Part One: The Ballad of Bill Gates

Robert is joined by Andrew Ti to discuss Bill Gates.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the show where the Lakers
and the Clippers are the same thing, the exact same thing, Sophie, Sophie,
We're we're already going. We're we're running, We're running, Sophie. Alright, alright,
I record. Are they still keep that all all of

(00:22):
this in? I saw that? Are they still owned by
Steve Balmer? They are still the Clippers are still owned
by Steve Balmer. There they are down zero. They're they're
down two games at zero two in the first round,
even though they were picked to win and they lost
at home both games. It's funny you bring up Steve Balmer.
Oh yeah, we're talking up in Microsoft. This is Behind

(00:47):
the Bastards, the show that started forty seven seconds ago.
Because I didn't inform anyone when it started, because I
wanted to say that the Lakers and the Clippers are
the same thing. I wanted to make Sophie angry. Didn't
make me angry because variants. It's very insulting to compare
how we did it. That's how we did it, the
same amount as me. That's how we did it. We're

(01:09):
doing it. It's done. Welcome to the same amount of
rings as the Clippers. She doesn't have a podcast. I
think that they are indistinguishable. But you know who's not
indistinguishable all of our other guests and our current guest,
Andrew T. Because Andrew T is distinguished, a distinguished man,

(01:31):
a distinguished podcast guest. How are you doing, Andrew. I'm
more of a distinguished podcast guest than a distinguished man,
that is for sure. Thanks for having me, Well you are.
You are one of my very favorite guests. We always
have such a good time when we talk about terrible things.
But because you're like talented in bullshit, you're always like
working on TV shows. So Sophie and I had to

(01:55):
had to sabotage your career in order to get you
back on the podcast. So welcome by appreciate it, Thank you. Sorry,
I'm sorry about the car bombs, but I don't know
any other way to make a podcast. It is it
is uh, it's effective. It's it's a way to be heard.
That's what people say about car bombs. Effective. Yeah, Well,

(02:18):
Andrew today, our show is uh titled. Our working title
is Bill Gates the child Molesting is pedophile in the
history of slander. Now, Andrew today, you and I are
going to have a debate primarily about whether or not
Bill Gates sexually traffic children. Now, my stance on the

(02:38):
matter is yes, absolutely, and I know your stance is,
and I want to make sure I'm getting this right
because you talked about this before we started the show. Yes, absolutely,
And if you want to dispute this, please sue me.
Bill Gates, you pasty, scum sucking coward. Is that that's
how you framed it, right? I feel like I wouldn't say, uh,
scum sucking. I guess that doesn't feel like me. But

(02:59):
everywhere better? Yeah, pretty close. I was hoping when I
when I came on the show that there would be
less blood on various hands than a typical episode that
I've guessed it on. I guess, I guess not. I mean,
in a way, we're still talking about imperialism now normally

(03:21):
the imperialism you and I talked about is you know
our old buddy King Leopold Um. Yeah, one of the greats,
and the and the Brazilian dude John of God, Oh god,
that was heroic. Yeah, that was horrible. We don't we
don't have to do the greatest Hits episode right now,

(03:42):
but yeah, that that ship. Was I just I was
actually just remember again it was like, okay, so bad
with that list of episodes that we've asked. You were
also on the episode about the Andaman Islands, which was
just Walt, Yes, yes, yes, so I truly I was like,
I I will say in all honestly, before I got here,
I was like, is there a chance that I was

(04:04):
about to potentially make the argument that, um, like, given
like the class of person Bill Gates is, was he
even the worst of the like tech billionaires? But I
suppose I'm about to be disabused. Yeah, that's a debatable point. Um.
You know that we had to leave a lot out

(04:26):
of this motherfucker of an episode, which is like one
of the things that's kind of when you actually try
to list all of the damaging things Bill Gates has done, it's, um,
it's an additional like course of study and how toxic
billionaires are because you realize, like, my god, they're able
to do so much. It's because all they all they
need to do is like have a whim and shotgun

(04:46):
money out to a team of people to make that
whim real, and then they've impacted the lives of millions
of folks, and it took them like eleven minutes. Yeah
or just a yeah, a thought or a whim or
or a tweet or whatever said that that is? That
was my my only thought. I was like, this one,
this one is the like graded on a curve. I'm
curious to actually here where Bill Kates land. Yeah, I'm

(05:08):
interested in your thoughts on that, Andrew. So without further ado,
let's start the episode Part one. Bill Gates is absolutely
a sex offender comma and that is legally actionable slander
um which which is the So if he can we
go with that as the title? No, we can't. Can
we publish that? Unfortunately? Unfortunately, unfortunately, I feel like our

(05:30):
overlords would be very unhappy with us. All right, well,
and I like having a place to live. Well, well,
well let's let's put a pin in that. We'll see, Well,
let's put a pin in you having a place to live,
because who knows how this EID is gonna go cool?
So William Henry Gates the Third was born on October

(05:52):
in Seattle, Washington, a town too rad for him to deserve.
His father was William H. Gates, Sr. Who used to
be a lie but now is not that William Gates, Sr.
Was a prominent corporate lawyer and a World War Two veteran.
His mother, Mary Maxwell Gates, was a girl boss and
served on the board of directors for the First Interstate
Bank System and the United Way. His mom's dad had

(06:14):
been the president of a national bank. So you know money, right,
Like your dad, you're your your your your maternal grandpa
is a bank president. Your dad's a wealthy corporate lawyer
like you've got You're not just like rich, You've got
family money, right. So religion was present, but doesn't seem
to have been a huge factor in Bill Gates's childhood
or in the Gates family childhood. He had. He had

(06:35):
two siblings. The family attended a Protestant Reformed church. Bill's
parents hoped he would follow in his father's footsteps and
pursue a law degree, but from what I've read, they
didn't put a lot of pressure on him to follow
a specific path. His family was close. They played a
lot of board games together, Sunday dinner was at the
same time every week, and they wore matching family pajamas.
So like, you know, oh my God, like a very

(06:57):
very like this family sends out cards every year on time,
like it's one of those kind of families exhausting so
much so, he was like a real ass pointdexter growing up.
Absolutely his name he has, William M. Henry Gates, the
third matching damn like he has. And he didn't go

(07:18):
by the very cool nickname Bill Hin, which is what
I would have. So Bill Gates Senior admitted in interviews
in the twenty one century that when Bill Gates, you know,
the one we know, was growing up, he was somewhat
emotionally distant as a father. Um, and a number of
folks have said this, and it's kind of usually written
as like, well, this is just sort of like a

(07:40):
sign of the times, right, Like he was a man,
He was a child of the of the nineteen twenties.
You know, that's kind of how those people are gonna
are gonna be h. He worked hard, and he left
most of the child rearing up to his wife. He
was serious, and he talked to his kids like they
were adults. His oldest daughter, Lady recalled, he'd come home
and he'd sit in his chair and eat dinner. But
there was never any kind of warm, give me a

(08:01):
hug kind of thing. Now, Bill's mom had been an
athlete and an honor student, and she had extremely high
standards for her kids. This was less of a push
your kids to follow a specific path thing and more
of a you have to work hard and do your
best at whatever you choose to do kind of thing. Though.
She encouraged her children to try music and sports, even
if they were bad at those things, because failure was
a good experience to have, and Bill was terrible in music,

(08:23):
which same now. The Gates children were expected to dress
nicely beyond and beyond time. Because both parents were members
of high society, they had to learn to socialize with
prominent adults at an early age. Bill followed his mother's guidance.
He was a voracious reader from an early age, and
he read the World Book Encyclopedia series from beginning to end.
So yeah, oh god, what are you reading, Bill? Volume Encyclopedia,

