Tech Won't Save Us - Don’t Praise Bill Gates w/ Tim Schwab

Episode Date: December 7, 2023

Paris Marx is joined by Tim Schwab to discuss why the story we hear about Bill Gates and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation doesn’t reflect their real impact on education and health around the world.Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist and the author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is produced by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:Bill Gates was pied in Belgium in 1999 and made fun of on The Simpsons.You can watch highlights from Gates’ deposition in the antitrust trial on YouTube.Gates had a reputation about questionable and inappropriate conduct toward women below him in the workplace.Aaron Gordon wrote there’s an adage that “everyone thinks Musk is a genius until you hear him talk about a subject you know something about.”In 2008, the head of the World Heath Organization’s malaria program criticized the growing dominance of the Gates Foundation in the research area.Support the show

Bill Gates shows us that philanthropy in the hands of a multibillionaire like Gates is a political tool. It's something that an individual like Bill Gates can use to shape politics and public policy, to bend it towards his own interests, his own narrow ideologies. I think we should debate whether it's good for the world to let Bill Gates be a philanthropist in any way, in any domain, but certainly not with our money, with our taxpayer dollars. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Tim Schwab. Tim is an investigative journalist and the author of The Bill Gates Problem, Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire. Now, I'm sure you've seen all of these glowing stories about Bill Gates and, you know, the work that him and his foundation are doing in the global south or, you know, in education in the United States and, you know, how he's making the world a better place. But you've probably seen

more recently some of the stories about the other side of Bill Gates, his role in vaccine apartheid during the COVID pandemic when he was advocating for intellectual property rights instead of getting vaccines to everybody as quickly as possible. His relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, his recent divorce from his wife, Melinda French Gates, and the stories that have come out since then about his inappropriate relationships with women at the foundation and at Microsoft. Bill Gates has been able to craft this image of himself as this fantastic person, as the good billionaire, as Tim Schwab would say. But in his book, Tim makes it clear that that image is not entirely accurate and that we need to interrogate it for

a number of reasons. First of all, because Bill Gates has created this model that other rich people and tech billionaires in particular can follow when they want to rehabilitate their images. And we see that happening now with Jeff Bezos putting more money into his foundation and Mark Zuckerberg doing the same with his wife. And surely others will be doing the same as they are increasingly facing this scrutiny and this backlash from the public will, you know, put their money into philanthropy to try to say, oh no, I'm a good person now. Don't look negatively at me. Don't criticize me because I'm giving money to whatever cause I feel is important.

But there's another thing that stands out from Tim's book as well. And that's that these problems that we have with the tech billionaires as they exist today are not a new thing. You know, we often focus on the Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezos and the Mark Zuckerbergs, you know, this kind of wave of internet entrepreneurs and act like these companies and these executives are the real problem in the tech industry. But I think someone like Bill Gates, who, you know, was a co-founder of Microsoft, who has been around and in the tech industry for much longer than these kind of newer wave of CEOs, not so new anymore, but you know what I mean, shows how a lot of these issues are not so much the product of the internet era, but are much more entrenched in this industry and in the type of people who succeed in it. Bill Gates being someone who comes from a wealthy

background and who feels that he is one of the smartest people in the world, who values racist metrics like IQ, who feels that technology and markets are the way that we improve problems, and that ultimately it's people like him who should be undemocratically making decisions, not just for people in the United States where he lives, but people the world over, because he has amassed this wealth from the monopoly that he was able to build with Microsoft and now wants to deploy it in the way that he feels it should be spent and feels that things should actually work. So I think this book in a sense is a warning, right? Of what these other tech billionaires can do and why we can't allow them to change the narrative on themselves. And

more broadly, why we need to take down these billionaires from their pedestals entirely, because there are inherent problems with all of them, even the ones who frame themselves as the good billionaire. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Tim. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you want to support the work that goes into making Tech Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these critical conversations and taking the mask off of these billionaires, you can join supporters like Almi in Lutz, Claudia in Oakland, California, Leone, and Benjamin in Ithaca, New York,

by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus, where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Tim, welcome back to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me, Paris. Great to be back. I'm very excited to chat with you. You know that I was occasionally kind of checking in to see when the book was finally going to arrive, you know, and it finally kind of hit my post office box, what, earlier this month, I guess. I was very excited to finally get to read it, to finally read like your big take on Gates and the Gates Foundation. Because I think especially after kind of what we saw with him during the pandemic, where he was really held up as this

kind of, you know, amazing figure. And then, you know, I think there was a bit more of kind of a critical perspective that finally kind of shoehorned its way in there. I love the book. I'm very happy that it's out there. And, you know, I guess to start, why did you turn your focus to Bill Gates in particular? Why is this man out of all the other people you could have kind of covered and done work on? Why was this the person who you wanted to really dig into and do this kind of book-length

investigation on? So I had become a freelance journalist in 2017 and had a pretty unproductive, unsuccessful career doing it. I was sort of at the end of that. And as a last-ditch effort, I started applying for fellowships because you can't really make money selling one-off articles. And I got a fellowship that gave me funding to spend most of the next year reporting on one topic.

And you're looking around at big topics that other journalists or what I do as investigative journalists have missed. And Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation, there's this flashing signal I'm getting about. The news media covers the Gates Foundation constantly, but it's very often in a one-sided manner. It's describing its big donations, its good deeds, and its ambitious plans to save the world. So it's a really one-sided narrative because at the same time, we know that critics of the Gates Foundation are legion. These are fancy people at fancy institutions from the first days of the Gates Foundation are legion. These are fancy people at fancy institutions from

the first days of the Gates Foundation that have questioned the logic of its work, its strategies, its approach, its undemocratic power. Yes, I mean, I approach this as a journalist and the mantra you learn in journalism school is to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted. And if that is what you're doing, then the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates as these wealthy, powerful people and institutions should be among the most scrutinized by journalists, but they're not. So that's where my reporting kind of started is to try and fill that gap. Yeah. And I think you do so really well. Of course, we've talked about Gates before, but I'm excited to kind of follow up that conversation with this deeper kind of talk based on the book that you've written.

