Behind the Bastards - Part Three: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World
Aired: 2026-02-24
Duration: 01:19:25


=== Building The Modern World (14:43) ===

[00:00:01]  Cool zone media.
[00:00:05]  Welcome back to the Jeffrey Epstein podcast extravaganza, also known on normal weeks as Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people.
[00:00:17]  For the last two weeks, that's meant Jeffrey Epstein, particularly getting into what the new Epstein file releases have revealed about how Jeffrey Epstein helped build the modern world.
[00:00:28]  Speaking of the modern world, our guest today is a part of it.
[00:00:32]  Andrew T Thanks.
[00:00:35]  Thanks for having me.
[00:00:38]  Yeah, I guess.
[00:00:38]  I would say a part of the modern world under protest at this point.
[00:00:42]  Yeah, under protest, isn't everyone, aren't we all?
[00:00:44]  Under protest.
[00:00:45]  I'm only here because I have to be.
[00:00:47]  Yeah.
[00:00:48]  Yeah.
[00:00:48]  The only part of the modern world I want to have anything to do with is my bed.
[00:00:52]  And they make me leave that for like 16 hours a day.
[00:00:55]  It's nuts.
[00:00:56]  You know what, though, being one of those, I hate the modern world, guys.
[00:00:59]  I do want to stress I'm not one of those.
[00:01:01]  It was better in Rome what happened to classical architecture.
[00:01:04]  I would have hated that too.
[00:01:07]  Anything where I have to get out of my bed, bad society.
[00:01:10]  Bed only.
[00:01:12]  We need to, yeah, we need to rebuild society entirely around naps.
[00:01:16]  That is my strong opinion.
[00:01:18]  Unfortunately, I think Jeffrey Epstein might have agreed with it at least for himself because he liked to, well, there wasn't a lot of sleep.
[00:01:28]  Anyway, Andrew, where can people find you on the internet before we continue?
[00:01:30]  Oh, God.
[00:01:32]  Thanks for letting me get it in before the fucking real crimes start.
[00:01:36]  Yeah, the real fucking crimes, too.
[00:01:38]  I don't know.
[00:01:39]  Andrew T everywhere.
[00:01:42]  I have doing a podcast called Starter Trek on subopphonepods.com.
[00:01:47]  My main podcast is Jose Racist, but we've been having a lot of fun doing talking Star Trek with my co-host, Tawny Newsome, who is, I don't know if you're I love that stuff.
[00:01:56]  If you're Star, spoiler alert people, but she's a beloved reveal happens in episode five of Starfleet Academies.
[00:02:05]  Yeah, the new Star Trek.
[00:02:06]  Yeah.
[00:02:07]  I don't know.
[00:02:08]  Star Trek is happening.
[00:02:09]  That's all.
[00:02:09]  Well, that's a good thing to be happening.
[00:02:11]  We love Star Trek almost as much as we love the opposite of Star Trek, which is about hearing about a wealthy pedophile.
[00:02:19]  Yeah.
[00:02:20]  Yeah.
[00:02:21]  Well, also a wealthy technocrat pedophile.
[00:02:24]  A wealthy technocrat pedophile.
[00:02:26]  Yes.
[00:02:26]  Exactly the sort of person Star Trek got rid of in the idealized future in Gene Roddenberry's beautiful dream.
[00:02:35]  No more Jeffrey Epsteins.
[00:02:37]  Because of literally this.
[00:02:39]  They got rid of people like this.
[00:02:41]  And in modern times, we're recording these episodes on the day that Ghelane Maxwell's lawyer has said that she will not talk unless she's given clemency.
[00:02:51]  But if given clemency, she can prove that both Donald J. Trump and Bill Clinton are innocent.
[00:02:58]  So that's cool.
[00:03:01]  It's tough for me because I hate that stuff.
[00:03:04]  But I also love people pleading the fifth.
[00:03:06]  I'm a big fan of the fifth.
[00:03:07]  I'm a big plead the fifth fan.
[00:03:10]  It's tough.
[00:03:11]  It's tough.
[00:03:12]  These are the times that try men's souls.
[00:03:14]  But I have to say, I have questions.
[00:03:16]  Frankly, I have questions.
[00:03:18]  It's the best.
[00:03:18]  It's the best amendment.
[00:03:19]  Easily.
[00:03:20]  The fifth?
[00:03:21]  Are you getting it?
[00:03:23]  I'm surprised she didn't.
[00:03:24]  At this point, you're just pinning it on a dead man, right?
[00:03:26]  Like, this is Webay eating up murders once he's in for life.
[00:03:32]  Yeah.
[00:03:33]  I mean, we'll see how it goes, but I have some theories that, you know.
[00:03:36]  Yeah.
[00:03:36]  I mean, I don't, anything could happen at this point.
[00:03:39]  We're not talking a lot about Gillen in these episodes just because they're more focused on Jeffrey and the nature of his communication.
[00:03:47]  We're not talking really a lot about the sex stuff in this episode because it's more about all of the different, I mean, we're talking about it to the extent that that's part of how he influenced people.
[00:03:55]  We're talking about like what stuff Jeffrey came to believe and how he tried to shift the world using his position of considerable cultural influence.
[00:04:03]  Yeah.
[00:04:05]  This is an iHeart podcast.
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[00:04:10]  When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
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[00:04:42]  I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
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[00:04:50]  I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
[00:04:57]  An in-depth conversation with the man who's shaping our future.
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[00:05:20]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:05:23]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:05:25]  That's so funny.
[00:05:27]  Shari stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:05:35]  Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:05:43]  What's up, everyone?
[00:05:44]  I'm Ego Mode.
[00:05:45]  My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
[00:05:49]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:05:52]  He goes, just give it a shot.
[00:05:53]  But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:06:00]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:06:03]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:06:10]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:06:12]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:06:13]  There's a lot of life.
[00:06:14]  Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:06:26]  So in May of 2013, Jeffrey Epstein was actively working through an intermediary to broker an in-person meeting with the most obvious.
[00:06:34]  It's a match made in heaven, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
[00:06:38]  And obviously, if you're Jeff Epstein in 2013 trying to get an in-person sit-down with Vladdy Putz, what are you wanting to talk about?
[00:06:46]  Bitcoin.
[00:06:47]  Of course.
[00:06:48]  God, right.
[00:06:49]  What else could you want to talk about Vladimir Putin with but Bitcoin in 2013?
[00:06:55]  His intermediary in these conversations was Thorbjorn Jaglund, who is a Norwegian Labor Party politician and the former prime minister of Norway.
[00:07:05]  He has been, he is not doing well as a result of the revelation that he and Epstein were quite close.
[00:07:10]  People are very unhappy with him over in Norway.
[00:07:14]  God, what's weird about?
[00:07:17]  Imagine a leader facing a consequence for his pedophile.
[00:07:23]  Yeah.
[00:07:23]  Yeah.
[00:07:24]  For specifically trying to broker a meeting with that pedophile and Vladimir Putin.
[00:07:29]  And it's weird because you can tell Epstein took this really seriously.
[00:07:33]  This is a guy who kind of seems to have, I mean, slept through a lot of the serious parts of his life when he's emailing with most of his rich and famous friends.
[00:07:42]  He spells fucking every other word wrong.
[00:07:44]  It's like watching, I mean, it's like a nine-year-old typing, right?
[00:07:48]  Like it's, it's, he's not dedicated to sounding good.
[00:07:53]  Right.
[00:07:53]  Giving like bad AOL instant messenger messages, like it's giving AOL yeah.
[00:07:58]  And so, as we talked about in the last episodes, whenever Jeffrey like, has a long, multi-paragraph email where everything's basically spelled right and written properly, you are like oh, he was taking this.
[00:08:08]  This was important to him.
[00:08:09]  Yeah, like he was, this was an all hands on deck situation, right.
[00:08:13]  And so one of these emails that Jeffrey sends to the former pm of Norway about trying to meet with Putin is one of these times where he writes a long email with pretty good spelling and grammar.
[00:08:24]  So he must have typed this one out somewhere other than his Ipad.
[00:08:26]  Here's a segment from that email.
[00:08:28]  This is his pitch to to this guy when.
[00:08:31]  This is his pitch to this guy to deliver to Putin.
[00:08:33]  Right, this is how he's basically trying to convince Putin.
[00:08:36]  He's got to get into the bitcoin game.
[00:08:38]  Quote, when Sputnik was announced, the West was caught flat-footed.
[00:08:41]  The same can now happen with Russia taking the lead in finance.
[00:08:44]  Instead of competing with the West for nanotech, copying Silicon Valley, looking for startups, playing catch up to Microsoft Apple, Google and the like, Russia can get out in front and leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.
[00:08:59]  Bitcoin is the Sputnik of the 21st century.
[00:09:03]  I genuinely have to say it is a little heartening slash, disheartening that these people genuinely believe they're bullshit.
[00:09:11]  Like this was a private conversation.
[00:09:13]  He really yeah like, because I, I on some level just wish that bitcoin people in private, when the, when the billionaires are talking to each other like oh, this is going to be great for money laundering and like whatever it's actually used for, it is a little insane to hear him like typing like a, like a, like a twitter person right now.
[00:09:34]  And it's hard to say because like, one of the versions of the story is that Epstein was one of the marks right, that the bitcoin people were willing to talk to him and be friends with him, primarily even more than the prostitutions, the child, like sex trafficking stuff, because Jeffrey could connect him to a lot of people with real money to put into the bitcoin system.
[00:09:55]  And maybe they never, maybe they were just playing with Jeffrey and maybe he was a fool, or maybe Jeffrey knows, maybe he's in on the con and the idea is, if Russia back, if Russia gets a bitcoin reserve, a shitload of their real currency can flow out to the people like us who have money in crypto and we can get real money out of the create.
[00:10:12]  Like I don't know what the plan was.
[00:10:14]  But also like trying to talk to Putin like an actual bitcoin mark is a lot for that.
[00:10:25]  Like he's not.
[00:10:26]  Vladimir Putin is not an idiot, he's not, at least.
[00:10:30]  He's made his plenty of mistakes, but none of them are like and then he adopted bitcoin as the currency for the Russian federation.
[00:10:38]  That's a little like.
[00:10:39]  That's just there's no benefit in that to him.
[00:10:42]  Like it would only benefit these.
[00:10:44]  It's always 1d chess.
[00:10:45]  It's 1d.
[00:10:46]  Like these people are not smarter than you.
[00:10:48]  They're actively dumber than you.
[00:10:51]  Yes, and that's.
[00:10:52]  Hang on to that.
[00:10:54]  Yeah, hang on to it and celebrate it.
[00:10:57]  And it's also funny to me just the idea that, like Sputnik, was the Soviet Union succeeding in doing a thing that honestly, Honestly, before they did it, it was debated by a number of people.
[00:11:08]  It was like, can we even do stuff like this?
[00:11:10]  Like, is this fully possible?
[00:11:11]  Can you get a working satellite into orbit?
[00:11:13]  There was like debate for quite a while as to how possible that was.
[00:11:17]  And then they figure it out, like ahead of us.
[00:11:20]  And it's this amazing moment for all mankind.
[00:11:22]  They prove you can do this thing that hadn't been done before.
[00:11:25]  And the difference between that and saying, yeah, this thing that we are already doing, if you just rip it off, you'll be doing the Sputnik of the 20th, which really says a lot about the 21st century.
[00:11:35]  That like our Sputnik is ripping off a thing that doesn't do anything and already exists.
[00:11:41]  Like amazing stuff, Jeffrey.
[00:11:43]  If you have the bold vision to crater your economy and the global economy, you will be the first to do that.
[00:11:49]  You can do it.
[00:11:49]  You can do it.
[00:11:50]  Yeah.
[00:11:50]  No one else has made Bitcoin their national currency yet because it's a bad idea.
[00:11:55]  Epstein goes on to claim that crypto offers the potential for a much more advanced disruptive securitization scheme than anything previously achievable, and that Russia was in a unique position to execute on a grand vision of a new form of money.
[00:12:09]  He insists that Thorbjorn needs to secure him and Putin a minimum two to three hour long meeting to discuss all of this.
[00:12:16]  And I find that so funny that he's like begging to set up this meeting with Vladimir Putin, who has no interest in him, at least no interest in meeting with him, it doesn't seem like.
[00:12:26]  You know, maybe he was utilizing him as an asset.
[00:12:28]  There's some evidence of that, but that also doesn't mean Putin himself was directly involved because he's got other shit on his plate.
[00:12:33]  The idea that Jeffrey's begging for this meeting is, but it has to be at least two or three hours.
[00:12:37]  I won't sit down for anything less.
[00:12:39]  It's like, man, if he can get you 20 minutes with Putin, you'd be happy for it.
[00:12:42]  Don't fucking bullshit like me.
[00:12:46]  And Putin, showing better judgment than anyone else in these four episodes, declined to meet with Jeffrey Epstein, at least as far as we know.
[00:12:55]  Wow.
[00:12:57]  Well, I love that at least being smart enough to not agree to it on fucking email puts him.
[00:13:02]  Yeah, in a fucking email.
[00:13:04]  Right.
[00:13:04]  Right.
[00:13:04]  Option-wise, he's at least ahead of everyone.
[00:13:08]  He's beating Bobby Kotik of Activision Blizzard and Peter Deal, that's for sure.
[00:13:15]  Yeah.
[00:13:16]  So this whole dalliance Jeffrey has with trying to get Russia on the Bitcoin train is not influential because of the outcome because nothing really happens here.
[00:13:25]  But it's important because of what it says about where Jeff's head was in 2013.
[00:13:29]  By this point, I really don't like you calling him Jeff.
[00:13:35]  I don't like you calling him Jeff.
[00:13:37]  It's like too humanizing to call him Jeff.
[00:13:40]  Yeah, I do it every now and then.
[00:13:41]  Jeff.
[00:13:42]  Jeffy.
[00:13:43]  Nope.
[00:13:43]  Little Jeffrey.
[00:13:44]  Nope.
[00:13:46]  So by 2013, whether or not he'd ever read Dugan's work, he was basically pitching Putin on Bitcoin's potential to contribute to a multipolar world by ending U.S. economic dominance.
[00:13:56]  In emails he sent around the same time to billionaire Richard Branson.
[00:13:59]  Epstein pitched his vague idea for what he called a new social good currency.
[00:14:04]  Quote, creating a new social good currency, similar to the creation of airline mile awards, special drawing rights, et cetera, would be the most disruptive of all advances.
[00:14:13]  The financial system has outgrown its purpose, allowing people to conduct exchanges with third-party trust and ease of transaction.
[00:14:19]  So what you kind of see is there's this budding interest Jeffrey has to disrupt the global order, which is a different picture of the man than I had when he just seemed to be this guy who was very deeply tied to the elite system and seemed to really have all of his power tied to the maintenance of that system, as opposed to a guy who, after he gets out of prison, clearly wants to burn stuff down to some extent, right?

