Inside Bill Gates' brain with Davis Guggenheim

This week on our Vergecast interview series, editor-in-chief of The Verge Nilay Patel chats with filmmaker Davis Guggenheim on his new documentary “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates” on Netflix. Davis talks about how he got Bill Gates to participate in the film, the structure for the documentary, the most surprising thing he’s learned about Bill, and more. We are conducting an audience survey to better serve you. It takes no more than five minutes, and it really helps out the show. Please take our survey here: theverge.com/survey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Hey everybody, it's Seonah on The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, I talked to Davis Guggenheim, who just directed the Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain. It's a three-hour documentary about Bill Gates. He had two years of access to Gates. Guggenheim directed An Inconvenient Truth. He directed It Gets Loud, which is a documentary about rock guitarists, which I love so much. But for Inside Bill's Brain, he had just total access to Bill and Melinda Gates for about two years. It's a really deep look at Gates's personal history, his relationship, his family. It also has a really interesting structure, so we got into that. This was a really fun conversation with a great filmmaker about how he does what he does and what he learned about Bill Gates. Check it out, Davis Guggenheim on The Vergecast.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  Davis Guggenheim, welcome to The Vergecast.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  It's really nice to be here. Nice to meet you, Neelai.

• 1:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so I want to talk about Inside Bill's Brain, which is a documentary I just made for Netflix. But first, can I tell you that you made It Might Get Loud, which is one of my favorite documentaries of all time? Because I just love people like using their tools, and that is just a bunch of wild guitar players using their tools.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Thank you. It was really fun to make.

• 2:01Nilay Patel?

  Did you notice any, like, did Jack White and Bill Gates have any similarities?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  Um, let me think about that.

• 2:09Nilay Patel?

  Cause in Mike Alad was, uh, it was Bono. Yeah. I'm sorry. It was the Edge, Jack White and who was the third person?

• 2:14Speaker 02

  Jimmy Page.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  Jimmy Page. Tell me if there's any similarities between those three and Bill Gates.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Jack White, I would say, well, actually all three, I would say extreme focus, all three of them, but especially Edge. You could go, I'd be filming with Edge and if we stopped to move a lighter or a camera, he would, um, just sort of start working and start working on his guitar or fiddling with gear. And you could just let four hours pass and he wouldn't, his head wouldn't come up. He'd be, he'd just, if you give him a free second, Edge would just go right in and start doing what he does. Same thing with Bill. We were, we were shooting in Hood Canal and we were in this little, the Think Cabin that's in episode two. We said, hey, we need five minutes to move a light and he walked outside and just opened the book he was reading and just read, standing up with one foot on his knee. So standing on one foot, reading a book.

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Meaning if you give him a free second, he wants to engage his brain again. And I would say that would, you know, other than that, lifestyle is very different. From Jimmy Page and Bill Gates for sure.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  I can imagine. Not a lot of scarves in the, in the, in the documentary that I watched with, with Gates.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  And not a lot of worship of the occult either.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  That's great. So Inside Bill's Brain, three part documentary on Netflix. I, I, I just watched it this week. Tell me how this project got started because you have, you got a lot of access to Gates. And it's obviously on Netflix. It's an unusual structure, this, you know, three one hour episodes. Tell, tell me how it came together.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  So I was making the film Waiting for Superman and we were almost done, but it felt like it was missing a voice. And, uh, Waiting for Superman was about public education. It's like, how does the sort of failure of our public schools affect business? And, you know, you, what better thing to talk about someone who's in Silicon Valley? Or at least the business of Silicon Valley, he's up, obviously up in Seattle. But what does that do to growing the best business in, in, in America? How do you find talented, educated people? And how does, how does? Failure of our schools, of some of our schools, I should say, many are do really well, but how does that affect our growing economy in the business, in the, in the tech business? And so I went up and interviewed Bill and he was so great and so surprising

• 4:25Speaker 02

  that, that I was like, wait a minute, this, this person needs to be reconsidered. Because to give you some backstory, I was a, I got a Macintosh in 1984. I was the first person in my dorm at Brown to get one. I think there was like 10 had arrived at Brown and everyone in my floor huddled around this magical computer. So I was a Mac, I was an Apple guy. And, you know, I always thought Steve Jobs is cool and Microsoft was like for the business people. And, you know, I, so and I sort of held Bill Gates in my mind in, in arm's length. I was like, he's, yeah, it's just business guy. And maybe he's a monopolist, maybe he's not, but, you know, I like, I like Mac. And so when I finally met him, I was like, wow, there's something he's doing right now that needs to be understood.

