Is Epstein Alive? The 313th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying dissect Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death—55-gallon drums of sulfuric acid, wiped prison surveillance footage, and elite power dynamics—while critiquing modern language manipulation, from Nation magazine’s absurd Nobel Peace Prize framing to Reuters’ misleading "trans woman" label in a Canadian school shooting. They argue ideological conformity now mirrors Orwell’s 1984, suppressing reality for control, and question whether Epstein’s demise was orchestrated to silence revelations. Ultimately, the episode exposes systemic distortions where truth is weaponized, leaving audiences to question institutional transparency and the cost of unchecked narrative manipulation. [Automatically generated summary]
Welcome to the 313th, I think, Dark Horse podcast live stream with me, Dr. Brett Weinstein, you, Dr. Heather Hang.
Before you show anything about content.
Yeah.
313.
313 has got to be prime.
It's so prime.
It is the second of the Twin Primes 311, 313.
We talked about 311 two episodes ago, as you'd expect.
Again, this is from one of our locals members who pointed out to me that 313 is 311.
Was it permutable prime?
Remember that?
Where you can move any of the digits around in any order you want.
And all resulting numbers 131, 113, et cetera, are prime.
313 is not permutable, but it's palindromic.
True.
Not just in decimal, but also in binary.
All right, folks.
So the lesson for you is welcome to prime time and this prime episode of the Dark Horse podcast.
100111001.
That's 313 in binary.
Of course it is.
I had to look.
Yeah.
But I mean, I just think that's.
Also a palindrome.
Yeah, that's amazing.
So see, you weren't even listening.
No, I was.
Like moving straight ahead.
No.
It's not like the palindrome in both decimal and binary.
It takes time to catch up the cycles, the bandwidth being divided across things.
In any case, we are, in this episode, going to, of course, talk about the developing story around the massive dump of Epstein files.
It is not going to be a discussion that you have heard elsewhere.
Among other things, I am going to describe why, quite apart from any evidence that has emerged here or previously, I believe we can surmise it is likely that Epstein survived his apparent suicide and may well still be alive somewhere.
So that's not based on the evidence.
I'm certainly aware of the evidence and its thinness in spots and suggestiveness in other places.
But anyway, if you're here for that, stay tuned.
It is coming.
Because that's not where we're going to start.
It's not where we're starting.
We're going to start with Orwell, because that is the moment that we're living in.
Yes.
Again, we've read from Orwell before and it's back.
We're going to talk a bit about the Nobel Peace Prize.
Wow.
About Wikipedia, about the horrifying latest school shooting in Canada, and maybe then a little more Orwell.
We will also talk about the article that has been circulating about AI and the spooked nature of many insiders who have been in close contact with AI and are watching the rate of progress and arriving at a shocking conclusion about its likely impact on normal civilization and the entire economy.
Okay.
When, as is likely, we don't get to all of those things, we will actually be back in three days.
So we'll be back on February 14th for a live stream when you will probably see some of that being discussed because I don't think we're going to get to all of that today.
If we could turn back time.
No, I am not.
I don't even know that song.
I'm sure I don't like it.
Would you like to cover it?
Would you like to do a cover?
Actually, it's a song I think I don't even know well enough to get past that.
If I could turn back time then, if, and I don't remember what the second contingent is.
Yeah, but you could belt out that line because I could.
A la Cher, who may have been covering it.
Is it Cher?
I think so.
I don't know.
All right.
have now very elegantly backtracked out of that line of discussion.
Yep.
Okay.
Check out locals.
We've got a watch party going on there.
We have a live stream again in a few days and then a Q ⁇ A on Sunday.
So lots of opportunity to watch and interact.
In fact, on Sunday coming up.
But first off, right now, top of the hour, we have three, as usual, amazing sponsors, and we'll start with that now.
Firelight Sauna Experience00:02:36
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Several years ago, I started looking into saunas, both traditional and infrared, and found a morass of information.
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Xylitol's Nasal Defense00:03:07
Now, I think that ad read needs something.
Somewhere in there, it needs to say that the tent has a decidedly Bedouin aesthetic.
Probably just because that phrase has never been used anywhere.
But we've said it before.
Well, it is decidedly Bedouin.
It is.
It's great.
Also, fun for cats.
I can speak from experience that you turn this thing on and the cats, the cats will flock.
Yeah, it warms them right up.
Yeah.
And if you don't like cats and you don't have any of your own, just close the door of your house and then they won't come in.
So don't be concerned that you'll get cats that you don't want.
It's not going to happen.
All right.
I mean, you've covered the territory.
Yeah.
Our second sponsor this week is Clear.
Clear is a nasal spray that supports respiratory health.
It's widely available online and in stores and both it and the company that makes it are fantastic.
It's clear.
That's X-L-E-A-R, pronounced CLEAR.
Throughout history, improvements in sanitation and hygiene have had huge impacts on human longevity and quality of life, more so than traditional medical advances.
For instance, when doctors started to wash their hands between handling cadavers and helping women give birth, seems obvious to us now, the rate of maternal deaths went way down, and it wasn't obvious then.
Breathing polluted air and drinking tated water have hugely negative effects on human health, clean up the air and water, and people get healthier.
Nasal hygiene often gets overlooked, but consider that the majority of bacteria and viruses that make us sick enter through our mouth and nose.
It has become a cultural norm to wash our hands in order to help stop the spread of disease from person to person, but it's rare that we get sick through our hands.
Rather, we get sick through our mouth and nose.
Thus, it makes sense that we should be using something that we know blocks bacterial and viral adhesion in the nose.
Enter CLEAR.
Clear is a nasal spray that contains xylitol, a five-carbon sugar alcohol.
Our bodies naturally contain five-carbon sugars, mostly in the form of ribose and deoxyribose, which are the backbone sugars in RNA and DNA, respectively, while most of our dietary sugars have six carbons, sugars like glucose and fructose.
Xylitol is known to reduce how sticky bacteria and viruses are to our tissues.
In the presence of xylitol, bacteria and viruses, including strep, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV, don't adhere to our airways as well, which helps our body's natural defense mechanisms easily flush them away.
Clear is a simple nasal spray that you use morning and evening.
It takes just three seconds.
It's fast and easy and healthy.
If any of this sounds familiar, perhaps you listen to Brett's conversation with Nathan Jones, founder of Clear, on the Inside Rail in November 2024, or to Brett's conversation with Nate's father, Lon Jones, osteopath and inventor of Clear, on how xylitol interacts with respiratory viruses in May of 2025.
We recommend those conversations and we highly recommend CLEAR as a daily habit and prophylactic against respiratory illnesses.
That's Clear with an X. X-L-E-A-R.
Get CLEAR online or at your pharmacy, grocery store, or natural products retailer, and start taking six seconds each day to improve your nasal hygiene and support your respiratory health.
Yep, I still feel Clear should be spelled with a C, but I'm also a guy who feels that xylophone should be spelled with a Z.
And how about xylitol?
You know, chemistry was never my strong suit.
Masa Chips Revelation00:02:31
Our final sponsor today is Masa.
what i spelled i literally spelled inquire today with an e I think that's just the British spelling.
Is it?
I think so.
Oh, I feel quite a bit better.
Yeah, I think you should.
Yes.
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Echoes of 198400:04:35
What the hell are you on about?
Oh, they're spicy.
Cobonero is a really spicy one.
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You know, the buffer must be full because a lot of stuff keeps, you know, yeah.
All right.
You wanted to set us in motion in the correct direction in light of the this societally moment relevant direction.
I don't know that it's the correct direction.
