Part Two: The Ballad of Bill Gates

Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti to continue to discuss Bill Gates.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M what's hungover my the host of this podcast Behind
the Bastards, the podcast that's being recorded at the unreasonably
early hour of Sophie, what is it? What time is
it right now? Tom Jesus Christ? So like the crack

(00:24):
of dawn, we're up doing this. I just hope you all,
I hope you all respected. This is why we have
too heavily. We have to. We have to sue anybody
who distributes this podcast for free because if all of
the backbreaking labor getting up at the crack of two
pm to record this podcast after I was drinking last night,

(00:45):
unbelievable dedication. I think we started around one, and yesterday
you text me being like, what time are we starting?
And I said one, you go, Jesus Sophie, that's so early.
I know, I know. This is this is the dedication
that I bring to my craft, which is why Well

(01:05):
Andrew would consider me. I'm on the other side of things.
I started waking up super early, so well Andrew, oh,
Drew Drew in Yeah, yeah, T Drizzle. Do people call
you T drizzle because it should I think they actually

(01:27):
have on um fellow, I heart podcast The Daily Side
Guys that feels like exactly the kind of ship they
would say. I think it's t Drizzle is a good name.
So we're just gonna roll forward with that. Yeah, Andrew,
how are you? How are you feeling about Bill Gates

(01:48):
so far? Have you learned anything new? We I feel
like we have gotten. We haven't gotten as far as
the bombshells so far. I'm feeling about the same as
I did when I walked in, which is like yeah,
but but not like seriously yea, yeah, that guy casual,

(02:10):
just like causual, stoic. Yeah, I don't. I don't think
he's gotten past. And again, it sounded like that was
going to be a point of potential debate, but I
would argue, he, I don't think he has eclipsed any
given billionaire, any given tech billionaire in back at this point. Yeah. Yeah,

(02:31):
So let's talk about what happens next. When we last
left Bill Gates, he just succeeded in burning tens of
millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man hours
fighting against a federal anti trust case. He won in
the end, as billionaires nearly always do, but the whole
process exhausted him emotionally. Microsoft's NASDAC value had been cut
in half, which destroyed about two hundred billion dollars in

(02:52):
fake money held by rich assholes like Gates. They made
it all back, of course, because they didn't actually lose anything,
but on paper they had less of an impossible fortune
for a while. Now. One long term impact of the
antitrust suit is that for all time Bill Gates will
remain a convicted monopolist. The stink this put on him
in Microsoft lasted longer than the actual charges. By September

(03:14):
of nineteen six, a huge number of top executives had
fled the company. This was the dot com boom, and
sexy new e businesses were starting every day. A lot
of opportunists figured as the antitrust case started spinning up
that Microsoft's day in the sun was over and it
was time to find the next big tech grift. Corey
Doctor will argue that we owe Google's existence and part
to the trauma Bill felt over the antitrust suit. Gates

(03:37):
had noted in the past that lingering fear of the
federal government is what stopped him from doing the same
thing to Google that he'd done to Netscape in two
thousand nineteen, but was asked by Kara Swisher why Microsoft
hadn't bought Android before Google. This was just seven years
after the anti trust action, and he claims that it
was he was just too scared of the d O
jay to risk it so again. Even though the government

(03:57):
doesn't win this case, it is good to do this
thing because it stops people like Bill Gates from sucking
up as much things as and it sounds like enough
of this was simply like on a personal level, he
was scared of the humiliation. He didn't want to do
another deposition. Now. The antitrust case had more of an
immediate impact on Gates. It convinced him to step down

(04:19):
from his position as at the head of Microsoft sort of.
Steve Balmer had become President of Microsoft, taking over more
of the day to day management of the company as
Bill Gates began to pull back. In two thousand, Gates
stepped down the CEO of Microsoft and Balmer took his place.
Bill was forty four at the time, and he remained
the chairman of the board in chief software architect at

(04:40):
the time. This was built as a way for Gates,
whose public image was of a genius programmer, to spend
his time exploring new technology. Two thousand would also mark
the point at which Gates increasingly got involved with philanthropy. Now,
before we get into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,
we should probably step back and cover some of the
developments in Bill's personal life during the late ninet nineties

(05:00):
that we sort of missed while we were talking about
business stuff. Last episode was obviously a big year for
Microsoft the company and for the tech industry as a whole,
but nine was an even more momentous year for Bill's
personal life. On the positive side of things, it's the
year he married Melinda French is now about to be
former wife. At the time they started dating, Melinda was
a Microsoft employee, a product manager. She started working there

(05:23):
in nineteen eight seven, the year after she graduated from college. Today,
this kind of relationship sets off immediate alarm belts for
a lot of people, but for decades it was kind
of framed in the media as like a Pam and
Jim style office romance. Bill and Melinda both gave interviews
over the years playing up how cute their beginnings were.
He flirted at her when they sat together at a conference,
which what is the chance Bill did not arranged to

(05:45):
sit next to her. We know this man, but he
absolutely made that happen. His actual EMO. Yeah that Later
they act just happened to run into each other in
a company parking lot. Again, he absolutely engineered that, and
Bill asked her out on a on a date, and
for a long time the story was they fell in
love and became a billionaire power couple. The end reality was,

(06:06):
of course, much grosser, but we'll talk about that later.
Nineteen ninety four was also a year of tragedy for
the Gates family. Bill had remained close with his parents.
He moved Microsoft back to Seattle in parts so he
could be near them. He had his dad's legal firm
represent the company, and he and his parents maintained their
tradition of Sunday dinner. He bought a house near them
to facilitate this. Ever since the late nineteen eighties, when

(06:27):
he got Fuck You Money, Bill's mom had advised him
to get into philanthropy, and since Bill had some control
issues with his mother, this became a source of tension
between them. She would press him to give away his
fortune and he'd snap, I'm just trying to run my company,
Mommy Gates eventually harangued her boy into raising money for
the United Way. This of course led other nonprofits to
beg him for money, and soon he was overwhelmed by

(06:48):
all the requests. He kept being too busy to deal
with it, and his mom kept pressuring him until she
was diagnosed with some horrible fucking cancer even rich people
can't escape, and she died in nineteen ninety four. Bill
Senior was as devastated by this as you'd expect, and
for a time he struggled to find ways to fill
his days. Eventually, he asked his son and daughter in
law if he could start going through their stack of
requests for philanthropy and give some of their money away. This,

(07:11):
as has claimed in later interviews, was kind of the
start of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and before
the foundation itself existed, Like they just kind of gave
him like a hundred million dollars to hand out. Basically,
Um was like sure, like eighty bucks for them, you know,
Um and uh so yeah. For for most of like
the late nineties, it's just kind of his dad handling

(07:32):
the Gates philanthropy. But then Bill quits being the secret
of Microsoft, and like two thousand and Melinda and he
start taking a more active role in philanthropy. The way
this was generally framed in the media was Bill Gates
leaves Microsoft behind to save the world, And there are
a lot of articles even up to the present day
with similar titles. Back in February of this year, there
was an article titled Bill Gates has a plan to

(07:54):
save the world in the Economists, which is like puffing
up one of his books about climate change or some ship.
But there's been bunch of pieces like that, right, yeah. Now.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started officially in the
year two thousand. It began with I think a hundred
million dollars, which was like the Bill Gates equivalent again,
like eighty bucks. The foundation expanded massively in two thousand six,
when Bill Gates convinced Warren Buffett to give most of

(08:16):
his fortune away to the organization. He claimed that he
felt Bill and Melinda could be trusted to use it
for good. And if you just sort of watched by
the sidelines, that probably looked like a defensive point, a
defensible point for most of the public crusade uh from
for years, the most public crusade of the Gates Foundation
was their war against malaria. UM. By two thousand eighteen,

(08:37):
they put almost four billion dollars towards fighting the deadly
disease around the world, in a mix of aid programs
to struggling nations, grants to researchers and scientists, all that stuff. Now,
malaria has probably killed more human beings than any other
single cause in history. It's like the number one killer
of human beings across all time. So good, good thing