• 5:03Nilay Patel?

  He is, he has really changed his public image. And I kind of want to get into that part of it. Because the way it, inside Bill's brain is structured, literally inside of every episode, it's almost like a thriller of like the project that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing, whether that's toilets or nuclear energy or vaccinations. Then there's like the history, which I think is what most people kind of assume you're going to get, right? We're going to, we're going to tell the story of Bill Gates from start to now. But there's this like thriller component of the, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation happening inside of it. How did you decide to like make that structure go?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Well, I started filming and, and, and I actually got lost and was like, I don't know how to make this, you know, and, uh, because a lot of the work they're doing is super complex and also not necessarily dramatically, it's not just add water and the story tells itself, right? And so I was experimenting with this kind of way of cutting back and forth between his biography and the work that he's doing. And the first time it worked was when I, and it's in episode two, I think, is when he's Trying to figure out why cases of polio keep popping up all over Nigeria and Afghanistan and Pakistan and why past efforts had failed and how he used sort of his brain, how do

• 6:20Speaker 02

  you delve inside his brain to sort of like crack that because people have been trying for years, they thought they were getting close and then it doesn't work. And what I thought I'd do is, is show Bill in the early days in high school cracking the class schedule. It's a sort of a famous story where his private school asked Bill, a sophomore, I think they ask him when he's a sophomore and then he does it in his junior, senior year, but they say, hey, you're, you're good at this computer thing. You know, there's a famous, there's a terminal in a school, there's only one terminal in any school in the state of Washington. Say, hey, you're good at this coding thing. Can you code the class schedule at Lakeside? And so he and Paul Allen stay up all night and figure out how, you know, because his Lakeside had merged with a girls' school. So they had all these

• 7:05Speaker 02

  different classrooms, different campuses, and Bill and Paul used sort of their brains and their sort of algorithms to crack that in the same way he cracks the algorithm or tries to crack the algorithm for eradicating polio. He did things like digital mapping and predictive analysis on where cases of polio would show up. So the storytelling, the whole storytelling for all three episodes follows that one example where we cut back and forth between something, some way in which his brain worked or, or something revealed in his character in his historical story with what he's doing now to reveal how his brain works and how, you know, how he solves problems.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  So you obviously got all this access to Bill, to Melinda. You got a bunch of archival footage, I guess you would call it, of them when they were young, when they were dating. There's video of Bill hugging his kids when they're babies, which like broke me. Like, you don't ever see that side of him. How did you go about getting access to Bill for the project?

• 8:03Speaker 02

  It's kind of the condition that I make for any movie. When I flew to England to meet Jimmy Page and talk him into doing It Might Get Loud, I was like, if we're gonna do this, you gotta open up to me. I wanna ask any question I wanna ask. I wanna put everything on the table. Because that's, you know, that's what, if you're gonna do a movie, if you're gonna go make that effort, you gotta open yourself up. And the same thing I did with Bill. And I have to say, of all the people I've ever made a movie about, he was the most open and the least concerned about, oh, you know, don't go there, don't get this right. I mean, I went, I went right into, you know, the depositions for the antitrust case. You know, there's pretty harsh stuff in there about how the world sees him. And I put all, if, even if you go and watch the trailer of it, the trailer and the opening