I don't I don't want to be living in an Orwellian landscape.
Nope.
Much less a Huxleyian one.
But this moment is reminding me a lot of 1984.
Yep.
And we have we've it's not the first time that we have talked to Orwell.
In fact, I went and looked.
I actually read experts, experts, excerpts from 1984 in live streams 22, 43, 84, appropriately, referenced room 101 in episode 101.
And we read from Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier, which was published before 1984 in episodes 117 and 118.
So, you know, we've we've traveled some of this road before, but the world doesn't seem to be getting any less Orwellian.
So here we are.
Yeah, I mean, that is one of the themes of the book.
Indeed.
Yeah.
Indeed.
So I wanted to start.
This is this, this, I believe this is a copy that belonged to my mom, and she got a fancier one.
And I may be wrong about that, but this is a 1977 printing, originally published in 1949.
And I just want to read a couple of paragraphs from, you know, you don't need to know exactly what's going on here to understand the significance of these couple of paragraphs.
One from early in the book, one from the middle of the book.
So this is, gosh, what's his name?
Syme talking to Winston, informing Winston of the glory that is to come.
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?
In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.
Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
Already in the 11th edition, we're not far from that point, but the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead.
Every year, fewer and fewer words and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.
Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thought crime.
It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality control.
But in the end, there won't be any need even for that.
The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
NewSpeak is Ingsock and Ingsock is Newspeak, he added with a sort of mystical satisfaction.
Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
Yes.
So, that's one paragraph.
Are you okay?
Yes, I'm just fine.
Okay.
You're responding to Orwell, perhaps?
The echoes are unmistakable.
The echoes in our current environment.
Yes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Okay.
And then this next paragraph, only a paragraph, happens in the middle of hate week, which is a moment that everyone has been forced to celebrate.
On the sixth day of hate week, after the processions, the speeches, the shouting, the singing, the banners, the posters, the films, the waxworks, the rolling of drums and squealing of trumpets, the tramp of marching feet, the grinding of the caterpillars of tanks, the roar of masked planes, the booming of guns, after six days of this, when the great orgasm was quivering to its climax and the general hatred of Eurasia had biled up, boiled up into such delirium that if the crowd could have got their hands on the 2,000 Eurasian war criminals who were to be publicly hanged on the last day of the proceedings,
The Editors Weigh In00:06:45
they would unquestionably have torn them to pieces.
At just this moment, it had been announced that Oceania was not after it all.
Excuse me.
It had been announced that Oceania was not after all at war with Eurasia.
Oceania was at war with East Asia.
Eurasia was an ally.
So, again, that happens in the middle of a book that you presumably are not in the middle of reading.
If you haven't read it, you should, obviously.
In which we are reminded of the capacity for humans to forget what is real, to speak things that are not true, and in speaking them over and over and over again sufficiently, they really do begin to believe that war is peace, that black is white, etc., that two plus two equals five, all things that are pronounced as truths from 1984.
So, in that vein, we have this week the Nation magazine, one of the maybe the country's oldest consistently running news weekly news.
I think it's the oldest American periodical, the oldest consistently published American periodical.
I'm not sure if it, at least weekly, I believe is the usual claim.
I don't know if it's the oldest running periodical, but we have so, and if you could show that image from The Nation, this is Minneapolis being excited about it's not coming from my computer.
Okay.
There we go.
So, this is the city of Minneapolis tweeting the flow.
Actually, could you scroll down so we can see that this is coming?
we'll read the tweet next so you just show us the whole yeah here we go The editors of the Nation magazine said, Through countless acts of courage and solidarity, the people of Minneapolis have challenged the culture of fear, hate, and brutality that has gripped the United States.
Their nonviolent resistance has captured the imagination of the nation and the world.
And so now you can scroll back up.
The nation has thus nominated the city of Minneapolis for the Nobel Peace Prize.
I can't, like, you've said this to me today, and I laughed at you.
It must be coming from the Babylon B, but no, no, it is not.
So the city of Minneapolis, of course, is very proud to have been nominated.
I don't even know how a city can be nominated for such a thing, but that's really the shallow end of the pool on this one.
The city of Minneapolis, whoever is manning their sorry, theming their social media account, writes of this high honor.
The bravery, resilience, and sacrifice our city to protect and support vulnerable communities show Minneapolis' values.
We're honored the city was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, and it's because of your courageous solidarity to promote democracy, human rights, and peace.
Other than there being words missing and it being grammatically weird, I don't even know if they're thanking the nation, the periodical, the nation, or if they're thanking the citizens of Minneapolis, presumably not the ones who think what's going on there is absurd and grotesque, only the ones who are actually using violence to achieve nonviolence, et cetera, employing warlike tactics to achieve peace.
Very, very newspeak, very Orwellian in all of its instantiations.
Yes.
And I must tell you, as you know very well, we used to be subscribers of The Nation.
It was a special publication.
It was published at the time we were subscribers.
I believe it was still published in black and white on newsprint.
It was a significant source of news.
And of course, it had a liberal bent, which it had a clear ideological bias.
It never pretended to.
It never pretended not to, which in fact is a good thing because all of these sources have some sort of bias and to pretend otherwise is.
And it was a far-left bias.
It always was.
Far-left bias.
But in this case, you have a news periodical weighing in on a contentious issue, having effectively declared the conclusion, right?
So they are weighing in not only on the behavior of the citizens of Minneapolis who are obstructing the federal exercise of power, which I understand they may support, but to declare that, the obviously peace-loving side, is to also take a position on the national consensus surrounding illegal immigration.
So that is an absurdity.
So peace is apparently anti-borders.
Right.
It's an open borders are the route to peace.
You know, never mind that it's an obvious route for people who dislike us to come in and dislike our nation or any nation with open borders and to disrupt it.
So the idea that this is, you know, a battle, a blow being struck in the battle for peace is absurd.
It's not an analytical conclusion.
It's an emotional response to those people are on my team.
And frankly, you know, the nation has been broken for a very long time as a news periodical.
But for them to not having, to have failed to wake up to their own brokenness as all of the nonsense around wokeness came to light.
You would think that they would shudder and realize what they've participated in and go back to being the hard-headed liberal publication that they once were.
No sign of it.
Yeah, no sign of it.
So that's exhibit one in the Aurelian landscape that we continue to live in.
Exhibit two comes from Reuters, who was reporting, reporting, which was, Reuters is not a who, just as Minneapolis is not a who.
Reporting on the mentally unstable young man who was on both SSRIs and cross-sex hormones who opened fire at a Canadian secondary school after killing his own mother and brother and killing nine so far, plus himself, probably more.
Mass Shooting Tragedy00:15:27
So Reuters reported 10 dead after shooter opens fire at Canadian high school in a rare massacre.
Summary, mass shooting took place at school in another location in British Columbia.
Public alert described the shooter as a female in a dress with brown hair.
Incident among the most deadly mass casualty events in recent Canadian history.
Now, to be fair to Reuters, they are reporting on what the first police report said.
So they are actually just saying what was said.
And then just the first couple of paragraphs in the Reuters piece from yesterday.
10 people, including the shooter, are dead after an assailant opened fire at a high school in Western Canada on Tuesday in one of the country's deadliest mass casualty events in recent history.
The attack brought to Canada the type of mass shooting more common in the neighboring United States and was carried out by a shooter described as female, police said.
And, you know, even if you haven't heard about this horrifying incident yet, you know what's coming.
This was not a woman who engaged in a mass shooting at a school.
This is a confused young man who had mental health issues quite apart from whether or not he was being, he believed himself to be female or was encouraged to believe himself to be female, both of which, for both of which there is evidence.
