Bill Gates and his "philanthropic" foundation. We've heard the conspiracy theories — but what if the reality was damning enough? Our guest is Tim Schwab, journalist and author of The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.
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The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250291431
Tim Schwab: https://twitter.com/TimothyWSchwab
Music by Nick Sena.
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This week's episode is brought to you by the Mill and Galinda Bates Foundation for Fair and Balanced Podcasting Innovation.
What's up QAA listeners?
The fun games have begun.
I found a way to connect to the internet.
I'm sorry boy.
Welcome, listener, to the 254th chapter of the QAA Podcast, the Busy Bill Gates episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Julian Field and Travis View.
The check has cleared, folks, and we are finally philanthropists.
That's why this week we've gathered to cover the beautiful billionaire who grants us breath each and every day we're lucky enough to spend on this increasingly equitable earth.
I am speaking, of course, about William Henry Gates III, also known as Bill Gates.
But some are a little more critical of Bill.
They claim there may be a problem with relying on billionaires to solve every problem faced by mankind.
One of these critics is journalist Tim Schwab, whose fantastic reporting we've relied on in the past.
His new book is The Bill Gates Problem, Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.
You can go and purchase it right now by following the link in the episode description.
Welcome to the show Tim.
Thank you so much for having me.
So before we get into it, I just wanted to ask, did you write this book to get the heat off of your uncle Klaus Schwab?
It's a really good question, but Klaus has asked me not to talk about that, so I'm gonna have to take the fifth.
I am kind of glad that I was able to focus again on Bill Gates because I do feel like he was the focus for a little while.
And now I do feel like Schwab is kind of stealing his thunder.
Gates gets so many less mentions now that people basically don't have to wear masks and not really anyone's pressuring them to get the vaccine.
So I'm glad to be back on on Bill because I have a feeling he has a little bit more influence than Mr. Schwab.
So, you know, reading your book, I was astounded by the sheer breadth of influence Bill Gates has over various aspects of how societies organize themselves on Earth.
I just wanted to kind of start by reading off some of your chapter titles here.
We've got Taxes, Lobbying, Family Planning, Journalism, Education, Science, and Agriculture.
Clearly, Mr. Gates is a busy man.
So let's kick this off by you maybe telling us a little bit about how long you've been studying the man and what drew you to the subject in the first place.
I first started reporting on the Gates Foundation in 2019.
And the reason I took a hard look at the Gates Foundation is because, you know, the job of journalists is to afflict the comforted.
And comfort the afflicted.
That's what they teach you in journalism school.
And you could see the news media covering the Gates Foundation on a daily basis.
If you set up a Google News alert, every day there are news stories out about the millions of dollars it's giving away, its big plans to solve poverty.
But it's really a one-sided story.
And I knew there was another side of this story.
And, you know, writing this book in many ways, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants because there are many other critics, occasionally some journalists, and of course, many scholars also, who have always put a critical lens to the Gates Foundation, raising questions about its approaches and its strategies.
So there was just a real vacuum, a real void in the news media that I thought I could fill.
You open your book with a short exploration of how Bill Gates built what has become a massive multinational corporation.
I'm talking about Microsoft, of course.
And specifically, you open by talking about a guy called Paul Allen.
I was kind of shocked by this part of the book, just because of how directly cruel and manipulative Bill Gates comes off as.
And later, he's done so much more work on appearing differently.
But yeah, can you tell us, like, how Bill treated Allen in their partnership?
So Paul Allen and Bill Gates were high school buddies.
They went to an elite, expensive private high school in Seattle where they had access to a computer room at a very young age.
So that gave them a huge head start later in life when they started Microsoft.
So they were friends, they were best friends for a time, and they started Microsoft together.
And as they launched it, Paul Allen was under the impression that they would be equal partners, 50-50 partners.
But Bill Gates let him know right away that he wanted to take a majority stake in the company, so it's going to be 60-40.
So Paul Allen kind of accepts the terms of this deal without thinking too much about it.
Bill Gates, realizing how easy that was, brought Paul Allen back in negotiations, claiming a larger share, 64-36.
And then later in Microsoft's history, Paul Allen becomes sick with cancer.
He's going away on sick leave and he overhears Bill Gates talking about diluting his shares even further.
So it was, I think Paul Allen in his autobiography calls it mercenary opportunism.
But I think it's important to understand that this is a personal anecdote about Bill Gates, but I think it says something important about who he is.
You know, we all think of the Gates Foundation, his second chapter after Microsoft, of him being this caring, compassionate, soft-hearted, kind-hearted individual who's a humanitarian, who's really interested in humanity.
But I think the real, true Bill Gates has very few of those characteristics.
It's more about optimization.
It's about numbers.
It's about trying to reduce everything into a mathematical problem that Bill Gates, the talented math geek, can solve.
Yeah, and I mean it seems like Alan was an ideas guy and what Bill really brought to the table was these kind of, like you mentioned, organizational skills.
It seems like a lot of what Bill Gates is good at doing, including with Microsoft and then later with his foundation, is consolidating and absorbing or disrupting competitors and essentially vying for a monopoly.
Yeah, I mean, I think Bill Gates likes to see himself as an innovator.
But if you look at the history of Microsoft, its reputation is really quite different.
It's about stifling innovation.
It's about Bill Gates and Microsoft trying to monopolize the computer revolution, to take over the terms and conditions of how it unfurled.
And that meant, you know, chiefly through the operating system, through MS-DOS, then through Microsoft Windows.
And I think that same lust for control also animates Bill Gates in his second chapter as a philanthropist.
It's not so much making charitable donations as it is funding other groups to follow Bill Gates's own agenda, his own ambitions about how the world should work.
And even in his treatment of Paul Allen, I was struck by the class element that you bring up in the book, which is that, you know, Bill comes from a long line of wealthy people and Paul Allen does not.
He ended up in this elite school, but that was not exactly his background.
So can you tell us a bit more about that?
Yeah, Paul Allen was, he describes himself as the son of a librarian to Bill Gates, who is the son of a corporate lawyer in a very prominent wealthy family in Seattle.
Bill Gates, I think it's fair to say he was born on third base.
