Communication Professor Reacts to Bill Gates Interview on PBS

i'm going to react to your recent controversial interview with bill gates on pbs it was supposed to be about vaccines but she asked gates about his relationship with jeffrey ebstein my feedback is not a criticism of gates as a person i'm just going to look at his specific behaviors in this interview for educational purposes to see what makes his communication come off as hinky that's a word that police officers and other people use to describe somebody who's acting nervous suspicious but it's difficult to articulate exactly why something seems off we're going to consider gates past behavior as a baseline to look at his answers about epstein i already watched his answers about vaccines from earlier in the interview to see how he would normally act and this clip starts 80 percent of the way into the conversation when judy woodruff changes the topic and starts asking questions about epstein the same the same focus i also want to ask you about something else in the public arena it was reported at that time that you had a number of meetings with jeffrey epstein who when you met him 10 years ago he was convicted of soliciting prostitution from minors what did you know about him when you were meeting with him as you've said yourself in the hopes of raising money uh you know i had dinners with him uh i regret doing that he had relationships with uh people he said you know would give to global health which is a uh interest i have you know not nearly enough philanthropy goes in that direction uh you know those meetings were were a mistake they didn't result in uh what he purported and i cut them off you know that goes back a long time ago now there's you know so there's nothing new on that it was reported first he didn't answer the question she asked him about what he knew about epstein when they first met he replied i had dinners with him his answer is misaligned and that's the first sign of trouble he's also giving off some very distracting body language he's shifting in his chair he's wringing his hands and playing with his fingers his eyes and his head are all over the place our baseline showed us that he did some of these behaviors here and there in his previous answers and now he's doing a whole collection of them all at once and that uptick shows that something has changed that also shows a misalignment between his words and his non-verbal cues so if we were playing poker with bill gates we'd say he's giving off tells and in the field of communication we call this misalignment nonverbal leakage there's something more going on in his mind than what his words are saying he looks bottled up as if he's restraining himself from saying more we then have two layers of misalignment woodruff's question and his answer misaligned and his own words and nonverbal cues misaligned so that's a double dose of hinky behavior we also see a sharp increase in his disfluency his baseline answers were averaging a filler word every 6.7 seconds that's already a lot his top two fillers are ah and you know during his epstein answers though he used a filler every 2.6 seconds that's a huge increase he's also repeating words and restarting more frequently he said those meetings were were a mistake theirs you know so there's nothing new on that and he's pausing frequently in the middle of sentences to search for words instead of pausing at the end those disfluencies are all signs of conversational trouble it's like his mind is the inside of a maraca and he's fighting to keep it organized meet with him over several years and that in other words a number of meetings what did you do when you found out about his background well you know i said i regretted having those dinners uh and there's nothing absolutely nothing new on that he's obviously shaking his head before the question is done he's agitated more importantly he didn't answer this question either he just repeated the same answer he already gave his replies were also almost exactly the same he said i had dinners with him i regret doing that the first time that's nine words for woodruff's next question he said i have said i regretted having those dinners that's eight words to the first question he responded there's so there's nothing new on that seven words to the next question he said there's nothing absolutely nothing new on that that's eight words this to me sounds exactly like the type of talking points that a lawyer prepared for him on a note card this is not how transparent people talk and it's not even how he talks in his earlier answers in the interview he used that as a baseline he used longer sentences and gave helpful details he's also here repeating the use of the word dinner that specific word sounds calculated to me he might be doing what the communication researchers in crisis call minimization to explain things in a way that make them seem less harmful the statement there's nothing new on that also sounds like minimization to me one way police interrogators establish if a suspect is telling the truth is to compare a suspect's answers with information that the police can verify in another way so if a suspect is lying about or downplaying basic verifiable facts like where they were they could be lying about even more important information that police have not yet verified so the question is does the word dinner accurately describe the various meetings that he had with epstein or is he minimizing i'm not a detective but if there's verifiable information out there that you know that establishes that they were these are more than just dinners then post a comment below about that but even if we put aside the fact that he's just repeated his answer here let's talk about an important concept called quantity that's a conversational maxim a concept that says a normal conversation will flow well when people provide an adequate amount of information quantity it's a sign of conversational trouble when somebody gives too much or too little information for the situation so i looked at all of his answers earlier and his answers about epstein are less than half the normal length his first several answers in the interview provide a baseline of a 46 second average his ebstein answers average just 21 seconds he clammed up all of a sudden and that's another reason he comes across as hinky is there a lesson for you for anyone else looking looking at this well he's dead so uh you know in general you always have to be careful and you know the you know i'm i'm very proud of what we've done in philanthropy very proud of the work of the foundation uh you know that's that's what i get up every day and focus on so she asks him is there a lesson and to me this should have been a very easy question but again his answer is way off he replied well he's dead this breaks the conversational maxim of relevance his answer does not logically correspond to what she asked him and that's why this moment is the weirdest one in the interview as the questions get easier his answers get less connected he then pivots to his work with the gates foundation and in crisis communication research we call this technique bolstering when companies and politicians get accused of wrongdoing they often try to refocus the conversation on all the good things they're doing to bolster their image so he says i'm a philanthropist i'm very generous now bolstering like this is not an omission of guilt but he is using it as a way to change the subject instead of answering a very basic question that he was asked so big picture i don't know what really happened with gates and ebscein i'm not evaluating him as a person but the way he handled these questions were really high on the hinky scale and if you want to present yourself like a credible person this interview is not an example of how to do that well so what's your point of view post that below i'm not going to debate you but i'll read what you have to say and by the way who else should i react to let me know that below too thanks god bless and i will see you soon

