Part Three: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World

Robert explains how Jeffrey Epstein became increasingly pilled on right-wing media and even started funding race science to further his eugenics-laced views. 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https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/30/jeffrey-epstein-files-bannon-musk-00758613 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/26/musk-bannon-thiel-epstein-documents-00582627 https://www.cryptobreaking.com/how-crypto-figures-in-epstein/ https://bsky.app/profile/picklebee.bsky.social/post/3mdss63eemc2n https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/epstein-powerful-men.html https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/crime/epstein-files-elon-musk-prince-andrew-richard-branson-b2911945.html https://medium.com/@areidross/neoliberalism-is-not-the-final-boss-and-it-never-was-63918dc68a51 https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01761115.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01968406.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00824843.pdf` https://bsky.app/profile/msmaxwellmusic.bsky.social/post/3mdsxo35qo222 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/fbi-tip-alleged-trump-witnessed-epstein-victims-baby-being-killed-dumped-in-lake-michigan/ar-AA1T5KJc https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/31/politics/new-documents-trump-epstein https://barthsnotes.com/2026/02/01/conspiracists-focus-on-murder-and-sra-adjacent-allegations-in-epstein-document-release/ https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/jeffrey-epstein-files-reveal-dinner-image-with-tech-billionaires-zuckerberg-and-musk/news-story/8a640c675dcabf36f6a972254bd1dc8c https://www.thedailybeast.com/mark-zuckerbergs-wild-dinner-with-epstein-revealed-in-files/ https://transnews.network/p/epstein-backed-prominent-anti-trans-figures?modal=login https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/jeffrey-epstein-john-brockman-edge-foundation?utm_campaign=epstein-backed-billionaires-dinner-network-of-prominent-anti-trans-figures&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=transnews.network 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https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01972089.pdf?utm_campaign=here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.garbageday.email https://archive.is/ObiDP#selection-917.2-925.110 https://www.newsweek.com/white-supremacist-wants-more-control-over-women-after-girlfriend-missing-1834188 https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA01249566.pdf?utm_campaign=here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.garbageday.email https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA01249566.pdf?utm_campaign=here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.garbageday.email https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02382770.pdf?utm_campaign=here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.garbageday.email https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02382770.pdf?utm_campaign=here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.garbageday.email https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2016/05/07/bills-sex-accusers-echo-trump-hillary-enabler/ https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00782408.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein https://www.garbageday.email/p/here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02394746.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01615377.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/search https://www.webcitation.org/6159jR9pC?utm_campaign=here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.garbageday.email https://www.webcitation.org/6159jR9pC?utm_campaign=here-s-how-epstein-broke-the-internet&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=www.garbageday.email https://maxread.substack.com/about https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01761115.pdf https://www.thegamer.com/jeffrey-epstein-call-of-duty-microtransactions/ https://kotaku.com/jeffrey-epstein-files-bobby-kotick-activision-ghislaine-maxwell-2000665456 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-04-17/childrens-video-games-addictive-features-gaming-report/105136744 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65372710 https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bitlicense-5-timeline-york-landmark-140100043.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140812110838/https://www.dfs.ny.gov/about/press2014/pr1407171-vc.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140812110838/https:/www.dfs.ny.gov/about/press2014/pr1407171-vc.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2010/EFTA01916226.pdf https://www.cbtnuggets.com/blog/technology/networking/l1-l2-vs-l3-whats-the-difference https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02604992.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02367627.pdf https://x.com/Acquired_Savant/status/2018160077769789584?s=20 https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/cryptocurrencies/epstein-files-spark-false-claims-linking-disgraced-financier-to-bitcoin-control/ar-AA1VvfOf https://archive.is/7tNPw#selection-1551.152-1551.226 https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/24/sec-drops-lawsuit-against-winklevoss-twins-gemini-crypto-exchange/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/17t6txf/how_bad_would_a_bank_run_have_to_be_to_push/ https://blocknuggets.com/news/tether-crash-threatens-crypto-world/ https://protos.com/new-epstein-files-reveal-contact-with-bitcoin-dev-andresen-before-cia-briefing/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/steve-bannon-once-guided-a-global-firm-that-made-millions-helping-gamers-cheat/2017/08/04/ef7ae442-76c8-11e7-803f-a6c989606ac7_story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-may-07-mn-27448-story.html https://www.aol.com/news/child-star-turned-millionaire-brock-155613028.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKtPluqCxdqV4VcHB6HTxIxjXR83tFW5Uav6fNBwHvED7ZM4EnkIlshTjQmsCe4DushIa2m8yCN1LOOag1v5Da1JRt4Vg60GG-hCcHRAFaXNUQ0J_hgM9vJoWYu5FjwTJesqS6sFyF2S9UYAhKGh-gVahFSwfsqay3pKzyv3rKvw https://www.aol.com/news/child-star-turned-millionaire-brock-155613028.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly9kdWNrZHVja2dvLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKtPluqCxdqV4VcHB6HTxIxjXR83tFW5Uav6fNBwHvED7ZM4EnkIlshTjQmsCe4DushIa2m8yCN1LOOag1v5Da1JRt4Vg60GG-hCcHRAFaXNUQ0J_hgM9vJoWYu5FjwTJesqS6sFyF2S9UYAhKGh-gVahFSwfsqay3pKzyv3rKvw See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to the Jeffrey Epstein Podcast Extravaganza, also known on Normal Week 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.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Thanks. Thanks for having me. I, uh, yeah, I guess I would say real part of the modern world under protest at this point.

