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 peoples book. Genetics on. All right. Thank you, everyone, for coming out supporting your local bookstore, the peoples book. Thank you for having me. I was going to start by doing a short reading from the book, then take some questions. Thats 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 worlds 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 antivax 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 were doing and how were 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 gatess 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 selfappointed spokesperson or expert on like vaccines and Climate Change. The simple fact is bill gates doesnt 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 cant blame gates as a sole driver of vaccine hesitancy, but hes 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. Its 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. Thats 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. Well give you your answers. Thats not true. And i know thats not true because ive asked questions many many times. Ive asked to interview and melinda french gates. Ive 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 nonresponse is essentially and im also not unique in this regard if you talk to theres 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 doesnt need to engage with critics criticism. And by and large, it doesnt. 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 youre sending messages out. Most people dont respond. The most common response i got from former employees was, sorry, tim, i cant talk to you because i signed an nda on my way out of the Gates Foundation. So india being a nondisclosure, nondisparagement agreement. Its odd for body to be making employees sign ndas on their way out door. Its a culture of secrecy thats difficult to square with this idea of the Gates Foundation being transparent being a humanitarian body. Theres 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. Thats 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. Its funding the ngos. Its funding the political advocacy, the think tanks, the university these, the news media, even governments. So it just theres a lot of people, institutions that have disincentives from up or speaking out. So all of this makes it difficult for me. Im 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 cant 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 thats not if you look back at the last two decades of reporting on the Gates Foundation, its really been a one sided narrative, verging on misinformation. It is stories. The Gates Foundations good deeds, its donations and its grand ambitions change the world. You have situations to pick on politico, but the Gates Foundation says its transparent. Therefore, it is transparent. Thats 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 Foundations rise to power in its in its normal in institutionalizing model of power. So welcome the. What im arguing in the book is that philanthropy in the hands of someone like bill gates is a Political Organization its a Political Tool its its a way for bill gates isnt 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 wellmeaning in the sense that i think that bill gates believes really is helping the world, but hes helping the world the only way he knows how, which by taking control in. This goes back to who bill gates really is. Hes one of the most storied monopoly to walk the earth. Weve 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. Its about exercising. Its about taking control control and its easy to say, well, gates is an anti democratic figure, but hes 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 Foundations 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 thats 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. Its 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 theyre doing so much harm. Gates has a very narrow ideological vision of how to fix problems. Its 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 dont need bill gates. His advice maybe they need his money. They dont 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, its 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 havent had success doesnt 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 ill give is the foundations work in Public Health, which is its greatest sort of pr, because it can say its saving lives and through a narrow lens it is. But the ultimate referendum on the foundations 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. Its a case study because its 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 youre going to have a small group of extremely wealthy tech pros and oligarchs who are, you know, figuring out how were going to solve climate, figuring out how were 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 ill say is that if in this book im 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 . Im interested in the book because i working Global Health. But ive 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 dont really like we