(08:58):
to fight. I would I would have three like, yes,
sounds good. Yeah. And Bill certainly can't be faulted for
lack of ambition here. He has stated his goal is
the total elimination of malaria, and scientists seem to suggest
this is possible. Now, this is an ongoing struggle. I
haven't found anything that suggests the Gates Foundation has been
like ineffective and their struggle against malaria. Obviously they haven't
bet in it. But that's you know, pretty big, pretty

(09:20):
big task. Um. And it's probably fair to say that
their advocacy and money has contributed to a lot of
life saving programs and aided in the battle against one
of mankind's death least foes. The Gates As have also
pledged ten billion dollars over the next decade to provide
free vaccines to the world's poor. Through its Global Alliance
for Vaccines and Immunization or GAVY, the foundation has vaccinated

(09:41):
millions of kids in impoverished countries against polio and other
horrible ship. Bill and Melinda takes some credit for the
fact that between nineteen nine and twelve, total deaths of
children under five dropped from twelve point six million to
six point six million. Now, there's no way to evaluate
how much of an impact they had on that, but
vaccinating it's absolutely saves lives. Here's the thing, though, The

(10:02):
whole story is not just the cool. Question should not
just be does this fat foundation's work save lives? Because
that's not all we're talking about here um, and it's
not as something you can answer that simply because the
tens of billions of dollars in that foundation we're able
to come from Gates and other plutocrats because they didn't
pay that ship in taxes. It's wonderful to vaccinate kids,

(10:24):
but the foundation brings more than free medicine. It spreads
a specific ideology about who should have wealth and about
how problems ought to be solved. In our society. I
want to quote now from a book called The New
Profits of Capital, which goes into some detail about what
I find so unsettling in Gates's ideology. As Bill Gates
has Riley noted, they are more interested in cures for

(10:45):
baldness than in cures from malaria. Why. Melinda Gates argues
that there is simply no rich world market for products
like diarrhea or pneumonia vaccines. Their solution is to use
the Gates Foundation to create such a market in poor countries.
If we could stimulate the pharmaceutical companies through public private
partnerships to create vaccines, if we could guarantee them the
market of millions of children getting this vaccine and then

(11:06):
being paid for it in the developing world, if we
could commit to a market and knew that those that
demand would be there, we could insent them with the
right research dollars to actually create those vaccines. That's Bill now.
Bill is, above all else a believer in the power
of profit driven capitalism. He thinks the best way to
do good is by providing profit incentives for corporations to
carry out behavior that also helps suffering people. But this

(11:28):
still means that those profits are valued more in his
world than those lives. When Jonah Saul convented the polio vaccine,
he was asked why he did not patent it, and
he said, you might as well try to patent the sun.
To Salk, a man whose contribution to our species is
literally incalculable, the vaccine was not a commodity. It was health.
It was millions of human lives not cut short, hundreds

(11:50):
of thousands of cumulative years not lived in pain. The
Gates Foundation has done things that save lives, but this
is not a zero sum game. The question isn't free vaccine.
It's vaccines or not. It's do we let individual men
accumulate the wealth necessary to operate foundations like this, or
do we build a world with less in equality, where
human beings don't need a profit motive to vaccinate starving children. Yeah?

(12:13):
Well yea. And also like where you know, philanthropy isn't
at the whim of you know, a handful of white dudes, exactly,
And and and that's that's kind of what we're building to.
I assure you this becomes more than just an ideological argument.
There's there's there's there's solid stuff to dig in. Here,
but I want to quote again from that book, the
new profits of capital. Turning something into a commodity means

(12:35):
it is no longer a right or even potentially a right.
It means that the commodity's value is now judged primarily
on whether or not it will turn a profit, and
people's access to the commodity hinges upon their ability to
pay for it. In the United States, where health care
is a commodity, the difference in lifespan between a poor
black man and a wealthy white woman is fourteen years.

(12:56):
We are forty six in the world for infant mortality,
this being the wealthiest country on Earth. Babies in poor
states like Alabama are twice as likely to die as
infants and wealthy areas. This is part of why virtually
all public health experts agree that universal health care is
a good idea. But as Nicole ash Off rights quote,
when we frame the problem of poor people in the

(13:18):
Global South dying from preventable diseases as a market failure problem,
we close off the possibility of building a health care
system in which healthcare is a right and does not
depend on one's ability to pay. And that's what's so
toxic about the Gates Foundation. Yeah, it's his idea, his
whole idea, like, yeah, it's wonderful to get vaccines to
poor people. But the way he wants to do that

(13:38):
is by creating a financial incentive to do that, rather
than by saying, well, we all have a responsibility, even
to people outside of our country, and maybe looking at
the COVID nine team pandemic, we can say, oh, yeah,
actually we all benefit in a purely selfish way from
making sure that healthcare is available worldwide. Turns out we
are all in this together and as opposed to let's

(14:01):
make it profitable to save children um. In two thousand fifteen,
the Gates Foundation funded to study in The Lancet and
that study it was about like public health options worldwide,
and that study called for universal healthcare. Despite this, in
that year's Development Report, the Gates Foundation claimed that universal
healthcare has quote limitations as a global development goal and

(14:23):
that evidence as to whether or not it helps health
outcomes is mixed. Bill Gates is on the side of
intellectual property, the right of corporations to profit maxively from
vaccines developed by scientists, often using public money. Millions and
foundation funds go to pharmaceutical companies. In fact, shockingly large
amounts of Gates Foundation money goes to big businesses, and

(14:44):
a lot of times as gifts to those businesses. For example,
in two thousand fourteen, the Gates Foundation announced an eleven
million dollar grant to MasterCard so that they could build
a financial inclusion lab in Kenya. The basic idea is
Kenya needs foreign investments, but investing in Africa is risky,

(15:04):
so you have to bribe MasterCard to take a chance
on Kenya. Um and that that aid is not a
loan or investment. It was a gift that we're giving
fucking MasterCard eleven million dollars. And the Gates Foundation does
this a lot. They give multimillion dollar gifts to mega
corporations like Vodafone, who themselves pay no corporate tax in
the UK. The Gates Foundation also gives gifts to the

(15:26):
Monsanto corporation, who Bill argues should be bribed to take
over more and more responsibility for agriculture in Africa. He
there's all these articles we're Bill talking about, like how
scary it is the population of Africa is set to explode.
Um and number one, there's some uncomfortable racial undertones. His
obsessive concern with the population of Africa. He always firms,

(15:47):
is like, I'm just worried that there's not going to
be enough food. They don't grow enough food to like
support themselves there um. But his his solution is, let's
pay him on Santo to like subsidize, or let's pay
him on Santo to subsidize see that they have to
buy that are genetically modified so that they can't share them. Right,
it's this, it's this fucking thing capitalists have been doing

(16:07):
since the seventeen hundreds. Right the seventeen seventies, a giant
British corporation takes over most of North and eastern India
and immediately are like, oh, all these farming villages have
like arrangements with each other and like social welfare programs
to take care of each other in the event of
a drought or if like one one village is harvest
is bad. Let's get rid of all that because we

(16:28):
want to centralize all of our farming to make it
more profitable. And then thirty million people starved to death.
And it's the same basic you We're not gonna go
into this nearly enough. But Gates is a lot of
like he keeps talking about how his ideas to reform
farming in Africa so that it can feed more people,
none of which involved talking to people who have been
farming in Africa for generation. Like it's just like, well,

(16:51):
let's bring this mega corporate, let's make it profitable from Monsanto.
Like fucking still, that's the only way to right, And
it is just like that. That is how people like
that view of the world and view solutions. Oh god,
yeah yeah. Darryl Ray is an agricultural expert from the

(17:12):
University of Tennessee, and he fears the consequences of these
investments for small farmers. Quote, we need to take farmers
exactly where they are at the moment and help them
be more productive using their knowledge and technology that would
be appropriate to add to it, and then gradually move
them into a higher rate of production, rather than talking
about them buying on Santo products or other kinds of
products they can't afford to have to buy every year,