• 0:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, under protest. Isn't everyone? Aren't we all?

• 0:44Speaker 01

  Under protest. I'm only here because I have to be.

• 0:47Robert Evans?

  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.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  I would have hated that too. Anything where I have to get out of my bed. Bad society.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  Bed only.

• 1:12Robert Evans?

  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 liked to, well, there wasn't a lot of sleep. Anyway, Andrew, where can people find you on the internet before we continue?

• 1:30Speaker 01

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

• 1:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the real fucking crimes too.

• 1:38Speaker 01

  I, yeah, I don't know. Andrew T. Everywhere. I have, um, doing a podcast called Starter Trek, um, on SubOfficalPod.com. My main podcast is Yo, Us, Racist, but we've been having a lot of fun doing, talking Star Trek with my co-host, Tony Newsom, who is, uh, I don't know if you're-

• 1:54Robert Evans?

  I love that stuff.

• 1:55Speaker 01

  If you're Star, spoiler alert, people, but, um, she's, a beloved reveal happens in episode five of Starfleet Academy.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the new Star Trek.

• 2:06Speaker 01

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

• 2:09Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  This. Yeah.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Well, also wealthy technocrat.

• 2:23Robert Evans?

  A wealthy technocrat pedophile. Yes. Exactly the sort of person Star Trek got rid of in the, in the, in the idealized future in Gene Roddenberry's beautiful dream. No more Jeffrey Epstein.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Because of literally this.

• 2:39Robert Evans?

  They got rid of people like this.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  And, 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.

• 3:01Robert Evans?

  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.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  I'm a big plead the fifth fan. Um.

• 3:10Robert Evans?

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

• 3:14Speaker 02

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

• 3:18Robert Evans?

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

• 3:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:21Robert Evans?

  The fifth? Are you kidding me?

• 3:23Speaker 01

  I'm surprised she didn't. At this point, you're just pinning it on a dead man, right? Like this is, this is a Wee Bay eating up murders. Once he's in for life.

• 3:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  We'll see how it goes, but I have some theories that, you know.

• 3:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, I don't, anything could happen at this point. I, we're not talking a lot about Gillan in these episodes.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  No.

• 3:41Robert Evans?

  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.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:05Speaker 03

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• 4:10Speaker 04

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• 4:40Robert Evans?

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• 5:15Robert Evans?

  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 Vladdy Poots, what are you wanting to talk about? Bitcoin, of course. Oh, God, right. What else could you want to talk about Vladimir Putin with but Bitcoin in 2013?

• 5:45Robert Evans?

  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.

• 6:04Robert Evans?

  God, what's that like?

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Imagine a leader facing a consequence for

• 6:09Robert Evans?

  For his

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Consorting with a pedophile? Weird.

• 6:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, for specifically trying to broker a meeting with that pedophile and Vladimir Putin. And it's, it's weird because you can tell Epstein took this really seriously. This is a guy who kinda seems to have, I mean, cut, 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.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  It's giving like bad AOL Instant Messenger messages. Like it's giving AOL.

