Part Three: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World

Summary

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Behind the Bastards

Part Three: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World

Released: February 24, 2026 | Host: Robert Evans | Guests: Andrew Ti, Sophie

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Episode Overview

In the third installment of the Jeffrey Epstein series, host Robert Evans—with guests Andrew Ti and producer Sophie—delve into new revelations from the recently released Epstein Files. This episode shifts focus from Epstein’s personal sex crimes to his wider influence on world events: his efforts to reshape global financial systems (notably through cryptocurrency), the surprising scope of his ties in academia and tech, his hands-on involvement in early internet culture, and the extent to which he seeded right-wing and fascist movements online and off. The hosts dissect newly uncovered emails and relationships, revealing not only Epstein's desire to disrupt the status quo but the alarming complicity or naivete of elites across tech, academia, and media.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Epstein’s Geopolitical Ambitions: Bitcoin and Putin (04:14–11:18)

• Epstein attempts to broker a meeting with Vladimir Putin via Thorbjorn Jaglund, ex-PM of Norway, to pitch Russia on adopting Bitcoin.
  • Epstein positions Bitcoin as the “Sputnik of the 21st century,” suggesting Russia could leapfrog the West by reinventing finance (06:22).
  • The crew riffs on Epstein’s embarrassing attempts to sound impressive to Putin and how his rare good spelling in emails signals high personal stakes.
  • Andrew Ti: “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.” (06:51)
  • Epstein’s bid with Putin failed: “Putin, showing better judgment than anyone else in these four episodes, declined to meet with Jeffrey Epstein, at least as far as we know.” (10:42)

2. Crypto, MIT, and the Academia Pipeline (17:58–24:26)

• MIT and JOI Ito’s deep ties to Epstein: Epstein donated at least $850,000 (2002–2017) and helped fund key MIT crypto projects, including the salaries of several Bitcoin devs. This support continued well after Epstein's 2008 conviction.
  • MIT professors visited Epstein’s island—even while he was in jail; there were thanks from MIT’s president. Robert highlights the seriousness of academia’s willingness to ignore sex crimes for funding.
  • Andrew Ti: “It’s also like... 850k is a lot of money, but for MIT? What is its endowment? ...I am a little surprised at the actual price tag.” (21:37)
  • “It shows you how little it really takes to bribe a lot of very influential people to change the world. You know, it’s less than you want it to be.” (22:37)
• Epstein’s interest in disrupting the global financial order: He pitches to Richard Branson and others a “social good currency” for worldwide use (11:18–12:39).
  • Branson reciprocates by inviting Epstein to his private island, with a disturbing reference to Epstein’s “harem” (16:23–16:36).
  • Robert: “If you're Jeffrey Epstein’s friend at this point and inviting him to islands, I consider you guilty of everything he was.” (17:39)

3. Crypto & Tech Bro Connections: Peter Thiel, Brock Pierce, Layer One (24:54–33:59)

• Epstein's reach into cryptocurrency development: He’s emailing Peter Thiel and providing regulatory tips—exhibiting early, influential involvement in crypto’s growth.
  • Epstein’s reply to Thiel: “Mini Ponzi gambling manipulation unlikely to cause trouble except for high value targets.” (32:53)
• Epstein as a connector between powerful figures and states: Set up meetings between Thiel and Russian officials; similarities drawn to how Mossad and Russia use “helpful idiots” among the rich.
  • Andrew Ti: “Yeah, it’s like agent of. But in the way that, like, so is a chainsaw. It doesn’t make it smart.” (31:06)

4. Seeding Right-Wing Internet Culture: 4chan, Moot, and /pol/ (36:00–47:20)

• The founding of 4chan’s /pol/ board—possibly catalyzed by Epstein:
  • The day before 4chan founder Chris “Moot” Poole launches the notoriously fascist “/pol/” board, he meets with Epstein. (45:20)
  • The implication: Epstein may have directly or indirectly influenced the institutionalization of the internet’s biggest right-wing hub.
  • Robert: “We simply don’t have enough information to know exactly what happened here... But I can’t ignore the timing of this.” (47:11)
• Epstein’s personal interest in 4chan: He was trawling the site for pornography and interacting with the culture (even Adventure Time/Princess Bubblegum porn), showing his knowledge of youth culture and creepy interests.
  • Robert: “I didn’t expect Jeffrey Epstein knew what Adventure Time was. That’s weird to me.” (48:41)
  • Sophie (on MIT head Joi Ito sending him a Wikipedia article about Japanese anime body pillows): “That’s like at least tier two sex offender shit.” (52:17)