(17:33):
as is the case with hybrid seed. So again, not
just me saying this is bad. Other people are saying
there's a lot of scary and it's again, you're not
a farmer, Bill, you don't know anything about farming. And
you don't know enough to know if the experts you're
paying because in a lot of cases you're paying them
to justify things you already believe. Like you're not. You're

(17:56):
not just saying here's billions of dollars for the best idea.
You're saying, I'm pretty sure we need to use modern
Western agricultural corporations, that this is the best way to
do it. Who can I hire it? Exactly backwards, It's
exactly backwards, exactly how you don't do this? Um and again,
this is one of those things like people talk about
state communism versus state capitalism. Fucking the like Russia and

(18:22):
China did versions of this that led to the great
famines of the twentieth century in parts of the world.
This is like, this is the sparrows. Yeah, exactly the
same thing. Because of my this new idea, in this
new technology, I know better than people who have been
making food to feed this place for forever, So let's

(18:42):
just change everything. It's just it's the incredible hubris of man. Go.
Anybody who wants to reform global agriculture like this should
have to work on a farm somewhere for ten fucking years,
um like just just fucking work on a like gross,
some goddamn potatoes, Bill Gates, like Jesus Christ, Um, I

(19:04):
say that, but then Mark Zuckerberg did that, went up
murdering goats with lasers or some ships. Maybe not, Yeah
he killed a goat with a laser. It's a whole thing.
Um well. But I mean that's the I think the
addition to what you're saying is they should have to
do it and do it successfully, to do it and

(19:26):
see what they do and then yeah, sure, I'm not
going to say like a guy who's capable of running
a giant corporation wouldn't have any insights that are useful,
but probably not certainly not at his current level of
knowledge about fucking farming. Um well. And also like at
the like it shows who he values and who you know,

(19:47):
every every farmer is expendable, clearly, but like you know,
no corporation is expendable. It's this It's a version of
the same problem that like social media has, like where
if you're if you're famous and rich and prominent, um,
you have to have a stance to take on everything right.
One way this goes is like every Hollywood celebrity, you know,

(20:10):
has to have a take on everything happening in the world, right, Um.
And the other way this goes is, you know, the
most toxic version of this is a billionaire deciding to
change how agriculture works in Africa because he got rich
in the nineties. Like, um, it's it's just but you
know who else got rich in the nineties. Andrew t

(20:33):
hit me the product of services that support this podcast.
Oh yeah, all nineties babies gotta be a good. Ah,
We're back, Andrew, Andrew. You see the new you see
the new they did. They made a new rug Rats,

(20:54):
but they made it all c g I and it's
so weird. I don't like it. It looked so good.
Just just rerun rug Rats. It's perfect. It doesn't need
anything else. Kids will still like it. They made Tommy
Pickles head scary. Yeah, I just like the old art
was just so classic and charming. The lady who did

(21:17):
the lady who did Tommy Pickles voice lived behind my
childhood home. Oh really, Yeah, that's that's rad um, because
that was a great show. I just don't get it.
I don't get this at all. Um. Yeah, it's it's
it's horrible. People should stop making things. I don't know
why we need to ruin a good thing. I'm saying

(21:42):
speaking of good things ruined, speaking of ruining good things.
So Bill's friendly gifts to the Monsanto Corporation, MasterCard, and
Vodaphone are part of a massive global trend that the
Gates Foundation has largely driven. That the Walton Foundation, the
Walmart people have a big part of this too. There's
a couple of big ones. I'm gonna quote from a

(22:03):
write up in Jacobin about this trend. More and more,
corporate philanthropy is not about corporations giving money to charity.
Companies actually do remarkably little of that, As a two
thousand two Harvard Business Review article pointed out, over the
past fifteen year period, charity by US companies as a
percentage of profits fell by More recently, Slate reported that

(22:23):
corporate giving had nosedive from a high of two point
one percent of pre tax profits during the mid nineteen
eighties to just point eight percent in two thousand twelve.
Corporate philanthropy today is about private tax exempt donors such
as the Gates Foundation, giving their charity to corporations. Now,
this kind of charity is not just profoundly undemocratic. Exkews

(22:43):
global attitudes towards public health and filters them through the
lenses of a handful of billionaires who, like Gates, have
never had to struggle a single moment of their lives.
Gates Foundation donations to the UN Health Agency outweigh even
the US government's contributions to that body. As a result,
people at the u N who disagree with Gates quickly
find themselves out on their asses. The same is often

(23:03):
true of the WHO, the World Health Organization, which is
also heavily subsidized by Gates. As Lorie Garrett wrote in
Foreign Affairs, few policy initiatives or normative standards set by
the WHO are announced before they have been casually unofficially
vetted by Gates Foundations staff. In two thousand eleven, Oxford
health economist David Stuckler argued, quote, global health is ruled

(23:25):
by a few private donors who make decisions in secret.
The capacity to decide what is relevant and how it
will be addressed is in the hands of very few,
who ultimately are accountable to their own interests. So that's rad.
That's good, yeah, And it is like right as you
get further into it. It is like the global health
of it. We just lived through. This is why, like

(23:48):
the value of uh really only caring about human beings
or at least like trying to do something outside of
a profit motive. Like every everything that we did during
COVID that was profit driven caused death and suffering and
loss of business, which is the craziest part, Like it's
business can't even be trusted to make business go. Well, yeah,

(24:10):
it's all you need to know about the difference between
when healthcare is primarily about profit and when it's primarily
about people is to look at Cuba. We'll talk about
Cuba a little later. Not a government that's without flaws.
You can look at a lot of horrible ship. They
did LGBT people back in like the nineties during the
AIDS epidemic and stuff. But as a rule, they put
make up. They public health is like the number one

(24:32):
thing that they worry about over there, and so they
have like a lung cancer vaccine, and they have a
COVID vaccine and now they're giving it away for free
to a bunch of countries. Like it's yeah, like it's
it's it's just different. When the goal of healthcare is
not to make some dude who lives in Mountain View richer. Um. Now,
since Gates doesn't like the idea of universal health care,

(24:55):
he's resisted supporting the w h o S nineteen seventy
eight Alma Alta declar aation. This is essentially an international
commitment to strengthen primary care systems and move towards universal
healthcare and more nations. It's basically saying the best way
to support public health worldwide is to strengthen the primary
care systems in those countries to make them more independent

(25:15):
and more capable of caring for people, rather than them
needing to rely on foreign NGOs and stuff to provide healthcare.
Right makes sense, you know? Um. The Gates Foundation, though,
pursues market based solutions and as a result, according to
the Lancet, grants made by the Foundation often quote do
not reflect the burden of disease endured by those in
deepest poverty. Let's discuss a practical example of how this looks.

(25:39):
If you google Bill Gates in Africa, you will come
across an awful lot of articles where Gates expresses is
worry that there might soon be too many Africans. This
is always framed in humanitarian terms. Um, here's a feminine
climate change. But I don't know, yo is that racist?
I mean, there's definitely too many Europeans, said, yet way

(26:02):
too many Italians. The birthrate has been following for years,
but not by enough. When I'm president, that's gonna be
my number one goal. Get getting Megan. There'll be less
Italians or anti Mussolini. If you will, Yeah, do a
reverse Mussolini, h reverse Alini if you will. I mean,

(26:26):
you know what, some very cool people in Milan in
the forties reverse to Mussolini and that worked out pretty well.
That's sort of the way to do it. That is
the path you're on. I slip them upside down. One
less Italian? Okay, good times. So again Gates is concerned

(26:47):
about there being too many Africans. It's always framed as like, no,
I'm worried about like famine and climate change and all
that stuff. But it's hard to ignore how often he
thinks about reproduction in sects among black Africans. He thinks
about out it a lot, and maybe he shouldn't be here,
everybody Robert Evans here um. The initial version of this
episode included a pretty long critique of HIV program, an

(27:11):
HIV mitigation program Bill Gates had had UH supported heavily
in Africa that was based on circumcision critique that based
largely on an article I'd found in the Journal of
Future HIV Therapy from two thousand and eight titled male
circumcision is not the HIV vaccine we were looking for.
That article included a lot of the critiques I made
in the episode, UM the name of the fact that