=== Academics And Alt-Right Ties (14:38) ===

[00:14:45]  In a way that's very familiar with how a lot of right-coated people talk today, a lot of these influential folks like Bannon.
[00:14:51]  Yeah.
[00:14:52]  I mean, yes and no, though, because they don't really mean burning it down.
[00:14:56]  Like, well, they mean the Fed, U.S. democracy, that kind of stuff, right?
[00:15:02]  They want to disrupt the system they rose up in, right?
[00:15:05]  They don't want it to keep working the way it has, right?
[00:15:08]  But they want society to look largely.
[00:15:12]  They want it to look more like Russia, which is like, they're in charge, but it's basically the same society.
[00:15:19]  And I think so weird.
[00:15:20]  Yeah.
[00:15:21]  I think you can see a lot of that here in that, okay, so he goes to prison for a thing that if you're a Russian oligarch who stays in good with Putin, you don't go to prison for the stuff Jeffrey Epstein was doing, right?
[00:15:31]  So maybe that's kind of it as he's like, well, we ought to be more like, we need to be more of an oligarchy, of a dictatorial oligarchy, because then people, me and other people like me, won't have consequences to deal with, right?
[00:15:43]  Maybe that's why he's like, that's how he's thinking, you know?
[00:15:46]  So Richard Branson and Epstein are two more.
[00:15:49]  That's another famed Epstein friendship, right?
[00:15:52]  And his, his, his close relationship with Branson was a two-way street.
[00:15:56]  And a little later that same year, 2013, Branson offered Epstein advice on fixing his public image after the whole registered sex offender thing.
[00:16:05]  He assured Epstein that he could repair Jeffrey's public profile if Epstein could just get Bill Gates to vouch for him.
[00:16:12]  And this is Branson saying, like, basically, this is what you need to get Bill Gates to say about you to fix your image.
[00:16:17]  Quote, you've been a brilliant advisor to him, that you slipped up many years ago by sleeping with a 17 and a half year old woman and were punished for it.
[00:16:24]  That you've more than learned your lesson and have done nothing that's against the law since.
[00:16:28]  If only Bill Gates would say, but can you imagine if Bill Gates in 2014 or so had come up and like, look, did Jeffrey Epstein sleep with a child?
[00:16:36]  Yes, but he's learned his lesson and we all need to forgive him.
[00:16:39]  None of this would be happening.
[00:16:42]  God.
[00:16:43]  I mean, all these men are fucking disgusting.
[00:16:49]  They're disgusting.
[00:16:50]  It's not just disgusting.
[00:16:52]  It's completely out of touch.
[00:16:53]  The fact that Richard Branson, it shows you how warping the bubble of nothing but other rich guys is.
[00:17:00]  That Richard Branson is looking like, who's someone who all Americans love and respect?
[00:17:04]  Love.
[00:17:05]  Yeah.
[00:17:05]  Yeah.
[00:17:05]  Bill Gates.
[00:17:07]  Obviously, everyone loves Bill.
[00:17:10]  I hate all these people.
[00:17:11]  No, we don't.
[00:17:12]  We never did.
[00:17:14]  Yeah.
[00:17:16]  I guess it's just like, get the, get the nerd to tell, to tell everyone you're not committing crimes.
[00:17:23]  Yeah.
[00:17:24]  And they're just like, he's the squarest one around.
[00:17:27]  Right.
[00:17:28]  Right.
[00:17:28]  Bill Gates, you know, a straight shooter.
[00:17:32]  So on a related note, that same year, 2013, this is a big year for Branson and Epstein.
[00:17:37]  Richard Branson reversed the normal order of things.
[00:17:39]  And he's, this is the only time I found this happening, although I haven't been through all of the millions of files released.
[00:17:44]  But Branson invited Epstein to his private island.
[00:17:48]  You know, there we go.
[00:17:49]  Finally, somebody's willing to pay Jeff back for his hospitality, you know?
[00:17:56]  I mean, look, Branson's Island can't be, I guess, at the risk of, it can't be that good.
[00:18:03]  I don't know.
[00:18:03]  Right?
[00:18:05]  I don't know.
[00:18:06]  I would have said before this, I would have guessed it had was like a higher age bracket of the people, but I don't actually know that that's true now.
[00:18:16]  So, yeah, right.
[00:18:18]  Yeah.
[00:18:18]  Is this just like the fucking cheap version of Epstein's Island or is Epstein's Island the cheap pedophile island, right?
[00:18:25]  That's also possible.
[00:18:26]  We simply don't know.
[00:18:27]  Maybe the really good pedophile islands don't tell, have emails where they talk about.
[00:18:33]  Yeah.
[00:18:35]  So Branson added to the invite, anytime you're in the area, would love to see you as long as you bring your harem and all with a cat exclamation point after it.
[00:18:44]  So I would say that implicates Richard Branson in some sex crashes.
[00:18:48]  Jesus Christ.
[00:18:49]  Via email.
[00:18:51]  Now, my favorite thing about this, my favorite thing about all this, is the denials all these people have to have their spokespeople issue after this shit comes out.
[00:18:58]  And once this email, people start talking about it.
[00:19:00]  Oh, Branson's referring to his harem and inviting him to his island.
[00:19:04]  I guess he's probably doing some sex crimes.
[00:19:06]  Branson's spokesperson told journalists with The Independent that, nah, no, no, no, no.
[00:19:10]  The harem he was referring to were just adult members of Epstein's staff.
[00:19:16]  Obviously.
[00:19:17]  Jesus Christ.
[00:19:18]  Obviously.
[00:19:20]  Yeah.
[00:19:21]  Who were those?
[00:19:22]  Yeah.
[00:19:23]  What are you talking about?
[00:19:24]  Yeah, not named.
[00:19:24]  Not named.
[00:19:25]  Which ones?
[00:19:26]  Right.
[00:19:26]  Can we get a name?
[00:19:28]  Yeah.
[00:19:28]  So the worst.
[00:19:29]  And again, does this mean that Jeffrey was just bringing children over when Branson was there?
[00:19:36]  Was he was Branson one of the ones that he plied with teenage girls?
[00:19:39]  Or was Branson one of the ones that he plied with adult women, right?
[00:19:43]  No way to know.
[00:19:44]  And honestly, I don't care.
[00:19:45]  If you're Jeffrey Epstein's friend at this point and inviting him to islands, I consider you guilty of everything he was, you know?
[00:19:51]  Yeah.
[00:19:52]  I think that's reasonable if you're going to islands with him, right?
[00:19:56]  Yeah.
[00:19:57]  On a regular basis, if you're inviting him to islands and talking about his harem.
[00:20:01]  If you're advising Bill Gates to be his like no pedophile spokesperson, then I'm going to go with not a great guy.
[00:20:15]  Yeah, just the dumbest frat house shit.
[00:20:17]  It's always, it's never better than that.
[00:20:20]  Yeah.
[00:20:21]  Yeah.
[00:20:21]  Well, no, that's worse than that.
[00:20:23]  When it comes to a question of like, well, why aren't these guys getting charged?
[00:20:26]  Well, because all you have is Branson saying, bring your harem.
[00:20:29]  And that's not, Branson didn't say, bring specifically the underage members.
[00:20:33]  I don't want anyone older than six.
[00:20:35]  That's not in an email, right?
[00:20:36]  So there's not, I don't think there's anything to charge Branson off of at this point.
[00:20:41]  Maybe there will be.
[00:20:41]  Maybe there's more stuff that we don't know.
[00:20:43]  I'm not against it.
[00:20:44]  I'm just like, yeah, I'm not surprised a lot of these guys aren't getting charged yet because that's not quite enough, you know, to actually convict someone.
[00:20:54]  The worst harms Epstein committed and the worst crimes his friends are implicated in took place offline.
[00:21:00]  The conversations we have documented are mostly either precursors or adjacent to the really bad stuff.
[00:21:05]  Every now and then you get something truly fucking horrifying.
[00:21:08]  Like there's an email chain in which one of Epstein's friends is like, hey, who is that gynecologist you sent your victims to?
[00:21:14]  And Epstein like gives him the name of a gynecologist and they're like, yeah, you really keep this guy busy, right?
[00:21:18]  Like there's some horrifying shit like that in there.
[00:21:21]  But for the most part, it's like quips like this, bring your harem.
[00:21:25]  And then like one interesting thing to do on the Epstein files is search for variants of like not for email or like not for online, right?
[00:21:33]  Where, cause there will be points where people will be made and then they'll be like, hey, let's take this to a phone call.
[00:21:37]  Right.
[00:21:39]  So it's just hard to kind of say what the exact extent of a lot of stuff was.
[00:21:43]  And because so many follow-up conversations that he had, not even about the criminal stuff, about stuff like crypto took place in person or over the phone.
[00:21:51]  And so I can say he was trying to influence the development of Bitcoin and crypto.
[00:21:55]  He wanted and he got that influence.
[00:21:57]  What did he do with it?
[00:21:58]  Not entirely clear to me.
[00:22:00]  What I can say is that Joey Ito and Epstein's friendship continued to blossom throughout the aughts.
[00:22:06]  And this was, remember, Ito is a big wigged MIT.
[00:22:09]  He's basically like running the lab that's doing like their crypto development, looking at a lot of stuff like that.
[00:22:15]  And he's the guy who plied Jeffrey to pay the salaries of those three big Bitcoin debts.
[00:22:20]  And this is the friendship between Ito and Epstein is very good for MIT.
[00:22:25]  The school receives at least $850,000 from the Epstein Foundation directly to Ito's projects from 2002 to 2017, in addition to other donations.
[00:22:35]  You also have to keep in mind that given how Epstein operated, he was responsible for an unknowable amount of donations to MIT from other rich guys and foundations, right?
[00:22:44]  He donated $850K to MIT over this period.
[00:22:48]  Who knows how much other money he got sent there by being Epstein?
[00:22:52]  Ito and MIT continued to accept Epstein's money for almost a decade after his conviction for sex crimes.
[00:22:58]  And I shouldn't just limit it to Ito, as thetech.com has summarized in an article on the subject.
[00:23:04]  Professor of mechanical engineering, Seth Lloyd, received research funding, went to Epstein's private island, and visited Epstein while he was in prison.
[00:23:11]  Following the investigation, Lloyd was put on paid administrative leave.
[00:23:15]  However, Lloyd retains his tenured professorship.
[00:23:17]  Former president of MIT, Rafael Rafe, signed a letter thanking Epstein for a donation in 2012, just six weeks into his presidency.
[00:23:25]  In a statement to MIT released in 2019, Rafe stated that Ito asked for permission to retain this initial gift, and members of my senior team allowed it.
[00:23:33]  Epstein's gifts were also discussed at at least one of MIT's regular senior team meetings with Rafe present.
[00:23:39]  So a lot of people in MIT should have known better, right?
[00:23:42]  And Ito himself is particularly, but not the only guy who was visiting Epstein and probably involved in some criminal stuff.
[00:23:49]  Right.
[00:23:49]  Because it's also like, like adjacent to him, $850,000 is a lot of money, but it's not actually a lot of money for MIT.
[00:24:02]  Like, what is its endowment in the billions?
[00:24:06]  The endowment's big, but for individuals, and you have to assume it's several million.
[00:24:11]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:24:14]  I'm just saying, in the grand scheme of things, every kind of financial, like some of the biggest malfeasances that happen, I am a little surprised at the actual price tag.
[00:24:24]  I will just say there's a couple of things.
[00:24:26]  One is, first off, people get this wrong all the time.
[00:24:29]  Jeffrey Epstein's not a billionaire, never was.
[00:24:32]  No evidence that he ever was.
[00:24:33]  He died.
[00:24:34]  When he died, his net worth was about $600 million, right?
[00:24:37]  And this is a guy who lied a lot and put, and there's not really much practical difference between $600 million and a billion or two in terms of what other people would notice about your spending.
[00:24:45]  They're both enough for yachts and private islands, right?
[00:24:48]  You know, right, right.
[00:24:49]  One thing, though, that as you point out, this does review is that how little money it really takes to bribe a lot of very influential people to change the world, you know, it's less than you want it to be.
[00:25:00]  Yeah.
[00:25:01]  Part of the problem is that for most billionaires in the low billions, a lot of their money, I mean, for all billionaires, really, a lot of and most of their actual assets are tied up in things that are not liquid cash, right?
[00:25:11]  Right.
[00:25:12]  So even for these guys, getting a million dollars or something in cash to throw at a single project is a pretty big donation for a lot of people at Epstein's level of wealth, right?
[00:25:22]  Yeah.
[00:25:23]  So anyway, that's why I would say that like his connection to like crypto bros is not that surprising to me.
[00:25:29]  But what is surprising is like the Epstein to academia pipeline being so massive.
[00:25:35]  I mean, not to say that there isn't, you know, anybody who's worked in academia can talk about how political and wild it is, but it's just there's his reach is just disgustingly big.
[00:25:49]  Part of it is just like venomous.
[00:25:52]  Well, yeah, part of it is, again, he's spreading a lot of money around.
[00:25:56]  And part of it is that all of these, these, like the academics he's going to are guys who are a lot of them, like Ito, interest, very interested in cryptocurrency, very interested in a lot of controversial, you know, stuff that winds up being part of the alt-right and what a lot of these academics That he's friends with in the early 2000s to the aughts wind up being like weird right-wing guys because that's just kind of the crew that he's running with.
[00:26:21]  And these are a lot of these are just people that are like addicted to the idea of being smarter than everybody else and on the cutting edge of shit.
[00:26:28]  And that means they fall for a lot of dumb stuff because none of them, they're all PhDs and shit.
[00:26:33]  None of them are as smart as they think they are, right?
[00:26:36]  Well, there's all that.
[00:26:36]  Which is usually true of people.
[00:26:38]  Even though there's a stereotype of the liberal ivory tower of academia, I mean, the reality is it's like, especially lately, so many of these bozos with academic sounding but bad ideas can only exist in an ecosystem of academia and tenure and economics professorships and like right-wing philosophy professorships because their ideas don't actually work.
[00:26:59]  They actually, you know, by their own petard, they could never survive in the free market.
[00:27:06]  It's the huge problem we have because you also have a version of this problem when it comes to like copyright and AI, right?
[00:27:15]  Where it's like, well, our copyright laws and intellectual property laws are a fucking disaster.
[00:27:19]  And I had never in my life stood up for that kind of thing up until all of these AI companies want to suck up everything that human beings have ever created and remix it.
[00:27:28]  And then it's like, well, maybe it's, it's just the weapon we have.
[00:27:31]  And I don't really like it.
[00:27:33]  And I understand there's a lot of arguments about, well, this is problematic, but what else are we going to do at this point?
[00:27:39]  Right.
[00:27:39]  I can see that argument.
[00:27:40]  And it's kind of like with academia, the war the right has been waging on college and on the system of tenure and whatnot is disastrous.
[00:27:49]  But also academia has a lot of problems.
[00:27:52]  Like the fact, like the very structure of how higher education works is a part of why our entire generation owes all of their money to colleges, right?
[00:28:02]  Like there's a lot of problems with the way the system works.
[00:28:05]  And so I don't, just because Trump's destroying it and I'm against that, I don't want to be like, but the system works great before because it did.
[00:28:12]  All these guys were friends with Jeffrey Epstein, you know?
[00:28:16]  To continue along that line, Epstein used MIT to headhunt future influential crypto developers that he wanted on his side, people like Jeremy Rubin, who's today a noteworthy cryptocurrency researcher who was connected to Epstein by Joy Ito in 2014.
[00:28:31]  At around the same time, Epstein was emailing with Peter Thiel, who was a friend of his and a regular confidant.
[00:28:38]  Epstein and Thiel send a lot of emails to each other.
[00:28:41]  Jeffrey sends him a link to the New York State Department of Financial Services, which had just announced that they were going to, in 2014, had just announced they were going to consider proposals for regulating virtual currency exchanges.
[00:28:53]  And they published a list of proposed rules for the New York-based Bitcoin businesses that very month.
[00:28:58]  Epstein sends this email to Thiel with like a link to this, these updated rules and titles it As I Told You, basically saying like, hey, I told you that New York was going to start regulating crypto.
[00:29:10]  And Thiel responded, Do you think this is the first step in upping the anti-Bitcoin pressure?
[00:29:15]  And here's Epstein.
[00:29:16]  Basically, do you think this is the first step in like the state governments and the federal government coming out against crypto?
[00:29:22]  And here's Epstein's reply.

