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

Episode Date: June 17, 2021

Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti to continue 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. What's hungover? My, the host of this podcast is behind the bastards. The podcast that's being recorded at the unreasonably early hour of Sophie. What time is it right now? It's 2.39 pm.

Jesus Christ. So like the crack of dawn we're up doing this. I just hope you all, I hope you all respect it. This is why we have to heavily, we have to, we have to sue anybody who distributes this podcast for free. Because if all of the, all of the backbreaking labor getting up at the crack of 2.39 pm to record this podcast after I was drinking last night. 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, Andrew, what do you consider? You should owe me $35. No, I'm on the other side of things. I started waking up super early. Yeah. Well, Andrew. Oh, yeah. Drew in.

And T. Yeah. T drizzle. Do people call you T drizzle? They should. I think they actually have on fellow I heart podcast, the daily is like, guys, that feels like exactly the kind of shit they would say. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's T drizzle is a good name. Yeah.

So we're just going to roll forward with that. Yeah. Yeah. Andrew. Hey, how are you? How are you feeling about Bill Gates so far? Have you learned anything new? I, 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. Fuck Bill Gates. Yeah. But, but not like, seriously, fuck Bill Gates. Yeah. Fuck that guy. Casual, just like casual stoic. Fuck Bill Gates.

Yeah. Fuck Bill Gates. I don't, 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 bad at this point. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. 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 antitrust case. And one in the end, as billionaires nearly always do, but the whole process exhausted him emotionally. Microsoft's NASDAQ value had been cut in half, which destroyed about $200 billion in fake money held by rich assholes like Bill 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. And this put on him and Microsoft lasted longer than the actual charges. By September of 1996, 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 Doctro will argue that we owe Google's existence in part to the trauma Bill felt over the antitrust suit. It was 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 2019, it was asked by Kara Swisher why Microsoft hadn't bought Android before Google. This was just seven years after the antitrust action, and he claims that it was just too scared of the DOJ to risk it.

So, again, even though the government doesn't win this case, it is good to do this thing, because it stops people like Bill Gates from fucking up as much things as they otherwise might. And it sounds like enough of this was simply on a personal level he was scared of the humiliation of it. 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 from his position at the head of Microsoft.

Sort of. In 1998, Steve Ballmer 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 2000, Gates stepped down as CEO of Microsoft, and Ballmer took his place. Bill was 44 at the time, and he remained the chairman of the board and chief software architect. At the time, this was billed as a way for Gates, whose public image was of a genius programmer, to spend his time exploring new technology. 2000 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 1990s that we sort of missed while we were talking about business stuff last episode. 1995 was obviously a big year for Microsoft, the company, and for the tech industry as a whole. But 1994 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, his now about to be former wife. At the time they started dating, Melinda was a Microsoft employee, a product manager. She started working there in 1987, the year after she graduated from college.

Today, this kind of relationship sets off immediate alarm bells 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 arrange to sit next to her? We know this man. Like he absolutely made that happen. His actual MO.

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 date. And for a long time, the story was they fell in love and became a billionaire power couple at the end. Reality was of course much grosser, but we'll talk about that later. 1994 was also a year of tragedy for the Gates family. Bill had remained close with his parents. He moved Microsoft back to Seattle in part 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 1980s, when 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. Mama 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 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 1994. Bill Sr. 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, as is 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. It's like sure like 80 bucks for them, you know. And so yeah, for for most of like the late 90s, it's just kind of his dad handling the Gates philanthropy.

But then Bill quits being the CEO of Microsoft in like 2000 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 save the world in the Economist, which is like puffing up one of his books about climate change or some shit. But there's been a bunch of pieces like that, right? Right, right. Yeah, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started officially in the year 2000.

It began with, I think, a hundred million dollars, which was like the Bill Gates equivalent again, like 80 bucks. The foundation expanded massively in 2006 when Bill Gates convinced Warren Buffett to give most of 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 watch by the sidelines, that probably looked like a defensive point, a defensible point. For most of the public crusade, for years, the most public crusade of the Gates Foundation was their war against malaria. By 2018, 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. Good thing to fight. I would agree. Sounds good. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. And Bill certainly can't be faulted for a 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 in their struggle against malaria. Obviously, they haven't beaten it, but that's, you know, pretty big, pretty big task. 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 deadliest foes. The Gates has have also pledged 10 billion dollars over the next decade to provide free vaccines to the world's poor. Through its Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunization, or GAVI, the Foundation has vaccinated millions of kids in impoverished countries against polio and other horrible shit.