(27:32):
while circumcision kind of a perfect environment can reduce the
spread of HIV, it didn't seem to actually do it
when when implemented in a large scale for a variety
of reasons, including it led to other kind of risky
behaviors and whatnot. People didn't understand um, you know, they
were still supposed to wear con is. There are a
number of things that we we brought up in the episode,
but a concerned fan reached out to me after that

(27:53):
UH and made me aware of a number of things
that I had gotten wrong, and also made me aware
of an article in the lance at Journal of Global
Health from JEE which was a systematic review and meta
analysis of a bunch of different studies into exactly this thing.
Like whether or not these circumcistion programs can reduce the
risk of spreading hi v UM, and I'm just going
to quote from UM a section of the of the

(28:16):
conclusion here UM, which reads, quote, our systematic review and
meta analysis found that, you know, the circumcition campaigns were
not associated with increased conom lest sex, or multiple sexual
partners among heterosexual men. This lack of association persisted across
a wide variety of subgroups. UM. These findings might help

(28:36):
alleviate concerns that widespread MMC programs could lead to risk
compensation and therefore reduced the benefit of MMC. UM. So
it seems like I was wrong on that. There's still
I have some concerns about it. But also I'm willing
to admit that I did not understand this as well
as I should have, So I apologize for that. If
you want to read more, that meta analysis is in

(28:57):
the Lancet UM and we will put up a couple
of other sources that were sent to me on our
website to update the source section. So UM, I have
cut out that chunk of the episode. There will be
a couple of references to it later on. But you know,
there's nothing we can do about that. But yeah, here's
the here's the correction. I'm sorry for being a hack

(29:17):
and a fraud. The charity of the Gates Foundation is
all too often it'sself a form of imperialism, one that
has harmful, unforeseen impacts on local populations. The good news
is that, since Gates is a billionaire narcissist his he
gets to do imperialism on the people of his own
country too, which brings us to the very fun story

(29:39):
of the Gates Foundation's war on public education. It's some
good ship, Andrew, it's some good ship. Now. It's probably
not gonna surprise you to learn that Bill and Melinda
also think the market can fix public education. Hilariously, he
diagnoses the problem with public education as a result of
the quote top down government man polie provider a k a.

(30:01):
The state. Now we could talk about how funny it
is that he's complaining education is bad because it's a monopoly,
and he's Bill Gates. He could laugh about that a lot,
and we will for a second. Yeah, oh god, yeah,
it's also just like you had unlimited resources to have

(30:23):
your fucking horrible dork public school, and like our private
school sorry, but it's just like like thinking that that
is the norm, even for private education. It's like, well,
it's it's interesting perspective because his the lesson from Bill
Gates's childhood is that number one, having more money going

(30:45):
to a school makes it a better school. Because he
was in a rich kids school and the moms were
able to raise money for a computer, which fucking nobody
had back then. He became a billionaire. Um. But his lesson,
the lesson he takes is not well, we should you know,
I mean he does. The Bill in mid Gates Foundation
does give computers to schools like they have. That's one

(31:05):
of the things that do. But their primary lesson isn't.
The primary lesson they take out of it isn't. And
like the other big thing it's not just that they
had the money, is that he got freedom. They altered
his education plan, bespoke to him and his interests to
make it work better for him, which I think is
the reasonable lesson to take, is like, oh, we should
taylor the kinds of educations kids receive to the kids

(31:28):
in their interests, because not only will that make them
more engage students, it will help them be more successful people.
That's not the lesson he gets out of this. Yeah.
But also the competitive version of education that involves driving
cost down, you know, so that you can be the
winner of the school education providing game is the opposite

(31:49):
of what happened. Yes, he his education was involved tons
of resources being ship loads of resources thrown at him. Yeah. Yeah,
and that's the best way to educate a yeah, and
all that and freedom like yeah, yeah, it was a
mix of it. Um. But he wants to bring market logic.
He doesn't know. To his credit, he does not want to.
He's not one of these guys that says we should

(32:09):
just privatize the whole education system. But he does want
to bring market logic to education, and that means that
schools should compete with each other or be shut down
and replaced if they don't perform well. During the early aughts,
the Gates Foundations started pouring tens of millions of dollars
into things like the Knowledge Is Power Program or KIP,
a chain of charter schools that Gates once described as

(32:31):
one of the very few places where great teachers are
being made. I'm gonna quote from the New Profits of
Capital to explain how these wonderful schools work. The KIP
schools follow an extended day strict disciplinary regime. Students learn
how to walk, get off the bus, and use the
restroom in the Kip way. Students are not allowed to
talk at school except to answer questions, and they have

(32:51):
to earn their desks. At some KIP school, students who
break minor rules are isolated and forced to wear signs
around their next that read miscreant or cretan. Again the
opposite of what made you successful. They didn't put you
in a room when you were a They made you
stop taking matt so you could do the thing you

(33:13):
were interested in, Like fucking hell Bill. It's also like
why why are all like billionaires or equivalent? Why do
they only have the same ideas about Like this is
some guilded age, it is some gilded ship. What is
wrong with you? We gotta make up? We got torture

(33:33):
sucking asshole. Keep schools are based on the work of
Martin Seligman, a psychologist whose work on learned helplessness has
also been adopted by the CIA, and they're enhanced interrogation
slash torture program when you're When your charter school has
a lot of the same intellectual DNA as the CIA
torture program. There might be a problem there. Yeah, I

(33:56):
don't know. Maybe maybe the guys at Guantanama recoding all
sorts of rad software we just haven't seen. That's actually
where zoom came from. You that you can tell they
put a dude in a boo box and he made zoom. Uh. Now,

(34:17):
Advocates of this system will point out that KIP schools
have much higher test scores than normal schools. However, this
comes at the loss of many of their students. Kids
who don't get with the program are counseled out or expelled.
Only of them graduate. So the reason why KIP schools
have high test scores is they kick out the kids

(34:39):
who aren't good at that particular kind of school. This
is how charter schools work across the country, which isn't
to say there are an excellent I know some people
who went to very good charter schools and they're very
grateful for the educations that they got. We're not talking
about individual charter schools here. I'm sure there are a
number of people listening with good experiences. We're talking about
the trend, the national trend of how this program. The

(35:00):
programs work, um and this is a major trend among
charter schools, some of which suspend as many of half
of their students in a year, low performing students, kids
with emotional or psychological disabilities. These kids are denied admission
or purged. This is why in two thousand and fourteen
the Department of Education had to issue a guidance reminding

(35:20):
charter schools, but they had to obey civil rights loss.
That's a good thing to have their mind. Kids. Yeah,
all this like clase like libertarians. Yeah, it always is
like hey, but also you have to evade basic decent.
It's amazing because in twenty years there's going to be
a billionaire who fucking played BioShock as a kid, and

(35:42):
it's going to be like, I'm gonna give the schools
four million dollars to make rapture, but the high school
oh god, uh depressingly. I want to quote now from
a section of Diane Ravitch's book Reign of Error, which
is a pretty good title for a book about, you know,

(36:03):
problems in the education system. Many studies show that charters
enroll a disproportionately small share of students who are English
language learners or who have disabilities as compared with their
home district. A survey of expulsion rates in the District
of Columbia found that the charters, which enroll nearly half
of the student population of the district, expel large numbers
of children. The charter's expulsion rate is seventy two times

(36:25):
the expulsion rate in public schools. As the charters shun
those students, the local district gets a disproportionately large number
of the students who are most expensive and most challenging
to educate. When public students leave for charters, the budget
of the public school shrinks, leaving them less able to
provide a quality education to the vast majority of students.
It's fucking segregation dressed up as fixing the education system

(36:48):
by removing black and white kids from each other and
then defunding the schools that black kids go to because
they got kicked out of the kids the schools the
white kids are going to. Um, it's cool, it's cool.
It always his wines on that way, just so happens. Gosh, Gee, chucks,
How does this country founded on white supremacy and genocide
keep doing white supremacy and genocide? Gosh? Darn would who

