Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Robert is joined by Andrew Ti to discuss Bill Gates. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Are they still owned by Steve Ballmer? The Clippers are still owned by Steve Ballmer. They're down two games, 0-2 in the first round, even though they were picked to win and they lost at home both games. It's funny you bring up Steve Ballmer.

And Microsoft, this is behind the bastards, the show that started 47 seconds ago. Because I didn't inform anyone when it started. Because I wanted to say that the Lakers and the Clippers are the same thing. Because I wanted to make Sophie angry. It did make me angry because it's very insulting to compare the Lakers 17 championships to the Clippers the same amount as me. That's how we did it. We're doing it. It's done. Anderson has the same amount of rings as the Clippers. She doesn't have thumbs.

We're doing a podcast. I think that they are indistinguishable. But you know who's not indistinguishable? All of our other guests and our current guest, Andrew T. Because Andrew T is distinguished, a distinguished man, a distinguished podcast guest. How are you doing, Andrew? I'm more of a distinguished podcast guest than a distinguished man. That is for fucking short. Thanks for having me.

Well, you are one of my very favorite guests. We always have such a good time when we talk about terrible things. But because you're, like, talented in bullshit, you're always, like, working on TV shows. So Sophie and I had to sabotage your career in order to get you back on the podcast. So welcome back to the podcast. I appreciate it. You're welcome for that. Thank you.

Thanks for having me. I'm sorry about the car bombs, but I don't know any other way to make a podcast. It is. It is. It's effective. It's a way to be heard. That's what people say about car bombs. Effective.

Yeah. Well, Andrew, today our show is titled or working title is Bill Gates. The child molesting is pedophile in the history of slander. Now, Andrew, today you and I are going to have a debate. Primarily about whether or not Bill Gates sexually trafficked children. Now, my stance on the matter is yes, absolutely. And I know your stance is, and I want to make sure I'm getting this right. You talked about this before we started the show.

Yes, absolutely. And if you want to dispute this, please sue me, Bill Gates. You pasty scum-sucking coward. That's how you framed it, right? I feel like I wouldn't say scum-sucking, I guess. That doesn't feel like me. You are a better writer than me. Sounds pretty close.

I was hoping when I came on the show that there'd be less blood on various hands than a typical episode that I've guessed it on. No. I guess not. I mean, in a way, we're still talking about imperialism. Now, normally the imperialism you and I talk about is, you know, our old buddy, King Leopold. Yeah.

One of the greats. And the Brazilian dude, John of God? Was that his name? Oh, yeah. John of God. Oh, God, that was harrowing. Yeah, that was horrible. We don't have to do a Greatest Hits episode right now.

But, damn, that shit was, I was actually just remembering it. I just feel so bad with that list of episodes that we've asked you to guess. You were also on the episode about the Andaman Islands, which was just wall-to-wall ethnic clinics. Yes, yes, yes. So I truly, I was like, I will say, in all honesty, before I got here, I was like, is there a chance that I was about to potentially make the argument that, like,

given, like, the class of person Bill Gates is, I don't see even the worst of the, like, tech billionaires. But I suppose I'm about to be disabused of this. Yeah, that's a debatable point. You know, we had to leave a lot out of this motherfucker of an episode, which is, like, one of the things that's kind of, when you actually try to list all of the damaging things Bill Gates has done, it's an additional, like, course of study

and how toxic billionaires are, because you realize, like, my God, they're able to do so much. It's because all they need to do is, like, have a whim and shotgun money out to a team of people to make that whim real. And then they've impacted the lives of millions of folks, and it took them, like, 11 minutes. Yeah, or just a thought or a whim or a tweet or whatever. That was my only thought.

I was like, this one is the, like, graded on a curve. I'm curious to actually hear where Bill Gates lands. Yeah, I'm interested in your thoughts on that, Andrew. So without further ado, let's start the episode. Part one, Bill Gates is absolutely a sex offender, comma, and that is legally actionable slander. Which is the... Sophie, can we go with that as the title?

No, we can't. Can we publish that? Unfortunately, unfortunately, I feel like our overlords would be very unhappy with us. All right, well... And I like having a place to live. Well, let's put a pin in that. We'll see. Yeah, let's put a pin in you having a place to live, because who knows how this episode's gonna go.

Cool. So, William Henry Gates III was born on October 28th in Seattle, Washington, a town too rad for him to deserve. His father was William H. Gates Sr., who used to be alive, but now is not that. William Gates Sr. was a prominent corporate lawyer and a World War II veteran. His mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a girl boss and served on the board of directors for the first interstate bank system in the United Way. His mom's dad had been the president of a national bank.

So, you know, money, right? Yeah. Your maternal grandpa is a bank president. Your dad's a wealthy corporate lawyer. You're not just rich, you've got family money. Right. So, religion was present, but doesn't seem to have been a huge factor in Bill Gates' childhood or in the Gates family childhood.

He had two siblings. The family attended a Protestant Reformed Church. Bill's parents hoped he would follow in his father's footsteps and pursue a law degree. But from what I've read, they didn't put a lot of pressure on him to follow a specific path. His family was close. They played a lot of board games together. Sunday dinner was at the same time every week and they wore matching family pajamas. So, like, you know.

Oh, my God. Like a very, very, like this family sends out cards every year on time. Like it's one of those kind of families. Yeah. Exhausting. That bothers me so much. So, he was like a real ass point dexter growing up. Absolutely.

Did you hear his name? He has William Henry Gates III matching pajamas. Yeah. Like. He has. And he didn't go by the very cool nickname Bill Hin, which is what I would have thought about. So, Bill Gates senior admitted in interviews in the 21st century that when Bill Gates,

you know, the one we know was growing up, he was somewhat emotionally distant as a father. And a number of folks have said this. And it's kind of usually written as like, well, this is just sort of like a sign of the times, right? Like he was a man. He was a child of the 1920s, you know, that's kind of how those people are going to be. He worked hard and he left most of the child rearing up to his wife. He was serious and he talked to his kids like they were adults.

His oldest daughter later recalled he'd come home and he'd sit in his chair and eat dinner. But there was never any kind of warm give me a hug kind of thing. Now, Bill's mom had been an athlete and an honors student and she had extremely high standards for her kids. This was less of a push your kids to follow a specific path thing and more of a you have to work hard and do your best at whatever you choose to do kind of thing, though. She encouraged her children to try music and sports, even if they were bad at those things because failure was a good experience to have.

And Bill was terrible at music, which same. Now, the Gates children were expected to dress nicely beyond and beyond time because both parents were members of high society. They had to learn to socialize with prominent adults at an early age. Bill followed his mother's guidance. He was a voracious reader from an early age and he read the World Book Encyclopedia series from beginning to end. So, yeah.

Oh, God. What are you reading, Bill? Volume F of the Encyclopedia. The entire Encyclopedia. Oh, my God. I guess I have to say if you catch your small child. Yeah, reading the Encyclopedia from beginning to end. You got to like you got to put some poison in his food or something.