(08:50):
entire Encyclopedia. Oh my god, I guess I have to say.
If you catch your small child reading the encycloped media
from beginning to end, you gotta like, you gotta put
some poison in his boot or something. You gotta slow
that bright down. You gotta slow that bright down. He's
not going anywhere. Good, Yeah, give him, get him on drugs,
you know, just give him some autumn, get him to

(09:11):
start him start drinking. That does explain, and Carter, Yeah,
it doesn't explain in Carter, it's it's it's it's a
shame that after the Encyclopedia giving him so much joy
as a child, he went on to commit such a
crime against encyclopedia kind as in um so, his parents

(09:33):
liked that he was a big reader, and they would
reward his hugger for knowledge by offering to buy him
any book he wanted. It should not be a surprise
that he grew up super nerdy and was bullied from
an early age for being small and weird and obsessed
with books. Um, which you know, say I was. I
was the kid who always had like a book underneath
the table in like math class. I got a lot

(09:53):
of trouble for that. Ship. Yeah, yeah, I I was
definitely a little bit of that. But it's also just
like that's not just why he was. He just is
such an unpleasant tweet. Yeah, I think he was probably
a real real dick um just judging by everything that
comes later, I guess it wasn't just the books. Um yeah,

(10:13):
So obviously getting bullied caused him to withdraw further into
his own little world. Uh, and this started to worry
his parents. His dad attempted to counter this by making
young Bill work as a greeter at their parties and
as a waiter at professional functions for his law firms. Again,
exhausting family. I mean, a family that has parties that

(10:35):
requires a greeter is yeah, yeah, that's wild ship. Holy
fuck Again, this whole family could have just just get him,
get him to start drinking, you know, yeah, they could
have all used a problem. You know. That's that's That's
the thing. His family clearly does not have enough problems.
They're rich, they're high society. Uh, they need more problems,

(10:56):
is what I'm saying. Holy fuck, you know this is
good as I feel like this childhood is gonna possibly
start going to feel exonerating, it's amazing. I mean, actually,
like we'll get to that in a bit, but it
is amazing that, Like it really gives you an insight
because his dad comes across as very reasonable in interviews,

(11:17):
like just an extremely reasonable man. But then you realize, like, Okay,
your kid was getting beat up in school, so your
solution was to make him be a waiter to rich
people because he thought that would help. Okay, so you
you you didn't really have everything together either when you
were like, it's that's a that's a weird move, what

(11:37):
a horrible solution? Yeah, Oh my god, Okay, okay. Now,
most interviews will say that by age eleven, when it
came to like intellect, Bill was more or less an adult.
We're talking about maturity here, but his ability to discuss
international affairs and business and like generally he was he
was a very smart kid. He was. He was, you know,
by the time he was eleven or twelve, not really

(11:57):
acting like a kid anymore. His dad, to recalled quote,
it was interesting, and I thought it was great. Now
I will say to you, his mother did not appreciate it.
It bothered h And she was bothered because Bill's intellect
made him arrogant and led to clashes with his parents.
And I'm gonna quote from the Wall Street Journal here,
the son pushed against his mother's instinct to control him,

(12:18):
sparking a battle of wills. All those things that she
had expected of him, a clean room, being at the
dinner table on time, not biting his pencils suddenly turned
into a source of a big source of friction. The
two fell into explosive arguments. He was nasty, his sister
says of her brother. Mr. Gates Senior played the role
of peacemaker. He'd sort of break them apart and calm
things down, says the eldest sibling. The battles reached a

(12:39):
climax at dinner one night, when Bill Gates was around twelve.
Over the table, he shouted at his mother and what
today he describes as utter total sarcastic, smartass kid rudeness.
His father responded by throwing a cold glass of water
at his son's face, which his son responded sarcastically, thanks
for the shower. Oh god, this doesn't sound fun. What

(13:02):
a tool? What an unbelievable tool? Real, young Sheldon vibes up. Yeah,
I know, I fucking fuck you child, Bill Gates. I
mean again, this is why more children need to drink um.
Yeah yeah, slow him down, We gotta slow down. Generation.

(13:24):
What is it after Z Z one? I mean, eventually
it's going to be simply generation final, Generation final? Thank god?
After Z? Is there an after Z? I don't think
I don't think it's happened yet. But like what the
Bill Gates story informs us of is that somewhere out

(13:46):
there is a kid who could become the future Bill
Gates if somebody doesn't put a steel reserve in his
hand faster, like or some Boone's farm. Kids love Boone's farm.
Give him some Booneist farm. When I get rich, I'm
going to start a charity that just distributes Boone's farm.
Too precocious children. I mean, he just brings sparks back.

(14:07):
That's felt like sparks is good for kids. Yeah, that's
how it basically got. You know, hey, kids, it's an
energy drink, but it'll make it dumber. Now. Um. The
throwing water in his son's face story is a story
you'll find a lot written in articles about Bill, particularly
in the early two thousand's. Now this is the period

(14:28):
we're talking about, like how what led to this today?
But the early two thousands was when Bill started kind
of stepping away from Microsoft and into philanthropy, and so
there were suddenly a rush of articles like because he
had been I don't people don't really know this. We're
gonna be talking about why I think people who weren't
you know, super cogent during the nineties. He was like
the demon to the devil to a lot of people
in the nineties, and then throughout the outs he got

(14:51):
really rehabilitated. His image did because he went from like
the evil overlord of the mega corporation that was, you know,
fucking everything up to like the guy ring malaria. Basically,
I guess it is true because because it is a
little hard to remember how pervasive Microsoft. Yeah, like right
you literally, yeah, unless you are a very unpleasant Bill

(15:13):
Gates type, couldn't have a computer without it. Yeah, yeah,
it was. It was a different era of technology. And
so this, for whatever reason, when this like rush of
articles came out kind of burnishing Bill's reputation in the
early two thousands, this story wound up on them a lot,
and they tended to portray this moment his dad throwing

(15:34):
water in his face. It's like a turning point for
young Bill Gates where he realized like, oh, I'm being
an asshole, and where his parents like when everything kind
of like turned around for him and his family. Um,
but I've I've run across other articles that were written
in a similar time period, and we're less of like
shameless plugs, um more. Yeah, And these articles make it

(15:55):
clear that his behavioral problems went deeper than that, and
there was not as clean a break when they stopped
as as Gates and his family like the portray. I
found a Washington Post article that noted Bill spent so
much time in his room during his adolescence that his
mom would buzz him on the house intercom to ask
what he would do it was doing, and he would
shout back, I'm thinking, have you ever tried thinking? So again?

(16:21):
He's he's he's a real he's a real asshole about
being smart. Like my mom would have slapped the ship
out of me if I'd said, like, not that that's good,
but like I would have gotten the ship slept out
of for saying yeah, um Now. The fight made it
clear to his father and mother that things were getting
out of control, so they took him to a therapist.

(16:42):
Bill later recalls telling them, I'm telling the the therapist
I'm at war with my parents over who is in control.
The therapist told his mom and dad that their son
was going to eventually win his struggle for independence, so
their best bet was to let him have his freedom
now and see how he handled it. So that's what
they did. They took him out of his old school
and they enrolled him in a private school, Lakeside Prep, Uh,

(17:03):
And the idea was that this school would give him
more freedom and that that would resolve his behavioral problems.
I don't know the extent to which he resolved his
behavioral issues, because I think he kept being a dick um,
but he absolutely loved the school, and it was it's
what made him. Going to this specific school is what
made him into the man that he became. UM. And
it's here I should probably note that of all of

(17:25):
the people I've studied in this series, Bill Gates is
absolutely the luckiest. I I think he might have the
most privileged upbringing I have ever encountered. And that includes
like fucking kings, like in terms of like the time
he was born, the time he was raised, the resources
his family had like not only but it's also like
not only did they have money, not only did he

(17:45):
grow up in a time when like opportunity was exploding
in this country. Um. Not only were his parents upper class,
but they were thoughtful and understanding in excess of the
norm for his era. They were willing to give him freedoms.
That exactly that was very few people are so like,
just comprehensively the luckiest man I've ever heard about. Um.