(37:12):
would have thought? Uh? In two thousand eight, Gates embarked
on another program to apply his market logic to education.
He put more than a billion dollars into reforming low
income and minority schools. The basic idea was that they
develop a set of metrics to evaluate teachers with the
goal of retaining good ones and reshaping or removing bad

(37:33):
ones over the course of seven years. There was no
evidence that this program helped schools higher better teachers. They
just Burt's a billion dollars not doing anything. A rand
study showed no evidence of impact on student outcomes. From
a write up in Business Insider quote, the study concluded
that the initiative fared poorly because the school's got better
over time at implementing measures of teacher effectiveness, rather than

(37:55):
using those measures to actually improve student outcomes. It's they
taught to the test but for teachers. In his view,
the Gates Foundation initiative appears to have generally done more
harm than good. It cost a fortune green rights, it
produced significant political turmoil, and distracted from other more promising efforts.
And when it comes to the Gates Foundation, that right

(38:15):
there is often the issue as much as any sort
of like mustache twirling evil Like. Sometimes it is like
I'm gonna circumcise all the black people, But a lot
of times it's just like, oh, well, let's well, let's
let's let's make like provide incentives to make teachers better,
and then huge amounts of resources go into making teachers
pass a test that a guy who doesn't know anything
about teaching help design, and so a lot of effort

(38:38):
is wasted that could have gone to actually helping kids,
but instead has gone to making things making it yeah anyway, um,
and yeah, it's because Gates pour so much money into
public health and education. His opinion is often the only
opinion that matters. So if he has a bad idea,
that bad idea gets a huge as it has to

(38:59):
be taken seriously. Better ideas get ignored, and effort gets wasted.
Here's another example of that. Starting in two thousand when
his foundation, when his foundation was new, Bill Gates decided
the big program with American education was that our schools
were too big. The whole system needed to be disrupted.
Large schools had to be broken up, more smaller schools
had to be created. He poured two billion dollars into

(39:20):
this program over the next nine years, which impacted fully
eight percent of the nation's public high schools from a
right up in Politico. So without a great deal of thought,
one school district after another signed onto the notion that
large public high school should be broken up and new
smaller school should be created. This was an inherently messy process.
The smaller schools proponents sometimes called them academies, would often

(39:41):
be shoehorned into premises into the premises of larger schools,
so you'd end up with two or three or more
schools competing for space and resources in one building. That
cost all sorts of headaches. Which schools would get to
use the science labs or the gym's, how would the
cafeterias be utilized? And who was responsible for policing the
brawls amongst students from high rival schools. The program, it's

(40:03):
just such a dumb idea. And like I went to
I graduated in two thousand and six. The year I graduated,
my school was the largest graduating class in US history,
and it was the largest the next year two and
the next. Plano schools are massive, they're some of the
largest schools in the world. Like high schools like two
thousand people was my graduating class something like that. Um,

(40:23):
they're really good schools, Like they're like, nationally some of
the best schools in the country. Obviously, plan it was
a lot of money part of why. But like, it
doesn't the fact that they're huge does not make them
worse schools. It's simply it's simply irrelevant. Now you can
argue class size might matter, but you can have small
classes in a huge school. It's it's fine. Um, yeah,
it's just fucking and yeah. Gates himself admitted in two

(40:46):
thousand eight that this program was a huge failure. Tens
of thousands of US students had their educations disrupted because
a billionaire had a bad idea, and basically no one
in the media covered the fact that this had flopped.
Why would you. The Gates Foundation was doing another dozen
dazzling things that they were going to cover, not the
fact that, like, boy, it seems like a lot of
their stuff doesn't work. Also, they're circumcising millions of black

(41:07):
people and it's causing AIDS to get more deadly. But
also they underwrite n P but they do underwrite NPR. Well, yeah,
so it's like right, yeah, that's a significant chunk of
the media. Yep. Yeah. Now the sheer amount of ship
Bill and Melinda Gates have gotten up to over the
last years, we're leaving out a lot um. We could

(41:30):
talk more about standardized testing. We could talk more about
his agricultural reform in Africa, which really we ought to um,
but we've still got to talk about COVID vaccines and
Jeffrey Epstein. So we're moving on. Let's talk about Bill
Gates Is sex life next? First? But first let's ask
the question on everyone's mind. Is he a grower or
a shower? I look, Sophie, I get paid the big

(41:55):
bucks to ask the hard questions, Okay, like how hard?
How hard does he get? Like? And I don't get
paid enough to listen to that. Honestly, Bill Gates doesn't
get paid enough to have to listen to that. Uh
products all right, So we're back and we're talking about

(42:21):
Bill Gates. Is Bill Gates's chungus I think is the
technical term for what he has. Yeah, anyway, it's probably
not going to surprise anybody to learn that Bill never
got better at flirting despite being one of the wealthiest
people to ever exist. He did grow more successful at
having sex, largely because he was one of the wealthiest

(42:43):
people to ever exist. His primary horning ground was Microsoft
and the Gates Foundation. Now earlier we discussed how he
met his wife while he was her boss. Well, he
met a lot of women in that way, in the
biblical way, while he was her their boss. In the
eight Windy Goldman Rome wrote a book titled The Microsoft File,

(43:04):
where she claimed Gates had frequent affairs with employees. She
alleged he'd started dating a sales manager in their German
office before he even started seeing Melinda. Gates met this
woman at a Microsoft corporate meeting in Monte Carlo. He
sent her an email after saying that seeing her energized him,
and adding I hope I didn't stare or anything. Gates
canceled his flight back to the US to flirt with her.

(43:25):
He sent her love letters, and the two embarked on
a brief affair, even though this one was by her
own admission, uncomfortable sleeping with her boss. Now we now
know this was a pattern for Bill. In two thousand six,
he attended a presentation by a female Microsoft employee. When
he left the meeting, he emailed the woman to ask
her out to dinner, writing, if this makes you uncomfortable,

(43:45):
pretend it never happened. But okay, I mean yeah, I
just don't understand it is simply a power. I mean,
why why do you need to do that? I don't know.
To your he's not it's not it's not a Weinstein thing.

(44:06):
He's not doing that because we have not heard any
evidence that he Obviously there's a power and balance to
discuss here, but I have an any of it. He's
not like he's not raping employees. I've never heard any
allegations of that. Um And in this case, he since
this ladies letters saying like, hey, let's go to dinner.
I'm a married billionaire. Uh but if I this makes
you uncomfortable, let's just pretend it never happened. And she did.

(44:27):
She decided she was uncomfortable, she ignored the email, and
Gates did not pursue her further. I haven't her dad
allegations that he harmed her career in any way. I
don't think he's doing that. Like I don't think he's
penalizing women who don't get with him. That said, I
think it's pop. You could argue that like this woman
in Germany may have gotten with him because she was like,
maybe it'll hurt my career to not get with him. Right,
he doesn't matter as much if he did it, as

(44:48):
he's the CEO. Yeah. A year or so later, Gates
was on a business trip on behalf of the Gates Foundation.
This isn't like two seven two eight. He was traveling
with a female employee. During a cocktail party, he whispered
to her, I want to see you. Will you have
dinner with me? The woman says she felt uncomfortable and
laughed to avoid responding. From a write up in The

(45:10):
New York Times, quote six current and former employees of Microsoft,
the Foundation, and the firm that manages gates Fortune, said
those incidents and others more recently, at times created an
uncomfortable workplace environment. Mr Gates was known for making clumsy
approaches to women in and out of the office. His
behavior fueled widespread chatter among employees about his personal life.
Some of the employees said that while they disapproved of Mr.