5. Epstein & the Alt-Right Media Ecosystem: Breitbart, Bannon, White Nationalist YouTubers (53:08–61:00)

• As /pol/ launches, Steve Bannon (Epstein’s friend) takes over Breitbart—both became key drivers of the alt-right movement and Gamergate.
• Epstein's drift into far-right media: He begins reading Breitbart and sending links (“What’s more disturbing is that you are reading Breitbart.”—Kathy Ruemler, Obama's WH counsel, 56:28).
• He funds white nationalist content, e.g., a $25,000 donation to French influencer Jean-Francois Gariepy—whose abuses go beyond racism to grooming and disappearance of a spouse (58:50–60:14).
  • Andrew Ti: “There is a certain point where you’re like, yeah, all these right wing people are awful...But it is kind of fascinating each time. They have no shame.” (60:36)

6. Endgame: Funding Neo-Fascist Ideology (61:00–65:00)

• Throughout the 2010s, Epstein gets “deeply involved in bitcoin” and starts funding projects and people who champion right-wing, anti-democratic philosophies—like biological hierarchy and fascist tactics masquerading as efficiency.

• Robert summarizes: After losing faith in the system that made him, Epstein (like Thiel and Bannon) seeks to “burn stuff down”—investing in crypto and alt-right media to destroy democratic and financial order for personal and class gain.

  Quotable Moment:

  • Epstein to Thiel, post-Brexit (June 2016):
    “Brexit, just the beginning.”
    “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.” (64:20)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On elite complicity: “If you’re Jeffrey Epstein’s friend at this point and inviting him to islands, I consider you guilty of everything he was.” — Robert (17:39)
• On right-wing tech bros: “These people are not smarter than you. They’re actively dumber than you.” — Andrew Ti (08:31)
• On the price of influence: “How little money it really takes to bribe a lot of very influential people to change the world...” — Robert (22:37)
• On /pol/’s origins: “We can’t know for certain, but the day before Poole creates /pol/, he meets Epstein... I can’t ignore the timing.” — Robert (47:11)
• On their exhaustion:
  • “I in pain.” — Sophie (65:31)
  • “Life is good.” — Robert (65:34)
  • “I guess we should do part four, huh?” — Sophie (65:36)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Epstein’s Putin Crypto Pitch: 04:14–11:18
• MIT/Academia Pipeline: 17:58–24:26
• Crypto Ponsis & Thiel Correspondence: 24:54–33:59
• /pol/, 4chan & Moot Meeting: 36:00–47:20
• Cartoon Porn, MIT Connection, Anime Pillows: 47:21–52:31
• Breitbart, Bannon, Right-Wing Media: 53:08–61:00
• White Nationalist Funding & Endgame: 61:00–65:00
• Post-Brexit Email w/ Thiel (“Brexit just the beginning”): 64:20
• Closing Reflections: 65:00–66:00

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Tone & Style

• Irreverent, darkly humorous, conversational—mixes investigative rigor with banter and gallows humor.
• Unapologetically critical of institutional cowardice, hypocrisy of the powerful, and the grim absurdity of elite behavior.

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Conclusion

This episode paints a damning picture of Epstein’s outsize influence on technology, academia, and the genesis of online fascist movements. Through newly-public emails and connections, Robert, Andrew, and Sophie show how Epstein wasn’t just a monstrous outlier but also a central node in the networks shaping the modern world—for the worse. The final message is grim: the people who built, enabled, and justified today's most destructive systems were smarter only in their self-interest and carelessness, and their damage goes far beyond what headlines ever captured.

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Transcript

[Sophie]

Call Zone Media.

[Robert]

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.

[Andrew T.]

Thanks. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I guess I would say part of the modern world. Under protest at this point.

[Robert]

Yeah, under protest. Isn't everyone.

[Andrew T.]

Aren't we all under protest? I'm only here because I have to be.

[Robert]

Yeah, yeah. The only part of the modern world I want anything to do with is my bed. And they make me leave that for like 16 hours a day. It's nuts.

[Andrew T.]

You know what, though? Being one of those I hate the modern world guys, I do want to stress I'm not one of those. It was better in Rome. What happened to classical architecture?

[Robert]

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. That is my strong opinion, unfortunately. I think Jeffrey Epstein might have agreed with it, at least for himself, because he. He liked to. Well, there wasn't a lot of sleep anyway. Andrew, where can people find you on the Internet before we continue?

[Andrew T.]

Oh, God, thanks. Thanks for letting me get it in before the fucking real crimes start.

[Robert]

Yeah, the real fucking crimes too. I don't know.

[Andrew T.]

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 talk. Talking Star Trek with my co host, Tawny Newsom, who is. I don't know if you're. I love that stuff if you're Star. Spoiler alert, people. But she's a beloved reveal. Happens in episode five of Starfleet Academy.

[Robert]

Yeah, the new Star Trek.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. I don't know. Star Trek is happening, that's all.

[Robert]

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. This is this. Yeah, yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Well, also wealthy technocrat pedophile.