=== Crypto Scams And Lies (07:38) ===

[00:29:24]  First, it appears there is little agreement on what Bitcoin is.
[00:29:27]  Store of intrinsic value, if any, currency, property architecture, payment system, et cetera, conflicting goals, anonymous but transparent, public ledger, like the continuum now in the gender classification.
[00:29:37]  Fitting things into narrow boxes seems old school.
[00:29:40]  Man presenting his woman smells like property presenting his currency.
[00:29:43]  Anyway, more when I see you.
[00:29:45]  This is interesting for a few reasons.
[00:29:47]  For one thing, you have this kind of this acknowledgement from Jeffrey that like no one really understands how, like, what Bitcoin is.
[00:29:57]  Like, like, like, there's not a lot of widespread understanding about like what it is, right?
[00:30:02]  Because the people who are marketing it are saying like, it frees you from the government.
[00:30:05]  It's totally anonymous, right?
[00:30:07]  But also it's transparent because of the public ledger, because like the proof of fucking work shit, right?
[00:30:12]  Which is, yeah, it is like the different things that have Bitcoin has been sold to us as it can't be all of them.
[00:30:17]  It literally can't be.
[00:30:18]  They were lying about a bunch of stuff because Bitcoin was more than anything, a con, right?
[00:30:24]  But the fact that he then, the fact that he pivots to comparing it to trans people and to the growing understanding that like, which in 2014 was still, you know, a lot more primitive than it is today, that like, oh, Gender.
[00:30:36]  Is not as like much of a binary as people, like most people, had assumed for all.
[00:30:41]  Like we're starting to kind of talk about that a lot more and Jeffrey's thinking about it and aware of it, which is interesting because, come the late aughts for the last period of his life, he's going to be a big anti-trans rights guy right, and he's going to be seeding that world, and so it's really interesting to me that in 2014, he's thinking about this alongside bitcoin right, and it's kind of incoherent and again, not very smart the way he's thinking about it, because it's that's not really accurate about bitcoin.
[00:31:06]  Like it's.
[00:31:07]  Bitcoin's not, in fact, like gender.
[00:31:09]  People were just like pretending bitcoin was anonymous to trick criminals into using it so that more people would put money into the system.
[00:31:17]  That's different than people understanding that gender is not as binary as they thought it was.
[00:31:22]  Right right, there's a difference.
[00:31:24]  Um yeah anyway, for a further summary of Teal and Epstein's relationship, here's what Ryan Broderick wrote in an issue of his newsletter Garbage DAY on the subject.
[00:31:33]  The earliest actual emails between Epstein and Teal released so far are from 2014.
[00:31:38]  In an email in june of 2015, Epstein connected Teal with Sergey Belyakov, Russia's deputy minister of economic development and alleged Russian intelligence operative.
[00:31:47]  In an email to Teal a month after that, Epstein alludes to a visit at his Zoro ranch in New Mexico.
[00:31:52]  In 2015, Epstein told medical researcher and author Peter Atia, who was just named as a new CBS contributor by Barry Weiss, whose wife, Nellie Bowles, also corresponded with Epstein, that he was having dinner with Musk, Teal and Zuckerberg.
[00:32:04]  And in 2016, Epstein offered to share the expenses for Teal's lawsuit against Gawker, which would eventually bankrupt the outlet.
[00:32:13]  We'll talk more about that dinner.
[00:32:14]  So dumb oh, it's such a club of the dumbest motherfuckers ever to live well, and he's just he's.
[00:32:22]  He is connecting people to spies.
[00:32:24]  He's, he is like, and that's.
[00:32:26]  This is why people are like, was he literally just working for the Russian government?
[00:32:29]  Because there's a lot of he may.
[00:32:31]  I think it right is likely just that he was as dumb as they were, but there's a lot of ooh.
[00:32:35]  This guy's the Russian deputy minister and probably a Spile connected my friend Peter Teal.
[00:32:40]  Um, he does a lot of that and it's very similar to like Robert Maxwell Gillin, Maxwell's dad where people I think wrongly are like he was a Mossad agent and I was like that would imply that.
[00:32:51]  Like he was hired and trained by the Mossad, as opposed to what the Mossad, we know the Mossad does, which is they find like rich guys who are sympathetic to Israel and make them feel special and feel like they're James Bond.
[00:33:03]  Yeah, in exchange for giving them information that's useful right, which is I did what?
[00:33:08]  And giving them tasks.
[00:33:09]  Sometimes, you know, talk to this guy, get this guy to say this thing right, you know, give it, bring us this information.
[00:33:15]  Well, you know, they're using it, just like the Russians are.
[00:33:18]  Yeah, it's like agent, Agent, but in the way that, like, so is like a chainsaw.
[00:33:23]  It doesn't make any sense smart.
[00:33:26]  And I think there's good evidence that Epstein was that kind of useful idiot, both the Russian government and for the Mossad, right?
[00:33:32]  Yeah.
[00:33:33]  But that's, again, an episode.
[00:33:35]  That's a subject for another series of episodes that we would have to get into.
[00:33:41]  Now, the tech in their write-up of all this points out one particularly interesting email chain from August of 2018.
[00:33:47]  Epstein and Teal are discussing an accountant named Richard, who Epstein connected Joy Ito with to set up the paperwork for some kind of crypto launch.
[00:33:55]  This is likely Richard Khan, Epstein's personal accountant.
[00:33:59]  And it's a little unclear about why Teal needed to be in contact with Khan other than some crypto project.
[00:34:08]  And they were talking about layer one.
[00:34:10]  And I didn't really know what this meant.
[00:34:12]  So I looked it up.
[00:34:13]  And in networking jargon, like the field of like computer networking, layer one can refer to either data and equipment.
[00:34:22]  I found a website, CBTN Nuggets, that describes all this.
[00:34:25]  Layer one data is simply bits sent across a wire, many, many zeros and ones.
[00:34:30]  This is the network layer where that happens so that it can be transmitted somewhere else.
[00:34:34]  So then layer one equipment is the gear that lets you send data and it uses, and it's specifically the gear that you use to send data that uses little to no object in operating.
[00:34:43]  So it's the most basic equipment for sending data.
[00:34:46]  We're talking like Ethernet and fiber optic cables, as well as physical transmission objects of any over-are technology, including like electricity.
[00:34:54]  So the fact that they were talking with Khan about layer one for some kind of crypto deal could have meant a wide variety of things, but they were definitely talking about like the very basic infrastructure that would be needed to make this company function, right?
[00:35:08]  So they could have been talking about a variety of things, but when Ito asks Jeffrey, like, how's Khan's investigation doing into this stuff?
[00:35:16]  Epstein responded, so far it's not good.
[00:35:18]  There seems to be a disconnect between manipulation, currency valuation.
[00:35:22]  It's how to protect ourselves.
[00:35:23]  Not easy.
[00:35:24]  Ito then asks if he should pass this on to the team, which again suggests Epstein had an influential role shaping crypto projects that were going through MIT at the time.
[00:35:33]  Ito responds by asking if there's any specific regulations he should look at when giving feedback to the team.
[00:35:38]  And Epstein tells Ito, Mini, Ponzi gambling, manipulation, unlikely to cause trouble except for high-value targets.
[00:35:45]  So we've got here is Epstein.
[00:35:47]  This is finally a little bit of, I talked about, I'm not sure how much is he conned or a con man.
[00:35:52]  This is he's a con man fully.
[00:35:55]  He is talking about a crypto project he's working on with fucking MIT and being like, this is Ponzi gambling.
[00:36:00]  We're manipulating people.
[00:36:02]  We're going to steal their money, but it's unlikely to cause a trouble unless we take too much money from a high-value target, right?
[00:36:07]  That's what he's saying here, right?
[00:36:09]  You know what?
[00:36:09]  Like whatever this project is.
[00:36:11]  You know what Jeffrey Epstein would have loved?
[00:36:14]  Huh?
[00:36:15]  All the Super Bowl commercials from this year.
[00:36:18]  Oh, yeah.
[00:36:19]  He would have loved the Super Bowl commercials for this year.
[00:36:21]  It was all Epstein-backed companies.
[00:36:25]  All AI, all crypto, all online gambling.
[00:36:32]  It was like his holy trinity.
[00:36:34]  Yeah.
[00:36:34]  It's never been more apparent that the Super Bowl is just a scam.
[00:36:39]  This is the year it has to be mask off, right?
[00:36:41]  Like this is scams only.
[00:36:43]  Only scams, I guess.
[00:36:44]  Only scams.
[00:36:45]  Yeah.
[00:36:46]  It was, it was all con's.
[00:36:48]  I don't think any of them seemed very good, but also there was the, like the, the part that really struck me because the one crypto ad I noticed was Coinbase, where it was just like the fucking the backstreet boys.
[00:37:01]  Everybody was so mad.