He was born wealthy.
He was going to be wealthy no matter what.
Paul Allen didn't have that, didn't have the background, didn't have the connections, didn't have the network.
So his ascension, he in his own right became a multi-billionaire many times over through Microsoft.
But that was more of a fluke, I think, for him coming from the background that he came from.
And do you think Gates saw an opportunity to kind of strong arm him and renegotiate these shares because, you know, he just wasn't as ruthless?
I mean, I think that's the way that Bill Gates seems to treat everybody.
It's that, you know, I think if you read Paul Allen's book, it's kind of heartbreaking in a way.
You know, ostensibly it's a book about his unlikely pathway to becoming a multi-billionaire.
But the way I read it, it's really a heartbreaking story about his relationship with Bill Gates.
A man he loved, but a man who was himself incapable of love.
It's that Bill Gates' truest sense, his truest being is wanting to dominate and to control.
Yeah, I think that there's also like a perception of him as a rather meek and soft spoken man.
But then you read about all these like early day Microsoft stories from people who were there and the guy was flying off the handle.
He was humiliating people in public.
You know, his his like most famous catchphrase was, that's the stupidest fucking idea I've ever heard.
Yeah, and there does seem to be, we've either forgotten or forgiven Gates's first chapter.
We've imagined that as he's become a philanthropist, he went from cold-hearted to kind-hearted, and it's a complete fiction.
You know, somebody who worked with the Gates Foundation who got screwed told me, he quoted Maya Angelou, who said, when somebody shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
Yeah.
Bill Gates today remains exactly the same corporate titan that he was at Microsoft.
He's animated by the same lust for control.
He believes that he is right and righteous in everything he does, and that now he's so fabulously wealthy, he can make his ideas into a reality by funding anyone and everyone, by planting a flag and claiming dominion over a whole field.
So how did he go from being this kind of ruthless software-related businessman and the man who in the 90s was, you know, embroiled in cases where they were, you know, considering breaking up Microsoft.
There was all kinds of antitrust stuff.
How did he go from being perceived that way to now, you know, this philanthropist, you know, like you said, you know, a man with a big heart?
So in the late 1990s, the Department of Justice accused Microsoft of having monopoly power.
And the courts actually found that it was exercising monopoly power, that it was stifling industry.
And at the height of these, so I should just say that some of those the worst, the worst remedies, including breaking apart Microsoft, those were overturned on appeal.
Nevertheless, the company had a toxic reputation as a monopoly power.
And right as this was happening, Bill Gates launches the Bill and Melinda French Gates Foundation.
He donates $20 billion to it.
It's just an incredible sum of money at that time.
Even today, that would be a huge sum of money.
So he goes from this corporate villain to suddenly the most generous man to walk the earth.
And it's a pretty powerful public relations coup to do something like that.
And to Bill Gates' credit, he spent the next 20 years building up the Gates Foundation as this charitable institution.
Whatever you want to say about the Gates Foundation, it has given away $80 billion.
So it's not simply a public relations coup for Bill Gates, though it is that.
So before we get into what that means to give away money and what that number means, $80 billion, can you tell me a little bit about this claim?
Bill Gates claims to be a man motivated by facts, reason, and science instead of ideology, which is like kind of a bad word in his lexicon.
So, I mean, what do you think of this portrayal?
Bill Gates leans hard on marketing and PR to present himself as somebody guided solely by science and reason.
He presents himself as an intellectual.
He's constantly putting out a list of the books that he's reading, books that he likes for the summer, for the holidays.
So he really leans hard on this idea that he is a man driven by reason and science and numbers.
If you look at the Gates Foundation's work, everything they do, they try and reduce everything into a number that they can quantify, that they can measure and optimize.
But the reality is that Bill Gates runs the Gates Foundation through a very clear ideology, if not dogma.
And that's pretty classically neoliberal in the sense that the Gates Foundation solutions to problems are the primacy of the private sector, market-based solutions, corporate partnerships, technology and innovation as a solution and the cure for all problems.
So that is one way to solve problems, but it's one of many ways.
But Gates really pushes those kinds of solutions in a ways that I think could be fairly called ideological, if not dogmatic.
You spoke about measurements.
In the book, you detail how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has repeatedly measured its success in, quote unquote, lives saved by their intervention.
So how do these numbers get measured?
And, you know, what did you find when you started looking into this stuff?
Yeah, it's hard to argue with the Gates Foundation when it's constantly putting out marketing materials talking about the millions of lives it's saving through its interventions.
But if you take a close look at the numbers, you've realized that all of the science and the research undergirding the numbers comes from the Gates Foundation itself.
So, you know, this is kind of an illustrative example of their charity where the Gates Foundation has put more than $10 billion into universities.
And those universities then reliably churn out research that tends to support or certainly doesn't undermine the Gates Foundation.
That's not to say that everything that the Gates funds is corrupted, but it's nevertheless the case that the Gates Foundation has developed a great deal of epistemic power by funding the people who explain to us what the Gates Foundation is doing.
Case in point is the lives saved.
If all of the numbers about the lives that Gates is saving is coming from research institutes funded by the Gates Foundation, I think there's reason to question those numbers.
The assumption here is that basically things would remain exactly the same as it has like in the 90s when they started, you know, operation.
That, for example, infant mortality or death rates due to certain diseases would just be a kind of flat graph if it weren't for their intervention.
So can you speak a bit about that, about how these numbers are arrived to and the macro context of it all?
Yeah, I mean, one difficulty I have reporting this book is that the Gates Foundation wouldn't agree to any interviews with me.
And that even before I wrote the book, even before I published the first article about the Gates Foundation, they would never agree to an interview or sit for an interview.
So it's not like you have an open line where you could ask the Gates Foundation to explain itself or to unpack the apparent contradictions in its own analyses.
So, you know, that's one difficulty.
But if you start to look at the numbers that the foundation puts out, they'll show a dramatic reduction in childhood deaths, for example, from all the way back from 1990.
But that's, you know, a decade before the Gates Foundation was even in operation.
So it is true that deaths are falling.
It is true that the Gates Foundation is helping deliver vaccines and vaccines save lives.