• 6:47Robert Evans?

  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.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:58Robert Evans?

  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, to this guy. When 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.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Quote?

• 7:27Robert Evans?

  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.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 8:02Robert Evans?

  He, yeah.

• 8:05Speaker 01

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

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  And it's hard to say, cause like, one of the versions of the story is that Epstein was one of the Marx, 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.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  But also like trying to talk to Putin like an actual Bitcoin mark is a cryptocurrency mark is, that's so crazy.

• 9:11Robert Evans?

  Cause he's too smart for that. 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 assholes.

• 9:33Speaker 01

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

• 9:40Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  And that's, hang on to that.

• 9:43Robert Evans?

  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, 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 we get in 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

• 10:28Robert Evans?

  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 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 Thor Bjorn 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,

• 11:11Robert Evans?

  at least no interest in meeting with him, it doesn't seem like. Ah, 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 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 could get you 20 minutes with Putin, you'd be happy for it. Don't, 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.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 11:46Robert Evans?

  Well, at least being smart enough to not agree to it on fucking email puts him a cut above. Yeah, in a fucking email. Right. Opssec 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 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 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 Dugin.

• 12:23Speaker 02

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

• 12:29Robert Evans?

  You gotta do it every now and then. Jeff, Jeffrey.

• 12:32Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 12:32Robert Evans?

  Little Jeffaroo.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 12:34Robert Evans?

  Um, 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."

• 13:09Robert Evans?

  So what you kind of see is there's this budding interest Jeffrey has to disrupt the global order, which is a different picture of the man than I had when he just seemed to be this guy who was very deeply tied to the elite system and seemed to really have all of his power tied to the maintenance of that system as opposed to a guy who, after he gets out of prison, clearly wants to burn stuff down to some extent, right? 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.

• 13:41Speaker 01

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

• 13:46Robert Evans?

  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?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  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.

• 14:08Robert Evans?

  And I think you can

• 14:09Speaker 01

  It's just so weird. Yeah.

• 14:10Robert Evans?

  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?

• 14:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:21Robert Evans?

  So maybe that's kind of it, is 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? 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

• 15:03Robert Evans?

  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 learnt your lesson and have done nothing that's against the law since." If only Bill Gates would say, but can you imagine if Bill Gates in 2014 or so had come up and like, "Look, did Jeffrey Epstein sleep with a child? Yes, but he's learned his lesson and we all need to forgive him." None of this would be happening.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  God, I mean. Yeah.

• 15:34Speaker 02

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

• 15:40Robert Evans?

  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.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:49Robert Evans?

  That Richard Branson is like, who's someone who all Americans love and respect?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  Love. Yeah, yeah.

• 15:55Robert Evans?

  Bill Gates, obviously. Obviously. Everyone loves Bill.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I hate all these people.

• 16:00Robert Evans?

  No, we don't. We never did.

• 16:03Speaker 01

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

• 16:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  They're, they're just like, he's the squarest one around.

• 16:16Robert Evans?

  Right, right.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Fucking Bill.

• 16:18Robert Evans?

  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 he's, 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?

• 16:43Speaker 01

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

• 16:52Robert Evans?

  I don't, I, 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.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 17:07Robert Evans?

  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.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:23Robert Evans?

  Um, 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 cat, exclamation point after it. So I would say that implicates Richard Branson in some sex crimes.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 17:38Robert Evans?

  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 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.

• 18:06Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ.

• 18:07Robert Evans?

  Obviously.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. Who were those? Yeah. What are you talking about?

• 18:13Robert Evans?

  Not named, not named. Which ones?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:16Robert Evans?

  Can you get a name? So the worst, again, does this mean that Jeffrey was just bringing, bringing children over when Branson was there? Was he, 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? 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?

• 18:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:41Robert Evans?

  That, I think that's reasonable if you're going to islands with him, right?

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:46Robert Evans?

  On a regular basis. If you're inviting him to islands and talking about his harem.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  If you're advising Bill Gates to be his, like, no pedophile spokesperson.

• 18:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Then, um, yeah, I'm gonna go with, I'm gonna go with, uh.

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna say no.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  I'm gonna go not a great guy.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, just the dumbest frat house shit. It's always, it's, it's never better than that.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  Well, it's worse than that.