=== Super Bowl Scam Alert (04:50) ===

[00:37:02]  They were like sing along.
[00:37:05]  And then they were like, by the way, fuck you, Coinbase.
[00:37:10]  You're like, oh, it actually made me happy because it's, it's desperation.
[00:37:14]  It's a huge desperation.
[00:37:15]  They're more done than last year.
[00:37:17]  Yeah.
[00:37:17]  I will say, actually, Sophie, when you said, do you know what Jeff Repsi would have loved?
[00:37:21]  I thought you were forcing an ad read right now.
[00:37:24]  Yeah, so did I.
[00:37:25]  No, no, I wasn't, but it is that time.
[00:37:28]  Yeah, we should go to ads.
[00:37:30]  God.
[00:37:31]  Yeah.
[00:37:36]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:37:40]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:37:43]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:37:46]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:37:50]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:37:53]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
[00:37:57]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:37:59]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:38:04]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:38:06]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:38:08]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:38:10]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:38:13]  I said, oh, hell no.
[00:38:14]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[00:38:17]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[00:38:21]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[00:38:23]  Trust me, babe.
[00:38:24]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:38:34]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[00:38:39]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[00:38:44]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[00:38:50]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
[00:38:59]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[00:39:04]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[00:39:07]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[00:39:10]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[00:39:12]  That's so funny.
[00:39:14]  Sherry stay with me each night, each morning.
[00:39:22]  Say you love me.
[00:39:25]  You know I.
[00:39:27]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:39:34]  What's up, everyone?
[00:39:35]  I'm Ago Modern.
[00:39:36]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[00:39:44]  It's Will Farrell.
[00:39:47]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[00:39:50]  I went and had lunch with him one day and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[00:39:55]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[00:39:58]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come.
[00:40:00]  Look for up and coming talent.
[00:40:02]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[00:40:07]  Yeah.
[00:40:07]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[00:40:10]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[00:40:11]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[00:40:20]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[00:40:22]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[00:40:30]  Yeah, it would not be.
[00:40:32]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[00:40:33]  There's a lot of luck.
[00:40:34]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:40:43]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[00:40:49]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[00:40:54]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[00:40:58]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[00:41:01]  I doctored the test once.
[00:41:03]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[00:41:06]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[00:41:10]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[00:41:13]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[00:41:15]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[00:41:17]  Greg Oespi and Michael Marcini.
[00:41:19]  My mind was blown.
[00:41:21]  I'm Stephanie Young.
[00:41:23]  This is Love Trap.
[00:41:25]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[00:41:27]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[00:41:31]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[00:41:37]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[00:41:42]  Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[00:41:52]  We're back.