(18:06):
He also looked into a good therapist, which people who
have tried to find therapists can say is like not
a common thing, especially finding a therapist whose answer to
behavior problems is going to be you just gotta let
your kid do his ship. You know, it's all good, Yeah,
it's all good approach. And then he lucked into Lakeside Prep, which,
you know, not only was like a lot of rich

(18:27):
kids go to fancy schools, Lakeside Prep was not just
a fancy school. It was a school with a computer. Now.
Bill started there when he was thirteen in nineteen sixty eight,
an era for which of people the term computer meant
either some ship NASA uses, or like sci fi nonsense.
Probably less than one percent of one percent of thirteen

(18:47):
year old boys had meaningful access to computers in this
time period, and Bill Gates was one of them. That's
what I like, just staggeringly fortunate, like at that time.
The other it feels like the other possible meaning or
access to computer is literally a human being who computes. Yeah, yeah,
like a guy with an abacus. Yeah. Um. So the

(19:12):
reason that Bill's school had a computer is that when
he was in eighth grade, the Mother's Club at Lakeside
held a rummage sale and they used the profits from
it to buy a Teletype Model thirty three, a SR terminal,
and they also rented a block of time on a
general electric computer. So Bill gets access to this machine
because the Mom's club at his school is forward thinking

(19:33):
enough to be like, we should probably get computers. These
kids can like that seems like it might be the future. Um.
And Bill is immediately obsessed with the machine. He starts programming,
he starts creating new like languages and ship um. And
he was so good at it. Actually, and this is
another ridiculous stroke of luck. He was so good at
programming that his school said he no longer had to
go to math class so he could spend more time

(19:54):
learning computers. It's just like, my god, categorically the luckiest
way who ever lived. But also it's like at the
time was that even like a thing that made sense, like,
I mean, computers were fucking I mean again, I think
if you were a smart person and you were someone
who could like a forward thinking because like a lot

(20:15):
of sci fi writers talking about this, A lot of
people new computers were going to be the future. It
would still be good to have done a little bit
of high school math. I guess, yeah, I mean I
assume he was ahead of it. Like they were also
like that his kid's good enough at math. He's not good.
He doesn't need to. Yeah. Now, when I say there
are no self made billionaires, ship like this is why,

(20:37):
because there's no way that Bill Gates becomes the multibillionaire
he is today if he doesn't have both this and
this is like not like leaving out exploitation and stuff.
There's no way he becomes a billionaire if he doesn't
have the privilege and wild fortunate to have access to
this computer. And like a lot of most rich kids
didn't have this opportunity, Bill benefited at an early age

(20:58):
not just from wealth and social privilege, but from a
wonderfully supportive community of moms who had the far sight
to buy a computer for their kids to use, and
a school that was progressive enough to let him like
spend his class time learning to program. And Bill blossomed
with all this additional freedom. His dad later recalled that
Bill realized, quote, Hey, I don't have to prove my
position relative to my parents. I just have to figure

(21:18):
out what I'm doing relative to the world. And Bill
decided the thing he really wanted to do was get
good at computers. His first computer program was a tic
tac toe game he programmed that let users play against
the computer. He was not the only kid obsessed with
the computer. Two other boys, Paul Allen and Kent Evans,
fell in love with this machine. Um. Paul Allen's one

(21:39):
of these, the Microsoft founder. Um. He died not too
long and I think, yeah, man, it is crazy, just
like you and your buddy from high school becoming billionaires together. Yeah,
because some moms sell a bunch of junk and buy
a computer. It's like one of those tic Tac toe things,
like a bunch of moms in the nineteen sixties hold

(22:00):
of rummage sale. And then the big Domino is millions
die of the coronavirus because vaccine access is lockdown. I mean, yeah,
I went to kind of a hippie high school. So
the only equivalent to that would be if we had
been able to be the only humans on earth with
access to weed. And I guess that would have changed ship.

(22:24):
If your school is like, he doesn't have to go
to math class man. If only they'd given Bill Gates
weed instead of a computer, he just would have been
really into Grand Funk Railroad and we could have solved
avoided a lot of problems. But you know what is

(22:48):
into Grand Funk Railroad, Andrew m The products and services
that support this podcast, one of which is Grand Funk Railroad,
our primary podcast sponsor. They're still alive, right or are
they dead? I'm gonna google is Grand Funk Railroad dead? Um? No,
they're still alive. Looks like it to present they were

(23:12):
disbanded and oh yeah, it seems like it seems like
they're still going. That's good. That's good. All right, Well, uh,
listen to Grand Funk Railroad. Here's ads. Ah, we're back.
We just we just listened to some g f R.

(23:33):
I call him g f R Andrew. Um. It's just
kind of a thing within the g f R community.
So I don't know why we're talking about Grandfunk Railator today. So, yeah,
Bill Gates gets real into computers with Paul Allen and
this other kid, Kent Evans. Now Kent Evans was Gates's
early best friend. He was a weird kid who carried
a briefcase filled with business magazine. So I hate this

(23:59):
high school full of dorks so much. I know I
was bullied as a kid, but it's making me want
to go back in time to deliver swirlies. Like, yeah,
we need like we need, we need time traveling. There's
a TV pitch time traveling bullies going back to like
beat up kids who turn into monsters. Let's take care
of this ship. That's we gotta deal with this. Yeah,

(24:23):
get some kid who was an incredible bully back in
the eighties and he retires to like go fly fishing
in Montana. The government finds him on his farm, like
you're needed. Yeah, this man can deliver thirteen swirlies in
the space of seven minutes. No one's ever equal. Bet. Well,
I guess the show version it would be. You know,
they need a child to do it, so they assume

(24:43):
the bullies kid. But the bullies kid is actually very gentle.
He's a sort of father and son bullying people through ks.
Got to teach his kid to beat up other kids
for for the sake of humanity. Oh god, Okay, well
it's not bad, I know you're listening, green light this ship.
We're gonna have a script out to you by what Thursday.

(25:04):
Yeah yeah, um, so yeah. Bill Gates is hanging out
with the briefcase boy, um and Kent pushes Gates. Will
credits that Kent is the guy who pushed him to
think big and take risks, and was like like they
were always talking about what they're going to be, some
kind of businessman, some kind of politicians like he was.
He was an ambitious kid. Um And together Gates and

(25:27):
Alan and another kid named Rick Whaland, who was another
Microsoft founder, started the Lakeside Programmers Club. Now, despite the
term club, this was not a hobby for them. The
goal from the beginning was to find ways to make
money with computers. I'm gonna quote from the Washington Post here.
The club operated with minimal supervision. This was by design,
says Fred Wright, the Lakeside Math chairman who provided that supervision.