[Robert]

A wealthy technocrat pedophile. Yes, exactly the sort of person Star Trek got rid of in the idealized future in Gene Roddenberry's Beautiful Dream.

[Andrew T.]

No more Jeffrey Epps scenes because of literally this.

[Robert]

They got rid of people like this.

[Sophie]

And in modern Times. We're recording these episodes on the day that Ghislaine 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. That's cool.

[Robert]

It's tough for me because I hate that stuff. But I also love people pleading the Fifth. I'm a big fan.

[Sophie]

I'm a big Plead the Fifth fan.

[Robert]

It's tough. It's tough. These are. These are the times that try men's souls.

[Sophie]

But I have to say, I have questions, frankly, I have questions.

[Robert]

It's the best. It's the best amendment, easily.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert]

The Fifth. Are you kidding me?

[Andrew T.]

I mean, I'm surprised she didn't. At this point, you're just pinning it on a dead man. Right. Like, this is. This is wee BEI eating up murders once he's in for life.

[Robert]

Yeah. I mean, we'll see how it goes.

[Sophie]

But I have some theories that, you know.

[Robert]

Yeah. I mean, I don't. Anything could happen at this point. We're not talking a lot about Gillan 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. 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.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

This is an iHeart podcast.

[Sophie]

Guaranteed Human.

[Robert]

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 Vladi Putz, what are you wanting to talk about? 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 Jaglund, who is a Norwegian Labour 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.

[Andrew T.]

God, what's that like? Imagine a leader facing a consequence for his pedophile.

[Robert]

Weird. Yeah, yeah. For specifically trying to broker a meeting with that pedophile and 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? Like it's, it's. He's not dedicated to sounding good.

[Sophie]

It's giving like bad AOL instant messenger messages. Like it's giving aol.

[Robert]

Yeah. And so as we talked about in the last episodes, whenever Geoffrey like has a long multi paragraph email where everything's basically spelled right and written properly, you, you are like, oh, he was taking this. This was important to him. Like he was. 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? This is how he's basically trying to convince Putin he's got to get into the bitcoin game. When Sputnik 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.

[Andrew T.]

I genuinely have to say it is a little heartening slash disheartening that these people genuinely believe they're bullshit. Like this was a private conversation.

[Robert]

He really. I'm just like.

[Andrew T.]

Because I on some level just wish that bitcoin people in private, when the billionaires are talking to each other like, oh, this is going to be great for money laundering and like whatever it's actually used for. It is a little insane to hear him talk piping like a Twitter person right now.

[Robert]

And it's hard to say. Cause 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

[Andrew T.]

was, but also, like, trying to talk to Putin like an actual bitcoin mark is a cryptocurrency mark is.

[Robert]

That's so crazy. Way too smart for that. Like, he's not. Vladimir Putin is not an idiot. He's not. At least 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.

[Andrew T.]

It's always 1D chess. It's 1D. Like, these people are not smarter than you. They're actively dumber than you.

[Robert]

Yes.

[Andrew T.]

And that's. Hang on to that.

[Robert]

Yeah. Hang onto 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, 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. And the difference between that and saying, yeah, this thing that we are already doing, if you just rip it off, you'll be doing the sputnik of the 20, which really says a lot about the 21st century, that, like, our Sputnik is ripping off a thing that doesn't do anything and already exists. Like, amazing stuff.

[Andrew T.]

Jeffrey, if you have the bold vision to crater your economy and the global economy, you will be the first to do that.

[Robert]

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, 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 Thorbjorn 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, cuz 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 he could get you 20 minutes with Putin, you'd be happy for it. Don't fucking bullshit like me. And Putin, showing better judgment than anyone else in these four episodes, declined to meet with Jeffrey Epstein, at least as far as we know. Wow.

[Andrew T.]

Well, at least being smart enough to not agree to it on fucking email

[Robert]

puts him in a fucking email, right?

[Andrew T.]

OPSEC wise, he's at least ahead of everyone.

[Robert]

He's, he's beating Bobby Kotick of Activision Blizzard and Peter Thiel, that's for sure.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

So this whole dalliance Jeffrey has with trying to get Russia on the bitcoin train is not influential because of the outcome, because nothing really happens here. But it's, it's important because of what it says about where Jeff's head was in 2013. By this point, whether or not he

[Sophie]

ever don't like you calling him Jeff. I don't like you don't, I don't like you calling him Jeff. It's like too humanizing to call him Jeff.

[Robert]

You gotta do it every now and then. Jeff. Jeffy. 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 US 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, et cetera, 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. So what you kind of see is there's this budding interest. Jeffrey has to disrupt the global order, which is a different picture of the man than I had when he just seemed to be this guy who was very deeply tied to the elite system and seemed to really have all of his power tied to the maintenance of that system, as opposed to a guy who has, 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.

[Andrew T.]

I mean, yes and no, though. Cause they don't really mean burning it down like.