Like we know all of that.
At a point, the Gates Foundation starts putting out numbers saying that it has helped saved 122 million lives.
And you start to look at where do those numbers come from, and how many of those lives they actually have to do with the Gates Foundation, and how many of them have to do with, you know, variables that have nothing to do with the Gates Foundation.
I've seen a bunch of numbers thrown around.
It seems like in one interview he says 7 and another one it's 11 and there's 122 and you did a bit of homework behind the numbers and kind of went up the food chain of how these are being fed in.
What did you find?
I mean, at the end of the day, it's hard to have confidence in these numbers because the Gates Foundation isn't going to explain them.
And the sources for many of the numbers are institutions funded by the Gates Foundation.
I mean, what Gates is telling us is one narrow side of the stories, which is the lives that it claims to be saved according to the research it tells.
What it's not telling you is the number of lives that are being lost, or the number of lives that could be saved.
And this gets into the idea of kind of the collateral damage or opportunity costs in the way that the Gates Foundation operates.
So what does it mean for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to be considered a charity?
Like, how is that different than, say, a government contractor or a private company?
I mean, in my mind, I think it's a question whether it really is a charity, or whether it is simply a political organization that Bill Gates uses to advance his own worldview, his agenda about how public policy should work.
I mean, legally, technically, it's incorporated as a tax-exempt nonprofit private foundation.
But, you know, if you really step back, what it is is Bill Gates taking money from his personal bank account, his private bank account, and putting money into his private foundation, where he continues to control it.
There are all kinds of tax benefits and tax subsidies.
Public funds that go into the Gates Foundation's charitable projects.
And we can go through those one by one if you want.
All of this to say is that there's billions of dollars from us, the taxpaying public, that's going into subsidizing the Gates Foundation's charitable projects.
Yet we have very little say in how Bill Gates uses our money.
We have very few checks and balances.
There's very little in the way of transparency.
And we don't get any of the credit for the work that Bill Gates does with our money.
It's just astonishing to me that Bill Gates today is worth $110 billion, that we would give him any tax breaks for anything.
Quite the opposite.
We should be asking, why isn't he paying his fair share?
How could we make Bill Gates pay his fair share of taxes?
Yeah, I mean, you mentioned the tax element to it, and there's also the question of, you know, every dollar that the foundation gives, half of that dollar is actually publicly funded.
You know, this is obviously, like, generally speaking, and a rough estimate.
But the fact that he allocates that money and, you know, gets a lot in return.
So can you explain what his version of giving involves for the people who are receiving these grants?
Yeah, in the book I argue that Bill Gates himself is the single biggest beneficiary of the Gates Foundation.
He gets massive tax breaks because the tax code rewards billionaires for donating money.
He gets public applause, awards, accolades, and he gets political power.
So, when I say political power, I mean that the Gates Foundation can take over a whole field of public policy.
Bill Gates and his team at the Gates Foundation's half-billion-dollar headquarters in Seattle, they sit in a war room.
It's Bill Gates, it's the pharmaceutical industry, it's MBAs, it's McKinsey, it's Boston Consulting Group, and they figure out how to solve other people's problems.
They then come up with their agenda and their priorities, and then they can go out into the field and fund anyone and everyone.
They can give charitable donations to NGOs, to think tanks, to the news media, even giving money to universities, to governments.
And you could have a whole field at that point that's rowing in the same direction.
They're chasing Gates's dollars and following Gates's agenda.
And, you know, if you look in the areas where the Gates Foundation works, agricultural development in Sub-Saharan Africa, educational policy in the United States, public health all over the world.
These are, you know, these are areas of public policy, public health, public education, that we imagine and that we should want to be administered and organized through a public process, through a democratic process.
The Gates model is the classic model of the richest guy gets the loudest voice.
Another word for that is oligarchy.
He has a huge sum of money, and he can tilt the scales in his favor.
It's that his solutions and his priorities become those of the globe.
And the donations, you know, these charitable donations, they come with a leash.
So the foundation was going to be checking in on your work.
If they don't approve of it, they can work against you because they are also often funding your competitors.
You know, what is there to say about, I guess, how free these grantees are to then use that money in ways that they see fit?
Yeah, I think there's probably an impression that most people have of Bill Gates just writing checks indiscriminately to other groups to empower them to do the good work that they're already doing.
But the reality is the Gates Foundation gives a check and a checklist of things to do, and an organization completes that checklist.
They show their work to the Gates Foundation, they run it up the ladder, and if the Gates Foundation's happy, more money flows.
So there's always an incentive, once you start taking the Gates Foundation's money, to keep the Gates Foundation happy.
And, you know, it's not uncommon.
I talk to organizations and companies that have taken grants from the foundation that said, you almost have to create a new full-time equivalent employee just to manage the relationship at the Gates Foundation, because they do have this reputation as micromanaging their grantees.
Trying to take control over their operations or certainly play a heavy hand in the way that they work on the charitable grants from the Gates Foundation.
Another aspect of this is that the Foundation asks these grantees to open their books and share their intellectual property and patents.
And this kind of leads us into the way Bill Gates perceives patents and intellectual property.
So, you know, can you tell us a bit about that and what the Global Good Fund is?
So an underappreciated aspect of the Gates Foundation is that it's actually donating billions of dollars to private companies.
It's counterintuitive.
I mean, you wouldn't imagine that a private for-profit company would be a worthy recipient of charity.
But the Gates Foundation has kind of turned that on its head, saying that pharmaceutical companies, for example, are good recipients of charitable funds, because this money will help them develop new drugs for poor people in the global south, so that there's a charitable end to it.
There's a humanitarian benefit by donating money to for-profit companies.
But when the Gates Foundation donates this money, it protects its investment, this is the Gates Foundation's language, by taking a licensing claim over any intellectual property produced with its charitable funds.
So, for example, this is the foundation telling the IRS, telling Congress, like, yes, this is odd.
We're giving money to private companies, but we also have a licensing claim to the technology.
So any important new drug, vaccine, fertilizer, whatever it is that they produce, That we have an ability to license the technology and to make sure it goes to humanitarian ends.
Hopefully it doesn't come to that, that the Gates Foundation has to trigger that technology license.