(25:50):
Our philosophy was get a group of smart people together,
give them tools, and get out of the way. Right
sets again incredibly lucky that, he says, is the best
environment to spurre creativity, competition, collaboration. If you want to
see the roots of Microsoft's culture look no further than
the Lakeside Programmer Club. Kent's father says the four boys
spent late night hours at Seattle's computer center Corps c Cubed,

(26:11):
which offered time on a digital equipment court machine pern
agreement with Lakeside. When c cubed went out of business
in nineteen seventy, the Lakeside Programmers Club nearly imploded in
a civil war. Gates and Evans agreed to buy a
set of D E C tapes cheap in a bankruptcy
auction without the knowledge of their partners. They hid the
tapes in a room at Lakeside, and when Alan learned
of this, he found and kept them livid. Gates and

(26:32):
Evans threatened legal action. They were fifteen, So these kids
are having like like corporate legal spats as like fifteen
year olds over the secret computing machines they bought and
hid from each other to keep in leg up on
their teenage friends. Oh my god, maybe there should have
been a little more superstition, Like it's one of those

(26:55):
things you should let kids be kids, you should let
kids explore. But also someone set said, guys, you think
you are not you are not a worring series. You
are not worrying mega corporations. You are children. To share
the fucking to a normal and stop carrying the briefcase

(27:15):
around Kent, for the love of God, we hate the briefcase.
We hate you. Yeah, you're gonna feel bad about that
in a second. So as their adolescence rolled off, Bill
and Kent started taking consulting jobs for local companies that
had computers but no one who knew how to use
them very well. They would often work in exchange for
free computing time. In their junior year, a Lakeside teacher

(27:37):
hired them to automate the school's class scheduling system. They
did several all nighters to get the program ready. Then
on Memorial Day of that year, Kent took a break
to go mountain climbing. Now, he was not an athletic kid,
but he had become he was, you know, he was
someone who was prone to like getting obsessed with things,
and he had decided, he's rather suddenly that he wanted
to get like good at physical tasks. So he got

(27:59):
in the mountain climbing um but he wasn't great at it,
and he slipped and fell to his death on nineteen
seventy two, so his father later blamed the accident on
the fact that Kent was too exhausted to pay attention
on mountain climbing because he'd been coding with Bill Gates
all night. Um And Gates told the Washington Post, I
was devastated. Um and He's been very consistent about the

(28:20):
fact that, like, this was an incredibly traumatic thing his
best friend dies. Uh. He was actually set to give
a speech at Kent's funeral, but he couldn't handle doing it.
It was just too emotional for him. I'm sure this
is true. His now soon to be ex wife says
that when she met him, like thirty years later, he
still talked about Kent all the time. But I have
to throw in this very odd quote he gave to
Netflix for a documentary when asked about Kent's death. It

(28:43):
was so unexpected, so unusual. People didn't know what to
say to me or do his parents. I sort of thought, hey, Okay,
now I'm gonna do all these things that we talked about,
but I'll do it without him. Like that's just a
weird dude. I think he is, like, because he's really
consistent about this, being devon and I'm sure it was

(29:03):
Um that said clearly it was a weird kind of
friendship because they're engaging in like corporate espionage with their
other teenage buddies. Like now, with his best friend dead,
Bill needed a new best friend to stay up all
night coding with one who wouldn't go mountain climbing. He
picked Paul Allen. Paul was enrolled at the University of Washington,
but he would come back to finish the project with

(29:25):
Gates when he was on break from college. Gates and
Allen finished coding the program during Gates's senior year while
he was still seventeen. He and Allen formed a company
called Trafo Data with with the goal of making traffic
counting machines. UM. So they they're like they're they're doing
businesses ship throughout this period Bill's last couple of years
in high school, but their collaborations weren't all professional. During

(29:46):
one of his breaks from college, Allen helped Bill Gates
do something creepy as hell and I'm going to quote
from a write up in the Cut. When he was
in high school, he and fellow Microsoft co founder Paul
Allen would hack into the school scheduling software and signed
Gates up are all girls classes to up his chances
of getting a date. Paul did the computer scheduling with me.
Gates said, Unfortunately for him, he was two years ahead

(30:07):
of me and he was off to college by then.
So I was the one who benefited by being able
to have the nice girls at least sitting near me.
It wasn't so that I could talk to them or anything,
but they were there. I think I was particularly inept
at talking to girls. Are thinking, Okay, do you ask
them out? Do you not? When I went off to Harvard,
I was a little more sociable, but I was still
below average on talking to girls. But okay, that is

(30:30):
the thing. It's like because I did a little kind
of fucking computer programming when I was in high school
and like making like business software, like just make a
weird quasi pornographic video game, Like that's what you want
to do? What is happening here? M h. It's it's
so bizarre because, like I mean, honestly, this is this

(30:54):
is like some fucking Mark Zuckerberg ship. Right, It's like
starting Facebook so that you could like spy on girl
roles and ship. Um, you know, it really is it's
the same basic idea Bills is from an earlier age.
He would have done the same thing Zuckerberg did. Um.
That said, it's also like he's too much of a
nerd to take advantage of it. He's just sitting in
class with these girls because he it is. It is

(31:17):
a very like, you know, child of the sixties, of
the fifties, I guess kind of what was just like
once I'm there, I made it. I made it. I'm
in the room with the girls. Bill, Yeah, yeah, Bill. Um.
And it's you know, the thing that's funny about it
is I mean there's a number of things that are
funny about it, um, but like it's, uh, it's like

(31:45):
Revenge of the Nerd Ship, you know, like it's it's
that kind of thing, which, like, if you haven't watched
Revenge of the Nerds, it's a movie that it's like
the silly movie about a bunch of nerds, you know, uh,
being the cool kids, um and getting one over on
the jocks at a college that nobody thought anything was
problematic about until I think ten years ago. Everyone realized

(32:06):
at the same time that the main character literally rapes
a girl, um, and it's played off as a gag,
like it's it's pretty bad, pretty pretty grim ass. Yet
it's just like what it Yeah, and Bill Bill Gates
is like that, Like now we'll talk about this in
the second episode. There's all these stories coming out about

(32:28):
how creepy he is and how like inappropriate a lot
of his relationships were, and people just like didn't talk
about it because it was just like, well, he's like
the who wouldn't want to fuck the billionaire nerd? Like
that's the thing. The nerds grow up and make money
and then all the women want them. That's like there's
like a million movies with that as the plot right now. Um,
interestingly enough, fucking the Simpsons uh early on uh put

(32:51):
a lot of time into like with a character clearly
themed after Bill Gates. Um like subverting that trope, which
is is good now, As that last quote made clear,
Bill was accepted into Harvard after after college creeper. Not
His grades and impressive computing resume made him a shoe in.
He started college in nineteen seventy three, and he lived
in a dormhouse that was filled with all of the

(33:13):
math and science nerds. Because even Harvard had standards, they
wanted to keep those kids away from the dorms where
kids were getting laid basically now, During his sophomore year,
Bill Gates met Steve Balmer, the future CEO of Microsoft
and presently most famous for allegedly throwing chairs that employees
during meetings. Uh. I can confirm from my time as
a tech journalist that he smells like onions. Um. I

(33:34):
don't know what he smelled like in college, but I
can confirm that in like two thousand ten, he smells
like onions. Um. Now, Balmer and Gates were opposites in
a number of ways. Steve was extremely involved in everything.
Bill was aggressively uninvolved in anything but his own little
world of computers. That Washington Post article I quoted from
includes a few interesting tidbits, like that both got perfect

(33:55):
scores on their S A T s. And we're obsessed
with Napoleon. There's probably something meaningful in the act that
Bill Gates loves Napoleon and Mark Zuckerberg loves Augustus Caesar. Um,
you know, not a cowinky dink, But all right, I'm
just saying it should be illegal to have classics education.
We should, we should, well, especially for for that type

(34:16):
of white guy. Know the only thing you should learn
about his genocide. We're throwing all of the statues into
the sea. Don't tell this kid about Hadrian. Yeah. Now,
the reports we have from Gates in college make it
clear that he was, uh, he was. He was gross.
He didn't use sheets. Instead, he slept directly on his
doorm mattress because making his bed was too hard. Um.

