Listen to Episode

Read Episode Transcript

Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's hungover? My the host of this podcast that's nice behind the ******** the podcast that's being recorded at the unreasonably early hour of Sophie. What is it? What time is it right now? Yeah. Jesus Christ. So, like the crack of dawn where we're up doing this. I just hope you all, I hope you all respect it. This is why we have to heavily. We we have to we have to sue anybody who distributes this podcast for free. Because if all of the all of backbreaking labor getting up at the crack of 2:39 PM to record this podcast after I was drinking last night. Unbelievable. Dedication. You know, I think we started around 1:00. 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 what? Andrew, what are you? Consider tell me $35. Other side of things, I started waking up super early so well. Andrew. Oh yeah, drewen, NT. Yeah, yeah. Tea drizzle. Do people call you tea drizzle? Because should I? I think they actually have on fellow iheart podcast the Daily Zeitgeist. That feels like exactly the kind of **** they would say. Yeah, I think it's tea drizzle is a good name. So we're just going to roll forward with that? Yeah. Yeah. Andrew. Hey, how are you? How you feeling about Bill Gates so far? Have you learned anything new? I. Me, 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, no. But not like, seriously, **** yeah, **** **** that guy. Casual. Just like casual, stoic. **** yeah, ****. I don't I don't think he's gotten past and again I it sounded like that was going to be a point of of potential debate but I would argue he I don't think he is eclipsed. Any given billionaire, any given tech billionaire in bad yeah, 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 10s of millions of dollars and 10s of thousands of man hours fighting against a federal antitrust case. He won 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 ******** 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. The stink that's put on him and Microsoft lasted longer than the actual charges. By September of 1996, I taught a huge number of top executives had fled the company. Thiswasthe.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 stay in the sun was over and it was time to find the next big tech grift. Cory Doctorow will argue that we owe Google's existence in part to the trauma bill felt over the antitrust suit Gates had noted in the past that lingering fear of the federal government is what stopped him from doing the same thing to Google that he'd done to Netscape. In 2019, though, 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 he 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 ******* up as much things as they are right? And it sounds like enough of this was simply like, on a personal level, he was scared of the humiliation of 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 as 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. We 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 get on a date and for a long time the story was they fell in love and became a billionaire power couple. The end reality was 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 **** 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 ******* cancer. Even rich people can't escape, and she died in 1994. Bill Senior was as devastated by this as you'd expect, and for a time he struggled to find ways to fill his days. Eventually, he asked his son and daughter-in-law if he could start going through their stack of requests for philanthropy and give some of their money away. This is, as 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 $100 million. Hand out basically just 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. Coughing up one of his books about climate change or some ****. But there's been a bunch of pieces like that, right? Right, right, yeah. The the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation started officially in the year 2000. It began with, I think, $100 million, 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 watched by the sidelines, that probably looked like a defensive point. A defensible point for most of the public crusade for for years, the most public crusade of the Gates Foundation was their war against malaria. By 2018, they put almost $4 billion towards fighting the deadly disease around the world in a mix of aid programs to struggling nations, grants to researchers and scientists. All that stuff now. Malaria has probably killed more human beings than any other single cause in history. It's like the number one killer of human beings across all time. So good. Good thing to fight. I would. I would agree, like, yeah. Sounds good. Yeah. And Bill certainly can't be faulted for lack of ambition here. He has stated his goal is the total elimination of malaria, and scientists seem to suggest this is possible. Now. This is an ongoing struggle. I haven't found anything that suggests the Gates Foundation has been, like, ineffective in their struggle against malaria. Obviously they haven't beaten that, 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 Gateses have also pledged $10 billion over the next decade to provide free vaccines to the world's poor. Through its global alliance for vaccines and Immunization, or Gabby, the foundation has vaccinated millions of kids in impoverished countries against polio and other horrible ****. Bill and Melinda take some credit for the fact that between 1990 and 2012. Total deaths of children under 5 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 the whole question should not just be does this fat foundations work? Save lives? Because that's not all we're talking about here. And it's not as something you can answer that simply because the 10s of billions of dollars in that foundation were able to come from gates and other plutocrats. Because they didn't pay that **** 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 at Gates's ideology. As Bill Gates is Riley 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 those that demand would be there, we could incent them with the right research. Dollars to actually create those vaccines that's built. 