Epstein Files Special: Prince Andrew Arrested, Global Network, Mythology, Reid Hoffman Files

(0:00) David Sacks introduces Saagar Enjeti and Michael Tracey (1:04) Reacting to the arrest of Prince Andrew in the UK, Epstein's global finance network (11:24) Who was Jeffrey Epstein, and what is this story really about? (34:10) Michael Tracey explains "Epstein Mythology" (1:14:23) Kevin Bass joins to discuss Reid Hoffman's history with Epstein (1:32:52) Michael Tracey responds to criticism Follow Saagar: https://x.com/esaagar Follow Michael: https://x.com/mtracey Follow Kevin: https://x.com/kevinnbass Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect Referenced in the show: https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2024276079888732649 https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/02/19/world/uk-prince-andrew-arrest-epstein https://signalohio.org/les-wexner-deposed-by-house-oversight-committee-over-epstein-ties https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-money-scams-investigation.html https://www.axios.com/2019/09/12/reid-hoffman-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2023941188588290502 https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2024276084401828260 https://x.com/kevinnbass/status/2023941213951512966 https://x.com/presentwitness_/status/2024522531542356447

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

• 0:00David Sacks?

  Okay, everyone. By popular demand, we're doing an all Epstein show today. My besties are all on vacation for Ski Week, so I'm taking this on solo. We have three different guests on who all have very different interpretations and opinions of the Epstein story. Sagar Angedi from Breaking Points believes that the Epstein story shows that there is a "Epstein class" that operates above law and accountability. He views the story as an indictment of our ruling elites. Michael Tracy is skeptical about many of the most delicious claims about Epstein and questions whether they meet any kind of evidentiary standard. He has criticized the media-feeding frenzy over what he has called "Epstein mythology." And finally, Kevin Bass, a citizen journalist who's been tracking the release files and

• 0:43David Sacks?

  posting his findings on X, specifically in regards to Reid Hoffman, perhaps the figure in tech most closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein. Some of it gets heated, but hopefully you'll come away with new perspectives and great information. I felt like it was important to showcase a range of viewpoints on this issue. I'm trying to keep an open mind, and I'll describe my own point of view at the end of the show. And with that, here we go. Sagar, let me start with you. What is the import of the arrest of Prince Andrew in the UK this morning? I mean, is this a case of "show us the man and we'll tell you the crime"? I mean, obviously, it seems kind of coincidental that he's not being arrested for misconduct in the Epstein affair.

• 1:26David Sacks?

  He's being arrested on mishandling, I guess, trade secrets or public documents? So, obviously, the timing of this is not coincidental.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  No, it's certainly not coincidental, but I do believe that the facts do matter in this case. And unfortunately, you know, for Prince Andrew, for Lord Mandelson, the former ambassador to the United States from the UK as well, it is pretty clear-cut that they did violate their official duties. We should remember that the crux of this case involving Andrew is not just about some of the accusations that were made, although that is the genesis, let's say, of the investigation of the interest. This is about Prince Andrew serving as a UK trade adviser and forwarding non-public information to Jeffrey Epstein that's been released that's currently in the files. Some of it is involved... Scheduling. However, Gordon Brown this morning said that he had actually shared some new information with Scotland Yard in the police. So none.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  It's not exactly just what's in the file, but it could potentially be other material that Gordon Brown and the Chancellery were able to investigate. As to what Prince Andrew was sharing as part of a broader probe into Lord Mandelson and the tip off that he gave to Jeffrey Epstein about an upcoming bailout. And I do think that this does reveal quite a lot about Jeffrey Epstein. The next is the genesis of his rise to power, his wealth and his influence. Something that involved, let's say even some of the co-hosts, let's say on this very podcast, which is a deep financial knowledge of money laundering networks of trying to be at the very forefront. Of moving money across the globe, which I believe is his real power and his influence, which is what enabled much of the behavior.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  That much of the public is now horrified by.

• 3:05David Sacks?

  Okay, wait, I can't let that just go by. What do you mean by involving co-hosts of this podcast?