Channel: Communication Coach Alex Lyon

Views: 3,123,090

Rating: 4.8777008 out of 5

Keywords: communication training, leadership skills, communication skills, presentation skills, communication coach, Alex Lyon, communication professor, communication professor reaction, bill gates interview, bill gates interview pbs, bill gates jeffrey epstein interview, jeffrey epstein, judy woodruff, bill gates, bill gates body language, bill gates awkward interview

Id: 79ExQWKb2vA

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/farkinga]

Wow, Gates comes across really poorly in that interview.

I mean, that question about whether there's any lesson and he says: [Epstein] is dead.

I haven't been particularly convinced by the revelations about business executives who worked for Microsoft and Epstein. It does seem like Epstein could have played a role in getting Gates to donate to universities - and that's likely to generate a paper trail. But when it comes to Gates' misdeeds, I haven't seen much that's convincing.

But he sure comes across as having secrets, in this interview. I mean, that's shockingly bad...

Some implications

So okay. Then let's assume Gates got down with Epstein.

The number of fresh accounts coming around reddit to amplify the Gates-Epstein connection suggests to me that there's money behind the effort. This is to say: I believe somebody is paying to specifically broadcast the Gates-Epstein connection.

We can safely assume there is a real possibility that Gates kompromat exists. This PBS interview was sketchy af. Whether there actually is kompromat is another question - but this also seems possible.

Whoever is paying to amplify the Gates connection probably has access to this kompromat - or is at least able to pretend that they do. Otherwise, there isn't much reason to invest the money it takes to amplify this sketchy relationship.

So whoever is doing this either doesn't like Bill Gates or wants to gain leverage over Gates for some reason.

Honestly, this is all more interesting than I expected... But also, I'm disappointed in Bill Gates - because I now think he has a guilty conscience.

[u/yunibyte]

He gets so Mr. Burns with his hands, tenting his fingers and stuff.

He doesn’t want to get into why/how his donations to MIT went to Joichi Ito and Media Lab for crypto development and research at the time he was hanging out with Epstein.

[u/satinwerewolf]

Nice, I came here to post this. I’d love to see BG get more pies to his mug.

[u/iamregarded]

man with fake job reacts to man with fake job