If that happened, it would be classed as assault in the UK - is it the same in America? And, if so, is Gates likely to be investigated by the police?

i just had to go and google this. now that's something i wish i could un-read

If it happened.

Keeping in mind that I wasn't the interviewee and this happened over 15 years ago, there was apparently a combination of extreme secrecy about the organization and a massive disconnect between the largely military experience of the interviewers and the company's supposed product space. Partner left wondering "black ops or bullshit?"

I interviewed and had an offer from Theranos. They were super slimey, and this was before they were known as a fraud.

- Sunny asked me why I went to such an unprestigious academic institution for undergrad

- Sunny flipped out at an extension cord going to the table AV setup in the meeting room. He called in 5 IT people and yelled at them during my interview about the extension cord and yanked it out of the wall.

- Elizabeth and Sunny parked their Lamborginis in the handicapped parking spaces directly in front of the office

- When I got the offer, the fine print noted the location my office would actually be located in was NOT at the fancy HQ in Palo Alto where they had recruited me at and showed me that I would be working, it was at a trailer park on the east side of highway 101 in Menlo Park (um, no thanks. Part of the reason I passed).

- part of the hiring process was to go get your blood tested by them and my lab results were discordant with my lab results from Stanford so it showed their testing didn't actually work

- security stood outside the restroom stall while I peed before the interview and came in with me while I washed my hands.

- Elizabeth rescheduled my interview with her 4x, once with 18 minutes notice. Their entire process took 3 months and 7 rounds.

People can amass power in a system with sortition, but those people don't amass it in the role of office holders (in those offices subject to sortition.) Of course, the office holders aren't the people amassing the most durable political power in the current system, either.

If you don't think officeholders that are randomly chosen amateurs in the field that are guaranteed to be out of it in short time aren't very often going to be extremely vulnerable to manipulation by people whose interests are stronger, more permanent, and durable, then you haven't thought things through very well, IMO.

I heard about lottocracy/sortition for the first time not long ago and I quite like the idea. The last time was when I heard a professor talk about it, and I was recommended reading the book "Lottocracy: Democracy Without Elections" by Guerrero [0].

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/217981747-lottocracy

Before applying sortition to the civil service, it'd be wise to observe how it works on a smaller scale. Some corporations may attempt it. Though it's more radical than the flat structure or other organization alternatives.

I knew about the strategy for using randomness to control corruption, but didn't know it had a procedural name in governance. Thanks for this!

Do this but with technocracy.

Also best of luck being random... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_paradox_(probability) and The Problem of Priors.

> Do you actually believe that if your taxes went up, power would be less concentrated, or that you or your countrymen would have more power?

Absolutely. The source of most of the corruption I see in the world today is wealth, and specifically wealthy people paying people off to get their own way. If there was less wealth inequality there'd be much less scope for this.

Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).

Politics has it's fair share of corruption too. But at least in my country (the UK) it's the lesser evil. And even if you look at a country like the US where there is a lot more political corruption, the source of a lot of that seems to be private money influencing elections.

I think they mean "taxation of the too rich" in that case.

> moves power from the people to the government

In a functioning democracy, the government is the people. If the government is against the people, it's not a functioning democracy.

And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.

The natural flow of money tends towards pooling on certain individuals and groups, because accumulating capital is significantly easier when you start with capital.

This is unwanted, first because it produces individuals powerful enough to topple the people’s will, and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.

By first principles you need a system to limit accumulation and redistribute it. That’s taxation.

The money not being extracted from the right places, or not being distributed where it should, is a sign that the government is unwilling or incapable or working for the people.

It is the people’s collective responsibility to prevent and fix that problem.

Power concentration can happen regardless of taxation level though. You can have relatively high taxes and relatively low authoritarianism. But you can also have low taxes and full blow dictatorship.

Taxes are much lower in Belarus and Russia vs western Europe, and they're much more authoritarian, coupled with third world tier public services outside of their capitals.

If that were true, then the wealthy and political establishment wouldn’t fight tax increases so damn hard. Over my lifetime, I’ve repeatedly watched wealthy individuals spend more money fighting tax increases than they’d end up paying.

Money is power. So to answer your question literally, if MY taxes went up, I would not have more power, but if the rich's did, I would because they'd have less power.

Take that to the next level.

How about taxing the...Government ?

For example: I am a teacher. I run for office. I win. Now, as a consequence of my win, my tax bracket for the rest of my life, is 100% after i exceed the higher of either: a) my elected official salary, OR b) the average last 5 years of W2 income, OR c) the average last 2 years of W2 income.

