Episode 6: Tim Schwab on the Bill Gates Problem

In this episode, I sit down with Tim Schwab, a freelance investigative journalist, whose new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of a Good Billionaire, critically examines the profound influence of one of global health's biggest players, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Transcript

Global Health Politics Podcast Episode 6:

Tim Schwab on The Bill Gates Problem

SPEAKERS

Joseph Harris, Tim Schwab

Joseph Harris  00:00

Welcome to the Global Health Politics Podcast, where we go beyond the articles and books and have real intimate conversations with people working in the field of global health today. I'm your host. JOSEPH HARRIS, Today, I'm pleased to be here with Tim Schwab, a freelance investigative journalist based in Washington, DC. Tim's work has explored a range of issues that include the relationship between private interests and public policy. His recent book Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of a Good Billionaire critically examines the profound political influence of a private foundation, the Gates Foundation. Thanks for joining the Global Health Politics Podcast.

Tim Schwab  00:55

Thanks so much for having me, Joe.

Joseph Harris  00:56

So what led you to become an investigative journalist?

Tim Schwab  01:00

I think I'd always wanted to be a writer from a fairly young age. At whatever age, high school, I guess you start to realize you have some aptitude with it, and you're interested in it. And I think journalism became the obvious or easiest or practical way to become a writer. And I'm also very interested in the idea the mission of journalism, and what they teach you in American journalism schools. And any job you have in journalism, it's  your job is to afflict the comforted and comfort the afflicted. And so it could sound kind of high falutin or high minded, but I see journalism as really having an important role in democracy. I don't know that you can have strong democracies without strong journalism. So that's what I guess appeals to me in my work as an investigative journalist. 

Joseph Harris  01:47

It sounds like a very social mission.

Tim Schwab  01:49

I think so, yeah. I mean, it's about challenging power. It's about confronting power and holding power to account. And so that's what makes the Gates Foundation such a ripe target for an investigative journalist.

Joseph Harris  02:00

A number of your articles have centered on private and corporate influence. Why that focus in particular? Can you say a bit more?

Tim Schwab  02:07

It's a good question. You're making me think, why do I focus on that topic? It could be something about my generation, my age, that were prominent political and social movements and activisms that sprung up around that coming of age in the late 90s into the early 2000s, the sort of social movements and political movements around me perhaps, or maybe that's just what the market has asked of me. But yeah, it is a through line in my work. It probably will continue to be. Well, how did the Bill Gates Problem, your recent book, come about? So I was actually careening toward the end of an unsuccessful freelance journalism career, because it's very difficult to make a living to make any money. And then I found out that you can get these things called fellowships. One of the fellowships I applied for you pitched a big investigative project, something you could spend a lot of time on, and they give you some money to be able to do that, whereas, normally, as a freelance journalist, you are pitching an idea for an article and getting 25 cents a word, and it's very difficult to do good reporting on that. So this fellowship, you know, I looked around and said, Well, what's the biggest story that isn't being told? And it was just sort of like this, this flashing light, that it was the Gates Foundation. You have this incredibly wealthy, incredibly powerful guy running this big foundation that has a great deal of political influence. And there's a lot of journalism about him, but most of it's profiling his big ambitions, his big donations, his good deeds, and there's very little in the way of accountability, reporting, really checking and challenging the power he wields doing basic accountability. Say, what did he say he was going to do? What did he actually do? Let's judge and measure and examine the Gates Foundation based on what it's actually doing, not simply what it says it's doing. Let's look at Bill Gates based on who he actually is, not who he says he is, and what you find is it's a much more interesting and complex story than what we've been told about this multi-billionaire in Seattle who's given away all of his money in a highly effective philanthropic crusade to help people. The real story is much more interesting and much more complex and much less favorable, I think, to Bill Gates.

Joseph Harris  04:16

Tell us a little bit about the methods for the book. Were you able to interview people at Gates who work there or work there?

