00:00:53.240and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.
00:00:58.760I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.
00:01:02.380Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:01:09.920These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:01:13.740Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:21.360If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:01:27.100Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:01:35.740Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture with your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions.
00:03:19.120So we are going to continue doing the news roundups, but rather than being in this feed, they will be available on Patreon.
00:03:27.700So if you just go to tangody.com slash roundup, you can get those roundups, including the rest of the roundup for this week will be on Patreon.
00:03:36.700The roundups will be free, so you don't have to pay to listen to the roundups, and they will not have ads.
00:04:39.360You know, there's a lot of great podcasts that have all sorts of different models and, you know, paywalls have their pros and their cons, but it feels really good to be able to continue putting this out for free. So yeah, people during this time can follow along every single week, tangody.com slash roundup. That'll take you right to our Patreon page.
00:05:53.280What's catching your interest on the Internet these days, Bridget?
00:05:56.560Well, first of all, in lieu of banter, please accept a complaint about something digitally, not to pull the dead parents card, but something that I have noticed that I've never really realized it until both my parents passed away.
00:06:13.580But it feels like every single business that I ever did any kind of transaction with, I could have bought a bottle of shampoo from a company 10 years ago.
00:06:24.560it's like I consented to them emailing me to remind me about Mother's Day and Father's Day
00:06:32.240until the day that I die. I will say a couple of companies have gotten wise and they'll send the
00:06:37.220email maybe in February that says, hey, Mother's Day and Father's Day is coming up. If you don't
00:06:42.800want us to email you about Mother's Day and Father's Day, click here to opt out. I click
00:06:47.740all the things I get. I click. It is like I cannot escape it. And I just think it's interesting of
00:06:54.180like, when did I opt into this dynamic where, yeah, I bought a hat from this company 16 years
00:07:00.100ago. They are reminding me that my mom and dad are dead every Mother's Day and Father's Day
00:07:04.600until the day that I die. And then I guess if I have kids, I will pass that hurt on to my kids
00:07:09.980and it'll be like, oh, did you buy a bar of soap from us? Just FYI, your mom is still dead.
00:07:16.820You know what I mean? Is this something you see? I do see the aggressive Mother's Day,
00:07:20.720father's day marketing and it always feels a little i don't know exploitative that seems a
00:07:27.380little strong but it reminds me of during the pandemic when you'd get emails like here at
00:07:33.100autozone we are taking the coronavirus pandemic very seriously like i don't know maybe everything
00:07:39.800doesn't need to be an opportunity for marketing and i could see how that would be really uh like
00:07:44.320a hurtful weird reminder when you're just trying to check your email i had not noticed companies
00:10:13.880The trailer, I mean, I still remember the trailer for The Social Network.
00:10:18.640It was one of those, if you were there, you remember a trailer.
00:10:21.840It had a choral cover of Radiohead's Creep, and it just was very much of an era.
00:10:28.980It really, let's just say when I saw that trailer, my interest was piqued.
00:10:32.900And this trailer for The Social Reckoning also has piqued my interest.
00:10:37.600The trailer makes it seem that it is much more a movie about Francis Haugen than it is about Mark Zuckerberg, whereas Mark Zuckerberg was the main storyline of the first movie, him creating Facebook while he was a student at Harvard.
00:10:51.080This is a movie about Francis Haugen deciding to blow the whistle.
00:10:54.520Jeremy Strong as Mark Zuckerberg, when I heard him doing Mark Zuckerberg's voice in the trailer, I had a moment where I had to pause it and say, like, is this Mark Zuckerberg speaking?
00:11:07.600That's how much he sounds like Mark Zuckerberg.
00:11:09.600They could not have gotten a more intense actor to portray Mark Zuckerberg, if you ask me.
00:11:16.640You mentioned that The Social Network, the companion film that came out well over a decade ago now, was of an era.
00:19:41.220let's get right back into it let's get into some of the news stories that you were following this
00:19:52.160week what have you got for us first well first of all y'all i'm obsessed with raw milk not
00:19:59.900drinking it although fun fact i actually have drank raw milk before did you know this actually
00:20:05.960mike maybe you don't even know this about me you've told me all about it but i don't think
00:20:10.680you've ever talked about it on the pod. So how did you come to drink raw milk, Bridget? Did you
00:20:15.860buy it from a store? I did not. I went to agriculture camp as a kid, 4-H camp, where I
00:20:23.700learned all about agriculture, including milking cows. I did milk a cow. If you put a cow's udder
00:20:31.400in front of me, I feel like it would come back muscle memory style. Why I wound up at 4-H camp,1.00
00:20:37.280I have no idea. I don't know how I wound up there. I don't know what my parents were like.