Bill and Melinda take some credit for the fact that between 1990 and 2012, total deaths of children under five dropped from 12.6 million to 6.6 million. Now, there's no way to evaluate how much of an impact they had on that, but vaccinating kids absolutely saves lives. Here's the thing, though. The whole story is not just the whole question should not just be, does this foundation's work save lives? Because that's not all we're talking about here. And it's not something you can answer that simply because the tens of billions of dollars in that foundation were able to come from Gates and other plutocrats because they didn't pay that shit in taxes. It's wonderful to vaccinate kids, 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 Prophets of Capital, which goes into some detail about what I find so unsettling in Gates's ideology. As Bill Gates has rightly noted, they are more interested in cures for baldness than in cures for 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 a market of millions of children getting this vaccine and then being paid for it in the developing world, if we could commit to a market and knew that demand would be there, we could incent 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 still means that those profits are valued more in his world than those lives. When Jonas Salk invented 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 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 Gates 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 inequality where human beings don't need a profit motive to vaccinate starving children? Yeah. And also where philanthropy isn't at the whim of a handful of white dudes. Yeah, exactly. And that's kind of what we're building to. I assure you this becomes more than just an ideological argument. There's solid stuff to dig in here, but I want to quote again from that book, The New Prophets of Capital.

Turning something into a commodity means 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 14 years. We are 46th in the world for infant mortality, despite being the wealthiest country on Earth. Babies in poor states, like Alabama, are twice as likely to die as infants in wealthy areas. This is part of why virtually all public health experts agree that universal health care is a good idea. But as Nicole Ashoff writes, quote, when we frame the problem of poor people in the global South dying from preventable diseases as a market failure problem,

we close off the possibility of building a health care system in which health care 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 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-19 pandemic, we can say, oh, yeah, actually, we all benefit in a purely selfish way from making sure that health care is available worldwide. Turns out we are all in this together. And yeah, as opposed to let's make it profitable to save children.

In 2015, the Gates Foundation funded a study in the Lancet and that study was about like public health options worldwide and that study called for universal health care. Despite this, in that year's development report, the Gates Foundation claimed that universal health care has, quote, limitations as a global development goal and 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 massively 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 a lot of times as gifts to those businesses. For example, in 2014, the Gates Foundation announced an $11 million 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. So you have to bribe MasterCard to take a chance on Kenya.

And that aid is not a loan or investment. It was a gift that we're giving fucking MasterCard $11 million. 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 Monsanto Corporation, who Bill argues should be bribed to take over more and more responsibility for agriculture in Africa. There's all these articles we're Bill talking about, like how scary it is the population of Africa is set to explode. And number one, there's some uncomfortable racial undertones of his obsessive concern with the population of Africa. He always for him says 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. But his solution is let's pay Monsanto to like subsidize seeds that they have to buy that are genetically modified so that they can't share them. It's this fucking thing capitalists have been doing since the 1700s, right? The 1770s, 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 village's harvest is bad. Let's get rid of all that because we want to centralize all of our farming to make it more profitable and then 30 million people starve to death. And it's the same basic. We're not going to 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 involve talking to people who have been farming in Africa for generations. Yeah, yeah. Like it's just like, well, let's bring this mega corporate. Let's make it profitable from Monsanto. Like fucking bill. That's the only way to do it. Right. And it is just like that. That is how people like that view the world and solutions.

Oh, God. Yeah. Yeah. Very grim. Daryl Ray is an agricultural expert from the 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 Monsanto products or other kinds of products that can't afford to have to buy every year, 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. Right. You're not. You're 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 to prove that this is the best way to do it. Who can I hire to agree with that?

Exactly backwards. It's exactly backwards. Exactly how you don't do this. And again, this is one of those things like people talk about state communism versus state capitalism. Fucking the like Russia and China did versions of this that led to the great famines of the 20th century in parts of the world. This is like this is the mouse sparrows. Yeah, exactly the same thing. Because of my this new idea and this new technology, I know better than people who have been making food to feed this place for forever.

So let's 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 10 fucking years. Right. Like just just fucking work on a like grow some goddamn potatoes Bill Gates like Jesus Christ. I say that but then Mark Zuckerberg did that one of murdering goats with lasers or some shit. Maybe not. Wait, what?