And I guess, you know, when you think about the impact that Gates has had and, you know, you talk about that coverage of Gates, why is the coverage of Bill Gates? Why does he receive this kind of often broadly on critical coverage? It's not even uncommon. I remember kind of reading The Guardian and you pull up an article on climate change or a whole load of different kind of topics in the world. And you'll have like sponsored by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or, you know, there are other ones that will kind of talk about Gates and who have received funding,

but won't even mention it. Maybe that's kind of leading the question a bit or kind of prompting your answer. But, you know, I think people will, if they hadn't noticed it before, they certainly saw it during the pandemic and on the recent kind of coverage of his talks about climate change, that like this man is treated as this kind of singular figure who can talk to us about so much. Why is he treated that way? Yeah, I mean, I think to your point, it is true that the Gates Foundation has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to newsrooms. And I think it'd be naive of us to think that that doesn't influence how journalism covers the Gates Foundation. I mean, I think like in a lot of places where the Gates Foundation is donating money, it's actually buying influence. I mean, but that isn't the only reason that

journalists I think have been soft on Gates. I think, but that isn't the only reason that journalists, I think, have been soft on Gates. I think part of it is just the sort of cult of personality. This is a guy who made incredible fortunes running Microsoft, and now he's given it all away. It's this hero narrative that's irresistible. It's also, I think, that Bill Gates brings to the table a real neoliberal mindset, this idea about market-based solutions and the primacy of the private sector, technology will save us, that really chimes with the sort of mainstream, radically centrist sensibilities of a lot of news media houses, certainly a lot of mainstream news media houses. I mean, a good comparison is someone like the Koch brothers, which journalists have

spilled a great deal of ink looking at their money in politics predations, the way that they've used philanthropy to influence university coursework, to influence politics. And part of the reason why the Kochs are such a good and easy target is because they have this kind of more ultra right wing ideology, which doesn't line up with the sensibilities of the news media. So I think there are a number of reasons why the news media has been soft on the Gates Foundation, but I think that bias certainly is there, however we describe it. Absolutely. And I think what you're talking about, having this figure that we can hold up as someone who kind of brings these solutions to us, who has these kind of seemingly easy solutions, right? We don't need to deal with difficult government bureaucracy.

We're just, you know, having this man with all this influence who is clearly a genius because of look at what he did in his previous career, you know, kind of revolutionizing the technology industry. And now he's kind of bringing that knowledge, you know, that genius to these other big problems facing the world. And of course, all of this money that he's amassed, you know, it plays into these narratives that it seems like, you know, media tend to like, or even narratives that tend to do well and kind of tap into this broader kind of psyche, right? Yeah. And I mean, the problem is that this one-sided reporting, it's ended up producing what is essentially misinformation. It's a lot of fictions,

really. You know, this idea that Bill Gates is giving away all of his money. You know, that's not true. His personal wealth is nearly doubled during his tenure as a philanthropist. You know, you go to the Gates Foundation's website and you'll see lots of pictures of black and brown women and children, the so-called targets of the Gates Foundation's website and you'll see lots of pictures of black and brown women and children, the so-called targets of the Gates Foundation's charitable giving. But if you follow the money, almost all of the foundation's charitable gifts go to rich nations like the United States, Switzerland, the United Kingdom. So once you start to really peel back the layers, you realize that a lot of this sort of prevailing news coverage of Gates is telling a story that's not just one-sided, but just it's wrong. Yeah, I think you put it well in the book. You said something like, it's not about a rich guy helping poor people. It's like a rich guy helping rich people help poor people. Because all this money goes to these other kind of Western organizations or Gates' own kind of organizations to supposedly help poor people

or whatever they're claiming to do, right? Yeah. I mean, it's a very colonial model. It's a model that seems, I think we could say it's disempowering. It doesn't expect or trust the global poor to have the sophistication required to solve their own problems. So it means creating new organizations in Washington, DC or Geneva to fix the problems of the global poor. So I do think it's a colonial model. And I think that's part of the reason why the Gates Foundation hasn't been nearly as effective as it claims to be. Yeah, it's a really good point. And I want to dig a bit more into the foundation. But before we do that, I do want to kind of pivot back to learn a bit more

about Bill Gates himself. Can you give us an idea of kind of who this man is, where he comes from, and what kind of influenced him as he was growing up and kind of building his business empire? So Bill Gates grew up in a wealthy family in Seattle. To borrow a terrible sports metaphor, you could say he was born on third base. So his father was a prominent lawyer in Seattle. To borrow a terrible sports metaphor, you could say he was born on third base. So his father was a prominent lawyer in Seattle and his mother came from a wealthy family. He had a very privileged upbringing. He went to like the finest private school in Seattle. And it was at this private school that he had access to a computer in the late 60s, which is a real rarity. Certainly that gave him a huge head start over his peers elsewhere in the late 60s, which is a real rarity. Certainly, that gave him a huge head start over

his peers elsewhere in the United States or in the world in terms of thinking about computer programming and learning about computers and thinking about the business dimensions of computers. So, he went on with that sort of head start. He and a friend of his from high school, they founded Microsoft, And it ended up becoming one of the most storied monopolies that we've ever seen. Its first big coup, or probably Microsoft's biggest coup under Gates was creating the operating system that would shepherd in this unfolding computer revolution. That was MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows. So over the decades ahead, Microsoft grew and grew,

acquiring other companies, acquiring technology, exercising greater and greater dominion over the computer revolution that was unfolding. Eventually, the Department of Justice took an interest in Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior. Around the turn of the millennium, the courts ruled that Microsoft was stifling industry. Microsoft appealed the decision and was able to overturn a lot of the strictest penalties. But at that point, it garnered a really serious public reputation for its destructive and bullying monopoly power. So that even in popular culture, there was resistance to Bill Gates as this kind of monopoly nerd tyrant. The Simpsons were lampooning Bill Gates on the show. People were throwing pies

