Dr. Elise Wang, in an episode of The Future With Bill Gates tells a story so I’ll tell one. Once upon a time, there was a man we call Bill Gates, who dreamed of a better future, but he wasn’t the only one, as there were others like him who dreamed of things to make lives better. Better, to some, means, using AI to help shortages like the lack of doctors in countries in South Asia. It means repeating accomplishments of the past, like eradicating diseases like malaria and polio like we did with smallpox. These dreams for the future exist because of a less ideal present, one full of anger and income inequality. People also urged him to act more quickly because a world greedy for energy is a world inching towards ruin.

Jason Zeldes, Morgan Neville, and three of their friends collaborate in What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates. A big portion of this docu series has sit down interviews with people like Wang and NYT columnist Kevin Roose. Those obscure luminaries of their field are there not to subvert but to counterbalance Gates’ optimism towards the future. Sure, AI is there to tell Bill Gates to do push ups, but they’re also trying to steal your man. Thankfully though, the show doesn’t just deliver soft jabs on Gates, as Gates playfully fights back at his detractors. I did not expect Gates to use Netflix to clap back against Charlamagne tha God, but here we are. We all know that this isn’t the biggest beef in the hip hop world but it is the funniest.

The gentle ribbing in What’s Next? The Future With Bill Gates goes back and forth and with subtlety. Or maybe not, as the fourth episode, ‘Can You Be Too Rich’ literally asks the titular question to Bill Gates. The episode is ambivalent towards that question, as he and fellow billionaire Mark Cuban praise capitalism in Turtle Island. And of course, the person countering that statement championing capitalism is another New York Times investigative reporter, Andrea Elliott. I like the idea of expanding the interview pool but Elliott does have things to say about the future. She parses out the world ‘income inequality’, a present and future problem linking the very poor with the very rich. The docuseries isn’t saying anything revolutionary but it’s right in saying that to make it tomorrow we should act now.