Tim Schwab  04:23

Now that was a long and slow process to cultivate sources, but yes, the short answer is yes. The long answer is: there is a well documented chilling effect surrounding the Gates Foundation because it funds so many people, so many the people who would be critics, who have a knowledge basis, close knowledge of the foundation, who are positioned to criticize the foundation, don't because they're afraid to lose their funding. Speaking of grant seekers here, and I know academics have coined this term, the "Bill Chill," to describe that chilling effect that people are afraid to bite the hand that feeds them, all of this makes the Gates Foundation a very tough target for investigative journalists because people don't want to talk. And that's certainly also the case with people inside the Gates Foundation, people who work there, or when people who leave the foundation, there's a very good chance,when you leave the foundation, you're going to go to an organization that is partnering with the foundation, so you have a disincentive to speak up. So it took a long time to cultivate sources to be able to write this book and tell this story the way I did. And there are a number of anonymous sources in the book, and the reasons for their anonymity are, I think, probably obvious based on what I just said, but the fear of professional consequences, it's not imaginary. If you do publicly criticize or challenge the Gates Foundation, there can be really serious professional consequences on your career. Certainly, people feel that way.

Joseph Harris  05:44

What is "the Bill Gates problem" for our listeners, and what in particular has Gates done that really gave you cause for concern?

Tim Schwab  05:52

Well, I mean, just to pick up on what I just said, I mean, there's a paradox there that the world's most celebrated humanitarian organization is also so widely feared. Once you start to peel back the layers of the Gates Foundation beyond its public relations machinery, you see that everything that you think you know about the Gates Foundation is probably wrong. We have this idea that Bill Gates is giving away all of his money because he's constantly telling us this, because the news media is constantly reporting it. And then you realize, actually no. He still remains one of the richest people in the world right now. His personal wealth is estimated at around $150 billion. That's like nearly double what it was when he started his philanthropic career.So you start to ask, well, how is it that he's becoming more and more rich while also being the most generous person on earth, you know. So these kinds of paradoxes, contradictions just crop up again and again. You start to look at the Gates Foundation for what it is and for what it's doing. But to answer your question, what is the Bill Gates problem? I wrote this book about Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, but it's really a case study for this bigger problem of extreme wealth. You know what happens when we allow someone to become this obscenely wealthy, to have tens or hundreds of billions of dollars? This is more money than they could ever possibly spend on themselves. There's only so many mansions and yachts and private planes and expensive artwork that you can buy when we allow people to become this wealthy. We know how they'll use that money, which is for political influence. They'll use it for campaign contributions. They'll use it for political lobbying, and as Bill Gates shows us, they use it through philanthropy. So philanthropy, as used by someone like Bill Gates, is political influence. It's unregulated political influence. It presents itself as charity. It presents itself as giving away money, but in reality, it's actually buying influence. It's buying a seat at the democratic decision making table, shaping public policy on everything from public health to public education to how we regulate AI to how we fight climate change. So it's one more way for the super rich among us to exercise power. So hopefully, when you read the book, you can step back and you say, "Well, is this the world that we want, in which the nextera of tech billionaires, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, who have already said that they intend to follow Bill Gates's footsteps into philanthropy? Is this really a good model of power? Is this good for democracy? Is this good for society? Or do we need to rethink how we've organized our economy so that a small group of people have hundreds of billions of dollars while billions of people on earth can't make ends meet? You know, those are political choices we've made to organize our economy in that way, but we could also make different political choices.

Joseph Harris  08:36

The subtitle of the book is "Reckoning with the Myth of a Good Billionaire." Can you say a bit about whether or not a good billionaire is possible?

Tim Schwab  08:45

I don't think so. I think that's the myth of the good billionaire. Once you allow people to have that much money, necessarily it means wealth inequality. You know, somebody having that much money necessarily means other people aren't going to have money. And moreover, when you allow people to have that much money, they will have special rights and privileges and entitlements in our society, in our democracy, to make their voices heard, to privilege their interests ahead of others. So I do think you know, and this isn't a new or radical idea. You can go back to the famous quote from Supreme Court Justice Louise Brandeis, who had said, "You can either have extreme wealth or you can have democracy, but you can't have both." I think he said, "You can either have extreme wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, or you can have democracy, but you can't have both." So this isn't, you know, a particularly radical or new idea. I think it's been well observed and well documented, that extreme wealth is bad. So no, I don't think there's any room for any billionaires, and I don't think there is a such thing as a good billionaire.

Joseph Harris  09:45

Obviously, this podcast focuses on global health politics. Can you put the impact that Gates has had in different policy areas in context? And where does global health fit among the many areas he and the foundation have impacted?

