for anyone I
Speaker 1: don't follow, and I know I should. No single thing
Speaker 1: I've ever done has improved my mental health more than that.
Speaker 1: It's amazing. I just don't see ship that other people
Speaker 1: post if I don't like them already. It's great. Um,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that's where I should be. It is,
Speaker 1: It's where we should all be. Anyway, this has been
Speaker 1: behind the bastards. Uh, find Bill Gates in the street. Um,
Speaker 1: but don't just stop at build gates. That's I think
Speaker 1: to me. The lesson is you got to work your
Speaker 1: way down the centers of capital and distribute it to
Speaker 1: the people, um back to because we we gave him,
Speaker 1: We gave him the indents, we gave him, we gave
Speaker 1: him the idea for graphical user interfaces. We did we
Speaker 1: did that. So take his money and use it to
Speaker 1: buy vaccines and rifles for the global South. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: your money, your money, it's it's I don't know. It's
Speaker 1: the end of the episode, all right,