You got to slow that brain down. You got to slow that brain down. He's not going anywhere good. Yeah, give him get him on drugs, you know, just give him some auto. Get him to have him start drinking. That does explain and Carter. Yeah, it doesn't explain in Carter. It's it's it's a shame that after the Encyclopedia giving him so much joy as a child,

he went on to commit such a crime against Encyclopedia kind as in Carter. So his parents liked that he was a big reader and they would reward his hunger for knowledge by offering to buy him any book he wanted. It should not be a surprise that he grew up super nerdy and was bullied from an early age for being small and weird and obsessed with books, which, you know, say I was I was the kid who always had like a book underneath the the table and like math class. I got in a lot of trouble for that shit. Yeah. Yeah.

I was definitely a little bit of that. But yeah, it's also just like that's not just why he was. He just is such an unpleasant. Yeah, I think he was probably a real real dick. Just judging by everything that comes later. I guess it wasn't just the books. Yeah. So obviously getting bullied caused him to withdraw further into his own little world.

And this started to worry his parents. His dad attempted to counter this by making young Bill work as a greeter at their parties and as a waiter at professional functions for his law firm. What? Again, exhausting family. I mean, a family that has parties that requires a greeter is. Yeah. Yeah.

That's wild shit. Holy fuck. Again, this whole family could just get him to start drinking, you know. Yeah. They could have all used a problem, you know. That's this. That's the thing. Family clearly does not have enough problems.

They're rich. Yeah. They're high society. They need more problems is what I'm saying. Yeah. Holy fuck. Okay. Exactly.

Yeah. You know, this is good as I feel like this child is going to possibly start going to feel exonerating. It's amazing. How fucked up it was. I mean, actually, like we'll get to that in a bit. But it is amazing that like it really gives you an insight because his dad comes across as very reasonable in interviews, like just an extremely reasonable man.

But then you realize like, okay, your kid was getting beat up in school. So your solution was to make him be a waiter to rich people. Because you thought that would help. Oh, okay. So you, you, you didn't really have everything together either when you were like, it's, that's a weird move. What a horrible solution. Yeah.

Oh my God. Okay. Okay. I'll say that by age 11, when it came to like intellect, Bill was more or less an adult. We're not having that maturity here, but his ability to discuss international affairs and business and like generally he was, he was a very smart kid. He was, he was, you know, by the time he was 11 or 12, not really acting like a kid anymore. His dad later recalled, quote, it was interesting and I thought it was great.

Now I will say to you, his mother did not appreciate it. It bothered her. And she was bothered because Bill's intellect made him arrogant and led to clashes with parents. And I'm going to quote from the Wall Street Journal here. The son pushed against his mother's instinct to control him, sparking a battle of wills, all those things that she had expected of him, a clean room, being at the dinner table on time, not biting his pencils, suddenly turned into a source of a big source of friction.

The two fell into explosive arguments. He was nasty, his sister says of her brother. Mr. Gates senior played the role of peacemaker. He'd sort of break them apart and calm things down, says the eldest sibling. The battles reached a climax at dinner one night when Bill Gates was around 12. Over the table, he shouted at his mother in what today he describes as utter, total, sarcastic, smart ass kid, rudeness. His father responded by throwing a cold glass of water at his son's face,

to which his son responded sarcastically. Thanks for the shower. Oh, God. This doesn't sound fun at all. What a tool. What an unbelievable tool. Real young Sheldon vibes up. Yeah, I know.

I know. Fucking fuck you, child Bill Gates. I mean, yeah. Again, this is why more children need to drink. Yeah. Yeah, slow them down. We got to slow down generation. What is it after ZZ one?

I mean, eventually it's going to be simply generation final. Yeah, generation final. Thank God. After Z, is there an after Z? I don't think I don't think it's happened yet. Yeah. But like what the Bill Gates story informs us of is that somewhere out there is a kid who could become the future Bill Gates if somebody doesn't put a steel reserve in his

hand faster. Yeah. Like or some Boone's farm. Kids love Boone's farm. Give him some Boone's farm. When I get rich, I'm going to start a charity that just distributes Boone's farm to precocious children. I mean, it just brings sparks back.

That's like sparks. It's good for kids. Yeah. That's how it basically got, you know. Hey kids, it's an energy drink, but it'll make it dumber. Now, the throwing water in his son's face story is a story you'll find a lot written in articles about Bill, particularly in the early 2000s. This is the period.

We're talking about like how what led to this today. But the early 2000s, this was when Bill started kind of stepping away from Microsoft and into philanthropy. And so there were suddenly a rush of articles like, because he had been, I don't know, people don't really know this. We're going to be talking about why I think people who weren't, you know, super cogent during the 90s. He was like the demon, the devil to a lot of people in the 90s.

And then throughout the aughts, he got really rehabilitated. His image did because he went from like the evil overlord of the mega corporation that was fucking everything up to like the guy curing malaria, basically, I guess it is true because it is a little hard to remember how pervasive Microsoft, like, right, you literally, yeah, unless you are a very unpleasant Bill Gates type, couldn't have a computer without windows on it. Yeah. Yeah, it was it was a different era of technology.

And so this, for whatever reason, when this like rush of articles came out kind of burnishing Bill's reputation in the early 2000s, this story wound up on them a lot. And they tended to portray this moment, his dad throwing water in his face as like a turning point for young Bill Gates, where he realized like, oh, I'm being an asshole and where his parent like, when everything kind of like turned around for him and his family. But I've run across other articles that were written in a similar time period and were less of like shameless plugs or yeah. And these articles make it clear that his behavioral problems went deeper than that.

And there was not as clean a break when they stopped as Gates and his family were portray. I found a Washington Post article that noted Bill spent so much time in his room during his adolescence that his mom would buzz him on the house intercom to ask what he would do it was doing. And he would shout back, I'm thinking, have you ever tried thinking? So again, he's he's he's a real he's a real asshole about being smart. Oh, my God. Yeah.

Like my mom would have slapped the shit out of me if I'd said like not that that's good, but like I would have gotten the shit slapped out of him for saying that sort of thing. Now the fight made it clear to his father and mother that things were getting out of control. So they took him to a therapist. Bill later recalls telling them I'm telling the therapist I'm at war with my parents over who is in control. The therapist told his mom and dad that their son was going to eventually win his struggle for independence.

So their best bet was to let him have his freedom now and see how he handled it. So that's what they did. They took him out of his old school and they enrolled him in a private school, Lakeside Prep. And the idea was that this school would give him more freedom and that that would resolve his behavioral problems. I don't know the extent to which it resolved his behavioral issues because I think he kept being a dick.

But he absolutely loved the school and it was it's what made him going to this specific school is what made him into the man that he became. And it's here I should probably note that of all of the people I've studied in this series, Bill Gates is absolutely the luckiest. I think he might have the most privileged upbringing I have ever encountered. And that includes like fucking kings, like right in terms of like the time he was born, the time he was raised, the resources his family had, like not only but it's also like not only did they have money, not only did he grow up in a time when like opportunity

was exploding in this country, not only were his parents upper class, but they were thoughtful and understanding in excess of the norm for his era. They were willing to give him freedoms that exactly that was very few people are so like just comprehensively the luckiest man I've ever heard about. He also looked into a good therapist, which people who have tried to find therapists can say is like not a common thing, especially finding a therapist who's answer to behavioral problems is going to be, you just got to let your kid do his shit, you know? Yeah, yeah.