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Well, I'm talking about Jason. I actually thought that the Jason email was very interesting. So you'll see that in 2011. That Jeffrey Epstein is contacting Jason about Bitcoin. This is by, I saw, I watched your discussion. I'm not implicating him in any crime. I'm saying. If you watch and look at that email very closely, you are watching Jeffrey Epstein, a master money launderer and financial mastermind himself. Be at the forefront of the Bitcoin technology and wondering about it in 2011, which as Jason even pointed out. In the last episode that you guys did about this, when Bitcoin was some $1 and some sort of open source project like to me. That shows how at the forefront he was of new technology and new ways to move money surreptitiously across the globe, which is what I believe.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Was his real strength and his basically his, his raison d'etre for being so useful. To all of these different foreign governments and intelligence assets, including ours, Russia, Israel, various different Israeli or various different intelligence. Networks across the globe.

• 4:14David Sacks?

  Yeah, let me just for, for viewers of this episode who didn't see that episode, let me just summarize what exactly happened there. Cause I want to just make sure that. Jason's reputation is not unfairly impugned, and I don't think you're doing that. But just to be absolutely clear about it, what happened was that Jason hosted an episode of This Week in Startups roughly, I think in 2011 with a couple of the Bitcoin core founders, and then Epstein reached out to him for an introduction to those people. I thought, and one of my takeaways from that was, like you said, Saagar, that Epstein was extraordinarily early to Bitcoin. He clearly had a nose for putting himself in the middle of things. I think 2011 is when I discovered Bitcoin, so that was relatively early.

• 4:59David Sacks?

  I thought it was almost comical the way that Jason was trying to warn Epstein, "Oh, you don't want to meet these guys. These are some crazies. They're like these crypto libertarians. They want to take down the government. There's no profit. There's no investment opportunity here." In a way, it was kind of comical that Jason was trying to warn Epstein about the Bitcoin guys rather than vice versa, but I don't really think people knew at that point in time what Epstein was involved in. Do you disagree with that? Do you think people should have known by 2011?

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Well, David, I mean, I will say, there is a way back machine, and we can go back and we can look at what the Google results were, and we do have somebody who pled guilty. And look, I mean, this is for every individual to make up their own mind. You can't Google for solicitation of prostitution involving a minor. I mean, that was literally a matter of public record. I can only speak for myself. That's not really somebody I would involve myself with, even at a professional level.

• 5:58David Sacks?

  Had you known?

• 6:01Speaker 01

  Well, you can Google it. It's literally public record.

• 6:03David Sacks?

  But it wasn't widely publicized at the time.

• 6:04Speaker 01

  There were Palm Beach posts. There were numerous news articles that described it.

• 6:07David Sacks?

  I thought the Palm Beach story didn't come out until, or sorry, maybe it was Miami Herald, didn't come out until 2018.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Well, you're talking about the 2018, kind of the broader story, but the original solicitation of prostitution involving a minor charge, 2007, I believe, is when the non-prosecution agreement came to bear. That was all public record in terms of registration of a sex offender. And again, you can use the way back machine and you can go back and look. I mean, again, this doesn't necessarily implicate anybody in a crime, and anybody can make up the decision for themselves as to how they would have, you know, involve themselves with that person. But it was, it was out there. Like, it wasn't unknown, and I do think it's not really responsible to imply otherwise.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Quick factual clarification on that. Although it wasn't an enormous story at the time, you can find coverage in the New York Times in July of 2008 after Epstein pleaded guilty to the two state level prostitution charges. We didn't have the full scope of the information, obviously, about what he was accused of or the nature of the non-prosecution agreement, but a Google search would have yielded that at that time.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 7:10David Sacks?

  Yeah, it's hard for me to judge. I certainly, in that time period, had never even heard of Jeffrey Epstein. And I don't think most people had. When did this become sort of a cause celebre? I mean, wasn't it more around his arrest?

• 7:24Speaker 02

  2018, I would say.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  2018. Yeah, I think it's important to explain.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  When the incredibly overrated Miami Herald series by Julie K. Brown, which is just rife with errors and mischaracterizations, became this sensation across the media landscape, and Julie K. Brown was showered with all these accolades from all these bogus journalism industry organizations, even though, for example, I caught her fabricating quotes in her book, Proversion of Justice, which was based on the initial Miami Herald series.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Michael, I don't think that you would deny-

• 7:54Speaker 02

  Most clownish people in the journalism landscape right now.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Michael, I don't think that you would deny that ultimately that this did not, yes, it was sparked by Julie K. Brown's Miami Herald stories, that a federal judge was not necessarily like, you know, a federal judge who reviewed the non-prosecution agreement did say that this was a violation of the Crime Victims Rights Act.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that was overturned on appeal.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  Right. Well, I understand. However, this has also gone forth to the Supreme Court involving Ghislaine Maxwell, as I understand now is currently being litigated. But I do think it is important-

• 8:21Speaker 02

  The Supreme Court rejected it.