=== Anime Porn And Bad Fans (15:03) ===

[00:41:53]  Boy, Jeffrey Epstein would have loved those ads.
[00:41:56]  Okay, Robert, I'd like to keep my health insurance.
[00:41:59]  Thanks so much.
[00:42:00]  Uh-huh.
[00:42:01]  Yeah.
[00:42:02]  I need it.
[00:42:03]  Jeffrey doesn't because he's dead.
[00:42:05]  Yeah, he sure doesn't.
[00:42:07]  Anyway, we're back.
[00:42:08]  So so far, we've discussed Epstein's early interest in cryptocurrency and his early advocacy for microtransactions and video games.
[00:42:15]  Now it's time to talk about where he starts to veer into the right-wing media game.
[00:42:20]  He starts hitting the fever swamps.
[00:42:21]  And to discuss that, I got to introduce a new character, Christopher Poole, better known socially as Moot.
[00:42:29]  Moot!
[00:42:30]  Moot!
[00:42:31]  Born in probably 1987, somewhere near Virginia, Chris's early life is a black hole until he joined the Something Awful forums.
[00:42:38]  If you weren't online during that brief but glorious window, there was a period of somewhat less than a decade from the late 90s to the early to mid-aughts, where that was a like the place for internet culture.
[00:42:50]  It's what invented a lot of things that are still foundational to internet culture.
[00:42:54]  A lot of like, you know, the stuff that people hate, like how folks get mobbed when they like do or say something dumb or fucked up online, the way that like the internet will just launch mobs after random people for saying the wrong thing.
[00:43:06]  That started on something awful.
[00:43:08]  And in fact, in both the good and the bad way, right?
[00:43:11]  Like the something awful, there was a big like anti-Scientology thing where like they were basically DDoSing Scientology websites at one point.
[00:43:19]  And also a bunch of random people got harassed for being weird on the internet.
[00:43:25]  Likewise, the way that like memes work, you know, a lot of the basics of that were kind of ironed out online on something awful.
[00:43:33]  There's a way in which you can say all modern social media is kind of downstream of something awful.
[00:43:40]  But Christopher Poole wasn't just spending his time on something awful.
[00:43:44]  He also spent a lot of time on Japanese message boards, specifically one called 2Chan, right?
[00:43:48]  Which is going to be relevant here in a second.
[00:43:51]  So something awful is basically a dictatorship, which we can say in most modern social media, but it's not like a company, really.
[00:43:59]  I mean, they do kind of have a company at one point, but it's not a real functional company.
[00:44:03]  It's run by one asshole, Richard Kianca, who takes donations and people have to pay to join the forum.
[00:44:08]  And Richard kind of rules things with an iron fist.
[00:44:12]  And because of the way he runs things, whenever there's something he doesn't like or that endangers the site, he tends to just ban stuff, right?
[00:44:23]  So the fact that Lotax is the single guy legally responsible for this website leads him to a couple of conundrums like this, right?
[00:44:30]  Because people, once something awful attracts tens of thousands, eventually over 100,000 members, people start doing all sorts of illegal shit on it, right?
[00:44:38]  One of the forums is just devoted to people using illegal drugs.
[00:44:41]  In fact, when I was a kid on there, watched with a number of other goons as a guy overdosed live in a threat and died.
[00:44:47]  Bunch of fucked up stuff happened on that site.
[00:44:51]  People also had illegal fire sharing on there.
[00:44:54]  There used to be a subsection of the forum where people would list, like put up torrents and whereas, which is like pirated video games back in the day, right?
[00:45:02]  That's very illegal.
[00:45:03]  So that gets banned after a while, because it had to be, right?
[00:45:07]  You can't have this massive public-facing website giving people, letting people steal shit from every company in the world.
[00:45:14]  You'll get in trouble.
[00:45:15]  So, Lotax bans that.
[00:45:17]  And he, you know, this happens a bunch of different times, right?
[00:45:21]  And particularly, it happens to a group of forum users who create a place in the forum to share their weird pornography.
[00:45:29]  And in order to describe this, this chunk of Something Awful history, I'm going to quote from Max Reed's Substack.
[00:45:35]  He banned LolaCon, that is, underage girl Hentai.
[00:45:38]  More generally, Lotax hated the anime subforum on Something Awful, and the anime fans who populated the subforum hated him back.
[00:45:44]  The sub forum was called Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse, not because it was devoted to tentacle rape, but because Lotax's contempt for anime nerds meant it thought he would be funny to call the general anime board that.
[00:45:55]  One punishment for misbehavior on the forums was to be banned, so you could only read or post in that sub forum.
[00:46:02]  And what's really funny to me about this is like, even from that little segment, you can tell Lotax is not a good guy.
[00:46:08]  He's a terrible, abusive spouse, an awful man.
[00:46:11]  The fact that he bans underage, like animated porn from his website makes him more responsible than any modern social media CEO.
[00:46:20]  Like he is lapping Elon Musk in terms of his level of care for the public good, and he's a massive piece of shit.
[00:46:27]  Lobos is so funny to me.
[00:46:29]  Yeah, he's somehow the good guy in this local dip.
[00:46:33]  Yeah.
[00:46:34]  And I hate him.
[00:46:36]  So Lolocon gets banned and it creates a bunch of people who were on something awful, who are into anime, who are angry at Lotax and are finally ready to find another place, right?
[00:46:45]  Christopher Poole is one of these people.
[00:46:47]  He had posted on ADTRW, right?
[00:46:51]  And he sees this as an opportunity, right?
[00:46:53]  There's all these guys who are looking for a new place to gather online.
[00:46:56]  Maybe I can make a place for them.
[00:46:58]  He's a fan of 2chan, so he copies the way this Japanese image board works and he makes a new website and he calls it 4chan.
[00:47:06]  And all of these guys who had been posting on something awful, who were angry at Richard Kianke, angry at all of the moderation, at the fact that there was stuff like underage girl anime that wasn't okay, they moved to 4chan because nothing's not okay on them.
[00:47:21]  That's the idea, right?
[00:47:23]  And so one of the things that happened is basically everyone on Something Awful is pretty toxic at this point.
[00:47:29]  I'd include myself in that.
[00:47:32]  But the most toxic people on Something Awful go over to 4chan, where they get to be totally anonymous.
[00:47:38]  They don't have to spend any money and they don't have to abide by most of the same rules.
[00:47:43]  So when Poole creates 4chan, though, he's got to deal with, ironically, the same question that had confronted Lotax, right?
[00:47:51]  Which is, okay, I'm the guy whose name is attached to this web community.
[00:47:57]  What crosses the line for me?
[00:47:59]  What am I not willing to have attached to my name, right?
[00:48:03]  Well, even if not socially, like legally, right?
[00:48:06]  Legally or socially, right?
[00:48:08]  Yeah.
[00:48:09]  You have to deal with that question when you're doing this shit.
[00:48:12]  So when the site was first created, there was a sub forum, slash in, which meant, which it was meant to be like slash in for news, right?
[00:48:20]  This is the news part of the chan, the image board.
[00:48:23]  So for reasons that are complex and largely irrelevant to our broader discussion, though, the news board evolves into the transportation board over time.
[00:48:31]  By like 2010, people are using it to discuss transportation issues because as much of a hub of like scum and villainy as 4chan is, a lot of it's just people discussing banal shit, right?
[00:48:42]  Right.
[00:48:43]  Yeah.
[00:48:43]  So it becomes clear: okay, we still probably need a news section of the image board.
[00:48:49]  And the one I initially created is all about fucking buses or whatever.
[00:48:53]  So Poole elects to launch a separate novel news section called slash new.
[00:48:58]  Now, Ryan Broderick writes that this was, quote, largely as a way to quarantine the overwhelming amount of support on the site for Ron Paul's 2008 campaign.
[00:49:06]  This is something that happens on Something Awful too.
[00:49:09]  But there's a lot, basically anywhere people post online is nothing but Ron Paul guys.
[00:49:15]  In 2008, if you let people talk about politics, it's all the Ron Paul revolution.
[00:49:20]  Yeah.