• 8:48Speaker 02

  of the movie, of the series is, is this guy a good guy? Is this guy a bad guy? You know, one, one voice calls him the devil. I really wanted to say, I wanna put it all on the table and say, who, you know, let's, let's put everything on the table and let's, let's consider this man.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  Did they, did Bill get any edit control? Did they get to say they didn't want anything in there?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  No. What I do is, for every movie, I'll, when I get a cut that I like, I'll go and show it to people. So I show it to Jimmy Page, or Edge, or anyone else, or Bono, or Malala, just because I wanna make sure that I didn't miss something, or I didn't miscategorize something. And often, in every case, you sort of, they say, oh, well, you know, what, there's another piece of that story that I didn't tell you. And usually it gets better. But nothing was, I didn't take anything out that I didn't wanna put in.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  So there's this sequence, you're talking about the antitrust piece. There's a sequence where you ask him if he was arrogant in the antitrust deposition. I thought this was great, because, you know, this is a heavy topic now. We actually talk about it on this podcast all the time. Like, are these companies too powerful? Should they get broken up? Microsoft was arguably the first. The current president of Microsoft, Brad Smith, he just wrote a book about basically asking the government to regulate tech companies. It's very interesting. But he, Bill Gates was the first. As you note in the documentary, he stepped back from the operations of Microsoft to handle the trial. He gave this famously bad deposition. And you ask him if he's arrogant, and he, he was like, well, look, when you're a 20

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  year old billionaire, sometimes, when, when you were getting that answer, did you sense that he was, that he was shading? Or was he just telling you what he thought?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  He was absolutely shading. I think what's fun about watching the movie and we put the full answer in is that he didn't want to say he was arrogant. The fun thing about making a movie is, one of my great teachers taught me this about storytelling is that, you know, that the filmmaker's job is two plus two. The audience's job is four. That sounds like a really pretentious film school way of saying it, but the idea is, I ask if he was arrogant, he gives an answer. It's up to you and the audience to say and decide whether he's arrogant or not. So I like to leave, put that in there and let the audience decide for himself or herself.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Do you think that arrogance, however he wants to think of it, is an asset to him in his current work?

• 11:06Speaker 02

  That's a good question. That's a really good question. I'd have to let him answer that. I mean, I think intense focus, I think being very certain, I think maybe with a touch of arrogance, gets to this place where you're cutting through a lot of bullshit. So that is, and let me, let me qualify this answer by this is my answer, not his answer. But I do think that effective people in the world have to cut through bullshit. They have to cut through group think in their own group, in their own company. They have to cut through how the bureaucratic nature of a big company slows things down. So if arrogance, you know, if like 5% or 12% arrogance and certainty and bullheadedness is effective,

• 11:48Speaker 02

  I wouldn't mind that. I think sometimes a director of documentaries has to be bullheaded and arrogant sometimes. But then you have to sort of, you know, put guardrails on yourself. You have to sort of have, you know, a fuse on that so that you don't go too far. And I think clearly you see footage in there from the early days of Microsoft, well, Bill clearly went too far.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, that's actually the one, the one piece of documentary that I, I don't know how interesting it would be to everybody. I kind of understand why it wouldn't be there, but it's very interesting to me is, Microsoft was a ruthless company with Gates at the helm. And you, you wave at it a few times, right? They buy their competitors or they, they crush them. Obviously Netscape and the antitrust trials there. But there was lots and lots of other stuff they did to ruthlessly destroy their competitors along the way. And that was all Bill. Was there a moment where you're like, I need to focus on that stuff more? Or say, I just need to say it once and move on. There's other stuff that's more important?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the focus of the series is really not about that. I put enough in there to acknowledge it and say this happened. But it wasn't an expose of the tactics of Microsoft in this period of time. And so, just like the movie doesn't get into all the details of the antitrust case, it doesn't get into all the details of why Bill thinks that they were maligned, nor does it get into all the details of why people think Microsoft is wrong. That wasn't the focus of the series. The focus of the series is a character study of a guy. And what is he doing with his life?

• 13:14Nilay Patel?

  I thought the most interesting part of the entire thing is when you were alone with him during his think week, and he's alone in the house, and he's reading books. And it, over time, you see the Diet Coke cans pile. Like, again, I have spent time with Bill Gates. He's actually been on this show before. I've never, like, seen the richest man in the world open a can of Diet Coke. Right? So, most people don't have that experience. And most people don't have the experience of, now he's got four empty cans of Diet Coke from his fridge floating out. Like, it's just very human and very, he's very, he's literally alone. What was it like to go into that space with him?