in Bill Gates' face when he went out and about in the public. So it was at this moment that Bill Gates really became a philanthropist. By the end of the year 2000, he had put $20 billion into the Gates Foundation. So I don't think it was a complete coincidence that it was the height of this PR crisis with Microsoft that he suddenly becomes the most generous man on earth. Yeah, I think you put that really well. And I think it's interesting to look at not just how Bill Gates's reputation looks today versus kind of, you know, around the turn of the millennium when all this kind of monopoly stuff was going on, but also how, you know, we have this kind of renewed antitrust push and Microsoft is like one of the giants who

is actually probably getting the least scrutiny compared to like Amazon and Facebook and the others, right? Even though it's still very much a monopolist in its own right. And I believe part of the reason that it's kind of antitrust conviction or whatever you would call it was overturned was in part because of a change of political administration from Clinton to Bush. And of course, the Republicans not, you know, wanting to tamp down on private industry as much. But to go back to what you were saying on kind of early Gates and whatnot, you know, obviously we know him as Bill Gates. His legal name, as I understand, is William Henry Gates III, which, you know, gives you a bit of a different picture of the man than kind of the

friendly Bill Gates that we usually know. But in the book, you also talked about his relationship with Paul Allen. And I feel like when we talk about these kind of earlier tech monopolies, like the Apples and the Microsofts, we often think about the relationship between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and how Jobs kind of took advantage of Wozniak. But I feel like the tale of Bill Gates and Paul Allen is not as discussed as much. Can you talk about kind of what Paul Allen said, you know, before his death about, you know, how Gates actually treated him in that kind of business relationship? Yeah, about a decade ago, Paul Allen wrote an autobiography called Idea Man. And it's kind of, you know, on the surface of it, it's about his unlikely path to becoming this multi-billionaire as the co-founder of Microsoft. But the way I read it, it's really kind of him trying to understand his relationship with Bill Gates, this man that he clearly loved.

They were best friends. They went to high school together. But a man who himself maybe was incapable of love. And you see this in the way that the relationship unfolded, in the way that Bill Gates essentially just kept screwing Paul Allen over. So they started the company together. Paul Allen went to it thinking, okay, we're 50-50 partners. Right off the bat, Bill Gates says, no, it's going to be 60-40. And then Paul Allen agrees to it. And Bill Gates realizing how easy that was, brings him back to the negotiating table and asked for a larger share, 64-36.

And Paul Allen, sort of the way he describes it, it sort of seems like he was so taken aback, so surprised that he didn't really have the mindset to challenge it. But later when Paul Allen had cancer and was taking sick leave from Microsoft, he overheard Bill Gates discussing a plan to dilute his shares in Microsoft even further. So I think that the expression that he uses, Paul Allen does, is mercenary opportunism on the part of Bill Gates to screw him successively serially in this way. So yeah, these were two kids. They went to high school together. They came up together. They came into the world, into the business world together,

but ultimately they had a terrible falling out. And I don't know, maybe this level of narcissism is required for somebody who's operating at this level of industry that Bill Gates is. But I still think it's worth considering, given the way that the news media presents Bill Gates today as this kind-hearted, soft-spoken, avuncular billionaire in a pastel sweater, it's really important we understand the other Bill Gates and that there aren't really two Bill Gates. Bill Gates didn't have a massive head injury that totally changed his personality when he became a philanthropist. He remains today the exact same bullying, corporate-minded business executive that he was at Microsoft. And once you start to understand that and think about his work in that ways, his philanthropic career makes a lot more sense.

It has a lot more dimension and a lot more complexity. Yeah, I think it's really important to understand, right? And just to kind of pick up on what you're saying there, it's quite a contrast to see that a man who presents himself as this kind of figure that cares so much about public health and helping the poor would take advantage of his co-founder when he has cancer to try to dilute his shares so that he would have, you know, greater control piece of the company that they control or that they started together. But then beyond that, you described in the book how people described Bill Gates as an attack dog when he was at Microsoft, you know, kind of his management style. There are obviously stories about kind of inappropriate relationships that he had with women at work. And even when we talk about the antitrust suit, you know, I think one of the kind of

main pictures, and as you talked about, you know, Bill Gates being hit in the face with pies, being made fun of on the Simpsons, a lot of that comes out of kind of this deposition that he did during that suit where he came off as this kind of arrogant man who felt that nobody could be smarter than him or could hold them to account. And when I was reading that, you know, I didn't go back and watch the video before we spoke, but it really brought to mind what we recently saw with Sam Bankman-Fried when he was kind of testifying on the stand. And, you know, when I was talking to Jacob Silverman, he was describing how Bankman-Fried

would be asked a question by these lawyers and then would say things like, I think you meant to say this and answer whatever question he wanted to answer as though he knew better than everybody else and he was going to school you even though he was on trial and now has been found guilty. So I just wonder kind of generally about this kind of perception that we have of Bill Gates and kind of who the man really is and what you saw kind of looking at both sides of that for the book. Yeah. I mean, the YouTube clips of Bill Gates and kind of who the man really is and what you saw kind of looking at both sides of that for the book. Yeah. I mean, the YouTube clips of Bill Gates and the deposition are worth watching where he's tediously rearranging every question. He's challenging the definition of the word definition. It's just, he's playing mind games with the other attorneys. And it clearly

is, you know, this incredible display of arrogance and hubris. And he brings that same level of arrogance and hubris to the Gates Foundation for sure. And you see it in the way that the foundation really operates. I mean, on a micro level, but also on a macro level, where the number of different issues that Bill Gates claims expertise and authority on today, It's really stunning. You know, he wrote a book about how to fix climate change, you know, as though the 30, 40 years of activism and research didn't already have solutions, that he had some value add that he needed to put himself out into the public spotlight. And let's be clear, I'm sure he did

