tim schwab, a freelance

journalist based in washington, dc. his 2019 investigation into the gates foundation won multiple awards, including an easy from the park center for independent and a deadline club award from the society of professional journalists. his reporting on gates has appeared in the nation, the columbia journalism review, the british medical journal, and represents some of the only investigative journalism ever published on mr. gates. earlier in his career, tim worked as a journalist for two daily newspaper and as a researcher for the watchdog

group food and water watch. these gentlemen, please welcome to people's book. genetics on. all right. thank you, everyone, for coming out supporting your local bookstore, the people's book. thank you for having me. i was going to start by doing a short reading from the book, then take some questions. that's all with everyone. the first edition of a new newsletter from politico called global pulse, published in late 2020, offered remarkable and rare clarity about a vastly story in the covid 19 pandemic response, the gates foundation seemed be in charge, as politico reported. america not be leading in global health anymore, but in american is. bill gates is the architect of the global health infrastructure at the forefront of the pandemic

response from. this revelation it should have been a small step to raise some obvious civics on one questions. why was the world's third richest person a magnate with no medical training, serving as the architect of? the response effort to the most pressing health crisis in many generations. politico went in a different direction. reporting everywhere you turn in this pandemic. the gates foundation involved, which has fueled conspire heresy theories amplified by anti-vax callers that he caused the pandemic to vaccinate the world and get richer the process or that he wants in the world to be implanted with a microchip politico then look the gates foundation itself to explain the crazy making as mark susman ceo the gates foundation explained, conspire to see theories thrive on the notion that hidden secret things are happening. and so one of the key things we

do 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 victim narrative played out hundreds, maybe thousands of times during the pandemic, as journalists build volumes in describing how the gates foundation, despite all of its best intentions and good deeds, was being maligned by irrational criticism and attacked with misinformation. the foundation leaned hard. this reporting, using it an opportunity to espouse its commitment to transparency. it is true that unhinged conspiracy theories targeted the gates foundation during the pandemic, like idea that bill gates had engineered the coronavirus. but reason people are drawn to such is that the foundation is so nontransparent and so undemocratic. and because the news media, instead of opening up a platform to interrogate gates, his power, have chosen to applaud and

defend this is not normal in people. no, this is not normal in the failures of the news media lead to public distrust and create a marketplace for demagogues and con artist to propose ridiculous theories and alternative facts. the mainstream. the mainstream news media then takes pot shots at the stupid idea of such theories. lather, rinse, repeat in you end up with is two distinct piles of misinformed people. one trading in absurd tales of bill gates implanting microchips in another one trading in equally, equally dangerous mythology is about gates's noble, selfless leadership in the pandemic. with the emergence of conspiracy theories around bill gates also shows us is how polar izing a figure he is. this raises important concerns about his expansive role as a self-appointed spokesperson or expert on like vaccines and climate change. the simple fact is bill gates

doesn't have expertise or education in most of the topics where he asserts it and almost universally, he or his foundation has financial in the public policies. he endorses as gates is someone, who often stands to gain financially or his private foundation does from the advice he gives. that fact alone makes him a terrible messenger on just about any. for everyone here tonight concerned about vaccine hesitancy. are you not concerned that bill gates is interminable efforts to play expert might actually have the effect of driving such in moment of a public health crisis like a pandemic should it be a software geek whose foundation has far reaching financial ties to vaccine companies giving? prime time advice on public health. we can't blame gates as a sole driver of vaccine hesitancy, but he's not helping to. when the gates foundation

aggressively uses its vast wealth to buy influence over the news media, the scientific discourse and, political debates very often in opaque ways, it is begging the wider world to simply speculate and to theorize as to what its real ambitions are. why this mega foundation is so deeply secretive, and why in the world we would ever allow such a malevolent model of private power to take hold in a democratic state? the reason the foundation cannot constitution really be transparent is that so would reveal just how much power it has and how many levers is pulling. the real solution to our bill gates problem is not simply for his foundation to be more transparent. it's for his foundation to lower its voice in unwise, the unaccountable power structure it is built. simply put, if bill gates wants to end conspiracy theories surrounding his work, he should stop talking. so that comes from a passage.

that's a passage from a chapter in the book. transparency, probably a better title for that chapter would be 90 transparency or opacity. if you remember what i read about the ceo of the gates foundation saying we have no ask us your questions. we'll give you your answers. that's not true. and i know that's not true because i've asked questions many many times. i've asked to interview and melinda french gates. i've asked to interview anyone at the gates foundation and the answer has always been no they ask you to email the questions over they provide non-response is essentially and i'm also not unique in this regard if you talk to there's obviously exceptions but journalists and researchers generally when they challenge the foundation when they really push back on the core logic of how the foundation operates, the foundation tends not to engage. it doesn't need to engage with critics criticism. and by and large, it doesn't.