You'd delete inmediately all the grifters getting into government to be rich. And because those narcissists griefters people would self select themselves out of the running; it gives breathing room to those willing to actually do their DUTY for country. Those willing to sacrifice lifetime income.

This is pathway to the less charismatic, but more duty-oriented people that would not mind working in the govt and also do a good job. Under these rules, you dont care if I stay in govt forever, either. Limited terms have no point, when you can't grift.

This also takes care of those pesky post-election speaking fees, as well!

Only if the government is allowed to spend the tax money. What if they were forced to give it away?

Taxation is what moves power from the powerful to the people. All of the Epstein crap was proceeded by Reagan and Thatcher and their trickle down BS that made the rich and powerful even more rich and powerful while everyone else could languish

Higher corruption tends to be associated with lower tax-to-GDP ratios, which seems the opposite to your assertion.

Of course there's the cause and effect issue -- does the high corruption cause lower tax, or do the lower taxes enable the corruption.

Weird post.

Who is saying YOUR taxes or MY taxes should go up? Our taxes should go down. Billionaires should be taxed more instead.

I don’t want my taxes to go up. I want billionaires to pay taxes that are as uncomfortable to them as mine are to me. Share the burden.

It is absolutely correct, hence why limited terms are a prerequisite for functioning democracies.

An ill intentioned participant in power will not have unlimited time to do that much damage. A good intentioned participant will not have too much time to become corrupted.

The downside is that a good intentioned ruler, may not have enough time to accomplish their good vision. But my thesis is that is a reasonable price to pay to avoid the opposite. A malicious ruler with infinite time to complete their destructive plan.

Sortition is the only system that ensures high quality universal education. If anyone can become president for a year then everyone needs to be able to be president for a year.

Well why not both? It is certainly true that power attracts those who seek to abuse it. But it is also true that a good fraction of those who are demonstrably corrupt started out way more idealistic.

Shouldn't it unsettle King dogmatics just as much?

Why is that only a problem for democracy? It’s one of the central problems of civilization and has been discussed by philosophers since the Greeks.

In monarchies you’d often end up with kings and people in line for the throne being murdered and all kinds of palace intrigue to select for the most conniving psychopath.

In theocratic systems you get hypocrite self dealing priests.

In socialist and communist systems you get an aristocracy of political pull where high ranking bureaucrats are basically identical to our billionaires and political elites.

I’m not aware of any system that durably protects against being taken over by deranged dark triad personalities. Democracy’s virtue is that it provides some way to clean house without destroying the stability of the whole system, at least when it works.

> But at the same time, the budget for justice system needs to increase. It should be most probably the strongest branch of the government. Delayed justice is one of the most common ways of injustice.

The judical branch should very much NOT be a part of the government itself, but a fully separate branch.

> Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

As we have seen in the past, we have the same, if not worse, power imbalances in private companies as in the public sector. I would therefore not call it irrelevant, but agree that the Justice system can help here if appropriatly staffed.

> Monopolies are not always a negative outcome on a free market if the company in Monopoly situation reaches that position by offering better products within the law. However they can be specially dangerous when they're artificially created by the Government (e.g. allocation of a common resource to a specific company --> corruption almost always follows).

Do you have a single example for a company who did not over time monetized its monopoly power to the detriment of the customer?

It's fundamentally still a problem of asymmetry of power and connections.

Try to put yourself in the shoes of an FBI agent tasked with investigating this same case. The accused are very wealthy very powerful people with deep pockets. They can and will take action against you, if you're revealed to be chasing after them. Plus, their network of allies is so vast, that you cannot even trust your superiors or other government agencies to back you up. And indeed that is exactly what happened here.

> Corruption within private companies is irrelevant

I'll have some of whatever you're smoking.

It's not that useful separating public and private when there are revolving doors and the people who run the companies bribe — sorry, lobby — politicians. It's an incredibly intimate relationship

Wouldn't limiting power also mean limiting their effectiveness? A government (at any layer) needs to have a certain amount of power, else they're just civilians.

As for budget, a country needs money to do stuff; if they don't have money they can't do stuff. Stuff can range from having the world's biggest army (several times over) to providing free education to everyone (the great social equalizer IMO, as in social mobility).

As for your justice argument, it depends - if power corrupts, wouldn't giving more power to justice corrupt them as well? You see what's happening in the US with various law enforcement branches getting A Lot Of Money - militarization of local police force for example, meaning they have the means to apply more violence.