Hopefully the company itself will work with the Gates Foundation to make sure that its products get into the hands of the global poor.
But it still is, nevertheless, it's odd, I think it's striking, that the Gates Foundation has organized its charitable giving in such a way that has so much bearing on intellectual property and patents.
Of course, Microsoft, its whole bottom line is organized around patented copyrighted software.
And so, you know, it's not a coincidence that Bill Gates has organized his philanthropic work according to the same idea around technology, but also patented technology.
I mean, just to me, there's a point where, or there are many points when you start to look at the Gates Foundation, where you just have to ask, how is this a charity?
If the Gates Foundation is donating money to private companies that is taking licensing claims of their technology.
You know, in the book, I reached out to many, many different private companies that have taken charitable grants from the Gates Foundation.
The ones that talked to me, a number of them talked about working with the Gates Foundation, almost like a corporate takeover, where the Gates Foundation was really, you know, they're given charitable grants, they might be investing money in the companies, they might take a board seat in the company.
So they have a great deal, a stunning level of control over the operations of what should be independent private sector for-profit companies.
And there's a point where the Gates Foundation could say, yes, but this is all humanitarian in nature.
It's all designed to produce a new vaccine that's going to save lives.
But some of the companies I talked to told a different story.
It's just that it really is a corporate takeover.
It's this classic Bill Gates monopoly ethos where he's trying to take over a company.
There's this line in the book that I found really kind of amazing and maybe a little scary.
You wrote, one vaccine developer I interviewed believes that Bill Gates is actually trying to create the world's largest pharmaceutical company.
So could you explain how someone working in the field might get that impression from the actions of the foundation?
Yeah, the foundation has such a broad stake in pharmaceutical research and development today.
It has long been funding private sector pharmaceutical companies.
The Gates Foundation has its own non-profit spinoff called the Bill and Melinda Gates Medical Research Institute that is working with big pharma to develop new drugs, vaccines, diagnostics.
Like I said, the foundation is investing in private pharmaceutical companies.
It's sitting on boards of directors of pharmaceutical companies.
It's giving charitable donations to pharmaceutical companies.
It really exercises a great deal of influence over a number of different areas, especially the so-called diseases of the poor.
These are diseases like malaria and tuberculosis, where we don't have these problems in the United States.
Pharmaceutical companies, generally speaking, aren't going to put a lot of money into a drug for a disease that people can't afford to pay for.
This is where the Gates Foundation comes in and says, we're going to make markets work for the poor.
There's not an incentive for big pharma to create a malaria vaccine, so we're going to help fund the creation of that malaria vaccine.
So in certain areas like malaria, tuberculosis, the Gates Foundation can really plant its flag and have a really significant influence over the entire landscape of pharmaceutical research and development.
You know, whether Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation really have ambitions to be the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, you know, I can't say I can just tell you what one private company that has worked with the Gates Foundation told me that was their impression.
Yeah, because it appears that they're collecting, slowly, intellectual property of different competing companies in a black box that we don't get to see inside of, through a series of contracts that we don't get to read.
And we're subsidizing about half of this through taxpayer money.
And the result is that more and more private and public sector efforts are now essentially under the control or supervision of the Foundation.
Yeah, I mean, every time that the Gates Foundation writes a charitable grant to an organization, you're talking about tens of thousands of charitable grants that's given out, it's going to have what are called global access agreements, which allow the foundation access to that organization or that company's intellectual property.
So these are licensing claims on the technology, and you can imagine the, you know, the scope of intellectual property that the Gates Foundation comes into in terms of having a legal access to the technology.
And, you know, I've talked to some private companies who just believe that's kind of a cudgel that the Gates Foundation uses to make its charitable partners move in whatever direction they want to.
Because the foundation could say is if one of its charitable partners isn't cooperating with it, it has the ability to step in and license the technology.
Or if the company or the organizational partner goes bankrupt, the Gates Foundation can license the technology.
I mean, if you take the Gates Foundation at its word, it does make a certain amount of sense that the Gates Foundation needs to make sure that its investment, its charitable grants really are going towards humanitarian ends.
The problem is, you can't really go to the Gates Foundation and ask them how this all works.
And there are so many examples where companies are taking funding from the Gates Foundation, and then are not acting in ways that are particularly charitable or humanitarian, and that the Gates Foundation isn't stepping in to use these global access agreements to force their hand to do so.
It's hard to see that this is helpful or that this is charitable, that the Gates Foundation is taking such an expansive role in intellectual property and patents.
I mean, again, a lot of this kind of goes back to Bill Gates' career at Microsoft, which ran on the same intellectual property patents and copyright issues.
So let's say he gets more and more of a say in how these things are run.
Have his efforts been more nimble and effective at addressing these health problems than, say, the efforts that would come from a publicly owned institution or governmental institution?
No, I mean, the Gates Foundation's track record of success on the innovation front isn't particularly good.
You know, they've been talking for years about the innovative new drugs and vaccines that they would produce, and you just really don't see that happening.
Recently, they came out with a new malaria vaccine that they had spent years and huge sums of money developing with GSK.
But once it got across the finish line, its efficacy was so low that even the Gates Foundation sort of stepped away from it.
Yeah, I mean, if you look back at what the Gates Foundation promised to do, things like eradicating malaria, coming up with revolutionary, game-changing tuberculosis drugs, and you look at their actual track record of success, it doesn't really substantiate the claims that they had made about what they would do.
There's also a question of perception management, let's put it that way.
So in the book you write about the CABC, or the Center for Analytics and Behavioral Change.
The CABC brands itself as a kind of civic-minded James Bond operation.
Quietly entering into the political discourse and deploying potent countermeasures to redirect the conversation.
Quote, in the analysis of every social media conversation, we are able to identify people speaking on each side of the conversation, i.e.
antagonists and protagonists, the center explains.
The protagonists are our allies, our citizen activists, those who are value-aligned and are already speaking in the conversation.
Our dialogue facilitators develop, nurture, and curate our bank of citizen activists.
They provide content, contacts, and contacts, assist them to amplify, and make their message more effective on social media.