It's all good. The it's all good approach. Yeah. The it's all good approach. And then he lucked into Lakeside Prep, which, you know, not only was like a lot of rich kids go to fancy schools, Lakeside Prep was not just a fancy school. It was a school with a computer. Now, Bill started there when he was 13 in 1968, an era for which 99 percent of people,

the term computer meant either some shit NASA uses or like sci-fi nonsense, probably less than 1 percent of 1 percent of 13 year old boys had meaningful access to computers in this time period. And Bill Gates was one of them. That's what I like. Just staggeringly fortunate. Right. Like at that time, the other it feels like the other possible meaning or access to computers

literally a human being who computes numbers. Yeah. Yeah. Like a guy with an abacus. Yeah. Yeah. So the reason that Bill's school had a computer is that when he was in eighth grade, the mother's club at Lakeside held a rummage sale and they used the profits from it to buy a teletype

model 33 ASR terminal. And they also rented a block of time on a general electric computer. So Bill gets access to this machine because the mom's club at his school is forward thinking enough to be like, we should probably get a computer so these kids can like that seems like it might be the future. And Bill is immediately obsessed with the machine. He starts programming. He starts creating new like languages and shit.

And he was so good at it, actually. And this is another ridiculous stroke of luck. He was so good at programming that his school said he no longer had to go to math class so he could spend more time learning computers, which is like, my God. Wow. Categorically, the luckiest boy who ever lived. Yeah. But also it's like, at the time, was that even like a thing that made sense?

Like, I mean. No. Computers were fucking. I mean, again, I think you were a smart person and you were someone who could like forward thinking because like a lot of sci-fi writers talk about this, a lot of people knew computers were going to be the future. Right. It would still be good to have done a little bit of high school math, I guess.

Yeah. I mean, I assume he was ahead of it. Like, they were also like, yeah, this kid's good enough in math. He's not going to. He doesn't need to. It's fine. Yeah. Now, when I say there are no self-made billionaires, shit like this is why.

Because there's no way that Bill Gates becomes the multi-billionaire he is today if he doesn't have both. And this is like not like leaving out exploitation and stuff. There's no way he becomes a billionaire if he doesn't have the privilege and wild fortune to have access to this computer. And like a lot of most rich kids didn't have this opportunity. Bill benefited at an early age, not just from wealth and social privilege, but from a wonderfully supportive community of moms who had the farsight to buy a computer for their kids to use and

a school that was progressive enough to let him like spend his class time learning to program. And Bill blossomed with all this additional freedom. His dad later recalled that Bill realized, quote, hey, I don't have to prove my position relative to my parents. I just have to figure out what I'm doing relative to the world. And Bill decided the thing he really wanted to do was get good at computers. His first computer program was a tic-tac-toe game he programmed that let users play against

the computer. He was not the only kid obsessed with the computer. Two other boys, Paul Allen and Kent Evans, fell in love with this machine. Paul Allen is the Microsoft founder. He died not too long ago, I think. Yeah. Man, it is crazy just like you and your buddy from high school becoming billionaires together. Yeah.

Bunch of moms sell a bunch of junk and buy a computer. It's like one of those tic-tac-toe things. Like a bunch of moms in the 1960s hold a rummage sale and then the big domino is millions die of the coronavirus because vaccine access is locked down. I mean, I went to kind of a hippie high school. So the only equivalent to that would be if we had been able to be the only humans on earth with access to weed at like age 14, and I guess that would have changed shit. If your school was like, he doesn't have to go to math class, he's getting real good

smoking pot. He's getting weed. True. Man, if only they'd given Bill Gates weed instead of a computer. He just would have been really into Grand Funk Railroad and we could have avoided a lot of problems. But you know what is into Grand Funk Railroad, Andrew? The products and services that support this podcast, one of which is Grand Funk Railroad,

our primary podcast sponsor. They're still alive, right? Or are they dead? I'm going to Google is Grand Funk Railroad dead? No, they're still alive. Looks like it. Six to present. They were disbanded and oh, yeah, seems like seems like they're still going.

That's good. That's good. All right. Well, listen to Grand Funk Railroad. Here's ads. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and

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What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

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Ah, we're back. We just we just listened to some GFR. I call them GFR, Andrew. It's just kind of a thing within the GFR community. So I don't know why we're talking about Grand Funk Railroad today. So yeah, Bill Gates gets real into computers with Paul Allen and this other kid, Kent Evans. Now Kent Evans was Gates's early best friend. He was a weird kid who carried a briefcase filled with business magazines.

So what? I hate this high school full of dorks so much. I know I was bullied as a kid, but it's making me want to go back in time to deliver swirly. Yeah, we need like we need time we need time traveling, there's a TV pitch, time traveling bullies going back to like beat up kids who turn into monsters. Let's take care of this shit. That's we got to deal with this. Yeah.

Got some kid who was an incredible bully back in the 80s and he retires to let go fly fishing in Montana. The government finds him on his farm like you're needed. Yeah, this man can deliver 13 swirly's in the space of seven minutes. No one's ever equaled that. Well, I guess the show version would be, you know, they need a child to do it. So they assume the bully's kid, but the bully's kid is actually very gentle. He's a nerd.

Sort of a father and son bullying people through time. Yes, he's going to teach his kid to beat up other kids for the sake of humanity. Oh, God. Okay. Well, it's not bad. I know you're listening. Green light this shit. We can have a script out to you by what?

Thursday? Yeah. Okay. Great. So, yeah, Bill Gates is hanging out with the briefcase boy and Kent pushes Gates credits that Kent is the guy like pushed him to think big and take risks and was like, like they were always talking about what they're going to be some kind of businessman, some kind of politician.

So like he was he was an ambitious kid and together Gates and Allent and another kid named Rick Wayland, who was another Microsoft founder, started the Lakeside Programmers Club. Now, despite the term club, this was not a hobby for them. The goal from the beginning was to find ways to make money with computers. I'm going to quote from the Washington Post here. The club operated with minimal supervision. This was by design says Fred Wright, the Lakeside math chairman who provided that supervision. Our philosophy was get a group of smart people together, give them tools and get out of the

way. Wright says again, incredibly lucky. That he says is the best environment to spur creativity, competition and collaboration. If you want to see the roots of Microsoft's culture, look no further than the Lakeside Programmer Club, Kent's father says. The four boys spent late night hours at Seattle's Computer Center Corp, C-Cubed, which offered time on a digital equipment court machine per an agreement with Lakeside. When C-Cubed went out of business in 1970, the Lakeside Programmers Club nearly imploded

in a civil war. Gates and Evans agreed to buy a set of DEC tapes cheap in a bankruptcy auction without the knowledge of their partners. They hid the tapes in a room at Lakeside and when Allent learned of this, he found and kept them. Livid, Gates and Evans threatened legal action. They were 15. So these kids are having like corporate legal spats as like 15-year-olds over the secret

computing machines they bought and hid from each other to keep and leg up on their teenage friends. Oh my God. Maybe there should have been a little more superstition. Yeah. Like it's one of those things. I believe you should let kids be kids. You should let kids explore, but also someone should have sat them and said, guys, you are

not, you are not a warring, you are not warring mega corporations. You are children. Yeah. Share the fucking tapes. Do one normal thing. Do one normal thing and stop carrying the briefcase around, Kent, for the love of God. Everyone hates the briefcase. We hate the briefcase.