not write the book. You know, I'm sure he had a ghostwriter. He just wanted to present himself as the authority on yet another subject that is kind of top of mind for us, right? Yeah, I don't know. He has very strong opinions about public health, public education, contraceptive access, agricultural development. And all of this is really driven by this kind of classically neoliberal ideology. But I do think his most important driving ideology is his hubris, that he believes he is right and righteous in everything he does, the smartest guy in the room, a man born to lead, and that he really does know what's best for other people, especially for the global poor, that he alone knows how to fix their problems and that his great wealth entitles and privileges him to do so, to put his hands on the levers of public

policy and remake the way the world works for the rest of us. Let's talk a bit more about that because this is another thing in the book that really kind of resonated with me while I was reading it, right? This idea that Bill Gates feels that he is inherently smarter than everybody else, because it's something that I've seen, you know, obviously with Elon Musk, people who listened to the recent Elon Musk series will have heard me talk about that. But with many of these other tech billionaires as well, where they feel that, you know, they have this kind of knowledge, this intelligence that is kind of unique or rare among the population. And that is the reason why they are in kind of their positions of power and have all the wealth that they have.

It's not because of, you know, inherent privileges or anything like that that they had, you know, as you're talking about Bill Gates coming from a wealthy and influential family already. But because they are brilliant, they did really well on tests, et cetera, et cetera. Can you talk about Bill Gates' ideas on intelligence, but also how he seeks to kind of push those out into the broader society to justify those ideas that he has about himself? Yeah. One of the interesting things in the last couple of years in the media story around Bill Gates is that a former director of Microsoft, Maria Klave, last I checked, she was president of Harvey Mudd College, I think, in the United States. She's a mathematician. And she came out about her experience

serving on the board of directors with Microsoft and talked about the infuriating experience of working with Bill Gates because he was so opposed to outside ideas like increasing diversity at Microsoft, for example, bringing in other female leaders. But she talked about this idea about Gates' intelligence and saying that Bill Gates really believes that he is one of the smartest people in the world. But she talked about having conversations, you know, she's a PhD mathematician with Bill Gates who dropped out of college, about mathematics. And she talked about how Bill Gates would assert the expertise that he had on

mathematics and talk about, you know, the whole field of mathematics in kind of an authoritative way, in ways that were just wrong, and that she knew were wrong, because she herself was an actual authority on mathematics. He doesn't know what he doesn't know, but he has a sense of self in terms of his intelligence, in terms of his IQ. I think at this point in his life, he surrounds himself or is surrounded by people who are constantly genuflecting to him, trying to either get his money or his attention because he's such a powerful and wealthy figure. I mean, there is this idea the emperor has no clothes. Whether by design or whether just unwittingly it's happened, I don't know that Bill Gates exposes himself to really outside criticism or critical points of views. I don't know that he understands how much of his charitable work today is really engulfed in criticism, including by the very people he claims to help who are now explicitly publicly asking the Gates Foundation to stop helping because they're doing so much harm.

But I do think to your point that, yes, I think Bill Gates really does have an inflated sense of his intelligence. And that really is a driving feature in the work that he does. I talk in the book about the Gates Foundation's work in public education in the United States, which has been a pretty big failure across the board. And it's not just that it has failed to improve education, but there's a lot of opportunity costs and collateral damage every time the Gates Foundation throws the dart and misses. If you're changing the architecture of a school to make smaller schools and it doesn't work, you know, there's a real cost to that. When you're imposing new measurement and evaluation structures onto teachers, basically telling them they don't know how to do their job, there's a real cost to the morale of the teaching force in the United States. When you're subjecting students to all kinds of high-stakes standardized tests and making them feel that they're not smart or capable, the lost morale in that exercise, also there are costs to

all these things. But Bill Gates went to a really elite private school his entire life. He went to Harvard. Before that, he went to the most elite school in Seattle. He's somebody who I'm sure does super well on standardized tests. There's kind of a funny story I came across of somebody who dated him when he was, I think, a freshman in college. The first question he asked was, what did you get in your SATs? And it was just a pretext for letting her know that he had gotten a perfect score. So he really puts a lot of value in standardized tests. I talk in the book, he's always talking about IQ, about getting the most people with the most IQ to Microsoft. How do we get people with high IQs working with the Gates Foundation? So he has a very narrow idea about what intelligence is and how to measure intelligence and how, of course,

it's according to metrics and rubrics that make him seem very intelligent. Absolutely. And, you know, as you talk about in the book, and as I've written about with Elon Musk, like this obsession with IQ, like this is a metric that was developed to kind of be inherently racist, right? To kind of push certain people out of programs. It was used to justify sterilization of people in the United States in the past, like, and to still hear this man who has so much authority and so much kind of, you know, power over these policies and these decisions who has the ear of lawmakers to still be kind of touting these antiquated ideas in many cases is incredibly worrying. Yeah. And you see this in the way that Bill Gates thinks and the way that he operates as

a philanthropist, where he's trying to reduce every social problem, every complex problem related to poverty into a math problem that he can solve. Like climate change, he wants it to be all about just the simple issue of carbon emissions. And how can we look at this number and get this number down and suck the carbon out of the atmosphere? And I'll keep flying on my jet airplane with huge emissions because, oh, I'm doing carbon capture over here. I'm spending millions of dollars to get it back. Yeah. It's a really shallow and narrow approach to understanding the world. Yeah. And what you talk about, about his own kind of intelligence and people who actually

have knowledge in those fields, hearing it and being like, what are you talking about? It brings to mind an article that Aaron Gordon wrote in Motherboard recently. And he said, there's an adage that quote, everyone thinks Musk is a genius until you hear him talk about a subject you know something about. These kind of themes, I feel like, run through so many of these tech billionaires. But I do want to talk a bit more about the foundation, right? So you say that after the antitrust suit and Gates's reputation is just torn to bits, he slowly starts to become more active in the work of the Gates Foundation. So can you talk to me about what does know, what does the foundation claim to do and how would you describe what it actually does and the impact that it has?