[Robert]

Well, they mean the Fed, US 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.

[Andrew T.]

But they, they want it to. They want society to look largely. They want it to look more like Russia, which is like, yeah, they're in charge, but yeah, basically the same society.

[Robert]

And I think you so 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. 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? Right. So Richard Branson and Epstein are two more. That's another famed Epstein friendship. Right. And his, his, 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. 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. Right. If only Bill Gates would say, but can you imagine if Bill Gates in 2014 or so had. Had come up and like, look, did Jeffrey Epstein sleep with the child? Yes, but he's learned his lesson, and we all need to forgive him. None of this would be happening.

[Andrew T.]

God. I mean, yeah. What an insane.

[Sophie]

All these men are fucking disgusting. They're disgusting.

[Robert]

Well, 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 looking like who? Someone who all Americans love and respect.

[Andrew T.]

Love. Yeah. Yeah.

[Robert]

Bill Gates, of course. Obviously, everyone loves Bill.

[Sophie]

I hate all these people.

[Robert]

No, we don't. We never did.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. I guess it's just like, get the nerd to tell. To tell everyone you're not committing crimes.

[Robert]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

And they'll believe he's the squarest one around.

[Robert]

Right. Bill Gates, you know, a 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. 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. He.

[Andrew T.]

I mean, look, Branson's island can't be. I guess at the risk of it can't be that good.

[Robert]

I don't.

[Andrew T.]

Right.

[Robert]

I don't know. I would have said before this. I would have guessed it had. It was like a higher age bracket of the people, but I don't actually know that that's true now, so.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, right.

[Robert]

Exactly. 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.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sophie]

Ew.

[Robert]

So Branson added to the invite, anytime you're in the area, would love to see you, as long as you bring your harem with a exclamation point after it. So I would say that implicates Richard Brucking Snack.

[Andrew T.]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert]

Via email. Now, my favorite thing about this. My favorite thing about all this is the denials. All these people have to have their spokespeople issue after this shit comes out. 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 doing some sex crimes. Branson's Spokesperson told journalists with the Independent that. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. The harem he was referring to were just adult members of Epstein's staff, obviously.

[Andrew T.]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert]

Obviously, yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Who were those?

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert]

What are you talking about? Not named. Not named. Which ones?

[Andrew T.]

Right.

[Robert]

Can we get a name?

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

So the worst again. Does this mean that Jeffrey was just bringing children over when Branson was there? Was he. Was Branson one of the ones that he played with teenage girls or was Branson one of the ones that he played with adult women? Right. 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.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert]

That. That. I think that's reasonable. If you're going to Islands with him. Right. Yeah. On a regular basis. If you're inviting him to Islands and talking about his harem, if you're advising

[Sophie]

Bill Gates to be his, like, no. Pedophile spokesperson.

[Robert]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Then, yeah.

[Robert]

I don't know.

[Sophie]

I'm going to go with.

[Robert]

I'm going to say no.

[Sophie]

I'm going to go. Not a great guy.

[Robert]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Just the dumbest frat house shit. It's always.

[Robert]

It's.

[Andrew T.]

It's never better than that.

[Robert]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Well, it's worse than that when it

[Robert]

comes to 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. I don't want anyone older than six. 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. That we don't know. I'm not against it. I'm just like, yeah, Like, 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. The worst harms Epstein committed and the worst crimes his friends are implicated in 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 victims to? And Epstein gives them 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 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. Because there will be points where people will be made and then they'll be like, here, 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. What did he do with it? Not entirely clear to me. What I can say is that Joey, Ito and Epstein's friendship continued to blossom throughout the aughts. And this was. Remember, Ito 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 debts. And this is the friendship between IDO and Epstein is very good for MIT. The school receives at least $850,000 from the Epstein foundation directly to IDO'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 and foundations. Right? Right. He donated 850k to MIT over this period. Who knows how much other money he got sent there by being Epstein. Ito 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 ito. As TheTech.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 tenured professorship. Former president of mit, Rafael Raiff, signed a letter thanking Epstein for a donation in 2012, just six weeks into his presidency. In a statement to mit released in 2019, Raife 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 at MIT should have known better. Right. And Ito himself is particularly, but not the only guy who was visiting Epstein and probably involved in some criminal stuff. Right.

[Andrew T.]

Cause it's also like, like adjacent to 850. $50,000 is a lot of money, but it's a lot of money for mit. Like what is its endowment in the buildings.

[Robert]

Like the endowments big, but for individual. And again, you have to assume it's several million.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert]

Over the years.

[Andrew T.]

I'm just, I'm just saying in the grand scheme of things, every kind of financial. Like some of the biggest malfeasances that happen, I am a little surprised at the actual price tag. I will just.

[Robert]

There's a couple of things. 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. He died. 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. They're both enough for yachts and private islands. Right. You know?

[Andrew T.]