(34:39):
Balmer did the same again, All boys in college are gross. Um,
So I don't know, It's just funny to me. Now.
Gates's main extracurricular during college was poker, which he was
terrible at. He lost so much money that he eventually
gave Steve Balmer his check book for safe keeping, because
otherwise he was going to lose all of his money
getting his ass kicked at poker. Now, while all this

(35:01):
was happening, personal computing was in its infancy. Nineteen seventy
four marked the release of what a lot of people
will call the first personal computer, the Altaire eighty eight.
UM Now Paul Allen, who at this point had graduated
and gotten a job at the Honeywell Corp, Immediately rushed
to Bill's dorm with an ad for the for the
Alta A D eight um he and Gates quickly wrote

(35:21):
a letter to the computer's manufacturer, m I T S
asking if they could write software for it. In basic
m I T S was like, yes, sure, you guys can, Like,
we'll pay you to write software if you come up
with software that's good, but you better hurry because a
shipload of people have actually been making the same offer
to us. Personal computing is kind of like starting to
blow up in this period of time. So both men
basically dropped everything else in their lives to move to Albuquerque,

(35:45):
where m I T S was headquartered, and write software
for the first personal computer. Uh. This meant Paul Allen
quit his job at Honeywell and Gates dropped out of
Harvard in his junior year in nineteen seventy five to
move to Albuquerque and start a company. You might have
expected this to have gone over poorly with his parents,
but again, Bill seems to have kind of hit the
mom and dad lottery in a lot of ways. When
questioned about it decades later, his father said, being a

(36:07):
college dropout wasn't precisely what my wife and I had
envisioned for any of our children. But Bill seemed to
know what he was doing. Um, very supportive family this
kid has and he didn't know what he was doing.
You have to give the man credit for that. Alan
and Gates formed a consulting company to sell software to
All Tear. They called it micro dash Soft. Can you

(36:29):
tell where this is going? Everything? He needed a dash
back in the back in the seventies. Is the napster
guy going to come and say get rid of the
get rid of the dash or is that? Is that
not what's going to happen? No, the napster guy, um
was had not been born at this point, Thank god. Yeah,

(36:51):
what's his name? Sean? Sean Parker? That Sean Parker. That
piece of ship you Sean Parker. Yeah, let's make legal
actionable claims about Sean Parker now. So uh? Bill and
Bill and Paul hired friends of theirs to help them
produce software, including a kid named Monty david Off, who

(37:12):
they had write a piece of software that would allow
computers to perform greater ranges of calculations. The three all
lived together in a two bedroom apartment. David Off slept
on the living room floor. In two thousand, he told
The Washington Post that although they were friends, Gates could
be something of a dick. Quote, there was definitely a
supervisory dynamic. Bill could get very loud. If he felt
you weren't getting something, he would say the same thing louder.

(37:34):
He liked strong interchanges. I preferred not to work in
that way. Now, this is the period of time a
lot of Microsoft stories come from, you know, the scrappy
upstarts on a shoestring bug budget, building a globe spanning
mega corporation from their living room or their garage or whatever. Um.
The reality is that Gates was backed from the beginning
by family money. There was never any like there was.

(37:55):
There's time when the company wasn't making much money, but
there was never a period of time when Gates was
had any financial worries. Yeah, davidoff worked for them for
two summers, and then they offered him a permanent job,
but he had to say no because he couldn't afford
to drop out of Harvard. He told the Post that
Bill Gates had only been able to drop out of
Harvard to start his company because his family was rich. Quote.

(38:16):
The way Bill and I thought about money was very different.
He would tell all of his friends just call me collect.
He knew there was he knew he wasn't going to
have to support himself coming out of college. And the
fact that Bill never ever in his whole life, worried
about money in a meaningful way, does not mean he
wasn't obsessed with it. In fact, his lust for profitability,
depending on who you ask, had a somewhat disastrous impact

(38:37):
on the growing computer community. In the early days, computing
was in fact a community. These were the days when
any given computer was a d I Y project. Most
personal computers, like you would have to solder parts of
it together to like get it working or to add
things like you're like using fucking tools and shipped to
like anyone who has a computer is doing this, ship
um your coding programs on like these weird paper things

(39:01):
like I couldn't. Yeah, Like it's it's it's so, it's
it's very much d I Y. It's it's actually not
all that different from like the three D printed gun
community is today. Like it's like everything is shared. All
of these programs are shared. You don't pay money for them.
Usually you just like oh, or if someone buys it,
they then just copy it and send it for free
to their friends. Like that's the way this stuff really

(39:22):
works um and computer hobbyists had a powerful sense of solidarity.
In the early days of Microsoft, Gates and Allen were
selling software to those hobbyists. Only not everyone who used
Microsoft software actually paid for it. A lot of these
people were poor, you know, buying a computer was all
they could afford to do, so they weren't buying the software,
and there was a brisk open trade and free software

(39:43):
from each according to their resources, to everyone according to
their needs. Microsoft programs were very popular with this set.
One expert later wrote, hobbyists loved it. They loved it
so much they were willing to send tapes paper tapes
around to each other for free. Now this was critical
in mi soft success because it spread adoption of their products,
but it enraged Bill Gates that people were getting software

(40:06):
for free. In nineteen seventy six, he pinned an infamous
open letter to computer hobbyists. He accused them of all
stealing all of stealing his software, and said that resellers
who sold computers with his programs already on them were
basically robbing them. The letter included the line hardware must
be paid for, but software is something to share. Who
cares if the people who worked on it, get paid.

(40:27):
He's being very snotty about this now. Gates complained that
the time he and Allen spent to create their products
was worth forty dollars, but that the royalties they received
based on what they'd actually sold meant they were just
making about two dollars an hour. This was many will argue,
a short sighted way of looking at things. The share
and share like mindset of early software was a major

(40:47):
driver of innovation. It allowed different ideas about software to
be merged and tested, and provided early programmers with a
greater base of knowledge to work from. Many of the
brilliant minds behind the computer revolution, guys like Steve Wozniak
benefited hugely from this state of affairs, like and and
the was as someone who will say, like, yeah, that's
why we have the computering systems that we have today
is because in my day we were just able to

(41:09):
like share everything. It was it's like like a punk
side of this thing. Like he's a phone freaker. He's
like doing back in the day you could like make
certain signals over the phone that would get you free
phone access and ship like he was all into that,
Like fucking Steve Wozniak is actually pretty fucking rat. When
he got super rich off of Apple, he blew all
of his money holding a bunch of giant concerts and
stuff like He's fucking cool dude. Actually, um, but Bill

(41:34):
did not, So Bill, you know a lot of And again,
Wozniak is one of those guys that you really can't
argue it was instrumental in the existence of personal computers
as we know them today. You can argue that about
Bill Gates. And he did not agree with guys like
Steve Wozniak about intellectual property. He felt that intellectual property
rights trumped human progress any day of the week. It

(41:55):
didn't matter that sharing software was good for computing, because
it was bad for Microsoft. And so from that moment on,
Gates dedicated himself to making sure I was kept sacrosanct. Today,
intellectual property rights and paid software are such pillars of
the industry that it can be hard to believe this
wasn't necessarily always going to be the case. One thing
that made Apple Computer interesting in nineteen seventy six was

(42:16):
the fact that their operating system, Apple Basic, was free,
and they openly claimed quote, our philosophy is to provide
software for our machines at free or minimal cost. Now,
there was significant fallout within the computing community over this
open letter. One hobbyist, how Singer, who published an influential newsletter,
complained that since Bill Gates had developed Basic on a

(42:38):
Harvard University computer funded by the US government and the
start of a Microsoft like the first programs they make,
they make in Harvard before they drop out, the Harvard
computer they make it on was paid for by DARPA,
like the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, um, And so
how Singer will say, like, well, he should never have
been able to sell my Windows because place, yeah it

(43:00):
was it was developed using the taxpayer funds. Which is true.
This is a very defensible line of argument. Now, I
mean it doesn't it sounds like Bill Gates is the
thing the philosophy, philosophy of his that has resonated down
is tech guys using public you know, neither public research,
public funded, intellectual property, public whatever, thinking they own it

