Behind the Bastards - Part Three: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World

Starting point is 00:00:01 Warzone Media. Welcome back to the Jeffrey Epstein podcast extravaganza, also known on normal weeks as Behind the Bastards, a podcast about bad people. 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. Speaking of the modern world, our guest today is a part of it. Andrew T. Thanks, thanks for having me. Yeah, I guess. I would say part of the modern world under protest at this point.

Starting point is 00:00:42 Yeah, under protest, isn't everyone, aren't we all? Under protest. I'm only here because I have to be. Yeah, yeah. The only part of the modern world I want to have anything to do with is my bed. And they make me leave that for like 16 hours a day. It's nuts. You know what, though, being one of those, I hate the modern world guys.

Starting point is 00:00:59 I do want to stress I'm not one of those. It was better in Rome what happened to classical architecture. I would have hated that too. I would have hated that too. Anything where I have to get out of my bed. Bad society. Bed only. We need to, yeah, we need to rebuild society entirely around naps.

Starting point is 00:01:16 That is my strong opinion. 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. Yeah. Anyway, Andrew, where can people find you on the internet before we continue? Oh, God. Thanks for letting me get it in before. the fucking real crimes start. Yeah, the real fucking crimes, too.

Starting point is 00:01:38 I don't know. Andrew T. Everywhere I have doing a podcast called Starter Trek on suboptimalpods.com. My main podcast is Yo's Us Racist, but we've been having a lot of fun doing talking Star Trek with my co-host, Tony Newsom, who is... Star Trek. I love that stuff. If you're spoiler alert people, but she's a beloved reveal happens in episode five. of Starfleet Academy.

Starting point is 00:02:05 Yeah, the new Star Trek. Yeah, I don't know. Star Trek is happening, that's all. Well, that's a good thing to be happening. We love Star Trek, almost as much as we love, the opposite of Star Trek, which is about hearing about a wealthy pedophile. Which is this. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:02:19 Yeah. Well, also, wealthy technocrat pedophile. A wealthy technocrat pedophile, yes, exactly the sort of person. Star Trek got rid of in the idealized future in Gene. in Jean Roddenberry's beautiful dream. No more Jeffrey Epstein's. Because of literally this. They got rid of people like this.

Starting point is 00:02:40 And in modern times, we're recording these episodes on the day that Galane Maxwell's lawyer has said that she will not talk unless she's given clemency. But if given clemency, she can prove that both Donald, J. Trump and Bill Clinton are innocent. So that's cool. It's tough for me. because I hate that stuff, but I also love people pleading the fifth. I'm a big fan of the fifth.

Starting point is 00:03:07 I'm a big plead the fifth fan. It's tough. It's tough. These are the times that try men's souls. But I have to say, I have questions. Frankly, I have questions.

Starting point is 00:03:18 It's the best. It's the best amendment, easily. Yeah. The fifth? Are you kidding me? I'm surprised she didn't. At this point,

Starting point is 00:03:25 you're just pinning it on a dead man, right? Like, this is, this is, exactly. Weebe eating up murders once he's in for life. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:32 I mean... We'll see how it goes, but I have some theories that, you know... Yeah, I mean, anything could happen at this point. 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. 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.

Starting point is 00:03:54 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. Yeah. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security,

Starting point is 00:04:20 one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Joe Interesting, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today I'm talking with my dear friend, Krista Williams. It can change you in the best way possible. Dance with the change. Dance with the breakdowns.

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Starting point is 00:05:28 The perpetrator was sentenced to 99 years. until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

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Starting point is 00:06:15 Is it a self-help miracle, a shady hypnosis scam, or both? Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So in May of 2013, Jeffrey Epstein was actively working through an intermediary to broker an in-person meeting with the most obvious. It's a match made in heaven. Russian president Vladimir Putin. And obviously, if you're Jeff Epstein in 2013 trying to get an in-person sit down with Vladiputz, what are you wanting to talk about?

Starting point is 00:06:50 Bitcoin. Of course. What else could you want to talk about Vladimir Putin with but Bitcoin in 2013? His intermediary in these conversations was Thorbjorn Yaglund, who is a Norwegian Labor Party politician and the former Prime Minister of Norway. He has been, he is not doing well as a result of the revelation that he and Epstein were quite close. People are very unhappy with him over in Norway. God, what's that like?

Starting point is 00:07:21 Imagine a leader facing a consequence for his association with a pedophile? Weird. Yeah, yeah. For specifically trying to broker a meeting with that pedophile in Vladimir Putin. And it's weird because you can tell Epstein took this really seriously. 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. He spells fucking every other word wrong. It's like watching, I mean, it's like a nine-year-old typing, right?

Starting point is 00:07:52 Like it's, he's not dedicated to sounding good. It's giving like bad AOL and messenger messages. Like it's giving AOL. Yeah, 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. This was important to him. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:13 Like, this was an all-hands-on-deck situation, right? 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. So he must have typed this one out somewhere other than his iPad. Here's a segment from that email. This is his pitch to this guy. This is his pitch to this guy to deliver to Putin, right?

Starting point is 00:08:38 This is how he's basically trying to convince Putin he's got to get into the Bitcoin game. When Spudnik was announced, the West was caught flat-footed. The same can now happen with Russia taking the lead in finance. 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. Bitcoin is the Sputnik of the 21st century.

Starting point is 00:09:07 I genuinely have to say it is a little heartening slash disheartening that these people genuinely believe their bullshit. Like this was a private conversation. He really, yeah. Like, because I on some level just wish that Bitcoin people in private when the billionaires are talking to each other, they're like, oh, this is going to be great for money laundering. and whatever it's actually used for. It is a little insane to hear him like typing like a Twitter person right now.

Starting point is 00:09:38 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 prostitution, 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. 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, like, I don't know what the plan was. But also like trying to talk to Putin like an actual Bitcoin mark is a, it's fucking nuts. That's so crazy. Because he's too

Starting point is 00:10:26 He's so you die over. He's way too smart for that. Like, he's not, Vladimir Putin is not an idiot. He's not, 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. That's a little, like, that's just, there's no benefit in that to him. Like, it would only benefit these asses. It's always one D-CHESS.