another thing i discovered in my reporting which is part of this chapter on transparency is the foundation will talk to you. so you have to understand it works. so you have to develop sources to trying to get people who have worked with or for the gates foundation to talk to you. so you're sending messages out. most people don't respond. the most common response i got from former employees was, sorry, tim, i can't talk to you because i signed an nda on my way out of the gates foundation. so india being a non-disclosure, non-disparagement agreement. it's odd for body to be making employees sign ndas on their way out door. it's a culture of secrecy that's difficult to square with this idea of the gates foundation being transparent being a humanitarian body. there's also something called the bill chill. this is a researcher started describing this a few years ago. this is the chilling effect what people are afraid to bite the

hand that feeds them. that's true of a lot of large and powerful institutions but that chilling effect is especially pernicious with. the gates foundation, because it funds everybody through charitable it can almost take over entire fields or or issues. it's funding the ngos. it's funding the political advocacy, the think tanks, the university these, the news media, even governments. so it just there's a lot of people, institutions that have disincentives from up or speaking out. so all of this makes it difficult for me. i'm a journalist. are other journalists, too, to report on gates to do their jobs of journalism. what makes it difficult is the gates foundation is now donating money to newsrooms the foundation has put hundreds of excuse me millions of dollars in charitable into journalism. that, again, makes it difficult, generally speaking, to the

funder of your journalism, the target of your journalism can't also be your funder. and the job of journalism, as the schools teach it, is to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted. and if that is your mantra and mission for doing journalism, then bill gates worth $115 billion in his private foundation, where $67 billion is enormously and powerful institutions, they should be rigorously scrutinized, challenged by journalists journalists. but that's not if you look back at the last two decades of reporting on the gates foundation, it's really been a one sided narrative, verging on misinformation. it is stories. the gates foundation's good deeds, its donations and its grand ambitions change the world. you have situations to pick on politico, but the gates foundation says it's transparent. therefore, it is transparent. that's as far as the news reporting. sometimes goes.

the news media is a big character in this book because it has been such an important accomplice in gates foundation's rise to power in its in its normal in institutionalizing model of power. so welcome the. what i'm arguing in the book is that philanthropy in the hands of someone like bill gates is a political organization it's a political tool it's it's a way for bill gates isn't donating money as much as it is much as he is buying influence. but i also want to be clear that i think that gates well-meaning in the sense that i think that bill gates believes really is helping the world, but he's helping the world the only way he knows how, which by taking control in. this goes back to who bill gates

really is. he's one of the most storied monopoly to walk the earth. we've forgotten his first chapter at microsoft, the antitrust trials in the late 90, the late 1990s. it was at the height of this pr crisis. he was one of the most reviled public figures on earth. people were throwing pies in his the simpsons was ridiculing him. in this moment of public crisis, he becomes a great philanthropist. very quickly. he goes from greedy to generous, from cold hearted to kind hearted. of course, bill has not really changed, and the way he runs the gates foundation is indistinguishable from the way ran microsoft. it's about exercising. it's about taking control control and it's easy to say, well, gates is an anti democratic figure, but he's giving the gates foundation at this point is giving away close to $80 billion. all of that money has to be helping people. right. and of course, the gates foundation's is helping people

through a narrow at times in places it might even be lives. it is saving lives. the gates foundation is putting lots of money into vaccine procurement and distribute vaccines in arms save lives. but that's not the whole story story. on net, the gates foundation is doing harm than good and can look across its body of work and see this. we have two decades of its work now. it's been up and going since 2000. we have a rich of data. we have a rich history that we can look to. you can look at what bill gates promised to do early in his philanthropic career and what he actually accomplished. so the foundation promised was going to revolutionize african. it was going to cut hunger in half and double yields. none of that has happened. gates not deliver on that, but more than that today. farmer organizations across the african continent are now openly, explicitly petitioning the gates foundation, asking to

stop helping because they're doing so much harm. gates has a very narrow ideological vision of how to fix problems. it's this classically neoliberal model, corporate partnership, public private partnerships market based solutions, technology, innovation. and in a lot of places, those are the wrong solutions. and when gates up with his bully pulpit and a suitcase full of money, it really has a way of crowding out and foreclosing other solutions, certainly other devised public policies. so mean. the point is that african farmers already have their own solutions. they know how fix agriculture they don't need bill gates. his advice maybe they need his money. they don't need his advice in us education, the gates foundation has had similarly disastrous results. the foundation failed to do what it set out to do, it's causing a great deal of collateral damage, an opportunity costs. but here again the foundation says just the foundation, an

