Bill Gates Is Saving the World, One Toilet at a Time

Bill Gates in 1985. By Deborah Feingold/Getty Images. I never thought I’d be discussing poop with Bill Gates. And yet here I was, listening to one of the world’s great tech minds expound on “the chemistry of human feces.” Finding innovative solutions to grave global dilemmas is one of Gates’s major obsessions, and few things are more problematic in the sprawling megacities of the developing world than sanitation. While most of the über-rich busy themselves buying art, property, and elections, “Bill chooses to spend a lot of his time thinking about shit,” filmmaker Davis Guggenheim said with a chuckle. The director of critically lauded documentaries like An Inconvenient Truth and It Might Get Loud, Guggenheim met Gates while shooting the education doc Waiting for “Superman” and decided that the Microsoft entrepreneur and billionaire philanthropist would make an ideal subject. Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates, the resulting three-part documentary series, drops on Netflix September 20. Guggenheim might well have called it An Inconvenient Poop. Like his Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about Al Gore ’s crusade against global warming, the new series sets out to educate its audience through the portrait of one man with a larger-than-life mission. “When I pitched it to Netflix, I told that executive: I’m going to do the best episode you’ve ever seen about toilets,” Guggenheim recalled. That made them laugh—but the director was deadly serious about getting viewers as absorbed by the challenge of solving some of the world’s most intractable problems as Gates is. The series delves into three of the huge issues that Gates and his wife, Melinda Gates , are trying to solve with their foundation: polio eradication, climate change, and improving sanitation to prevent needless child deaths. Gates sounded slightly puzzled as he pointed out that Guggenheim chose “not to focus […]

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