• 13:47Speaker 02

  Well, it's so interesting because, look, I'll pull the curtain a little bit on making documentaries. You know, you say, okay, well, here we are, we're doing a time lapse of you working. Right? And we're gonna, you know, we're gonna start you reading at the late afternoon, and then we're gonna have you reading and working till night so that we get a sense of time passing. And I've done this in different projects and stuff. And usually, it's like, a person says, what do you want me to read? Like, what page do you want me to be on? And for Bill, it was just like, oh, I get to read. And so, I remember the book, it's Tara Westover's book, the book Educated, which he just picked up that day. It was on his list, and he just, and he read for like an hour and 45 minutes. And we're all moving around, moving lights, and we're moving camera positions. We're all whispering.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  But I'm telling you, the guy just, he read as if we weren't there. And drinking Diet Cokes at will, like, that's just sort of like, you know, us taking a breath. So, it's kind of astounding, his focus. Us having cameras and lights was really uninteresting to him. It was more like, oh, I get a quiet moment to read. I'll take my quiet moment to read.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  What was it like setting up the, there's many shots of him using a computer, and you were saying, like, you tell him what's, like... What was it? We're like, Bill, just use Excel for a while and we're gonna take some beautiful B-roll of you. Like, that to me, like, we, you know, we make videos here. And so I'm thinking, like, how would you set that up with Bill Gates? Like, we would, how would I even ask that question? I'm very curious.

• 15:13Speaker 02

  No, in this case, you just say, hey, Bill, uh, um, we want to film you at your desk working. And then he just does whatever he wants to do.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  The one thing I did tell him to do is like, there's one, this is the end of the day, and I knew he played online bridge. And say, I was like, hey, why don't you play, why don't you play online bridge now? He went and played online bridge for 45 minutes. But again, once I said to do it, he just was like, he could care less that we were there. He was trying to win the bridge game.

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• 17:13Nilay Patel?

  So another huge character in this documentary is Melinda, who you actually, you make the point that for a while Bill was the face of the foundation and she had to make this, this choice of her own to become a prominent figure and stand next to him. And I think just the funniest, the funniest moment is when you tell her the title of thing called Inside Bill's Brain. And she just starts, she loses it. And she's like, I wouldn't want to be in there. Which is, I mean, it's just like literally one of the funniest moments in a documentary is like someone's wifing like, I don't, I don't know about his brain. I'm assuming everyone's wife feels that way, but I'm sure mine does. How was bringing her into the piece? Like how did, you're, you're making a documentary about Bill. It's obvious that he wants her to be as important. How did you think about bringing her into the piece and into the forefront?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Well, what's interesting is that Melinda is in every single way, an equal partner. So, you know, getting on Bill's schedule is one thing, but getting on Melinda's schedule is another because they're both doing so many different things. She's writing her book. She's at the foundation. She's got the issues that are really important to her. And so, once we sat down together and she realized that this was like, hey, I just want to figure out who this guy is. She was like, oh, awesome. I finally get to tell people who this guy really is. And you realize that she is so incredibly warm. And one of her gifts, I mean, she's so smart. She's, her work is, on its, on its own is

• 18:38Speaker 02

  incredible. But I think one of her gifts is that she gets and interprets and understands Bill in ways that people don't. Like she helped me, like in the series are these, every episode has me and Bill walking. And we walk through these different locations. And, and she gave me this idea. She was like, you know, I find that Bill is the most open and relaxed and expressive when he's moving. You know, so like when he's really into something and passionate about something, he'll pace in the living room or in the kitchen because he's just, his mind is moving and it helps him to get the flow of his ideas going. And so I was like, well, maybe, maybe we should do that. So she gave me the idea of going, taking these walks.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  So what we do is get these steady cams and we would and it would be behind us. So Bill just was was just concentrating on us walking and where he's going. He didn't see the crew, but he knew there was a steady cam following him and two sets of steady cams. It would sort of take turns because, you know, on in this giant loop. But she gave me that idea and it was her. It was it makes you realize two wonderful things. One is that she has an intuitive sense of how he works and what he needs. And he understands that value that that she gives to him in that partnership.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, those shots are incredible. I mean, that's that's when you're doing the quick fire. What's your favorite food? What's your favorite animal? Right, like, and he's just answering. It seems like there's another partner in the mix, which I think historically people know about the Gates Warren Buffett relationship. But it feels like you captured another side of it, which I just don't expect Bill Gates to look up to anyone or need to please anyone. And it seems very much as though Buffett plays that role for him. He's it's paternal almost.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  It does feel paternal. It's kind of 50% paternal and 50% like 11 year old boy. Like they're both like 11 year old boys. They sit down at this diner and Warren takes the bun off the burger. It takes two salt shakers, not one, and just floods one side of the of the patty. And then flips the patty over and does the other side. And then, of course, they both have milkshakes. And it's two little boys, except two little boys that are super smart. And they're geeking out over things that you and I wouldn't geek out about. But for them, it's like it could be you and me talking about, you know, fast cars or a cool computer.

