Kurzgesagt receiving $570,000 from Bill Gates doesn't make them biased.
Though, I have some slight concerns with their research process for one particular video.
Kurzgesagt receiving $570,000 from Bill Gates doesn’t automatically make them biased. I’ll tell you why, but let me tell you the story first. (Don’t worry, this isn’t some tin foil hat “Bill gates is the boogeyman!” piece, or even a story about “bad guys.” )
This gets a little long so let me break down what we’re going to cover:
・Kurzgesagt, which has received funding from Bill Gates, has been working with Our World in Data, which has received funding from Bill gates, since at least 2016 when they made a video sponsored by Bill Gates.
・To make their recent video on meat and climate change, 4/5 of the experts Kurzgesagt consulted with are of Oxford University and have written articles or research justifying the reduction of meat (or cow rearing) for the health of the planet.
*Note: The little plant symbol doesn’t necessarily mean they are vegan, but they advocate for reducing meat consumption.
・One of Kurzgesagt’s experts, Tara Garnett founded Oxford University’s Food Research Climate Network (FRCN). FRCN is a partner of the Eat Lancet Commission which, with the help of a Norwegian billionaire, is advocating for people to eat a “planetary health” diet that is about 90% vegan. Tara Garnett was an author on a large paper attempting to justify the EAT Lancet Commission’s mostly vegan diet.
・Multiple studies justifying this planetary health diet are funded by Bill Gates. Bill Gates has invested in multiple plant-based protein sources since 2013 and would stand to profit directly from the public assuming the best way to stop climate change is to stop eating meat.
・I’m not trying to say Kurzgesagt is biased, I think they work very hard to try and do good research. However, given the circumstances they’ve arrived in, I’m not surprised that their research process for this particular video led to their conclusion.
As you’ve noticed from my posts I’ve been breaking down this video of Kurzgesagt’s where they claim meat is one of the biggest drivers of climate change, yet didn’t provide near enough support for that claim. It also stood out to me that they chose to make it sound like people who talk about the fact that cows can turn useless grass are just ‘marketers.’
Quote from their vid at 7:47: "While the idea of cows turning useless grass into steak is nice, it is part of a marketing lie." (I’ve written here why that doesn’t make any sense)
Something about this particular wording seemed odd. It didn’t feel like the neutral tone I’ve come to expect from Kurzgesagt, but more like they were trying to use the bias game to support their argument. This got me curious: I wonder if there’s any reason Kurzgesagt would be extra invested in this topic?
Kurzgesagt has many income streams, but a quick search revealed that they’ve also received $570,000 from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bear with me, let me explain why this is actually relevant. Again, I’m not just saying Bill Gates is the boogeyman or that this is all some big evil scheme. Nope. Just that Bill Gates is very good at winning at capitalism and building favorable ties with media companies. Here’s the quick breakdown:
Bill Gates has given $319 Million to Media Outlets
Some notable ones(S):
・NPR - $24 Million
・The Guardian - $12 Million
・BBC - $3.6 Million
・CNN - $3.6 Million
・Al-Jazeera $1 Million
・Kurzgesagt $570,000
・PBS $500,000
As early as 2010, the Columbia Journalism review wrote a two-part series that examined, in part, the millions of dollars going toward PBS NewsHour, which it found to reliably avoid critical reporting on Gates.
In 2011, the Seattle Times wrote a piece titled Does Gates’ funding of media taint objectivity? They pointed out some very concerning ways:
To garner attention for the issues it cares about, the foundation has invested millions in training programs for journalists. It funds research on the most effective ways to craft media messages. Gates-backed think tanks turn out media fact sheets and newspaper opinion pieces. Magazines and scientific journals get Gates money to publish research and articles. Experts coached in Gates-funded programs write columns that appear in media outlets from The New York Times to The Huffington Post, while digital portals blur the line between journalism and spin.
Seattle Times is saying not only are the media outlets receiving funding from Gates, but the training of some of the journalists doing the reporting are funded by Gates and even the research they report on may be funded by Gates.