TL;DR, governments and justice systems need a clear description of what they can and cannot do, and checks, balances and consequences when they don't.

> Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

This ignores the vast majority of anyone involved in a private company - the customers. Or even the not-customers that are still affected by what a private company does (think e.g. pollution), but that's where as you say the law should come in.

> Corruption within private companies is irrelevant, as the main ones to suffer from it are usually shareholders.

And a few millions of people suffering because they're being misled into buying "wellness" solutions.

And a few hundreds of millions of people around the world suffering the effects of local pollution and clean water laws being skirted.

And a few billion folks who are gonna suffer the effects of climate change.

etc...

Other than the 6-7 billion humans who suffer due to private company corruption, it's basically only the shareholders.

I always laugh when libertarians propose all kinds of mechanism to prevent the concentration of power in the public administration but at the same time see no problem with a few individuals concentrating exponentially the most important and corrupting of the powers: wealth.

God forbid a representative being reelected but there is no problem with a billionaire destabilizing dozens of democracies and around the world.

Libertarianism is just the blind worship of people who have money.

Weak public servants mean strong private actors: that's what's currently eating the US republic from the inside. You have a few billionaires (Trump, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Ellison, Zuckerberg...) able to buy their way into power and keeping the opposition down. Reducing taxation only makes these people even more powerful, and worsen the situation. You can't have democracy when some people are able to get this much richer and more powerful than the rest, it's as simple as that.

Are you just completely unaware with what's going on in the US or something? The reason why we're here is because of corruption within private companies leading to mass accumulation of wealth which has reality-bending effects on politics. Trump and the cronies is as much a symptom as it is a cause; related to the way billionaires bought literally all of news and social media over 30 years and weaponized it for their own personal propaganda.

You're not going to solve this problem with a 'strong justice system', you're going to solve it by making sure no one can get that wealthy in the first place. I mean we're literally in a topic about Jeffry Epstein who is so deeply connected to everything that it would make your average TV show seem like a hack.

This obsession over a billion as a marker is toxic nonsense. Having nine hundred something million is not that much different. The main way to deal with this is progressive taxation of both income and wealth which should provide increasing resistance to growth, a mechanism that needs to particular breaking point or limit and is stronger because of that.

One of the best businessmen I have known is Paul Orfalea, broadly known as Kinko. When he couldn't hold a job he started a company, he focused on trying to make things work for employees and customers alike, and it grew. When he sold Kinko's Copies it had a record of serving not only individuals well, but also the broader society as capitalist enterprise ideally should. And he got five billion out of that deal, which he shared with this family. Now I am supposed to believe that this is all a horrible tale of darkness cursing us all because there was some boundary that he accidentally blew through with his extensive business success. In all honesty the one who sounds corrupted and disconnected here is you.

If not for taxes, how would you fund prisons, police, the army, etc? Not to mention other things.

Then why are billionaires so anti-taxation? This is completely incoherent.

He's strangely breezy about the whole thing.

'...a short jail stint in one’s past for “soliciting prostitution” simply doesn’t sound disqualifying, according to the secular liberal morality that most academics hold, unless you researched the details, which most didn’t.'

Uh. Really?

Wait - I thought it was a Democratic hoax and that only Epstein was the bad guy? Is Trump wrong?

The kind of piece of shit who donates basically his entire fortune to charity? And actual charity at that, not Ellison style "Larry Ellison Research Foundation for Prolonging the Life of Larry Ellison and Getting Some Tax Breaks Along the Way".

These binary distinctions (mostly) don't work for people in the real world. It's not a book or movie where people are clearly either good or bad, in reality all people are a mix of both.

He's still doing his work on philanthropy which is IMO a good thing.

The one counterexample to my point that I'd think of is Hitler. And _technically_ he did do good things for Germany as well, the bad just overwhelmingly outshines the good in this case.

"There are two kinds of politicians, insiders and outsiders. The outsiders prioritize their freedom to speak their version of the truth. The price for their freedom is that they are ignored by the insiders, who make the important decisions. The insiders, for their part, follow a sacrosanct rule: never turn against other insiders and never talk to outsiders about what insiders say or do. Their reward? Access to inside information and a chance, though no guarantee, of influencing powerful people and outcomes." -- Larry Summers, according to Yanis Varoufakis in "Adults in the Room"

It sounds a bit cartoon villainy, but honestly, I see no reason to doubt that he said this. Everything points to these people being casually desperate to be let into ever innermore circles. Even now that this particularly ugly circle is blown open, notice that they still simply do not talk about what their fellow insiders did except in vague generalities.