And we are receiving information that reverses reality, that makes it impossible to know what is true.
And just as, just as, when we were assured that the new COVID shots that were about to be introduced to the public were safe and effective, and we knew that they could not know they were safe, and therefore we had to ask, what else are they lying to us about?
At the point that news organizations, police, whoever it is, start lying to you about something that you can see with your own eyes is not true, you have to ask, what else are they lying to me about?
Like, what else is it?
And so there are several photographs out there now.
If you could show Jennifer Say's tweet, and she writes an excellent screed here that we're not going to read through, but at the bottom of it, she has some images.
And let's just show, we don't need to see the one in the range, but this is the young man in question at one of his more attractive moments.
There are plenty of pictures out there that reveal him to be quite drugged up, both drugs that he's been given by healthcare professionals, SSRIs, and we don't know if he was on cross-sex hormones, probably, but also several street drugs of his own choosing.
And then next image that Jennifer Say, I'm probably not going to be able to read this, but this is too small.
He says, this is back in 2023, so a little over two years ago, October of 2023.
I went crazy and burnt my house down my second time trying shrooms, but still have a desire to try alternatives.
And then he talks about, you know, I'm going to keep this brief.
He's been released from the psych ward.
He's been diagnosed with, I don't even know what most of these or half of these diagnoses that he says he's been diagnosed with are ADHD, MDD, I think that says, this is like an eye test.
I don't know if those are O's or D's, ASD or OCD, and OCD.
So he's been diagnosed with all these things.
He's in some, you know, diagnosis happy healthcare system.
He's been given drugs that are known to make mental instability worse in many cases.
And now he's putting himself on hallucinogens.
And let's see.
Now thinking the third paragraph down, maybe fourth, now thinking about extreme harm reduction measures, considering restraint and low doses of DMT, et cetera, et cetera.
I can't read most of that.
But this young man had been troubled from a long time ago.
This is an actively moving story.
And it's his uncle who has identified him as the person who was doing the shooting.
He apparently killed his mother and one of his siblings as well at the family home before going to the school and killing several people, his peers.
And there's a lot already out about for how long this boy had been troubled.
There is some evidence that his mother was a trans rights enthusiast.
We have no idea if she was encouraging him in these delusions.
She, at least early on, was concerned about his aggression and apparent violence when he was still quite a young boy.
All of this is horrible, modern, grotesque, and very much not the behavior of deeply troubled young women.
Deeply troubled young women do all sorts of harm, but this does not tend to be the kind of thing that they do.
And we are becoming an utterly deranged society when we cannot keep peace from violence with regard to the Nobel Peace Prize, and we cannot keep male from female when trying to understand what factors lead to and might have predicted, indeed predicted such a fiendish display of murderous rage in no, not a female.
I don't care if he was wearing a dress.
That doesn't make you a female.
It doesn't make you a woman.
And like, when are we going to grow up?
Like, what is happening?
So I want to add a couple things here.
I'm particularly troubled by the police and then Reuters.
And many others.
And many others discussing this as if this had been a woman.
And yes, I wholeheartedly agree that at one level, the answer is, look, you're just lying.
And the point is this evidences that you are willing to lie and therefore raises exactly the question you suggest about what else are they lying about.
But I think there's a deeper issue here as well.
And I want to go back to something that I think we've discussed before called predator inspection.
There is a phenomenon in nature where when an animal has been captured by another animal, when a predation event is occurring, it often attracts other creatures to see.
And the interpretation of this is that if there is something preying on creatures in your environment, that it makes sense to go find out what it is so you know in what way to be more on alert.
So predator inspection is a real thing because information is a real thing.
There's a lot that goes into shootings and mass shootings.
They are not simple events.
We have a right to process information about patterns.
There is a very clear pattern about trans women.
That is to say, men who are presenting as women.
I'm going to ask that we start using the language trans-identified men.
That's the word that I use because there's nothing woman about that guy.
Right.
About any man who decides to don a dress, whether or not he's gotten surgery or hormones or whatever.
The only reason that I am not ready to sign up for that is that I think the problem is it does not tell you the thing that you're trying to clarify with certainty.
That only if you're in on this discussion do you understand that that person is a man.
So actually, I think the inverse is true.
I think that most people, when you say trans women, they're like, I don't know what that means.
I don't know if you mean that's a woman who thinks she's a man or that's a man.
Separate questions.
Well, I would say what I would like to see in the meantime while we are still in this Orwellian landscape is something like shooting by a trans woman parentheses born male.
That leaves no.
I don't like that.
Well, but here's the reason that here's the reason.
Born male, still male, always male.
Doesn't change.
Okay.
Sorry, like I'm, as you know, I am sorry, fucking done.
Right.
I am done with you.
I'm with you at the level of done.
I want to solve the problem, which is we have lost the ability to speak.
So to your point about Orwell, we have to be able to say that's another one.
And to the extent that we have decided collectively, and maybe we will undecide, but to the extent that we have decided collectively to say that a trans woman is born male presenting as female.
We have a right to notice the pattern that is these people keep engaging in mass shootings.
These people are generally on SSRIs, which are also connected to both self-harm and murder.
And it is this point about predator inspection.
We have a right to have the presentation of evidence allow us to recognize a pattern.
And what is going on here, both on the part of the police and the part of the press, is that they are directly covering for pharma at the very least.
The idea that pharma has been pushing a medicalized idea of transition, that it is connected to violence in a way that is unmistakable.
And the police and the press, presumably motivated out of some wrongheaded desire not to be insensitive to murderers, is covering and obscuring the pattern that we, of course, should be talking about, along with any other pattern that is connected to these events.
This is a larger, a more global version of what many women, including myself, have been talking about with regard to the harms enacted by the trans activism on women, which is that we are told, you know, do not believe your lying eyes, believe my delusion, believe my fantasy.
It would be disrespectful not to.
And furthermore, if you, you know, if you have, if you get that tingling on the top of your head and the back of your head and back of your neck, you sense, am I being followed?
I don't like to look at that guy.
These are things that women have been honing for, I'm going to go with millions of years, have always been encouraged to become aware of, to become hyper-aware of, and to listen to our instincts, even if it might mean that that looks offensive to someone.
I'm sorry, it's not worth getting murdered over not looking offensive.
So the idea for a while now, like, oh, actually, I'm not supposed to point out that that's a dude wearing a dress on lipstick.
No, I am going to point that out and I'm going to be hyper-aware of it because frankly, you're using your cosplay, your fantasy to get into spaces where you don't belong.
And obviously, murderous rage is an extreme version of going places you should never go.
But part of what is happening when we're told, oh, it's a trans woman.
It's like, no, it's not.
That is a man who has been mentally unstable since he was a boy, who has been on drugs that probably no one should be on.
And, you know, I'll get pushback from that.
But there is, you know, ample evidence that SSRIs are terrible for almost everyone that they're on.
I have not seen any evidence that he was on cross-sex hormones.
But these are deranging as well.
They're more likely to be deranging if you're a woman on testosterone, inexperienced with the levels of exogenous testosterone you're now getting.
But especially as a young person who is still going through active puberty, as an 18-year-old man typically will be, receiving exogenous cross-sex hormones is not going to help with what is clearly mental instability.
And as you say, we are entitled to, and we actually are obligated to do pattern recognition for our own selves and on behalf of those whom we care about.
And when we get garbage like this saying, well, it would seem to be that the logic was the person was in a dress, therefore the person was a woman, which is absurd.
And then there's a press conference in which they're referring to the gun person.
Yeah.
The gun person.
