Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine.

I am joined today by the journalist Tim Schwab. He is the author of the new book, The Bill Gates Problem, Reckoning with the myth of the Good Bill the good billionaire available from Metropolitan Books.

Tim Schwab has reported on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation for the Nation, the Columbia

Journalism Review, and elsewhere, his book collects a lot of the findings of his journalism over the past few years. Tim, welcome

to McCarran Affairs. Thank you so much for having me, Nate. It's an honor to be here.

How long have you been looking into the Gates Foundation? I can't remember. It's been a while.

It has been a while. I started looking at Gates in 2019, so it hasn't been exclusively only on that topic, but it has

been a number of years I've been looking at the Gates Foundation. Yeah, and the book covers every

aspect of it. And so let's start perhaps with the image of the Gates Foundation. Before you

take us to the reality, let's begin with the image. Perhaps you could tell us how the Gates Foundation presents itself and has been perceived by those who are its supporters.

Well, we could include its supporters. We could include much of the news media, I think,

which have really done a very important job in crafting the Gates narrative.

This is the world's largest private foundation, charitable foundation.

It's giving away billions of dollars and it's saving lives.

This is an organization that proceeds from the mission that all lives have equal value.

It works in many different fields from agricultural development to public health,

to public education, to contraceptive access. So it really has far-ranging influence in a great

number of public policies. But it presents itself very much as this force of good, this unimpeachable,

innocent philanthropy that has one goal, which is really to help

the poor. I wanted to ask you, you know, just procedurally, one of the things that comes up a lot

in the book is that you are examining this story of the Gates Foundation to see the extent

to which it is true versus not true. There are a great

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