Tim Schwab  10:00

Early on in my reporting of the Gates Foundation, I was noticing how much PR firepower the foundation puts behind its work in global health, because in the other areas it works, like agriculture and education, it really has not accomplished very much. Its work in those areas is marked by collateral damage and opportunity costs, whereas in global health, the Gates Foundation has this trump card. It can say, well, we're saving lives. We're saving millions of lives. So you would see, I would read an interview with Bill Gates, and he would say, Well, last year, my foundation saved six million lives that wouldn't have been saved otherwise. And then in another interview, he would say, you know, it'd be a different number, nine million lives today, they started using the slogan that our bottom line is lives saved. And it's one of those things. It's kind of like philanthropy itself. Who can argue with the billionaire giving away all of his money? Who can argue with Bill Gates saving millions of lives? So that's sort of the challenge of the book: it's to move beyond these kind of easy PR and marketing points at the Gates Foundation that are very effectively pushed out into the public discourse and to finally, hopefully open up a public, open, honest debate about the Gates Foundation.

Joseph Harris  11:11

Some argue that by focusing so much on metrics the foundation ensures that its interventions have the widest possible impact. What's the problem with that logic?

Tim Schwab  11:22

You know, by trying to reduce everything into a number, whether it's the number of lives saved or the number of contraceptives that have been distributed, or the number of vaccines distributed. I mean, there's a few problems with it. One is that these metrics and measurements are usually owned by the Gates Foundation itself. And so if you can control the metrics, if you control the data and how the data is interpreted and how the data is presented, you can really control the narrative. So it's telling you one side of the story, and it's telling you a story through one type of number, but you're never considering the counterfactuals. And this is where the foundation really has, what you would say is "epistemic power," because they have so much influence, especially over the scientific enterprise and the metrics enterprise in particular, they can really write their own narrative. They can shape what we know about them and how we think about them. When you're looking at the Gates Foundation's narrow, totally not independent analysis of how many lives they saved, you never seen the researchers ask, well, how many more lives could we save if we used a different intervention? How much more social progress could we make, or human progress could we make if we made Bill Gates pay his fair share in taxes instead of taking his would be-taxed hours and put them to use through philanthropy? So this is kind of a perennial problem with what the foundation is. When you try to reduce something into a number, the foundation has outsized influence over what those numbers say and what those numbers look like, and who is producing those numbers.

Joseph Harris  12:52

So some critics of the Gates Foundation in global health circles have raised concern about the role that powerful private foundation with little or no public accountability has had in global health relative to other much less well funded organizations, like the WHO, whose role should loom larger. Others have drawn attention the way in which Gates focuses on technical solutions at the expense of longer term investments in health systems, and still others have suggested that Gates could be much stronger in challenging intellectual property patent monopolies that prevent access to critical medicines by allowing pharmaceutical companies to keep drug prices very high. Can you say a bit about what your book has to offer on these and other criticisms that specifically relate to global health?

Tim Schwab 13:36

Yeah, these are all important critiques of the Gates Foundation that speak to this sort of narrow worldview that the foundation has. You know, all of us have our own ideas about how to improve public health or any other public policy, but not all of us have $200 billion to our name to make our voices heard, and this is really how Bill Gates can exercise power that flying the banner of philanthropy. He can go into decision making forums, buy himself a seat at the table and make sure that his voice is heard. And, you know, what his voice is bringing to the table is kind of this classically neoliberal point of view, or worldview, where it's about market-based solutions. It's about technology and innovation. It's about the primacy of the private sector. It's about working with and through Big Pharma instead of challenging Big Pharma. And this mindset is something that, of course, goes back to Bill Gates's work at Microsoft. The history of Microsoft and our Gates' leadership is one of destructive monopoly power, of preventing better and cheaper products from reaching the marketplace, of stifling innovation. But of course, that's not how Bill Gates sees his work at Microsoft. He believes that he helped usher in a computer revolution which drove human progress, which drove immense human progress and social progress. And so from that point of view, he can bring in the same work, set, the same mindset, the same world view that made Microsoft successful, and to try to bring into philanthropy. And yes, that is one way to try to fix problems: through these market-based mechanisms. But it's not the only way. And I think you know, it's now 2024. We're about 25 years into the Gates Foundation experiment. We have decades of evidence that we could look back to and really ask ourselves a serious question: is the Gates Foundation really doing more good than harm? A lot of people don't think that's the case. And I'm, after writing this book, I'm definitely in the camp, in that camp, which is to say that the Gates Foundation is doing more harm than good, and it's hard to think about. I'm sure you're going to ask me about, is there a way to reform the Gates Foundation? And I'm not sure that there is.

Joseph Harris  15:37

So what kind of guardrails does society need to guard against good billionaires? Are these even possible?