00:20:40.680That's a reasonable thing for our child who has never been around agriculture or farm life or any of that in her entire life.
00:20:49.560Sure. But one time when we milked the cow, they said, oh, you can have a little sip if you want.
00:20:54.080So I had the tiniest little taste of it.
00:20:56.380I will say, I mean, we'll get into the story in a minute, but that's one of the things that makes me so confused about the raw milk movement,
00:21:04.440which is that, you know, drinking raw milk, it doesn't give you any better health.
00:21:11.400It's not it's not any better for you than pasteurized milk.
00:21:15.620The only thing having tasted it, the only thing that maybe I would say is that it tasted a little bit,
00:22:49.200But for folks who haven't read it yet, Bridget, what is the raw milk movement?
00:22:54.020So raw milk, which is basically just unpasteurized milk, meaning that it has not been heated to kill harmful bacteria, has gone from this fringe obsession to a full-blown mainstream movement.
00:23:07.140More than 10 million Americans right now drink it.
00:23:10.820So that's 10 million people who probably have stomach aches or are getting sick or are sickening their loved ones from this milk.
00:23:17.760National weekly sales of raw milk rose from 65% from 2023 to 2024 alone.
00:23:25.280And at the center of all of this is one guy, a 64-year-old guy from California named Mark McAfee,
00:23:31.700whose company, Raw Farm, is the largest raw milk dairy in the country.
00:23:36.880And they bring in about $30 million a year selling raw milk.
00:23:44.800What differentiates it from the milk that you might just go get at the grocery store?
00:23:50.280So before we had widely adopted pasteurization, which we've been doing as a standard practice for about a century,
00:23:57.700thousands of babies died each year from contaminated dairy.
00:24:01.720Today, scientists and health experts pretty broadly agree that raw milk does not have significant proven nutritional benefits over pasteurized milk.
00:24:11.560It can't treat or cure diseases. And on top of that, it carries over 100 times the risk for foodborne illness. And it is particularly dangerous for young children. It's one of those stories where I read stories about raw milk and it's easy for me to say, wow, this person is really stupid and they just drank raw milk and now they got sick.
00:24:34.360But the fact that people are giving this to their children who really can't, you know, it's not like the kids have a sense of it.0.97
00:24:39.580The fact that adults are giving it to kids and it's particularly risky for children, that is what keeps us from being just pure sort of like, like, oh, you've got what you deserve for drinking raw milk.
00:24:51.680Yeah, it's such a difficult thing to wrap my head around.
00:24:54.740I remember in school learning about Louis Pasteur and the invention of pasteurization as this great boon for all of humankind, this huge step forward to eliminate disease and suffering and unnecessary death.
00:25:09.600And it's just wild that now in 2026, we have these adherents to this, what previously was a fringe idea and is still a ridiculous idea, just turning that logic on its head, despite so much evidence over, like you said, more than a century.
00:25:33.660and it's clear. The evidence is clear. It used to be a non-controversial thing.
00:25:38.960It's still not controversial among scientists, but here we are. Help us understand how we got
00:25:45.440here, Bridget. Well, I think that your point is really helpful of understanding how we got here,
00:25:50.880which is that it's the fact that this was non-controversial and it's like, oh, yeah,
00:25:56.040we've accepted that pasteurization is a thing that you need to do to dairy so that you don't
00:25:59.800get sick and don't kill your child. And now people are like, wait a minute, isn't the jury still out
00:26:04.760on science? That really does boil it down. And, you know, when I was reading this article, this is
00:26:10.360just me extrapolating here. The thing that jumped out at me is that you can get people to sicken
00:26:17.960themselves and poison themselves and pay for the pleasure if you tell them that it means that
00:26:23.720they're standing up against some unseen force that doesn't want them to be doing this. If you tell
00:26:30.980them that they are a free thinker or that it means that they are better than other people, smarter
00:26:36.400than other people, more healthy than other people, you can get people to pay for the benefit of
00:26:42.260poisoning themselves. And when you go to his dairy, which is called Raw Farm, even the labels and
00:26:51.640stuff, I kind of think that you could get a certain subsection of people to buy anything
00:26:57.980if the label is cute enough. If the typeface and the font is a particular kind of way that
00:27:04.100is signaling to you, oh, this is healthy or special or good for you in some way, you can
00:28:04.100Some places like Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia,
00:28:08.020Ohio, Wisconsin, and others, it's allowed to be sold as pet food.
