Summary
Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates Season 1, Episode 2 delves deeper into his thought process when growing up and his desire to eradicate Polio.
This recap of Netflix Series Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates Season 1 Episode 2 contains points specific to the documentary. You can read the recap of the previous episode by clicking these words.
Another fact about Bill Gates — Episode 2 of Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates reveals he’s on a mission to eradicate Polio. While the Western world was rid of the disease due to the availability of the vaccination years ago, Bill Gates analyses Nigeria like a hawk. It’s common in that country, with outbreaks ebbing and flowing.
Episode 2 feels way more insightful than the previous chapter. It describes Bill’s high college life and how he embarked on creating Microsoft; how one of his best friends died, and amongst the adversity and grief, he buckled down trying to solve a school problem — scheduling the students, which presents a range of complexities. We are also introduced to Paul Allen, another best friend of Bill, and co-founder of Microsoft later.
What’s fascinating is how incredibly messy the entire ordeal was; I always imagined Bill and Paul having clean offices and the most organized environments, but the description of their working situation at the start sounds like a group of teenagers living in student-like conditions. Episode 2 hints how Bill Gates enjoyed coming out of his comfort zone when Paul encouraged him to, but eventually he wanted to put his head down, while Paul was distracted by other ventures like watching NASA launch a shuttle. The entire business-building sounded optimistic but nightmarish at the same time.
Episode 2 is directed with overlapping subjects which works well — it flits between Bill’s progress in eradicating Polio and his career timeline of creating the first piece of software and eventually developing a partnership with IBM. Interestingly, every time there’s an emotional component to the story, Bill’s interviews go quiet and other family and friends in the docuseries speak on behalf of Bill on his pain. There’s almost a suggestion that Bill does not like discussing his emotions.
I curiously watched how Bill mapped out Nigeria and wanted to form a strategy to tackle Polio purely by data alone. Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates Season 1, Episode 2 is probably the closest we will ever get to figuring out how Bill’s brain works, despite his amused wife laughing at how absurd that sounds.
You can read the recap of Episode 3 by clicking these words
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