We hate you. Yeah. You're going to feel bad about that in a second. So as their adolescents rolled on, Bill and Kent started taking consulting jobs for local companies that had computers, but no one who knew how to use them very well. They would often work in exchange for free computing time. In their junior year, a lakeside teacher hired them to automate the school's class scheduling system.

They did several all-nighters to get the program ready. Then on Memorial Day of that year, Kent took a break to go mountain climbing. Now, he was not an athletic kid, but he had become, he was, you know, he was someone who was prone to like getting obsessed with things and he had decided he's rather suddenly that he wanted to get like good at physical tasks. So he got into mountain climbing. But he wasn't great at it. And he slipped and fell to his death on May 28th, 1972.

So his father later blamed the accident on the fact that Kent was too exhausted to pay attention on mountain climbing because he'd been coding with Bill Gates all night. And Gates told the Washington Post, I was devastated. And he's been very consistent about the fact that like this was an incredibly traumatic thing. His best friend dies. He was actually set to give a speech at Kent's funeral, but he couldn't handle doing it. It was just too emotional for him.

I'm sure this is true. His now soon-to-be ex-wife says that when she met him, like 30 years later, he still talked about Kent all the time. But I have to throw in this very odd quote he gave to Netflix for a documentary when asked about Kent's death. It was so unexpected, so unusual. People didn't know what to say to me or to his parents. I sort of thought, hey, okay, now I'm going to do all these things that we talked about,

but I'll do it without him. Like that's just a weird dude who has trouble phrasing things like I think he is like because he's really consistent about this being devil. And I'm sure it was that said clearly, it was a weird kind of friendship because they're engaging in like corporate espionage with their other teenage buddies like now with his best friend dead, Bill needed a new best friend to stay up all night coding with one who wouldn't go mountain climbing. He picked Paul Allen.

Paul was enrolled at the University of Washington, but he would come back to finish the project with Gates when he was on break from college. Gates and Allen finished coding the program during Gates's senior year. While he was still 17, he and Allen formed a company called Traff O Data with the goal of making traffic counting machines. So they're doing businessy shit throughout this period, Bill's last couple of years in high school, but their collaborations weren't all professional. During one of his breaks from college, Allen helped Bill Gates do something creepy as hell,

and I'm going to quote from a write up in the cut. When he was in high school, he and fellow Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen would hack into the school's scheduling software and sign Gates up for all girls classes to up his chances of getting a date. Paul did the computer scheduling with me, Gates said. Unfortunately for him, he was two years ahead of me and he was off to college by then. So I was the one who benefited by being able to have the nice girls at least sit near me. It wasn't so that I could talk to them or anything, but they were there.

I think I was particularly inept at talking to girls or thinking, okay, do you ask them out? Do you not? When I went off to Harvard, I was a little more sociable, but I was still below average on talking to girls. But that is the thing, it's like, because I did a little kind of fucking computer programming when I was in high school and like making like business software, like just make a weird quasi pornographic video game.

Like that's what you want to do. What is happening here? It's so bizarre because like I mean, honestly, this is this is like some fucking Mark Zuckerberg shit, right? It's like starting Facebook so that you could like spy on girls and shit. Yeah. You know, it really is. It's the same basic idea bills is from an earlier age.

He would have done the same thing Zuckerberg did. That said, it's also like he's too much of a nerd to take advantage of it. He's just sitting in class with these girls because he it is a very like, you know, child of the sixties, the fifties, I guess, kind of what was just like once I'm there, I made it. I made it. I'm in the room with the girls. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Bill. And it's, you know, the thing that's funny about it is I mean, there's a number of things that are funny about it. But like it's it's like revenge of the nerd shit, you know, like it's that kind of thing, which like if you haven't watched revenge of the nerds, it's a movie that it's like

this silly movie about a bunch of nerds, you know, being the cool kids and getting one over on the jocks at a college that nobody thought anything was problematic about until I think about 10 years ago, everyone realized at the same time that the main character literally rapes a girl. Yeah. And it's played off as a gag. It's it's pretty bad, pretty, pretty grim ass. Yeah.

It's truly just like, what? How? But it's so many movies from the 80s like that also. Yeah. And Bill Gates is like that. Like now we'll talk about this in the second episode, there's all these stories coming out about how creepy he is and how like inappropriate a lot of his relationships were. And people just like didn't talk about it because it was just like, well, he's like

the who wouldn't want to fuck the billionaire nerd. Like that's the thing. The nerds grow up and make money and then all the women want them. That's like there's like a million movies with that as the plot, right? Now, interestingly enough, fucking the Simpsons early on put a lot of time into like with a character clearly themed after Bill Gates, like subverting that trope, which is is good. Now as that last quote made clear, Bill was accepted into Harvard after after college creeper not his grades and impressive computing resume made him a shoe in.

He started college in 1973 and he lived in a dorm house that was filled with all of the math and science nerds because even Harvard had standards. They wanted to keep those kids away from the dorms where kids were getting laid, basically. Now, during his sophomore year, Bill Gates met Steve Balmer, the future CEO of Microsoft and presently most famous for allegedly throwing chairs at employees during meetings. I can confirm from my time as a tech journalist that he smells like onions. I don't know what he smelled like in college, but I can confirm that in like 2010 he smells like onions.

Now, Balmer and Gates were opposites in a number of ways. Steve was extremely involved in everything. Bill was aggressively uninvolved in anything but his own little world of computers. That Washington Post article I quoted from includes a few interesting tidbits like that both got perfect scores on their SATs and were obsessed with Napoleon. There's probably something meaningful in the fact that Bill Gates loves Napoleon and Mark Zuckerberg loves Augustus Caesar. Not a co-winky dink, but all right.

I'm just saying it should be illegal to have classics education. We should. Yeah. Well, especially for that type of white guy, you know, like, come on. Yeah. No. The only thing you should learn about is genocide. We're throwing all of the statues into the sea.

Don't tell this kid about Hadrian. Now, the reports we have from Gates in college make it clear that he was he was he was gross. He didn't use sheets. Instead, he slept directly on his dorm mattress because making his bed was too hard. Balmer did the same. Again, all boys in college are gross. So I don't know. It's just funny to me.

Now Gates's main extracurricular during college was poker, which he was terrible at. He lost so much money that he eventually gave Steve Balmer his checkbook for safekeeping because otherwise he was going to lose all of his money getting his ass kicked at poker. Now, while all this was happening, personal computing was in its infancy. 1974 marked the release of what a lot of people will call the first personal computer, the Altair 8080. Now Paul Allen, who at this point had graduated and gotten a job at the Honeywell Corp, immediately rushed to Bill's dorm with an ad for the for the Altair 8080.