(43:22):
and then not letting and then getting mad when you know,
like like taking taking from the common good and pretending
they invented it. Yeah, yeah, it's fucking it's fucking rad um.
But you know what else is rad Andrew hit the
products and services that support Yeah, yeah, that's right every time. Yeah,

(43:44):
thank you, thank you. We're back and we're talking about
non consensual relationships with stuffed animals. Andrew have you. I'm
going to edit that out right. Been in a non
consensual relationship with the stuffed animals, Sophie. These are the

(44:05):
conversations people tune in for. I wider on this podcast.
You are the one who slandered them. Yeah, because stuffed
animals can't really consent, can they? Mostly it's all non consensual.
It's all non consensual. It's really something we should analyze more.
Pretty fuck up. It's not great, it's not great, but

(44:26):
you know what is consensual? I cut cut that. I
cut that entire conversation out of This is all staying end,
This is all gold notes that it is not well
according to my edit notes, Chris, you don't have to
do that. You can you can, you can keep this in.
You can fight the system. You can't stop the signal, Sophie.

(44:48):
And the signal is talking about whether or not stuffed
animals can consent, and the signal I think largely it's
coming out on no on that one. But it's happening.
Hit us up and we're back, continued, We've been back.
So other people who knew Gates and Allen at the
time reposted his estimate that he and his colleagues had

(45:11):
put forty dollars into designing their software. Right, that's a
big part of his argument on this open letters. This
is how much money it's costs to make this. We
have to be able to make it back. We can't
afford to do this. One member of the Homebrew Computer Club,
Leif Felsenstein, who Lei Felsenstein designed the first mass produced
personal computer, later said quote, well, we all knew that
the evaluation of computer time was the ultimate and funny money.

(45:33):
You never pay that much for the computer time. And
I think that research will show that they were using
someone else's computer time. Someone else was paying for that.
It could have been Honeywell where Paul Allen was working.
So we all knew this to be a spurious argument.
So back in this day, you had to like pay
in a lot of cases for access to a computer. Right.
And one of the things Bill gets in trouble with
when he's a kid, like he and his friends get

(45:54):
kicked out of one of the places because they're hacking
the system to get free computer time. Um, they're using
free computer time, and they're almost certainly using Paul Allen's
companies freak like, they're doing a lot of things they
would call stealing. But ye, but it's also like the
pointing out the hypocrisy with those thots never works. Yeah, no,

(46:17):
not ever. Yeah, And you know Felsenstein again, it's it
talks about like kind of the the injustices of the world.
Felsenstein is one of the most influential computing pioneers you
never heard of. And the reason that Gates is famous
and Felsenstein isn't has nothing to do with the fact
that Gates did more to revolutionize the world. It's not
that he was like that much more influential than Felsenstein.

(46:39):
It's because Felsenstein was obsessed with pushing the boundaries of computing,
while Gates was obsessed with pushing the boundaries of how
much money computing could make. Felsenstein later wrote that the
open letter quote delineated a rift between the actual industry
where there's trying to make money and there's where those
those hobbyists, where we're trying to make things happen. So
there's this rift that opens that Bill starts, but beqween

(47:00):
making money and making computers better. Bill is not on
the making computers better side, right right right as anyone
who's used microsoftivist, I could tell you, Oh god, I
mean it's just it's it's the through line of like
he was a weird businessman since he was a child.
Is the to me? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, it's

(47:26):
like weird again. Could could have given this kid, could
have like gone back in time and given nine year
old Bill Gates a blunt and like a King Crimson
album and Ben like just just get into weird nerds
any say, away from start worshiping the devil, worship the devil,
listen to prog rock take about your acid. It'll be
fine God, or you'll become Steve Jobs. Actually, so yeah,

(47:49):
you know, it's kind of the same kind of the
same same journey. Um So, Lee, I'm going to read
another quote from Lee Felsenstein here where he's just kind
of explaining why Microsoft gets big and what that has
to do with this this homebrew computer culture that he hates. Quote,
the industry needs the hobbyists, and this was illustrated by

(48:12):
what happened Eventually, when National Semiconductor, which made their own
microprocessor chips in seventies seven or seventy eight, decided they
needed a basic an operating system. They asked what's the
most popular basic, and the answer was Microsoft Basic because
everybody had copied it and everybody was using it. So
we made Microsoft the standard basic. National Semiconductor went to

(48:32):
Microsoft and bought a license. They were in business that way.
This was the marketing function, and the hobbyists did the
marketing with a complete antipathy of the company in question.
There were other basics, and you know, some of them
might even have been better. Gates's later success was in
a certain measure because of what we did that he
said we shouldn't do. We were thieves to do it
at all. Like that's important? Is Bill is arguing that, like, well,

(48:57):
we can't be expected to do this for free, otherwise
you won't have innovation. It's like, well, the fact that
people were sharing your program for free is why you
became a billionaire. Because when companies started realizing we need
to pay for operating systems, what's the most popular one? Oh,
this one, because everyone's been sharing it for free. Like
it's the argument about piracy. Right, it's the same thing
as like, well, if people are able to share movies
and music and stuff for free, it doesn't hurt the industry,

(49:19):
will actually bring them more fans who will spend money
on those things in other ways, which I think was
borne out by what happened, Like yeah, well, it's also
the sort of inevitability of it, right, which is like
like it or not? I mean it also it is
just a better model for I guess some stuff I
don't know. I'm sitting here for a lot of things

(49:40):
for every for a lot of things that are covered
by intellectual property. Like yeah, you know, my boss, part
of why I'm putting out my book for free, Um,
like there will be a print version and stuff. I've
got a publisher, but it's going to be available for
free online. Is it something my my boss Jason Pargeon
did back in the early two thousands, He just published
his book online for free. It became hugely popular. And

(50:02):
when you have something for free that you know X
number of people have consumed anyway, there will be a
way to monetize it. Jason got made a lot of
money off of that book eventually, like it's it works
out and the same thing with Bill Gates. Bill Gates
made a shipload of money off of people using his
ship for free. That's kind of how intellectual property actually

(50:22):
works most of the time. But Bill Gates is a dick.
So one of the people who spends the most times
slamming Bill Gates and is the best at it because
he's right about literally everything, is Corey doctor rowe Um.
I fucking love Corey. He's He's rad uh And I
found a really good interview with him on Jacobin where

(50:44):
he goes into more detail and how Gates went from
quote another company making al tear software into a giant
of the industry, and he makes a similar argument to Felsenstein,
but he highlights Microsoft steel with IBM is more crucial. Quote.
Gates gets his fortune because IBM had been subject to
years of anti trust hell. Every year for twelve years,
IBM out spent the entire Department of Justice Anti Trust

(51:06):
Division fighting an anti trust claim. Finally, under Reagan they
were let off the hook. So IBM had spent years
tied to the bumper of the d o J. And
one of the things they knew that the d o
J really hated was monopolizing software by tying it to hardware.
So they made the pace PC and they made it
out of commodity apart so that it could be cloned.
They sat back as Phoenix Computing reverse engineered their ROM
and started selling it to Dell and Gateway and Compacts

(51:29):
so that there were compatible machines. And they said, we're
not going to make the operating system. And they went
to Bill Gates and Paul Allen and asked them to
make a d a DOSS that they could use their
machines so the d o J would leave them alone.
So that's where Gates his fortune comes from. He was
in the right place at the right time, and his mindset,
this idea of cutthroat competition, of no sharing, of no collegiality,
allowed him to leverage the weakness of IBM's own ip