00:28:12.260And so that's sort of the way that they're getting around it.
00:28:14.500With these labels that make you think like, oh, we're selling this as pet food, but we both know what you're going to do with it.
00:28:22.080You're going to drink it and have your kids drink it.
00:28:24.320So this guy that they profile in the ProPublica piece, he's basically and kind of proudly, it sounds like, offender number one for raw milk sales.
00:28:34.040So federal and state regulators have linked his one specific farm to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that have left at least 233 people sick and at least 40 people hospitalized since 2006.
00:28:47.960And those are just the documented cases.
00:28:50.040Experts say that the true number is almost certainly higher because a lot of people will just recover at home and be sick at home without ever getting tested.
00:28:58.400A lot of the victims skew very young children because children are more vulnerable to this.0.98
00:29:04.040And this guy is like, fuck yeah, that's me. That's my record. Love it. He told ProPublica, quote, I put a couple of kids in the hospital and they have been sick, but they recovered. But here's the thing. I'm a pioneer and I'm going against the grain here. I'm climbing the mountain. They say you can't climb.0.99
00:29:23.640And that's my whole point is that the whole thing with these people, because again, it's not like raw milk is some sort of special thing that's going to cure what ails you or anything. It doesn't have any additional benefits.
00:29:36.220The thing, in my opinion, is that these guys and the people who get mixed up in this, what they're actually buying is being able to think of themselves as free thinkers and pioneers and people who are brave enough to climb a mountain that they say that you can't climb and who go against the grain.
00:29:54.300And if you ask me, that feeling of smugness is not worth you getting sick or your child getting sick because you wanted to feel like a free thinker.
00:30:04.160There are plenty of ways to feel like free thinkers that don't involve sending your own kid to the hospital.
00:30:08.420And I think that smugness is adjacent to something that's even more insidious and harmful. I think it's right up against some of the eugenics ideology that underlies a lot of this kind of thinking.
00:30:24.600You know, he says, oh, I put kids in the hospital. They got sick, but they've recovered. So no big deal. You know, they're stronger for it. But that leaves out the kids who didn't recover. Right. Like the reason we started pasteurizing milk in the first place is because many kids would get sick and die.
00:30:39.080And I think, like, just below the surface there is the idea that, like, the strong will survive and the weak will get sick and die.
00:30:49.360And that's okay because we're a country of plucky pioneers.
00:30:55.940And if you're one of the unlucky kids who happens to get a bad batch of milk, that's actually on you.
00:32:35.180Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:32:39.620I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:32:44.180I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:32:51.140They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:32:55.640But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:32:59.080They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:33:02.160Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:33:11.120If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:33:17.060This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:33:29.520I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:33:36.640I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:33:40.220From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:33:46.160It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:33:53.640Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:34:03.260Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:35:34.620Oh, it is. I'm so glad you brought that up because it's absolutely a dynamic rooted in eugenics.0.99
00:35:41.520And I think that Venn diagram is a circle.0.60
00:35:44.320That's essentially what they're saying.
00:35:45.940You know, what pisses me off is that kids are uniquely vulnerable to being sickened and hospitalized because of raw milk because they're children.
00:35:55.120So it's just a totally not rooted in reality worldview.
00:35:59.460It's just a very toxic, dangerous worldview that I agree with you is absolutely based on this idea that, oh, the ones who get sick, well, maybe they weren't supposed to make it after all.
00:36:09.620They couldn't handle drinking this unpasteurized milk.
00:36:12.200Never mind the point that there is no point to drinking it.
00:36:15.760There's no benefit whatsoever. So why even do this? It infuriates me that this guy is making millions, basically selling these lies that get people sick. And it's a social media and tech story to me because, you know, this movement did not get to 10 million people chugging raw milk through word of mouth and farmers markets.
00:36:36.440It happened through the Internet and social media. And McAfee, this guy who runs this one farm, really understood that early.
00:36:43.560And according to this piece, kind of got it on the ground floor of that.
00:36:47.200He built websites claiming that raw milk could cure asthma, treat diabetes, clear eczema, fix ear infections.