(45:31):
Gates's behavior, they did not perceive it to be predatory.
They said he did not pressure women to submit to
his advances for the sake of their careers. And he
seemed to feel that he was giving the women's space
to refuse his advances. So again, we're not taught like technically,
technically yes, it's not a Weinstein thing, but it's not okay,
right like you you can you cannot be as bad

(45:51):
as Harvey right Weinstein industrial rapist, and your behavior is
still unacceptable. Um, because all, like, a work place is
not a fucking nightclub. If if Bill Gates had a
history of hitting on women awkwardly in nightclubs whatever, Like fine,
everyone has the right to be like to be like, hey,
you want to fun and then be told no if

(46:12):
you're not being you know, bad about it. But this
is a workplace. These are his employees. He runs the company. Yeah,
it's not okay. Um again it's yeah so um. He
was also noted by his employees to be dismissive towards
his wife, Melinda, sometimes speaking to her during foundation meetings

(46:33):
in ways that made employees cringe. Um on its own.
I don't know if all of this would have merited
an inclusion in an episode is Packed as this one, right,
Compared to circumcising twelve million people and making an AIDS
epidemic course it's not on that level, but it all
helps set the stage that leads us, as all things
eventually lead Andrew to Jeffrey Epstein. Ye, Jepstein, Carly Ray Jeffstein.

(46:58):
That's a mash up of Jeffrey. I mean he did
say call me maybe, but then he also sexually trafficked teenagers.
Yeah it was it's the maybe that was taken out. Yeah,
I'm so sorry. Hey, I just met you and this
is crazy, but get in the car or I will
have your life systematically destroyed. It's time for you to

(47:20):
be sexually traffics to the wealthiest men on the planet. Yeah,
not as not as catchy as as the original, but
I think it but not as I think. It's got weights.
It's something there work well. Workshop this a whole album
of Jeffrey Epstein themed pop song. I mean you could,
you could, you could like what is it that? What

(47:41):
is that? What's her name? That? The lady who wrote
the song monster? That one will work? Um? Yeah, the
red Corvette Jeffrey Epstein's jet Um babies grow up too
fast because of the child sex trafficking. That was the joke.

(48:04):
I just want to make sure so by the mid
odds Bill Gates was clearly frustrated by in his marriage.
He was wealthy and powerful, but he had never enjoyed
the kind of success with young women that other billionaires
seemed to exhibit. You know, you've got Richard Branson like
regularly jet skiing naked with supermodels, which seems to be
his hobby. Um, Bill Gates doesn't do that kind of thing.

(48:25):
And I think this frustrates him. Um, and he doesn't
like he's clearly he's not personally like he's not like
enough of a predator or anything to like take it.
And for whatever reason, I don't know, it's weird, Like
you think, just Bill, just just pay sex workers to
hang out with you. You have the money. They'll be
happy too. You can find some very nice sex workers
who would love to make you look like you're cool

(48:46):
and sexy all the time. You'd feel great and nobody
would nobody reasonable would complain about it. Um. Yeah, anyway, Um,
he gets frustrated, and I think that his sexual frustration
is like that's like the bat signal to Jeffrey Epstein,
a billionaire who isn't getting laid as much as he wants.
Like Epstein could smell that ship from a mile away.

(49:08):
He's like a shark um. Now the two met. Epstein
and Gates meet in two thousand eleven, which is three
years after Epstein pled guilty to celesity soliciting sex from
a child. So you can't argue I had no idea
very public. Yeah, I'm going to quote from the New

(49:29):
York Times here. Mr Epstein and Mr Gates first met
face to face on the evening of January thirty one,
two thousand eleven, at Mr Epstein's town house on the
Upper East Side. They were joined by Dr Eva Anderson Dubin,
a former Miss Sweden who Mr Epstein had once dated,
and her fifteen year old daughter. Dr Anderson Dubin's husband,
the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, was a friend in

(49:50):
business associate of Mr Epstein's. The gathering started at eight
and lasted several hours, according to Miss Arnold, Mr gates
is spokes woman. Mr Epstein subsequently boasted about the meeting
and emails to friends and associates. Bill's great, he wrote
in one reviewed by The Times. Mr Gates, in turn,
praised Mr Epstein's charm and intelligence. Emailed in colleagues the
next day, he said, a very attractive Swedish woman and

(50:12):
her daughter dropped by, and I ended up staying there
until quite late. Which why would why would you mention that?
Why would you phrase it that way? Bill, that's your work?
Email Christ to Epstein. Bill was the ultimate whale, a
wealthy man child who could be separated from some of
his money in exchange for access to women. Epstein pitched

(50:35):
Gates an idea for a charitable fund seated by Gates
Foundation money and donations by other rich guys he knew.
So Epstein's like, you put in a bunch of money
I can get we could make, like we can make
like tens of billions of dollars we could raise to
do to make a huge charity fund. And of course
Epstein's proposal included a suggestion that he be paid point
three percent of whatever money he raised, which would of

(50:56):
course be tens of millions of dollars for him. Now,
the good news is that Bill hires smart people. Uh,
and the people who run his foundation that he sent
to meet with Epstein spotted him as a con man. Immediately, Um,
They're like, well this guy is full of ship. Nick Grifter, Like,
we shouldn't get involved with him, but Bill remained fascinated

(51:16):
with Epstein. He visited Epstein's mansion at least three times.
He's on his plane. I think he went to the island.
At one point, he emailed colleagues, I don't know, maybe
maybe I don't. I could probably have looked that up,
but I'm a hack and a fraud. Um. But at
one point Epstein emailed colleagues his lifestyle is very different
and kind of intriguing, although it would not work for me.
When questioned about what this meant after Epstein's death, Gates

(51:39):
claimed he was referring to the decor of Jeffrey's mansion.
J Yeah, that's that's what you meant, buddy. Yeah. Bill
apparently talked about his unhappiness in his marriage with Epstein,
and to be frank, we don't know the precise dimensions
of their relationship. We don't know what Bill did or
did not get up to Depstein. We don't have conclusive

(52:02):
information about any of that, which is why it's probably
going to get us in trouble. To title this podcast,
Bill Gates sex offender and also sex offender um for sure,
Bill Gates, the dick chopping sex offender of Epstein's Island, Um,
something like that. In that one business affairs is ears

(52:26):
are perking up now you're The actual fact of the
matter is, we cannot ever include circumcision in a title
because that immediately makes it a hot spot for the
kind of arguments you do not want to get involved in. Um,
don't ever say circumcision on the internet. That's all I'm
gonna say on the matter. Um. It immediately goes off

(52:47):
the rails, like like it's like it's it's like talking
about Palestine, like yeah, so um yeah. Again, we don't
know exactly what Bill did with Epstein. We know Melinda
did meet with Epstein and Bill on one occasion, like

(53:07):
she and Bill met Epstein um, And she has claimed
that this like event still haunts her. I think it
was in two thousand thirteen, And she seems to have
gotten increasingly furious about Bill's relationship with Epstein after two thirteen.
In two thousand nineteen, she started talking to advisors about
divorcing her husband. And that's more or less where we
are now. Just a few weeks before this episode was recorded,

(53:29):
Microsoft corporate board members decided Bill Gates needed to step
down from the board. While they pursued an investigation into
an inappropriate relationship he may have had with a female
Microsoft employee. Gates claims the decision to transition off the
board was purely due to his desire to spend more
time with on philanthropy um And this I think brings
us to the last bit of our journey through the
life of Billiam Gates, his role in the COVID nineteen

(53:52):
pandemic and the current intellectual property status of its most
successful vaccines. So this is that part of it, right
is nineteen pages to get to nineteen plages and a
surprising number of circumcisions right, way, way more circumcisions than

(54:13):
I anticipated. Initiative. I was gonna if you'd if you'd
asked me to wager the start, how many millions of
circumcisions do you think you're going to be involved in
this story? You probably would not have said twelve. I
think that's fair now. The first Gates Foundation initiative geared
towards fighting the plague was actually rather modest. On March eleven,
two days before the who declared a pandemic, the Foundation

(54:36):
started what they called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative
with MasterCard and a charity called the Welcome Trust to
identify and develop treatments to the virus. And again, as
far as I could tell, I think Mastercard's only role
in this is because it will make them look good,
right like that, Well, we'll have Macrosoft involved, that will
be good for their image, like MasterCard, MasterCard, Like well,

(54:59):
you know know you've we've all been seen, like a
car accident happened, and the first thing an injured person
cries out for his MasterCard. You know, sometimes Visa shows
up and it's just a real tragedy. Um, I always
gave a MasterCard and my emergency kit. The fuck. But
what this means is that from the beginning, Gates placed