Yeah, he killed a goat with a laser. It's a whole thing. 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. Yeah, listen to why you do it and 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. Well, and also it like at the like it shows who he values and who, you know, 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, you have to have a stance to take on everything. Right. One way this goes is like every Hollywood celebrity, you know, has to have a take on everything happening in the world. Right. 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 90s. Like it's it's just but you know, who else got rich in the 90s, Andrew T. Heavy. The products and services that support this podcast. Oh, yeah. All 90s babies.

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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. 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.

Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart 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 offending 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, we're back. Andrew. What up? Andrew. You see the new, you see the new, they made a new Rugrats, but they made it all CGI. Oh, it's so weird. I don't like it. Oh God. It looked so good. Just rerun Rugrats. It's perfect. It doesn't need anything else. Kids will still like it.

They made Tommy Pickle's head scary. Yeah, I just like the old art was just so classic and charming. The lady who does Tommy Pickle's voice lived behind my child at home. Oh, really? Yeah. That's rad. Because that was a great show. I just don't get it. I don't get this at all. It's horrible. People shouldn't stop making things. I don't know why we need to ruin a good thing is what I'm saying. Speaking of good things ruined.

Speaking of ruining good things. So Bill's friendly gifts to the Monsanto Corporation, Mastercard and Vodafone are part of a massive global trend that the Gates Foundation has largely driven. The Walton Foundation, the Walmart people, that's a big part of this too. There's a couple of big ones. I'm going to quote from a 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 2002 Harvard Business Review article pointed out, over the past 15-year period, charity by U.S. companies as a percentage of profits fell by 50%.

More recently, Slate reported that corporate giving had nosedived from a high of 2.1% of pre-tax profits during the mid-1980s to just 0.8% in 2012. 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. It skews 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 U.S. government's contributions to that body. As a result, people at the UN who disagree with Gates quickly find themselves out on their asses. The same is often true of the WHO, the World Health Organization, which is also heavily subsidized by Gates.

As Laurie 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 Foundation staff. In 2011, Oxford Health Economist David Stucler argued, Global health is ruled 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 the value of 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 business can't even be trusted to make business go well. Yeah, it's all you need to know about the difference between when health care 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 shit. They did LGBT people back in like the 90s during the AIDS epidemic and stuff.

But as a rule, they put make public health is like the number one 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 health care is not to make some dude who lives in Mountain View richer. Now, since Gates doesn't like the idea of universal health care, he's resisted supporting the WHO's 1978 Alma Alta Declaration. This is essentially an international commitment to strengthen primary care systems and move towards universal health care in 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 and more capable of caring for people rather than them needing to rely on foreign NGOs and stuff to provide health care, right? Makes sense, you know, 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. If you Google Bill Gates in Africa, you will come across an awful lot of articles where Gates expresses his worry that there might soon be too many Africans. This is always framed in humanitarian terms. Fierce of famine and climate change, but I don't know. Yo, is that racist? I mean, there's definitely too many Europeans and yet. Way too many Italians. The birth rate has been falling for years, but not by enough. Yeah. When I'm president, that's going to be my number one goal.

Megan, there'll be less Italians. Yeah, sort of an anti-Musselini, if you will. Yeah, do a reverse Mussolini. A reverse Mussolini, if you will. Oh, my God. I mean, you know what? Some very cool people in Milan in the 40s reversed a Mussolini and that worked out pretty well. That's sort of the way to do it.

That is the path you're on. Got to flip them upside down. One less Italian. OK, good times. So, again, Gates is concerned 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 sex among black Africans. He thinks about it a lot.

And maybe he shouldn't be. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. The initial version of this episode included a pretty long critique of HIV program. The HIV mitigation program Bill Gates had supported heavily in Africa. It was based on circumcision. I critiqued that based largely on an article I'd found in the Journal of Future HIV Therapy from 2008 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, namely the fact that while circumcision in kind of a perfect environment can reduce the spread of HIV, it didn't seem to actually do it when implemented on a large scale for a variety of reasons, including it led to other kind of risky behaviors and whatnot.

People didn't understand, you know, they were still supposed to wear condoms. There are a number of things that we brought up in the episode, but a concerned fan reached out to me after that and made me aware of a number of things that I had gotten wrong. And also made me aware of an article in the Lancet Journal of Global Health from July 2021, which was a systematic review and meta-analysis of a bunch of different studies into exactly this thing, like whether or not these circumcision programs can reduce the risk of spreading HIV. And I'm just going to quote from a section of the conclusion here, which reads, quote, Our systematic review and meta-analysis found that, you know, the circumcision campaigns were not associated with increased condomless sex or multiple sexual partners among heterosexual men. This lack of association persisted across a wide variety of subgroups. These findings might help alleviate concerns that widespread MMC programs could lead to risk compensation and therefore reduce the benefit of MMC.