(51:51):
its ability to control its critics and competitors and customers,
and then impose his own And so, in another bit
of irony, Gates, who spends a chunk of his life
fighting one of the biggest anti trust cases in history,
maybe the biggest, also is only able to get started
because the d o J goes after IBM for monopoly
ship like because IBM has stopped from making monopoly. That's

(52:13):
why they don't go in house to make their operating
system because they're worried about antitrust ship, which is why
Bill Gates gets rich like all of these things. He
hates his whole life for the whole reason he has money. Yeah, right,
it's it's yeah. The hypocrisy of it is like, what

(52:34):
can you do? I don't know. They're always going to
think they invented it. Yeah, they're always going to think
it was all them. Again. This is why we need, uh,
we need like to to dismantle all of our present
federal law enforcement agencies and devote their resources to like
hiring a bunch of middle aged and like early fifties

(52:58):
sixties women and giveing them tire irons and the ability
to track people down and hit them in the face
with tire irons. When they start doing ship, that's clearly
going to end in a bad place. Like you see
a fifteen year old suing his partners in the computer club,
and it's like it's time for the ladies to hit
him with some irons, you know, like smack them around
a little bit. Yeah, maybe have may make another one
of them have a mountain climbing accident. I don't know,

(53:24):
so hypothetically, just hypothetically, just the old ladies with tire irons. Uh, no, nonsense.
Division they could have got after the we work guy.
You know, when he starts talking about being the world's
first trillionaire, hit him with a fucking iron right in
the face, like fucking crack that boy's jaw. Just give
it him. Take us take a thought. It couldn't be

(53:47):
worse than the current system. Yeah, exactly, Yeah, now Microsoft, Okay,
So by nineteen eighty Microsoft was enough of a real
company that Bill was able to hire his buddy Steve
Balmer to do the non techie business man stuff that
was necessary in a growing company. Balmer was employee number
twenty four. No what, you won't get the reference, but

(54:09):
ill continue. Oh okay, it's probably a basketball thing. Sophie
loves the Lakers, who are the same as I don't
know whatever other team she was mentioning earlier. I don't
know any of these things, Sophie. So, but but Steve
Balmer does because he owns a golf team or some
ship whatever kind of support. So this is not a

(54:30):
business nerd podcast where you talk about how companies grow
and ship. You can find so much written about like
the intricacies of early Microsoft corporate culture and whatnot. Um,
and it's all boring as hell. Apple is a lot
more fun because Steve Jobs is a freaking lunatic, just
like a Philly. He's literally like a filthy vagrant to

(54:51):
like forces everybody to smell his rance a ass as
he like refuses to shower for weeks and lives in
the office. It's such a he's a again. I got
my start in journalism in like reporting on the tech industry,
and I was legitimately bummed when he died because he
was just so fucking entertaining. Um, but also a monster

(55:16):
like they all are, except for the walls. Um. Someone's
gonna tell me about Steve Wozniak designed Israeli missile to
technology or some ship and made me really sad. But
I don't know anything about anything bad he's done yet. Um.
So there were twists and turns, obviously in the story
of Microsoft's growth, but the gist of it is expanded

(55:37):
steadily over the eighties and nineteen eight six. It had
its I p O, which is the i p O
is when it goes public on the stock market. That's
when all of the people who found a company get
richish shit, Um, and Gates gets I mean he's always
been rich, but he gets fuck, he gets fucked everyone money.
At this point, from nineteen eight seven on, he was
never off the list of wealthiest Americans. Now Gates and Balm,

(55:58):
Yeah right, Like that's how long he's been fucking rich now.
Gates and Balmer fought constantly. They were as much rivals
as they were friends, um and against. Steve Balmer has
allegedly throws chairs and employees during meetings when they argue
with him, So like Um, the two would get into

(56:19):
screaming arguments over just about anything. One friendly chess match
between the two ended in Bill Gates throwing a tantrum
and tossing the board in pieces off the table. Um.
But none of this fighting seems to have harmed the
expansion of the company. In the nineteen eighties, Balmber headed
the team that developed Windows. By the nineteen nineties, Apple
and Microsoft were the biggest names in the computing game.

(56:39):
The history of that rivalry is something we could get into,
but honestly, both are are helmed by narcissistic assholes. What
do you care? Uh. The story of Gates's crapitude has
less to do with like shady ship that he did
fighting another giant company, and more to do with how
he constantly assaulted anyone trying to innovate in a way
that might reduce Microsoft profits. Core Doctor describes this as

(57:01):
a process of tying quote. He ties the ability to
get Windows or DOSS on your machine to an agreement
not to pre install rival products. He can sabotage the
operating system, which he does for through vertical integration. He
sells you an operating system in a suit of applications
that run on it, and then if you make a
competing application, he can tweak the operating system. Excel, for example,

(57:23):
had a long running competitor that was by all accounts
better called Lotus one, two, and three. The model of
Microsoft was Doss isn't done until Lotus won't won't run,
and every new release would just fall apart. So they
literally sabotage other products so that they won't work on
Microsoft machines. Um Bill and Microsoft also had the ability

(57:44):
to strategically snuff out rivals by bundling free versions of
rifle products into the operating system. So in Toronto, there
was a great software success story called Delrina that made
the world's most successful fact software. One day they started
including free fact software with Windows, and no one ever
bought it. Will be the license again. That was the
end of it. But Gates was able to do what
everyone who's dreamed of a command economy wanted to do,

(58:06):
subordinate the individual priorities of other market actors to his
needs to achieve a strategic goal, in this case for
his own enrichment. So that's fucking cool. Now, all of
this went very smoothly for Gates and for Microsoft until
the latter half of the nineteen nineties. Now, throughout the nineties,
the Justice Department is kind of on an annual basis,

(58:27):
sending out their equivalent of like warning shots, saying like,
we're investigating potential anti trust at Microsoft. But nothing really
solid materializes until Bill Gates decides to take aim at
a plucky little web browser called Netscape Navigator. Yes, now,
if you're not as old as us, especially if you
came of age after the dominance of social media, browser

(58:48):
preference probably doesn't mean a lot to you. Like people
can argue about Firefox or Chrome or Safari or I
don't know, fucking opera. But unless you're using Microsoft Edge
like some sort of goddamn heathen, all browsers are more
or less from a usability standpoint, right, people, I'm I'm
sure people now Firefox I like fuck you, I don't
care how basically like fuck it? Like yeah. But back

(59:10):
in the day Netscape. Netscape was the only PC browser
that wasn't an unholy nightmare to use, like everything was trash.
And then there was Netscape Navigator, this oasis of competent
design in a sea of mostly Microsoft Explorer flavored ship
like fucking Netscape ruled. Consumers loved it, and that drove
Gates crazy. In he had some of his people meet

(59:31):
the developers of the browser and offered to invest in
the company. Microsoft reps were extremely complimentary at this meeting.
The friendly attitude did not last, though, from a write
up in a blog dedicated to the book nine the
Year the Future Began quote, the pretense of cordiality dissipated
on June at a four hour meeting at Netscape headquarters

(59:53):
in Mountain View, California, at which representatives of Microsoft delivered
what Netscape considered a heavy handed threat divide the market
for web browsers or face the prospect of annihilation. According
to detailed notes of the meeting made by Mark Anderson,
Netscape's co founder, Microsoft's representatives proposed restricting the Netscape Navigator
browser to older versions of Microsoft Windows operating systems. That

(01:00:14):
would mean excluding Navigator from Windows ninety five, the upgraded
operating system that Microsoft was planning to release. Now at
the time, no one was sure if Microsoft was legally
allowed to do this. There are laws against being a monopoly.
And when you're saying not only do we make operating systems,
but we unilaterally will decide which browsers work for them,
you're edging across that line. But again, it was new

(01:00:35):
enough that, like there was debate as to whether or
not this was this was verboten now. Anderson, at the
time was a twenty four year old callo youth like
Bill had been back in Albuquerque, and he described Microsoft
reps as acting like Don Corleone from The Godfather. I
have never been in a meeting with in my thirty
five year business career in which a competitor had so
blatantly implied that we would either stop competing with it

(01:00:58):
or the competitor would kill us. In all my years
in business, I have never heard nor experienced such an
explicit proposal to divide markets. Netscape said no, and Microsoft
did what they promised. By nineteen nine, they had successfully
killed Netscape, which was duly bought and destroyed by a O. L. R.
I p pour one out to Miaomi. Now, did you

(01:01:21):
ever use an Netscape Andrew? Oh? Yeah, yeah, I am
definitely of that age. I actually, I will say I
saw of the like pay attention to ship. I did
not exactly realize that it was had been killed. Yeah,
that's why it's stopped being a thing. Yeah, I guess
I just assumed that's what Firefox because it was all Mozilla.