extent acknowledges its failures, but it says just because we haven't had success doesn't mean we should give up in this is the hubris that drives the gates foundation its belief that it is entitled of its vast wealth to keep throwing the dart collateral damage be --. the last example i'll give is the foundation's work in public health, which is its greatest sort of pr, because it can say it's saving lives and through a narrow lens it is. but the ultimate referendum on the foundation's work was during pandemic. so remember, bill gates was architect of this major pandemic response. it nominally at the world health organization or ostensibly at the world health organization. but bill gates was the gates foundation was the architect, the organizer and the administrator of this program. gates promised that his partnerships with the with the pharmaceutical industry. the gates foundation, that its

partnerships with the pharmaceutical industry would deliver vaccine equity. bill gates said his decades work with the vaccine industry. he and the network he had, the connections he had, the expertise. he alone could broker these deals. he could make sure that the poorest people, earth got their shots. but this project did not deliver vaccine equity. it delivered vaccine apartheid to the most vulnerable people in the poorest nations, stood in the back of the line waiting for their vaccine shots. so the last the next time, the next time we have a pandemic, the last person on earth, we should listen is bill gates. so this book is, really a case study about the problems with extreme wealth when we allow people to become this obscenely wealthy, we know this is more than they could ever possibly spend on themselves. we know that they will use that money for political purposes to try to remake the world according to their own worldview, if not through campaign contribution and lobbying and political advocacy.

then through philanthropy and the stakes of this. it's a case study because it's about more than bill gates. hundreds of other billionaires have already pledged to give most of their wealth to. so this is the mark zuckerberg and the jeff bezos of the world. we have to think about what it means for, our political future. if you're going to have a small group of extremely wealthy tech pros and oligarchs who are, you know, figuring out how we're going to solve climate, figuring out how we're going to regulate artificial public health, public education, the line we have to ask if the world we want to live in or do we want to address the bill gates problem right now. and the last thing i'll say is that if in this book i'm really pushing back on political failings them in bill gates and the gates foundation, they always talk their optimism. they even trademark this, i think, impatient, optimist so i am also an impatient optimist. i believe another world is

possible a world without billionaires. questions questions. right now of course. yeah. okay, perfect. thank you so much once again for writing the book. did you have stop it? i'm interested in the book because i working global health. but i've been following your writing for a couple of years now and if you could just talk a little bit about what has kept you consumed with this idea of researching on opiates and his philanthropic investments? and secondly, you mentioned the idea that the gates foundation is rather immune to critique and they don't really like we like to not respond and haven't responded to your requests for interviews as well. in 2020, marxism, actually the annual letter for gates foundation. they start with the question do we have to move forward with

help? and it goes on to talk about all the stuff that they do to voice to the voiceless. and of course, as somebody who in the field i know that that's not true. robert thank you. but in terms of since you mentioned that this trend of that grows in billionaires is not going anywhere the wealthy philanthropy in fact getting more poppy in the way they function. what would cure poor people working in global health what in a position to receive grants etc. work with gates foundation. what would be your kind of a read on both of initiatives that aren't going anywhere anywhere? so what got me interested in what got me going on? the gates foundation? i published my first article on the gates foundation, right that first week of the pandemic. so it was kind of interesting timing because for the gates foundation, this was the beginning of their of their

ascension to this very of bill gates philanthropic career, where he was at the absolute top of his game. he was constantly appearing in the news media as a public health expert. you'd see him there with fauci. so suddenly, bill gates was super relevant. and i was the bill gates guy because i'd been reporting him so kind of what got me interested in. and then it became more and more of saga because the pandemic response started to fall apart. bill and melinda gates got divorced. all these allegations emerged. bill gates's misconduct towards women, which he denies a very hard to explain relationship ship with convicted sex offender jeffrey epstein some kind you know all of this this became a growing scandal and so then i was i guess position to to continue the reporting it and now to your next question. remind me what am i missing the

billionaire culture. it's really going anywhere. nor is philanthropy. so what's your read in terms of in to the kind of effect that book like this might create culture. yeah there i guess there's ways to answer that question. i mean, in terms of the growing opacity of philanthropy, you know, it's interesting you see this even happening within, you know, bill and melinda french gates. so they run the foundation, but they also run of these ancillary groups. them bill gates has venture fund gates ventures, melinda french gates has a venture fund, pivotal ventures. they're working almost with the gates foundation in ways that are indistinguishable, the gates foundation. but these are private llc private venture funds. and it's those are only two of two of many example laws. and it becomes unclear they have so many different. but ultimately i think of it is just a matter of opacity. if the gates foundation isn't