00:36:54.860He founded a nonprofit called the Raw Milk Institute to kind of bolster those claims.
00:37:00.040And then on social media, those ideas were able to scale in ways that he could have never done alone.
00:37:06.560And so now there's influencers with millions of followers and huge platforms that are spreading the message that raw milk healed their gut or balanced their hormones or cleared their skin or helped their fertility issues or transform their child.
00:37:21.600And all of this wellness content, this like wellness content machine has turned raw milk into a symbol of freedom, a symbol of authenticity, and this symbol of resistance to big food and big pharma.
00:37:37.780And McAfee has leaned into the whole thing and profited from it.
00:37:41.580Now, I want to be clear, I'm not saying that, like, our food, this is where they get you because they're such a, like, kernel of truth that these grifters then blow up to exploit.
00:37:54.440So we definitely have issues with our food system and how food is regulated in this country and big pharma.0.86
00:38:02.320I don't want to make it seem like I'm, like, the real, you know, way to be authentic is to support big pharma or whatever.
00:38:09.040But I think that what these people do is they exploit our perhaps grounded concerns about the food industry and the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry, and then they blow that up, make it outsized, and then they say, oh, well, I actually had the cure and you can trust me.
00:38:29.240buy my raw milk or my supplement or whatever.
00:38:32.500And it is effective because they are exploiting people's very real suspicions,
00:38:38.840very real fears, which sometimes can be grounded in reality.
00:41:06.180He said, they have the guns and the money, but I've got the truth and the moms.
00:41:11.040And so the Biden administration was on the verge of cracking down on his farm when Trump took office and then the Department of Health and Human Services changed hands.
00:41:22.200It's now run by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is notably one of McAfee's most prominent customers.
00:41:28.140Folks might remember that they celebrated a federal health report with a toast of raw milk shooters in the White House.
00:41:35.040and described the Biden administration's previous stance
00:41:38.540in trying to shut down this farm as, quote, aggressive suppression.
00:41:42.260So without publicly stating a reason, but I feel like we know why,
00:41:46.800the Trump administration dropped its ongoing legal efforts against this farm in January.
00:41:52.120A former federal employee told ProPublica that the raw milk cases were being deprioritized
00:42:09.780So in March of this year, raw farmed cheese was linked to another E. coli outbreak.
00:42:15.160Nine people got sick across three states.
00:42:16.980More than half of them were under five years old, one developing the same severe kidney condition that nearly killed a seven-year-old boy back in 2006.
00:42:26.160The CDC told people to consider not eating the cheese.
00:42:29.600That was their, that was like their version of handling it was saying, oh, people should consider not eating this cheese.
00:42:36.460But the FDA gave no consumption guidance whatsoever.
00:42:40.240McAfee refused to issue a recall for 18 days.
00:42:43.180And when he finally did, under the threat of a forced recall, he appended statements to his advisory saying the recall was being performed under protest.
00:42:51.600Then the FDA closed its investigation into all of this on April 30th without taking any kind of enforcement action.
00:42:59.240And you might be wondering, how did McAfee feel about all this?
00:43:02.000Was he saying, was he like, oh, we're so sad.
00:43:44.000Well, speaking of rich people, can I tell you what's going on with Bill Gates?
00:43:48.620Yeah, let's talk about what's going on with Bill Gates.
00:43:50.720So what exactly was the nature of the relationship between disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates?
00:44:00.760That is what the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee are trying to find out.
00:44:05.960Bill Gates sat down for a transcribed interview with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has been summoning powerful people from Epstein's orbit for months, including the Clintons earlier this year.
00:44:19.200Unlike the Clintons' interviews, which were taped and later released,
00:44:23.940Bill Gates' was a closed-door, not-recorded-on-camera interview that ran for six hours.
00:44:29.580The transcript hasn't been released, but several committee members have spoken publicly about how it went,
00:44:34.840and Gates' team released his opening statement ahead of the hearing.
00:44:38.700Now, importantly, Bill Gates was there voluntarily,
00:44:42.700A fact that based on everything that I have read, he could not have mentioned more times if he tried.
00:44:48.760Every other line is, well, I'm happy to be here voluntarily.
00:44:52.360You know, I voluntarily came here and showed up for this.
00:45:08.740I'll start with the elephant in the room, which is that he's sort of been back and forth a little bit saying, oh, I didn't know what was going on with Epstein.