Starting point is 00:10:49 It's one D-CH. Like, these people are not smarter than you. They're actively dumber than you. Yes. And hang on to that. Yeah, hang on to it and celebrate it. And it's also funny to me, just the idea that, like, Sputnik was the Soviet Union succeeding and doing a thing that honestly, before they did it, was debated by a number of people.

Starting point is 00:11:12 Like, can we even do stuff like this? Like, is this fully possible? Can you get a working satellite into orbit? There was, like, debate for quite a while as to how possible that was. And then they figure it out, like, ahead of us. And it's this amazing moment for all mankind. They prove you can do this thing that hadn't been done before. And the difference would be at in saying, yeah, this thing that we are already doing,

Starting point is 00:11:33 if you just rip it off, you'll be doing the Sputnik of the 20, which really says a lot about the 21st century. But like our Sputnik is ripping off a thing that doesn't do anything and already exists. Like amazing stuff, Jeffrey. If you have the bold vision to crater your economy and the global economy, you will be the first to do that. You can do it. You can do it. Yeah, no one else has made Bitcoin their national currency yet because it's a bad idea. Epstein goes on to claim that crypto offers the potential for a much more advanced

Starting point is 00:12:03 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. He insists that Thorbiorn needs to secure him and Putin a minimum two to three hour long meeting to discuss all of this. 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. You know, maybe he was utilizing him as an asset. There's some evidence of that, but that also doesn't mean Putin himself was directly involved

Starting point is 00:12:36 because he's got other shit on his plate. The idea that Jeffrey's begging for this meeting is, but it has to be at least two or three hours. I won't sit down for anything less. It's like, man, if you can get you 20 minutes with Putin, you'd be happy for it. Don't fucking bullshit of shit like me. And Putin's showing better judgment than anyone else in these four episodes. declined to meet with Jeffrey Epstein, at least as far as we know. Wow.

Starting point is 00:13:01 Well, listen, at least being smart enough to not agree to it on fucking email puts him a cut above. Yeah, in a fucking email. Right. Opsack-wise, he's at least ahead of everyone? He's beating Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard and Peter Thiel, that's for sure. Yeah. So this whole daliants Jeffrey has was trying to get Russian. on the Bitcoin train is not influential because of the outcome because nothing really happens here.

Starting point is 00:13:29 But it's important because of what it says about where Jeff's head was in 2013. By this point, whether or not he'd ever read Alexander Dugan. I don't like you. Don't like you calling him Jeff. It's like too humanizing to call him Jeff. You're going to do it every now and then. Jeff. Jeffie.

Starting point is 00:13:47 Nope. Little Jefferoo. Nope. 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. In emails he sent around the same time to billionaire Richard Branson, Epstein pitched his vague idea for what he called a new social good currency. Quote, creating a new social good currency, similar to the creation of airline mile awards, special drawing rights,

Starting point is 00:14:14 etc. would be the most disruptive of all advances. The financial system has outgrown its purpose, allowing people to conduct exchanges with third-party trust and ease of transaction. 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, in a way that's very familiar with how a lot of right-coded people talk today, a lot of these influential folks like Bannon, yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:55 I mean, yes and no, though, because they don't really mean burning it down. Well, they mean the Fed, U.S. democracy, that kind of stuff, right? They want to disrupt the system they rose up in, right? They don't want it to keep working the way it has, right? But they want it to, they want society to look largely. They want it to look more like Russia, which is like they're in charge, but it's basically the same society. you. And I think you can...

Starting point is 00:15:23 It's just a weird. Yeah. 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? So maybe that's kind of it as he's like, well, we ought to be more... 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? Maybe that's why he's, like, that's how he's thinking, you know?

Starting point is 00:15:50 Right. So Richard Branson and Epstein. are two more, that's another famed Epstein friendship, right? And his close relationship with Branson was a two-way street. And a little later that same year, 2013, Branson offered Epstein advice on fixing his public image after the whole registered sex offender thing. He assured Epstein that he could repair Jeffrey's public profile if Epstein could just get Bill Gates to vouch for him.

Starting point is 00:16:16 And this is Branson saying like, basically, this is what you need to get Bill Gates to say about you to fix your image. 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, that you've more than learned your lesson and have done nothing that's against the law since. If only Bill Gates would say,

Starting point is 00:16:34 but can you imagine if Bill Gates in 2014 or so had come up and like, look, did Jeffrey Epstein sleep with a child? Yes, but he's learned his lesson and we all need to forgive him. None of this would be happening. I mean, yeah, what an insane. All these men are fucking disgusting. They're disgusting.

Starting point is 00:16:54 It's not just disgusting. It's completely out of touch. The fact that Richard Branson, it shows you how warping the bubble of nothing but other rich guys is. That Richard Branson is like, who's someone who all Americans love and respect. Love. Yeah, yeah. Bill Gates, obviously. Obviously.

Starting point is 00:17:12 Everyone loves Bill. I hate all these people. No, we don't. We never did. Yeah. I guess it's just like get the nerd. to tell everyone you're not committing crimes. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:17:28 They're just like, he's the squarrest one around. Right, right. Bill Gates, you know, straight shooter. So on a related note, that same year, 2013, this is a big year for Branson and Epstein. Richard Branson reversed the normal order of things. And this is the only time I found this happening, although I haven't been through all of the millions of files released.