Right, right.

[Robert]

One thing though, that as you point out this does review is that how little money it really takes to. To bribe a lot of very influential

[Andrew T.]

people to change the world. You know, it's less than you want it to be.

[Robert]

Yeah. 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, Right.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

So anyway, that's. That's.

[Sophie]

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.

[Robert]

Oh yeah.

[Sophie]

So massive. I mean, not to say that there isn't, you know, anybody who, 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 just like venomous.

[Robert]

Well, yeah, part of it is again, he's spreading a lot of money around 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 Ito, interest, very interested in cryptocurrency, very interested in a lot of controversial, you know, stuff that winds up being part of the alt right. And what a lot of these academics that he's friends with in the early 2000s to the aughts wind up being like weird right wing guys because that's just kind of the crew that he's running with. And these are kind, 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, they're all PhDs and shit, none of them are as smart as they think they are. Right? Which is usually true of people.

[Andrew T.]

Even though there's a stereotype of the liberal ivory tower of academia. I mean, the reality is it's like a spiritual, 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 couldn't, they could never survive in the free market.

[Robert]

It's, 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, 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, with academia, the war 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, 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. 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 didn't. 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 is today a noteworthy cryptocurrency researcher who was connected to Epstein by Joy Ito 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 Thiel send a lot of emails to each other. 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 Thiel with like a link to this, these updated rules and titles. It as I told you, basically saying like hey, I told you that New York was going to start regulating crypto. And Thiel 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? 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, et cetera. 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 as woman smells like property presenting as currency. Anyway, more when I see you. This is interesting for a few reasons. For one thing you have this kind of this acknowledgement from Jeffrey that like no one really understands how like what bitcoin is like there's not 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 bitcoin has been sold to us as, it can't be all of them. It literally can't be. They were lying about a bunch of stuff because bitcoin was more than anything a con. Right? Yes. 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. Like, we're starting to kind of talk about that a lot more. And Jeffrey's thinking about it and aware of it, which is interesting, because come the late aughts for the last period of his life, he's going to be a big anti trans rights guy. Right. And he's going to be seeding that world. And so it's really interesting to me that in 2014, he's thinking about this alongside bitcoin. Right. And it's kind of incoherent and again, not very smart the way he's thinking about it, because it's. That's not really accurate about bitcoin. Like, it's. 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, Right. There's a difference. Oh, God, yeah. Anyway, for a further summary of Thiel 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 Thiel released so far are from 2014. In an email in June of 2015, Epstein connected Thiel with Sergei Belyakov, Russia's Deputy Minister of Economic Development, an alleged Russian intelligence operative. In an email to Thiel a month after that, Epstein alludes to a visit at his Zorro 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. And. And in 2016, Epstein offered to share the expenses for Thiel's lawsuit against Gawker, which would eventually bankrupt the outlet. We'll talk more about that dinner.

[Andrew T.]

So dumb. Oh, it's such a club of the dumbest motherfuckers ever to live.

[Robert]

Well, and he's just. He's. He is connecting people to spies. He's. He is like. And that's. 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. Connect to my friend Peter Thiel. He does a lot of that shit. And it's very similar to like Robert Maxwell Gillan, Maxwell's dad, where people, I think, wrongly are like, he was a Mossad agent. And it's 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 they're James Bond in exchange for giving them information that's useful. Right. 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, give it, bring us this information. Well, you know, they're using it just like the Russians are.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, it's like agent of. But in the way that like, so is like a chainsaw. It doesn't make it smart.

[Robert]

And I think there's good evidence that Epstein was that kind of useful idiot, both the Russian government and for the Mossad. Right?

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

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. Epstein and Thiel are discussing an accountant named Richard, who Epstein connected Joy Ito 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 Thiel needed to be in contact with Khan other than some crypto project. And they were talking about layer one and I. It's un. 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 1 can refer to either data and equipment. I found a website, CBTN Nuggets, that describes all this. Layer one 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 one equipment is the gear that lets you send data and it uses. And it's specifically the gear that you use to send data that uses little to no object in operating. So it's the most basic equipment for sending data. We're talking like ethernet and, and fiber optic cables as well as physical transmission objects of any overair technology, including 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 Ito 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, currency valuation. It's how to protect ourselves. Not easy. Ido 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. Ito responds by asking if there's any specific regulations he should look at when giving feedback to the team. And Epstein tells Ito, mini Ponzi gambling manipulation, unlikely to cause trouble except for high value targets. So we've got. Here is Epstein. 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. 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? Like whatever this project is.

[Sophie]

You know what Jeffrey Epstein would have loved?

[Robert]

Huh?

[Sophie]

All the super bowl commercials from this year.