00:45:18.240Well, he pretty much admitted that he knew what was going on with Epstein.
00:45:21.700According to Democratic Representative Melanie Stansbury of New Mexico, quote, he admitted that he knew of Mr. Epstein's reputation.
00:45:28.880He admitted that he knew that he had been convicted of sex crimes, but ultimately, in his words, he viewed this narrow relationship as being an acceptable means to access wealthy donors.
00:47:09.740So Gates says that his relationship with Epstein went from 2011 to 2014 and was really focused on setting up a donor advised fund, which is a tax advantage charitable vehicle through which Epstein had hoped to connect Gates with other wealthy donors and then himself earn a fee.
00:47:26.520Importantly, Epstein was simultaneously trying to use J.P. Morgan to set up this charitable fund as a way to rebuild his reputation after that guilty plea and conviction in 2008 and him having to register as a sex offender.
00:47:40.760So this whole thing was about laundering his reputation using Bill Gates. The whole scheme was about Epstein delivering Gates money and connections. And he was communicating with J.P. Morgan as if he was Bill Gates's personal financial advisor, which he was not.
00:47:58.100So Epstein was sort of lying about Bill Gates and pretending to represent Bill Gates in a more official capacity than he actually was because he was hoping that this would allow him to launder his reputation.
00:48:10.080When it became clear that that was all going on, that Epstein was like lying and misrepresenting things, it sounds like that's when the relationship fell apart.
00:48:18.760Epstein could not deliver the donors that he'd promised, and Bill Gates says that that's when he cut him off.
00:48:23.420In the testimony, Representative Stansberry asked Gates and said, well, are you saying that the ends justify the means? Like, you know, it was worth it to work with this convicted child sex criminal if it ended with there being, you know, some charitable thing done by your organization. And he said, quote, well, that's probably too strong of language, but I felt that getting billions of dollars for global health was worth it.
00:48:47.220Yeah, that's, you know, that's that's what the ends justify the means means, right?
00:48:56.680I did feel that working with him in this narrow capacity was worth it if it meant that I would get the money that I was looking for for my charity.
00:49:06.320That's literally what the expression means, I think.
00:49:11.040And I feel there's like two lessons in that, assuming we take him at his word that that was his main motivation for being in business with Epstein.
00:49:22.460One is just the fact that the ends don't justify the means, right?
00:49:26.100It is important to act ethically, even if you have some really attractive ends that you think is noble, getting there through ill means that you know are unethical is bad and it's probably not going to pay off for you.
00:49:43.820The other lesson is, like, don't get mixed up with a conman, liar, blackmailer, like somebody who has already publicly pled guilty to such unethical stuff about whom so much is known.
00:49:59.160The idea that, like, well, he's unethical in those other areas of his life, but when he's dealing with me, I'm sure I can trust him.
00:50:05.880He's not going to turn around and try to screw me is just, like, baffling.
00:50:58.120Let's get into it because Epstein was extorting Bill Gates.
00:51:02.260I've talked about this on the podcast before, but Gates did acknowledge in his opening statement
00:51:07.700what we already sort of knew, which is that Epstein had obtained information about his
00:51:12.000extramarital affairs and was using that as leverage to pressure him back into the relationship
00:51:17.760after Gates started pulling away. Gates didn't spell out the specifics, but we do have reporting
00:51:23.780from the Wall Street Journal and The Guardian about how some of this might have played out.
00:51:29.260So Epstein found out that Gates had been having an affair with this Russian bridge player, like
00:51:35.340the card game Bridge, who was 20 at the time, so at least everybody is like of legal age here,
00:51:42.020that Russian Bridge player wanted about half a million dollars to start a business to teach
00:51:47.440people how to play Bridge on the internet. Epstein said, oh, I know exactly who you should meet,
00:51:52.400Bill Gates. He's got lots of money. So Epstein connected Bill Gates to this Russian Bridge
00:51:57.740player. Bill Gates declined to fund this business, but it seems like they did start up some kind of
00:52:05.080a non-platonic, non-business relationship while Bill Gates was still married to Melinda.
00:52:12.680One little detail about this is that Epstein paid for this woman to attend coding classes.
00:52:19.840And I guess after he connected her with Bill Gates and Bill Gates declined to fund her
00:52:26.020bridge enterprise, Epstein then was like, well, Bill Gates is the one having sex with
00:52:32.300He should at least be reimbursing me the money that I'm out for these coding classes.
