HN Reader

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

Well it looks like Bill Gates had his wife for advice, and apparently his not following it played a part in ending his marriage.

I was hoping the comments would be full of similar stories, in which a demon makes a half-hearted effort to pull you into his clutches, only to be naively blown off, then not thought of again until his true nature was revealed.

Our story of this sort comes from when my partner interviewed at Theranos (!) long before the collapse or any public recognition, related the super-creepy interview process, and I was like "sounds like a big no to me." When the Theranos story blew up it was like "oh boy".

Power corrupts, end of story.

Democracy (limited terms), taxation and anti-monopoly regulation are examples that show a path to cure the disease.

Nobody should be trusted with too much power for too long.

Since it's ultimately about morals, maybe it is time to reread CS Lewis' "The Inner Ring" from 1944[0,1]. It's about the same kind of choices but in situations which are much harder to extricate oneself from than just a random sleazeball messaging you out of the blue.

[0] Link: https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

[1] HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38696764

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

Doubt it would have changed anything for Bill. There's a pattern there and this is just a piece of that pattern.

The most surprising name in the Epstein files is Rebecca Watson also known as Skepchick on YouTube. She has been a thorn in their side for years and years.

> S&S Deli in Cambridge

Good lunch spot for a nudnik

> If only Bill Gates . . . had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

That's assuming Bill Gates didn't know what he was doing. Sadly, it sounds like he knew exactly what he was doing.

Sometimes (sometimes) it just implies that someone sent an email, got ignored, and left a paper trail behind

While I understand that once one attains those short of connections, certain intelligence agencies will reach out offering lucrative opportunities for your co-operation.

Disgusting nature aside, I can't help but be amazed as to how someone can be so well connected. What sort of skills did Epstein have that managed to have so many people on speed dial?

How do you get in a position to correspond with presidents, royals, celebrities and getting them all hooked on you?

Amazing indeed.

> adding: “perhaps you will know Jeffrey and his background and situation."

This is the most-interesting bit. The introducer put this up front. Maybe it's Nigerian-prince scame logic? Or maybe there really is that much sympathy for pedophiles in Silicon Valley [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/05/business/epstein-investme...

The names of someone close to me and his (adult) daughter both show up in the latest Epstein file release but for innocuous reasons. They both have published a lot and, apparently, Epstein was recommended some of their works.

This is interesting to me as it demonstrates that a normal person at the time could see for themselves that Epstein was someone you didn't want to associate. I've wondered if Epstein put up a good smoke screen that confounded ordinary judgements (rather than moral judgements). IMO this demonstrates that a normal person could see him for who he was, even in the midst of one of his charm offensives.

>Scott Aaronson was born on May 21st, 1981. He will be 30 in 2011. The conference could follow a theme of: “hurry to think together with Scott Aaronson while he is still in his 20s and not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s.” This offers another nice opportunity for celebration.

may be somebody would train a model on the Epstein and his associates emails/etc. which would allow to research the workings of the such psychopaths' minds

"Charles Harper" is a common name.

Is Scott referring to this Charles Harper, of the Templeton Foundation, dedicated to the science of theology?

http://capabilities.templeton.org/2006/interview/c_harper.ht...

This is what makes so much of the Epstein files damning. They are correspondents that happen after 2008 when he was publicly convicted of prostitution.

The fact that Scott here was able to find that information and cut ties shows how corrupt every powerful person that didn't do that was. Sorry billionaires and politicians, you don't come out looking clean being friendly to the known pedophile pimp.

Excerpt from one of the related emails (written by JE):

"great proposal„ however, it needs to be more around deception alice -bob. communication. virus hacking, battle between defense and infiltration.. computation is already looked at in various fields. camoflauge , mimickry, signal processing, and its non random nature, misinformation. ( the anti- truth - but right answer for the moment ).. computation does not involve defending against interception, a key area for biological systems, if a predator breaks the code, it usually can accumulate its preys free energy at a discount . self deception, ( necessary to prevent accidental disclosure of inate algorithms. WE need more hackers , also interested in biological hacking , security, etc."

Damn! I once worked with a guy that was exactly like this. Not just writing but his style of speech irl was like that, incoherent loosely bound ideas around one topic. Ironically, the harder he tried to appear smart the more idiotic were the things that spewed out of his mouth.