• 19:12Robert Evans?

  When it 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, 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

• 19:55Robert Evans?

  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, 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 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?

• 20:28Robert Evans?

  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.

• 21:10Robert Evans?

  And this is, the friendship between Ito and Epstein is very good for MIT. The school receives at least $850,000 from the Epstein Foundation directly to Ito's projects from 2002 to 2017, in addition to other donations. 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.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 21:34Robert Evans?

  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 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 tenured professorship. Former president of MIT Raphael 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

• 22:19Robert Evans?

  this initial gift and members of my senior team allowed it. Epstein's gifts were also discussed at 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 Ito himself is particularly, but not the only guy, who was visiting Epstein and probably involved in some criminal stuff.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Right, because it's also like, like, you know, $850,000 is a lot of money, but it's not actually a lot of money for...

• 22:50Speaker 01

  MIT, like, what is its endowment in the billions?

• 22:54Robert Evans?

  I mean, the endowment's big, but for individual, and I get, you have to assume it's several million.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 23:01Robert Evans?

  Over the years.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  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, the actual price tag, I will just say.

• 23:14Robert Evans?

  There's a couple of things to get. 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?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 23:39Robert Evans?

  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.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  To like, to change the world, you know?

• 23:47Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  It's, it's less than you want it to be.

• 23:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And a 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?

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 24:01Robert Evans?

  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?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:12Robert Evans?

  So, anyway, that's, that's all.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  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

• 24:22Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:23Speaker 02

  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. His

• 24:38Robert Evans?

  Part of it is

• 24:39Speaker 02

  is just, like, venomous.

• 24:42Robert Evans?

  Well, yeah, part of it is that, again, he's spreading a lot of money around and part of it is that all of these, these, like, the academics he's going to are guys who are, a lot of them, like, you know, 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, 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?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Well, there's also the idea that-

• 25:26Robert Evans?

  Which is usually true of people.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  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 couldn't, they could never survive in the free market.

• 25:55Robert Evans?

  It's, it's the huge problem we have because you also have a version of this problem when it comes to, uh, uh, 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 of the right has been waging on college and on the

• 26:35Robert Evans?

  system of tenure and whatnot is disastrous. But also academia has a lot of problems, like the, 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 did. Right. All these guys were friends with Jeffrey Epstein, you know?

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  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, Ah, yes. 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.

• 27:48Robert Evans?

  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, 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 as woman smells like property presenting as currency.

• 28:32Robert Evans?

  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, like, like, there's not a lot of 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? And, which is, yeah, it is like, the, the different things that have 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?

• 29:14Robert Evans?

  But the fact that he then, the fact that he pivots to comparing it to trans people and to the, 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. Cause it's, that's not really accurate about Bitcoin. Like it's Bitcoin's not in fact like gender.

• 29:58Robert Evans?

  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.

• 30:15Robert Evans?

  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 Sergey Believka, Russia's Deputy Minister of Economic Development and 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, Thiel and Zuckerberg. And in 2016, Epstein offered to share the expenses for Thiel's lawsuit against Gawker, which would eventually bankrupt the outlet.

• 31:02Robert Evans?

  We'll talk more about that dinner.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  These people are so dumb. Such a club of the dumbest motherfuckers ever to live.

• 31:10Robert Evans?

  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? Cause there's a lot of, he may, I think it

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:21Robert Evans?

  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 it probably is smile connected to my friend Peter Thiel. Um, he does a lot of that shit and it's very similar to like Robert Maxwell, Gillian 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 they're James Bond in exchange for giving them information that's useful. Right?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:56Robert Evans?

  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 him just like the Russians are.

• 32:07Speaker 01

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

• 32:15Robert Evans?

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

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:22Robert Evans?

  But that's again, an episode, that, that's a subject for another series of episodes that we would have to get into.

• 32:30Robert Evans?

  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 Edo with to set up the paperwork for some kind of crypto launch. This is likely Richard Khan, 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, 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. I found a website, CBT and Nuggets, that describes all this.

• 33:15Robert Evans?

  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 fiber optic cables as well as physical transmission objects of any over air 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?

• 33:58Robert Evans?

  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. Ito then asks if he should pass this on to the team, which again suggests Epstein had an influential role shaping crypto projects that were going through MIT at the time. Ito responds by asking if there's any specific regulations he should look at when giving feedback to the team. And Epstein tells Ito, many 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.