Starting point is 00:17:48 But Branson invited Epstein to his private island, you know? there we go. Finally, somebody's willing to pay Jeff back for his hospitality, you know? Jesus Christ. I mean, look, Branson's Island can't be, I guess, at the risk of, it can't be that good. I don't know. I don't know. I would have said before this, I would have guessed it had, it was like a higher age bracket

Starting point is 00:18:15 of the people, but I don't actually know that that's true now. So. Yeah, right. Yeah, is this just like the fucking cheap version of Epstein's Island, or is Epstein's Island, the cheap pedophile island, right? That's also possible. We simply don't know. Maybe the really good pedophile islands don't tell, have emails where they talk about it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:18:38 Ew. 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, and with a exclamation point after it. So I would say that implicates Richard Branson. in some sex Christ. Yeah, via email. Now, my favorite thing

Starting point is 00:18:56 about this, my favorite thing about all this is the denials all these people have to have their spokespeople issue after this shit

Starting point is 00:19:01 comes out. And once this email, people start talking about it, oh, Branson's referring to his harem and inviting him to his island. I guess he's probably

Starting point is 00:19:09 doing some sex crimes. Branson's spokesperson told journalists with the independent that, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah,

Starting point is 00:19:14 the harem he was referring to were just adult members of Epstein's staff. obviously Jesus Christ Obviously Yeah

Starting point is 00:19:24 Who were those Yeah What are you talking about? Not named Which ones? Right Can you get a name? Yeah

Starting point is 00:19:32 So the worst Again Does this mean that Jeffrey was just Bringing Bringing children over When Branson was there Was he

Starting point is 00:19:40 Was Branson one of the ones That he plied with teenage girls Or was Branson One of the ones That he plied With adult women Right

Starting point is 00:19:47 No way to know And honestly I don't care 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? Yeah. Yeah. That I think that's reasonable if you're going to islands with him, right?

Starting point is 00:20:00 Yeah. On a regular basis. If you're inviting him to islands and talking about his heir him. If you're advising Bill Gates to be his like no pedophile spokesperson. Yeah. Then, um, yeah. I don't know, man. I'm going to go with, uh, I'm going to say no.

Starting point is 00:20:17 I'm going to go not a great guy. Yeah, just the dumbest frat house shit. It's always, it's never better than that. Yeah. Well, it's worse than that. When it comes to a question of like, well, why aren't these guys getting charged? Well, because all you have is Branson saying bring your harem. And that's not, Branson didn't say bring specifically the underage members.

Starting point is 00:20:37 I don't want anyone older than sick. That's not in an email, right? So there's not, I don't think there's anything to charge Branson off of at this point. Maybe there will be. Maybe there's more stuff that we don't know. I'm not against it. 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.

Starting point is 00:20:58 The worst harms Epstein committed and the worst crimes, his friends are implicated and took place offline. The conversations we have documented are mostly either precursors or adjacent to the really bad stuff. Every now and then you get something truly fucking horrifying. Like there's an email chain in which one of Epstein's friends is like, hey, who is that gynecologist you sent your victim? to and Epstein like gives him the name of a gynecologist and they're like yeah you really keep this guy busy right like there's some horrifying shit like that in there but for the most part it's

Starting point is 00:21:27 like quips like this bring your harem 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 where because there will be points where people will be made and then they'll be like hey let's take this to a phone call right so it's just hard to kind of say what the exact extent of a lot of stuff was 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. And so I can say he was trying to influence the development of Bitcoin and crypto. He wanted and he got that influence.

Starting point is 00:22:01 What did he do with it? Not entirely clear to me. What I can say is that Joey Edo and Epstein's friendship continued to blossom throughout the aughts. And this was, remember, Edo is a big wig at MIT. He's basically like running the lab that's doing like their crypto development. looking at a lot of stuff like that. And he's the guy who plied Jeffrey to pay the salaries of those three big Bitcoin deaths.

Starting point is 00:22:24 And this is the friendship between Edo and Epstein is very good for MIT. The school receives at least $850,000 from the Epstein Foundation directly to Edo's projects from 2002 to 2017 in addition to other donations. 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 in Foundations. foundations, right? Right. He donated $850k to MIT over this period.

Starting point is 00:22:52 Who knows how much other money he got sent there by being Epstein? Edo and MIT continued to accept Epstein's money for almost a decade after his conviction for sex crimes. And I shouldn't just limit it to Edo, as the tech.com has summarized in an article on the subject. Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Seth Lloyd received research funding, went to Epstein's private island and visited Epstein while he was in prison. Following the investigation, Lloyd was put on paid administrative leave. However, Lloyd retains his

Starting point is 00:23:20 tenured professorship. Former president of MIT, Rafael Rafe, signed a letter thanking Epstein for a donation in 2012, just six weeks into his presidency. 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. Epstein's gifts were also discussed at least one of MIT's regular senior team meetings with Rafe present. So a lot of people in MIT should have known better, right? And Edo himself is particularly, but not the only guy who was visiting Epstein and probably involved in some criminal stuff. Right, because it's also like, like, you know, $850,000 is a lot of money.

Starting point is 00:24:01 To a scientist, yeah. But it's not actually a lot of money for MIT. Like, what is its endowment in the billions? I mean, the endowments big, but for individual. And you have to assume it's several million over the years. I'm not 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, I will just say. There's a couple of things.

Starting point is 00:24:30 One is, first off, people get this wrong all the time. Jeffrey Epstein's not a billionaire. Never was. No evidence that he ever was. When he died, his net worth was about $600 million, right? 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,

Starting point is 00:24:49 they're both enough for yachts and private islands, right? Right, right, right. 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. Right. It's less than you want it to be. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:05 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? Right. 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? Yeah. So anyway, that's all.

Starting point is 00:25:28 I would say that, like, his connection to, like, crypto bros is not that surprising to me, but what is surprising is, like, the Epstein to academia pipeline being so massive. 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. Part of it is. It's just like venomous. Well, yeah, part of it is, again, he's spreading a lot of money around.

Starting point is 00:26:00 And part of it is that all of these, like the academics he's going to are guys who are a lot of them, like, Ido, very interested in cryptocurrency. He's very interested in a lot of controversial 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. And 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. And that means they fall for a lot of dumb stuff because none of them.

Starting point is 00:26:36 They're all PhDs and shit. none of them are as smart as they think they are, right? Which is usually true of people. 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. They actually, you know, by their own petard, they could be.