He was the access agent and the one procuring girls for powerful men. He would then produce blackmail and force the men to capitulate to his demands. He was a mossad operative.

Some people would love to play against those groups with the goal of not winning but costing their opponents dearly.

They never get the opportunity though because those groups are intentionally protected from those kinds of players.

I think it’s an oversimplification. Epstein isn’t the only “connecting big people to other big people” person. It just happened to be on top of all the shady stuff, he also trafficked kids. I believe there are more people like him, just flying under the radar.

What triggered Mossad to toss their best informant?

It's at a minimum extremely ignorant to believe or pretent that this begins and end at "Mossad" being a magical shady force that controls the world. Looking for tight little narrative misses the complexity of human sociery.

I'm struggling to read the word "situation" charitably in the context of an introduction.

I had no idea about any of this! Thank you for sharing this!

According to her videos, the timing lines up perfectly

Yup. There's a few people like that in the files. But a distressingly large number of named people had ongoing correspondence.

Ugh. I worked for a guy like this, he was a full-on cybersecurity paranoiac. You need to be a special type of person with near-infinite patience of stupidity just to be able to work under them.

biology is all about thermodynamics. Why do you think we eat?

That's a very generous interpretation. Excessively so. He may have heard of someone suggesting that and repeated it in garbled form, but that would not refute the accusation of bullshittery.

Postmodernism generator:

https://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/

Maybe this style indicates that drugs other than alcohol were involved?

> A few of the examples are that he describes the subprime crisis as originating in Clinton-era home-ownership reform that pressured government lenders to essentially back many subprime mortgages (expanded during the Bush-era).

But I think that's incorrect. The lynchpin of the subprime crisis was really the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1998, which made sure that consumer-facing banks had strict limits on how much they could be leveraged in their investments. This set them apart from investment banks which were allowed to take bigger risks.

Then, a bunch of financial fuckery in new kinds derivatives generated the idea that they had "solved" the risk factor of subprime mortgages and that they could open the floodgates on accepting any and all mortgages without doing any of the traditional underwriting. They sliced them into tranches using a magic formula which nobody understood and sold them off. The ratings agencies helped by stamping this garbage with top grades and tricking institutional investors into holding the bag.

The result was that when it all imploded the US consumers were the ones who got hosed -- because those consumer banks were over-leveraged in these bad investments.

It was criminal activity all the way. It was conspiracy to make billions of the short-term commissions on all the mortgage transaction activity, while sticking someone else with the toxic waste.

It was not a simple policy decision from the 90's. That narrative is just another way for the oligarchs to rewrite history and evade responsibility. Ensuring that we'll learn nothing and they can do this all over again once people forget.

I took your transcript and discussed it with Claude Opus 4.6, after removing both Epstein's and Bannon names (not that it mattered, it understood perfectly who they both were, but didn't mention it until after I asked it explicitly).

Claude suggested an interesting pattern: on several topics, Epstein starts with some medium level concept (not naive, but not expert-level), then distracts with a metaphor or a short anecdote, then drops some hint that he has great authority on the subject ("I was in the room", "I had insider knowledge") and finally changes subject or claims that nobody really knows, without ever going deeper.

>i mean working in tech you haven't run into [...]

Yeah, it's on my comment.

I used to know someone wealthy whose continued wealth relied on working with local and state governments. This person's public correspondence in lawsuits and with local government officials was purposefully littered with spelling, punctuation, grammar, and capitalization errors. When I asked them about it, their response was that it was on purpose so that they seemed less smart and thus less threatening, with the hope that they would get more favorable rulings and contracts by not seeming like "one of the big entities."

I'm not asking you to believe me on this, but sharing it more as an anecdote of: something on the surface is sometimes not the reality of what's underneath.

> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

I'd more focus on the ideas being expressed being incoherent. Spelling is surface level, but that word salad made no sense.

> But I have read some of his emails, and all of the ones I have seen are full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors. I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

I kinda assumed that was (at least partly) a "flex," basically doing something dumb to show you're such hot stuff you can get away with it. It's like Sam Altman writing in lowercase all the time.

It has to be a "my time is worth more than your time" flex.

He was probably more impressive in-person.

He was probably dyslexic. I know people who type like that too but normal in person.

I listened to the two hour interview that was posted. It sounds nothing like this. He was extremely well spoken. How carefully he spoke is what stood out most in the interview to me.

I've found that problem solving intelligence and language skills are not that strongly correlated. He clearly had some kind of skill to keep his operation running, even before you consider the more cynical explanations in the other replies.