[Robert]

Oh yeah, he would have loved the super bowl commercials for this year. It was all Epstein backed companies, all

[Sophie]

AI, all crypto, all online gambling. It was like his holy trinity.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah. It's never been more apparent that the super bowl is just a scare. This is the year I has to be mask off. Right. Like this is scams. Only. Only scams.

[Robert]

I guess.

[Sophie]

Only scams.

[Robert]

Yeah, it was, 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.

[Sophie]

Everybody was so mad.

[Robert]

Everyone sang along to the fucking karaoke

[Sophie]

and the karaoke thing, by the way. Fuck you, Coinbase. You're like.

[Robert]

It actually made me happy because it's, it's desperation. It's desperation.

[Andrew T.]

They're more done than last year, I will say. Actually, Sophie, when you said, do you know what Jeffrey Epste would have loved? I thought you were forcing an ad read right now.

[Robert]

Yeah, so did I.

[Sophie]

No, no, I wasn't. But it is that time.

[Robert]

Yeah. We should go to ads.

[Sophie]

God, yeah.

[Robert]

We're back, boy. Jeffrey Epstein Would have loved those ads.

[Sophie]

Okay, Robert, I'd like to keep my health insurance, thanks so much.

[Robert]

Uh huh.

[Sophie]

Yeah, I need it. Jeffrey doesn't because he's dead.

[Robert]

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 microtransactions in 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 gotta introduce a new character. Christopher Poole, better known socially as Moot.

[Andrew T.]

Moot.

[Robert]

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. And in fact in both the good and the bad way, right, like the Something Awful, there was a big like anti Scientology thing where like they were basically ddosing 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. 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 2chan, right, which is going to be relevant here in a second. So Something Awful is basically a dictatorship, which we can say in 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 Kianka, 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 tends to just Ban stuff, right? So the fact that Lotax 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 a hundred thousand members, people start doing all sorts of illegal shit on it, right? One of the forums is just devoted to people using illegal drugs. And 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. 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 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 site giving people, letting people steal shit from every company in the world. You'll get in trouble. Soltax bans that. And 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. And in order to describe this chunk of Something Awful history, I'm going to quote from Max Reed's substack. He banned Lolicon, that is underage girl Hentai. More generally, Lotax hated the anime sub forum 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 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 Lotex is not a good guy. He's a terrible abusive spouse. An awful man. The fact that he bans underaged like animated porn from his website makes him more responsible than any modern social media 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. So funny to me. Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

He's somehow the good guy in this local dip.

[Robert]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

And I hate him.

[Robert]

So Lolicon gets banned and it creates a bunch of people who were on Something Awful who are into anime, who are angry at low tax and are finally ready to find another Place, Right. Christopher Poole is one of these people he had posted on adtrw, right. And he sees this as 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 Kianca, 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. That's the idea, right?

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

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 when Pool creates 4chan, though, he's got to deal with, ironically, the same question that had confronted Lotax, right? Which is, okay, I'm the guy whose name is attached to this web community. What crosses the line for me? What am I not willing to have attached to my name? Right.

[Andrew T.]

Well, even if not socially, like legally. Right.

[Robert]

Legally or socially. Right. Yeah. You have to deal with that question when you're doing this shit. So when the site was first created, there was a subforum in which meant. Which it was meant to be like N4 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 discussing banal shit, Right?

[Andrew T.]

Right.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Robert]

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 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. Um, but there's a lot. Basically, anywhere people post online is nothing but Ron Paul Guys in 2008. If you let people talk about politics, it's all the Ron Paul revolution.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

Um. Cause 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. That's the base. Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

So they're all freedom in a way,

[Robert]

you know, and that's freedom. That's libertarianism in a nutshell. So the first posts to this new 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, pool deletes 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 Stormfront, I'd remove it. It did, ages ago. 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 site at this stage. Now, at this point, that makes sense.

[Sophie]

Key words. At this stage.

[Robert]

At this stage, it all makes sense. Right. Pool'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 happen

[Andrew T.]

associated openly with Nazis.

[Robert]

Right.

[Andrew T.]

And that is unfortunately a step.

[Robert]

Yeah, he's fine with Lola Khan, but like. And it is a step he's gonna take because a year or so later, Poole creates the pole 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.

[Sophie]

No.

[Robert]

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 3 million pages worth of Epstein files, which have provided us with information that may finally solve, or at least bring this mystery closer to being solved. And here's the big revelation. The day before Poole created Poll, he met with Jeffrey Epstein in person. The day before he makes poll, he meets fucking Epstein.

[Andrew T.]

You're lying.

[Sophie]

What the fuck?

[Andrew T.]

I mean, I guess it makes sense.

[Robert]

Yeah. But 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 20, 2011, Boris Nicolic, 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, Nikolic followed up asking Epstein, how did you like Moot? He is very sensitive, so be gentle. I liked him a lot. I drove him home. He is very bright, Epstein replied. Nikolak went on to write that he will be a friend and that he is one of the greatest hackers now. I mean, we don't have enough. Yeah, right. First off, the whole fact that he's like, there is a cool guy kid is really weird.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah, yeah.