• 21:05Speaker 02

  They're talking about like algorithms and the state of the financial system in Singapore or something like that, you know. And but it is also paternal, like, like you said, Bill, he said this thing that really strikes me. It's in the movie. He says, I thought in my whole career that that people would be asking me all these tough questions about his business. This is at this height of Microsoft. He goes, and no one was. And, you know, the famous meeting where Bill's mother said, hey, I want you to meet Warren Buffett. He's coming to the thing and Bill says, I don't have time. And his mother says, you have to meet him. So he takes a helicopter. He says, I'm gonna only be there for a little bit of time and I'm not chopper in, chopper out because I got a code. And the famous story is that Bill does it reluctantly, sits down with Warren and then

• 21:47Speaker 02

  they talk for six hours. And I think what's so interesting is that Warren could speak at Bill's level and could ask him these really tough questions about, okay, why, why is, why is software gonna sustain itself as a business? Why is this not a flash in the pan? Where is the business going? How do I compare, you know, Microsoft to, you know, the train industry? Why are your competition not gonna just totally blow you out of the water in a couple of years? All those big questions that you think that if you imagine the sort of executive offices at Microsoft, those people will be asking, of course, they ask some of it, but not in the way that Warren did. And I think what's so wonderful seeing them together is they both do that of each other. Like Warren will say, okay, so, you know, Polio cases are up this

• 22:31Speaker 02

  year. It was 10 last year and 20 this year. That's, I'm paraphrasing. He goes, why are those cases persisting? What are, what are you not thinking about? Have you thought about this? And so it is wonderful that Bill sort of like becomes a student and Warren's a teacher. And that's, and that's kind of surprising to see Bill because in so few cases does he walk in the room and he's not the most well-read, most informed person.

• 22:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, every time I've interviewed him, I've likened it to talking to Alexa. Like, if you, I mean, if you, if you get the right keyword, it's, an encyclopedia gets read to you.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, the only thing I can beat him on is like obscure Wes Anderson movies.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  He's not, he's not studying up on, on Wes Anderson movies?

• 23:14Speaker 02

  He's, you know, he's probably seen one or two, but he hasn't seen them all. So I get like, like, I was only like, I'm trying to think what areas of knowledge. Like, you know, or the Smiths, or, you know, of the Velvet Underground. Like, I could beat, I could beat him on that shit, but nothing else. Everything else, like, his brain knows in every category, every other category of my intelligence, he can destroy me.

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the next time he comes on the show, I'm gonna be like, all right, let's talk about Clash B-sides. That's what, it's like where I'm at, that's what I got for you. So, I wanna talk about the, the foundation side of things.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 23:49Nilay Patel?

  Cause they are working on it, and like, those scenes with Buffett, where they're talking about polio is very powerful. The building of the, of the waste processor is very powerful. There is a big critique right now of billionaires doing philanthropy, right? I think Anand Giridharadas wrote the book, Winners Take All. He's like, billionaires are laundering their reputations by doing this philanthropy selectively. It's not great, we should rethink this system. It's not, that critique is not really present in the documentary, but were you thinking about it? And how do you think, how are you thinking about that now?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  It's funny, I did ask him a lot about, you know, what gives you the right to go in and try to solve these problems? And what's interesting is the answer was so obvious that I didn't put it in the movie.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  It didn't seem dramatic enough, it, it felt, his answer felt too, it felt like I was actually giving a pass. I'll give you my point of view, which is that some billionaires are laundering their reputation. And worse, some billionaires are putting undue influence on important issues. So, I, I think that's a really important question, it's a very topical question since, because there's a massive imbalance of wealth. Full stop. However, there are millions and millions of children who are alive because of what Bill and Melinda have done. They said, you know, the vaccinations that our kids get in the Western world, poor kids are not getting in, in, in the third world. And they took their expertise, their influence, their money, and their expertise to say, how do we get, how do we make it cheaper? How do we get access?