He and Gates quickly wrote a letter to the computer's manufacturer, MITS, asking if they could write software for it in basic MITS was like, yeah, sure, you guys can like, we'll pay you to write software if you come up with software that's good, but you better hurry because a shitload of people have actually been making the same offer to us. Personal computing is kind of like starting to blow up in this period of time. So both men basically dropped everything else in their lives to move to Albuquerque, where MITS was headquartered and write software for the first personal computer. This meant Paul Allen quit his job at Honeywell and Gates dropped out of Harvard in his junior

year in 1975 to move to Albuquerque and start a company. You might have expected this to have gone over poorly with his parents. But again, Bill seems to have kind of hit the mom and dad lottery in a lot of ways. When questioned about it, decades later, his father said, being a college dropout wasn't precisely what my wife and I had envisioned for any of our children, but Bill seemed to know what he was doing. Very supportive family this kid has, and he didn't know what he was doing. You have to give the man credit for that.

Allen and Gates formed a consulting company to sell software to Altair. They called it Micro Dash Soft. Hmm. Hmm. Why is there a dash? Can you tell where this is going? Yeah, everything needed a dash back in the back in the 70s. Is the Napster guy going to come and say, get rid of the get rid of the dash or is that

not what's going to happen? No, the Napster guy was had not been born at this point. Yeah. Thank God. Yeah. Oh. What's his name? Sean Parker.

That fucker. Sean Parker. That piece of shit. Fuck you, Sean Parker. That's true. Yeah. Let's make legally actionable claims about Sean Parker next. So Bill and Paul hired friends of theirs to help them produce software, including a kid

named Monty Davidoff, who they had write a piece of software that would allow computers to perform greater ranges of calculations. The three all lived together in a two bedroom apartment. Davidoff slept on the living room floor in 2000. He told the Washington Post that although they were friends, Gates could be something of a dick. Quote, there was definitely a supervisory dynamic bill could get very loud. If he felt you weren't getting something, he would say the same thing louder.

He liked strong interchanges. I preferred not to work in that way. Now, this is the period of time. A lot of Microsoft stories come from, you know, the scrappy upstarts on a shoestring budget, building a globe spanning mega corporation from their living room or their garage or whatever. Right. Right.

The reality is that Gates was backed from the beginning by family money. There was never any like there was a time when the company wasn't making much money, but there was never a period of time when Gates was had any financial worries. Right. Right. Yeah. Davidoff worked for them for two summers and then they offered him a permanent job. But he had to say no because he couldn't afford to drop out of Harvard.

He told the Post that Bill Gates had only been able to drop out of Harvard to start his company because his family was rich, quote, the way Bill and I thought about money was very different. He would tell all of his friends, just call me collect. He knew there was he knew he wasn't going to have to support himself coming out of college. And the fact that Bill never ever in his whole life worried about money in a meaningful way does not mean he wasn't obsessed with it. In fact, his lust for profitability, depending on who you ask, had a somewhat disastrous impact

on the growing computing community. In the early days, computing was in fact a community. These were the days when any given computer was a DIY project. Most personal computers, like you would have to solder parts of it together to like get it working or to add things like you're like using fucking tools and shit to like anyone who has a computer is doing this shit. Your coding programs on like these weird paper things like I couldn't. Right.

Right. Yeah. Like it's it's it's so it's it's very much DIY. So it's actually not all that different from like the the the 3D printed gun community is today. Right. So like everything is shared, all of these programs are shared. You don't pay money for them.

Usually you just like, oh, or if someone buys it, they then just copy it and send it for free to their friends. Like that's the way this stuff really works. And computer hobbyists had a powerful sense of solidarity. In the early days of Microsoft, Gates and Allen were selling software to those hobbyists, only not everyone who used Microsoft software actually paid for it. A lot of these people were poor, you know, buying a computer was all they could afford to do.

So they weren't buying the software. And there was a brisk open trade and free software from each according to their resources to everyone according to their needs. Microsoft programs were very popular with this set. One expert later wrote, hobbyists loved it. They loved it so much they were willing to send tapes, paper tapes around to each other for free. Now this was critical in Microsoft's success because it spread adoption of their products,

but it enraged Bill Gates that people were getting software for free. In 1976, he penned an infamous open letter to computer hobbyists. He accused them of all stealing all of stealing his software and said that resellers who sold computers with his programs already on them were basically robbing them. The letter included the line, hardware must be paid for, but software is something to share. Who cares if the people who worked on it get paid? He's being very snotty about this.

Now Gates complained that the time he and Allen spent to create their products was worth $40,000, but that the royalties they received based on what they'd actually sold meant they were just making about $2 an hour. This was, many will argue, a short-sighted way of looking at things. The share-and-share-like mindset of early software was a major driver of innovation. It allowed different ideas about software to be merged and tested and provided early programmers with a greater base of knowledge to work from. Many of the brilliant minds behind the computer revolution, guys like Steve Wozniak, benefited

hugely from this state of affairs. And the Woz is someone who will say, yeah, that's why we have the computing systems that we have today is because in my day, we were just able to share everything. And Woz is like a punk side of this thing. He's a phone freaker. He's like doing, back in the day, you could make certain signals over the phone that would get you free phone access and shit. He was all into that.

Fucking Steve Wozniak is actually pretty fucking rad. When he got super rich off of Apple, he blew all of his money holding a bunch of giant concerts and stuff. He's a fucking cool dude, actually. But Bill did not. So Bill, you know, a lot of, and again, Wozniak is one of those guys that you really can't argue it was instrumental in the existence of personal computers, as we know them today. You can argue that about Bill Gates.

And he did not agree with guys like Steve Wozniak about intellectual property. He felt that intellectual property rights trumped human progress any day of the week. It didn't matter that sharing software was good for computing because it was bad for Microsoft. And so from that moment on Gates dedicated himself to making sure IP was kept sacrosanct. Today intellectual property rights and paid software are such pillars of the industry that it can be hard to believe this wasn't necessarily always going to be the case. One thing that made Apple computer interesting in 1976 was the fact that their operating

system Apple basic was free and they openly claimed, quote, our philosophy is to provide software for our machines at free or minimal cost. Now there was significant fallout within the computing community over this open letter. One hobbyist, Hal Singer, who published an influential newsletter complained that since Bill Gates had developed basic on a Harvard University computer funded by the US government and the start of the Microsoft like the most programs they make, they make in Harvard before they drop out. The Harvard computer they make it on was paid for by DARPA, like the Defense Advanced Research

Project Agency. And so Hal Singer will say like, well, he should never have been able to sell Windows in the first place. Yeah. It was it was developed using taxpayer funds, which is true. This is a very defensible line of argument. Now, I mean, it does it sounds like Bill Gates is the thing the philosophy of his that has resonated down is tech guys using public, you know, either public research, public funded

intellectual property, public, whatever, thinking they own it and then not letting and then getting mad when, you know, like, like taking taking from the common good and pretending they invented it. Yeah. Yeah. It's fucking it's fucking rad. But you know what else is rad, Andrew heavy? The products and services that support the podcast.

Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Every time. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, Hey, let's start a coup back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock and I'm Alex French in our newest show. We take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts.

We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler and I got a lot to say for one, my personal history is raw, inspiring and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads from my heart podcast and school of humans? This is let's start a coup. Welcome to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you

find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Welcome to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories, but there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about non-consensual relationships with stuffed animals. Andrew, have you ever... I'm going to edit that out, right?

In an unconsensual relationship with a stuffed animal, Sophie, these are the conversations people tune in for. I will not have Anderson Slander on this podcast. I mean, probably also. You are the one who slandered them, yeah, because stuffed animals can't really consent, can they? Yeah, mostly. It's all non-consensual.

It's all non-consensual. It's really something we should analyze more. Pretty fucked up, yeah. It's not great. It's not great. But you know what is consensual? I cut that entire conversation out of it. Nope, Sophie, this is all stayin' in.

This is all gold. According to my edit notes, it is not. Well, according to my edit notes, Chris, you don't have to do that. You can keep this in. You can fight the system. You can't stop the signal, Sophie, and the signal is talking about whether or not stuffed animals can consent. The signal, I think largely is coming out on no on that one.

But... It's not happening. Hit us up. And we're back. Continue around. Oh, we've been back. So other people who knew Gates and Allen at the time reposted his estimate that he and his colleagues had put $40,000 into designing their software, right?

That's a big part of his argument on this open letter is, this is how much money it's cost us to make this. We have to be able to make it back. We can't afford to do this. One member of the Homebrew Computer Club, Lee Felsenstein, designed the first mass-produced personal computer, later said, quote, well, we all knew that the evaluation of computer time was the ultimate in funny money. You never pay that much for the computer time.

And I think that research will show that they were using someone else's computer time. Someone else was paying for that. It could have been Honeywell where Paul Allen was working. So we all knew this to be a spurious argument. So back in this day, you had to pay in a lot of cases for access to a computer, right? And one of the things Bill gets in trouble with when he's a kid, like he and his friends get kicked out of one of the places because they're hacking the system to get free computer time.

They're using free computer time at Stanford. They're almost certainly using Paul Allen's company's freak. They're doing a lot of things they would call stealing. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But it's also like the pointing out the hypocrisy with those folks never works. Yeah.

No, not ever. They, I mean, yeah. Yeah. And Felsenstein, again, it talks about kind of the injustices of the world. Felsenstein is one of the most influential computing pioneers you never heard of. And the reason that Gates is famous and Felsenstein isn't has nothing to do with the fact that Gates did more to revolutionize the world. It's not that he was like that much more influential than Felsenstein.

It's because Felsenstein was obsessed with pushing the boundaries of computing while Gates was obsessed with pushing the boundaries of how much money computing could make. Right. Felsenstein later wrote that the open letter quote delineated a rift between the actual industry where there's trying to make money and there's where those, those hobbyists where we're trying to make things happen. So there's this rift that opens that Bill starts between making money and making computers better.

Bill is not on the making computers better side. Right. Right. Right. As anyone who's used Microsoft Vista could tell you. Oh, God, I mean, it's just it's the the through line of like he was a weird businessman since he was a child is the like to me. Yeah.

I don't know. Yes. Sue and his friends at age 15. Yeah. They're weird. Again, could he could have given this kid could have like gone back in time and given nine year old Bill Gates a blunt and like a crimson album and then like just just get into weird nerd shit.

Just any way from yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Start worshiping the devil. Worship the devil. Listen to Prague Rock. Take a bunch of acid. It'll be fine.

God or you'll become Steve Jobs, actually. So yeah. You know, it's kind of the same kind of the same same journey. So Lee, I'm going to read another quote from Lee Felsenstein here, where he's just kind of explaining why Microsoft gets big and what that has to do with this this homebrew computer culture that he hates, quote, the industry needs the hobbyists. And this was illustrated by what happened eventually when National Semiconductor, which made their own microprocessor chips in 77 or 78 decided they needed a basic operating

system. They asked what's the most popular basic and the answer was Microsoft basic because everybody had copied it and everybody was using it. So we made Microsoft the standard basic. National Semiconductor went to Microsoft and bought a license. They were in business that way. This was the marketing function. And the hobbyists did the marketing with a complete antipathy of the company in question.

There were other basics. And you know, some of them might even have been better. Gates's later success was in a certain measure because of what we did that he said we shouldn't do. We were thieves to do it at all. Like that's important is Bill is arguing that like, well, we can't be expected to do this for free. Otherwise, you won't have innovation.

It's like, well, the fact that people were sharing your program for free is why you became a billionaire because when companies started realizing we need to pay for operating systems, what's the most popular one? Oh, this one, because everyone's been sharing it for free. Like, yeah, it's the argument about piracy, right? It's the same thing is like, well, if people are able to share movies and music and stuff for free, it doesn't hurt the industry. We'll actually bring them more fans who will spend money on those things in other ways,

which I think was born out by what happened. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's also the sort of inevitability of it, right, which is like like it or not. I mean, it also it is just a better model for, I guess, some stuff. I don't know. I'm sitting here for a lot of things for every for most a lot of things that are covered by intellectual property, like, yeah, you know, my boss, part of why I'm putting out

my book for free. Like there will be a print version and stuff. I've got a publisher, but it's going to be available for free online. Is it something my my boss, Jason Parjan, did back in the early 2000s, he just published his book online for free. It became hugely popular. And when you have something for free that, you know, X number of people have consumed anyway, there will be a way to monetize it.

Jason got made a lot of money off of that book eventually, like it's it works out and the same thing with Bill Gates. Bill Gates made a shitload of money off of people using his shit for free. That's kind of how intellectual property actually works most of the time. But Bill Gates is a dick. So one of the people who spends the most time slamming Bill Gates and is the best at it because he's right about literally everything is Corey Doctorow. I fucking love Corey.

He's he's he's rad. And I found a really good interview with him on Jacobin, where he goes into more detail on how Gates went from, quote, another company making Altair software into a giant of the industry. And he makes a similar argument to Felsenstein, but he highlights Microsoft's deal with IBM is more crucial. Quote Gates gets his fortune because IBM had been subject to years of antitrust hell. Every year for 12 years, IBM outspent the entire Department of Justice antitrust division

fighting an antitrust claim. Finally, under Reagan, they were let off the hook. So IBM had spent years tied to the bumper of the DOJ. And one of the things they knew that the DOJ really hated was monopolizing software by tying it to hardware. So they made the PC and they made it out of commodity parts so that it could be cloned. They sat back as Phoenix computing reverse engineered their ROM and started selling it to Dell and Gateway and Compact so that there were compatible machines.

And they said, we're not going to make the operating system. And they went to Bill Gates and Paul Allen and asked them to make a D a DOS that they could use their machines so the DOJ would leave them alone. So that's where Gates's fortune comes from. He was in the right place at the right time in his mindset. This idea of cutthroat competition, of no sharing, of no collegiality allowed him to leverage the weakness of IBM's own IP, its ability to control its critics and competitors and customers and then impose his own.