Starting point is 00:27:07 They could never survive in the free market. 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? Where it's like, well, our copyright laws and intellectual property laws are a fucking disaster. 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. And then it's like, well, maybe it's just the weapon we have. And I don't really like it. 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? Right. I can see that argument. And it's kind of like with academia, the war of the right has been waging on college and on the system of tenure and whatnot is disastrous. But also, academia has a lot of problems. 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? Like there's a lot of problems. with the way the system works.

Starting point is 00:28:09 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. All these guys were friends with Jeffrey Epstein, you know? 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 Edo in 2014. At around the same time, Epstein was emailing with Peter Thiel, who was a friend of his and a regular confidant. Epstein and Teal send a lot of emails to each other.

Starting point is 00:28:45 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. And they published a list of proposed rules for the New York-based Bitcoin businesses that very month. Epstein sends this email to Teal 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. And Teal responded, do you think this is the first step in upping the anti-Bitcoin pressure? And here's Epstein, basically do you think this is the first step in like the state governments and the federal government coming out against crypto?

Starting point is 00:29:26 And here's Epstein's reply. First, it appears there is little agreement on what Bitcoin is. store of intrinsic value, if any, currency, property, architecture, payment system, etc., conflicting goals, anonymous but transparent, public ledger, like the continuum now in the gender classification. Fitting things into narrow boxes seems old school. Man presenting his woman, smells like property presenting his currency. Anyway, more when I see you. This is interesting for a few reasons.

Starting point is 00:29:51 For one thing, you have this kind of, this acknowledgement from Jeffrey that, like, no one really understands how like what Bitcoin is like like like there's not a lot a widespread understanding about like what it is right because the people who are marketing it are saying like it frees you from the government it's totally anonymous right but also it's transparent because of the public ledger because like the proof of fucking work shit right 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 literally can be they were lying about a bunch of stuff because Bitcoin was more than anything a con right 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 is not as like much of a binary as people, like most people had assumed for all.

Starting point is 00:30:45 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 that's not really accurate about Bitcoin.

Starting point is 00:31:11 Like, Bitcoin's not, in fact, like gender. People were just like pretending Bitcoin was anonymous to trick criminals into using it so that more people would put money into the system that's different than people understanding that gender is not as binary as they thought it was, right? There's a difference. Oh, God.

Starting point is 00:31:30 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. The earliest actual emails between Epstein and Teal released so far are from 2014. In an email in June of 2015, Epstein connected Teal with Sergei Beliakov, Russia's Deputy Minister of Economic Development, an alleged Russian intelligence operative. In an email to Teal a month after that, Epstein alludes to a visit at his Zoro Ranch in New Mexico. In 2015, Epstein told medical researcher and author Peter Attia, 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.

Starting point is 00:32:08 And in 2016, Epstein offered to share the expenses for Teal's lawsuit against Gocker, which would eventually bankrupt the outlet. We'll talk more about that dinner. These people are so dumb. It's such a club of the dumbest motherfuckers ever to live. Well, and he's just, he is connecting people to spies. He is, like, and this is why people are like, was he literally just working for the Russian government? Because there's a lot of, he may, I think it is likely just that he was as dumb as they were. But there's a lot of, ooh, this guy's the Russian deputy minister and probably a smile connected to my friend Peter Thiel.

Starting point is 00:32:45 He does a lot of that shit. And it's very similar to like Robert Maxwell, Gillen Maxwell's dad, where people, I think wrongly are like, he was a Mossad agent. And I was like, that would imply that, 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 their James Bond in exchange for giving them information that's useful, right? Yeah. Which is, I think, what, and giving them tasks sometimes, you know, talk to this guy, get this guy to say this thing, right? You know, bring us this information. Well, it's like what is an agent, just like the Russians are.

Starting point is 00:33:22 Yeah, it's like agent of. But in the way that like, so is like a chainsaw. It doesn't make it the chainsaw smart. And I think there's good evidence that Epstein was that kind of useful idiot, both the Russian government and for the Mossad, right? Yeah. But that's, again, an episode, that's a subject for another series of episodes that we would have to get into. Now, the tech in their write-up of all this points out one particularly interesting email chain from August of 2018.

Starting point is 00:33:51 Epstein and Teal are discussing an accountant named Richard. who Epstein connected Joy Edo with to set up the paperwork for some kind of crypto launch. This is likely Richard Kahn, Epstein's personal accountant, and it's a little unclear about why Teal needed to be in contact with Kahn other than some crypto project. And they were talking about layer one. And I didn't really know what this meant, so I looked it up. And in networking jargon, like the field of like computer networking, layer one can refer to either data and equipment.

Starting point is 00:34:25 I found a website, CBTN Nuggets, that describes all this. Layer 1 data is simply bits sent across a wire, many, many zeros and ones. This is the network layer where that happens so that it can be transmitted somewhere else. So then layer 1 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. So it's the most basic equipment for sending data. We're talking like Ethernet and Fibir. optic cables, as well as physical transmission objects of any over-air technology, including

Starting point is 00:34:57 like electricity. 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? So they could have been talking about a variety of things. But when Edo asks Jeffrey, like, how's Khan's investigation doing into this stuff, Epstein responded, so far it's not good. There seems to be a disconnect between manipulation,

Starting point is 00:35:25 currency valuation. It's how to protect ourselves. Not easy. Edo 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. Edo responds by asking if there's any specific regulations he should look at when giving feedback to the team.

Starting point is 00:35:43 And Epstein tells Edo, mini, Ponzi gambling, manipulation, unlikely to cause trouble except for high value targets. So we've got here is Epson. This is finally a little bit of I talked about. I'm not sure how much is he conned or a con man. This is he's a con man fully. He is talking about a crypto project he's working on with fucking MIT and being like, this is Ponzi gambling.

Starting point is 00:36:04 We're manipulating people. 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. That's what he's saying here. Right. You know what? Like whatever this project is.

Starting point is 00:36:15 You know what Jeffrey Epstein would have loved? Huh. All the Super Bowl. commercials from this year. Oh, yeah. He would have loved the Super Bowl commercials for this year. It was all... All Epstein-backed companies.