• 25:16Speaker 02

  And you should get the numbers, but it's, it's in, it's in the, the high millions of, of children, mostly, a lot of children and other people who are alive because they're getting vaccines, they're getting healthcare that they wouldn't get. And Bill and Melon deserve a lot, you know, they work, they work with a lot of other organizations. But the emphasis they put on, the expertise, the focus that they do is saving millions and millions of lives. And it's not just, it's interesting, the impression people get is like, oh, they just, they do it by spending money. It's actually not the case, that actually the amount of money that the foundation spends is a drop in the bucket compared to what governments spend. It's teeny. Like, if the Gates Foundation spent all its money, they could spend it all

• 26:00Speaker 02

  like in a year and finish itself because there just isn't enough money to get all these problems solved. So my critique of Bill and Melinda is a good one, because they're actually using their money and their influence in incredibly important way. And if you look at episode three, which is about climate change, Bill is using his incredible brain and his knowledge of technology to push and accelerate new technologies, including reconsidering nuclear, to find a way to get clean energy. And without that, I would be so much more dark about our prospects in the world. Because I like saving energy, but we need massive breakthroughs. We need massive

• 26:43Speaker 02

  breakthroughs in technology to solve this problem, and not enough is being done in that regard. And Bill, and I'm not saying Bill's gonna do it, but my money is on someone like Bill to do it. And so I'm glad that he's doing that. I'm glad that he's spending his money and his influence in this direction.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  So what was his answer?

• 26:59Speaker 02

  Similar, but not as good.

• 27:02Nilay Patel?

  I'll take it.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  But it is, it's like, no, I mean, I think his answer was, and it's been maybe a year since, so I'm taking, I'm paraphrasing my memory, which is, it's a very good question, you know, you have to be really careful about how you're spending your, I don't think he's putting his levers on our political system.

• 27:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Which is dangerous. I don't think he's putting, you know, undue influence on sort of the more scary things that rich people are doing. I think he's using his wealth towards good, and I'm glad he's doing it.

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, when I had him on, I asked him about modern monetary theory, which is And he was like in it, right? He's Bill Gates. He like had a clear answer about what he he thought it was. But he, I think recently he gave an interview. He's like, well, I support a wealth tax, but it's complicated for all these reasons. And you can tell he's thinking about it, but he's not. I think he's willing to let that side go because he's got these other problems he's focused on. And it seems like part of the, part of the answer here is, well, I have a lot of money. I'm really smart. Smart people like working for me. There's no market for better toilets. I'm just gonna pour money at them until it works. And it, it seems like that is just as simple as the answer can be, but he never really quite says it that way.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, his, his answer was very cerebral and much more complex than I could put in a movie. But it was essentially that. And you mentioned toilets. When I, when I pitched the series to Netflix, I was like, I'm gonna make the best episode about toilets you've ever seen. And that sounds like hyperbole, but it wasn't. And they were kind of like, what? And, and I said that on purpose because, first of all, I did make an episode about toilets. I made an episode about shit, actually. And you see a lot of human feces in this series. Sorry if that turns you off, but, but it's true. But what is interesting is that, and it's another argument for why I'm so glad Bill is on this planet, is that shit

• 28:54Speaker 02

  and human feces is not something people want to talk about or deal with, but it's why a lot of young children die. That, you know, we can do all this thing about getting people clean water, and we can send money to these villages to get them higher rates of living, but as long as you don't solve the sanitation city, sanitation problem in some of these poor cities where there's not good toilets, not good sanitation systems. People shit in the street, they shit in a creek, and the water goes down the stream, and kids play in it, and they get really dangerous diseases, and they die. And so Bill says, well, fuck, we gotta, we gotta find a way to reinvent the toilet, because you can't put a modern toilet in a modern sanitation system in one of these big cities or one of these. And, and