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 the Lancet. And we will put up a couple of other sources that were sent to me on our website to update the source section. So 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 and a fraud. The charity of the Gates Foundation is all too often itself a form of imperialism, one that has harmful, unforeseen impacts on local populations. The good news is that since Gates is a billionaire narcissist, he gets to do imperialism on the people of his own country, too. Which brings us to the very fun story of the Gates Foundation's war on public education. Ah, it's some good shit, Andrew. It's some good shit. Jesus. Now, it's probably not going to surprise you to learn that Bill and Melinda also think the market can fix public education. Hilariously, he diagnoses the problem of public education as a result of the, quote, top-down government monopoly provider, a.k.a. 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. Right, right, right, right. We could laugh about that a lot and we will for a second. Oh, God. Yeah, it is also just like you had unlimited resources to have your fucking horrible dork public school and like our private schools. Yeah, sorry, but it's just like like thinking that that is the norm even for private education is like, well, it's interesting perspective. Because his the lesson from Bill Gates' childhood is that number one, having more money going to a school makes it a better school because he was in a rich kid school and the moms were able to raise money for a computer, which fucking nobody had back then. He became a billionaire, but his lesson, the lesson he takes is not, well, we should, you know, I mean, he does the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does give computers to schools like they have, but that's one of the things. Sure, sure.

But their primary lesson isn't the primary lesson they take out of it, isn't that like the other big thing? It's not just that they had the money. It's 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. Oh, we should tailor the kinds of educations kids receive to the kids and their interests because not only will that make them more engaged 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 costs down, you know, so that you can be the winner of the school education providing game is the opposite of what happened. Yes.

And he, his education was involved tons of resources being. Yeah, loads of resources thrown at him. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the best way to educate a fucking kid. Yeah. And well, that and freedom. Like, yeah, yeah, it was a mix of it.

But he wants to bring market logic to his credit. He does not want to. He's not one of these guys that says we should 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 Foundation started pouring tens of millions of dollars into things like the knowledge is power program or KIPP, a chain of charter schools that Gates once described as one of the very few places where great teachers are being made. I'm going to quote from the new profits of capital to explain how these wonderful schools work. The KIPP schools follow an extended day strict disciplinary regime. Students learn how to walk, get off the bus and use the restroom in the KIPP way. Students are not allowed to talk at school except to answer questions and they have to earn their desks.

At some KIPP schools, students who break minor rules are isolated and forced to wear signs around their necks that read miscreant or creten. Oh, like, again, the opposite of what made you successful. They didn't put you in a room when you were a dick. They made you stop taking math so you could do the thing you 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 Gilded Age shit. It is some Gilded Age shit.

Joe, what is wrong with you? We got to make a, we got to torture it more. Fucking asshole. KIPP schools are based on the work of Martin Seligman, a psychologist whose work on learned helplessness has also been adopted by the CIA in their enhanced interrogation slash torture program. 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 don't know, maybe the guys at Guantanamo are coding all sorts of rad software we just haven't seen. That's actually where Zoom came from.

You can tell, that you can tell. They put a dude in the brew box and he made Zoom. Now, advocates of this system will point out that KIPP 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 40% of them graduate. So the reason why KIPP schools have high test scores is they kick out the kids 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 education 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 these programs work. 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 2014, the Department of Education had to issue a guidance reminding charter schools that they had to obey civil rights laws. That's a good thing to have to remind kids. All this quasi-libertarian shit, it always is like, hey, but also you have to obey basic decency. It's amazing because in 20 years, there's going to be a billionaire who fucking played BioShock as a kid and is going to be like, I'm going to give the schools $4 million to make rapture by the high school. Oh, God.

That is depressingly true. I want to quote now from a section of Diane Ravitch's book, Rain of Error, which is a pretty good title for a book about 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 72 times 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 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 schools that white kids are going to.

Yeah, it's cool and good. It always winds up that way. Just so happens. Gosh, gee shucks. How does this country founded on white supremacy and genocide keep doing white supremacy and genocide? Gosh darn it. Who would have thought? In 2008, 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 in reshaping or removing bad ones. Over the course of seven years, there was no evidence that this program helped schools hire better teachers. They just burnt 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 schools got better over time at implementing measures of teacher effectiveness rather than using those measures to actually improve student outcomes. 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 there is often the issue as much as any sort of like mustache twirling evil. Like sometimes it is like, I'm going to circumcise all the black people.