We were working with GPUs, trying to find ways to optimize GPU code, he called the team for an informal meeting and told us dead serious, "Why can't you just like, ..., remove the GPUs from the server, then crack them open, turn them outside out and put them back in to see if they perform better". :O

I don't know if this has a name, I just thought the guy had schizophrenia. So glad I moved on from that place.

I thought this was going to be a joke article about how easy it is to not be a pedo. But it turns out the author did have engagements with Epstein, and is now trying to pretend he just randomly showed up in the files.

Do you know how many times I’ve appeared in the files? Zero. It’s very easy to not appear in them. 99.999999% of people didn’t.

> not yet a pitiful over-the-hill geezer in his 30s

Hey. Fuck them. At least most of us are not greedy corrupt fucks. Or died in prison as a consequence of our own sins.

Guily by (lack of) association!

> If only Bill Gates and Larry Summers had had my mom to go to for advice, they could’ve saved themselves a lot of grief.

The actual lesson is not "listen to your mom", but "character matters". It doesn't matter how much someone agrees with you, how smart they are, how rich they are, how many great ideas they have etc etc. A rotten character will eventually rot everything around it. Techines/nerds/geeks get so enamoured with ideas they tend to not even see the kind of people ideas come from.

What's your Epstein / Erdos number?

Linus Torvalds was found in Jeffrey's emails.

A different Jeffrey, mind.

Not sure how he's meant to come back from this.

> Last night, I was taken aback to discover that my name appears in the Epstein Files, in 26 different documents

I'm kind of disappointed that my name is not in there. (Well the name is in there but not as my name. When you have a last name that has been in the top 5 in the US for over 230 years and a first name that was top 20 when people in the age group most likely to be in those files were born, you get a lot of false positives).

The bar to ending up in those files for perfectly innocent reasons is pretty low. Epstein was involved in a lot of legitimate things, probably to draw attention away from the illegitimate things.

Do some interesting research that gets some attention in the popular science press and Epstein might want to talk about funding you. Write an interesting book or article that comes to his attention and he might mention it in an email. Heck, write an interesting answer on Quora and you might end up in the files, because Epstein was subscribed to Quora's digest email.

If even 5% of what 15 year old tzs planned to accomplish with his life had happened, I'd be in there in at least one of those innocent ways. It highlights how mundane my life turned out.

Evil is, as evil does.

Bill Gates and his Foundation have a bad rep long before his Epstein link came into the news.

Who better to collude with a known child trafficker/molester, than one who has no qualms in killing children via illegal vaccines/drugs to help his nexus with Big Pharma.

Bill & Melinda Gates' Foundation's evil illegal "vaccine trials" on tribal children (especially girls) in India (without the consent of them and their parents) directly caused the deaths of several children, hospitalizations of scores of such innocent victims, and it was a huge conspiracy and controversy that was uncovered during investigations by Supreme Court and police.

https://m.economictimes.com/industry/healthcare/biotech/heal...

The Gates Foundation operates like a monopolistic unethical pharmaceutical company (as a weapon and Think Tank of Big Pharma) under the guise of a charitable NGO or grantmaker.

https://capitalresearch.org/article/bill-gates-big-philanthr...

It would fit perfectly if Epstein was a Russian agent.

- Where did he get his money from?

- Who's interests are served by this whole dodgy setup?

- The Trump connection.

- The Trump Russia connection.

Maybe I imagine but it all seems aligned.

I think it's obvious Epstein was engineered as a "control theory lever" over a global financial/political system, that despite the best wargaming/simulation, could never be perfectly predicted. The system was simply too complex. So, real politik, and Machiavellian necessity required elements of control to be injected into this system to provide definiteness where ambiguity dared reign.

Ne pas comprende? That means that the blackmail was used to ensure definiteness of otherwise variable elements. If we were in Ancient Greece, it wouldn't be pedophilia (then, a "good") it would have been "chthonic excess"- or "ideological heresy"- based blackmail. The architects of this twistedness merely used the tools available that leveraged the age we live in.

So, that bacchic excess (beyond such needed for blackmail)? Human nature in secret succumbed to unchecked desires, itself a predictable outcome. The OG plan was not "evil" per se (ensure predictability of unpredictable system), it was pragmatic, but the implementation, necessarily became evil and the evil was normalized and justified by the "importance" of the plan to the stability of the playmakers.

The banality of evil, eh?

> For whatever reason, I forwarded this email to my parents, brother, and then-fiancee Dana.

A very strange action to take for someone who claims to have no recollection of the meeting.