Bill Gates has been investing in various plant-based companies since 2013
・Bill Gates has been invested in plant-based egg substitute in 2013(S)
Beyond Egg (now JustEgg) received $800 million in funding from investors including Bill Gates, Marc Benioff, and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s Vulcan Capital
・Bill Gates invested in a protein made from microbes in 2020(S)
Bill Gates and Al Gore combined contributed $80 million.
・Bill Gates participated in a $75 million funding round for a non-animal dairy in 2021 (S)
・Invested in Beyond Meat, amount unknown.
・Invested $50 million into Impossible Foods. (S)
・Participated in a funding round for Upside Foods that totaled at $400 million. (S)
・Participated in a funding round for Motif Foodworks totaling at $226 million.(S)
Not to mention Gates has been blaming the cows for climate change for a while now.
Not that someone can’t be right and make money off their being right… but, it’s a simple fact that were people to be told that cows are bad for the planet and we should all be eating meatless protein, it would benefit Gates’ financially.
Gates has at one point promoted his plant-based meat via large Youtubers. (See Mark Rober’s Feeding Bill Gates a Fake Burger (to save the world) )
But is Kurzgesagt really influenced by Gates?
OK so there’s a bit more to Bill Gates that I’ll cover later, but let’s get back to Kurzgesagt for now.
I posted a slightly unreserved tweet about Kurzgesagt’s funding after I learned about it.
At first, I thought maybe I jumped the gun too soon because after all, we don’t know what exactly that money was for. It could have been for something totally unrelated to their meat video! The question is whether we have reason to wonder if Kurzgesagt’s views on climate change could be influenced by Gates. Well… their video Can YOU Fix Climate Change? was sponsored directly by the personal blog of Bill Gates…
The article What you can do to fight climate change by Gates recommends you eat plant-based burgers and eat less meat and dairy.
Let me point out that Kurzgesagt doesn’t necessarily need the Gates money - they have multiple revenue streams. I honestly don’t think Kurzgesagt was just told what to say by some Gates lackeys. I do think that Kurzgesagt tries their best to do good research. You can tell from their extensive Sources & Further Reading links provided in the description of their videos that they’re putting in the work.
So I took a look at the Sources & Further Reading for their meat video. At the very top of it you’ll see they say their video was based in part on the work of Joseph Poore from Oxford University’s 2018 paper. They also thank the following experts for helping them craft the video:
Hannah Ritchie - Oxford University, Our World in Data
Joseph Poore - Oxford University
Tara Garnett - Oxford University, Food Climate Research Network founder
Walter Fraanje - Oxford University, Food Climate Research Network
Matthew Hayek - New York University
Hannah Ritchie, Joseph Poore, Walter Fraanje and Tara Garnett are all from Oxford University.
Kurzgesagt Advisor #1 - Hannah Ritchie
Advisor for Kurzgesagt #1 Hannah Ritchie is the Head of Research at OurWorldinData, which was produced in partnership with Oxford University. Let’s take a moment to talk about Our World in Data because Kurzgesagt has teamed up with them (and specifically with Hannah Ritchie) many times to produce their videos.
-Kurzgesagt was collaborating with OurWorldinData as early as 2016, working with their Max Roser to make a video sponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
-Bill Gates released a video featuring Max Roser of OurWorldinData on his personal youtube channel.
-OurWorldinData has received 1.8 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Despite the conflicts of interest, I’m not saying the OurWorldinData data is bunk or fudged or anything like that. I’ve used Our World in Data in the past and have no reason not to continue considering the data they provide. However, if you go into parse data with the mindset that a vegan diet is best for the planet… it may change what you look for, how you interpret the data available and the conclusions you make. You can choose to focus on certain data and simply not be aware of others. The head researcher of OurWorldinData, Hannah Ritchie, is the Business Development Manager for a meat-free protein company, and has written several articles like these:
1)If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares - title self explanatory.