But a lot of times it's just like, oh, well, let's let's make like provide incentives to make teachers better. 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 is wasted that could have gone to actually helping kids, but instead has gone to making things making it. Yeah. Anyway. And yeah, it's because Gates pours 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 it has to be taken seriously. Better ideas get ignored and effort gets wasted. Here's another example of that.

Starting in 2000, 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 $2 billion into this program over the next nine years, which impacted fully 8% of the nation's public high schools from a write up in Politico. So without a great deal of thought, one school district after another signed on to the notion that large public high school should be broken up and new smaller schools should be created. This was an inherently messy process. The smaller schools, proponents sometimes called them academies, would often be shoehorned 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 caused all sorts of headaches. Which schools would get to use the science labs or the gyms? How would the cafeterias be utilized? And who was responsible for policing the brawls among students from high rival schools? The program. It's just such a dumb idea. I graduated in 2006. The year I graduated, my school was the largest graduating class in U.S. history.

And it was the largest the next year too. Plano schools are massive. Some of the largest schools in the world, like high schools, like 2,000 people was my graduating class, something like that. They're really good schools. Nationally, some of the best schools in the country, obviously Plano has a lot of money, part of why, but the fact that they're huge does not make them worse schools. It's simply irrelevant. Now you can argue class size might matter, but you can have small classes in a huge school. It's fine.

Yeah, it's just fucking... Gates himself admitted in 2008 that this program was a huge failure. Tens of thousands of U.S. 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 people and it's causing AIDS to get more deadly.

But also they underwrite NPR. Yeah, but they do underwrite NPR. Well, yeah, so it's like, right. Yeah, that's a significant chunk of the media. Yeah. Now, the sheer amount of shit Bill and Melinda Gates have gotten up to over the last 21 years, we're leaving out a lot. We could talk more about standardized testing. We could talk more about his agricultural reform in Africa, which really we ought to.

But we've still got to talk about COVID vaccines and Jeffrey Epstein, so we're moving on. Let's talk about Bill Gates' sex life next. Yeah, let's play. But first, let's ask the question on everyone's mind. Is he a grower or a shower? God. Look, Sophie, I get paid the big bucks to ask the hard questions, okay? Like, how hard does he get?

And I don't get paid enough to have to listen to that, so it's time for an answer. Honestly, Bill Gates doesn't get paid enough to have to listen to that. Oh, products. 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.

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So we're back and we're talking about Bill Gates's, Bill Gates's chungus, I think is the technical term for what he has. I hate that. 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 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 their boss.

In 1998, Wendy Goldman-Rome wrote a book titled The Microsoft File, 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. He sent her love letters and the two embarked on a brief affair even though this woman was, by her own admission, uncomfortable sleeping with her boss. Now, we now know this was a pattern for Bill. In 2006, 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, pretend it never happened. I mean, I just don't understand it is simply a power. Why do you need to do this to your fucking employees? It's not a Weinstein thing. He's not doing that because I've not heard any evidence that he... Obviously, there's a power imbalance to discuss here, but I haven't heard any of it. He's not raping employees. I've never heard any allegations of that.

And in this case, he senselessly is letter saying like, Hey, let's go to dinner. I'm a married billionaire. But if this makes you uncomfortable, let's just pretend it never happened. And she did. She decided she was uncomfortable. She ignored the email and Gates did not pursue her further. I haven't heard allegations that he harmed her career in any way. I don't think he's doing that. 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? It doesn't matter as much if he did it as he's the CEO. Whether it's stated, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. A year or so later, Gates was on a business trip on behalf of the Gates Foundation. This is in like 2007, 2008. 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 said she felt uncomfortable and laughed to avoid responding. From a write-up in the 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. Gates's behavior,

they did not perceive it to be predatory. Some of the employees 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 space to refuse his advances. So again, we're not talking like technically, technically, yes. It's not a Weinstein thing, but it's not OK. Right. Like you can not be as bad as Harvey Weinstein industrial rapist. And your behavior is still unacceptable. Because all like a workplace is not a fucking nightclub.

If Bill Gates had a history of hitting on women awkwardly in nightclubs, whatever, like fine. Everyone has the right to be like, hey, you want to fuck and then be told no. You're not being bad about it. But this is a workplace. These are his employees. He runs the company. It's not OK. Again, yeah.