So the foundation is trying to use the word equity a lot as sort of a driving feature, driving mission of its work. It's trying to drive equity into the world to make sure that poor kids in the United States have a great high quality education, just like high income kids do in the United States, to make sure that, you know, medicines and pharmaceuticals that generally there's major access problems with the global poor can't get to them because they're so expensive. So trying to drive equity into vaccine access, for example. But the reality of what the Gates Foundation is doing is trying to achieve this idea of equity through, again, this kind of classically neoliberal approach to things

like corporate partnerships and technology and innovation. So it hasn't been terribly effective at delivering the equity it claims. And certainly this idea that all lives have equal value, I don't know how much the Gates Foundation has really moved the world in that direction. Yeah, I think that's a fair point and one that you make really clearly throughout the book. Again, not to constantly be drawing examples to other things in the tech industry, but this was always kind of in my mind as I was reading the book in recent years. And of course, I mentioned Sam Bankman-Fried, there's been a lot of talk about effective altruism, right? This idea that, you know, there's this group of people, they want to do the most good in the world with their money. And they need to kind of look at the data to figure out where they should deploy those things.

And, you know, I don't believe you use the term effective altruism in the book. But when I was reading about the way that Gates approaches the work of the foundation, this was something that really stood out to me. It was almost like effective altruism in the book. But when I was reading about the way that Gates approaches the work of the foundation, this was something that really stood out to me. It was almost like effective altruism before effective altruism that Gates was doing by being obsessed with metrics and data to drive the so-called efficiency of the foundation. Can you talk about the role of this in what Gates is trying to do, or at least claim to do with the Gates Foundation and how that works out in practice. Yeah. I don't know that Gates is a card-carrying member of effective altruism, but absolutely features of that movement are part and parcel of what he does and what he's been doing for decades. He'll openly talk about what he's

trying to do with philanthropy is around optimization. So he's doing things like market failures that he sees, like he will acknowledge that the pharmaceutical industry, the way it's constructed right now, a lot of poor people aren't going to have access to medicines. So how do you fix this problem? There's a lot of ways to fix this problem. During the pandemic, there was a global movement trying to push back on patent rights that pharmaceutical industry was holding to say, why don't we waive the patents? Why don't we share the technology? Why don't we get every capable manufacturing facility in the world pushing out COVID vaccines to get the supply

up, to get shots in arms? So, you know, the Gates Foundation would take a different approach and did take a different approach during the pandemic, which was we're going to work with and through the private sector. The Gates Foundation for years has built these relationships with the pharmaceutical industry. It had the network and knew the CEOs personally in some cases with Bill Gates. So Bill Gates thought that he could create a massive procurement mechanism driven by donor dollars from nations around the world, and that this would allow this organization based at the World Health Organization to negotiate lower prices for bulk purchases of COVID vaccines. And it would drive vaccine equity, it would protect the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to make sure that they

weren't put in the back of the line. But the Gates Foundation's pandemic response, it actually drove vaccine apartheid. It did not change the logic of the marketplace. Of course, the large pharmaceutical companies prioritize sales to the highest bidders in the richest nations. And this meant that the Gates Foundation's big solution in the pandemic, it didn't really have an effect on vaccine apartheid. It didn't protect the poorest and most vulnerable people. Yet at the end of the day, years later, the Gates Foundation and its partners can claim probably honestly that they've given out close to something like 2 billion COVID vaccines to the global poor. I mean, yes, they did that, but they did it in the most inefficient

and unjust manner possible. And so this gets at a question about effectiveness that I look at, you know, in many of the chapters of the book, is that the Gates Foundation, you know, it's really understood according to its own metrics, the research that it funds, sometimes the journalism that it underwrites. To a large extent, it's been able to write its own story. And it's a very simplistic story. It's about dollars in, vaccines out, equals lives saved. But if you take a more complex look at what's happening, you have to consider the counterfactuals, the opportunity costs, the collateral damage. How many more lives could we save if we took a

different approach, if Bill Gates wasn't involved, if we had challenged big pharma instead of partnering with big pharma, or if we had addressed public health in ways that went beyond the provision of pharmaceuticals? Building clinics, building roads that help people to get clinics, training doctors, all of these things help public health. But those kinds of activities maybe don't lend themselves as well to the logic of metrics and evaluation that Gates likes. For Gates, like the simplicity of a techno solution, like a new fertilizer, a new GMO seed, a new vaccine, a new drug, all of this fits really well within his paradigm that you're describing, which yeah, I do think there are some overlap with effective altruism. It would be interesting

to take that further though. It's something I'm going to think about. There we go. I'll be looking forward to the article you write in a couple months compares it to effective altruism. But I think what you're describing there picks up on something that is really important. Like a point that is throughout the book, basically, right, is that, you know, there are on one hand, the actions that the Gates Foundation is interested in, and that Bill Gates personally thinks will make a difference because he thinks he's the smartest man in the know, what the people in local communities say would actually make a difference for them if they were actually trying to approach addressing this issue. So can you talk about that divide and how the power and wealth that Gates and the foundation have allow it to set priorities for people despite claiming, you know, that they're helping them and listening to them and all these sorts of things. Yeah. I mean, during the pandemic, you had more than a hundred nations, including many poor nations petitioning the world trade organization, asking for a waiver of patents. Yet at the same time, Bill Gates became one of the most public apologists and defenders of the patent rights for pharmaceutical companies, which of course are the same patent rights and intellectual property

rights that undergird the profits of Microsoft, in which Bill Gates remains a big investor, in which Bill Gates supposedly still spends a third of his work week at. There's a lot of ways that the ideology of the Gates Foundation does overlap with financial interests. But I mean, another example that I think is useful is to look at the Gates Foundation's work in African agriculture, which is an underfunded sector where the Gates Foundation has really taken a loud voice in shaping policies, rules, regulations in a really classically top-down, undemocratic manner. So the foundation promised it would deliver a new green revolution throughout many African nations on the continent in Sub-Saharan Africa. And it was going to cut hunger in half. It was going to double yields the farmers had.