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  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.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  You know what Jeffrey Epstein would have loved? All the Super Bowl commercials from this year.

• 35:08Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, he would have loved the Super Bowl commercials for this year.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  It was all.

• 35:11Robert Evans?

  All Epstein backed companies.

• 35:14Speaker 02

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

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's never been more apparent that the Super Bowl is just a scam. This is the year it has to be masked off, right? Like this is all scams only, only scams, I guess.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Only scams, yeah.

• 35:35Robert Evans?

  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. Cause the one crypto ad I noticed was Coinbase where it was just like the fucking, the Backstreet Boys.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Oh, man, that everybody was so mad. They were like.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  Everyone sang along to the fucking.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Karaoke and then they're like, by the way, fuck you Coinbase. You're like.

• 36:00Robert Evans?

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

• 36:05Speaker 01

  They're more done than last year. I will say actually, Sophie, when you said, do you know what Jeff Repsley would have loved? I thought you were forcing an ad read.

• 36:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so did I.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  No, I, I wasn't, but it is that time.

• 36:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we should go to ads.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  God, yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 05

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• 36:50Robert Evans?

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• 37:14Speaker 06

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• 37:50Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 38:00Robert Evans?

  We're back. Boy, Jeffrey Epstein would have loved those ads.

• 38:03Speaker 02

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

• 38:08Robert Evans?

  Uh huh, yeah.

• 38:10Speaker 02

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

• 38:13Robert Evans?

  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 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 character, Christopher Poole, better known socially as Moot.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  Moot!

• 38:38Robert Evans?

  Moot! Born in probably 1987, somewhere near Virginia, Chris's early life is a black hole until he joined the Something Awful forums. He 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

• 39:23Robert Evans?

  basically de-dosing Scientology websites at one point. And also a bunch of random people got harassed for being weird on the internet.

• 39:33Robert Evans?

  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.

• 39:48Robert Evans?

  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 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?

• 40:31Robert Evans?

  So the fact that Lowtax 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. And in fact, when I was a kid on there, watched with a number of other goons as a guy overdosed, live in a thread and died. Bunch of fucked up stuff happened on that site.

• 40:59Robert Evans?

  People also had illegal fire sharing on there. There used to be a subsection of the forum where people would like put up torrents and weres, 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 giving, 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. And in order to describe this, this chunk of something awful history, I'm going to quote from Max Reed's Substack.

• 41:43Robert Evans?

  He banned Lola Khan, that is underage girl hentai. More generally, Low Tax 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 Low Tax'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 subforum. And what's really funny to me about this is like even from that little segment, you tell Low Tax is not a good guy. He's a terrible abusive spouse and awful man. The fact that he bans underage, like animated porn from his website makes him more responsible than any modern social media CEO.

• 42:28Robert Evans?

  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.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Low bar.

• 42:36Robert Evans?

  So funny to me.

• 42:37Speaker 01

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

• 42:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  And I hate him.

• 42:43Robert Evans?

  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 Low Tax and are finally ready to find another place, right? Christopher Poole is one of these people. He, he had posted on ADTRW, 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.

• 43:25Robert Evans?

  They moved to 4chan because nothing's not okay on, that's the idea, right? And so one of the things that happened is

• 43:34Robert Evans?

  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 Poole 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 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.

• 44:20Robert Evans?

  So when the site was first created, there was a subforum slash in, which meant, which 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 discussing banal shit, right? Right.

• 44:50Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  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. So 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

• 45:35Robert Evans?

  on the internet and use digital currency to buy drugs or child sex abuse imagery, right? Like, that's, that's the base. So they're all over-

• 45:44Speaker 01

  And that's freedom in a way, you know?

• 45:45Robert Evans?

  And that's libertarianism. 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 had 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. 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.

• 46:29Robert Evans?

  Now, at this point, that makes sense.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  "At this stage."

• 46:34Robert Evans?

  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.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  He's not willing to be associated openly with Nazis.

• 46:46Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 46:46Speaker 01

  And that is unfortunately a step.

• 46:49Robert Evans?

  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 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.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  No.

• 47:16Robert Evans?