• 29:36Speaker 02

  he's spent the last five years trying to redo this, and he's getting close. It's another reason, like, who else would do this? Who else would put their mind towards reinventing how a toilet works? We don't even want to think about a toilet. And you know, in our office or our home, we just wanna do what it takes to use it and get out of there as fast as possible. Bill, Bill doesn't mind focusing on these problems that no one wants to focus on. I think that's what makes what he does so extraordinary.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  So as you're going through it, what's the thing that surprised you most about Gates?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  He's very emotional.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  That actually is hugely surprising.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  I think the rap he gets. And by the way, the first three or four interviews, I didn't always see emotion, you know, and Melinda talks about it. It's like, you know, when they're all watching a movie, the kids notice that he's, he's the first to cry and he cries a lot. And I think he presents because his intellect is so, so powerful and he believes so much in sort of rational thinking and optimization of things that he always leads with that. And he actually thinks that sort of emotions, I'm, I'm, this is, this is me speaking for what I think he thinks, which is, I think he, I think he truly believes that, you know, emotion shouldn't cloud your decisions and that too often, you know, businesses and nonprofits and foundations, their, their decision-making is clouded by emotion. Certainly

• 30:56Speaker 02

  it happens to me all the time, that he wants to be analytical, that he, that he doesn't sort of share that side of him. And that's a shame. And I think, I think the series starts to reveal that in him. And I think, and I think it's, you see someone who is, who's very driven by wanting to do good in the world, driven by a sense of deep, deep unfairness that children on the other side of the world are dying, you know, for things that his children have.

• 31:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a, you have a scene where he's going through the stats of how many kids have polio and how many people he can save. And I think you say something like, well, that's not very inspiring. And he's like, yeah, so what? And it occurs to me that he's the person who needs to be inspired. Like, he's got the money and the power and he actually doesn't need to inspire anyone else because all the inspiration and awareness raising that goes on. Right now, the way we're structured anyway, is that he's, it's him. He's got to get affected. And it sounds like you're saying he is actually deeply affected.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  He is deeply affected, or else why wouldn't he just be like, you know, why wouldn't he just be just like buying art? Or, you know, huge toys like other billionaires do. I mean, I actually don't know why he doesn't just, I'm only guessing why he doesn't display his emotion more. You know, people think of him as this sort of like analytical guy who doesn't have emotions. I think he's deeply emotional. He just doesn't show it.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  I think people also think of him as a huge nerd and you show him playing tennis. Like that, it was like very surprising.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  Well, the funnest, the funnest interview is when I, you know, I, I, I literally wrote 100 questions with my writer. And I had him at the net and I literally asked a question every time he hit the ball. And that's, and that's one of my, I think it's my favorite scene in the, in the series. Because he doesn't have a chance to think because he's, he's trying to hit the ball right.

• 32:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And he's, he's pretty good. You know, you just like not what you expect. And he's, he's like kayaking. There's an entire side there. So, last question. There's a lot of scenes of him driving you around in a car. It seems like a very nice Mercedes.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  What kind of driver is Bill Gates?

• 32:52Speaker 02

  Very good, actually.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  Does he, does he go fast?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  He can, well, in the, the series opens with him getting the famous speeding ticket in Albuquerque at 2:00 AM in the morning. And, and that mugshot, if, if, if you're listeners, most of them probably because they're tech people, know this mugshot. But if you haven't seen the mugshot, it's Bill mugshot being caught for speeding with this flowered shirt with big lapels, big wire frame glasses and the hugest shit eating grin.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  For being arrested.

• 33:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Uh, it's fantastic. Uh, but he, uh, when I was with him, I wasn't terrified. He's a good driver. He's a good driver.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  I can imagine. All right. Davis Guggenheim, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure. By the time people listen to this, it's on Netflix, Inside Bill's Brain.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. What a pleasure to be on your show. Thank you so much.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  Uh, where can people find you if they want to tweet at you or something like that?

• 33:42Speaker 02

  I'm not, I'm on Instagram. How about that?

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  Davis Guggenheim on Instagram. I think it's DavisGuggenheim1 or something like that.

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  Awesome.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  All right. My thank you to Davis Guggenheim for joining us on The Vergecast. You can check out Inside Bill's Brain on Netflix now. If you're a Vergecast listener, it's worth, it's worth your time. It's very interesting. We'll be back later this week with the chat show, then the interview show, then the chat show, and on and on and on through tech season, which is coming fast and furious right now. You can tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. Love to hear from you. Talk to you soon.

• 34:12Speaker 05

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