• 8:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm talking-

• 8:24Speaker 02

  You mean Maxwell's appeal?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  I'm talking about the Maxwell appeal, but specifically the non-prosecution agreement and the overturning is what re-led to the current indictment of the 2019 indictment of Jeffrey Epstein. No-

• 8:36Speaker 02

  That's wrong, Sager.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  No, well, go ahead. I'm happy for you to explain it to me. Go ahead.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is a misconception. The non-prosecution agreement was never overturned. Ghislaine Maxwell's argument includes, let me just finish.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Ghislaine Maxwell's argument in her appeals included citing the non-prosecution agreement as something that she claimed she ought to have been covered by-

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 8:59Speaker 02

  And therefore insulated from federal prosecution. Which was initiated against her in 2020. The non-prosecution agreement was never nullified. It was never avoided. Bradley Edwards, the victim lawyer, attempted to convince federal judges to somehow nullify it, but he failed. The reason why Jeffrey Epstein was federally re-prosecuted in 2019 is because prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, Maureen Comey at all, concocted this cockamamie rationale for how they could circumvent the non-prosecution agreement by picking, claiming they found a new victim in New York, claiming that there was some interstate nexus in which they could tie some of the old Florida allegations, but it was never nullified at all. So just to be clear about that.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  I apologize for not being very specific in my language. It was ruled in 2019 that it had violated the Crime Victims Rights Act. That's what led to the re-indictment. But what I'm specific, well, no, no.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  There was no connection.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Well, no, because that led to the story reopening from Miami Herald and that led then to the 2019 SDMI prosecution.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  I'm sorry, not to be combative, but you have your chronology wrong. The Miami Herald story was based on Julie K. Brown. Yeah, that was based on Julie K. Brown colluding with the victims' lawyers, not the court ruling on the Crime Victims Rights Act.

• 10:17David Sacks?

  All right, guys, let me just get control of this again because I think we're going down a rabbit hole and there's lots of aspects of this story that we could discuss. I think that we should probably judge each person who interacted with Epstein or visited his island and so forth and so on individually in terms of what they actually did, what they actually knew. Sagar, I just think you're being a little bit unfair to Jason because all he did was exchange emails with Epstein on in the 2011 time period. That's all.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  Well, what I was trying to point out was Jeffrey Epstein's knowledge or interest of Bitcoin in 2011, and that links to a broader Epstein involvement with money laundering and tax fraud and so-called involvement with Leon Black and many of these other multi-billionaires who paid him lots of money. I'm just saying I'm putting that as part of a piece into a broader scheme.

• 11:07David Sacks?

  Yes, and I think that exchange was noteworthy for the reason you just said, which is that Epstein somehow. Was putting himself in the middle of all sorts of things. I mean, he's almost like a Zelig like figure who pops up in many different newsworthy stories over the last few decades, which is what I think makes this interesting. I think maybe a question for each of you is, who do you think this guy ultimately was? I mean, you hear all sorts of theories. Let's say maybe the Epstein maximalist position would be that he was an intelligence asset or intelligence agent who was running a vast compromise operation on his island and thereby was corrupting and blackmailing

• 11:52David Sacks?

  the world's elite to someone who, uh, I think, Michael, you have a different point of view on that. Let me not characterize it. I'll let you guys do it. But, Sagar, let me start with you. Who do you think this guy was? And ultimately, you know, at a 30,000 foot level, what do you think is going on here? What is this Epstein story really about? And then, Michael, I want to go to you on the same question.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. I mean, I do think that there is a very low IQ unfortunate, you know, explosion of accusations that are out there. And I want to be very responsible in the way that I describe it. I think that Jeffrey Epstein was somebody who arose under very suspicious conditions in the 1980s, potentially involving Iran contra knowledge, specifically with arms traffickers like Adnan Khashoggi and Douglas Leese, Steven Hoffenberg as well, and that these black market money laundering, tax evasion strategies were honed over a period, which eventually ensnared various people like Leslie Wexner and many other multi billionaires. And that at the very same time, he also had, you know, his sexual proclivities,