  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 slash poll, he met with Jeffrey Epstein in person. The day before he makes poll.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  You're fucking lying. You're lying. What the fuck?

• 48:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I guess it makes sense.

• 48:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  But oh.

• 48:05Robert Evans?

  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 Nikolic, 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. Nikolic 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.

• 48:42Speaker 07

  I hate it here.

• 48:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah, right?

• 48:44Speaker 07

  I hate it here.

• 48:45Robert Evans?

  First off, the whole fact that he's like, "There is a cool guy, kid," is really weird.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  That's really upsetting to me. Um, we simply don't have enough information to know exactly what happened here, to write, 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 Poole. 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 Poole. I can't ignore the timing of this, right?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:19Robert Evans?

  Knowing that Epstein is getting increasingly into right wing media, he's going to fund some of it directly in the, in the coming years. Knowing that Christopher Poole removed the news chunk of 4chan because it was basically Stormfront, and then creates Poole, making it into basically the Stormfront section of the site. After meeting with Epstein, "I can't not, I can't not think that maybe Epstein said, you gotta bring this back. I don't know."

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Or, or like, "Oh, 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.

• 49:55Robert Evans?

  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, and he was like, "I think you should just go for it, man. Fuck it." You know, I don't know. Um.

• 50:13Robert Evans?

  That said, Epstein is a regular user of 4chan, 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 Shulik, 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

• 50:58Robert Evans?

  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.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  I mean, I think-

• 51:08Robert Evans?

  It's there.

• 51:10Speaker 01

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

• 51:17Robert Evans?

  It's all upsetting, yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  Unknowable to, I think, normal, I mean, not even nor, now I'm like, what, how do you even phrase this?

• 51:25Robert Evans?

  I guess that's not unknowable. I'm not, like, cause I know, 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, right? Like, I'm aware of that. I didn't, I didn't expect Jeffrey Epstein knew what Adventure Time was. That's weird to me.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Although- It's, 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, that is what, you know, on a sanitized level, Twitter has shown us about billionaires writ large, and these emails are telling us more.

• 51:54Robert Evans?

  Why they're interested in kids. Yeah. When I brought, cause I will say, I was talking to my partner about this. I was like, Epstein was sending fucking Princess Bubblegum porn, and like, other, like 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.

• 52:26Robert Evans?

  Okay.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  What a fucking bummer.

• 52:30Robert Evans?

  I didn't assume that one. That was me being dumb. You're right.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  100%.

• 52:37Robert Evans?

  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'd talked to him about, right? You know, we've all done this.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 53:12Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 53:13Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 53:13Robert Evans?

  In this case, the email that Ito sends Epstein is just the Wikipedia page for daki makura or Japanese body pillows that are printed with art depicting an anime wife or waifu. 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.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:35Robert Evans?

  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.

• 53:56Speaker 01

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

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  Which is like, what the fuck is happening?

• 54:05Robert Evans?

  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.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  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.

• 54:27Speaker 01

  It's just one of those things where it's like, it is obviously circumstantial evidence, but you could actually walk down every path that leads to that and it is impossible to find one that doesn't involve a crime.

• 54:38Robert Evans?

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

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:46Robert Evans?

  Speaking of crimes against humanity. What? Oh, sorry, Sophie. I cut you off. I was just doing an ad pivot.

• 54:52Speaker 02

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

• 55:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, he's he's an elite pedophile. You gotta give him that. Yeah. Mm hmm.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  I hate it here.

• 55:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, probably shouldn't go to ads right after saying elite pedophile, but.

• 55:14Speaker 02

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

• 55:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  I'm getting frown lines from these episodes.

• 55:28Speaker 08

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• 56:57Robert Evans?

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• 57:08Robert Evans?

  We're back, you know, we're, uh, we're steening, we're Epstein-ing, we're steening. Fuck off. We're steening. You guys like steening? Fuck off. Read the script. Want to steen a little more? Okay. Read the script. Um, so not long after 4chan introduced the poll board, which again stood for politically incorrect, Epstein's friend Steve Bannon took over the far, at the far right news website, Breitbart.com. These are like within a year of each other that Bannon takes over at Breitbart. Really? And Epstein is again buddies with Bannon. This has been back in 2012. And I, I hate that we kept a shift in time so much in these episodes, but it's kind of impossible to cover all this stuff and not do it. So in 2012, 4chan's poll board launches and we know Epstein spends time on 4chan because

• 57:51Robert Evans?