(01:01:41):
I don't. I mean, the same people I think later
wound up being a big part of Firefox. But yeah,
Netscape gets murdered. Obviously, good browsers eventually become I mean
you can we people will argue about that to this
day and like fuck you, I don't care. Um, Netscape
and and Chrome or or a Firefox and Chrome at
the same go to help. Yes, absolutely, Um, Now Microsoft

(01:02:05):
edges trash but whatever. I don't even know what that is,
but it's what they were placed Explorer with. Yeah, that's
a hilarious part. It's like this was like a like,
you know, a war for the keys of who would
control the Internet. And now it's like, what's the difference.
There's a new one, and it's like you guys were
never never got good at making browsers. Like it clearly

(01:02:28):
wasn't the thing you were interested in. It was just
because it wasn't even It wasn't even because it was
gonna hurt your ability to make money because they're using
the thing on your computers that they're paying for. It
was that someone else was making money. Like it didn't
even hurt you. You just hate the idea that other
people will profit. It's amazing. Um so yeah. Uh. That

(01:02:50):
meeting with Microsoft and Netscape, where Microsoft threatened Netscape, wound
up playing a key role in a massive antitrust lawsuit
the federal government brought against my Resoft. Twenty state governments
joined the lawsuit, which alleged that the company was engaged
in a systemic pattern of anti competitive tactics. It's attempt
to wipe out all competition in the browser market was

(01:03:10):
just one example of this. The government case against Microsoft
was heavily boosted by a memorandum written in nine by
Gates himself, titled the Internet Title Wave. It described Netscape
as a threat that had to be beaten. The government
alleged using this that Microsoft set out to win at
any cost. The federal judge who heard the case, Thomas
Pinfield Jackson, decided for the government, finding that Microsoft had

(01:03:33):
attempted to monopolize the web browser market. He ordered the
company split into Now you're probably aware that this did
not happen. Um. Microsoft appealed. They obviously they have all
of the money in the world. They appeal, the judge's
decision gets overturned. They and the thing they eventually got
was just like a slap on the wrist. I'm not
going to labor long on why this happened. Microsoft had

(01:03:55):
all the money, all the lawyers, and owned a decent
number of the politicians. Of course they want in the
long term. Our system is designed for them to win.
What's important and what was valuable about the antitrust suit
is that it shattered Bill Gates for a while. It
was hugely stressful, It made for months of bad pr
it led him to have several in office nervous breakdowns,

(01:04:15):
and worst of all, it involved a public deposition that
exposed him to the world as exactly the kind of
arrogant and angry little man those who had worked closely
with him had known since the Albuquerque days. So let's
end this episode by talking about that deposition. Microsoft's legal
strategy in the first case was to depict the prosecutors
as out of touch old fogies who didn't understand technology,

(01:04:36):
and to claim like Microsoft is just acting in the
way any reasonable tech company would do. Gates's lawyers and
pr Flax wanted him to make hay out of his
reputation as a boy genius who dropped out of Harvard
to become the world's richest man. Here's how Ours Technica
described what came next. By day two, it became clear
that the strategy was failing spectacularly. As New Yorker writer

(01:04:56):
Kent Aletta once noted, Gates had never in his life
groveled for a job or suffered many of the indignities
most of us experience. On a regular basis, He regularly
berated reporters for asking what he'd say were stupid questions.
Publicly lauded as the yse age consummate businessmen and industry visionary.
Gates was accustomed to being treated with obsequious deference from
all but a small number of peers. As such, he

(01:05:18):
had little or no experience tolerating, let alone encountering dissent, criticism,
or challenges to his authority. The lack of experience played
right into the government's hand. Instead of portraying a leader
in control of his domain and confident in his case
and his company's legal and ethical righteousness, the current courtroom
video showed a sight of Gates that had never been
on public display before. He was petulant, petty, flustered, and dower.

(01:05:41):
He was ineffectual. He was, in a word, beaten. During
three days of intense questioning, Gates often feigned ignorance of
his own company's policies and actions. He passed out everyday
words or phrases such as concern, support, and piss on.
Gates seemed to use the strategy to evade tough questions
about whether his company abused its entrenched windows franchise kill
off emerging competitors such as Navigator and Java. To the

(01:06:03):
surprise of him and his many attorneys and image handlers,
Gates came off as argumentative, petty, and someone badly losing
ground to a more formidable rival. What example of this
exchange came came in this exchange with David Boys, the
private attorney hired by the Justice Department. Boys, what non
Microsoft browsers were you concerned about in January of nineteen Gates?

(01:06:23):
I don't know what you mean concerned? Boys. What is
it about the word concerned that you don't understand? Gates?
I'm not sure what you mean by it? Boys? Is Gates?
Is there a document where I use that term? Boys?
Is the term concerned a term you're familiar with in
the English language? Gates? Yes? Does it have a meaning
you're familiar with? Gates? Yes? Fucking piece of shit? He really,

(01:06:49):
that's like the Ben Shapiro school of debate. It's like, yeah,
just like, don't address the issue. Yeah, what is it?
Harvard Dweebs. Yeah, again, it's like that ours technical writer
points out, like he's he's he's never had to grovel
for a job, He's never had to deal with in dignities.
At one point, Thomas Penfield Jackson, the judge hearing the case,

(01:07:12):
started laughing. Microsoft lawyers argued during a closed door session
that the deposition was turning into a side show and
government lawyers should be barred from showing any more segments
during the trial. The judge denied this motion, saying, if anything,
I think your problem is with your witness, not the
way in which this testimony is being presented. Basically like there,
you can't show this deposition because it makes us look
bad and the kids like, that's exactly why we should

(01:07:34):
show it now. Unfortunately for all mankind, Uh, the Microsoft
anti trust case was actually kind of even though the
government kind of lost, was basically the best case scenario
for such a trial in our system. Good didn't win
and evil didn't lose, but evil had a horrible time
and wound up traumatized enough that it quit its job.

(01:07:55):
So that's like the best case scenario. You're never going
to break up the big company because they have all
the mon to fight you, but you can make the
CEO like not want to do his job anymore. Sort
of sort of the Vietcong Yeah lawsuit, Yes, famous famous
Viet Cong analogs the US Department of Justice. There's always

(01:08:20):
a bigger fish. That's always a bigger, bigger fish. Yeah,
all right, So Andrew, that's the end of part one
for the day you wanted? What a story? What a
tale you got? You get any pluggables to plug? Oh? Yeah,
just uh you know, you know, as this racist. We

(01:08:43):
are independent. Now I don't remember if we said that
at the top, but uh yeah, I gotta go to
suboptimal pods dot com and you'll see how to subscribe
to you know, premium shows and stuff and whatever. See
that's exciting because in part two we are going to
have to ask, oh is that racist? A couple of times.

(01:09:03):
Can't wait? Uh hot m