Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates (2019)

[ER]

This is on Netflix now and it disappointed me, but I have to admit I didn't get through all of it so it might turn better later on.

I thought this was going to be a documentary about Bill Gates, his life, and his way of thinking, his brain, in other words, that's how it was advertised, and in some places it was just that, and those bits were interesting, but then Lucy Netflix pulled the football out from under me again and did what it so often does anymore and went into preachy mode about subjects that I wasn't interested in, including in episode one long, LONG segments (plural) about diarrhea.

Yup, that was the main subject of the episode: diarrhea.

Namely how it kills so many people, especially children, in the "developing" world today, and how the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is working to combat it.

I have nothing but praise for that work (all except the tiny reptile corner of my brain that mutters Malthusian doctrines at me about overpopulation and competition for global resources) and wouldn't have begrudged a mention or two, but I sat there watching and thought, yep, okay, diarrhea kills....yes, okay, yes....uh-huh, diarrhea, yeah, okay, yes, it's bad and....oh look, there's footage of men shoveling out a communal latrine with raw waste leaking down the sides....hey, look, there's even more footage of raw sewage being poured into a stream....look, still more brown gooshy fly-swarmed close-ups of what these Third World folks just ate....and gosh, another segment showing poop splashed all over the floor and walls of the open-air privvy children and adults have to use, yeppers, point made and then some.

If this had been a drinking game, I'd have been legally drunk ten minutes in with every use of the d-word.

So I finally I turned it off and I may finish it another time but I think I'll be fast forwarding to the parts about Microsoft and Gates' genius ("more a Rockefeller than an Edison") and I've seen enough close-ups of watery excrement to re-activate my teeange eating disorder for a while.

Really disappointing!

[ER]

I finished this three-parter and take back everything negative I said about it. Sure, it dwelled on poo a little long in the first part but from there it went on to be everything I was hoping for, an insight into Bill Gates, whom I truly consider among the great innovators of human history, and this ended up being a great show. I recommend it.