Like, you know, maybe, maybe there should be, excuse me, a gender neutral term for gunmen.
I don't know.
You can't create it.
That's part of part of Orwell's point is that we don't, you know, we can't just decree that there's now a new word for something and voila, make it happen.
But gun person is actually, that's got backfire on them because now anytime anyone uses the term gun person, it's like, oh, it's a dude and lipstick.
Great.
Like, that's what we got.
Right.
Well, okay.
I do want to make one more point, which is that there is a legitimate issue.
Like, let's say that I don't know when the report came out by the police.
I don't know if this all went down so fast that the report was actually effectively after it was over.
I wasn't following real time.
But let's say that you've got a real-time active shooter situation and you are trying to put out information that is a warning.
Now you have an issue, which is what am I on the lookout for?
You are looking for a man who may well be presenting as a woman, either compellingly or not compellingly.
So if it really was like fog of war stuff and all they knew was wearing a dress, you could say person in a dress.
Person wearing a dress.
Female in a dress is, which is what was written, is simply wrong.
Just simply wrong.
And anyone who got anywhere close would have known that.
Yep.
So all I'm saying is, A, this is journalistic and police malpractice to be giving us contentious, misleading representations in place of actual information.
What you actually have to do is give us the information.
We can sort out later what to think about it.
But we need to come to an agreement, right?
As I've discussed other times, the idea that the New York Times reports Chelsea Manning giving documents to Julian Assange just is not true.
It's a fiction.
You can't do that.
You can say Bradley Manning, who now goes by Chelsea Manning, but you can't make shit up.
And they're making shit up and it's going to get people killed because there are lots of patterns here.
The Decline Of Clear Writing00:14:26
If one of them is that something about trans ideology, about the medications, about the counseling, whatever it is that is causing trans people to engage in mass killings is something that we have a right to grapple with and you are covering for the killers.
It's not a reasonable thing to do.
No reasonable person would conclude this, except in an Orwellian age where reason isn't a thing.
Right.
Okay, but at least we have the.
The public has been creating a world encyclopedia for 25 years now.
And it's extraordinary, is it not?
So can you see my screen?
Nature, the International Journal of Science, Nature, on January 29th of 2026, wrote an opinion piece titled, Wikipedia is Needed Now More Than Ever, 25 Years On.
The online encyclopedia is an antidote to an increasingly poisoned information ecosystem.
Researchers should help to nourish it.
That is so upside down.
There was a time.
There was a time.
That time has passed when Wikipedia was actually extraordinarily useful as a human-sourced, human, actively engaged with, fact-checked repository of information.
We have we got slandered in Wikipedia early in talking about COVID.
And I think they've actually backtracked a little bit, but it's still insane.
And many people have experienced far more absurd, absurd treatment in Wikipedia.
And here is Nature, the International Journal of Science, Nature, which is its, I did not know before that that was its tagline.
Writing, and I'm just going to read a couple little bits from this short op-ed piece.
Wikipedia is 25, they write.
The world's largest encyclopedia celebrated its birthday on the 15th of January.
This is a remarkable milestone, not just because of the website's longevity and enduring relevance, but also because it has retained its founding values.
These are worth reiterating.
Wikipedia is free to use, is extremely participatory, and aims for a high degree of transparency in its content.
Let me go a little bit later in the article here.
They say, to accommodate such a collaborative effort, Wikipedia has had to develop and adapt its working practices, which are summarized in five pillars.
Most famous is Wikipedia's neutral point of view.
This principle requires editors to be accurate and fair.
The entry on climate change, for instance, states clearly that the modern increase in global temperatures is caused by human activities.
but it also discusses the misinformation that informs climate denial.
I'm just...
Not only did somebody write that, but it got through the editorial process without anyone understanding the Orwellian upside-downness of it.
Yeah, the neutral point of view that includes clearly this position that you're not allowed to disagree with for why?
For political reasons, not for scientific reasons.
But it's neutral and balanced and fair, presumably, as well, because it provides the other position, which, oh, by the way, is misinformation.
We all know that.
Don't we know that?
We know that because we're reading it right here in Nature, the International Journal of Science.
And that demonstrates that the neutral point of view to which Wikipedia aspires is in fact being met.
Right, which of course, you know, the sad reality is that Wikipedia was, for a time, the greatest encyclopedia ever assembled.
It is still the most complete, but the problem is there are entries in there that have no reason to be misleading.
I'm sure if you look up Quasars, you'll get a pretty decent rundown of what we know about Quasars because there's nothing riding on it politically or economically.
But every place where there is stuff riding on it, this is a captured, gamed, and hijacked institution, and it simply misleads.
So in some sense, the true stuff, which might even be the majority of it, is the lost leader that covers for the fact that it is basically distributing propaganda everywhere where people are battling over things with important ramifications for profitability or guilt or whatever it is.
So, you know, it's one of the most, it's one of the saddest stories in the entire internet age because how, you know, you had this thing that humanity could benefit from.
I mean, you remember encyclopedias used to be these expensive things.
I'm sure you had a line of them in some bookshelf in your house growing up.
We certainly did.
We had an encyclopedia and we were lucky to have it.
But the idea that suddenly this was going to be available to everybody, something vastly more complete than the encyclopedias you and I remember, was going to be available to anybody who could get themselves to the internet.
And then anybody who could get there with their phone having the world's greatest encyclopedia in your pocket, this was a gift to humanity.
And it's a major tragedy that it vanished.
And like so many of the things in our landscape, because it exists, it can't be replaced, right?
Right.
But we can't allow the institutions to fail, but they have failed there for me to replace them.
But no, you're misunderstanding.
They exist, therefore they must be good.
Like this is the sort of crazy circular argument you get from people when you say, it's already gone.
I know it's standing there in front of you, but it's a skin suit.
Right.
And so, you know, whether we're talking about Wikipedia or the FBI, you might need something that does this job, but the fact that there's already something that gets all of the traffic and all of the attention and all of the legitimacy and has the budget means there's no room to build it.
Now, kudos to Elon Musk for building Gracopedia.
Early signs are it's just simply hands down better for the fraction of the material that it already covers, including coverage of you and me.
But it's a hard slog because of the network effects of the first case in which something like this was accomplished.
It's such a loss.
Yeah, it really is.
I just want to do one little bit from Orwell before we transition into the rest of the rest of what we're going to talk about.
Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
You used the word transition.
Suddenly I was jarred.
But it's a real word.
Segue.
Segue.
Yes.
All right.
So three years before 1984 was published in 1949, Orwell published an essay called Politics in the English Language in 1946.
And this is a cute little book that includes several of his essays, including Politics in the English Language.
So I want to read just a page from this.
Orwell writes, I, Orwell, am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort.
So this is him talking about how in 1946, the language that he loves was becoming a gunky mess by its most literate users, and that this is no fault but all of our own, right?
So he says, I'm going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort.
Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes.
I returned and saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill.
But time and chance happeneth to them all.
Here is Orwell's modern English rendering of Ecclesiastes.
Objective consideration of contemporary phenomena compels the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
That's beautiful.
It's beautiful, right?
Let me just read a little bit of his analysis of what he's done here.
This, Orwell writes, is a parody, but not a very gross one.
The beginning and ending of the sentence follow the original meaning fairly closely, but in the middle, the concrete illustrations, race, battle, and bread, dissolve into the vague phrase, success or failure in competitive activities.
This had to be so, because no modern writer of the kind I am discussing, no one capable of using phrases like objective consideration of contemporary phenomena, would ever tabulate his thoughts in that precise and detailed way.
The whole tendency of modern prose is away from concreteness.