2)What are the carbon opportunity costs of our food? - Explains how while going vegan will have the biggest impact, reducing your beef consumption is the ticket to reducing your personal carbon footprint.
3)Breath: it’s time to rationalise respiration in livestock emissions - She’s trying to make the case that we should reinterpret data on livestock respiration such that livestock would be seen as an even greater source of emissions (and that her non-meat protein is even more sustainable)
4)Less meat is nearly always better than sustainable meat, to reduce your carbon footprint - This article arguing less meat is always better is based on the data that comes Joseph Poore who is of the same university as Hannah Ritchie - Oxford University. I have written about several flaws with Poore’s study, but we can leave this for now.
Consider how the above table from Article 4 might be different if the following were taken into account:
-Article (4) compared protein output of foods with their carbon footprint, finding beef to rank very poorly. What about the nutrient output of foods? Were you to analyze that data, beef would appear more favorably and plant-foods less so.
-Plant foods are often poor in Lysine, a critical amino acid that people in developing countries often lack, leading to stunting of growth. What if article (4) was to look at lysine output of foods? Beef would appear more favorably here too.
-What if this article took into account that the tilling soil to make way for growing crops releases carbon dioxide? And that conventional growing of crops reduces soil organic matter, reducing the carbon that can be sucked out of the air and stored in the soil (sequestration)?
-What if the article took into account the fact that when cattle are managed properly, they can help revitalize the soil, increasing soil organic matter and increasing the amount of carbon that can be sequestered?
Those are just a few examples - I could go on, but I think you get my point.
I’m not saying Hannah Ritchie has ill intentions or that she’s ignoring data, just what she’s not aware of, or what the OurWorldinData team is not aware of may unintentionally bias the conclusions they make about the data.
Kurzgesagt advisors #2 - Joseph Poore
As mentioned a couple times now, Joseph Poore is famous for a 2018 paper he wrote that some plant-based folk seem to think is the “checkmate” to support their arguments for why a vegan diet is best for the planet. I talked about just a few of the many flaws with this paper on page 29 of the PDF here.
His research paper appeared in the “plant-based for athletes” documentary The Game Changers.
Poore is quite extreme with his analogies, likening feeding a cow grass to putting coal in a coal furnace.
He’s told The Guardian that “A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth…”
Unsurprisingly, Joseph Poore with Hannah Ritchie were behind the Vox video Why Beef is the Worst Food for the Climate
Kurzgesagt Advisor #3 & 4 - Tara Garnett, Walter Fraanje
Tara Garnett, founder of the Food Climate Research Network, published a paper via Oxford titled Grazed and Confused which tries to make the case for why even sustainable well managed grass fed beef is no good. The regenerative grazing movement has been a rock in the shoe of the plant-based folk because well managed livestock have the ability to reverse desertification and improve soil health, increasing the carbon sequestration of soil - literally pulling carbon dioxide out of the air. Grazed and Confused is a poor attempt at discrediting this movement. I will make a breakdown of this paper later, but the main point is the authors clearly don’t acknowledge the biological and ecological components of soil. For now, let’s focus on the Food Climate Research Network (FCRN) which Walter Fraanje is also a part of.
FCRN is a partner of the Bill Gates supported EAT Lancet which recommends a vegan diet for planetary health
The Food Climate Research Network is a partner of the EAT Lancet commission. (Tara Garnett is featured on their website) Norwegian billionaire Gunhild Stordalen is the founder and executive chair of EAT Lancet. EAT Lancet has formulated what they call the “Planetary Health Diet” that aims to invoke a “Great Food Transformation.” Simply put, this EAT Lancet commission is attempting to get people to eat an astonishingly low amount of animal foods.
