With a healthy skepticism I began watching “Inside Bill’s Brain,” a recent Netflix documentary by Davis Guggenheim that promises to delve into the inner workings of Bill Gates’s brain. Wealthy white men have more often than not been the architects of the world’s problems and not their solution, and any story that presents another wealthy white man as the solution to the world’s problems is bound to bring with it a little nausea and healthy concern. So much time has been spent worrying about the minds and thoughts of wealthy white men, and I wondered why we needed another three-part documentary to this end.
Variety has published a deftly written article about the dangers of “celebrity hagiography,” a new genre of documentary biopic that celebrates our cultural heroes by presenting uncomplicated puff pieces about these figures. “Inside Bill’s Brain” is part puff piece. But it is also a documentary about the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and both Bill and Melinda Gates’s collective attempt to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.
This is less a documentary about Bill Gates than it is a documentary about the work of the foundation, which is run in equal measure by both Bill and Melinda. And while the documentary is adamant in making the point that Melinda is just as much responsible for the foundation as Bill is, Melinda’s voice gets lost in the mix. When she’s interviewed, she’s asked about Bill, not really about her role in the foundation. Once again, the wife is relegated to the role of helpmate, while Bill is left to explain the intricacies of saving the world. I wanted to see Melinda at work. Instead, she’s sitting in a room laughing about the title of the documentary.
This should have been a documentary about Bill and Melinda, but the documentary’s title is “Inside Bill’s Brain” and Guggenheim didn’t have the vision to push the documentary further than that.
The value proposition underlying the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is the concept that “all lives have equal value.” To this end, Bill and Melinda Gates strategically invest their money to solve what they believe to be the greatest challenges facing humanity. In the first episodes of “Inside Bill’s Brain” we learn that a great deal of Bill’s time and money has gone into focusing on poop. More specifically, on finding a way to create an affordable toilet that can be used in the developing world. The CDC notes that diarrhea kills more than 2000 children every day.
Interestingly, the documentary doesn’t go into too much detail about wastewater treatment in America, but thankfully, there’s an Atlantic article for that. 20% of Americans use septic tanks and 80% send their waste to municipal water treatment plants. Septic tanks separate waste into liquid and sludge portions. The liquid portion is dispersed into the soil, where natural microbes take care of it. If the tank is working well, the liquid part should never pose a risk to groundwater, but eventually the sludge builds up and needs to be cleaned—pumped out. Wastewater treatment plants work similarly, but on a larger scale.
The problem with wastewater treatment in America is that periodically wastewater is released directly into the ocean, or environment, especially when the plant gets overwhelmed. As the population grows, and as wastewater treatment plants become overwhelmed by storms or power outages, we may find more cases where waste is released directly into the environment. Many wastewater treatment plants have to handle both toilet waste and stormwater drainage. The consequences when storms hit are catastrophic if you’re thinking about water treatment catastrophe. The Atlantic reports that the consequences of these dumps can be catastrophic for people and the environment: fish died off after a dump in Long Island, and Toledo, Ohio’s drinking water was rendered undrinkable. Because, yes, just like in the developing world, we source our drinking water from the same places we dump our sewage, and if it isn’t clean, we’re screwed. I recall surfing in Rockaway Beach after a storm, suddenly finding myself surrounded by what I will disgustingly call “shit buoys.”
The Gates documentary seemed to present the idea that gastrointestinal distress due to mixing of clean water and sewage water was a third-world or developing world problem. The reality is that this is also increasingly becoming an America problem—especially as infrastructure continues to be neglected in favor of tax cuts for the rich. Sending money abroad to solve a problem we’d like to believe has been solved at home, but—surprise—hasn’t really been solved at home, maybe doesn’t solve the problem at all.
I won’t spend too long commenting on how there was something cathartic in watching one of the world’s wealthiest men spend his days thinking about shit. It made me feel like I should probably spend more of my time thinking about shit and where my shit goes.
One of the most memorable (for me) moments of the documentary involved a conversation Gates has with security backstage before he gives a lecture about toilets. The security guard tells him two things. One, that he has purposefully cracked all the waters in the podium, so that all Gates needs to do is drink up, and that Gates’s poop specimen (a cup of shit he’ll use as a prop during his talk) is also in the podium. Gates is quick to ask whether security has taken the time to keep the water properly separated from the poop sample. And perhaps this sequence alone could serve as an adequate allegory for the film as a whole.
Gates succeeds in bringing affordable toilets to the developing world, but his other mission, to shift the world’s reliance on coal to nuclear, won’t be so easy. The documentary makes a strong case for why the world should give a nuclear energy a second chance, and introduces us to a group of scientists trying to make nuclear safer with less byproduct than nuclear of the past. I’m not sure whether Gates’s solution is the right one or only one available, but I wish more wealthy people spent their money and time trying to make the world genuinely better (like Gates genuinely seems to be trying to do) rather than just thinking about ways they can send rockets into space to leave said world.
The narrative of the wealthy philanthropist doesn’t excuse inequality, no matter how humane it paints Gates and his good buddy, Warren Buffet. Sure, Buffet it no Koch brother, but rather than questioning the structures of a society that permits such wealth to exist in the hands of so few, the docuseries celebrates these men for choosing to use their wealth to make the world a better place. Yes, I’m glad Gates and Buffet are trying to make the world a better place, and I do indeed wish that more wealthy people followed their example, but the documentary could certainly have looked at the darker side of Gates’s company and wealth.
The benefit of a documentary that creates “celebrity hagiography” to quote Variety, is that it offers models of goodness that others might follow. I do indeed hope that more intelligent men make it a goal to read as voraciously at Gates, and that they aim to use their wealth, power, and privilege for good.
But I still wonder what gets lost when we, as a society, rely on the philanthropy of a few wealthy men rather than demand a more transparent government to ensure equality for all? The world suffers from immense disparities of access to healthcare and food, but children in America similarly suffer. When men like Gates are not asked to pay higher taxes, children at home suffer. Buffet, to be fair, has commented on this. It should not be the role of private citizens to play the role of government nor should a single individual be responsible for the social safety net.
But Gates (and the documentary, for all its social consciousness) doesn’t talk about these issues.
And while I found myself endeared to see Gates’s menagerie of fascinating friends (my favorite was the guy who wrote a paper on the physics of dinosaur tails and a five-volume meditation on bread), I also couldn’t help but feel like I was watching the product of a culture bloated beyond its own good, so enamored and engorged by its own excesses, that it couldn’t see the shit on which it was standing.
Bill Gates grew up in a comfortable wealthy family where he was given every opportunity and then some to success. Yes, it is clear that he had natural talent, but that talent was nurtured and coddled and celebrated every step of the way. Not all children are so lucky.
If every life has equal value as his foundation notes, what world would we live in if every child had the opportunities Gates had from the start? The myth of genius is that he is singular, alone, and self-made. The biggest good that comes from the docuseries, Inside Bill’s Brain is that Gates was anything but self-made, but as much a product of his time, culture, and background.
About the Writer
Janice Greenwood is a writer, surfer, and poet. She holds an M.F.A. in poetry and creative writing from Columbia University.