[00:49:21]  Because Ron Paul's entire voter base at this period of time is guys who live on the internet and use digital currency to buy drugs or child sex abuse imagery, right?
[00:49:32]  Like that's the base.
[00:49:35]  So they're all freedom.
[00:49:37]  And that's libertarianism.
[00:49:39]  That's libertarianism in a nutshell.
[00:49:42]  So the first posts to this new segment of 4chan are really problematic, right?
[00:49:48]  Like he sets this up as a way to quarantine all the Ron Paul people, and they immediately start saying shit that even Poole has some issues with.
[00:49:56]  And so in June of 2011, Poole deletes slash new posting.
[00:50:01]  Anybody who used it knows exactly why it was removed.
[00:50:04]  When I re-edited the board last year, I made a note that if it evolved into slash stormfront, I'd remove it.
[00:50:09]  It did ages ago.
[00:50:11]  Now it's gone as promised.
[00:50:12]  So he, by his own discussion, removes the news board because it's all Nazi stuff and he doesn't want that on his side at this stage.
[00:50:21]  Now, at this point, that's at this stage.
[00:50:26]  At this stage, it all makes sense, right?
[00:50:29]  Poole's not a great guy, but he's not a Nazi, it seems like at this point, right?
[00:50:34]  And he just doesn't want that.
[00:50:35]  He's not willing to be associated openly with Nazis.
[00:50:38]  Right.
[00:50:38]  And that is, unfortunately, a step.
[00:50:41]  Yeah, he's fine with Lolican, but like, and it is a step he's going to take because a year or so later, Poole creates the poll board for 4chan, which stands for politically incorrect.
[00:50:53]  And the fact that that's what it stood for might suggest to you that this is meant from the beginning as a hub for right-wing news and politics discussion, right?
[00:51:03]  Politically incorrect is not a term that liberals are using positively.
[00:51:07]  No.
[00:51:08]  It is a term that conservatives use, right?
[00:51:11]  So slash poll almost immediately devolves into a hub for neo-Nazi and white supremacist propaganda.
[00:51:17]  For years, no one but Poole knew why he had decided to open Poll after the failure of New and its predecessor.
[00:51:24]  Then the Department of Justice published this most recent 3 million pages worth of Epstein files, which have provided us with information that may finally solve or at least bring this mystery closer to being solved.
[00:51:34]  And here's the big revelation.
[00:51:36]  The day before Poole created slash poll, he met with Jeffrey Epstein in person.
[00:51:44]  The day before he makes polls.
[00:51:46]  He meets fucking Epstein.
[00:51:48]  You're lying.
[00:51:51]  What the fuck?
[00:51:53]  I guess it makes sense.
[00:51:55]  Yeah.
[00:51:56]  But let's hear a little more about that before we try to puzzle this all out.
[00:52:01]  I'm going to quote from that Garbage Day newsletter again.
[00:52:03]  On October 20th, 2011, Boris Nikolik, a venture capitalist and former advisor to Bill Gates, sent Epstein the Wikipedia page for Christopher Poole, writing, there is a cool guy, kid in all caps in parentheses that you should meet.
[00:52:17]  Four days later, Nikolik followed up, asking Epstein, how did you like Moot?
[00:52:21]  He is very sensitive, so be gentle.
[00:52:23]  I liked him a lot.
[00:52:24]  I drove him home.
[00:52:25]  He is very bright, Epstein replied.
[00:52:27]  Nikolik went on to write that he will be a friend and that he is one of the greatest hackers.
[00:52:32]  Now, we don't have enough in here, right?
[00:52:36]  First off, the whole fact that he's like, there's a cool guy kid is really weird.
[00:52:41]  Yeah.
[00:52:42]  That's really upsetting to me.
[00:52:46]  We simply don't have enough information to know exactly what happened here, to know what the actual dimensions of their relationship were or what they even fucking talked about.
[00:52:54]  We know that Epstein and Moot met the day before Moot creates Pohl.
[00:52:58]  After that, we have no clear documentation of their relationship.
[00:53:01]  We've got some emails of them trying to schedule meetings or get togethers, and that's really it.
[00:53:05]  Perhaps the conversation they had didn't relate at all to Pohl.
[00:53:08]  I can't ignore the timing of this, right?
[00:53:10]  Yeah.
[00:53:11]  Knowing that Epstein is getting increasingly into right-wing media, he's going to fund some of it directly in the coming years.
[00:53:19]  Knowing that Christopher Poole removed the news chunk of 4chan because it was basically Stormfront and then creates poll making it into basically the Stormfront section of the site after meeting with Epstein.
[00:53:33]  I can't not.
[00:53:34]  I can't not think that maybe Epstein said you got to bring this back.
[00:53:37]  I don't know.
[00:53:38]  Or, or like, we'll never know.
[00:53:39]  What a shame.
[00:53:40]  Or like, eh, it's not so bad.
[00:53:42]  Or like, wouldn't it be great if this existed?
[00:53:44]  Like, it doesn't even have to be like hard pressure.
[00:53:47]  Yeah, it doesn't have to be hard pressure.
[00:53:49]  Yeah.
[00:53:50]  Or maybe Poole was having thinking about this a lot himself because he clearly wanted there to be something like this and had tried to get it right.
[00:53:58]  And maybe he brought that up to Epstein.
[00:53:59]  Epstein was like, I think you should just go for it, man.
[00:54:01]  Fuck it.
[00:54:02]  You know, I don't know.
[00:54:05]  That said, Epstein is a regular user of 4chan after a semi-regular user of 4chan after this point.
[00:54:12]  We don't know that he was posting.
[00:54:13]  And in fact, that doesn't seem very likely based on what he used it for, but he's on there fairly regularly, right?
[00:54:20]  He sends links to 4chan to his friends.
[00:54:22]  In 2017, he sent Karina Shuliak, his girlfriend at the time, a 4chan link containing five nights at Freddy's porn.
[00:54:30]  He sent other fans links to like fucking princess bubblegum porn from Adventure Time, all sorts of shit like that.
[00:54:37]  Jeffrey Epstein's trawling like the porn parts of 4chan primarily for like animated porn of animated characters seems to be like one of his big things.
[00:54:49]  And I don't know what to do with that information, Andrew.
[00:54:52]  I don't know what to do with the fact that fucking Jeffrey Epstein is masturbating to Princess Bubblegum pornography.
[00:54:56]  I don't know what to do with that knowledge.
[00:54:59]  I have it.
[00:55:00]  I think it's there.
[00:55:02]  Part of it is like, what do you do with just, I mean, I think all of his sexuality is something that is.
[00:55:09]  It's all upsetting.
[00:55:10]  Yeah.
[00:55:11]  Unknowable to, I think, normal.
[00:55:14]  I mean, not even normal.
[00:55:15]  Now I'm like, what?
[00:55:17]  I guess that's not unknowable.
[00:55:18]  I'm not like, cause I know a lot.
[00:55:20]  I've been on the internet.
[00:55:20]  I know a lot of weird people.
[00:55:21]  I know if there's a cartoon, there's porn of it.
[00:55:23]  Yeah.
[00:55:24]  Right.
[00:55:24]  Like, I'm aware of that.
[00:55:26]  I, I didn't, I didn't expect Jeffrey Epstein knew what adventure time was.
[00:55:30]  That's weird to me.
[00:55:31]  Although it's, it's just upsetting that a man that was interested in power this much was also such a juvenile moron.
[00:55:37]  But I guess that is what, that is what it's, you know, on a sanitized level, Twitter has shown us about billionaires writ large and these.
[00:55:47]  Yeah.
[00:55:48]  Yeah.
[00:55:48]  When I brought, because I will say, I, I was talking to my partner about this.
[00:55:53]  I was like, Epstein was sending fucking princess bubblegum porn and like other like porn from like animated kid shows.
[00:56:00]  I didn't even know he knew what adventure time was.
[00:56:02]  And she just looks at me and she says, you're surprised Jeffrey Epstein knew what teenage girls were watching in the 2000s?
[00:56:09]  And I was like, oh, oh, yeah.
[00:56:11]  You know what?
[00:56:13]  That actually makes complete sense.
[00:56:15]  Mystery solved.
[00:56:18]  Okay.
[00:56:21]  God, what a fucking bummer.
[00:56:23]  I didn't assume that one.
[00:56:25]  That was me being dumb.
[00:56:26]  You're right.
[00:56:28]  100%.
[00:56:29]  Now, this doesn't tie into the broader themes of these episodes at all, Andrew, but I have to tell you something because it's in my head now.
[00:56:36]  And now it's going to be in everyone else's head because, God damn it, I'm not going to deal with this alone.
[00:56:42]  On Thursday, July 4th of 2013, while the rest of the country was setting up fireworks and day drinking, Joy Ito sent an email to Jeffrey Epstein that, best as we can tell, was an appendix to an in-person conversation that they'd had a few days or hours earlier, right?