Starting point is 00:36:29 All AI, all crypto, all online gambling. It was like his Holy Trinity. Yeah. It's never been more apparent that the Super Bowl is just a scam. This is the year it has to be mask off, right? Like, this is all scams only. Only scams, I guess. Only scams, yeah.

Starting point is 00:36:49 It was all cons. 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. Oh man. Everybody was so mad. Everyone's sung along to the fucking karaoke and then they're like, by the way, fuck you, Coinbase. You're like, oh. It actually made me happy because it's desperation.

Starting point is 00:37:18 It's pure desperation. They are more done than last year. I will say actually, Sophie, when you said, do you know what Jeff Ripsy would have loved? I thought you were forcing an ad read right now. Yeah, so did I. Oh, no, I wasn't, but it is that time. Yeah, we should go to ads. God.

Starting point is 00:37:35 Yeah. Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. Entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey.

Starting point is 00:37:59 So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us. Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on I Heart Radio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic, Aquarian visionary.

Starting point is 00:38:31 Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people. sleeping in different rooms, on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want to chart-side view

Starting point is 00:38:57 into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast, starting on February 24th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Seas. and two podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two families.

Starting point is 00:39:25 Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime. He pulls the gun. Tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Tremaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termaine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity.

Starting point is 00:39:48 The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real?

Starting point is 00:40:17 If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.

Starting point is 00:40:39 NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is wild.

Starting point is 00:41:11 Listen to Mind Games on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. Boy, Jeffrey Epstein, would have loved those. ads. Okay. Robert, I'd like to keep my health insurance. Thanks so much. Uh-huh. Yeah. I need it. Jeffrey doesn't because he's dead. Yeah, he sure doesn't. Anyway, we're back. So, so far we've discussed Epstein's early interest in cryptocurrency and his early advocacy for micro-transactions and video games. Now it's time to talk about where he starts to veer into the right-wing media game. He starts hitting the fever swamps. And to discuss that, I got to introduce a new

Starting point is 00:41:52 character. Christopher Poole, better known socially as moot. Moot! Moot! Born in probably 1987, somewhere near Virginia, Chris's early life is a black hole until he joined the Something Awful forums. 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. It's what invented a lot of things that are still foundational to internet culture. 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. That started on something awful.

Starting point is 00:42:36 And in fact, in both the good and the bad way, right? Like something awful, there was a big, like, anti-Scientology thing where, like, they were basically dedossing Scientology websites at one point. And also a bunch of random people got harassed. for being weird on the internet. 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. There's a way in which you can say all modern social media is kind of downstream of something awful.

Starting point is 00:43:08 But Christopher Poole wasn't just spending his time on something awful. He also spent a lot of time on Japanese message boards, specifically one called Tuchan, right, which is going to be relevant here in a second. So something awful is basically a dictatorship, which we can say most modern social media, but it's not like a company really. I mean, they do kind of have a company at one point, but it's not a real functional company. It's run by one asshole, Richard Kianca, who takes donations and people have to pay to join the forum. And Richard kind of rules things with an iron fist. And because of the way he runs things, whenever there's something he doesn't like or that endangers the site, he takes.

Starting point is 00:43:48 tends to just ban stuff, right? So the fact that low tax is the single guy legally responsible for this website leads him to a couple of conundrums like this, right? 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? One of the forums is just devoted to people using illegal drugs. 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. A bunch of fucked up stuff happened on that site. People also had illegal fire sharing on there. There used to be a subsection of the forum where people would put up torrents and whereas,

Starting point is 00:44:27 which is like pirated video games back in the day, right? That's very illegal. So that gets banned after a while because it had to be, right? You can't have this massive public-facing website letting people steal shit from every company in the world. You'll get in trouble. So low tax bans that. And he, you know, this happens a bunch of different times, right? And particularly, it happens to a group of forum users who create a place in the forum to share their weird pornography.

Starting point is 00:44:57 And in order to describe this chunk of something awful history, I'm going to quote from Max Reed's substack. He banned LolaCon, that is, underage girl hentai. More generally, Lotex hated the anime subforum on something awful, and the anime fans who populated the subforum hated him back. The subforum 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. One punishment for misbehavior on the forums

Starting point is 00:45:25 was to be banned so you could only read or post in that sub-forum. 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. He's a terrible abusive spouse, an awful man. The fact that he bans underage, like animated porn from his website

Starting point is 00:45:44 makes him more responsible than any modern social media a CEO. 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. It's so funny to me. He's somehow the good guy in this local dip. Yeah. And I hate him. So, Lola Khan gets banned, and it creates a bunch of people who were on something awful, who are into anime, who are angry at Lothax, and are finally ready to find another place, right? Christopher Poole is one of these people. He had posted on ADTR. D.A.D.R. right? And he sees this is an opportunity, right? There's all these guys who are looking for a new place to gather online. Maybe I can make a place for them. 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. And all of these guys who had been posting on something awful, who were angry at Richard Kiyanka, 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 it.

Starting point is 00:46:49 That's the idea, right? Yeah. And so one of the things that happened is basically everyone on something awful is pretty toxic at this point. I'd include myself in that. But the most toxic people on something awful go over to 4chan, where they get to be totally anonymous. They don't have to spend any money, and they don't have to abide by most of the same rules. So Winpool creates 4chan, though, he's got to deal with, ironically, the same question that had confronted low tax, right? Which is, okay, I'm the guy whose name is attached to this web

Starting point is 00:47:23 community. What crosses the line for me? What am I not willing to have attached to my name, right? Well, even if not socially, like legally, right? Legally or socially, right? Yeah. You have to, you have to deal with that question when you're doing this shit. So when the site was first created, there was a subforum slash in, which meant, it was meant to be like slash in for news, right? This is the news part of the Chan, the image board. So for reasons that are complex and largely irrelevant to our broader discussion, though, the news board evolves into the transportation board over time. 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

Starting point is 00:48:08 discussing banal shit, right? Right. Yeah. So it becomes clear, okay, we still probably need a news section of the image board, and the one I initially created is all about fucking buses or whatever. So Poole elects to launch a separate novel news section called slash new. 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. This is something that happens on something awful, too. But there's a lot, basically anywhere people post online is nothing but Ron Paul guys.