Now analyze these two sentences a little more closely.
The first, Ecclesiastes, contains 49 words but only 60 syllables, and all its words are those of everyday life.
The second, Orwell's send-up in modern English, contains 38 words, fewer words, of 90 syllables.
18 of its words are from Latin roots and one from Greek.
The first sentence contains six vivid images, and only one phrase, time and chance, could be called vague.
The second contains not a single fresh arresting phrase, and in spite of its 90 syllables, it gives only a shortened version of the meaning contained in the first.
Yet without a doubt, it is the second kind of sentence that is gaining ground in modern English.
I do not want to exaggerate, Orwell writes.
This kind of writing is not yet universal, and outcrops of simplicity will occur here and there in the worst written page.
Still, if you or I were told to write a few lines on the uncertainty of human fortunes, we should probably come much nearer to my imaginary sentence than to the one from Ecclesiastes.
Obviously, most of what we're talking about here isn't about the written word, although the Reuters bit is written word and what's in Wikipedia is the written word.
But we're seeing now the same thing happening to poetry and vivid imagery and actual observed truth in description in speech as well, not just in writing.
We're not going to get to hear from Ecclesiastes anymore because we have to be talking about contemporary phenomena and such.
Well, I'm reminded of the preferences of the Academy.
There's something about leaning into precise language that obscures meaning.
And I remember when I was writing my dissertation that I was looking at many of the things that my dissertation were based on were actually not fully modern, and people used to write differently.
The greats in our field wrote differently.
If you look at Darwin, for example, he presents a compelling argument, accessible to anybody.
It's not full of high-minded jargon that makes it impossible for the layperson to know what Darwin is claiming.
It's written in plain English and as an argument, deliberately so, in which he again and again says, here are the things that if they are true, my argument is false.
So it's not like he's presenting a case and obscuring the case against it.
He makes both cases, but in English, right?
You'll find the same thing in Fisher.
It's simply a feature of compelling good work in science and elsewhere.
But it is taken the reason that when I got to writing my dissertation, it felt like this is no longer allowed.
This is not how we speak anymore.
And it's like, why?
Are we still making big gains the way the people who did write like this were?
No, we aren't.
Geez, maybe this is one of the reasons is that we're not allowed to present an argument and have it out in English.
What we're supposed to do is present something so full of jargon that it excludes everybody who isn't already on board.
I mean, it's a cloaking mechanism is what it is.
Yeah.
I mean, I think I can make an argument for precision, some jargon, but not nearly as much as is being used, and a sort of a tighter, grayer writing form within scientific literature, as opposed to within all of English as Orwell is writing.
I mean, I remember when I was writing my dissertation, I was simultaneously writing my first book, which was about sort of life and research in Madagascar, but it was not a scientific tome.
It was a literary nonfiction for the general public.
And people, our peers in grad school would say, oh, you're writing now, meaning because that's what the phase at which you are all done with your hypothesizing and experimental design and data collection and data analysis.
And now the stage is you're writing.
That's all you have to do.
And then defend your dissertation.
Then you're done.
You're writing.
And I'd say, well, yeah, actually, I am.
I'm writing a book.
Oh, but you're talking about the dissertation.
Oh, that doesn't feel like writing because it's so circumscribed in part so that it could be replicated, right?
So that there is no ambiguity about what was done and what was seen and what I think I know or what whoever the author is thinks they know.
But within the introduction and the discussion of any given paper, any given chapter of a dissertation, for instance, each of which should hold their own as their own research paper, as was the case for both your and my dissertations, there should be the ability to make big claims, to speak clearly, to not hide behind jargon.
And you are absolutely correct that these sorts of things are generally frowned upon in the academy.
Yeah, it's looked upon as unprofessional when it is exactly the inverse.
The Art of Suggestion00:15:48
And I would argue that the distinction which we've made before is very clear.
You have terms of art, which are things where it is necessary to speak with special terminology that not everyone would know in order to say what you're saying, because your discipline has, you know, a term for a paraphyletic clade.
There's no common parlance way of saying that with precision.
And so you're forced to use it.
But the bias in favor of using exclusionary language where it isn't necessary is so clear in modern academic work that it tells you what's going on.
It's part of a club in which the idea is we know and we will deliver you a conclusion and you will not be able to evaluate why we think this.
Well, in my, you know, my defense of highly precise and hard to get through language in some parts of the academy is limited to science, where there needs to be the capacity, at least in theory, for replication.
And so there's no similar defense for history or philosophy, except perhaps with regard to exactly what sources did you use.
Like, be clear about where you got this so that someone else can go and look at your sources.
But there's no similar impetus to replicability in non-scientific fields.
I totally agree with that.
And I would just point out that even inside of the Academy, you will often hear people jokingly refer to the jargon in their own work.
And what it speaks to is the loss of this distinction.
Jargon is unnecessary.
Terms of art are necessary.
They're necessary evils, but they're necessary.
So the point is, if you understand this distinction, you wouldn't refer to your own work as full of jargon because you're not really supposed to put that stuff in there.
What you're supposed to do is use as little of this as you can in order to make your work fully replicable.
And I would point to the parallel where people conflate the meaning of rationale and rationalization.
A rationale is the reason you did something.
A rationalization is the reason you claim you did something when the rationale was something else.
You rationalize that which was not rational by the logic that you're presenting.
And so a rationalization generally is invoked when the conclusion was foregone.
When you started with a conclusion and then you needed an explanation for why you did the thing, that's your rationalization.
Right.
So if you do something for a selfish reason, but you don't wish to pay the cost of your selfishness, you may portray it as something you did for the greater good.
And the point is that's not why you did it.
You applied something after the fact.
So anyway, these distinctions between the honorable version and the malformed version is really important to maintain them.
And I think it fits perfectly here.
Ecclesiastes makes the point.
Orwell's ridiculous paragraph fails to make the point.
You would read right past it because it doesn't sound.
It's not memorable.
It doesn't stick.
It's not human.
It's not resonant.
And yet, if you take all the words apart and consider them very carefully in a sort of a thoughtful academic manner, you can conclude that I guess the same message is there without any of the joy or poetry or humanity.
Yeah, the message could be extracted from Orwell's version of the paragraph, but it's not, it doesn't convey itself.
The user has to do some work to figure out what the hell does that actually mean.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
I started and ended with Orwell.
I'm good for the moment.
From Orwell to Epstein.
All right.
So I have two purposes today.
Obviously, there is no shortage of ink and pixels spilled over Epstein over the content of the recent releases.
And I don't want to rehash that.
I don't think there's any point in it.
But what I do want to do is talk about two things that I think are not widely discussed, or maybe not discussed at all.
The first of them is the question of what is the meaning of what we just saw.
So the narrative is that Thomas Massey forced the release of a massive tranche of documents from the Epstein files, and people are now going through that material and finding all sorts of patterns and suggestions of bad behavior and all of that.
Everybody who is paying attention to this story is familiar with some of what has emerged here.
I'm trying to pay attention to almost the inverse.
We didn't get all the documents.
I don't think we got the file.
And I will come back to that distinction in a second.
We got a lot of stuff that appears to be real and appears to be significant in terms of telling us what the Epstein phenomenon was.
I don't know that it tells us what it wasn't, but it tells us a lot about what it was and a certain amount about how it worked.
Not a ton, but anyway, 3 million plus documents is allowing us to know a lot of what we didn't know before or couldn't be certain of.
But there's something conspicuous about the pattern in what we have.
And I wanted to lay out a model on the table.