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 saulk 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 0 sum game. The question isn't free vaccine 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. What? Yeah. And also, like, where, you know, philanthropy isn't at the whim of, you know, a handful of white dudes. Yeah, exactly. A hand. And and that's that's kind of what we're building to. I I assure you, this becomes more than just an ideological argument. There's, there's, there's there's solid stuff to dig in here. But I want to quote again from that book, the new profits of capital. Turning something into a commodity means it is no longer a right, or even potentially a right. It means that the commodities 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 Healthcare 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 and wealthy areas. This is part of why virtually all public health experts agree that universal Healthcare is a good idea. But as Nicole Aschoff writes quote when we framed the problem of poor people in the global S. Dying from preventable diseases as a market failure problem, we close off the possibility of building a healthcare system in which Healthcare is a right and does not depend on one's ability to pay. And that's what's so toxic about the Gates Foundation. Yeah, it's his idea, his whole idea. Like, yeah, it's wonderful to get vaccines to poor people. But the way he wants to do that 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 like 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 that was about, like public health options worldwide, and that study called for Universal Healthcare. Despite this, in that year's development report, the Gates Foundation claimed that Universal healthcare has quote limitations as a global development goal, and 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 they that aid is not a loaner investment. It was a gift that we're giving ******* MasterCard $11 million. Yeah, and the Gates Foundation does this a lot. They give multi $1,000,000 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 argue should be bribed to take over more and more responsibility for agriculture in Africa. He he there's all these articles were talking about like how scary it is. The population of Africa is set to explode. And #1 there's some uncomfortable racial undertones that his obsessive concern with the population of Africa he always firms is like, I'm just worried that there's not going to be enough food. They don't grow enough food to like, support themselves there. But his his solution is let's pay Monsanto to like subsidized or let's say Monsanto to subsidize seeds that they have to buy that are genetically modified so that they they can't share them, right? It's this, it's this ******* thing capitalists have been doing since the 1700s, right? In 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 once you know, one village is harvest is bad, let's get rid of all that because we want to centralized all of our farming to make it more profitable. And then 30 million people starve to death. And it's the same basic you you. 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 for Monsanto, like. ******* bill. That's the only way that is right. It is just like that. That is how people like that. View the world and view solutions. Oh, God, yeah, yeah. Darryl 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 they 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 like 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. This is 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, ******* the 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 this is like, this is the mouse sparrows. Yeah, exactly the same thing because of my this new idea in this new technology I know better than people who have been making. Food to feed this place for forever. So let's 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 ******* years, like just just ******* work on a like grow some *** **** potatoes, Bill Gates. Like, Jesus Christ. I say that, but then Mark Zuckerberg did that and wound up murdering goats with lasers or some *****. Maybe not. What? Yeah, he killed a goat with a laser. It's a whole thing. No, 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, which is why you do it and 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 ******* farming. And also like at the like it 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, get the most toxic version of this is a, a billionaire deciding to change how agriculture works in Africa because, right, he got rich in the 90s. Like it's it's just. But you know who else got rich in the 90s? Andrew T hit me, the product and services that support this podcast. Ohh yeah, all 90s babies got me again. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. Whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint mobilcom slash behind. Now, a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com. Slash behind betterhelp.com/behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research. With you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Ah, we're back, Andrew. What? Andrew? You see the new. You see the new? They did. They're made made made a new Rugrats, but they made it all CGI, and it's so weird. I don't like it. It it looked so good. Just just rerun Rugrats. It's perfect. It doesn't need anything else. Kids will still like it. They made Tommy Pickles head scary. Yeah, and I just like the old art was just so classic and charming. The lady who did the lady. The lady who does Tommy. Voice went lived behind my childhood home. Oh really? Yeah, that's that's rad because that was a great show. It just don't get it. I don't get this at all. Yeah, it's it's it's horrible. People should stop making things. I don't know why we need to ruin a good thing, is what I'm saying. So 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 now that 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. Charity by U.S. companies has a percentage of profits fell by 50%. More recently, Slate reported that corporate giving had nosedived from a high of 2.1% of pretax profits during the mid 1980s to just .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 US government's contributions to that body. As a result, people at the UN who disagree with Gates quickly find themselves out on their *****. The same is often true of The Who the World Health Organization, which is also heavily subsidized by Gates as Laurie Garrett. Putting 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 Stuckler argued. Quote 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 it's business can't even be trusted to make business go well. Yeah, it's all you need to know about the difference between when Healthcare is primarily about profit and when it's primarily about people is to look at Cuba. We'll talk about Cuba a little later. Not a government that's without flaws. You can look at a lot of horrible **** they did LGBT people back in like the 90s during the AIDS epidemic and stuff. But as a rule, they put makeup. They they 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 it it's it's just different when the goal of Healthcare is not to make some dude who lives in Mountain View richer. Now, since Gates doesn't like the idea of universal healthcare, 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 healthcare and more nations. It's basically saying the best way to support public health worldwide is to strengthen the primary care systems in those countries to make them more independent and more capable of caring for people rather than them needing to rely on foreign NGO's and stuff to provide healthcare, 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. Will Gates expresses his worry that there might soon be too many Africans. This is always framed in humanitarian terms, fears 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, getting getting Megan there be less Italians. Yeah, sort of an anti Mussolini if you will. Do a reverse Mussolini. A reverse allini, if you will. Oh my God. I mean, you know what? Some very cool people in Milan in the 40s reversed to Mussolini and that worked out pretty well. That's sort of the way to do it. That is, that is the path you're on. You gotta get a 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 and 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 that HIV mitigation program Bill Gates had 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, name of the fact that while circumcision and kind of a perfect environment can reduce the spread of HIV, it didn't seem to actually do it when 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're 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. 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 MC programs could lead to risk compensation and therefore reduce the benefit of MC. 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. 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 these source sections. 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's a billionaire narcissist, his he gets to do imperialism on the people of his own country too. Which brings us to the very fun story of the Gates Foundation's War on public education. It's some good **** Andrew. It's some good ****. Jesus. Now, it's probably not gonna surprise you to learn that Bill and Melinda also think the market can fix public education. Hilariously, he diagnosis the problem with public education as a result of the quote, top down government monopoly provider, AKA 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. Could laugh about that. A lot, and we will for a second. Yeah. Oh God, yeah, it's it's also just like you had unlimited resources to have your ******* horrible dork public school and like, or private schools. Sorry, but it's just like like thinking that that is the norm, even for private education. It's like, well, it's it's interesting perspective. Because his the lesson from Bill Gates's childhood is that number one having more money going to a school. Makes it a better school because he was in a rich kids school and the moms were able to raise money for a computer which ******* 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 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation does give computers to schools like they have. That's one of the things done. But their primary lesson isn't. The primary lesson they take out of it isn't. And like the other big thing, it's not just that they had the money, is that he got freedom. They altered his education plan bespoke to him. And his interests to make it work better for him, which I think is the reasonable lesson to take, is like, oh, we should tailor the kinds of educations kids receive to the kids in 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. Mission providing game is the opposite of what happened. Yes. He his education was involved. Tons of resources being **** loads of resources thrown at him. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the best way to educate a ******* yeah. And well, that and freedom, like, yeah yeah it's it was a mix of it. But he wants to bring market logic he doesn't know. To his credit, he does not want to. He's not one of these guys that says we should 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 10s of millions of dollars into things like the knowledge is power program or Kip, 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 school students who break minor rules, or isolated and forced to wear signs around their necks that read, miscreant or create. Like, again, the opposite of what made you successful. They didn't put you in a room when you were * ****. They made you stop taking math so you could do the thing you were interested in. Like, ******* hell, Bill. That's all. Like, why? Why are all like billionaires or equivalent? Why do they only have the same ideas about like, this is some Gilded Age. It is some Gilded Age ****. What is wrong with you? We got to make up. We got to torture them. ******* *******. They're 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 you're when you're 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 that's maybe the guys at Guantanamo recoding all sorts of rad software we just haven't seen. That's actually where zoom came from. You could tell that. You can tell that they put a dude in a boom 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 extra. 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 good experiences. We're talking about the trend, the national trend of how this program, these programs work. And this is a major trend among charter schools, some of which suspend as many of half of their students in a year. Low performing students, kids with emotional or psychological disabilities, these kids are denied admission or purged. This is why in 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, yeah, all this like, quasi like libertarian ****. It always is like, hey, but also you have to obey, you know, basic decency. It's amazing because in 20 years there's going to be a billionaire who ******* played Bioshock as a kid and is going to be like, I'm going to give the schools $4 million to make rapture, but a high school. God. Ohh, depressingly true. I want to quote now from a section of Diane Ravitch's book reign of Error, which is a pretty good title for a book about, you know, 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 Charter 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 ******* 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 this kids, the schools the white kids are going to yeah, it's cool. It's cool, and it always winds up that way. Just so happens, Kashi. Gee, shucks. How does this country founded on white supremacy in genocide keep doing white supremacy in genocide? Gosh darn, it would have thought would have thought. Ohh, and 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 and 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 burts a billion dollars not doing anything. A Rand study showed no evidence of impact on student outcomes. From a right up in Business Insider quote, the study concluded that the initiative fared poorly because the schools got better overtime at implementing measures of teacher effectiveness rather than using those measures to actually improve student outcomes. It's they they taught to the test, you know? But for teachers, in his view, the Gates Foundation initiative appears to have generally done more harm than good. It cost a fortune, green writes. 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 gonna circumcise all the black people. But a lot of times it's just like Oh well like well, let's let's let's make like provide incentives to make teachers better and then a 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, right, that bad idea gets a huge amount that 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 schools 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 premises into the premises of larger schools. So you'd end up with two or three or more schools competing for space and resources in one building that cost all sorts of headaches. Which schools would get to use the science labs or the gyms? How would the cafeterias be utilized? And who was responsible for policing the brawls among students from high rival schools? The program within? Yeah, it's just such a dumb idea and like I went to. 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, and the next. It's Plano. Schools are massive. They're some of the largest schools in the world, like high schools, like 2000 people was my graduating class, something like that. They're really good schools, like they're like nationally, some of the best schools in the country. Obviously, Plano was a lot of money. Part of why, but like it does it. The fact that they're huge does not make them worse school, right? It's simply, it's simply irrelevant. Now you can argue class size might matter. But you can have small classes in a huge school. It's it's fine. Yeah, it's just ******* and yeah. Gates himself admitted in 2008 that this program was a huge failure. 10s of thousands of US students had their educations disrupted because the 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. But they do underwrite NPR. Well, yeah. So it's like, right, yeah, that's a significant chunk of the media. Like, yeah, now the sheer amount of **** 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's sex life next. Yeah. First, that's but first. But first, let's ask the question on everyone's minds. Is he a grower or a shower? God, I look, Sophie, I get paid the big bucks to ask the hard questions, OK? Like, how hard? How hard does he get? Like, and I don't get paid enough to have to listen to that, so it's time for an honestly, Bill Gates doesn't get paid enough to have to listen to that. Ohh products. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind now a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great. Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tiktok. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Alright. So we're back and we're talking about Bill Gates, Bill Gates's chungus, I think, is the technical term for what he has. Yeah. Anyway, it's probably not going to surprise anybody to learn that bill never got better at flirting, despite being one of the wealthiest people to ever exist. He did grow more successful at having sex, largely because he was one of the wealthiest 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 hurt their boss. In 1998, Wendy Goldman Rohm 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. And 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 e-mail after saying that seeing her energized him and adding I hope I didn't stare or anything, Gates cancelled 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 a 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. Ohh but OK I mean. Yeah, it I just don't understand. It is simply a power. I mean, why why do you need to do this? I don't know. To your ******* employees. He's not, it's not it's not a Weinstein thing. He's not doing that right because we. I've not heard any evidence that he, like, obviously there's a power imbalance to discuss here, but I haven't any of it. He's not like he's not ****** employees. I've never heard any allegations of that. And in this case, since this lady's letter saying, like, hey, let's go to dinner. I'm a married billionaire, but if I this makes you uncomfortable, let's just pretend it never happened. And she did. She decided she was uncomfortable. She ignored the e-mail, and Gates did not pursue her further. I haven't her dad. Allegations that he harmed her career in any way. I I don't think he's doing that. Like, I don't think he's penalizing women who don't get with him. That said, I think it's pop. You could argue that, like, this woman in Germany may have gotten with him because she was like, maybe it'll hurt my career to not get with him, right? He doesn't matter as much if he did it as he's the CEO 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 6, 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. They said he did not pressure women to submit to his advances for the sake of their careers, and he seemed to feel that he was giving the women space to refuse his advances. O again, we're not talking like, technically, technically, yes, it's not a Weinstein thing, but it's not OK, right like you you can you can not be as bad as Harvey Weinstein, industrial ****** and your behavior is still unacceptable because all like a a workplace is not a ******* nightclub. If if Bill Gates had a history of hitting on women awkwardly in nightclubs, whatever, like, fine, everyone has the right to be like to be like, hey, you want to **** and then be told no. If you're not being, you know, bad about it, but this is a workplace. These are his employees. He runs the company. Yeah, it's not OK. Yeah. Again, it's yeah. So. He was also noted by his employees to be dismissive towards his wife Melinda, sometimes speaking to her during foundation meetings in 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 helped set the stage that leads us, as all things eventually lead Andrew to Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, Jeff Stein. Carly Rae Jepsen. That's a mashup of Jeffrey Epstein. Carly Rae Jepsen. I mean, he did say, Call Me Maybe, but then he also sexually trafficked teenagers. Yeah, it was. It's the maybe, yeah, that was taken out. I'm so sorry. Hey, I just met you and this is crazy, but get in the car or I will have your life systematically destroyed. It's time for you to be sexually trafficked to the wealthiest men on the planet. Yeah that was not as catchy as as the original but I think it but not as I think it's got wings. If something there we'll workshop this a whole album of Jeffrey Epstein themed pop song. I mean you could you could, you could like what is it that? What 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 wanted 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 seemed 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. Not like enough of a predator or anything to, like, take it and for whatever reason, I don't know it. It's weird. Like you think just Bill just just pay sex workers to hang out with you. You have the money, they'll be happy too. You can find some very nice sex workers who would love to make you look like you're cool and sexy all the time. You 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 laid as much as he wants. Like Epstein could smell that **** from a mile away. He's like a shark. Now, the two met. Epstein and Gates meet in 2011, which is 3 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. There were joined by Doctor Eva Andersson Dubin, a former Miss Sweden who Mr Epstein had once dated, and her 15 year old daughter, Doctor Anderson. Dubin's husband, the hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, was a friend and business associate of Mr Epstein's. The Gathering started at 8 and lasted several hours. According to Miss 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, emailing 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. Which why would you? Why would you mention that? Why would you phrase it that way, Bill? That's all your work on your work e-mail. Ohh 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 I can get. We could make like, we could make like 10s 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 .3% of whatever money he raised, which would. Of course, be 10s 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 **** and the 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. 