Starting point is 00:48:43 to 2008. If you let people talk about politics, it's all the Ron Paul revolution. Yeah. 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? Like, that's the base. Yeah. So they're all over. And that's freedom in a way, you know. That's that's freedom. That's freedom. That's libertarianism in a nutshell. So the first posts to this new

Starting point is 00:49:12 segment of 4chan are really problematic, right? 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. And so in June of 2011, Poole deletes slash new posting anybody who used it knows exactly why it was removed. When I re-added the board last year, I made a note that if it evolved into slash stormfront, I'd remove it. It did ages ago.

Starting point is 00:49:39 Now it's gone as promised. 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. Now, at this point, that makes sense. At this stage, it all makes sense, right? Poole's not a great guy, but he's not a Nazi, it seems like, at this point, right? And he just doesn't want that on his website. He's not willing to be associated openly with Nazis.

Starting point is 00:50:06 Right. And that is, unfortunately, a step. Yeah, he's fine with Lerner. Lola Khan, but like, and it is a step he's going to take because a year or so later, pool creates the poll board for 4chan, which stands for politically incorrect. 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? Politically incorrect is not a term that liberals are using positively.

Starting point is 00:50:35 No. It is a term that conservatives use, right? So slash poll almost immediately devolves into a hub for neo-Nazi and white supremacist propaganda. For years, no one but Poole knew why he had decided to open poll after the failure of new and its predecessor. Then the Department of Justice published this most recent three 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. And here's the big revelation. The day before Poole created Slash poll, he met with,

Starting point is 00:51:09 with Jeffrey Epstein in person. The day before, he makes bold. You're fucking lying. You're lying. You're lying. What the fuck? I mean, I guess it makes sense. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:51:25 But, oh. Let's hear a little more about that before we try to puzzle this all out. I'm going to quote from that Garbage Day newsletter again. 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 and parentheses, that you should meet. Four days later, Nicolich followed up, asking Epstein, how did you like Mute? He is very sensitive, so be gentle.

Starting point is 00:51:51 I liked him a lot. I drove him home. He is very bright, Epstein replied. Nicolik went on to write that he will be a friend and that he is one of the greatest hackers. Now, we don't have enough. I hate it here. I hate it here. First off, the whole fact that he's like, there is a cool guy.

Starting point is 00:52:07 Kid is really weird. Yeah. Yeah. That's really upsetting to me. 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. We know that Epstein and Mute met the day before Mute creates poll. After that, we have no clear documentation of their relationship.

Starting point is 00:52:29 We've got some emails of them trying to schedule meetings or get-togethers, and that's really it. Perhaps the conversation they had didn't relate at all to poll. I can't ignore the timing of this, right? Knowing that Epstein is getting increasingly into right-wing media, he's going to fund some of it directly in the coming years, 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.

Starting point is 00:52:59 After meeting with Epstein, I can't not. I can't not think that maybe Epstein said, you got to bring this back. I don't know. Or like, oh, what a shame. Or like, eh, it's not so bad. Or like, wouldn't it be great if this existed? Like, it doesn't even have to be, like, hard pressure.

Starting point is 00:53:15 Yeah, it doesn't have to be hard pressure. Yeah. 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. And maybe he brought that up to Epstein. He was like, I think you should just go for it, man. Fuck it. You know, I don't know.

Starting point is 00:53:33 That said, Epstein is a regular, user of 4chan after a semi-regular user of 4chan after this point we don't know that he was posting and in fact i that doesn't seem very likely based on what he used it for but he's on there fairly regularly right he sends links to 4chan to his friends in 2017 he sent uh karina shuliuk whose girlfriend at the time a 4chan link containing five nights at freddy's porn he sent other fans links to like fucking princess bubble gum porn from adventure time all sorts of shit like that 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.

Starting point is 00:54:17 And I don't know what to do with that information, Andrew. I don't know what to do with the fact that fucking Jeffrey Epstein is masturbating to Princess Bubblegum pornography. I don't know what to do with that knowledge. I have it. It's there. Part of it is like what do you do with just, I mean, I think all of his sexual. is something that is...

Starting point is 00:54:37 It's all upsetting. Yeah. Unknowable to, I think, normal. I mean, not even normal. Now I'm like, how do you phrase this? I guess that's not unknowable. I'm not, like, because I know a lot, I've been on the internet. I know a lot of weird people.

Starting point is 00:54:49 I know if there's a cartoon, there's porn of it. Yeah. Right. Like, I'm aware of that. I didn't expect Jeffrey Epstein knew what adventure time was. That's weird to me. Although it's just upsetting that a man that was interested in power this much was also such a juvenile moron.

Starting point is 00:55:06 But I guess that is what, that is what, you know, on a sanitized level, Twitter has shown us about billionaires writ large. And these emails are telling us more. Yeah. When I brought, because I will say I was talking to my partner about this. I was like, Epstein was sending fucking Princess Bubblegun porn. And like other like porn from like animated kid shows. I didn't even know he knew what Adventure Time was.

Starting point is 00:55:30 And she just looks at me and she says, you're surprised Jeffrey Epstein knew what teenage girls were watching in the 2000s. And I was like, oh, yeah. You know what? That actually makes complete sense. Mystery solved. Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:55:49 Yeah. I didn't assume that one. That was me being dumb. You're right. 100%. Now, this doesn't tie in to the broader themes of these episodes at all, Andrew. But I have to tell you something because it's in my head. now and now it's going to be in everyone else's head because god damn it i'm not going to deal with

Starting point is 00:56:08 this alone on thursday july fourth of 2013 while the rest of the country was setting up fireworks and day drinking joy edo sent an email to geoffrey epstein that best as we can tell was an appendix to an in-person that they'd had a few days or hours earlier right they were talking about something over the phone or in person and then edo sends him an email about this thing he'd talk to him about right you know we've all done this right right sure in this case The email that Edo sends Epstein is just the Wikipedia page for Daki Makura or Japanese body pillows that are printed with art depicting an anime wife or wafu. And he appends a picture of one such pillow to the email, which you will all be seeing now

Starting point is 00:56:50 if you're watching the video version of the show. If not, it's a pillow with a naked anime girl on it. Yeah. Why did Jeffrey Epstein need to read the Wikipedia page for anime body pillows? What was the conversation that inspired this? We will never know. And none of this is really relevant to the main thesis of these episodes. But I felt like, again, you have to know this now.