Last time you and I spoke about this, we talked about my response to Mike Benz saying he didn't think blackmail was certain here, that the pattern didn't add up because the first time that Epstein went to use the blackmail, the ability to collect more blackmail would evaporate.
And so how exactly does it work?
And I said last time that I thought that effectively Epstein was bringing people in, inducing everybody to go beyond their own limits in some way, and then to live in fear that what they did, said, or whatever might emerge.
So some people probably betrayed their marital vows.
They didn't do anything illegal.
They didn't have sex with a minor, but they did something that causes them to now rein in their own behavior so that if the network of Epstein-connected phenomena starts broadcasting that it strongly favors this policy or strongly disfavors that policy, you know what side you're supposed to come out on.
And for most people, coming out on the side of some policy is a minor thing because there are millions of other people on the same side.
So who's to say why you did it?
Okay.
But the pattern that we have, I would argue, is conspicuous.
What we have is a lot of highly suggestive stuff that I think is, as far as I've seen, not actionable.
It is indicative, but it is not in and of itself proof of any of the wrongdoing that seems more likely given all of the sum total of what we've seen.
So I have an example or two here.
Let's show Rod Dreer's tweet here.
Rod Dreer says, from the Epstein files, I think we might owe the QAnon loons an apology.
By the way, he took a lot of crap for saying loons.
I would like to see a Justice Department investigation of all of this, but who can trust them?
Here's a link to the email below.
And then it shows one of the emails from Sarah Kaye to Rich Burnett.
And it says, it's having a little trouble reading.
It says, hi, Rich.
Jeffrey is asking if you can FedEx the painting he had made of the massacre of the innocents to the ranch.
That's presumably the Zorro Ranch.
It's the large 9 by 9 foot canvas that we had rolled out for him to see on the entryway where they are killing babies.
He wants to use it on the ranch and is hoping you could FedEx it to arrive by Wednesday.
Thanks, Sarah.
Now, there's an obvious linguistic ambiguity in there.
The benign interpretation is that it was laid out and the painting depicts the killing of babies.
Which Massacre of the Innocents does.
Yeah.
The pernicious interpretation is that this is referencing a location where babies were killed on Epstein's ranch.
Now, this is the first time I'm seeing this.
It seems like an insane interpretation of this.
Why would anyone specify an entryway where they kill babies as opposed to an entryway where they don't?
That seems like a that seems like an absurd interpretation.
I agree with you.
A massive stretch.
On the other hand, there's a pattern here.
You've got a guy who appears to have been involved in trafficking young women and a painting, The Massacre of the Innocents.
And this is an echo of what was seen with the emails that were pried loose from the DNC, in which there is all sorts of suggestive discussion amongst John Podesta and his circle of all sorts of things, including pizza, which shows up across the Epstein files.
So the point is, what the hell is this bad taste in art or taste that specifically immoral taste?
Immoral taste in art, where the immorality is even that you're engaged in some behavior and you're memorializing it in art for the purpose of making a point about how powerful you are or whatever.
But the point is, that ain't actionable.
That's a question about art and poor grammar on the part of somebody who isn't Epstein.
So it is suggestive of a culture in which the massacring of innocents might be some kind of weird allusion to their own behavior.
But there's nothing you can do about that, right?
It doesn't mean anything actionable.
Okay, so let's look at the tweet about the sulfuric acid.
So this tweet shows an invoice here.
We'll show you the tweet first.
It says, this is from an account called 50 Shades of Way, like the liquid that comes off of cheese manufacture.
On the same exact day that the FBI opened a child sex trafficking case against Epstein in 2018, he ordered half a dozen 55-gallon containers full of sulfuric acid to his private island.
It could be a coincidence, but what are the odds?
On the same day, was he tipped off?
And then it shows some screenshots that are redacted.
I can't read them from here, but I've looked at them and what they say is that they made an order for 55-gallon drums, six of them, full of sulfuric acid.
Okay, now, on the one hand, sulfuric acid can be used to dissolve a body.
On the other hand, it's not the best acid for that.
And on the third hand, no, it's not.
It's not.
I don't know.
It's slower, darling.
You should know that.
Then stronger acid.
Hydrochloric acid.
I can't remember what the better alternatives are, but people who are into dissolving bodies have a list of acids that work better.
Yeah.
Yep.
I hadn't either, and I'm kind of sorry I did.
But here's what I would say.
I find it conspicuous that, especially given the coincidence and timing, that there's an order for six 55-gallon barrels of sulfuric acid.
Is there an innocent explanation?
Yes and no.
I mean, there's an invoice.
It's legal to purchase bats of sulfuric acid, and there are presumably reasons that normal people would use sulfur acid.
Not normal people, but people who own small islands.
Specifically.
Yeah.
Other people who own small islands.
Yeah.
If you own that island.
Well, let me tell you what I've learned.
And anyone who's welcome to correct me, I know a little bit about this topic, but not a lot.
Little St. James does not appear to have a source of water.
Now, there are a couple of possibilities.
St. James is Epstein's Island.
That's Epstein's Island.
You could have a well, but the well is not likely to produce enough fresh water, and it's also likely to have lots of salt infiltration.
So, how were they getting their water?
There are two possible ways.
One is water catchment, which also is finicky because it requires rainfall, and yes, you can collect a lot of water.
But it would appear from the documents about the sale of the island, for example, the real estate advertisement for the island before Epstein owned it, that the way it was done is the obvious way, which is desalination of seawater.
Reverse osmosis.
Reverse osmosis, exactly.
Now, reverse osmosis is a very energy-intensive, expensive process, and it's a finicky process that involves sorting out all of the stuff using membranes that are semi-permeable, using pressure to drive seawater through these membranes such that the salt is held on one side, creating a brine, yada, yada, yada.
There is a problem with this process, which is that if the pH balance isn't quite right, you get the buildup of mineral materials that degrade, I think, the membranes, but certainly build up on the machinery.
And so you want to prevent that from happening.
And does it tend to go basic?
Is that the direction that it tends to fail?
I think so.
And sulfuric acid is a relatively weak acid?
No, but nonetheless, you can titrate it.
But when I pursued this, I pursued this with the fancy version of ChatGPT.
It does not seem to hallucinate, but I can't vouch for it because I don't even know how to exactly check this.
But I asked it to estimate per 1,000 gallons of potable water produced from Caribbean seawater desalinated by a standard process, what would the right amount of sulfuric acid that I would need in order to reduce the basic nature of the output so that we didn't build up scale.
Per thousand gallons, which is not a ton.
Yeah.
How much do you think it said?
I'm going to be orders of magnitude off.
Probably.
I mean, I was going to guess something very small, like a tablespoon.
It's too much.
It says you don't need any.
It says, given basic assumptions about Caribbean seawater, you would need none.
So.
Because pH is not inherently an issue.
Game Theory and Compromises00:14:56
So why?
You started this story by saying that there is a use.
Right.
it is associated with the reverse osmosis when your source of water has a ph issue this caribbean water is not understood to have a ph issue correct Now, could there be an issue with for some reason?
Could there be some other use for sulfuric acid?
I don't know.
Yes, there could be.
There could be.
So what do we have?
We have nothing actionable.
We have a conspicuous pattern both in the timing and the quantity of sulfuric acid.
Six freaking 55-gallon drums of this stuff?
That's a lot of sulfuric acid.
And 55-gallon drums, it obviously suggests a question.
So this goes to the next point.
We have something.
It may be evidence of a crime.
It is not actionable.
But let me tell you what we don't have.
We don't have the evidence that the FBI looked into the question of what the 55 gallon drums of sulfuric acid were for.
So the point is, I think that there's a little game being played here where the point is the files.