Closely aligned to this process is the development of strategy-aligned content to amplify our message.
But who is this bank of citizen activists?
And what messages are they covertly inserting into the public discourse?
If this isn't a black ops propaganda campaign to manipulate public opinion, then why is it shrouded in so much secrecy?
So how is Bill Gates related to the CABC?
And what does this say about his approach to PR in general?
Yes, so this comes, I have an entire chapter in the book about transparency and the difficulty that I had as a reporter trying to follow the money.
You would find organizations like the CABC that on their website talk about their charitable partnership with the Gates Foundation.
But when you probe to ask for more information, they say, well, only the Gates Foundation can explain what we're doing.
And the Gates Foundation did not engage with my reporting at any level in this book.
I mean, I think this project was supposed to, if you look at the footnotes of the book, the project was supposed to be about vaccine hesitancy.
You know, and that I think is a good, worthy and important goal.
But the idea of Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation using a project like this to fight vaccine hesitancy, I think is problematic because there's no transparency to it.
And the lack of transparency, I think, is a recipe for public distrust.
You know, you mentioned how a lot of these approaches are so shrouded in mystery, and yet the Foundation claims to be, you know, very transparent.
In fact, they built their kind of HQ out of glass to be like, look, we're literally transparent.
I mean, was that what you found when you started looking in?
Were you able to just view the data and follow the money?
No.
I mean, they give you the illusion of transparency.
Bill and Melinda French Gates, for example, are constantly giving interviews in the news media, and that certainly gives the impression that they are an open and transparent organization.
But if you look at the news outlets and the journalists that report these stories, they tend to be with outlets that aren't going to criticize the Gates Foundation or challenge the logic of its work.
The same thing as the Gates Foundation online has a database of all the grants it gives out a searchable database that again gives the illusion of transparency.
But if you try to use the database and you get these kind of six word descriptions of how the money was spent like to improve global health.
It gives you no real meaningful explanation of what the money was used for and how it was used.
And in many cases, there's no way to get to the bottom of it, because the Gates Foundation, as a private organization, doesn't have to answer any questions it doesn't want to.
It's not subject to public records requests, FOIA requests, and many of its recipients are also private sector entities, so they're also not required to explain what they're doing.
And is this, you know, kind of part and parcel of how Bill Gates sees the world?
I mean, I even read a mention that he made of trickle-down, you know, the idea that the money will trickle down to the poor if we just, you know, empower these big companies to make money, to make profit.
Yeah, I mean, I think this gets back to his conception about how pharmaceutical markets work.
That if you give a patent monopoly to a big pharmaceutical company, that company will produce that vaccine or that drug.
It won't be available to poor people because it'll be too expensive.
Giving a pharmaceutical company a patent means you're giving them exclusive control to decide where to sell it, how much to produce, what the price is.
Bill Gates idea is that after a certain period of time that drug or vaccine will go off patent and that the benefits of it will trickle down to the global poor and everyone will have access to it.
It hasn't really worked that way in practice and there's many examples we could point to, but he really does and this goes back to The sort of dogma or ideology of Bill Gates is that, you know, the sanctity of intellectual property and patents, whether it's with software or pharmaceutical companies, is it cannot be questioned.
So the idea here is to make this attractive to private companies, and hopefully these private companies will then start producing cheaper drugs or more affordable drugs.
But the results, as I was reading about it, sounded more like a kind of price-fixing cartel that has to be relied on for their own goodness of spirit.
If they don't feel like doing it at the end of the day, there's no real mechanism to hold them accountable.
Yeah, I mean, Big Pharma has become a humanitarian enterprise to the help of the Gates Foundation.
The Gates Foundation creates these massive public-private partnerships where they go around the world raising funds from rich governments like the United States.
This money goes into these public-private partnerships, which then go out and negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies to make a bulk order and get a lower price on, say, a pneumococcal vaccine.
And they can then send that vaccine to poor nations all over the world, you know, vaccines in arms save lives and The Gates Foundation and its partners can produce scientific research talking about all the lives they've saved.
Of course, there's an entirely different model that many public health experts would like to see, which is challenging the patent rights of the big pharmaceutical companies.
And, you know, where this really came to a head or the ultimate referendum on the Gates Foundation's work was in the pandemic.
So Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation essentially took over the pandemic response for the global poor.
This response effort was nominally organized at the World Health Organization, but the Gates Foundation, by all accounts, was sort of the architect and the organizer of this plan.
And Bill Gates, you know, leaning on the same strategies and practices and approaches he had for two decades, he really thought that he and his foundation had the network, the expertise, the negotiating clout, That they could create this massive buyers club that would work with the big pharmaceutical companies.
They would raise money from rich governments, create this huge buyers fund, negotiate a bulk purchase, and it would create vaccine equity.
And instead, the Gates Foundation's plan presided over what became known as vaccine apartheid, where the poor did eventually get their vaccines, but it was years after people in rich nations got them.
I mean, they, of course, got to the end of the line, because Big Pharma prioritized selling vaccines to the richest countries, which could pay the highest price.
So, you know, the foundation's track record of working with Big Pharma instead of against Big Pharma, again, that's one way to organize public health.
And to get vaccines out into the world, but it's probably not the best way.
I mean, it's just important to note that at the same time that Bill Gates was pushing this plan to solve the pandemic, there were alternative strategies.
People were widely calling for a people's vaccine.
Public health experts around the world said the public health crisis is too serious.
There's millions of people dying at a cost to trillions of dollars to the global economy.
We can't let patent rights get in the way of this.
More than 100 poor nations petitioned the World Trade Organization to waive patents over COVID vaccines.
These were the poor nations that Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation claims to protect.
And so that would have been a different way to manage the pandemic.
If you waive the patents and you force or embarrass or shame or compel the pharmaceutical companies to hand over the vaccine technology to help set up manufacturing facilities all over the world, suddenly you're in a place where poor nations can be producing their own vaccines for their own people instead of being standing on line and being dependent on the whims of A billionaire in Seattle and some massive procurement mechanisms he's worked out with Big Pharma.
So there's always been an alternative solution to what Gates proposes.
And the pandemic was really the ultimate referendum on what Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation can accomplish through their partnerships with Big Pharma.