• 12:55Speaker 01

  which I think at this point were well known, and that those became and became useful. His money laundering, specific dirt duties and knowledge and usefulness, let's say to the CIA, to various other intelligence assets, became a very useful part of the nexus in the post-Cold War environment. And that at the time, it was also socially known for a lot of Epstein associates that he had this bizarre practice of often, you know, seeking out Massages, which in some cases they are saying involving underage girls. And so to say that he was running a vast compromat operation, I think ascribes too much intention to what's really happening here. And the reason why I'm being intentional in my language is that what he clearly was

• 13:39Speaker 01

  doing was recruiting and running this like vast massage scheme, also involving Ghislaine Maxwell all across the world, Russian and Eastern European women, but also that this behavior was tolerated, in some cases seen by a vast number of the global elite. Now, the 2007 circumstances of the non prosecution agreement, you know, and Michael and I could go back on this forward a long time as to the circumstances of which that arose. However, I don't think, Michael, you would even deny that his access to wealth, power, and money did eventually allow him to get off with the 2007 non prosecution agreement and the eventual sweetheart deal that he gets with his hiring.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  I wouldn't agree with that, actually.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, I don't think the average Joe can just hire Ken Starr and private investigators and lawyers to tell some of the purported victims.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Oh, sure. I mean, his vast wealth enabled him to secure very high powered legal representation.

• 14:30Speaker 01

  Well, that's what I'm claiming is that certain.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  But this whole concept of a sweetheart deal is a total canard that was polarized by Julian K. Brown.

• 14:36David Sacks?

  Michael, I don't want to get off on that yet, but just go back to my original question of what is your 30,000 foot take on what this story is about? Who was this guy in your view?

• 14:46Speaker 02

  I will answer that. However, I do want to just stipulate upfront that I think this reflex to have to offer some kind of totalistic assessment of who Jeffrey Epstein was at his very essence has fed into so much of the constant churn of algorithmic slop that has generated this hysterical frenzy around this issue and has led to people being totally deluded about what we're even talking about. What do most people? I have some surmises about Jeffrey Epstein. He definitely was a money manager who, as you mentioned, was sort of like this Zelig character who did have an extraordinary cross section of connections with people from across fields. And, you know, I just was looking through some of these records in the new Epstein

• 15:31Speaker 02

  Files productions and I was looking for something else, but there are. There's an archive of these old message pads that he had at his Palm Beach house. And I'm scrolling through and it turns out Holly Berry left him a couple of messages. I had no idea that Holly Berry was ever in contact with Jeffrey Epstein. So you can always find somebody new and novel who apparently had one dealing or another with him. But why are we talking about Jeffrey Epstein right now in February of 2026? Because Pete, he is believed to have been the most prolific child sex trafficker in American or perhaps world history, which is why this issue might now take down the British government. It's embroiling Norway. A minister in Slovakia had to resign over it. There's a new criminal investigation that was just launched in France, et cetera.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  That's what people conceive Jeffrey Epstein to have been. And that whole notion is based on just an onslaught of mythological nonsense that's pumped out daily by these YouTube shows, I won't mention names, podcasts, et cetera, social media personalities who are driven by these perverse algorithmic incentives to be totally divorced from the facts foreground this rampant speculation that ties in the Mossad, ties in unnamed other intelligence agencies with this presumed implication or this presumed reality that of course we know for sure that Jeffrey Epstein was running this pedo crime ring.

• 17:01Speaker 02

  And we all to the they presuppose a conclusion that's just been floating out there in the ether, thanks to all this horrendous media coverage. I think this is the worst story of my adult lifetime in terms of the media coverage and it implicates the alternative media, the mainstream media and everybody in between. It's actually shocking. I will predict here and now that if we revisit this issue, and I don't know, two or three years, people will come to realize, if I have anything to do with it, that they were bamboozled on a mass scale. There's genuine fraud that has been rampant in terms of the journalistic malfeasance. We're not supposed to ever consider the massive financial incentives where the Epstein industry is now something like I've estimated a billion dollars in terms of the payouts.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  have been given to purported victims who are allowed to just reimagine things that happened to them 20 years before as an adult, not as a child, but adult at the time of their claim victimization and then call themselves a sex trafficking victim and then they can secure a couple million dollars tax-free from JP Morgan and the media will hail them as these brave survivors without doing a single thing to check the veracity of any of their claims. You know why people are so upset about these redactions in the Epstein files and I'm upset too. I criticized Thomas Massey and Ro Khanna for the language of their bill that they crafted, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which they crafted in concert with Bradley Edwards, this extortionist quote-unquote "victim's lawyer" who's made