Basically they want people to be vegan aside from something like half of a cheeseburger once per week. In fact, you are allowed to have about as much animal sourced protein as added sugars and, you are to have more unsaturated plant oils than animal sourced protein and dairy combined. With the onslaught of gut issues this would cause, maybe the real villain here is Big Toilet. What’s so bad about unsaturated plant oils? Don’t get me started… (Check this video of mine for context)
Dr. Zoe Harcombe has done a nice preliminary breakdown of why this diet is in fact nutritionally deficient.
Of course this diet needs a bit of scientific justification - some published research is in order to make it look legit. Tara Garnett was an author in a paper published in the Lancet justifying the need for a diet like the one EAT Lancet proposes. Remember how I mentioned earlier in this post about research being funded by Gates? Some lazy googling revealed that multiple published papers justifying the EAT Lancet diet(S,S2,S3,S4) are funded by Bill Gates.
Another article saying that the EAT-Lancet’s diet benefits are “significant and robust” had Marco Springmann of Oxford University as the first author. Marco has in the past called for a tax on meat. The second author, Ashkan Afshin, receives funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation.
Well, what else are you supposed to do with all that money?
Here’s the thing. Bill Gates is really fucking rich. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has given $375 Million to Oxford University, but he’s given money to almost 500 Universities. He’s given at least $15 million to Oxford for agricultural research and 12% of his university funding is for agricultural projects. So I mean it’s really hard to think of a way it’s “bad” that he gave $15M to Oxford University to make more efficient GMO rice. Seems like a decent approach to tackling worldwide hunger.
Another thing to do with a ton of money is to… make more money. Bill Gates famously bought up tons of farmland, racking his total land ownership up to 242,000 acres of farmland. This makes him the largest private farmland owner. Whether his land has anything to do with his meat-reduced vision for the future of food is yet to be seen. Apparently the reason he bought up that land is ‘because it’s a good investment.’
Kurzgesagt isn’t necessarily biased but they were a bit hypocritical in this one video
While the best way to get to the truth and further discussions in a productive way is to just stick to the data. Work with the argument, not the arguer.
The unfortunate thing is though, is a good bias argument is very compelling because it makes for a story. Jordan Peterson and other psychologists have talked about how the natural disposition is to see our life and the events that occur in the world as part of a story. When we learn about motives is when the characters of the story become alive. Simon Sinek wrote a book called Start with Why? where he explains the importance of letting people know your motives when you’re selling something. Sinek says “people don't buy what you do. People buy why you do it.” The motives are what is compelling - it’s about the story and why the characters do what they do.
For a while now, the plant-based advocates have been using the biased “bad actors” narrative, and it’s very persuasive.
As the name suggests, Kip Andersen’s 2014 Documentary Cowspiracy played the “they don’t want you to know” card pretty hard and suggested that the reason environmental groups like Greenpeace or the Sierra Club and others weren’t spreading the word that livestock was the biggest driver of climate change because “The Meat Industry™” paid them off. This documentary arguably started this whole idea (for the average person) that meat is a key driver of climate change.
Kip Andersen’s What the Health played a very similar narrative.
The Game Changers suggested the only reason people like meat so much is because of marketing, and that this marketing of meat was oh so similar to the nefarious marketing tactics of big Tobacco.
Ironically, Kip Andersen filmed an interview with himself and the Markegards, a rancher family who graze their cattle in a way that makes the grass healthier, increases soil organic matter, and increases the sequestration capacity of it. They explained in detail to Kip the harmonic interaction between the cow, the soil and the grass. With that long explanation in mind, they told Kip “…we don’t feel our livestock have a carbon footprint.” Yet Kip cut the film in way that after Kip asks what they do about their cows’ carbon footprint, you just hear them say they think they don’t have a carbon footprint. He cut out their long explanation so it appeared like these ranchers were just in denial or clueless about livestock’s impact on the environment.
Sounds like straight out of their own film: “What Kip Anderson doesn’t want you to know!”
The Game Changers producer James Cameron happens to be Vegan since 2012 and has a huge stake in a vegan alternative protein company.