Starting point is 00:57:09 Like, you can't not. Jeffrey Epstein knew what Japanese body pillows were. That's just part of life for everyone now. Like the head of the goddamn MIT Media Lab was sending body pillow shit to a pedophile. Yeah. Which is like, what the fuck is happening? Yeah. And, like, Edo resigned.

Starting point is 00:57:28 He should have been fired. And I mean in like from a can. Like out of a cannon into the sea. That should be a crime. We just need to make that a sex crime. Letting Jeffrey Epstein know about Japanese body pillows is something you should have to register as a sex offender for doing. 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. And it is impossible to find one that doesn't involve a crime.

Starting point is 00:57:58 Yeah, exactly. There's no way you get to that point having not committed sex crime. It's simply impossible. Yeah. Speaking of crimes against humanity. What? Oh, sorry, Sophie. I cut you off.

Starting point is 00:58:11 I was just doing an ad pivot. Yeah, I was just going to say that that's like at least tier two sex offender shit. At least tier two, if not tier three. Yeah. Yeah, he's an elite pedophile. You got to give him that. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Starting point is 00:58:29 I hate it here. Yeah. Probably shouldn't go to ads right after. saying elite pedophile, but... What else are we supposed to do? It's Jeffrey Epstein-Ebstein-Files episodes. Yeah, yeah. I'm getting frown lines from these episodes.

Starting point is 00:58:46 Canadian women are looking for more. More to themselves, their businesses, their elected leaders, and the world are out of them. And that's why we're thrilled to introduce the Honest Talk podcast. I'm Jennifer Stewart. And I'm Catherine Clark. And in this podcast, we interview Canada's most inspiring women. entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, politicians, and newsmakers, all at different stages of their journey. So if you're looking to connect, then we hope you'll join us.

Starting point is 00:59:13 Listen to the Honest Talk podcast on IHartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Hi, this is Joe Wintersstein, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish traveler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. actor, storyteller, and unapologetic Aquarian visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives, and I find a lot of people with strong placements in Aquarius are misunderstood.

Starting point is 00:59:50 A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms, on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want to chart-side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast starting on February 24th on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. I'm Nancy Glass, host of the Burden of Guilt Season 2 podcast. This is a story about a horrendous lie that destroyed two. families. Late one night, Bobby Gumpright became the victim of a random crime.

Starting point is 01:00:41 He pulls the gun. Tells me to lie down on the ground. He identified Tremaine Hudson as the perpetrator. Termaine was sentenced to 99 years. I'm like, Lord, this can't be real. I thought it was a mistaken identity. The best lie is partial truth. For 22 years, Only two people knew the truth until a confession changed everything. I was a monster. Listen to Burden of Guilt Season 2 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?

Starting point is 01:01:30 Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed. with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult?

Starting point is 01:01:47 NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness.

Starting point is 01:02:02 Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disavis. and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP, might actually work. This is wild. Listen to mind games on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back, you know, we're steening, we're steining, we're steining, we're steening.

Starting point is 01:02:37 Fuck off. You guys like steining? Fuck off. Read the script. Read the script. Read the script. So not long after 4chan introduced the poll board, which again stood for politically incorrect, Epstein's friend Steve Bannon took over at the far right news website, Brightbart.com.

Starting point is 01:02:53 You see like within a year of each other that Bannon takes over at Brightbart. And Epstein is again buddies with Bannon. This has been back in 2012. And I hate that we kept a shift in time so much in these episodes, but it's kind of impossible to cover all the stuff and not do it. So in 2012, 4chan's poll board launches. And we know Epstein spends time on 4chan because he sends links to his friends. 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.

Starting point is 01:03:24 These things happen very close to each other. Bannon and Epstein were socially adjacent over the years for years before we have evidence of them corresponding. Right. Officially, if you are reading about this, officially, I believe it's 2017. 17, 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. There's no way that that was the case. For one thing, Bannon is working with Brock Pierce, who we started these episodes with, right? Much earlier than that.

Starting point is 01:03:55 And Epstein is friends with Brock Pierce during this period of time, right, from 2013 to 2014. Right. Again, Wolf is kind of our best documentation of, like, when they started emailing each other. 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? Like, we just don't know exactly like when this all happened. 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.

Starting point is 01:04:34 and a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein's. Kathy and Epstein email, obviously. And what's weird about this is that Kathy's obviously a Democrat, right? Like she's working for Barack Obama. She's not fans of Steve Bannon and a lot of the people that Epstein keeps in his social orbit. 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? The article was saying people are angry at Trump for being mean to Hillary, but he's just. just mirroring the language that Bill's victims used to describe how mean Hillary was to them,

Starting point is 01:05:09 right? That's the article, you know? And Epstein sends this to Kathy Rimmler, who's a Democrat working for Obama. And that's so that's really weird, right? Her sending, him sending her a bright Bart link. And Kathy seems confused by this too. She responds, what's more disturbing is that you are reading Bright Bart. Like, what's more disturbing to anything in the article is that you're reading Brightbart. And this, I think this is an important exchange because it suggests a few things. For one, by 2016, Epstein is pretty new to reading and sharing Breitbart articles. And I think he's pretty new because he found himself surprisingly interested in the content. And so it just kind of becomes an increasingly large part of his media diet. And I don't think he's thinking about how extreme

Starting point is 01:05:51 it is or how weird other people think it is that he's reading Breitbart articles because he sends it casually to Kathy. The two are good friends in their emailing constantly. And he doesn't think twice about sending her a Breitbart article until she's like, what the fuck, man, that's really weird. 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? That really seems like what this is suggesting to me, that like he is legitimately finding himself interested in this stuff.

