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Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates
2019 · TV series · documentary · 1 season
Created by Davis Guggenheim
Take a trip inside the mind of Bill Gates as the billionaire opens up about those who influenced him and the audacious goals he's still pursuing.
4 positive2 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Something I remember from Netflix's documentary Inside Bill's Brain- He reads really fast and synthesizes really well...That's a gift to read 150 pages an hour...90 percent retention.
I follow his lists/ recommendations and in the process have read some very good fiction/non-fiction books.
In the documentary 'inside bill's brain', you hear that regulatory problems led his team of physicists to look to China for a manufacturing partner and a location to build a new reactor (which the trade war between US and China also squashed). If they could have built it on US soil, they would have.
I suggest you watch the documentary Inside Bill's Brain https://www.netflix.com/title/80184771
Bill is way too invested in this stuff for it to be a cynical PR effort. And he himself states it was his mother who inspired him to give: https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-mother-inspired-philanthropy-2015-5 If Bill's giving was a cynical PR play, why would he be pushing other HNWs to give through the giving pledge? Wouldn't it be better to discourage them from giving so he looks better by comparison?
Note also that a few years ago when Zuck pledged to donate 99% of his money, the internet erupted in incoherent anger. Similarly whenever the news covers tech philanthropy, the angle is always "well really this is something that the government should be doing, the fact that it is being handled by private philanthropy is kinda problematic". The giver's generosity is inevitably taken for granted. For the supposed PR benefits of philanthropy there is a shocking lack of good PR. Far more scorn is heaped upon wealthy philanthropists than rich people who just quietly buy yachts and stuff. Your reaction of "giving is just a cynical ploy" seems to be way more common they "hey, they are giving, that's pretty cool" in all the online discussions I have seen of billionaire giving.
BTW, did demonization of wall street in the wake of the 2008 crash trigger a wave of philanthropic giving from them?
He also talks about it in the Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain.
Warren Buffett famously said to some students, "Read 500 pages like this every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it."
Charlie Munger is as much of a reader as Buffett. He's especially fond of biographies, according to the book The Joy of Compounding. His children call him "a book with legs." https://fs.blog/2013/05/the-buffett-formula/
From googling these guys just now, I found there are a lot of other examples. Mark Cuban is one, crediting a lot of his early success to reading and saying he still reads over three hours a day: https://blogmaverick.com/2011/04/07/shark-tank-success-motivation/
The 2019 documentary "Inside Bill's Brain" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCv29JKmHNY) definitely focused a part on how Bill still hates talking about this deposition.
He makes it very clear in that documentary how much he regrets that he wore his disdain for the antitrust suit on his sleeve, as it played directly into the prosecutor's hands.
Bill Gates and Warren Buffet apparently know each other pretty well, maybe they can even be called friends, and Buffet trusts Gates enough to give his foundation $3.6 billion.
Imho the Netflix documentation "Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates" is worth watching for a variety of reasons.