• 18:27Speaker 02

  a killing on this issue over the past 10 years in conjunction with David Boies, another shyster. And Bradley Edwards, at his urging, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey put in this giant carve-out to so-called transparency and disclosure into their bill, such that the DOJ was authorized to redact or withhold or conceal any information that could be the most tangentially tied to anything that's quote "victim identifying." So they've been arguing frantically in federal court for the past few months that they're opposed to the disclosure of Epstein files because it's going to terrorize all these beleaguered women. I don't know. Do you think that maybe if we did get full transparency, it might disrupt this sanitized quote "survivor"

• 19:11Speaker 02

  narrative that everybody pushes so credulously? I'll just give you one example and I don't want to go on for too long and I, there's so many threads that I could pull here that you have to kind of rein me in. But one narrative that could disrupt if we actually did get genuine disclosure, which we're not, and in fact Edwards at all demanded that the entire archive be taken down because this disclosure was just too horrendously threatening to them. We would maybe get more insight into some of the government propaganda that's been allowed to promulgate unchecked. And Sagar, I wonder if you've corrected this on Breaking Points. You can let me know. But for months, politicians across the media, the political spectrum,

• 19:52Speaker 02

  as well as the media writ large, have unthinkingly regurgitated this figure that there were over 1,000 victims of Jeffrey Epstein. Sometimes that gets upgraded to thousands of victims. That's what Pramila Jayapal said at the Bondi hearing last week. Rohana constantly blurts out this whole, this claim of over 1,000 survivors. And this is based on the July 6, 2025 FBI DOJ memo, which claimed that they, after a review of the evidence, after the second Trump administration came in, they found that over 1,000 victims were, quote, harmed by Epstein. So they used this very conspicuous weasel wordage. And it was very dubious to me the instant I read it. Turns out, you know, thank God on some level for the Epstein files, because there is a major revelation contained therein, which is that

• 20:36Speaker 02

  this whole, this number is a fraud. It's bogus. They, they, they admit in FBI memorandum that this number is based on a total of purported victims, the majority of whom were, would have been adults at the time of their claimed victimization anyway. But it, that includes the family members of alleged victims in that total number that's been bandied about.

• 20:58David Sacks?

  Well, Michael, how many alleged victims are there?

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Well, who knows? Why is the government deceiving the public about it? If people want to be mad at Cash Patel and Pam Bondi for putting out that phony propagandistic figure and then have it be repeated ad nauseam without the slightest bit of critical discernment?

• 21:17Speaker 01

  Well, I do, Michael, I think we can at least agree that Cash Patel and Pam Bondi haven't handled this all that responsibly.

• 21:22Speaker 02

  What happened on that particular issue?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Oh, well, I mean, you're asking me to correct the record of something I've never even uttered. I've never said the word over 1,000 people. It's literally not something that I've ever claimed. I mean, I do think, Michael, that what you like to do is to go after, and really, I think fundamentally, I'm not even sure if you would reject this, you reject the idea of victimization, that post-victimization can even happen. And I also, I don't even necessarily want to get to-

• 21:46Speaker 02

  The idea of victimization, I don't even know what that means.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  Well, you reject the idea that an adult woman could be victimized, let's say by Jeffrey Epstein, manipulated. Yes, even if some cases, money works changing hands. I will say, by the way, that just paying or flying in adult women from Eastern Europe for the express purposes of having sex is a crime, by the way. Sure, it's not underage. However, we do have the 2007 draft indictment, where there were a number of underage victims that were mentioned there, where Epstein specifically asked a 15-year-old if he knows anybody who's younger that he could be able to recruit it. And so I do think your core contention that at the end of the day, he wasn't a quote "pedophile", is definitely illegitimate. But I also don't necessarily want to get dragged into the victim stuff, which I think that you are fundamentally focused on, because I do think when you're saying,