=== Japanese Body Pillows Crime (02:01) ===

[00:56:57]  They were talking about something over the phone or in person.
[00:56:59]  And then Ito sends him an email about this thing he'd talked to him about, right?
[00:57:03]  You know, we've all done this.
[00:57:04]  Right.
[00:57:05]  Right.
[00:57:05]  Sure.
[00:57:05]  In this case, the email that Ito sends Epstein is just the Wikipedia page for daki makura, or Japanese body pillows that are printed with art depicting an anime wife or waifu.
[00:57:17]  And he appends a picture of one such pillow to the email, which you will all be seeing now if you're watching the video version of the show.
[00:57:23]  If not, it's a pillow with a naked anime girl on it.
[00:57:27]  Yeah.
[00:57:27]  Why did Jeffrey Epstein need to read the Wikipedia page for anime body pillows?
[00:57:31]  What was the conversation that inspired this?
[00:57:33]  We will never know.
[00:57:35]  And none of this is really relevant to the main thesis of these episodes, but I felt like, again, I just, you have to know this now.
[00:57:41]  Like, you can't not.
[00:57:43]  Jeffrey Epstein knew what Japanese body pillows were.
[00:57:46]  That's just part of life for everyone now.
[00:57:48]  Like the head of the goddamn MIT Media Lab was sending body pillow shit to a pedophile.
[00:57:54]  Yeah.
[00:57:54]  Which is like, what the fuck is happening?
[00:57:58]  Yeah.
[00:57:58]  And like Ito resigned.
[00:58:00]  He should have been fired.
[00:58:03]  And I mean in like from a cannon.
[00:58:05]  Like out of a can and into the sea.
[00:58:10]  That should be a crime.
[00:58:11]  We just need to make that a sex crime.
[00:58:13]  Letting Jeffrey Epstein know about Japanese body pillows is something you should have to register as a sex offender for doing.
[00:58:19]  It's just one of those things where it's like, it is obviously circumstantial evidence, but you can actually walk down every path that leads to that.
[00:58:27]  And it is impossible to find one that doesn't involve a crime.
[00:58:30]  Yeah, exactly.
[00:58:31]  There's no way you get to that point having not committed sex crimes.
[00:58:35]  It's simply impossible.
[00:58:37]  Yeah.
[00:58:38]  Speaking of crimes against humanity.
[00:58:41]  What?
[00:58:41]  Oh, sorry, Sophie.
[00:58:42]  I cut you off.
[00:58:43]  I was just doing an ad pivot.
[00:58:45]  Yeah, I was just going to say that that's like at least tier two sex offender shit.
[00:58:52]  At least tier two, if not tier three.
[00:58:55]  Yeah.
[00:58:55]  Yeah, he's he's an elite pedophile.
[00:58:57]  You got to give him that.

=== Elite Pedophile Patterns (04:10) ===

[00:58:59]  Yeah.
[00:59:01]  I hear anyway.
[00:59:02]  Yeah.
[00:59:03]  Probably shouldn't go to ads right after saying elite pedophile, but what else are we supposed to do with Jeffrey Epstein Epstein files episodes?
[00:59:12]  Yeah.
[00:59:12]  Yeah.
[00:59:13]  I'm getting frown lines from these episodes.
[00:59:23]  There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
[00:59:27]  Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
[00:59:30]  You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
[00:59:33]  And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
[00:59:36]  We always say, trust your girlfriends.
[00:59:40]  I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
[00:59:44]  Oh my God, this is the same man.
[00:59:46]  A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
[00:59:51]  I felt like I got hit by a truck.
[00:59:53]  I thought, how could this happen to me?
[00:59:54]  The cops didn't seem to care.
[00:59:57]  So they take matters into their own hands.
[00:59:59]  I said, oh, hell no.
[01:00:01]  I vowed I will be his last target.
[01:00:03]  He's going to get what he deserves.
[01:00:08]  Listen to the girlfriends.
[01:00:10]  Trust me, babe.
[01:00:11]  On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:00:20]  Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
[01:00:26]  I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
[01:00:31]  Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
[01:00:36]  Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy.
[01:00:44]  Really too many to name.
[01:00:46]  And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
[01:00:51]  Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
[01:00:54]  You related to the Phantom at that point.
[01:00:57]  Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
[01:00:59]  That's so funny.
[01:01:01]  Mary stay with me each night, each morning.
[01:01:09]  Say you love me, you know.
[01:01:13]  So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:01:21]  What's up, everyone?
[01:01:21]  I'm Ego Modem.
[01:01:23]  My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
[01:01:30]  It's Will Farrell.
[01:01:34]  My dad gave me the best advice ever.
[01:01:37]  I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
[01:01:42]  I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
[01:01:44]  I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
[01:01:49]  He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
[01:01:53]  Yeah.
[01:01:54]  He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
[01:01:57]  And he's like, just give it a shot.
[01:01:58]  He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
[01:02:07]  If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
[01:02:09]  It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
[01:02:16]  Yeah, it would not be.
[01:02:18]  Right, it wouldn't be that.
[01:02:19]  There's a lot of luck.
[01:02:21]  Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:02:29]  In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
[01:02:36]  The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
[01:02:41]  This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
[01:02:44]  You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
[01:02:48]  I doctored the test once.
[01:02:49]  It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
[01:02:53]  I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
[01:02:57]  Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
[01:02:59]  They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
[01:03:01]  Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
[01:03:04]  Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
[01:03:06]  My mind was blown.
[01:03:08]  I'm Stephanie Young.