So he was also noted by his employees to be dismissive towards his wife, Melinda, sometimes speaking to her during foundation meetings and ways that made employees cringe. On its own, I don't know if all of this would have merited inclusion in an episode as packed as this one. Right. Compared to circumcising 12 million people and making an AIDS epidemic worse. 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. Yeah. Jepstein, Carly Ray Jepstein. That's a mashup of Jeffrey Epstein and Carly Ray Jepstein.

Yeah. 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, Carly. 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 be sexually trafficked to the wealthiest men on the planet.

Yeah. That was dark. Not as catchy as the original. But I think it but not as. I think it's got wings. There's something there. We'll workshop this. A whole album of Jeffrey Epstein themed pop song. We will not.

I mean, you could you could you could like what is it? What is that? What's her name? The lady who wrote the song Monster? That one will work. Yeah. Little red Corvette Jeffrey Epstein's jet. Babies grow up too fast.

Because of the child sex trafficking. That was the joke. I just want to make sure. So by the mid aughts, 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 seem to exhibit. You know, you got Richard Branson like regularly jet skiing naked with supermodels, which seems to be his hobby. Bill Gates doesn't do that kind of thing. And I think this frustrates him.

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. Yeah. They'll be happy too. And some very nice sex workers who would love to make you look like you're cool and sexy all the time.

You'd feel great and nobody would nobody reasonable would complain about it. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, 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 late as much as he wants. Like Epstein could smell that shit from a mile away. He's like a shark. Right.

Now, the two met Epstein and Gates meet in 2011, which is three years after Epstein pled guilty to soliciting soliciting sex from a child. So. Right. This is not a tie. You can't argue I had no idea. Right. Very publicly known too. Yeah.

I'm going to quote from the New York Times here. Mr. Epstein and Mr. Gates first met face to face on the evening of January 31st, 2011 at Mr. Epstein's townhouse 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 15 year old daughter, Dr. Anderson Dubin's husband, the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, was a friend and business associate of Mr. Epstein's. The gathering started at eight and lasted several hours, according to Ms. Arnold. Mr. Gates's spokeswoman, 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.

He mailed in colleagues the next day. He said, a very attractive Swedish woman and her daughter dropped by and I ended up staying there till quite late. Why would you mention that? Why would you phrase it that way, Bill? That's on your work email. Jesus 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 Gates an idea for a charitable fund seeded by Gates Foundation money and donations by other rich guys he knew.

So Epstein's like, you put in a bunch of money, we could make like tens of billions of dollars we could raise to do a to make a huge charity fund. And of course, Epstein's proposal included a suggestion that he be paid 0.3% of whatever money he raised, which would of course be tens of millions of dollars for him. Now, the good news is that Bill hires smart people. And the people who run his foundation that he sent to meet with Epstein spotted him as a con man immediately. They're like, well, this guy's full of shit in a grifter. Like we shouldn't get involved with him. But Bill remained fascinated 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 know. I could probably have looked that up, but I'm a hack and a fraud. 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 claimed he was referring to the decor of Jeffrey's mansion. 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 with Epstein. We don't have conclusive 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. Right.

And also sex offender. For sure. Bill Gates, the dick-chopping sex offender of Epstein's island. Something like that. You're getting closer. You're getting warmer. Put a pin in that one. Business affairs, his ears are perking up now.

Now you're negotiating. 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. Don't ever say circumcision on the Internet. That's all I'm going to say on the matter. It immediately goes off the rails. Right. It's like talking about Palestine. Yeah.

It's hard to have the conversation in any way. Yeah. So, 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 she and Bill met Epstein, and she has claimed that this like event still haunts her. I think it was in 2013. And she seems to have gotten increasingly furious about Bill's relationship with Epstein after 2013. In 2019, 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, 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. And this, I think, brings us to the last bit of our journey through the life of Billiam Gates, his role in the COVID-19 pandemic and the current intellectual property status of its most successful vaccines. So, yeah, this is that part of it, right? Took us 19 pages to get to COVID. 19 pages and a surprising number of circumcisions. Right on time. Yeah, quite a few.

Way more circumcisions than I anticipated initially. I was going to, if you'd asked me to wager at the start, I would have said zero. How many millions of circumcisions do you think are going to be involved in this story? You probably would not have said 12. I think that's fair. Now, the first Gates Foundation initiative geared towards fighting the plague was actually rather modest. On March 11, 2020, two days before the WHO declared a pandemic, the Foundation 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 can tell, I think MasterCard's only role in this is because it'll make them look good, right? We'll have Microsoft involved. That'll be good for their image. MasterCard? It's crazy. MasterCard. It's so wild. Well, you know, we've all been seen like a car accident happen. And the first thing an injured person cries out for is MasterCard.