Well, we certainly have a lot of files, but we don't have the files that tell us if these leads were chased down.
If they weren't chased down, why not?
If they were chased down, what was concluded?
And so we are now, the public is trying to do a job it can't do with a woefully incomplete data set and no evidence about what was discovered about the things that seem suggestive.
Did the FBI look into all of the weird mentions of pizza and grape soda and beef jerky and frozen tuna?
Frozen tuna tuna?
Yeah, frozen tuna.
Which could be a reference to frozen tuna.
I mean, it's an island.
Wouldn't be shocking if there were frozen tuna involved.
But in light of all of the all of the weird language, I mean, why is beef jerky being kept on ice?
Beef jerky does not need to be kept on ice.
It's one of the reasons that you want beef jerky is that it doesn't require you to control the temperature in order for it to be durable.
So why does he have all of these people corresponding with him, waxing philosophic and updating on how quickly they're going through the beef jerky they have and when they might need some more, and why it's being kept on ice and where?
It's crazy?
Did the FBI investigate the beef jerky?
I'd like to know what they concluded.
Maybe that's a perfectly innocent explanation, but we don't have it.
So okay, now let's talk about why we don't have it.
I think there are a couple things to understand and basically, what I'm going to argue is that, both with respect to whether or not Jeffrey Epstein remains alive and with respect to the games that are played over the Epstein files, it's the game theory that tells you what's going on.
So I would argue.
A couple things are true.
One and I pointed this out months ago you have a guy who appears to have collected a huge amount of compromise.
What is compromont?
It is power.
It is the power to shape events.
It is the power to bring people onto your team.
It is the power to isolate people who need to be gotten out of the way for something that you want them.
It is power.
So one of the problems that you're going to run into is the same problem.
You know, if the police discover a huge stash of money involved in criminal activity, there's an obvious question about what it is that forces them to turn that money in versus disappear that money.
So what I think is one thing is true, we are living downstream of some amazing elite game that looks like Game of Thrones.
Right, the elites are playing some game with the rest of us where they have information we don't have access to.
It allows them to make huge amounts of profits.
It allows them to to function like superhumans.
To the extent that Epstein had accumulated this stuff, it is highly valuable to other people to have it and they will therefore be reluctant to cough it up.
So one of the things that I think we see in the massive release of partial evidence that we saw is that those redactions where the perpetrators identities are hidden functions as a shot across the bow, to the extent that somebody is now in control of Epstein's library of compromise.
Well, somebody else can advertise to those who are in that library of compromot, hey, we now own you, right?
So we'd be foolish not to wonder if that's what the pattern is.
Why did the documents we did get to see get through and the documents we haven't yet seen, not get through, and you can see this, the number of documents that start in the middle, or correspondence, where you have one piece that's responding to something we don't have.
It's obvious that this is selective.
In what way was it selective what?
What picture does what's not there?
Paint, and one of the things that it does is seems to create the opportunity for that power to be seamlessly transferred to somebody else.
Yeah, it seems to put it names a lot of people who may now be considered to be on notice, but presumably there are many, many people who are not yet named as well.
Yeah, lots of people who know they're in there right, who know they're in there, who presumably many of them are dumbshits, who went to the site and searched for their own names to see whether or not they're in there.
So somebody who was paying attention and decided to log that information might be able to get a map of the things they maybe haven't spotted yet and who might be nervous.
So anyway, the point is, it's Game of Thrones.
It's still going on whether Epstein survived or not.
Okay, now I want to get to the reason that I think Epstein probably did survive before you do.
Does it matter?
Yes and no, I mean, for one thing, it seems to me that he was.
He was a puppeteer, but he wasn't, it seems, a brilliant puppeteer.
Well, let's put it this way, um, if he survived, that describes a landscape of people who participated in dodging justice for him, in hoodwinking the public, in breaking the justice system.
So the point is that's a vast crime of its own right.
We had a right, that's.
That's a different question from, does it matter if he still lives?
Um well, if he lives, then that uh, then that implies more crimes, yet it implies more crimes yet um, but it also, I think, is suggestive of where we should be looking for this power to be continued to be wielded.
So, to the extent that the thing is still alive, Epstein having survived is meaningful because wow, is it an important feature of the game Of Thrones that's being conducted?
So I think that the game theory, quite apart from the evidence and there is evidence that's weird, there's evidence that there was a decoy vehicle um, when Epstein supposedly killed himself um, you know, designed to mislead the press as to what vehicle to follow um, could you put up the?
Uh evidence of the hard drive having been wiped?
So, okay, I tweeted nothing to see here, literally, in response to an account called Brian Allen, who says, newly released documents show an FBI agent removed the hard drive from the jail, the jail's camera, wiping all the footage from the night Jeffrey Epstein died.
And then if you look at the documents, which are unfortunately a little blurry, I think I have a copy here.
It's the second one, Jen.
So this one is a document.
It appears to be the interview of a witness who has been redacted on 312-2020.
It's page two of two.
Page one of two is also included here.
It says, told to start working on the system, then redacted started removing the bad drives in order to rebuild the DVR.
Redacted advised that an FBI agent was the one who pulled out the DVR.
Redacted also advised that he knew that by replacing both hard drives, the system would be wiped, and that he had advised personnel at MCC of that.
MCC is the correctional facility where Epstein was.
Yeah.
So there is evidence.
The story that we are given is that there was massive failure in the technology at the prison site.
Bad luck.
Well, I think there is massive failure of the technology.
It's not well maintained, which of course leaves open the option to hide something with technological failures.
But the claim here, which I find frankly extraordinary.
The claim in what you just read.
Yeah, is that the drive, that there were failures of multiple drives.
There was only one drive, I think, that was likely to have the footage.
It had failed.
And in order to replace it to get the system back up and running after his death, they knew that it would wipe the data off this drive.
Now, that contravenes my understanding of how most drives work, whether this was a physical disk drive or an SSD.
There's no reason that memory should be volatile.
And of course, the FBI should have captured whatever drive was removed.
And there's, of course, an industry that specializes on recovering data, even deleted data from hard drives and things.
So I don't understand what the claim even is, why it would have been deleted.
But let's say that that claim is valid.
Okay.
Why on earth, in light of the crime that was committed, would you not have moved heaven and earth to preserve whatever evidence was there?
Because the question about whether he killed himself is painfully obvious, especially in light of the failure.
You know, the guards were asleep.
The camera system wasn't working in the right place.
Some dude had been moved into his cell, some murderer.
So there's all kinds of reasons that you would want to be able to nail down exactly what happened if that's what you were trying to do.
And it is very convenient that the hard drive apparently got wiped in an attempt to repair the system.
If that happened.
Okay, but I don't think any of the evidence we have so far is more than suggestive.
And some of it, I think, turns out to be garbage.
So there was a brief flurry of excitement over the fact that Epstein appears to have had a Fortnite account, a video game, that continued to be active after his death.
Fortnite put out a press release in which they said that some other account had changed their name to look like Jeffrey Epstein's account, the prank or whatever.
Hilarious.
But the point is, okay, so that could be just some lone person doing something stupid, or it could be what's called flooding the zone, where you're trying to figure out what happened and lots of garbage-y conspiracy theories are introduced into the milieu so that you can't sort reality from garbage.
But all right.
Here's my point.
Put the evidence of something fishy around Epstein's death aside.
And let's do this from pure game theory.
Epstein, whether it was the purpose of what he was doing, one of the purposes, or not the purpose at all, had a lot of compromise on some of the most important, powerful people on earth.
You know, members of the royal family, people at the top of science, universities, government.