Starting point is 01:06:24 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. There's other evidence of this. A 2014 email from a redacted sender who had just returned from a visit to Epstein Island. The anonymous sender of this email who signed the email just M thanked Epstein and offered lots of hugs and then appended this postscript to the email. I researched some movie we can watch when you are back.

Starting point is 01:06:52 Have you ever heard of Alexander Dugan, one of Putin's advisors? If not, reading about him and his views might be interesting and perhaps quite useful. And that's really interesting. 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. 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.

Starting point is 01:07:22 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 T. to govern city, states, and regions without oversight. There's no other mention of Dugan in the archives yet, but as I noted before, Epstein has a number of weird Russian connections. And this is all just kind of part of this picture we're getting of Epstein, 2014 to 2018. He's sending Breitbart articles to his friends.

Starting point is 01:07:50 He's talking about Alex... People are suggesting he reads Alexander Dugan, and he's going to increasingly start putting his money towards supporting right-wing content. In 2015, Jeffrey Epstein donates $25,000 to the YouTube channel of Juan Jean Francois Garriope, a French-white nationalist influencer who announced the donation on his channel during an episode with Richard Spencer. So Gariopee and Richard Spencer are bragging that Jeffrey Epstein donated to support his white supremacist YouTube channel in 2015. Oh, right.

Starting point is 01:08:26 I mean... For an idea, yeah, of the kind of... shit Gary Epi saying he calls for a white ethno state and advocates that men should own their wives. This is interesting about Garipi because his own wife disappeared in 2023. Yeah, she fell off

Starting point is 01:08:41 the face of the earth in 2023. 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. Critics note that he deep cleaned their whole home right before she allegedly left on this trip. The Royal Canadian mounted police were at one point seeking

Starting point is 01:08:57 tips from the public to help find her, but they have deleted that website, and I don't know what her status is. This segment from a Daily Beast article on the matter does give you a very good idea of who Garriope is, though. During a contentious child custody battle in the U.S., a now ex-wife accused Garriopee of threatening to take their child to Canada. During the custody case, an undergraduate Duke University student testified that Garriapie had conducted an inappropriate sexual relationship with her when he was employed as a

Starting point is 01:09:23 researcher at the school, and she was working as his research assistant. The student alleged emotional abuse by Gariope. Gary P. had previously told The Daily Beast that the relationship was consensual. During that custody case, which he lost, Gary A P also became embroiled in a guardianship battle over a 19-year-old who he described as his fiancé. 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. Cool guy. Horrific motherfucker. This is who Epstein gives him $25,000.

Starting point is 01:09:53 And he's just out here, like, living, right? He's not still on the street? He's still around as far as I'm aware, yeah. It's also like, like, thanks for the, thanks for the donation from Jeffrey E. Thanks for the 25,000 coins or whatever. Yeah. That's just like, I mean, I, like, there is a certain point where you're like, yeah, all these right-wing people are fucking awful, you know, certainly pedophile supporting whatever, no, there's such hypocrites. But it is like kind of fascinating each time they have no shame.

Starting point is 01:10:27 I don't know. It's not a slam dunk, I think. But it is just like, yeah, yeah, these people are exactly this. Yeah, well, 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. He's putting a lot of money into it. We know about this $25,000 donation.

Starting point is 01:10:51 We don't know about the others. We don't know where else he's sending money. 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. While he's talking about like race signs, in fact, I want to quote, A. Reid 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.

Starting point is 01:11:17 The following year, he exchanged emails with tech leader Joshua Bach, revealing racist sentiments. By this time, he was supporting the changing politics of the Silicon Valley right wing, including what the byline times calls biological higher. hierarchy, racial destiny, gender determinism, genetic optimization, population culling, fascism as efficiency. We could call this something like a counter-revolutionary movement, broadly speaking, using the strategies and ideas of the revolutionary movement against it.

Starting point is 01:11:42 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. 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. All this comes to a head in 2016 after Brexit in a series of celebratory emails between

Starting point is 01:12:19 Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein. So right after Brexit, Epstein sends an email to Pete. Teal, June 26, 2016, at 3.17 a.m. and says, Brexit, just the beginning. Teal responds a couple hours later by asking, of what? And Epstein responds, return to tribalism, counter to globalization, amazing new alliances. You and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, and as I said in your office, finding things on their way to collapse was much easier than finding the next bargain. So Epstein, by this point, what he's talking with Teal about is, You and I have been discussing the fact that, like, if we can return to tribalism, destroy

Starting point is 01:13:00 globalization, destroy the order that exists, destroy this idea of like liberal democracy, then we can buy all of the assets, the same way these Russian oligarchs did after the Soviet Union collapse, we can buy every public asset that exists in a fire sale. We can own everything, right? Finding things on their way to collapse is the best bargain that exists. 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. All of these interests that Jeffrey has in these years are all tied to this destruction of the

Starting point is 01:13:37 global order, which I think to some extent he saw us betraying him, right? 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. And that only happened because of these damn women because of democracy. got the vote now, you know? And so he and Teal and all these guys, like he turns in with them. And he's not, he's not manipulating Peter Teal. He's not the guy who made Teal start thinking about anti-democratic bullshit, but he gets on board that fairly early. And he uses his newfound

Starting point is 01:14:15 interest in this stuff to work towards the same ends that people like Peter Teal are working towards. 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. And that's where we are at the end of part three. Jesus Christ. Good. Great.

Starting point is 01:14:40 I love it. 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? Like, it's so weird. You're in the files so much, right-wing everything. Mm-hmm. Yep.

Starting point is 01:15:03 It's so bizarre. Yep. I've been pain. Life is good. I guess we should do part four, huh? Yeah, why not? Why not? All right.

Starting point is 01:15:17 We'll be back Thursday. Pain. Yeah. Bye. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeartRadio app,

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Starting point is 01:16:01 This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its fault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Joe Interesting, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life.

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Behind the Bastards - Part Three: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World

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