It was going to dramatically increase farmer income. And 15 years later, more than 15 years later, it's done none of that. So the revolution did not arrive. But not only that, but you have farmer organizations across the African continent now who are calling on the Gates Foundation to end its charitable crusade because it's causing so many problems. And it's obstructing the pathway to better solutions, which African farmers themselves are proposing, that they already have this model in place, that they can pursue a different model of agricultural development that doesn't rely on imported fertilizers and high-tech seeds from Europe and the United States. Nobody is saying that agriculture in many of these

nations couldn't be improved or couldn't be helped. But I mean, you could look at the agriculture in the United States where I live, for example, there's plenty of room to criticize the American model. And that's the you know, new techno solutions and new technologies over, you know, kind of local knowledge or the things that people locally think would make a difference. You know, as you've described, Gates is really interested in vaccines and fertilizers and GMO seeds and things like that, but less interested in, for example, agroecology, if we're thinking about agriculture, or, you know, kind of the broader focus or scope of public health, if we're thinking about kind of actually rolling out things that are going to make people's lives better or improve their health outcomes in parts of Africa or India or wherever else the Gates Foundation has been

involved in. So when we look at these techno solutions that Gates pursues, what are the real flaws in them when the idea of the techno solution meets the reality on the ground? Well, I mean, I think there's different ways to look at it. On the one hand, it hasn't been effective. It hasn't achieved what the Gates Foundation wanted to achieve. In an area like pharmaceutical development, for example, the foundation today plays a very heavy hand, interestingly, even in private sector pharmaceutical development. It's making charitable donations to pharmaceutical companies. It's providing startup money to create new pharmaceutical companies. It's sitting on boards of directors. It's even making licensing claims on pharmaceutical companies.

And the foundation had promised that its work with the pharmaceutical industry would deliver all kinds of game-changing, revolutionary new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics. And we really haven't seen that. So, I mean, the practical effect of the Gates Foundation's innovation forward, technology forward agenda, it hasn't really delivered. At a point, we probably could go back to Microsoft, which was a company not known for innovation, but for stifling innovation. this intelligent guy, he also wants to be seen as an innovator, as somebody who's really ahead of the curve with technology and that could use applied technology readily to solve any problem. But if you look at the practical effect of its work around technology and innovation, you don't see much in the way of success. So what do we see in terms of outcomes then? Because we've talked about education, we've talked about health and public health and what he's been trying to achieve in the global south through vaccines and whatnot. And we also talked about agriculture. So what are the promises that the Gates Foundation more specifically is kind of making in those areas? And then what are the results after it throws all of this money at the problem? Are there any real

improvements that are being realized here as a result of that? We can definitely point to improvements for sure. The Gates Foundation has at this point pledged to give away some $80 billion, huge sums of money. Of course, there are times and places where the Gates Foundation is helping people and even saving lives. You know, again, the foundation has put a great deal of money into the distribution of vaccines, for example. We know that vaccines and arms save lives, improve lives. But the onus is on us to think more deeply and to understand, are there other ways that we can distribute vaccines? Are there other ways that we can address public health that could also improve lives or save lives? And of course there are. One of the things I discovered in writing

the book is how much taxpayer money and public funds goes into the Gates Foundation's charitable projects. Like its signature work on vaccines is a Swiss organization named Gavi. The Gates Foundation provided the seed money to get it off the ground. It sits on the board of directors. Many of Gates' partners, allies, surrogates also sit on the board of directors. And it's the top destination for the Gates Foundation's funding. I think it's $6 billion the foundation has put into it. It's one of the things that Bill and Melinda Gates say that they're most proud of in their work. And for that reason, I give it special attention in the book. This is the thing Gates is most proud of that says it's one of their

biggest achievement. But if you look at the budget of this organization, Gavi, the vast majority of it actually comes from taxpayers. Tens of billions of dollars from us, from public funds are going into this vaccine procurement organization. And I think it would be naive for us, from public funds, are going into this vaccine procurement organization. And I think it would be naive for us to say, well, couldn't these tens of billions of dollars going into this private, unaccountable, non-transparent organization, couldn't those save and improve lives if we spent them in other ways on public health? Why does it make sense to put them in an undemocratic forum or an undemocratic organization? You know, government, yes, messy as it is, at least there are some measures of checks and balance,

some kind of transparency around how this works. But, you know, and it's, this is a trend you see throughout the Gates Foundation's work that many of its largest projects are organized as public private partnerships where Gates is involved and probably sits on the board of directors. And yes, it donates money, but much of the money actually comes from public funds, from taxpayers. So it should be a real trigger for accountability. If they're using our money, we should be able to follow the money. We should be able to ask questions and we should be able to get answers. Or we should be able to say say this is not a legitimate structure and we should dismantle it. But I think that's the kind of debate that I hope the book helps inspire is to rethink the way that the Gates Foundation works in so many areas. It was one of the big concerns that I had when I

was reading the book as well, right? Because you really effectively illustrate not just kind of the influence that Gates and the Gates Foundation has with kind of Western governments and Western politicians where, you know, it can use not just the money and influence that it has, but also kind of the reputation of Bill Gates in order to get access to so many lawmakers and even kind of, you know, wiggle its way past kind of lobbying rules and things like that to say it's not actually lobbying, you know, it's actually doing something else. But even more than that, how it uses that kind of wealth and power to then shape international institutions like the World Health Organization around kind of the key areas that it's focused on. Can you talk to us a bit about that angle of it and kind

of the risks that come of that? Yeah. And I think it's worth mentioning too, that, you know, while rich nations contribute so much money into Gates charitable interventions, poor nations also put large resources into making sure that these Gates led vaccine distribution efforts, for example, work. And, you know, all of these nations, whether rich or poor, have limited capacity, limited resources. And what the Gates Foundation is able to do is put its priorities. It wants to handle public health narrowly to the provision of pharmaceuticals like vaccines. There are lots of different ways to deliver public health. But when Gates is able to mount these massive projects, poor nations and rich nations alike end up putting a lot of resources that could be spent on other projects.