He had a lot of compromise on powerful people.
That means two things.
One, it means that he would have perceived a certain amount of danger.
Because to the extent that people had done things in his presence that then jeopardized them later, the temptation to eliminate him so that that stuff did not come to light must have been on a lot of people's minds.
Yep.
And two, he had the purest, most refined material with which to fashion a dead man switch.
The term ring a bell?
I think you talked about this last time.
So the point is he would have understood.
I mean, I know what it means, but you may, if you thought I didn't, it's impossible that some people in our audience don't.
A dead man's switch is something that is designed to be revealed if you suffer an untimely death in order that those who might want to kill you will not do it.
And my feeling is Jeffrey Epstein may not have been the swiftest tool in the shed, but he was certainly smart enough to understand.
Yeah, the swiftest tool.
He wasn't the sharpest bulb in the drawer.
Yeah.
But he was certainly smart enough to understand, A, that he was in jeopardy, and B, that he could change the set of incentives around eliminating him such that were he to find himself in prison, he couldn't just simply be suicided.
So I think if, let's just go through the set of possibilities.
It is possible Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
Why would he have done that?
He would have killed himself because he didn't want to face the consequences for what would be revealed in a trial.
Jeffrey Epstein's Suicide00:09:00
Okay.
On the other hand, he had a lot of power.
He had a lot of powerful people who had an interest in him not saying what he knew on the stand or making a plea deal, throwing bigger fish under the bus.
So would he have killed himself in order to avoid a trial in which he actually had cards that may well have allowed him to get a sweetheart deal the way he did in his first trial?
Doesn't sound likely.
This is somebody who might have done that only if he thought he didn't have any other options.
And we were a long way from finding out that he didn't have any other options.
So that raises the question of whether or not he was suicided.
would he have been suicided well he would have been that's an aurelian word right there It is an Orwellian word, but he would have been suicided by people who thought they stood to gain by his never making it to the stand.
Yes.
Which he would have anticipated.
Sure.
Having already been convicted once.
So I think that that suggests that in light of his being incarcerated, there would be a lot of very powerful people, people with superpowers at their disposal.
If this involved intelligence agencies, those are the kinds of people who have the ability to bake evidence, to create events, to, you know, disappear people and put them in witness protection or whatever it is that they do.
So the game theory alone suggests that this should be a primary concern for the public.
And if he is still alive, obviously he's still a witness to whatever it was he was participating in and he knows who else was participating.
And I should point out, I am so not suicidal.
I'm really not suicidal and I'm in very good health.
Yes, you are.
Yep.
All right.
You're looking at me like I should have a follow-on.
And I just, I, I honestly, I mean, I was, I was right there with you.
Yep.
Also, the frogs have begun to call.
And I was thinking about the beauty of a spring that is coming with the frogs calling and how much more I prefer to think about frogs than Jeffrey Epstein.
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
I agree.
The frogs are beginning to call.
I heard that last week and thought, you know, there's always that one day.
It's always strangely in the winter here when the frogs call.
That's frogs for you.
That's temperate frogs.
It was a little later in Michigan.
A lot later, in fact.
Well, Michigan, you may remember, had rather harsher winters.
I mean, just, you know, a little bit south and west of Michigan, the frogs, some species of frogs, actually bury themselves underground and become frozen little frogsicles, such that you could dig them up and drop them and they'd shatter if you didn't give them the time to thaw out.
So Michigan and the Pacific Northwest do not exactly have the same kind of winters.
Totally agree.
Yeah.
Totally agree.
See, I'm much more energized to talk about frogs than Jeffrey Epstein.
Agreed.
right um well shall we save the uh you know as much more awful what may be coming in ai will be three days from now and that is in fact one of the messages in the piece I don't think 72 hours with regard to our discussion of it is going to change that much.
And we are going to be back in three days.
So I think we should save that discussion.
All right.
We'll save it.
All right.
Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?
Frogs, perhaps?
Ah.
Oh.
Yes.
Good.
There is something I want to talk about.
Full stop from all of that stuff.
Actually, pick the discussion up from frogs.
Frogs.
Which have nothing to do with what I want to present, but is at least a lovely topic.
Okay.
I wanted to point out that Ralston has their applications.
You talked about this last time, too.
Maybe you didn't.
I don't think I did.
I intended to.
I intended to, and I forgot.
I tweeted it, yes.
You twittered it.
I'm not going to put that in the past tense.
It's just something I don't do.
All right.
Ralston College is an amazing educational institution and educational experiment.
You and I spent a lovely, was it a week?
Something close to that?
Close to that.
At their Savannah campus interacting with their class, which was on the verge of graduation in their master's program.
We gave Sophia lectures, which are available online.
Anyway, I know that I speak for both of us in that we were completely blown away by how effective Ralston had been at creating an educational environment that was like the full human experience from their initiating their program in Greece,
learning a language, and then coming back to Savannah and studying classics and much else.
Anyway, a beautiful experience and one that is clearly hyper-enabling for the soul, for lack of a better term.
Anyway, their applications are open.
I don't know if you all have the bandwidth to take this master's program or if you know somebody who does have that bandwidth.
It's one full, intensive, full residency year, which begins in Greece and ends in Savannah, Georgia.
Yep.
And I will tell you that if I were of an appropriate age and stage in my life, I would want to have done this program, having now seen what it's like.
So anyway, great stuff.
And I hope this catches someone's attention who applies and ends up taking the course.
And we'd love to hear how it goes.
Okay, actually, one more thing before we sign off today, and we'll be back on Valentine's Day, is two weeks ago, I initiated the COVID era stories project at Natural Selections.
And you can show my screen.
I'm not going to read from this week's contribution, but at Natural Selections, I am now for the foreseeable future, every Tuesday publishing one, or this week it was two shorter pieces from people who have written in.
And the directions for what to submit and how to submit it are here in the original COVID era stories post.
But we now have, as of yesterday, three stories in two separate posts of people's experiences during COVID that are already highly variable.
And this is in part an attempt for none of us to forget, for us all to remember pieces of the things that we lived through that are becoming foggier and vaguer with every passing week.
So I'm encouraging people to write, even if they don't want to submit.
And we had a huge outpouring of contributions right after I first posted this.
So there's a big backlog.
There's a lot of work happening behind the scenes.
But know that if you did want to submit something, it would get read and it might get published.
And people are saying that it is helpful not just to write, but to read what other people are saying about what it is that individuals and that society went through as we lived through COVID.
I'm so thrilled that you're doing this.
I really think in light of the dynamics that you and I lived where sorting out what the hell was going on in real time was an incredibly fraught activity and the pressure to move on and get past this has been incredibly intense that this has not only world-changing potential, but world bettering potential.
If we can figure out at an individual level, at a personal level, what unfolded, how it caused people to behave in the ways that they did, and what it means.
What are the ways in which we've all been traumatized by the show of force that coerced us into taking medications that we didn't want to take or saying things we didn't want to say?
The fact that people were forced into all this stuff, the mechanism by which that happened has to be recorded or it will happen again.
Indeed.
Understanding Trauma Mechanisms00:00:44
Precisely right.
All right.
Well, we appreciate that you've been here with us today.
Consider joining us on Locals.
We will be doing a Q ⁇ A on Sunday for two hours starting at 11 a.m. Pacific on Locals only.
And before then, on Saturday, at our usual time of 11.30 a.m. Pacific, we'll be doing another live stream before going off air for a little bit for the second half of the month.
But there are going to be two great inside rail episodes while we are away.
But come back in three days for a somewhat rare Saturday live stream.
And until you see us again, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.