=== Breitbart Links And Right-Wing (12:31) ===

[01:03:09]  This is Love Trap.
[01:03:11]  Laura, Scottsdale Police.
[01:03:13]  As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
[01:03:17]  Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
[01:03:24]  This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
[01:03:29]  Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
[01:03:39]  We're back.
[01:03:41]  You know, we're steening.
[01:03:44]  We're Epsteining.
[01:03:44]  We're steening.
[01:03:45]  Steening.
[01:03:46]  You guys like steening?
[01:03:47]  Fuck off.
[01:03:48]  Read the script.
[01:03:48]  Read Steen a little more?
[01:03:49]  Okay.
[01:03:50]  Read the script.
[01:03:51]  So not long after 4chan introduced the poll board, which again stood for politically incorrect, Epstein's friend Steve Bannon took over the fart at the far-right news website, Breitbart.com.
[01:04:01]  These are like within a year of each other that Bannon takes over at Breitbart.
[01:04:05]  And Epstein is again buddies with Bannon.
[01:04:08]  This has been back in 2012.
[01:04:10]  And I hate that we have to shift in time so much in these episodes, but it's kind of impossible to cover all this stuff and not do it.
[01:04:17]  So in 2012, 4chan's poll board launches.
[01:04:20]  And we know Epstein spends time on 4chan because he sends links to his friends.
[01:04:23]  Steve Bannon takes over Breitbart and he starts turning it into the machine that's going to drive Gamergate, which arises from 4chan, into the mainstream news in 2014.
[01:04:32]  These things happen very close to each other.
[01:04:35]  Bannon and Epstein were socially adjacent over the years, for years, before we have evidence of them corresponding, right?
[01:04:41]  Officially, if you like, are reading about this.
[01:04:43]  Officially, I believe it's 2017.
[01:04:47]  That is the earliest point we know Bannon and Epstein were connected directly and it was via Michael Wolf, or at least that's one of the sources I read said that.
[01:04:56]  There's no way that that was the case.
[01:04:58]  For one thing, Bannon is working with Brock Pierce, who we started these episodes with, right?
[01:05:02]  Much earlier than that.
[01:05:03]  And Epstein is friends with Brock Pierce during this period of time, right?
[01:05:06]  From 2013 to 2014.
[01:05:10]  Again, Wolf is kind of our best documentation of like when they started emailing each other.
[01:05:14]  But even if, and we don't have enough of the emails to know if there are earlier emails between Bannon and Epstein, but we know they were in touch earlier than that, right?
[01:05:23]  Like we just don't know exactly like when this all happened.
[01:05:27]  I don't know when they were first communicating directly, but I know that in May of 2016, Epstein emailed Kathy Ruhmler, who is the White House counsel to President Barack Obama, or at least who was the White House counsel to President Barack Obama, and a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein's.
[01:05:44]  Kathy and Epstein email, obviously.
[01:05:47]  And what's weird about this is that Kathy's obviously a Democrat, right?
[01:05:50]  Like she's working for Barack Obama.
[01:05:52]  She's not fans of Steve Bannon and a lot of the people that Epstein keeps in his social orbit.
[01:05:58]  On May 8th, Epstein sent her an email that was just a link to a Breitbart article about how Trump was using the same language to attack Hillary that the women who have accused Bill Clinton of rape used to describe Hillary, right?
[01:06:09]  The article was saying people are angry at Trump for being mean to Hillary, but he's just mirroring the language that Bill's victims used to describe how mean Hillary was to them, right?
[01:06:17]  That's the article, you know?
[01:06:19]  And Epstein sends this to Kathy Rumler, who's a Democrat working for Obama.
[01:06:25]  And that's so that's really weird, right?
[01:06:26]  Her sending, him sending her a Breitbart link.
[01:06:29]  And Kathy seems confused by this too.
[01:06:31]  She responds, what's more disturbing is that you are reading Breitbart.
[01:06:35]  Like, what's more disturbing to anything in the article is that you're reading Breitbart.
[01:06:38]  And this, I think this is an important exchange because it suggests a few things.
[01:06:41]  For one, by 2016, Epstein is pretty new to reading and sharing Breitbart articles.
[01:06:47]  And I think he's pretty new because he found himself surprisingly interested in the content.
[01:06:52]  And so it just kind of becomes an increasingly large part of his media diet.
[01:06:56]  And I don't think he's thinking about how extreme it is or how weird other people think it is that he's reading Breitbart articles because he sends it casually to Kathy.
[01:07:05]  The two are good friends and they're emailing constantly.
[01:07:08]  And he doesn't think twice about sending her a Breitbart article until she's like, what the fuck, man?
[01:07:13]  That's really weird.
[01:07:15]  That says to me that Epstein, however much of this is him being like a master manipulator, Epstein's also organically falling down a right-wing rabbit hole, right?
[01:07:25]  That really seems like what this is suggesting to me, that like he is legitimately finding himself interested in this stuff in addition to whatever kind of grievances he has that are leading him to support people like Bannon to support this political move that's going to culminate in the Trump campaign.
[01:07:41]  There's other evidence of this.
[01:07:43]  A 2014 email from a redacted sender who had just returned from a visit to Epstein Island.
[01:07:49]  The anonymous sender of this email who signed the email just him thanked Epstein and offered lots of hugs and then appended this postscript to the email.
[01:07:57]  I researched some movie we can watch when you are back.
[01:08:00]  Have you ever heard of Alexander Dugan, one of Putin's advisors?
[01:08:03]  If not, reading about him and his views might be interesting and perhaps quite useful.
[01:08:07]  And that's really interesting to me that people in his circle are trying to push him, maybe people who are connected to the Russian government are trying to push him to read Alexander Dugan.
[01:08:16]  Dugan is an influential right-wing philosopher and political theorist whose work deals heavily with the concept of a multipolar world, aka one in which the U.S. has lost its status as a superpower and the world is divided between competing blocks of hegemonic powers.
[01:08:30]  Silicon Valley fascists often find a lot that they like in Dugan because their own goal is to see the collapse of the U.S. as a nation state, which will allow CEO kings like Peter Thiel to govern city-states and regions without oversight.
[01:08:42]  There's no other mention of Dugan in the archives yet, but as I noted before, Epstein has a number of weird Russian connections.
[01:08:48]  And this is all just kind of part of this picture we're getting of Epstein 2014 to 2018.
[01:08:56]  He's sending Breitbart articles to his friends.
[01:08:58]  He's talking about Alex.
[01:08:59]  People are suggesting he reads Alexander Dugan, and he's going to increasingly start putting his money towards supporting right-wing content.
[01:09:07]  In 2015, Jeffrey Epstein donates $25,000 to the YouTube channel of Juan Jean-François Gariapi, a French white nationalist influencer who announced the donation on his channel during an episode with Richard Spencer.
[01:09:22]  So Gary Api and Richard Spencer are bragging that Jeffrey Epstein donated to support his white supremacist YouTube channel in 2015.
[01:09:34]  Right.
[01:09:34]  I mean, for an idea, yeah, of the kind of shit Gary P is saying, he calls for a white ethno-state and advocates that men should own their wives.
[01:09:43]  This is interesting about Gary Epi because his own wife disappeared in 2023.
[01:09:47]  Yeah, she fell off the face of the earth in 2023.
[01:09:51]  He claims he dropped her off to go camping in the middle of the woods because she was a big fan of off-grid living and had been planning the trip for a while.
[01:09:58]  Critics note that he deep-cleaned their whole home right before she allegedly left on this trip.
[01:10:02]  The Royal Canadian Mounted Police were at one point seeking tips from the public to help find her, but they have deleted that website, and I don't know what her status is.
[01:10:11]  This segment from a Daily Beast article on the matter does give you a very good idea of who Gary Appey is, though.
[01:10:17]  During a contentious child custody battle in the U.S., a now ex-wife accused Gary Epi of threatening to take their child to Canada.
[01:10:23]  During the custody case, an undergraduate Duke University student testified that Gary Epi had conducted an inappropriate sexual relationship with her when he was employed as a researcher at the school and she was working as his research assistant.
[01:10:34]  The student alleged emotional abuse by Gary Api.
[01:10:37]  Gary P had previously told the Daily Beast that the relationship was consensual.
[01:10:41]  During that custody case, which he lost, Gary Appey also became embroiled in a guardianship battle over a 19-year-old who he described as his fiancé.
[01:10:48]  The teenager had autism and had been assessed by a counselor as having the social and mental maturity of a 10 to 11-year-old child.
[01:10:55]  Cool guy.
[01:10:56]  Horrific.
[01:10:57]  This is who gives him $25,000.
[01:11:01]  And he's just out here like living, right?
[01:11:05]  He's still on the shit.
[01:11:06]  Yeah, he's still around, as far as I'm aware.
[01:11:08]  Yeah.
[01:11:08]  It's also like, thanks for the donation from Jeffrey E. Thanks for thanks for the 25,000 coins or whatever.
[01:11:17]  Yeah.
[01:11:17]  That's just like, I mean, like, there is a certain point where you're like, yeah, all these right-wing people are fucking awful, you know, certainly pedophiles supporting whatever.
[01:11:29]  No, they're such hypocrites.
[01:11:30]  But it is like kind of fascinating each time they have no shame.
[01:11:35]  I don't know.
[01:11:36]  It's not a slam dunk, I think, but it is just like, yeah, yeah, these people are exactly this.
[01:11:42]  Yeah, well, it's, it's fucking the this is the side of Jeffrey we didn't get until there was this release, the side where he's he's not just even, you know, there was maybe some evidence he was flirting, certainly with some right-wing ideas over the years.
[01:11:55]  He's putting a lot of money into this.
[01:11:57]  We know about this $25,000 donation.
[01:11:59]  We don't know about the others.
[01:12:00]  We don't know where else he's sending money.
[01:12:02]  We know he's sending links to like the fucking right stuff, which is a super fucking fascist podcast, like to their website to like a friend.
[01:12:10]  Well, he's talking about like race signs.
[01:12:11]  In fact, I want to quote A. Reed Ross wrote a really good column on his Medium page about some of Jeffrey's right-wing connections that summarizes like what happens after this $25,000 donation because he just gets increasingly pilled after this point.
[01:12:25]  The following year, he exchanged emails with tech leader Joshua Bach revealing racist sentiments.
[01:12:30]  By this time, he was supporting the changing politics of the Silicon Valley right wing, including what the Byline Times calls biological hierarchy, racial destiny, gender determinism, genetic optimization, population culling, fascism as efficiency.
[01:12:43]  We could call this something like a counter-revolutionary movement, broadly speaking, using the strategies and ideas of the revolutionary movement against it.
[01:12:51]  So, to put all of this together for you, after getting out of jail in 2010 to about 2016, Jeffrey Epstein gets deeply involved in Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole because he sees it as a way to reinvent the financial system and make a new form of money decoupled from democratic Western governance.
[01:13:09]  He'd become a believer in biological and racial hierarchy and had started funding fascist thinkers who supported using the tactics of left-wing revolutionary movements to bring down democratic governments.
[01:13:20]  All this comes to a head in 2016 after Brexit in a series of celebratory emails between Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein.
[01:13:29]  So, right after Brexit, Epstein sends an email to Peter Thiel, June 26, 2016, at 3:17 a.m. and says, Brexit, just the beginning.
[01:13:39]  Thiel responds a couple hours later by asking, of what?
[01:13:43]  And Epstein responds: Return to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances.
[01:13:48]  You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high.
[01:13:51]  And as I said in your office, finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain.
[01:13:57]  So, Epstein, by this point, what he's talking with Thiel about is: you and I have been discussing the fact that, like, if we can return to tribalism, destroy globalization, destroy the order that exists, destroy this idea of like liberal democracy, then we can buy all of the asset the same way these Russian oligarchs did after the Soviet Union collapse.
[01:14:20]  We can buy every public asset that exists in a fire sale.
[01:14:23]  We can own everything, right?
[01:14:25]  Finding things on their way to collapse is way is the best bargain that exists.
[01:14:30]  And I think that ties all of this together: the right-wing politics, the crypto, the fucking getting kids addicted to loot boxes and gambling and stuff.
[01:14:39]  All of these interests that Jeffrey has in these years are all tied to this destruction of the global order, which I think to some extent he saw as betraying him, right?
[01:14:49]  He was a system guy, he was friends with presidents and kings and other members of royalty, and then he gets convicted of sex crimes.
[01:14:59]  And that only happened because of these damn women because of democracy, they got the vote now, you know.
[01:15:05]  And so, he and Thiel and all these guys, like he turns in with them, and he's not manipulating Peter Thiel.
[01:15:13]  He's not the guy who made Thiel start thinking about anti-democratic bullshit, but he gets on board that fairly early and he uses his newfound interest in this stuff to work towards the same ends that people like Peter Thiel are working towards.
[01:15:28]  And he has a lot of influence, and so he has a lot of influence on how this whole right-wing ecosystem and this whole right-wing populist movement that's going to increasingly be a factor in everyone's lives develops.

=== Democracy And Anti-Democratic Ends (03:44) ===

[01:15:41]  And that's where we are at the end of part three.
[01:15:44]  Jesus Christ.
[01:15:45]  Good.
[01:15:47]  Great.
[01:15:48]  I love it.
[01:15:50]  I mean, to me, the overarching thing that's coalescing is like, why were the why was all the right-wing establishments so confident that like releasing the Epstein files was some kind of slam dunk?
[01:16:01]  Like, it's so weird.
[01:16:04]  You're in the files so much, right-wing everything.
[01:16:10]  Yep.
[01:16:12]  So bizarre.
[01:16:14]  Yep.
[01:16:15]  I've been pain.
[01:16:17]  Life is good.
[01:16:19]  I guess we should do part four, huh?
[01:16:22]  Yeah, why not?
[01:16:24]  Why not?
[01:16:25]  All right.
[01:16:25]  We'll be back Thursday.
[01:16:27]  Pain.
[01:16:29]  Yeah.
[01:16:30]  Bye.
[01:16:31]  Bye.
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