MasterCard. You know, sometimes visa shows up and it's just a real tragedy. I always keep a MasterCard in my emergency kit. The fuck. But what this means is that from the beginning, Gates placed burnishing the public image of a finance company on equal footing with actual virology. In April of 2020, with the entire country locked the fuck down and the virus just beginning to bite, Bill Gates launched the COVID-19 Act Accelerator. This program was geared towards organizing the research, development, manufacture and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like everything the Gates Foundation funds, 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 intellectual property claims of whoever won the vaccine race. From a write-up in New Republic, it's explicit 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 carried 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 without paying to license it. Gates fought against this. Covax, 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 in wealthier countries. It was hoped that this would vaccine this was not to vaccinate all of them.

This was to vaccinate about 20% of people in low- to middle-income countries. After that, those governments would have to bid and compete on the open market for access to vaccines. One side of this is saying the vaccine should be open source and equally available to everybody and to be manufactured everywhere for as close to free as is humanly possible. Bill Gates says, what if instead we do it for money and we donate 20% of the necessary vaccines to poor people? They'll never learn how to teach themselves how to stay alive unless we make them work for it. It's like an EMT. And us stay alive, by the way. You have three gunshot wounds and EMT shows up and bandages one of them and says, well, if I handle the rest for you, you're never going to learn how to bandage your own gunshot wound.

If you can pay for the gauze, I'll let you fix yourself. Again, you take his big picture, logic about health care and apply it to an actual health problem and it's immediately nonsense. It's just very clearly a bad idea. But because you're talking about the big picture, people think he's smarter. Now, many people warned 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 Borders, has since said that people in the Gates administration were central in pushing a global line that, quote, IP is not an access barrier in vaccines.

Of course, the only reason to have IP is to make an access barrier. That's all it is. 100% of IP is about reducing access. That's the only reason for it to exist. Which is not to say there's zero thing. There's zero reason for the kind of IP that he wants to exist. Obviously, it always winds up. It would be one of those things if, I don't know, the people who invented the Avengers and Superman and stuff got to make money off of their things instead of these gigantic syndicates using IP law.

Anyway, everything Disney does, like, fuck all of this shit, is what I'm saying. I believe in the ability of an artist to have control over their art, obviously. And for the record, I think that if you're, I think, for example, one of the things we as a society could do is when we have 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. Maybe that's a thing we could do as a planet. Actual Tony Stark happened and yet we couldn't manage to do anything good. It's because the people who did the amazing thing weren't Tony Starks.

They were international teams of very dedicated researchers whose names most people will never know and also shouldn't know because they'll get assassinated by lunatics. And there is no Tony Stark. Well, Tony Stark is the one saying this thing other people invented should be profitable to a group of people separate from the people who invented it. And other it's worth human death for this to be the way it works. And again, when it comes to IP, 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 worst modest harm because again, you're talking about Mickey Mouse. When we're talking about vaccines, you're literally talking about restricting who gets life saving medicine.

That's what IP 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 and IP. He's been involved in global public health policy as long 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 WHO CTAP, which basically would 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 of research, the vaccine process, all of the studies into its effect. All of this should be pooled together. We should pool knowledge.

You may recognize this as exactly the same thing computer nerds were doing in the 1970s 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 happened with a vaccine, Bill Gates fought like a devil against it. 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 CTAP 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 fifth of the world's 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 Houghton'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 institutions are still industry dependent. Now, the ACT accelerator is also technically part of the WHO, 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, A few weeks later, Oxford, urged on by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, reversed course and signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant soul rights to no and no guarantee of low prices.

So, yeah. It's so weird to, I guess that's how you control a market is make sure everyone thinks that the same, like by the same rules you want, but it's like, well, who gives a shit if someone else gives away their property? Yeah, their intellectual property. But obviously, I'm being ignorant. It's, you know, again, I keep going back to Jonas Salk, one of humankind'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 actually a pretty good idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you, are you working on that? Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's exactly the kind of thing. So he would have strong armed Jonas Salk into not do it. Yeah, he would have, he would have, he would have not have not listened to Jonas about that shit. Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the growing interest in intellectual property barriers.