[Robert]

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 Moot met the day before. Moot creates poll. After that, we have no clear documentation of their relationship. 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, yeah. 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 after meeting with Epstein. Ah, 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 we'll never know.

[Andrew T.]

Maybe what a shame. Or like 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.

[Robert]

Yeah, it doesn't have to be hard pressure. Yeah. Or maybe, 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, was like, I think you should just go for it, man. Fuck it, you know, I don't know. 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 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 Karina Schuliak, his girlfriend at the time, a 4chan link containing five nights at Freddy's porn. He sent other fans links to, like, fucking Princess Bubblegum 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. Um, 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 think it's there.

[Andrew T.]

Part of it is like, what do you do with just. I mean, I think all of his sexuality is something that is.

[Robert]

It's all upsetting. Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Unknowable to. I think normal. I mean, not even normal. Now I'm like, what?

[Robert]

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. 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.

[Andrew T.]

Although it's just upsetting that a man that was interested in power this much was also such a juvenile moron. But I guess that is what, on a sanitized level, Twitter has shown us about billionaires writ large and these emails.

[Robert]

That's why they're interested in kids. Yeah. When I brought. Because I will say I was talking to my partner about this, I was like, Epstein was sending fucking Princess Bubblegum porn and, like, other porn from, like, animated kid shows. I didn't even know he knew what Adventure Time was. 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. Oh, yeah. You know what? That actually makes complete sense. Mystery solved. Okay. What a fucking bummer. I didn't assume that one. That was me being dumb. You're right. Yeah.

[Sophie]

100%.

[Robert]

Now, this doesn't tie into the broader themes of these episodes at all, Andrew, but I have to tell you something, because it's in my head now, and now it's going to be in everyone else's head, because God damn it, I'm not gonna deal with this alone. On Thursday, July 4th of 2013, while the rest of the country was setting up fireworks and day drinking. Joy. Ito sent an email to Jeffrey Epstein that best, as we can tell, was an appendix to an in person conversation that they'd had a few days or hours earlier. Right. They were talking about something over the phone or in person. And then Ito sends him an email about this thing he talked to him about. Right. You know, we've all done this. Right? Sure. In this case, the email that Ito sends Epstein is just the Wikipedia page for dakimakura, or Japanese body pillows that are printed with art depicting an anime wife or waifu. And he appends a picture of one such pillow to the email, which you will all be seeing. Now, if you're watching the video version of the show. If not, it's a pillow with a naked anime girl on it.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

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, I just. You have to know this now. Like, you can't not. Jeffrey Epstein knew what Japanese body pillows were. That's just part of life for everyone now.

[Andrew T.]

Like, the head of the goddamn MIT Media lab was sending body pillow shit to a pedophile.

[Sophie]

Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

Which is like, what the fuck is happening?

[Robert]

Yeah. And like, Ito resigned. He should have been fired. And I mean in, like, from a cannon. Like. 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.

[Andrew T.]

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.

[Robert]

Yeah, exactly. There's no way you get to that point having not committed sex crimes. It's simply impossible. Yeah, yeah. Speaking of crimes against humanity.

[Andrew T.]

What?

[Robert]

Oh, sorry, Sophie, I cut you off. I was just doing an ad pivot.

[Sophie]

Yeah, I was just gonna say that that's like, at least tier two sex offender shit. At least tier two, if not tier three.

[Robert]

Yeah, yeah, he's. He's an elite pedophile. You got to give him that.

[Andrew T.]

Yeah.

[Robert]

Mm. Anyway, yeah, probably shouldn't go to ads right after saying elite pedophile, but what.

[Sophie]

What else are we supposed to do? It's Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein files episodes.

[Robert]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Sophie]

I'm getting Frown lines from these episodes.

[Robert]

We're back. You know, we're. We're steening. We're epsteining. We're steening. You guys like steening?

[Sophie]

Fuck off. Read the script.

[Robert]

Read the script a little more. Okay.

[Sophie]

Read the script.

[Robert]