To your question about international institutions, I tracked the money from the Gates Foundation, and the two top destinations for it are Washington, D.C. and Geneva. Washington, D.C. is obviously a seat of power because the United States government's there. You have Bill Gates going to Washington all the time, meeting with members of Congress, essentially lobbying them, certainly pushing them to think about keeping up congressional spending on charitable projects, aid giving, all of these billions of dollars that help keep the Gates Foundation going to help keep their charitable projects successful. And in Geneva, you have the World Health Organization, which is part of the United Nations. So during the pandemic, for example, the Gates Foundation's massive COVID

vaccine distribution program, it was organized at the World Health Organization, but it was really run by the Gates Foundation and several of its private sector partners. So having that influence in places like Geneva allows it a great deal of influence over institutions like the World Health Organization. One of the most famous public criticisms of the foundation came from the head of malaria at the World Health Organization in, I think it was 2006. He had issued an internal memo, which was leaked to the New York Times, but it talked about the Gates Foundation was putting so much money into malaria research that it had effectively co-opted the field that had put researchers into a cartel,

was the word he used. This was essentially a classically Microsoft-like model where Bill Gates had planted his flag and claimed dominion. He and the army of former pharma industry alum that now populate the ranks of the Gates Foundation really thought they knew themselves how to fix malaria, how to solve it. And what the head of the WHO at the time was saying was that this has potentially destructive consequences on the WHO's policymaking, that Gates had so much influence, and that it seemed to be using that influence to steer the field in the wrong direction. So in the decade ahead, the Gates Foundation became one of the largest funders of the World

Health Organization. So that gives it influence on what WHO works on and what it doesn't work on. So it absolutely is having a great deal of influence through, you know, again, this is all through charitable donations on all kinds of institutions around the world, rich and poor. And it feels like it goes beyond kind of the United Nations and our governments as well, because in the book and in some of your previous work, you talk about how the Gates Foundation also makes a lot of investments or grants to companies themselves. And as a result of that, tends to get a lot of kind of data and a lot of control and a lot of influence over, say, the direction of pharmaceutical development and all of these sorts of kind of key topics that it's interested in. What's the risk of something like that and how does that actually work?

Like how is a charitable organization able to do that? Before I started my reporting, there was a robust body of scholarship and research around this idea of philanthropic capitalism. Scholars like Lindsay McGaughy, if you've read her book, it's a great book. She had talked over the years about, it's a paradox that the Gates Foundation is donating money to private companies, to private for-profit companies. How are these deserving claimants of charity? One of the earliest pieces I did as I tried to quantify donating money to private companies, to private for-profit companies? How are these deserving claimants of charity? And one of the earliest pieces I did as I tried to quantify that, how much money is the Gates Foundation donating to companies? At the time in 2019, it was like $2 billion. I think it's about twice that amount now. What I did in the book is I just took that

analysis much further to look at all the ways that the Gates Foundation, which is a nonprofit tax-privileged private foundation in the United States, how it's blurring the line with for-profit activities. The foundation says when it gives money to, say, a private vaccine company to develop a new vaccine for a disease that big pharma won't touch because there's no revenues making money from malaria, for example, the Gates Foundation could say, well, this is charity. Yes, it's a for-profit company, but they're going to use our money to develop a new vaccine that's going to save lives. So that's kind of the logic of the foundation's engagement with the private

sector. But the lines are increasingly blurred. And I think in part, because there's so little oversight from government over the operations of the Gates Foundation, again, where it's making equity investments, it's making charitable donations. Sometimes it's making charitable donations to companies in which the Gates Foundation itself is invested in. It's sitting on boards of directors. It's, you know, at times, I mean, the other, I guess the really groundbreaking thing I did in this book is at a point I started reaching out to the private companies that the Gates foundation is working with. And, you know, most of them don't respond, but some of the ones that did

respond said working with the Gates foundation was like a corporate takeover where once you take the Gates foundation's money, suddenly the foundation, they would justify it by saying, well, we have to make sure this money is being used responsibly. But the companies it worked with says Gates is telling them who they could and couldn't hire in their own organization. They're setting the endpoints for clinical trials that have massive impacts on the trajectory of a company's technology. When the Gates Foundation donates money to a pharmaceutical company, it puts a licensing claim on any technology produced with its funding. Again, the foundation could claim, well, we need to do this to make sure that whatever vaccine is produced with our money, it ends up in the arms of the global poor. But through another lens, is it just a coincidence that Bill Gates, the guy who ran Microsoft, is organizing his charitable

empire around the acquisition of technology and IP and patents from all of the different companies that he works with? Is this appropriate? Is anyone even aware that this is happening? That is blurring the lines so greatly between for-profit and non-profit? capitalist expansion where, you know, at Microsoft, he was enclosing the software market to, you know, kind of create this, you know, whole new market in this thing that didn't previously exist. But now, even as he's moved into supposed charitable work, you know, he's interfering in education to try to expand private education through charter schools in the United States, or, you know, through expanding private schooling, through really terrible model in Africa, or, you know, pushing for vaccine patents,