In recent months, as the debate has shifted from the WHO to the WTO, reporters have drawn testy responses from Gates that harken back to his prickly performances before congressional antitrust 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. It's irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn't about IP, but it is about IP. There's very 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 its COVID-19 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, 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 just be like, well, I want it 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 go on vacation to Mexico, give everyone the vaccine for free. Like, there's a selfish way to justify this, too. But it's amazing 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 10 years of publicly funded mRNA 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 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 UN 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 IP and monopolies. And there are a lot of advantages to being on his team. It's a sweet, comfortable ride for a lot of people. 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. No one should be surprised about the toxic impact Gates has had on the COVID-19 rollout and 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 in history make life and death decisions for billions of strangers. Anyway, I don't like Bill Gates a lot. Yeah, no, 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 is might be the least bastard-y bastard we've done. That might be because I've done some of the most bastard-y bastard.

I mean, to be fair, King Leopold. Yeah, you've done. But it's also a question of King Leopold's death toll. Well, I mean, you can argue to a degree like the violence that's ongoing in the Congo, some of its side to him. We don't know how many people Bill Gates's impact are going to die as a result of the impact he's had on global health. And we and it might be in that live save, to be honest, because of the fucking malaria shit. But we like it's it's it's hard. He's done so much.

It's really difficult to parse out. Yeah, he's out. I think, though, it is it is a little bit that history of, you know, is it great manners that forces thing? Yeah, 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 sort of like benevolent but market driven, just like any American billionaire. Yeah, I mean, is a candidate to do precisely what he's done. But Bill Gates is the one who did it. Who did it?

And it's the so it's the kind of thing where, yes, this is a system problem. The system failure is that he accumulated enough money to be able to do this as opposed to that money going into taxes and then maybe us deciding as a nation. Well, let's provide aid to other countries to build up their health care infrastructure vote on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess I would just say any American billionaire would almost by definition have the lack of perspective. Yes. In a very similar way to Bill Gates that that his actions, I guess, seem inevitable. Had he been hit by a bus?

Had he fallen off the mountain? Yeah. The other guy could easily would have done this. The fucking briefcase boy would have would have been this person. Yeah. Hadn't have been Bill. I guess that's what I what I mean is is like this. This feels like less like specifically bill unique bastard.

That's going to be my argument on this. Yeah. They're all. Yeah. I mean, yes. Yes. The answer is the actual bastard here is a system that lets individuals accumulate billions of dollars. Yeah. By by commodifying 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 commodify cool shit. Yeah. In order to make it better. Yeah. And yeah, it's it's truly this like thinking they they did it on their own that like that's the lack of perspective. I think what's important about the Bill Gates story is covering things like, OK, well, because people are sharing and trading software for free. First off, it helps. It creates the industry he succeeds in and them 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 what he makes this thing illegal, basically. And he does that with everything his whole life. This, you know, he benefits fundamentally from the public sector, from pooled resources of the community being invested in him. And he 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 yeah, it is. It makes it clear covering this guy's story, covering the story of the Homebrew Computer Club, those early guys and talking about, you know, the scientists using public money 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, which he then used to pull the rug out from under him and circumcise 12 million people. Yeah, yeah. And then and then it's like, why are you mad at me for sucking all this blood? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nobody else gets blood.

But I'll give some away for free to MasterCard. Oh, God damn it. Oh, God, this is great. Yeah, it's it's fucking rad, dude. You love to see it. Well, Andrew. Yeah, you gotta get a pluggable. Maybe two pluggables.

Yeah, you know, just, you know, as this racist, we went independent as a podcast. So you can go to suboptimalpods.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 am a person who I've like blocked by hand. This is not with a block list like over 20,000 people. That's amazing. Andrew, that's incredible. $100 I will consider unblocking. We stand a blocking king.

That's self care. I recently turned off notifications for anyone I don't follow. And I know I shouldn't do that single thing I've ever done has improved my mental health more than that. It's amazing. I just don't see shit that other people post if I don't like them already. It's great. Oh my God, that's where I should be. It's where we should all be.

Anyway, this has been behind the bastards. Find Bill Gates in the street. Yeah. But don't just stop at Bill 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. Back to because we we gave him we gave him the Internet. We gave him we gave him the idea for graphical user interfaces. We did that.

So take his money and use it to buy vaccines and rifles for the global south. Yeah, it's your money. It's your money. Yeah, I don't know. It's the end of the episode. 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 was like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? They're 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 and 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.