Tim Schwab  15:44

Well, I mean, I think to the extent that we're trying to challenge extreme wealth or abolish billionaires, abolish a billionaire class, this super-class of extra, super-rich people, the most obvious way to do that is through taxation and through regulation. You know, why don't we regulate these tech companies before they become massive monopolies, and before they start minting these multi billionaires? Why don't we make the CEOs of these tech companies pay their fair share in taxes? Why don't we make the huge tech companies pay their fair share in corporate taxes? And that's like the obvious, practical way. That's the way that our elected leaders are already talking about. Can we impose a wealth tax on someone like Bill Gates? Can we raise the capital gains tax on wealthy investors? That's the sort of the low hanging fruit. The easy way to look at curbing the billionaire power is by simply confiscating their extreme wealth.

Joseph Harris  16:35

And not that easy always. 

Tim Schwab  16:37

Of course not. No, it's not easy at all. I mean, Bill Gates just showed up in this Netflix Docuseries, and he had to sit down with Senator Bernie Sanders, who is a critic of billionaires, wants to abolish billionaires, but they end up having this nice three minute chat where they both agree that billionaires should pay more in taxes. It's just: should they pay a lot more, or a little bit more? It's just frustrating to me because I feel like that distorts what should be a very robust public debate in which I don't think there's a lot of room for Bill Gates really to be talking about that he should be a few billion dollars less rich. You know, to me, that point of view doesn't really belong at the table, but that's the world we live in right now.

Joseph Harris  17:14

Well, what organizations or activists that you follow who are trying to make changes on these issues can you point to? 

Tim Schwab  17:21

It is easy to become very fatalistic about the billionaires we have in the world because they've become so institutionalized, because they've become so normalized, to end up with this feeling like the best we can hope for is that our billionaires are good billionaires, and that our oligarchs are good oligarchs. That said, I myself, like Bill Gates, am an impatient optimist, not like Bill Gates, but I have my own brand of impatient optimism, you could say, which is that I'm inspired by all the political and social movements happening right now, which are clearly signal a turning tide against the kind of oligarch ethos that Bill Gates brings to the table. You can look at Occupy Wall Street. You can look at Decolonize Global Health. You can look at Black Lives Matter. You can look at the Green New Deal. All of this, I think, is a clear signal that the politics are changing. The political debate is changing, and that the ideas that Gates brings to the table are just terribly anachronistic neoliberal ideas from the 1990s about market-based solutions and the primacy of the private sector. All of this is really, I think, quite dated and quite fading. Just the trick now to the specific point of the Gates Foundation is to make these issues very relevant and to bring them up about the Gates Foundation again, and I think it's timely to do so because it is a case study for all of these other multi-billionaires waiting in the wings, ready to follow in Gates's footsteps, to transform themselves from these embattled tech CEOs into these admired, revered philanthropists. So I think we've been tricked once. The trick for us all now is to really confront the Bill Gates Problem.

Joseph Harris  18:55

Well, certainly there's some optimism or hope in the different movements you just pointed to. But are there particular policies that we've yet arrived at, or that have been put into practice that go beyond just changing the narrative, but actually change the sort of fabric of society? Is there any optimism that you'd point to from particular policy change as a very specific example?

Tim Schwab  19:15

So Congress last regulated private foundations like the Gates Foundation, more than 50 years ago. So Congress is way long overdue to take a new look at what these charitable foundations are doing. And I think if they did take a look, they would find that their activities are impossible to place under the common definition of charity. So one thing I looked at in my book, for example, is the Gates Foundation's far-reaching involvement in the private sector, especially with pharmaceutical companies. Whereas the Gates Foundation is not just donating money, billions of dollars, to private for-profit companies, including Pharma companies, but the foundation will put money, seed money, in to create a new private for-profit company. It will sit on the board of directors of those companies. It is making equity investments, loan guarantees, purchase guarantees. I even found a case where the Gates Foundation gave donated money to a private pharmaceutical company and then sued the company. So if you look at this suite of activities between investing in companies, which means you're a co owner of the company, giving money to companies directly working on research and development, suing companies. You know, at a point if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, it's probably a duck. If the Gates Foundation wants to involve itself in the private sector, in private research and development for pharmaceuticals, it should pay taxes like a private company. It should be regulated like a private company. It should be scrutinized. It should present itself to the public and to journalists as a pharmaceutical company, not as a philanthropy, because doing so would draw a lot more scrutiny to it. So I think if you look back, if I have this right, and I think I do, the last time Congress really did seriously look at charities, 50 some years ago, it was because of similar concerns about the ways that these private foundations were getting too close, were blurring the line with private commerce, with private commercial interests. So I don't know if that's the right trigger for accountability, the only trigger for accountability, but there is, right now, a number of scholars and activists working on reform of that sector. I think it's an important short term goal, but the really big picture political goal is reorganizing our economy, our society, our democracy, in a way that is much more equitable, has fewer extremes. It doesn't have extremes, and that is really working for people and accountable to people, to your question in terms of specific policies beyond the narrative. So unlike Bill Gates, I don't have all the answers. I don't pretend to have all the answers. I can't tell you chapter and verse how we're going to get there. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be out there trying.