And at the end of the day, when it came down to it, he intervened with companies that had the potential to become, you know, what you were saying, the kind of the people's vaccine, and told them, the best way for you forward, and I'll help you with this, I'll connect you, is to work through these large pharmaceutical companies, private companies.
Yeah, I mean, Bill Gates became like the most fervent and public defender and apologist for Big Pharma and its patent rights during the pandemic, both in front of cameras and behind the scenes.
It's difficult to overstate how important of a role he played.
I don't know if you remember it, but he would go on CNN and MSNBC.
He was like a public health expert right next to Anthony Fauci.
It was the absolute zenith of his philanthropic career.
It was, you know, the decades of work the foundation had put into vaccines and the network it had.
It positioned Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation perfectly.
I mean, on top of that, national leaders around the world, especially President Trump, were really dropping the ball.
There was no effort at statesmanship.
There was no effort at being an ambassador about helping the poor.
So there was a void there.
And Bill Gates just stepped into it and said, I got this.
There was a point where pharmaceutical companies started going public almost as whistleblowers waving their hands saying, we have spare manufacturing capacity, we could be helping produce COVID vaccines.
And Bill Gates at the same time is doing interviews saying that the patents are too important.
That manufacturing capacity is already at full speed, that the pandemic response that he was organizing gets a high grade, that it's going to eventually deliver vaccine equity.
So it's like all of the political capital that he built up in that first year of the pandemic is sort of this unelected leader.
He really burnt through all of that in the next year.
There's a passage in your book that I'd like to read and let you expand on a little bit.
I found it incredibly relevant to this podcast subject matter.
The first edition of a new newsletter from Politico called Global Pulse, published in late 2020, offered remarkable and rare clarity about a vastly underreported story in the COVID-19 pandemic response that Gates Foundation seemed to be in charge.
Quote, America may not be leading in global health anymore, but an American is, Politico reported.
Bill Gates is the architect of the global health infrastructure now at the forefront of the pandemic response.
From this revelation, it should have been a small, easy step to raise some obvious Civics 101 questions.
Why was the world's then third richest person, a software magnate with no medical training, serving as the architect of the response effort to the most pressing public health crisis in many generations?
Politico went in a different direction.
Quote, Everywhere you turn in this pandemic, the Gates Foundation is involved, which has fueled conspiracy theories amplified by anti-vaxxers.
That he caused the pandemic to vaccinate the world and get richer in the process.
Or that he wants everyone in the world to be implanted with a microchip, the outlet reported.
I then looked to the Gates Foundation itself to explain the crazy making.
Quote, conspiracy theories thrive on the notion that hidden secret things are happening, Mark Sussman, CEO of the Gates Foundation explained.
And so one of the key things we do is to say we have no secrets.
Ask us questions and we will explain what we're doing and how we're doing it.
Versions of this victim narrative played out hundreds or maybe thousands of times during the pandemic, as journalists spilled volumes of ink describing how the Gates Foundation, despite all its best intentions and good deeds, was being maligned by irrational criticism and attacked with misinformation.
The Foundation leaned hard into this reporting, using it as an opportunity to espouse its commitment to transparency.
Bill Gates took endless questions from journalists about the conspiracy theories, in one instance condemning them as evil and crazy.
The Foundation also poured millions of dollars into charitable grants aimed at combating misinformation and disinformation.
The effect was to cement Gates' reputation as a champion of truth, reason, and transparency.
Some of the Foundation's fiercest defenders were found in the fact-checking verticals that populate the news media today.
Politifact and USA Today, run by Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively, both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation, deploy their fact-checkers to defend Gates from false conspiracy theories and misinformation, specifically the allegation that the Foundation had financial investments in companies developing COVID-19 vaccines and therapies.
In fact, the Foundation's annual tax filings clearly showed hundreds of millions of dollars invested in companies working on the pandemic.
That is, the Foundation, while exercising significant decision-making power over the pandemic response, was positioned to benefit financially from the pandemic through its stock and bond investments, including in pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Gilead.
So, you know, you mentioned vaccine hesitancy.
Can you kind of explain the negative effects of, I hate to use the word, but this sounds a bit like gaslighting?
Yeah, I mean, I think that for anyone who cares about vaccine hesitancy, and that includes me, I think Bill Gates is just a terrible messenger and a terrible spokesperson on this issue.
Most of the issues that the Gates Foundation works on, Bill Gates or the Gates Foundation has a financial interest in the issue.
And that's because they have so much money.
Bill Gates, as a private citizen, has $110 billion fortune.
That money is invested into anything and everything.
The Gates Foundation has a $67 billion bank account, which is also invested into anything and everything.
Much of my career as a journalist has focused on this idea of financial conflicts of interest.
When people who are given public trust or who are in charge of public funds, when they have an outside financial interest that limits or biases their ability to act independently, to act in the public's interest.
And the Gates Foundation kind of top to bottom is one big financial conflict of interest.
I mean, what makes matters worse is that the news media isn't pointing out these financial conflicts of interest.
It isn't challenging the contradictions that define the Gates Foundation.
Instead, it's producing these fact-checking verticals that tend to defend the Gates Foundation.
What I ultimately concluded is that the Gates Foundation, on the whole, is a beneficiary of misinformation, not the victim.
While it is true that there are these unhinged conspiracy theories surrounding the Gates Foundation, they're a huge distraction from the reality of what the Gates Foundation is doing.
Yeah, and yet it's kind of a baby out with the bathwater when they kind of, you know, fact-check this stuff.
So, I mean, there are a dizzying amount of journalistic outlets taking money from the Gates Foundation.
This includes The Guardian, Al Jazeera, NPR, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, CNN, The Atlantic, El País, The Financial Times, The Spectator, and the BBC.
How does this work?
I mean, these outlets are supposed to be independent and able to criticize Bill Gates and his vast network of enterprises.
How does that work if they're taking his money?
Yeah, I mean it's a question we could put to these news outlets, but most news outlets today, especially most mainstream news outlets today, have in one way or the other a financial tie to the Gates Foundation.
