Bill Gates warns of a dark trend in his depressing annual letter. So here is a little deer guy who absolutely owns a rhino

Bill Gates released his annual letter on Friday and it was a bit worrying. The Microsoft co-founder titled his letter “Optimism with Footnotes.” The footnotes are grim, to say the least.

“My friends and colleagues often ask me how I can remain optimistic in a time with so many challenges and so much polarization. My answer is: I am always optimistic because I see what innovation accelerated by artificial intelligence will bring. But these days, my optimism comes with footnotes,” Gates wrote.

Gates points out that the world has regressed in 2025 in one very important way: the number of deaths of children under 5 years old.

“Over the past 25 years, these deaths have declined more rapidly than at any other time in history,” Gates wrote. “But in 2025, they increased for the first time this century, from 4.6 million in 2024 to 4.8 million in 2025, an increase driven by less support from rich to poor countries. This trend will continue unless we make progress in restoring aid budgets.”

Gates has previously warned of the destruction of USAID, calling out fellow billionaire Elon Musk specifically for taking a chainsaw to the federal government and destroying the foreign aid agency. If we can reverse the trend, Gates says humanity could get back on track.

“The next five years will be difficult as we try to get back on track and work to scale new life-saving tools. Yet, I remain optimistic about the long-term future. As difficult as the last year has been, I do not believe we will slip back into the dark ages. I believe that over the next decade, we will not only get the world back on track, but we will enter a new era of unprecedented progress,” Gates insisted.

If you want to read the full letteryou can do it, but you’ve probably read enough depressing crap this week, from Renee Good’s murder by an ICE agent in Minneapolis to Elon Musk’s robot creating child sexual abuse material.

Instead, why not take this moment to watch a video of a 30-pound deer confronting a 1.7-ton rhino? The deer is called Tata and the rhino is called Maruska, according to the Telegraph and they are at the Wroclaw Zoo in Poland.

Isn’t that a lot more fun than watching horror stories all day or reading an annual letter from some guy who keeps showing up in the Epstein Files? We thought so too. Until we noticed that people were wondering if the deer and rhino video was real. As far as we can tell, this is not AI, especially since AFP is a reputable international media outlet. The zoo also published the clip on its own site. Facebook page.

But you never know, right?