> I would not gotten out of sixth grade if I wrote like that.

I like using “astute businessman” as a backhanded compliment sometimes.

Usually meaning the revenues and results are there .. although everything about their personal or professional ethos disgusts me.

Eh. From time to time you’ll have that one brilliant but grossly tangential asset on a team who leaves you wondering if they’re manic or cracked out from the weekend.

Who’s in infrastructure and hasn’t sent a few sleep-deprived and cringey status updates out at 6am :D

Okay okay okay fine, it’s an internet comment section I don’t have to be PC. I think this one’s coke.

> full of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization errors

I can spell correctly in a few different languages without having to think about it. I suspect you can, too. I can do a lot of math in my head that Jeffery Epstein probably couldn't have done with a calculator. I'm not a billionaire, though, and I never will be. The kind of smart - "street smart", it's sometimes called - that makes you that kind of rich is a different kind of smart that shows up as being a competent writer. Make no mistake, though, it wasn't stupidity or incompetence that got him where he was.

somehow he was allowed to teach college classes without a degree, doors just open like that when you’re part of the tribe of pedophiles

I think that ... given one specific topic, few people understand it while the vast majority is completely oblivious to its workings.

So they then hear someone who speaks like that, with a fast cadence and Andrew Tate's "Confidence" TM, and are inclined to think "yeah, the guy looks like he knows what he's talking about".

But for people who have minimal knowledge about the thing, it's evident that said person is just stupid.

An email is an email. I used to talk to contacts like that all the time and they did too. These are quick interchanges with folk.

The grammar police as well as PC became a thing and now everyone is expected to construct paragraphs of text without any grammatical errors otherwise you're mobbed and lynched.

Just because you're expecting full pronunciation doesn't mean others do. I'd rather write with laziness and short hand than having to punctuate a whole paragraph and bore the person to death like this paragraph.

1 if you've been emailed or mentioned (cited) by Jeffrey Epstein. 2 if you've been emailed or cited by someone who has an Epstein number of 1, and so on.

It's called Grok

This was mentioned on The Daily Show this past monday.[0]

You're right that people on social media aren't talking about it very much for some reason but that doesn't mean that it isn't being talked about in American media.

[0] https://youtu.be/cwXIq81eE24?t=881

Also as a European, these mossad conspiracy theories are laughable. Story doesn't add up ? Mossad! You even threw in the FSB for good measure.

>As a European, I find it very funny to see how nobody in the US is willing to address the elephant in the room called Mossad.

This is driving me up the wall. Look, I know part of this talk/accusation [about Mossad] is coming from Nazi/antisemitic circles, so people being hesitant to engage makes a bit of sense. But come on, it's not a stretch to consider. The idea that the US would let a Russian operation go unchecked like that is completely bonkers.

It doesn't help that almost all members of the U.S. congress is funded by AIPAC. See how much your representative received from AIPAC here: https://www.trackaipac.com/congress

As a “European” you are happy to simply fabricate an unsubstantiated conspiracy involving the Jews.

I call him "Zion Don" for a reason.

Madelson was dismissed from the ambassadorship September 2025, not this week.

You might be thinking of his stepping down from the House of Lords (upper house of UK parliament) which did happen recently.

John Kiriakou Openly claims he was mossad in recent interviews.

Also look up Israel’s relationship with pedophilia (being a safe haven for the accused and convicted). You’ll find plenty of Jewish in isreal media sources reporting on this.

Someone blaming every young person's illness on a vaccine, without any context for comparsion vs the population that didn't get the vaccine? That is horrifying. What are they trying to cover up?

Horrifying indeed. And yet, my comments to reveal this truth are getting downvoted.

It is pure evil to give experimental drugs to poor people (especially children) without proper consent and close scrutiny.

It is not the first time that Gates Foundation has been caught red-handed dealing experimental drugs to poor people, without their consent. This has happened before too.

But if you want unbelievable horror stories, you should find out why Big Pharma companies are camped in Africa - they are doing all sorts of awful experiments on the poor illiterate masses there.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/02/testing-d...

At least, the current Indian government is a patriotic one, and it is trying its best to fight against such foreign evils. But the past governments were corrupt, and hands-in-glove with such powerful megacorporations up to no good.

https://www.newsweek.com/foreign-funding-threatened-india-mo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/world/asia/india-health-n...

Slowly though, the world is waking up to the reality of what subversive malicious evils these so-called humanitarian billionaires have really been doing, under the guise of charity.

It worked for me!

The Anna Karenina Principle: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."