Catherine Raynes: Precipice and Billionaire, Nerd Saviour, King: Bill Gates and his Quest to Shape Our World

Precipice by Robert Harris 

Summer 1914. A world on the brink of catastrophe. 

In London, 26-year-old Venetia Stanley – aristocratic, clever, bored, reckless – is having a love affair with the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, a man more than twice her age. He writes to her obsessively, sharing the most sensitive matters of state. 

As Asquith reluctantly leads the country into war with Germany, a young intelligence officer is assigned to investigate a leak of top secret documents – and suddenly what was a sexual intrigue becomes a matter of national security that will alter the course of political history. 

 

Billionaire, Nerd Saviour, King: Bill Gates and his Quest to Shape Our World by Anupreeta Das 

Few billionaires have been in the public eye for as long, and in as many guises, as Bill Gates. At first heralded as a tech visionary, the Microsoft cofounder next morphed into a ruthless capitalist, only to change yet again when he fashioned himself into a global do-gooder. Along the way, Gates forever influenced how we think about tech founders, as the products they make and the ideas they sell continue to dominate our lives. Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, he also set a new standard for high-profile, billionaire philanthropy. But there is more to Gates's story, and here, Das's revelatory reporting shows us that billionaires have secrets and philanthropy can have a dark side. 

Drawing upon hundreds of interviews with current and former employees of the Gates Foundation, Microsoft, academics, nonprofits, and those with insight into the Gates universe, Das delves into Gates's relationships with Warren Buffett, Jeffrey Epstein, Melinda French Gates, and others, to uncover the truths behind the public persona. In telling Gates's story, Das also provides a new way to think about how billionaires wield their power, manipulate their image, and pursue philanthropy to become heroes, repair damaged reputations, and direct policy to achieve their preferred outcomes. 

Insightful, illuminating, and timely, Billionaire, Nerd, Savior, King is an important story of money and government, wealth and power, and media and image, and the ways in which the world's richest people hold us in their thrall. 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from newstalk SEDB.

Speaker 2 (00:12):
News Talk said b Katharine Rains has our book picks
for this weekend and is with us now Yoda morning Jack. Okay,
let's begin this morning with Precipice by Robert Harris.

Speaker 3 (00:23):
So this novel is based on the original love letters
between then British Prime Minister has Asquith and Vanicia Stanley.
So you get this very intimate insight into their love
affair because the letters weren't only about love but also
and trust. But they actually boarded on treason as their
correspondence took place during World War One. And so the
book itself begins in the summer of nineteen fourteen and

(00:46):
in London, twenty six year old Vanicia Stanley is part
of this group of very aristocratic young people who like
to party, but she has the secret she's having an
affair with Asquith, and he's married, he's in his early sixties,
and they write to each other constantly, three times a day,
and then as the wardrobe draws closer, he starts to
share some incredibly sensitive information with her in top secret

(01:07):
coummits from various sources, including Believe it or Not government
battle plans, and eventually the British government wants to work
out where these leaks are coming from, and this guy
Vandema is tasked with finding the source of it, and
he discovers this love affair and this obsessive nature of
Asquith in their relationship, and of course it's a matter
of national security. And so what you have is this

(01:28):
book that's a mix of fact and fiction because Harris
uses the actual letters and telegrams, athquests and Venetia sent
to each other, and so you can see him constantly
being distracted from the office of Prime Minister and some Yeah,
it's just as a bizarre and almost unbelievable story. And
the letters from Asquith are at his actual words, hers

(01:49):
are invented because he destroyed her correspondence, and just this
anonymity that he manages to do things around things. You know,
he walks around unrecognized, and he rarely seems to realize
that he's out of his depth his role of Prime Minister,
and his wife Margo seems to be the really strong,
ambitious one in the relationship. You know, he comes to
this this role is through her networking, and Vanesshia herself

(02:10):
is very interesting. She's clearly intelligent, she's bored, she wants
to she's of the lifestyle that she's living. And so
the beginning of this affair is she's able to use
her mind and she seems to enjoy her stuff at
the start, but it's changed. He a fascinating read and
glimpse into history.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Great. Okay, so it's a novel, but it sounds.

Speaker 3 (02:27):
Yeah, based on those historical documents.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yeah, yeah, okay, So that's Precipice by Robert Harris. I'm
excited about your next book, Billionaire nerd Savior King Bill
Gates in His Quest to Shape Our World by Anu
Preta dars So.

Speaker 3 (02:41):
Dars is the finance eder of the New York Times.
So she's clearly had a bit to do with gill
Gates overline, and so she looks at a more holistic
story than just him. So money and government and wealth
and power and media and image. You know, the fortunes
of the richest people in the world, and with wealth,
of course comes great power. And often in our society,
billionaires have found their way around, you know, years of

(03:04):
systems of democratic oversight. They dodge tax has been politics
and create monopolies and yeah, it's fascinating. So she starts
with him in nineteen seventy five as a young man
with his school friend Paul Allen writing the first loads
of code for the company we all know now as Microsoft,
and that blooms and talks about Gates as America's youngest

(03:27):
billionaire at thirty one, focus probably a little bit too
much on how nerdy he is. But then as Microsoft
competition starts to grow, and he excludes products from software platforms.
And then there's the anti trust legislation in the States
in the nineties that's used against Microsoft. So he starts
to move away from the country a company sorry, And
then him and his wife Melinda decide to launch the

(03:51):
Gates Foundation, and they apply a lot of data and results,
same practices which he excelled at in Microsoft. And it's
quite interesting as he pledges other billionaires to pledge money
and this light, massive, filant, tropic enterprise and they have
prevented millions of deaths, you know, the billions of dollars
into fighting AIDS and tuberculosis, and their vaccine alliance which

(04:12):
is vaccinated almost half of the world's children. But it
also talks about his other contacts like Jeffrey Epstein when
in twenty nineteen he admitted that he had met him
on several occasions and he said that he was introduced
to them by the aim of raising funds for his foundation.
So it varies, you know, but it also talks about
his other contemporaries like Warren Buffet and the public perception

(04:34):
of billionaires. But it varies away from being a typical
biography and interviews people very much on the fringes of Gates' life,
and so he gets this very differing viewpoint of him.
And yeah, as I doesn't read as a typical biography,
and it jumps around and talks about him and his
wife as ex wife now and early life and contemporaries.
So it's quite an interesting viewpoint and to the world
of a billionaire.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Ah, sounds so good. Great, Thank you, Catherine. Okay, that's
Billionaire Nerds Savior King Bill Gates and his quest to
shape our world. And Catherine's first book is Precipice. That
one's by Robert Harris. Both of those will be up
on the News Talks the website

Speaker 1 (05:07):
For more From Saturday Morning with Jack Tame listen live
to News Talks ed B from nine am Saturday, or
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