(55:20):
burnishing the public image of a finance company on equal
footing with actual virology. In April, with the entire country
locked the funk down and the virus just beginning to bite,
Bill Gates launched the COVID nineteen Act Accelerator. This program
was geared towards organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution
of treatments and vaccines. Like everything the Gates Foundation funds,

(55:44):
this was a public private partnership based around using charity
to entice corporations to do the right thing by making
it profitable. This was one of a number of programs
all geared at funding vaccine research, but unlike most of those,
the Accelerator was from the start focused on respecting the
exclusive intellect actual property claims of whoever won the vaccine
race from a right up a new republic. It's explicit

(56:05):
arguments that intellectual property rights won't present problems for meeting
global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must
be protected even during a pandemic carry it the enormous
weight of Gates's reputation as a wise, beneficent and prophetic leader.
As vaccine research proceeded, a lot of people suggested that
when one was developed, the recipe should basically be open source,
so that any country with the capacity could make it

(56:26):
without paying to license it. Gates fought against this. COVACS,
which is the largest arm of his COVID Response organization,
proposed instead that poor countries should have vaccines donated to
them by rich countries who would fund this through vaccine
sales and wealthier countries. It was hoped that this would vaccine.
This was not to vaccinite all of them this was
to vaccinate about twenty percent of people in load of

(56:48):
middle income countries. After that, those governments would have to
bid and compete on the open market for access to vaccines.
So one side of this is saying the vaccine should
be open so is and equally available to everybody, to
be manufactured everywhere for as close to free as humanly possible.
And Bill Gates says, what if instead we do it

(57:08):
for money and we donate of the necessary vaccines to
poor people. Yeah, they'll they'll never learn, they'll they'll never
learn how to teach themselves how to stay alive unless
we make them work for it. It's like an e
m T stay alive. You have like three gunshot wounds,
and e MT like shows up and like bandages one

(57:30):
of them and then says, well, if I if I
handle the rest for you, you're never gonna learn how
to bandage your own gun shot wounds. So I'm gonna
if you if you can pay for the gauss like,
I'll let you mix yourself again. You take his big
picture logic about healthcare and apply it to an actual
health problem, and it's immediately nonsense. Like, it's just very

(57:52):
clearly a bad idea. But because you're talking about the
big picture, people think he's smarter. Now. Many people wore
that his ideas were horrible and that by fighting against
the idea of a people's vaccine, he was essentially saying
it was fine for people to die to protect the
concept of intellectual property. Manuel Martin, a policy advisor for
Doctors Without Porters, has since said that people in the

(58:15):
Gates administration we're central in pushing a global line that
quote i P is not an access barrier in vaccines.
Of course, the only reason to have i P is
to make an access barriers. Of i P is about
reducing access. That's the only reason for it to exist. Like,

(58:38):
which is not to say there's zero thing like obviously,
like I'm a I'm not gonna like, but it's like
there's zero reason for the kind of i P that
he wants to exist, like obviously like and it's obviously
it always winds up like it's it's one of it
would be one of those things if like, I don't know,
the people who invented the Avengers and Superman and stuff

(59:00):
got to make money off of their things instead of
these gigantic syndicates using IP law to anyway, Well, everything
Disney does, like funk all of this ship is what
I'm saying. Like I I believe in the ability of
an artist to have control over their art obviously, um
and for the record, I think that if you're I
think for I think, for example, one of the things
we as a society could do is when we have

(59:22):
a global pandemic and an international team of heroic researchers
creates vaccines in record time, maybe we should make sure
none of them ever have to worry about anything financial
for the rest of their lives. Like, yeah, maybe that's
the thing we could do is the planet. Yeah, yeah,
actual Tony Stark happened, and yet we couldn't manage to
do anything good. It's because the people who did the

(59:42):
amazing thing weren't Tony Stark's. They were international teams of
of of very dedicated researchers whose names most people will
never know and also should know because they will get
assassinated by lunatics like you think. And there is no
Tony Well. Tony Stark is the one saying this thing
other people invented, uh should be profitable to a group

(01:00:04):
of people separate from the people who invented it, um
and other it's worth human death for this to be
the way it works. Um. And again, when it comes
to i P, if you're talking about like a novel
or like Mickey Mouse or whatever, right, we can argue
about how like bad it is culturally, but it's at
it worst modest harm because again you're talking about Mickey Mouse.

(01:00:24):
When we're talking about vaccines, you're literally talking about restricting
who gets life saving medicine. That's what i P protections
are for vaccines is a restriction on whose life gets saved.
James Love is the founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International,
a think tank that studies the pharmaceutical industry in i P.
He's been involved in global public health policy as long

(01:00:45):
as Bill Gates and has analyzed his impact for quite
a while. He points out that at the start there
was a fight between a pooling approach advised by groups
like the w h o C TAP, which basically what
have said, we should pool research. Any research done anywhere
in the world should be available to all researchers working
on this program. We should open source the entire process

(01:01:05):
of research, the vaccine process, all of the studies into
its effect, all of this should be pulled together. We
should pool knowledge. You may recognize this is exactly the
same thing computer nerds were doing in the nineteen seventies
when Bill Gates wrote an angry open letter at them.
They were pooling their knowledge to improve a thing. Bill
Gates got really fucking angry. And of course, when this

(01:01:27):
happened with a vaccine, Bill Gates fought like a devil
against it. Quote. Things could have gone either way, says Love,
but Gates wanted exclusive rights, maintained. He acted fast to
stop the push for sharing the knowledge needed to make
the products, the know how, the data, the cell lines,
the tech transfer, the transparency that is critically important in
a dozen ways. The pooling approach represented by c TAP

(01:01:48):
included all of that. Instead of backing those early discussions,
he raced ahead and signaled support for business as usual
on intellectual property by announcing the ACT Accelerator in March.
And how did Gates's public private partnership work? One year later?
His ACT Accelerator has completely failed in its goal of
providing discounted vaccines to the Priority five of the world's

(01:02:08):
poorest people. The drug companies and wealthy nations that supported
his plan have all made bilateral agreements that basically said
fuck poor countries. As Peter Hoton's, dean of the National
School of Tropical Medicine, said, the low and middle income
countries are pretty much on their own and there's just
not much out there. Despite their best efforts, the Gates
model and its intent and its institutions are still industry dependent. Now.

(01:02:30):
The ACT Accelerator is also technically part of the w
h O, but it is funded, managed, and staffed mostly
by Gates Foundation people. It has ensured that globally rich
countries and respect for intellectual property have been prioritized over
human lives. From New Republic quote companies partnering with Kovacs
are allowed to set their own tiered prices. They are
subject to almost no transparency requirements and to toothless contractual

(01:02:54):
nods to equitable access that have never been enforced. Crucially,
the companies retain exclusive rights to their electoral property. If
they stray from their Gates Foundation line on exclusive rights,
they're quickly brought to heal. When the director of Oxford's
Jenner Institute had funny ideas about placing the rights to
it's KOVAC supported vaccine candidate in the public domain, Gates intervened,
As reported by Kaiser Health News. A few weeks later, Oxford,

(01:03:17):
urged on by the Billy Melinda Gates Foundation, reversed course
and signed an exclusive vaccine deal with Astra Zeneca that
gave the pharmaceutical giant soul rights to know and no
guarantee of low prices. So, yeah, it's so weird to
I mean, I guess that's how you control the market
is make sure everyone thinks that the same, like, by

(01:03:38):
the same rules you want. But it's like who gives
a ship if someone else gives away their property, Yeah,
their intellectual property, but obviously it's it's you know again,
I keep going back to Jonah Salk, one of the
human kind's greatest heroes, who, when asked if he was
going to patent the polio vaccine, said you might as
well patent the sun, to which Bill Gates responded, that's

(01:04:00):
actually a pretty good idea. Yeah, can you did you
are working? Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's exactly the kind
of thing. So he would have strong armed Jonas Salk
into not do Yeah, he would have. He would have.
He would not have not a listened to Jonas about
that ship. Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the