Joseph Harris  19:27

Tell us a little bit about your next projects.

Tim Schwab  21:55

I just started a newsletter on substack. It's my name. I think it's Tim Schwab substack, where I'm hoping in the weeks and months ahead will be the sort of primary place where I'm going to be publishing, and it might be a launching point or starting point for a new book. Yeah, my book came out last November, and so I am still, to some extent, focusing on the Gates Foundation and Bill Gates, but I am eagerly looking forward to the date where I can pivot to a new topic to be determined.

Joseph Harris  22:27

That's great. And can you say anything about the reception that this book, that we're still giving wonderful talks on what kinds of implications has the book had in terms of policy, in terms of practitioner circles?

Tim Schwab  22:40

This is a good opportunity, I guess, to talk about the media, which is, I think the book landed in a media landscape that is larger with Gates Foundation funding. So Gates donates hundreds of millions of dollars to the news media. These are direct donations to newsrooms. The foundation is creating journalism, NGOs that are trying to introduce new brands of journalism. It's creating relationships with individual journalists. So that's one important reason, not the only reason, but one reason why I think that most of my colleagues in journalism have really missed the story over the last two decades, and they've presented a one sided story that has misinformed the public about the Gates Foundation, because it's focused on all the good it's doing without really looking at the other side of that equation. So despite all of that, it's my debut book, so the book got a very good reception in the media. It's been translated into, I think, six languages at this point. I can't point to a specific policy or regulation or change that's happened, but I think it has hopefully helped open up the public debate and to help mainstream some of these criticisms with the Gates Foundation and to help it make it more of a mainstream sort of public discourse or public debate about the foundation, to make it clear that the story is much more complicated than the fairy tale we've been told about this rich guy in Seattle giving away all of his money. 

Joseph Harris  24:03

If you could give young journalists or activists who work on these and other similar issues one piece of advice? What would it be? 

24:12

It's really tricky because I'm thinking now of somebody out there who might be listening, who might be that person, and a lot of whatever success I've had in my career is, I think, is fluke. A lot of it is luck. I wouldn't necessarily tell somebody to go into journalism right now because it is very difficult to make money doing this, and I myself still haven't figured it out. I happen to have already been the investigative journalist looking at Bill Gates at a time when kind of things fell apart for Bill Gates. He got divorced. His name kept coming up in investigations about Me Too, investigations about misbehavior with female subordinates. He denies those. He had a hard to explain association with Jeffrey Epstein. He was at the head of a pandemic response effort that was grossly mismanaged, that failed. So all of these things were kind of happening in 2021, and I was the Bill Gates reporter, so I was positioned to get this book contract. So all that to say it's kind of a luck or fluke that I was able to do this. And I don't know that I would necessarily recommend that somebody else go into this work or think that they're necessarily going to have a book contract or do what I did, but I guess as a more general sense, I would say not to be profane, but don't let the bastards get you down because when you do something where you're kind of presenting a counter-narrative, and you're you're saying something, everyone else is saying one thing, and then you're trying to say something else when people are telling you you're wrong or you don't know what you're doing, but if you just really stick with it, you can eventually see the light at the end of the tunnel. I guess that's a bad metaphor, but you can actually get to where you're  going if you really believe. Just believe in yourself, I guess is what I want to say because if you're really on the right path and you believe in yourself and you stick to it, you can actually get somewhere.

Joseph Harris  26:04

Tim Schwab is the author of the Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of a Good Billionaire, and he's a freelance investigative journalist based in Washington, DC. Tim, it's been a real pleasure.

Tim Schwab  26:17

Thank you so much for having me, Joe.

Joseph Harris  26:19

Thanks for joining the Global Health politics podcast. This episode of The Global Health politics podcast was produced by Vicky Yang. Thank you for listening.