00:52:36.180So he tried to get Bill Gates to reimburse him for the coding classes for this Russian bridge player that he had spent.
00:52:46.020Well, like, what a weird story, right?
00:52:49.700It just feels so petty, like such small stakes stuff.
00:52:55.140Like we're talking about reimbursements for some coding classes connected with this story about global financiers, a global sex pest ring that Epstein was running.
00:53:09.840There's like such a juxtaposition there that, like you said, really puts the lie to the idea that these guys are in some sort of genius class above everyone else.
00:54:54.260Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable.
00:54:58.600I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me.
00:55:03.180I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming.
00:55:10.600They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.
00:55:14.420But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.
00:55:18.080They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.
00:55:21.160Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:55:30.100If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.
00:55:36.040This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.
00:55:48.520I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.
00:55:55.640I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed.
00:55:59.220From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.
00:56:05.160It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse.
00:56:12.620Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place.
00:56:22.240Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:57:53.540This is small, petty men being led around by their junk stuff.
00:58:00.480This is not like we really have to disabuse ourselves of the notion that these are men of stature who are really smart and really great.0.53
00:58:09.540And like they're they're cut from better cloth than the rest of us.
00:58:13.080This is you know, these guys like you like this is if they weren't wealthy and they didn't run tech companies,
00:58:19.160they would be the guys in the Applebee's downtown having little power games about who's getting the attention of the waitress.
00:58:27.220Like, like, you know, these guys, these are guys that, you know, these are not like, I guess the reason I harp on these stories is because it just really puts to bed the notion that these are people who are smarter or better than us. They are not. These are the these are just guys. They're just guys who have terrible judgment, especially when it comes to stuff like this.
00:58:45.020So of the coding classes, the Wall Street Journal reported that, quote,
00:58:48.740the tone of the message was that Epstein knew about the affair and could expose it.
00:58:53.260So pay me for these coding classes or I'll tell your wife everything.
00:58:58.120A Gates spokesperson said that Gates had no financial dealings with Epstein.
00:59:02.360And I guess to me, it kind of sounds like they're implying that he never that he was like, this is a shakes down.
00:59:06.580I'm being extorted and I'm not going to pay.
00:59:09.660But the fact that Epstein felt like he had enough leverage over Bill Gates, this like powerful, wealthy man, I feel like Ridley's has a lot about how these relationships worked.
00:59:19.060It's no big revelation that Epstein was somebody who was really good at getting compromising personal information of wealthy, powerful people and then using that to control them and keep them close.
00:59:30.420There's also these images of Bill Gates in the Epstein files that show Bill Gates standing next to women whose identities are unknown.
00:59:40.980Gates's spokesperson's explanation is that Epstein would just ask him to pose for photos and that he didn't have any kind of substantive interaction with these women.
00:59:50.460The women were not introduced to him by name or by role.
00:59:54.720That Epstein would be like, hey, get next to this woman so I can take your picture.1.00
01:00:27.220sure thing we'll do no follow-ups yeah i mean if that's the official story i don't know man
01:00:34.000yeah like he's a he's a known blackmailer he's like i stand next to this woman so i could take
01:00:39.220her photo next to her why unimportant like either i just don't believe it like no outcome is good0.99
01:00:48.400either bill gates is this manipulatable stupid naive whatever you want to call it which is not0.99
01:00:56.060good, or he's lying, which is not good. I honestly, like, I don't know, I'm not sure which one is0.99
01:01:01.060worse, but neither of those situations, I guess just being stupid and naive and posing for a0.99
01:01:05.860photograph with a woman and nothing untoward happened, I guess at least is not a crime,0.99
01:01:09.940but does not make you look like a super smart guy, in my opinion.
01:01:13.900Agree. Was there anything else in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department that
01:01:20.760you might care to comment on with regard to this story, Bridget?
01:01:23.380Oh, talk about. I'll just get into it. There is an email released by the Justice Department in the files in which Epstein appears to allege that he helped Gates obtained medicine to treat a sexually transmitted infection. Gates has denied this. That's there. There it is.
01:01:44.560Maybe that's lesson number three about why you don't get mixed up with guys like this.
01:01:48.400Yeah, lesson number a thousand about why you don't get mixed up with guys like this. So all of this did a ton of damage to Gates's personal life. I saw this interview with Melinda Gates, Bill Gates's ex-wife, with Gayle King, and you can find the interview very easily.