and through the expansion of fertilizers and GMO seeds into the global south in these markets where there are not as many people who have access to these things now. So it just seems like on every front, you know, certainly he can kind of present it as charity, as you know, his work on public health or whatever to try to improve these outcomes for poor people. But every action that he takes seems to be designed to ensure that these various companies that he often has kind of commercial relationships with can expand their markets into new areas. In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. And one thing I found research in the book is that, for example, in the pharmaceutical markets,

he treats big pharma very different than he treats little pharma. His idea is that it just makes sense for a few large multinational companies to control a marketplace. Of course, he does. That's the Microsoft model of software. Of course, Pfizer should have a monopoly on a pneumococcal vaccine. Of course, that makes sense to him. Little pharmaceutical developers like academics, academic universities, small startups, those are treated by the Gates Foundation and kind of everyone else as well as the real engines of innovations. They're the ones that are coming up with the new technology and the prevailing model,

which I think Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation supports, is that their job is to produce the technology so that the large pharmaceutical companies can acquire it and can market it and make sure it gets out into the world. That's what these large pharmaceutical companies are. So, you could talk to, as I have, small pharmaceutical companies who Gates isn't helping, who Gates, you know, they would say that the Gates Foundation is hurting them. Some would even allege that the Gates Foundation's meddling and micromanaging is preventing better, cheaper drugs, vaccines, diagnostics from reaching the marketplace. An extraordinary claim,

considering the Gates Foundation's mission about driving equity and being an innovator. But yeah, for sure, the foundation in many different areas where it works, it's sort of shepherding corporate ideology, corporate humanitarianism under the banner of philanthropy. It's creating corporate partnerships. It's working closely with big ag, big pharma, big consulting, and it's really presenting them as humanitarian partners, which is hugely helpful to their reputations, to their business interests as well. Absolutely. A couple of final questions for you before we kind of wrap up our interview. Was there anything as you were kind of reporting this book and as you were putting it together that really kind of shocked you or stood out to you that you weren't expecting to

discover in the course of this investigation into the Gates Foundation? I think one thing that I didn't fully appreciate was how much public funds and taxpayer dollars went into Gates charitable work. And that happens on a number of different levels. So you have Bill and Melinda French Gates who donate money to the Gates Foundation. And when they do that, they avoid a massive tax bill. That money then sits in the Gates Foundation's bank account, which today is $67 billion. And that generates billions of dollars in investment income most years. That's also virtually tax-free. And then you have the Gates Foundation creating these large public-private partnerships as sort of the way its whole charitable empire works.

And those also are drawing tens of billions of dollars in public funds into them. So just the level and the scope of the public funds and the taxpayer dollars that go into this, I just find it surprising that Bill Gates is one of the richest guys in the world. He's getting richer and richer year over year. Why would we give him any tax benefits or any tax allowance for any of this work he does? If he wants to give away his money, I mean, I think we should even still debate that, whether we should allow anyone to have this level of money. Because we know once we allow people to become this rich, they will use it for political purposes. If not campaign contributions, if not lobbying, if not political advocacy,

then through philanthropy. And Bill Gates shows us that philanthropy in the hands of a multi-billionaire like Gates is a political tool. It's something that an individual like Bill Gates can use to shape politics and public policy, to bend it towards his own interests, his own narrow ideologies. I think we should debate whether it's good for the world to let Bill Gates be a philanthropist in any way, in any domain, but certainly not with our money, with our taxpayer dollars. Yeah. And I think that leads perfectly into my final question, which is, you know, recognizing all of these problems with the influence that Bill Gates has and how the Gates Foundation works,

what should be done to rein in the power that they are able to exert over public health or over education or over agriculture in the global south and these other issues that they get very involved in because they have so much money to deploy so that people listen to them? There are a lot of solutions to the Bill Gates problem. One is trying to regulate philanthropy. Congress in the United States has latitude that it could impose new rules and regulations over the operations of how charity operates in the United States. It hasn't looked at philanthropy in like 50 years. So you could create new rules that limit its political activities, that limits its political influence, for example. The problem with that is that if you start to create rules in the Gates

Foundation, there's nothing stopping Bill and Melinda French Gates, who are private billionaires in their own right, from simply engaging in the same activities as private citizens. If you squeeze the foundation and say, you can't do this, why can't Bill Gates just go off and fund a different organization or different company to engage in the exact same activities? So I say that to say that the real solution is to make sure that we don't let anyone become this rich in the first place. And that is a longer term political goal. I mean, myself, I'm inspired to see all the political and social movements already moving us in that direction. If you think about from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, now in public health for poor people that feel called global health, there's a growing movement around decolonized global health, which directly poses an existential challenge to the way the Gates Foundation does business. In the United States, many political figures are going to be asked directly, should billionaires exist? So I do think that the world is kind of turning against Bill Gates,

against what he represents and what he stands for. I mean, how exactly we get there through taxation or regulation to prevent people from becoming this wealthy? Like I mean, how exactly we get there through taxation or regulation to prevent people from becoming this wealthy. Like I said, it's a long-term political goal. And unlike Bill Gates, I don't have a confident, articulate solution to every single problem. I can't tell you the exact pathway, but I do feel like it's already happening. The world is already turning in that way. And we just need to build that political power to keep things moving

in that direction. Yeah, it's a fantastic point. And I think at a moment when we are talking about these billionaires and we are scrutinizing them and talking about whether they should have this much power, we often talk about the Elon Musks of the world or the Jeff Bezos of the world or the Mark Zuckerbergs. And because Bill Gates has worked so hard to create this persona that he has to craft this narrative about himself, he's one of the figures that we look at less and less. And so that's why I think a book like the one you've written, The Bill Gates Problem, is really important. And I highly recommend people check it out if they want, I think, a more honest perspective on the real impact of Bill Gates.

So Tim, thanks so much for the book. And thanks so much for coming back on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Paris. I appreciate it. Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist and the author of The Bill Gates Problem, Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire. Tech Won't Save Us is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.