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, *** **** chopping sex offender of Epstein's island? Something like that. You're so close, Sophie, you're getting put a pin in that one. Does this affairs is yours 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 out off the rails. Like, like, it's like, it's it's like talking about Palestine. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. To have the conversation in any. 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 advisers 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 the 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? This 19 pages to get the COVID. My team pages in a surprising number of circumcisions. Right on time. Yeah, quite way more circumcisions than I anticipated. Initially I was going to if you'd if you'd asked me to wager the start, I would have said 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 11th, 2022, 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, Matt, as far as I can tell, I think Mastercard's only role in this is because it'll make him look good, right. Like that. Well, have macrosoft involved. That'll be good for their image. Why is like MasterCard, crazy MasterCard? Why? Well, you know, you know, you know, we've all been seen like a car accident happened and the first thing an injured. Person cries out for his MasterCard, right? You know, sometimes visa shows up and it's just a real tragedy. I always give a MasterCard in my emergency kit. The ****. 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 **** 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, carry 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 and 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. So one side of this is saying the vaccine should be open source and equally available to everybody to be manufactured everywhere for as close to free as is humanly possible. And Bill Gates says, what if instead we do it for money and we donate 20% of the necessary vaccines to to poor people? Yeah, they'll they'll never learn. They'll they'll never learn how to teach themselves, how to stay alive unless we make them work for it. It's like an EMT and US stay alive, by the way. Yeah, you have like 3 gunshot wounds. An EMT like shows up and like, bandages one of them, and then says, well, if I if I handle the rest for you. You're never going to learn how to bandage your own gunshot wounds. So I'm going to if you, if you can pay for the Goss like, I'll let you fix yourself. You take his big picture logic about healthcare and apply it to an actual health problem and it's immediately nonsense. Like it's just very 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 peoples vaccine he was essentially saying it was fine for people to die to protect the concept of intellectual property. Manuel Martin, a policy adviser 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. Like, which is not to say there's zero thing like obviously like, I'm a like, I'm not going to, I don't like, but it's like. There's zero reason for the kind of IP that he wants to exist. Like obviously and in that way like and it's obviously it always winds up like it's it's one. It would be one of those things if like 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 to anyway everything Disney does, like **** all of this **** is what I'm saying. Like I 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 a I think for 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. Like, yeah, maybe that's the thing we could do as a planet. Yeah. Yeah. Actual Tony Stark happened, and yet we couldn't manage to do anything good. That's because the people who did the amazing thing weren't Tony Starks, they were international. Teams of of of very dedicated researchers whose names most people will never know and also should know because they'll get assassinated by lunatics like you think that there is no target and there is no Tony? 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, 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, and to its effect, all of this should be pooled together. We should pool knowledge. You may recognize this as exactly the same thing, computer nerds. They're 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 ******* angry. And of course, when this happened with a vaccine, Bill Gates fought like a devil against it. Quote. Things could have gone either way, says love, but Gates wanted exclusive rights maintained. He acted fast to stop the push for sharing, the knowledge needed to make the products the know how the data, the cell lines, the tech transfer, the transparency that is critically important, and 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 **** poor countries. As Peter Houghtons, 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 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, companies partnering with Kovacs are allowed to set their own tiered prices. They are subject to almost no transparency requirements and to toothless contractual nods to equitable access that have never been enforced. Crucially, the companies retain exclusive rights to their intellectual property. If they stray from their Gates Foundation lie on exclusive rights, they are quickly brought to heel. When the director of Oxford's Jenner Institute had funny ideas about placing the rights to its Kovac supported vaccine candidate in the public domain, gates intervened, as reported by Kaiser Health News. 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 sole rights to no and no guarantee of low prices. So. Yeah. It's so weird to I mean, 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, who gives a **** if someone else gives away their property? Yeah, their intellectual property. But obviously I'm being ignored. It's 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. Can you did you are are you working on. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. That's exactly the kind of thing. So he would have strong arm Jonas Salk into not do yeah, he would. He would have, he would have not have not have listened to Jonas about that ****. 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 1/4 century ago. When a fast company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates raising his voice slightly and laughing in frustration before snapping. It's irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn't about IP. But it is about IBM. There is very little real, 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 $0.00. And right away we paid for this with public money. Still, it should be free because the plague sucks. Like *** **** it. Hello, bill. This is the only way this comes to a stop. Yeah, you don't even have to have the ******* like, anarchist altruist, you know, human positive addict. You should 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 it's it's 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 ten years of publicly funded M RNA 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 IPMI 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 S 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, I know, not into it. It's so common, though, I will just say, I think this is this is as far as the planet goes and, you know, his peers go. This is might be the least bastardy ******* we've done. This might have done some of the most dastardly ********. I mean, to be fair, King Leopold. Yeah, you've done. 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 it's tied to him, no. But the number, 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 ******* malaria ship. 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 I think, though, it is it is a little bit that history of, you know is is a great man or is it forces. Thing, yeah. Because I I will say the evil Bill Gates has done would easily have been done by someone else. In fact actively there are other people pursuing you know that's sort of like benevolent but market driven just like any American billionaire. Yeah. I mean is a candidate to do precisely what he. Bill Gates is the one who did it, who did it and it's it's so it's the kind of thing where. Yes. This is a system problem, that 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 healthcare infrastructure. Vote on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I 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 build that that his his actions, I guess seem inevitable had had he been hit by a bus, had he fallen off the mountain? Yeah, the other guy, Kent, would have. Have done this, the ******* briefcase boy would have would have been this person if it hadn't have been built. I guess that's what I what I mean, is is like this, this feels like less like specifically Bill Younique ******* Doom. That's going to be my argument on this one. They're all yeah. I mean, yes, yes, the the answer is the actual *******. Here is a system that lets individuals accumulate billions of dollars by by commodifying every single thing, even though the only reason they were able to make those money is that money is because a lot of nicer people didn't commodify cool **** in order to make it better. And yeah it's it's it's truly this like thinking they they did it on their own. Yeah 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. It creates the industry. He succeeds and and them using his product for free and sharing, it creates the demand that allows him to get rich in the 1st place and he then makes what made him what he makes this thing illegal basically and he does that with. Everything is whole life this, you know, he he 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 it is it it. It makes it clear. Covering this guy's story, covering the story of the Homebrew Computer Club, those early guys. 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 an incredible opportunity, which he then used to pull the rug out from under him and circumcised 12 million people. 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. *** **** it. God, this is correct. Yeah, it's it's ******* rad, dude. Would love to see it. Well, Andrew. Yeah, you gotta. Got a plugable, maybe 2 plegables. Yeah, you know, just, uh, you know, is this racist? We went independent as a podcast, so you can go to suboptimalpods.com and 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 I'm a person who I've, like blocked by hand. This is not with a block list like over 20,000 people. That's amazing. Incredible $100 I will consider unblocking we we stand a blocking king that self-care. I recently turned off notifications for anyone I don't follow and I know I should know single thing I've ever done has improved my mental health more than that. It's amazing. I just don't see **** that other people post if I don't like them already. It's great. Yeah, that's where I should be. It is. It's where we should all be anyway. This has been behind the ********. 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 cause we we gave him, we gave him the Internet, we gave him, we gave him the idea for graphical user interfaces. We did. We did that. So take his money and use it to buy vaccines and rifles for the global S yeah, it's your money. It's it's. I don't know. It's the end of the episode. Alright. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio. This is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as? Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff, you should know you will. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.