(01:04:20):
growing interest in intellectual property barriers. In recent months, as
the debate has shifted from the w h O to
the w t O, reporters have drawn testy responses from
Gates that hearkened back to his prickly performances before Congressional
anti trust hearings a quarter century ago. When a Fast
Company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates
raising his voice slightly and laughing and frustration before snapping,

(01:04:41):
it's irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn't
about i P, but it is about i P. There
is very little, really little, real disagreement among epidemiologists here.
Gates's own arguments have been petulant and childish. He has suggested,
for example, that India, which makes more vaccines than any
other country, can't be trusted to safely manufacture it's COVID

(01:05:02):
nineteen vaccines. He has called advocates of poor countries spoiled,
telling Reuters, it's the classic situation in global health where
advocates all of a sudden want the vaccine for zero dollars,
and right away we paid for this with public money.
Bill it should be free because the plague sucks, like

(01:05:23):
god damn it. Like hello, Bill, this is the only
way this comes to a stop. Yeah, you don't even
have to have the fucking like anarchist, altruist, you know,
human positive at it. You should be like, well, I
wanted to be free because I want to go back
to bars, like I want to be able to drink
in a bar. Give away the vaccine. I want to

(01:05:44):
go on vacation in Mexico. Give everyone the vaccine for free.
Like there's a selfish way to justify this too, but
it's it's it's amazing. Um. When he has been challenged
that his capitalist approach to vaccinating the world is dumb
and evil, especially since the vaccines were developed largely with
public money, including ten years have publicly funded m R

(01:06:05):
and A vaccine research that made up the entire underpinning
of these vaccines, he has responded with snide comments about socialism,
saying North Korea doesn't have that many vaccines. As far
as we can tell, this is true. I think James
Love probably put it best if you said to an
ordinary person, we're in a pandemic. Let's figure out everyone
who can make vaccines and give them everything they need

(01:06:25):
to get online as fast as possible. It would be
a no brainer. But Gates won't go there, neither will
the people dependent on his funding. He has immense power.
He can get you fired from a u win job.
He knows that if you want to work in global
public health, you'd better not make an enemy of the
Gates Foundation by questioning its positions on IPM monopolies. And
there are a lot of advantages to being on his team.
It's a sweet, comfortable ride for a lot of people.

(01:06:48):
The good news is that it does look like Bill
Gates is more on the losing side of this issue
than the winning one. Biden has recently somewhat reluctantly committed
to a more open approach to sharing vaccines and vaccine ingredients.
Gates himself has partly walked back his own commitment to
an ip focused vaccine rollout after massive backlash. But for
a lot of dead people, the damage is done already.

(01:07:10):
No one should be surprised about the toxic impact Gates
has had on the COVID nineteen rollout in public health
in general. He has been extremely consistent his entire life,
from his first letter to the Computer hobbyist community to
the corpse fires burning in the streets of the global South.
This is what you get when you let one man
born to the most inconceivable privilege of perhaps any human

(01:07:31):
in history, make life and death decisions for billions of strangers. Anyway,
I don't like Bill Gates a lot. Yeah, I know,
not into it. It's so common though. I will just
say I think this is this is as far as
the planet goes, and you know, his peers go, this

(01:07:54):
might be the least bastardy bastard we've done, in spite
of on some of the most past I mean, to
be fair, King Leopold, yeah you've done. He's definitely mean.
But it's also a question of um King Leopold's death toll. Well.
I mean, you can argue to a degree, like the
violence that's ongoing in the Congo someone side to him,

(01:08:16):
but the numbers, you don't know how many people Bill
gates Is impact are going to die as a result
of the impact he's had on global health. And it
might be in that live safe to be honest, because
of the fucking malarious ship. But like it's it's it's hard.
He's done so much. It's really difficult for parts out. Yeah,
he's I I think though it is it is a
little bit that history of you know, is a great

(01:08:38):
manner is it forces thing? Because I will say the
evil Bill Gates has done would easily have been done
by someone else. In fact, actively there are other people
pursuing you know, that's sort of like benevolent but market driven,
just like any American billionaire. Yeah, I mean is a

(01:08:58):
candidate to do cisely one, but Bill Gates is the
one who did it. Yeah, And it's it's the So
it's a kind of thing where um, yes, this is
a system problem. The system failure is that he accumulated
enough money to be able to do this, um as
opposed to that money going into taxes and then maybe

(01:09:20):
us deciding as a nation, well let's provide aid to
other countries to build up their health vote on it. Yeah. Yeah, yeah,
I guess I would just say any American billionaire would
almost by definition have the lack of perspective in a
very similar way to build absolutely that that his his

(01:09:43):
actions I guess seemed inevitable had had he been hit
by a bus, had he fallen off the mountain, Yeah,
the other would have done this the fucking briefcase boy
would have would have been this person it hadn't have
been built. I guess that's what I What I mean
is it's like this, this feel it's like less like
specifically Bill unique bastardom. That's gonna be my argument on this. Yeah,

(01:10:08):
they're all yeah, I mean, yes, yes. The the answer
is the actual bastard Here is a system that lets
individuals accumulate billions of dollars by by modifying every single thing,
even though the only reason they were able to make
those money that money is because a lot of nicer
people didn't co modify cool shit in order to make

(01:10:30):
it better. Yum and yeah, it's it's it's truly this
like thinking they did it on their own. Um that like,
that's the lack of perspective. I think what's important about
the Bill Gates story is covering things like okay, well,
because people are sharing and trading software for free, first off,
it helps, it creates the industry he succeeds in, and

(01:10:50):
then using his product for free and sharing, it creates
the demand that allows him to get rich in the
first place, and he then makes what made him He
makes this thing a legal Basically um. And he does
that with everything his whole life. This um. You know,
he he benefits fundamentally from the public sector, from pooled
resources of the community being invested in him, and he

(01:11:13):
takes that and turns that into personal wealth and turns
that into When he does give that away, he only
does it in whatever way he personally thinks is best.
Because all that matters is what Bill thinks, and it is.
It makes it clear covering this guy's story, covering the
story of the Homebrew Computer Club, those are the guys,
and talking about you know, the scientists using public money

(01:11:35):
who developed these vaccines that then became an engine for profit.
It makes it clear. And what's important about this story
because it's not just Bill. These people are parasites. These
people are parasites. That's what that's what is happening here.
This is the story of a parasite who got fat
off of public investments that gave him an incredible opportunity

(01:11:57):
which he then used to pull the rug out from
under the circumcised twelve million people. Yeah, and then and
then it's like, why you mad at me for sucking
all this blood? Yeah yeah, yeah, nobody else gets blood. Um,
but I'll give some away for free to MasterCard. Uh god,

(01:12:19):
damn it, God, this is cool. Yeah, it's it's fucking rad, dude.
You love to see it, well, Andrew, Yeah, you gotta
got a puble maybe two plug doubles. Yeah, you know,

(01:12:42):
just uh, you know it's this racist. We went independent
as a podcast, so you can go to suboptimal pods
dot com and find out how to get some of
the premium content. By the way I should pitch my
favorite piece of premium content is I'm a person who
I've like blocked by hand. This is not with a

(01:13:02):
blocklist like over people. That's amazing, Andrew, that's incredible. One
I will consider unblocked. We stand a blocking king. That's
self care. I recently turned off notifications for anyone I
don't follow, and I know I should. No single thing

(01:13:23):
I've ever done has improved my mental health more than that.
It's amazing. I just don't see ship that other people
post if I don't like them already. It's great. Um,
oh my god, that's where I should be. It is,
It's where we should all be. Anyway, this has been
behind the bastards. Uh, find Bill Gates in the street. Um,

(01:13:48):
but don't just stop at build gates. That's I think
to me. The lesson is you got to work your
way down the centers of capital and distribute it to
the people, um back to because we we gave him,
We gave him the indents, we gave him, we gave
him the idea for graphical user interfaces. We did we

(01:14:09):
did that. So take his money and use it to
buy vaccines and rifles for the global South. Yeah, it's
your money, your money, it's it's I don't know. It's
the end of the episode, all right,