And so in another bit of irony Gates, who spends a chunk of his life fighting one of the biggest antitrust cases in history, maybe the biggest, also is only able to get started because the DOJ goes after IBM for monopoly shit. Like because IBM has stopped from making monopoly, that's why they don't go in-house to make their operating system because they're worried about antitrust shit, which is why Bill Gates gets rich. Like all of these things he hates his whole life are the whole reason he has money. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. The hypocrisy of it is like, what can you do? I don't know. They're always going to think they invented it. Yeah. They're always going to think it was all them.

Yeah. Again, this is why we need we need like to dismantle all of our present federal law enforcement agencies and devote their resources to like hiring a bunch of middle aged and like early 50s, 60s women and giving them tire irons and the ability to track people down and hit them in the face with tire irons when they start doing shit that's clearly going to end in a bad place. Yeah. Like a 15 year old suing his partners in the computer club and it's like it's time for

the ladies to hit him with some irons, you know, yeah, like smack him around a little bit. Yeah. Maybe have make make another one of them have a mountain climbing accident. I don't know. Just hypothetically, just hypothetically, just the old ladies with tire irons, no nonsense division. They could have gone after the we work guy, you know, when he starts talking about being

the world's first trillionaire, hit him with a fucking iron right in the face, like fucking crack that boy's jaw. Just give it. Give it. Take a take a thought. Mm hmm. It couldn't be worse than the current system. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. Now, Microsoft. Okay. So by 1980, Microsoft was enough of a real company that Bill was able to hire his buddy Steve Ballmer to do the non techy business managing stuff that was necessary in a growing company. Ballmer was employee number 24.

No. What? You won't get the reference, but it'll continue. Oh, OK. It's probably a basketball thing. Sophie loves the Lakers, who are the same as whatever other team she was mentioning earlier. I don't know any of these things, Sophie.

So but but Steve Ballmer does because he owns a golf team or some shit, whatever kind of sport. They don't win. So might as well go with that. So this is not a business nerd podcast where we talk about how companies grow and shit. You can find so much written about like the intricacies of early Microsoft corporate culture and whatnot. And it's all boring as hell.

Apple is a lot more fun because Steve Jobs is a freaking lunatic. Right. Right. Right. He's literally like a filthy vagrant to like forces everybody to smell his rancid ass as he like refuses to shower for weeks and lives in the office. He's such a he's a hoot. I again, I got my start in journalism in like reporting on the tech industry and I was legitimately

bummed when he died because he was just so fucking entertaining, but also a monster like they all are except for the was someone's going to tell me about Steve Wozniak designed Israeli missile to technology or some shit and make me really sad. But I don't know anything about anything bad he's done yet. So there were twists and turns, obviously, in the story of Microsoft's growth. But the gist of it is it expanded steadily over the 80s. In 1986, it had its IPO, which is the IPO is when it goes public on the stock market. That's when all of the people who found a company get rich as shit.

And Gates gets I mean, he's always been rich, but he gets fuck. He gets fuck everyone money at this point. From 1987 on, he was never off the list of wealthiest Americans. Now Gates and Balmer. Yeah. Right. That's how long he's been fucking rich. Right.

That's that. Yeah. Now, Gates and Balmer fought constantly. They were as much rivals as they were friends. And again, Steve Balmer has is allegedly throws chairs at employees during meetings when they argue with him. So like the two would get into screaming arguments over just about anything. One friendly chess match between the two ended in Bill Gates throwing a tantrum and tossing

the board and pieces off the table. But none of this fighting seems to have harmed the expansion of the company. In the 1980s, Balmer headed the team that developed Windows. By the 1990s, Apple and Microsoft were the biggest names in the computing game. The history of that rivalry is something we could get into. But honestly, both are harmed by narcissistic assholes. What do you care? The story of Gates's crappitude has less to do with like shady shit that he did fighting

another giant company and more to do with how he constantly assaulted anyone trying to innovate in a way that might reduce Microsoft profits. Every doctor who describes this as a process of tying quote, he ties the ability to get Windows or DOS on your machine to an agreement not to pre install rival products. He can sabotage the operating system, which he does for through vertical integration. He sells you an operating system and a suit of applications that run on it. And then if you make a competing application, he can tweak the operating system. Excel, for example, had a long running competitor that was by all accounts better called Lotus

one, two and three. The model at Microsoft was DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run and every new release would just fall apart. So they literally sabotage other products so that they won't work on Microsoft machines. Bill and Microsoft also had the ability to strategically snuff out rivals by bundling free versions of rival products into the operating system. So in Toronto, there was a great software success story called Del Reena that made the world's most successful fact software.

One day they started including free fact software with Windows and no one ever bought a Del Reena license again. That was the end of it. But Gates was able to do what everyone who's dreamt of a command economy wanted to do. Subordinate the individual priorities of other market actors to his needs to achieve a strategic goal in this case for his own enrichment. So that's fucking cool. Now all of this went very smoothly for Gates and for Microsoft until the latter half of

the 1990s. Now throughout the 90s, the Justice Department is kind of on an annual basis sending out their equivalent of like warning shots saying like we're investigating potential antitrust at Microsoft. But nothing really solid materializes until Bill Gates decides to take aim at a plucky little web browser called Netscape Navigator. Yes, now if you're not as old as us, especially if you came of age after the dominance of social media, browser preference probably doesn't mean a lot to you.

People can argue about Firefox or Chrome or Safari or I don't know, fucking opera. But unless you're using Microsoft Edge, like some sort of goddamn heathen, all browsers are more or less fine from a usability standpoint, right? I'm sure people are going, no, if you're like, fuck you. I don't care. Yeah. Basically like fuck it. Like whatever.

Indistinguishable. Yeah. Yeah. But back in the day, Netscape was the only PC browser that wasn't an unholy nightmare to use. Like everything was trash and then there was Netscape Navigator. This oasis of competent design in a sea of mostly Microsoft Explorer flavored shit. Like fucking Netscape ruled consumers loved it.

And that drove Gates crazy. In 1995, he had some of his people meet the developers of the browser and offer to invest in the company. Microsoft reps were extremely complimentary at this meeting. The friendly attitude did not last though. From a write up in a blog dedicated to the book 1995, the year the future began, quote, the pretense of cordiality dissipated on June 21st, 1995 at a four hour meeting at Netscape headquarters in Mountain View, California at which representatives of Microsoft delivered

what Netscape considered a heavy handed threat, divide the market for web browsers or face the prospect of annihilation. According to detailed notes of the meeting made by Mark Andresen, Netscape's co-founder, Microsoft's representatives proposed restricting the Netscape Navigator browser to older versions of Microsoft's Windows operating systems. That would mean excluding Navigator from Windows 95, the upgraded operating system that Microsoft was planning to release. Now at the time, no one was 100% sure if Microsoft was legally allowed to do this.

