Bill Gates' daughter Phoebe says she has lost friends due to vaccine conspiracies

When it comes to conspiracy theories and misinformation, Bill Gates can sometimes shrug off the “wild” stuff – but his daughter Phoebe warns: You have to be careful what you say online.

In the new Netflix documentary series by the billionaire and philanthropist What's next? The future with Bill GatesBill, 68, says his “incredible success” with Microsoft made him realize that “there would be all sorts of opinions about him,” but since he turned to charity full-time, things have “really gotten crazy.”

But as is clear from the beginning of the episode about internet misinformation – when he is asked to read a series of conspiracy theories about him – sometimes the things that are out there are so far-fetched that it is impossible to take them too seriously.

A plan to force people to eat insects to weaken the lower class? Bill replies, “I would feel bad if I did that.”

What would it be like to be part of a “reptilian” race of shape-shifting lizards? He shrugs: “Someone told me about it.”

Regarding a conspiracy that he and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates have been replaced by clones, he jokes with a smile that Melinda is “still a real person” while he is “doing the best I can.”

Larry Cohen, CEO of Gates Ventures, Bill's private services company, puts it this way: The philanthropist is “pretty thick-skinned.”

“Some of the stuff is wild, so wild that it almost makes him laugh,” Cohen says in the episode. “But when you talk to Bill, I think misinformation is confusing him incredibly because it's still not clear how we're going to address the problem.”

When he speaks to his 22-year-old daughter Phoebe, he asks her if she has “ever come across any crazy misinformation” about him.

Her answer? “All the time.”

“I've even had friends cut off contact with me because of these vaccine rumors,” she adds, referring to baseless theories about her father, the COVID-19 vaccine and microchips – the origins of which are explored in detail in the episode.

“I don’t know, I need to learn more because in my naivety I still believe that digital communication can be a force that brings us together and enables us to have a reasonable debate,” Bill Phoebe replies.

The Microsoft co-founder's youngest daughter also gently points out that she doesn't think her father “really” understands online life: “It's not really logic and facts that prevail.”

“People want to escape from everyday life, they want to laugh, they want an exciting video, they want to be taken out of boring reality,” says the young Stanford University graduate.

But the entertainment value doesn't explain why some conspiracy theories take on such great proportions. “It's just madness, and who promotes something like that?” asks Bill.

He notes that after the rampant spread of misinformation during the COVID pandemic, it is “scary” to think about what would happen “if we had a pandemic that was ten times worse.”

But Phoebe quickly stops her father from saying anything more – otherwise “they’ll think you’re causing it,” she says.

“Right, I’m working on it,” he replies, laughing.

Although Phoebe herself laughs as she tells the production team to “edit it out,” she adds, “You can't tell people something is going to happen” because “when it does happen, they'll be like, 'Ohhhhh!'” – and the “short video” of those comments “will be everywhere” and get “millions of views.”

Speaking to PEOPLE ahead of the show's release, Bill said that working on the Netflix project gave him a “real chance to talk about issues that I care about and have opinions on, and I learned a lot.” Other episodes explore artificial intelligence, global warming and more.

And in a new post on his blog Gates Notes, he wrote that he hopes to “inspire more people to have conversations about these important issues.”

“We should not underestimate what happens when people work together and focus on a problem. I am confident that brilliant people – especially young people – will come up with great solutions,” he wrote. “It is a critical time, but if we engage, there is a path to progress.”

What's next? The future with Bill Gates is currently streaming on Netflix.