I only got one episode into the three-part documentary Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates. Not that it's bad, much less offensively so. It's not what I was looking for.

I came for a vivisection, maybe with a sprinkle of analysis on top, and they instead served me a hagiography.

I wanted to see the hunger, the drive, the callousness that gets you to the point where you can then decide to be anything – even a saint who channels his non-insignificant brainpower to finding people who are capable of solving the world's greatest problems, and then convincing them that they should help.

Instead, the documentary focuses on the latter, and inevitably, lionizes his efforts with the Gates Foundation.

It's great work, sure. Want to eradicate polio? Bring affordable sanitation to areas where children are forced to drink pestilent waters? Awesome. Big pat on the back for you. But there's nothing for me to learn there.

To do these things you need fuck-you money, and you don't get to Gates' heights of fuck-you money without having said fuck-you to a few people and the drive to step on them. Pretending that Gates' capacity to help tackle these big issues is all about how smart and uniquely talented Bill happens to be is disingenuous. His intelligence and drive help when pushing against apathy and inertia and corruption, I'm sure, but also do his uncountable piles of money. And to get there, you need to have behaved in a very particular way.

That behavior is what I wanted to see, to examine, to reverse engineer.

You can spend all your runtime lovingly zooming into perfectly glazed steaks which slowly in balanced light which brings out the impeccable garnishes.

Gorgeous, but that's advertising. What would teach the viewers something is to see the farm, abattoir, and butcher shop.

#documentary #billgates