If they're not receiving the Gates Foundation's funding now, they might hope to in the future, or one of its reporters might have a side gig working on a Gates-funded project.
I mean, I do think that that absolutely is one reason why the news media has been so soft on the Gates Foundation and, in my view, failed to do its job.
The job of journalists is to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted.
And if that really is your mantra or your modus operandi, then Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation should be among the most scrutinized people and institutions in the world.
They have so much money and they have so much power.
I mean, I do think that the Gates Foundation's charitable donations to newsrooms has limited their independence, and that's one explanation, but I don't think it's the only reason.
I think that the news media is always looking for hero narratives, and Bill Gates, you know, fits the bill perfectly.
Here's a guy who made loads of money and now, we're told, is giving it all away.
That's fiction.
He's not giving away that much money compared to how much he has.
He's managed to nearly double his personal wealth during his tenure as a philanthropist.
I'd like to get to a point where journalists, instead of profiling or celebrating the $10 or $50 million gift that the Gates Foundation is giving away, is instead asking about the $110 billion that Bill Gates isn't giving away.
Or the $67 billion that the Gates Foundation isn't giving away.
I mean, these are huge numbers that the Gates Foundation is dealing with.
Millions of dollars and billions of dollars.
And it has the effect, I think, of short-circuiting our cognition or breaking the brains of journalists, because you don't understand how small that sum of money is compared to the vast wealth that Gates controls.
I was kind of struck also by this idea of solution journalism, which seems to be a really cool new version of journalism where you just don't bum people out.
You just focus on the freaking solution.
So can you explain what this solutions journalism network is and this new kind of trend?
Yeah, it's a new brand of journalism that, you know, it sees the prevailing news media as too focused on what's wrong with the world, the problems with the world.
And what it tries to do, it says, well, let's look at what's working in the world, what's right.
I mean, my own view is that it's totally unnecessary that if I'm writing a story about a problem with the world, like a conflict of interest, the solutions are always going to be in the story already.
You can disclose the conflict of interest.
You can manage the conflict of interest.
You can fire the person with the conflict of interest.
I don't really think that you need a whole brand of solutions journalism to do this.
But it's a brand that certainly chimes with the Gates Foundation's view of the world.
And it's a brand of journalism that the Gates Foundation has put millions of dollars into supporting.
You know, it works for the Gates Foundation because the Gates Foundation itself is in the business of solutions.
It's coming up with innovative ideas and approaches to social problems, to poverty.
So invariably, the Gates Foundation funds solutions journalism, and the people practicing solutions journalism end up reporting on the good work that the Gates Foundation is doing.
I mean, to me, it's just such a conflict of interest.
It highlights the conflict of interest and the problems with the Gates Foundation funding the news media.
The foundation has been putting You know, more than $300 million into journalism over the years.
I think it's got a major return on investment in terms of the generally favorable or uncritical coverage.
So I think it's been of great benefit to the Gates Foundation, but it's been of great detriment to democracy, to the public debate.
It's created a world where there are few venues or forums that are really independent of the Gates Foundation, and it's made it difficult for us to have an open, honest, sober debate about the Gates Foundation, about who Bill Gates is and what he's doing, about what the Gates Foundation is and what it's doing.
You know, speaking of democracy, it would be illegal for the Gates Foundation to engage in lobbying politicians.
And yet in your book, you describe these, quote unquote, educational trips that involve Congress people being flown to African countries or even Aspen, Colorado.
So what's that all about?
Yeah, before I wrote this book, I didn't realize that this existed, but private sector entities can pay to send members of Congress and their staff on educational trips that are related to their congressional duties.
And I mean, when you think about it, this is like clearly money in politics, because, you know, you or I aren't going to have the money to foot the bill to send a fleet of Congress people to sub-Saharan Africa to learn about our own pet project.
Small NGOs, small foundations, small companies also aren't going to have that kind of money.
But the Gates Foundation does.
You know, it's one way to get the Gates Foundation's agenda and its priorities and its issues in front of Congress is sending members of Congress and their staff on these educational trips abroad.
What strikes me when reading your book is just the vast array of companies that are either kind of owned, subsidized, are grantees, provide intellectual property to, and have some relation to Bill Gates.
So, you know, what is there to be said about this, the structure of how Bill Gates's influence exists through all of these different companies and the final result of that?
Certainly, I think the Gates Foundation really blurs the line between non-profit and for-profit, between a private philanthropy and a private company, because it has so many fingers in so many different companies.
It's giving charitable grants to private companies.
It's sitting on boards of directors of private companies.
It's taking large equity positions, like shareholder positions in private companies.
And in certain times, in certain places, it can have a great deal of oversight and influence around how an entire field of, say, pharmaceutical development takes place.
It can be funding a given company working on a vaccine and also five of that company's competitors.
So the Gates Foundation is playing an integral role with many different competing companies working on the same vaccine or drug or diagnostic.
And that gives the Gates Foundation a great deal of influence over how an entire field can develop.
The companies that I interviewed say that the Gates Foundation is really abusing its power, that working with the Gates Foundation, taking its money, and oftentimes can amount to a kind of corporate takeover, up to and including the Gates Foundation can put a licensing claim on a company's technology.
If a company develops a vaccine using the Gates Foundation's money, the Gates Foundation will have a licensing claim on that technology.
And you start to look at these activities about its overlap with the private sector, and it becomes more and more difficult to place it under the common definition of charity.
You know, it strikes me that there are some solutions that I would have to the Bill Gates problem, but all of them would have to be in Minecraft, which he also owns!
He also owns Skype, which we're using right now.
Microsoft owns Skype.
Oh boy.
Well, Bill, hi.
All right.
On a lighter note, can you tell us about Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein?
What is it with these two men's relationships and Bill's shifting representation of it to the media?
It is a conundrum.
I don't know that we have the full story or that we'll ever have the full story about Bill Gates' relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
I mean, the short story is that at some point Bill Gates apparently thought that Jeffrey Epstein could help him raise money for global health, for philanthropy.
And he and staff from the Gates Foundation met with him multiple times over a number of years to brainstorm ideas.
So that's the sort of innocent explanation.