  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, right? Officially, if you like are reading about this, officially, um, 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. Um, 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. And Epstein is friends with Brock Pierce during this period of time, right?

• 58:35Robert Evans?

  From 2013 to 2014. Right. Again, Wolff 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 Ruhmeler, uh, 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?

• 59:19Robert Evans?

  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 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 mirroring the language that Bill's victims used to describe how mean Hillary was to them." 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 Breitbart link. And Kathy seems confused by this, too. She responds, "What's more disturbing is that you are reading Breitbart."

• 1:00:04Robert Evans?

  Like, what's more disturbing than 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, because 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,

• 1:00:49Robert Evans?

  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 advisers?

• 1:01:32Robert Evans?

  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 blocks 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.

• 1:02:17Robert Evans?

  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. He's talking about Alexi, people are suggesting he reads Alexander Dugin. 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 Gariapi, a French white nationalist influencer who announced the donation on his channel during an episode with Richard Spencer. So Gariapi and Richard Spencer are bragging that Jeffrey Epstein donated to support his white supremacist YouTube channel in 2015.

• 1:03:02Robert Evans?

  Right. I mean, for an idea, yeah, of the kind of shit Gariapi's saying, he calls for a white ethno-state and advocates that men should own their wives. This is interesting about Gariapi because his own wife disappeared in 2023. Yeah, she, she, 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 Gariapi is, though.

• 1:03:46Robert Evans?

  During a contentious child custody battle in the US, a now ex-wife accused Gary Pei of threatening to take their child to Canada. During the custody case, an undergraduate Duke University student testified that Gary Pei 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 Pei. Gary Pei had previously told The Daily Beast that the relationship was consensual. During that custody case, which he lost, Gary Pei also became embroiled in a guardianship battle over a 19-year-old who he described as his fiance. 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.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  Horrific motherfucker.

• 1:04:27Robert Evans?

  This is who Epstein gives him $25,000.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  And he's just out here, like, living, right?

• 1:04:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's still, he's still around, as far as I'm aware, yeah.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:04:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  It'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, 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.

• 1:05:11Robert Evans?

  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 into it.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  No, he's investing.

• 1:05:26Robert Evans?

  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, 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. 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,

• 1:06:10Robert Evans?

  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 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,

• 1:06:51Robert Evans?

  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 3:17 a.m. 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,

• 1:07:36Robert Evans?

  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 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 way 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.

• 1:08:20Robert Evans?

  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 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 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

• 1:09:04Robert Evans?

  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.

• 1:09:13Speaker 02

  Jesus Christ.

• 1:09:14Robert Evans?

  Good. Great. I love it.

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  I mean, to me, the overarching thing that's coalescing is like, why were the, why was all the right wing establishment 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.

• 1:09:38Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. Yep.

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  It's so bizarre.

• 1:09:43Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  I've been paid.

• 1:09:46Robert Evans?

  Life is good.

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  I guess we should do part four, huh?

• 1:09:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, why not?

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

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

• 1:09:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Bye.

• 1:10:00Robert Evans?

  Bye.

• 1:10:04Speaker 09

  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 and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 1:10:38Speaker 05

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• 1:11:06Speaker 10

  This January, bare-knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool-deck bare-knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Mess of parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at bkfsea.com.

• 1:11:36Speaker 11

  This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know those little promises you make to your future self? Tomorrow, I'll put my phone away earlier, or stop rehearsing arguments in the shower. Tomorrow, I'll stop saying yes to everything, or stop overthinking that conversation. Most of us aren't trying to become completely different people. We're just hoping to feel a little better every day. That's what's great about BetterHelp. With them, better is personal. It's matching with a therapist who gets you, and having someone in your corner. Better doesn't have to come from major victories. It can be from the small habits you create, and how you honor your needs on a daily basis. So many of us are great at prioritizing even the smallest things for our loved ones. But what about ourselves?

• 1:12:21Speaker 11

  With thousands of therapists and millions of members in over 100 countries, BetterHelp is making therapy more accessible so more people can keep moving forward, one conversation at a time. Better is personal. Therapy should be too. Visit betterhelp.com to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp.com.

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.