Melinda French Gates
Wild Card with Rachel Martin
NPR
4.7 • 989 Ratings
🗓️ 5 February 2026
⏱️ 44 minutes
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Summary
Melinda French Gates has been through some painful and public transitions — ending her marriage of 27 years, stepping away from the foundation she built with her ex-husband Bill Gates and turning her professional focus to women’s health and social progress. She talks to Rachel about forgiveness, learning to trust, and her ex-husband’s association with Jeffrey Epstein. To listen sponsor-free and support the show, sign up for Wild Card+ at plus.npr.org/wildcard
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Are you good at forgiveness? |
| 0:02.1 | Yes. |
| 0:03.6 | Yes, I think I am. |
| 0:06.2 | If you can't eventually forgive somebody, then you hurt yourself, I think, right? |
| 0:11.2 | And I don't want to live my life hurting myself. |
| 0:18.7 | I'm Rachel Martin, and this is Wild Card, the show where cards control the conversation. |
| 0:25.1 | Each week, my guest answers questions about their life. |
| 0:28.6 | Questions pulled from a deck of cards. |
| 0:30.8 | They're allowed to skip one question and to flip one back on me. |
| 0:34.2 | My guest this week is Melinda French Gates. |
| 0:37.1 | I've learned that love absolutely takes |
| 0:40.2 | trust, absolute trust, and if you have that deep trust, both partners can grow individually |
| 0:48.4 | and together. Melinda French Gates has lived through some very high profile turning points, |
| 0:54.1 | including ending her marriage to Bill Gates and starting her own separate philanthropic work. |
| 0:58.9 | She wrote beautifully about all of it in a memoir that was published last year called The Next Day, Transitions, Change, and Moving Forward. |
| 1:06.5 | And it is my great pleasure to welcome Melinda French Gates to Wildcard. |
| 1:10.2 | Hi. |
| 1:10.9 | Hi, thanks for having me, Rachel. |
| 1:12.7 | I'm so pleased that we could make this work. |
| 1:15.2 | Me too. |
| 1:19.5 | We're going to do round one. |
| 1:21.6 | Memories. Are you ready? |
... |
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