transfer, if you can't see what it's doing, you can't possibly hold it accountable. mark zuckerberg, he is organize his philanthropy through an llc instead of a private foundation. so he doesn't get maybe all the same benefits or tax benefits that the gates family does, but he gets a great deal more flexibility in terms of even less transparency, even less accountability. what do i hope my book accomplishes? i mean, unlike bill gates, don't believe that i have the answer to every question or the solution to every problem. i do think that we've never really had an open debate about the gates foundation. it's not up to me to decide what happens to it. ultimately, i what i'm trying to inspire with this book is this kind of democratic debate and more of a democratic process. because bill gates is such an anti-democratic figure, i the real solution we could talk

about regulating gates foundation. there's good reason to didn't talk about this, but the foundation benefits the gates family the gates foundation benefits from billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies and benefits dirty little secret the gates foundation is heavily fueled by our by public funds but we don't really have checks and balances over bill gates is using our money we don't have much ability to follow the money. we don't get any credit for the for the good work that's done with our money. so there's lots of ways that you could try to regulate philanthropy. and i think that's an important political goal. but here's the problem. if you to squeeze the gates foundation through all of these, just ancillary organizations, bill or melinda french gates, can just act as private citizens or private. you tell attacks privileged nonprofit, private foundation not allowed to engage in lobbying and campaign. what's the stop gates from taking this $115 billion private

fortune and in those activities as a private citizen, nothing. so, i mean, again, i do think it's congress hasn't substantively addressed it. private foundations in 50 years. it's long overdue to do that. but you know the really big, long term political goal is eliminating extreme wealth and making, reorganize our economy in society so we don't have extreme wealth and if bill gates didn't have these princely sums of money, he wouldn't. this billionaire philanthropist in, nobody would listen to what no one would care what he had to say. so, yeah, how do we get there? that's a longer term political, but that's my response. thank you. yeah, the questions now we could browse and do some book signing signing.

know with someone that has not followed the bill gates to the pathway into the philanthropy or the kind of private world you that in the late 1980s there was. this sort of like pr hit they took from know the mtv monopoly, microsoft like suits and remember that there were legal brought to court by their government or competitors but i don't remember that moment in time. can you kind of talk about maybe you know what you know what his thinking or the family's that the company is thinking in sort of moving from when you describe as just sort of very focused on selling obviously a product to really putting, you know, the toes or the foot into that philanthropic world to begin. i don't know much sort of how transition happened and what he saw right at the very that

immediate to get from the what he saw it or thought. well you know he thought yes so i mean what really built microsoft's empire was operating by controlling you know, microsoft windows by controlling the system that every computer uses you exercise a great deal of power over. what was the computer revolution. and so that was really and then a later point is the 1990 superseded the internet came in and microsoft wanted to get into internet browsing with internet explorer and began sort of the beginning, the end of bill gates at microsoft. he yeah, the antitrust trials it really it made microsoft a really embattled company made bill gates a really embattled industry titan. so that really changed the reputation of bill gates from being kind of a a whiz kid

technologist to, a bully and a corporate monopolist. and i mean, he had or to be fair to bill gates, he had already been dabbling philanthropy in charity at that. but it was at that moment that really that that pr crisis that he really his charitable giving by the end of 2000 he had put $22 billion into endowing the gates foundation. you you know what were his and what was the question sort of what was it like? what was he seeking and course made that move and put in 23 billion was it like a short term like let me just sort of clean this image that people may of, you know, sort of agreeing or was he you've admitted some sort of long term planning to do good by way of the philanthropy. so just sort of in that moment of time, do you think he was it, too? i mean, was. yeah, i think what bill gates is

that he had always planned to give away most of his money. i mean, during the 1990s, there were asking him, why are you so greedy? aren't you giving away more money? so what he says is, i think that the antitrust trial sort of accelerated his move into philanthropy. but yeah, i'm willing i imagine that he'd always planned to give away money and like said, i do think that the hubris i think is really the defining word here. but he really does think that he has unique talents and skills and ability to do everything, you know he is today claims to be an expert on climate change on every all manner of public health agricultural policy c the work on contraceptive they work on financial systems you know it's really stunning the sort of expertise mongering that he engages in in part of i really do think it goes back to his self-image as a really smart and

talented guy and that he has all this money he can just put it into action. i mean, that's my read read. all. and it's a lot of content.

i good morning. than