There are laws against being a monopoly. And when you're saying not only do we make operating systems, but we unilaterally will decide which browsers work for them, you're edging across that line. But again, it was new enough that like there was debate as to whether or not this was verboten. Now Andresen at the time was a 24 year old Callow youth like Bill had been back in Albuquerque, and he described Microsoft reps as acting like Don Corleone from The Godfather. I have never been in a meeting with in my 35 year business career in which a competitor had so blatantly implied that we would either stop competing with it or the competitor would

kill us. In all my years in business, I have never heard nor experienced such an explicit proposal to divide markets. Netscape said no, and Microsoft did what they promised. By 1999, they had successfully killed Netscape, which was duly bought and destroyed by AOL RIP, like pour one out to my homie. Now, did you ever use Netscape, Andrew? Oh, yeah, yeah.

I am definitely of that age. I actually I will say also of the like pay attention to shit. I did not exactly realize that it was had been killed. Yeah, that's why it stopped being a thing. Yeah. I assume that's what the fire because it was all Mozilla. I don't know. I mean, the same people, I think, later wound up being a big part of a fire, but yeah,

Netscape gets murdered. Obviously, good browsers eventually become I mean, you can we people will argue about that to this day and like you fuck you. I don't care. Netscape and Chrome or Firefox and Chrome are the same. Go to hell. Yeah. Absolutely.

No, no. Now, Microsoft edges trash, but whatever. Yeah. I don't even know what that is. Exactly. But that's what they know. It's what they replaced Explorer with. Yeah.

That's the hilarious part. It's like this was like a like, you know, a war for the keys of who would control the Internet. And now it's like, what's the difference? There's a new one. Yeah. Well, it's like you guys were never never got good at making browsers. Like it clearly wasn't the thing you were interested in.

It was just because it wasn't even because it was going to hurt your ability to make money because they're using the thing on your computers that they're paying for. It was that someone else was making money like it didn't even hurt you. You just hate the idea that other people will profit. Yeah. It's amazing. So yeah, that meeting with Microsoft and Netscape where Microsoft threatened Netscape wound up playing a key role in a massive 1998 antitrust lawsuit the federal government

brought against Microsoft 20 state governments joined the lawsuit, which alleged that the company was engaged in a systemic pattern of anti competitive tactics. Its attempt to wipe out all competition in the browser market was just one example of this. The government case against Microsoft was heavily boosted by a memorandum written in 1995 by Gates himself titled the Internet title wave. It described Netscape as a threat that had to be beaten. The government alleged using this that Microsoft set out to win at any cost.

The federal judge who heard the case, Thomas Penfield Jackson, decided for the government finding that Microsoft had attempted to monopolize the web browser market. He ordered the company split in two. Now you're probably aware that this did not happen. Microsoft appealed. They obviously they have all of the money in the world. They appeal. The judge's decision gets overturned.

They and the thing they eventually got was just like a slap on the wrist. I'm not going to labor long on why this happened. Microsoft had all the money, all the lawyers and owned a decent number of the politicians. Of course they won in the long term. Our system is designed for them to win. What's important and what was valuable about the antitrust suit is that it shattered Bill Gates for a while. It was hugely stressful.

It made for months of bad PR. It led him to have several in office nervous breakdowns. And worst of all, it involved a public deposition that exposed him to the world as exactly the kind of arrogant and angry little man. Those who'd worked closely with him had known since the Albuquerque days. So let's end this episode by talking about that deposition. Microsoft's legal strategy in the first case was to depict the prosecutors as out of touch old fogies who didn't understand technology and to claim like Microsoft is just acting

in the way any reasonable tech company would do. Gates's lawyers in PR flax wanted him to make hay out of his reputation as a boy genius who dropped out of Harvard to become the world's richest man. Here's how ours Technica described what came next. By day two, it became clear that the strategy was failing spectacularly. As New Yorker writer Kent Owletto once noted, Gates had never in his life groveled for a job or suffered many of the indignities most of us experience on a regular basis. He regularly berated reporters for asking what he'd say were stupid questions.

Publicly lauded as the wise sage, consummate businessman and industry visionary, Gates was accustomed to being treated with obsequious deference from all but a small number of peers. As such, he had little or no experience tolerating, let alone encountering, dissent, criticism or challenges to his authority. The lack of experience played right into the government's hand. Instead of portraying a leader in control of his domain and confident in his case and his company's legal and ethical righteousness, the courtroom video showed a side of Gates

that had never been on public display before. He was petulant, petty, flustered and dour. He was ineffectual. He was in a word beaten. During three days of intense questioning, Gates often feigned ignorance of his own company's policies and actions. He parsed out everyday words or phrases such as concern, support and piss on. Gates seemed to use the strategy to evade tough questions about whether his company abused

its entrenched Windows franchise to kill off emerging competitors, such as Navigator and Java. To the surprise of him and his many attorneys and image handlers, Gates came off as argumentative, petty and someone badly losing ground to a more formidable rival. One example of this exchange came in this exchange with David Boyce, the private attorney hired by the Justice Department. Boyce, what non-Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of 1996? Gates, I don't know what you mean concerned.

Boyce, what is it about the word concerned that you don't understand? Gates, I'm not sure what you mean by it. Boyce, is Gates, is there a document where I use that term? Boyce, is the term concerned a term you're familiar with in the English language? Gates, yes. Does it have a meaning you're familiar with? Gates, yes. You fucking piece of shit.

That's like the Ben Shapiro School of Debate, it's like, yeah, just like don't address the issue. Oh, yeah. What is it? Harvard dweebs. Yeah. Again, it's like that Ars Technica writer points out, like he's never had to grovel for a job.

He's never had to deal with indignities. At one point, Thomas Pinfield Jackson, the judge hearing the case, started laughing. Microsoft lawyers argued during a closed-door session that the deposition was turning into a sideshow and government lawyers should be barred from showing any more segments during the trial. The judge denied this motion saying, if anything, I think your problem is with your witness, not the way in which his testimony is being presented. Basically like there, you can't show this deposition because it makes us look bad and

the judge is like, that's exactly why we should show it. Holy shit. Unfortunately for all mankind, the Microsoft anti-trust case was actually kind of even though the government kind of lost, was basically the best case scenario for such a trial in our system. Good didn't win and evil didn't lose, but evil had a horrible time and wound up traumatized enough that it quit its job. So that's like the best case scenario.

You're never going to break up the big company because they have all the money to fight you, but you can make the CEO like not want to do his job anymore. Yeah. Sort of the Viet Cong portion of the lawsuit. Yes. Famous Viet Cong analogs, the U.S. Department of Justice. There's always a bigger fish, that's the lesson, there's always a bigger fish. All right.

So, Andrew, that's the end of part one for the day. Awesome. What a story. What a tale. You got any pluggables to plug? No, yeah, just, you know, Yozef's racist. We are independent now. I don't remember if we said that at the top, but yeah, go to suboptimalpods.com and you'll

see how to subscribe to, you know, premium shows and stuff and whatever. See, that's exciting because in part two, we are going to have to ask, hey, Yozef, is that racist? Amazing. A couple of times. Can't wait. Oh, pot. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations.

In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of goods. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

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Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.