But Gates's story seems to have evolved over the years as journalists took perhaps the most spirited look ever at Bill Gates through this story.
Finding, turning up contradiction after contradiction that raises, that continues to raise questions about their relationship.
I guess I should say there's no evidence that Bill Gates engaged in any illicit activities with Gates Foundation.
Bill Gates has consistently denied or downplayed his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
But at the same time, Bill Gates's story seems to have evolved.
Where, you know, he made it sound like he had one or two formal meetings.
And then it later turned out that he flew on his airplane.
He visited him in person several times.
He had dinners with him.
He appeared to be socializing with him.
And this is all after Jeffrey Epstein's original 2008 conviction, right?
Right, so by the time that Bill Gates is associated with Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein is a felon, he's a registered sex offender.
It's important to understand that Bill and Melinda French Gates have an army of people surrounding them to keep them safe, to keep their reputation safe and secure.
So when Bill Gates is meeting with Jeffrey Epstein at this late stage, You know, there's every reason to believe that he knew exactly who and what Jeffrey Epstein was and the potential risks involved.
So, I wanted to read a final passage from your book about the world Bill Gates is helping to create.
Finding a solution also requires us to widen the lens on the problems at hand.
The Foundation describes its work as guided by the belief that every life has equal value and is helping all people lead healthy, productive lives.
This mission and vision have great merit.
But they necessarily require us to imagine a world where everyone has basic rights and privileges and can fulfill the most basic needs.
A decent place to live, basic health care, clean water and enough food to eat, educational opportunities, the ability to find gainful employment, legal protections from discrimination, and other basic democratic rights.
Can we confidently state that the Gates Foundation moves us in this direction?
Under Gates' model, the global poor will never have clean water, but some will have access to rotavirus and polio vaccines that offer some protection against sickness caused by dirty water and poor sanitation.
The poor will never have access to basic health care systems that provide routine cancer screenings, but some will have access to HPV vaccines that allow some protection against cervical cancer.
Poor women will never have full autonomy over their reproductive health, but some will have access to limited contraceptive choices Gates subsidizes.
Farmers in many African nations will have access to the foundation's favorite solutions, synthetic fertilizer, and maybe eventually GMO seeds, but they may be asked to take on devastating debt or watch their soils degrade from chemical inputs.
The poorest school districts in the United States, likewise, will be subject to new tests and surveillance mechanisms that Gates believes they need to succeed.
But the students there will never have the encouragement or freedom that Gates' own children have had to develop and explore their intellectual interests.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation cannot be expected to fix all the world's problems or single-handedly resolve global poverty.
That's not really the issue.
The question we have to ask is whether Gates' model of charitable giving is moving us in the right direction or, in fact, setting up distractions and roadblocks to the real, systemic changes we need.
Can we truly achieve equality in the face or by the hand of billionaire oligarchs?
On some basic level, can't we see that Gates' model boils down to empowering the wealthiest people on Earth to make decisions for the poorest?
You also wrote that, quote, the world needs Bill Gates's money, but it doesn't need Bill Gates.
Can you expand on that a little bit?
What did you mean?
At this point, Bill Gates has $110 billion private fortune and the Gates Foundation has $67 billion in its bank account.
So that $177 billion, I think all of us could look at it and see that that money could be of use to society.
The problem is when you allow one man to become that obscenely wealthy, to control that level of wealth, and then you allow him to seamlessly turn that money into power through campaign contributions, through lobbying, or now through philanthropy, Then you've created a world that really boils down to this model of the richest guy gets the loudest voice.
It's a model that looks far more like oligarchy than it does charity, and I think it's a threat to democracy.
The problem is bigger than Bill Gates.
You already have Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and hundreds of other billionaires who are starting to follow in Bill Gates' footsteps.
And, you know, what this portends is a future in which, you know, climate policy, public education, public health are increasingly the domain of private sector billionaire philanthropists who are turning their outsized personal fortunes into political power through charity.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation are fundamentally problems of democracy, and it's going to take a democratic movement to understand and to challenge the threat that extreme wealth poses to democracy and society.
People should absolutely go pick up your book, The Bill Gates Problem, Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire.
They will find a link in the description of this episode.
Where can people follow you and your work in general?
I'm on Twitter at Timothy W. Schwab.
I'm trying to join the other social platforms now as that one dissolves.
Speaking of billionaire oligarchs.
Absolutely.
Fun stuff.
Well, I have to say the book was extremely enlightening.
It was a great read.
It is very well documented.
So, yeah, great job.
And thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Tim.
Thank you for having me.
Thanks for listening to another episode of the QAA Podcast.
You can go to patreon.com slash QAnonAnonymous and subscribe for five bucks a month to get a whole second episode for every normal one, plus to get a whole second episode for every free one, plus access to our entire archive of premium episodes and our mini-series.
For everything else, we have a website, QAnonAnonymous.com.
Listener, until next week, may the deep dish bless you and keep you.
It's not a conspiracy, it's a fact.
And now, today's AutoCue.
Hello, I'm Bill Gates.
I've been hearing a lot of crazy theories about me, that I invented the coronavirus, that I want to inject you all with tracking devices, and I'm here to say that that's all true, and much, much more.
Bitch, I'm Bill Gates.
Watch me pull up to the party.
Open the doors and the hoes hoppin' out the Bugatti.
Walk in the place and I crank in the bass.
Makin' things shake like we in Abu Dhabi.
Rock so much flow, call that shit a safari.
Clad in the cloak cause I'm Illuminati.
Corona rain comin' from Asia.
I'm the song, teriyaki.
I be in tight with the deep straight.
Do what I like, got a blank check.
Buy me a clean slate, hung out with Jeffrey But when shit got messy, I hung him
Now Jeffrey ain't seein' release date Hillary speed dial weenie mitts
Think that's so?
Please wait How many other conspiracies about me?
At least eight You know that pimp with the grey hair Got a side hustle, sell kids on Wayfair Couldn't care less
'cause Bill never play fair Grab a couple toddlers straight from daycare Now tellin'
you again, kids stay there Make a pretty penny like Mayfair 10k for a cabinet, that's
the place where I keep 'em locked up like they're birtherin' J.P.S.