The other day, I was watching a debate between Nina Teicholz, animal foods for nutrition proponent and author of the Big Fat Surprise, and vegan proponent David Katz. Before the debate, David Katz had made several disparaging remarks about Teicholz, calling her a “parasite of science,” saying she’s a “wingnut living in [her] mother’s basement.” And of course he played the bias card. He told the Huffington post that Nina must be biased because she’s here to make book sales, not interested in science.
Katz: “It matters that a journalist with a diet book to sell you…
And did I mention she has a diet book to sell you?”
Nina explained in the debate that she receives no money from industry, but it was very interesting to learn of Katz’s conflicts of interest from Nina:
Hershey paid Katz $731,000
Quaker Oats paid Katz $633,000
Katz wrote a column promoting Quaker Oats and mentioned the brand in his book
KIND Bars paid Katz $154,000 to be a Scientific Advisor
Katz wrote a HuffingtonPost column on KIND bars, telling people to “add a low-sugar KIND bar” to their bag.
Walnut Industry paid Katz $1,109,945
Katz wrote two HuffPo columns promoting walnuts without disclosing this.
Western Sugar Association—Katz was an expert witness (Law360)
So, when Kurzgesagt played the bias card by insinuating that people who acknowledge cows’ magical ability to turn junk grass into a nutritious piece of meat are just “marketers,” I got curious. Ironically, they turned out to be receiving a nice chunk of change from a man who stands to benefit plenty from the demonization of meat.
Now, I’m not even trying to say Kurzgesagt themselves are for sure biased. I’m not sure what their motivations for making that video was, but… if all your key experts for research are people who have mainly published pro plant-based articles and research and have ties with a Bill & Melinda Gates funded commission aiming to make the planet almost entirely vegan, the resulting video might be just a tad bit slanted against meat.
(Their video still presents interesting data that is worth considering, but frankly it’s misleading and they don’t sufficiently substantiate their conclusion.)
Everyone is biased
Hold on Joseph, aren’t you biased yourself? Sure I am. Everyone is biased.
(I’m a shill of Big Yarn btw)
You could say I’m biased because I eat meat and have made videos about the health benefits of meat and a video about why meat is not as bad for the planet as we thought. You could say I would be hesitant to admit Actually guys, I missed something! because it would be bad for my channel image. In fact, pretty much anyone who takes a stance on something could now be considered biased against the other side. After all, if I make another video on meat and the environment, it would be because I’m stubbornly “doubling down” on my message.
I receive money from LMNT for specific videos, so some people might say I’m biased about the benefits of electrolytes. Fair enough - that’s a conflict of interest if say I’m debating someone on whether a water only fast or a water plus salt and electrolytes fast is better.
Then if some billionaire who is sympathetic to the things presented on my channel wants to give me money simply to support my endeavors and promises no intervention in the content whatsoever, people could accuse me of bias. After all, I would unconsciously want to continue making content of that nature to hopefully secure another paycheck, right?
Everyone is biased in some way. Once you form an opinion, you’re more interested in data that supports that opinion. That’s how the brain works - it needs to be biased. It can’t just neutrally hold tons of disparate data points in its head or you’d never be able to make a decision.
So the real point is - As much as you can, stick to the data. Stick to the argument, try not to argue the arguer. If you notice that someone may be biased, it may give you reason to look at their data and arguments a lot closer, but don’t use that to make conclusion about their argument. You still have to do the work of investigating the claims. That’s what I tried to do by addressing the weak points of Kurzgesagt’s argument first (here and here) before talking about their potential conflict of interest. But sometimes, the bias story is pretty interesting.
What do you think about all of this?
Joseph, have you considered narrating these articles? Your voice and style of narration are an important part of what makes your videos so appealing. Does substack even allow for that? Looking forward to binge reading/listening to all your articles.
I knew you were a shill for the big yarn-ah industry. But seriously, these are some great points. It's hard to talk about subjects like these and remain neutral. Nobody wants to be labeled a conspiracy nut. That being said, if you follow the money you will eventually find the truth.