01:02:07.020So they divorced in 2021. In my opinion, it sounds to me as if Melinda Gates is saying without saying that we're not being told the whole story about what Bill Gates and Jeffrey Epstein got up to together.
01:02:22.000She says that the reason for their divorce was Gates's relationship with Epstein. When Gayle King asks, like, can you tell us more? Is there something specific? She's like, you're going to have to ask Bill what I'm talking about. I can't speak to it.
01:02:36.220To me, knowing how women speak, it seems very clear to me that she's trying to say something without saying something.
01:02:44.100Committee chairman Comer said that Gates answered every question that was asked of him and that he thanked Gates for his philanthropy.
01:02:51.200But when asked about whether or not Gates expressed remorts, Comer said, quote, he regretted his brief relationship with Epstein.
01:03:01.960And one other note to keep an eye on, Representative Stephen Lynch of Massachusetts said that Gates provided the committee with names of people in Epstein's circle who helped facilitate connections with Gates or his foundation.
01:03:13.460And it seems like that might significantly expand the scope of this investigation and could even potentially complicate Gates's legacy, depending on who those names are and what they have to say.
01:03:25.120We don't know who the people are that he named, but it's definitely an ongoing story.
01:03:29.820Representative Robert Garcia said that the committee intends to follow every lead, regardless of wealth or politics, saying, quote, we don't care if they're a Republican, a Democrat or how wealthy they are.
01:03:40.880And I'll just end on this idea that I was reading about in a piece of The Post about all of this.
01:03:46.140Despite all of this, humanitarian and aid organizations are sticking with Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation, which still remains the largest private provider of global health funding in the world.
01:03:58.280And especially now with the Trump administration slashing billions of dollars in global health and foreign aid and leaving these organizations really scrambling, it does sound like this partnership is even more critical.
01:04:11.760It's a tough reality to have to hold simultaneously that Bill Gates's personal conduct, which at the very, very best is terrible judgment, you know, and at the worst, you can just imagine that you have to sort of simultaneously hold these two truths that the work that they're doing because of cuts to funding work and global aid worldwide is really important.
01:04:38.540And the committee spoke to this. Representative Walkinshaw said, quote, in my mind, those two realities and facts exist. I can't reconcile them. And I get that. That's hard. You know, it's hard to live in a reality where this one person, the aid work they're doing is critical and made even more critical by these cuts by this administration.
01:05:02.060but here we are having simultaneously having a conversation with the public face of all of this
01:05:07.160important critical even more critical work is getting mixed up in all of this behavior that is
01:05:12.460at best really unsavory and just an exercise in terrible terrible judgment and i think that's
01:05:19.320what's sort of hard to accept about all this is that the work of the gates foundation that is the
01:05:24.980public face of which is this one guy bill gates it is so important and at the same time we're having
01:05:31.440this person testify to the way that they behave in that work in service of that work. It's it is
01:05:39.240hard. It is. And it's so disappointing because the Gates Foundation has funded a lot of really
01:05:46.220important stuff and continues to. And like you said, it's even more important now because so
01:05:51.700much aid funding has been cut. Yeah, it's just so disappointing to see, I guess, that somebody who
01:06:00.480could lead something so beneficial could also in their personal life act so unsavory and also
01:06:09.700reckless right like because doing so jeopardizes all of that other work it's uh it's a really
01:06:18.620sad story and you know hopefully the Epstein's victims will get justice and the other powerful
01:06:28.940people who aided and abetted this will get their justice too. Yeah, and I'm glad that you said that
01:06:34.260and it's a great place to end that people like to think that the way that powerful people behave in
01:06:39.740their personal life is divorced from how they behave in business or philanthropy or the way
01:06:46.080that they lead or govern. That's not true, right? The fact that this aid is so critical and it's
01:06:51.760being potentially threatened by the way that Bill Gates conducted himself personally and
01:06:56.380professionally because if you believe him in his testimony, he was hanging out with this convicted
01:07:00.120sex offender because he thought it might service his philanthropic work. And so it's all related.
01:07:07.440I think that the sooner that we get away from the idea that when powerful people do something like
01:07:12.180this, that it's just, you know, one segment of who they are, as opposed to an indictment of how they
01:07:18.260lead, I think that we will all be better served.
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