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 Breitbart.com you see, like, within a year of each other, that Bannon takes over at Breitbart 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. It's kind of impossible to cover all this stuff and not do it. So in 2012, 4chan's pole 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. 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 officially. If you are reading about this officially, I believe it's 2017. That is the earliest point we know Bannon and Epstein were connected directly. And it was via Michael Wolff, 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 he started these episodes with. Right. Much earlier than that. And Epstein is friends with Brock Pierce during this period of time. Right. From 2013 to 2014. Again, Wolf is kind of our best documentation of, like, when they started emailing each other. But even if. And we don't have enough of the emails to know if there are earlier emails between Bannon and Epstein, but we know they were in touch earlier than that. Right? 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 Ruemler, who is the White House counsel to President Barack Obama, or at least who was the White House counsel to President Barack Obama and a good friend of Jeffrey Epstein's. Kathy and Epstein email, obviously. And what's weird about this is that Kathy's obviously a Democrat, right? Like these, 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 8, 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 mirroring the language that Bill's victims use to describe how mean Hillary was to them. Right. That's the article, you know, and Epstein sends this to Kathy Rimler, who's a Democrat working for Obama and that. So that's really weird, right? Her sending him sending her a Breitbart link. And Kathy seems confused by this too. She responds, what's more disturbing is that you are reading Breitbart. Like, what's more disturbing to anything in the article is that you're reading Breitbart. 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 it is or how weird other people think it is that he's reading Breitbart articles. Cause he sends it casually to Kathy. The two are good friends and they're 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. 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. Have you ever heard of Alexander Dugin, 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 to me that people in his circle are trying to push him. Maybe people who are connected to the Russian government are trying to push him to read Alexander Dugin. Dugin 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 US has lost its status as a superpower and the world is divided between competing blocs of hegemonic powers. Silicon Valley fascists often find a lot that they like in Dugin because their own goal is to see the collapse of the US as a nation state, which will allow CEO kings like Peter Thiel to govern city states and regions without oversight. There's no other mention of Dugin 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 2014-2018. He's sending Breitbart articles to his friends, 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 One Jean Francois Gariapi, a French white nationalist influencer who announced the donation on his channel during an episode with Richard Spencer. So Gary P. And Richard Spencer are bragging that Jeffrey Epstein donated to support his white supremacist YouTube channel in 2015.

[Andrew T.]

Right?

[Robert]

I mean for an idea. Yeah. Of the kind of shit Gary Epe's saying. He calls for a white ethnostate and advocates that men should own their wives. This is interesting about Gary. A puppy because his own wife disappeared in 2023. Yeah, she fell off 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 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 Gary Appe is though. During a contentious child custody battle in the U.S. a now ex wife accused Gary Epi of threatening to take their child to Canada. During the custody case, an undergraduate Duke University Student testified that Gary P. Had conducted an inappropriate sexual relationship with her when he was employed as a researcher at the school and she was working as his research assistant. The student alleged emotional abuse by Gary PI Gary P. Had previously told the Daily Beast that the relationship was consensual. During that custody case, which he lost. Gary PI also became embroiled in a guardianship battle over a 19 year old who he described as his fiance, Beyonce. 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.

[Sophie]

Horrific motherfucker.

[Robert]

This is who Epstein gives him $25,000

[Sophie]

and he's just out here like living right.

[Robert]

He's still on the street, he's still around as far as I'm aware. Yeah.

[Andrew T.]

It's also like, thanks for the donation from Jeffrey E. Thanks for the 25,000 coins or whatever.

[Robert]

Yeah, that's just like, I mean I,

[Andrew T.]

I like there is a certain point where you're like, yeah, all these right wing people are awful. You know, certainly pedophile supporting, whatever. No, they're such hypocrites. But it is like kind of fascinating each time. They have no shame. I don't know, it's not a slam dunk, I think, but it is just like, yeah, yeah, these people are exactly this.

[Robert]

Yeah, well it's, it's fucking the, this is the side of Jeffrey we didn't get until there was this release. The side where he's, he's not just even, you know, there was maybe some evidence he was flirting certainly with some right wing ideas over the years. He's putting a lot of money in. We know about this $25,000 donation. 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 science. And in fact, I want to quote, Areid 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. 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 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. So to put all 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, 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 Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein. So right after Brexit, Epstein sends an email to Peter Thiel, June 26, 2016 at 3:17am and says, Brexit, just the beginning. Thiel 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 Thiel about is you and I have been discussing the fact that like, if we can return to tribalism, destroy globalization, destroy the order that exists, destroy this idea of like liberal democracy, then we can buy all of the assets the same way these Russian oligarchs did after the Soviet Union collapsed. 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 global order, which I think to some extent he saw as 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. They got the vote now, you know, and so he and Thiel and all these guys, like he turns in with them and he's not, he's not manipulating Peter Thiel, 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 interest in this stuff to work towards the same ends that people like Peter Thiel 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.

[Andrew T.]

Jesus Christ.

[Robert]

Good. Great. I love it.

[Andrew T.]

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.

[Robert]

Yep.

[Andrew T.]

It's so bizarre.

[Robert]

Yep.

[Sophie]

I in pain.

[Robert]

Life is good.

[Sophie]

I guess we should do part four, huh?

[Robert]

Yeah, why not?

[Sophie]

Why not? All right, we'll be back Thursday. Pain.

[Robert]

Yeah.

[Sophie]

Bye.

[Robert]

Bye.

[Sophie]

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, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com behindthebastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

[Robert]

This is an Iheart podcast. Guaranteed.