• 22:29Speaker 01

  "Why are people talking about this?", it confirms a general suspicion of the way that people act with impunity at the highest levels of American or global society, in terms of their moral character, in terms of their dealings, let's say financially. And you know, you like to brush across this intelligence question. Actually, I would love for you to be able to just grapple with some of the facts, necessarily just related today, where the Israeli government was installing surveillance equipment in Epstein-owned apartments, used for the former Prime Minister of Israel, Ayud Barak, where we have Ayud Barak and Epstein joking questioningly about Mossad, where Epstein is foiling 1999, the CIA for any mention of himself, or the very dealings that he

• 23:12Speaker 01

  himself had with the arms dealing industry in the 1980s, for the fact that he had a false Austrian passport at the age of 29 years old, Austria being the capital of spies, long before he ever became very filthy rich. And so, Michael, I think what you're obfuscating is a general interest in the story. And often, what you try to do is find the lowest IQ, most maximalist, people talking about cannibals or anything like that, and then paint that as a bigger question.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  That's not what I do at all.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  No, but it is. Michael, even in your-

• 23:42Speaker 02

  I barely mentioned the cannibalism stuff. I mean, of course, that kind of historical lunacy-

• 23:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you paint the rest of us who believe, let's say, in some of a bigger part of this story, as credit-

• 23:52Speaker 02

  I mean, Saagar, if you believe that we can just accept at face value that a 21-year-old model who accepted an invitation to visit Jeffrey's Island when she was in the British Virgin Islands-

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Potentially under false pretenses, also-

• 24:04Speaker 02

  Let me finish, let me finish.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  Potentially under false pretenses by Jean-Luc Brunel, who, by the way, is investigated-

• 24:08Speaker 02

  And you don't bother even looking into it. No, it had nothing to do with Jean-Luc Brunel.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  What do you mean, "I don't bother looking into it"? This is nonsense. I mean, I'm talking-

• 24:12Speaker 02

  Then tell me if you've looked into what I'm about to describe. Can I have 30 seconds to describe it?

• 24:15Speaker 01

  All right, go ahead.

• 24:16Speaker 02

  Lisa Phillips, who was one of the women, quote, survivors, who spoke at these press conferences in front of the US Capitol and infamously declared that she and her fellow survivors were going to create their own list of Epstein clients and then hand it over to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massey so they could read it out on the floor of the House of Representatives under the protections of the Speech and Debate Clause and caused a giant media firestorm, as I don't have to remind you. Her whole tale of victimization is that at age 21, as a professional model, she was on a photo shoot in the British Virgin Islands, another girl, you know, or young woman that she was with invited her to take a ferry to Jeffrey Epstein's island in the US Virgin Islands. She accepted.

• 24:59Speaker 02

  She never claimed victimization for like 17 or 20 years. She's on a podcast in 2020 saying, gee whiz, I never heard anything about all this crazy Epstein stuff, but I knew him and I don't know what went happened there. Then all of a sudden JP Morgan opens its floodgates for settlements of, you know, $290 million. You know, I know, like, we're not supposed to acknowledge human nature about what that can incentivize on this particular subject. I mean, explain that to me. And she now claims that we're supposed to just take her to be a survivor? She was the one, one of the women who also stood up and protested Pam Bondi last week. So, yes, Augur, if you do take at face value that that person can be rightly designated

• 25:39Speaker 02

  as a victim and fuel and foment this giant worldwide pedophilia crisis that we're supposedly in the midst of, then, I don't know, I mean, I consider you to have a pretty high IQ. And that's just not some, like, rando on social media talking about cannibals.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  Right.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  So you tell me if you agree that that's a legitimate case of victimization and it should be rightly engendering this worldwide pedophilic mass panic.

• 26:02Speaker 01

  Look, I'm not here to defend every so-called Epstein victim, because, by the way, I think that what you do very expertly is finding people like Lisa Phillips and then trying to portray all of them of that sort. Like, would you deny that vast wire transfers were sent to Eastern Europe to fly in women for the express purposes of sex? Because that actually is...

• 26:21Speaker 02

  Adult women.

• 26:22Speaker 01

  Okay, is that not a crime, Michael? Have you Googled the Mann Act? I mean, for somebody who has actually looked into prostitution, I mean, this is what I'm talking about is that, by the way, also, you have not yet grappled with the 2007 draft indictment there against Epstein. Okay, I mean, look, I have unfortunately very limited amount of time. Outstanding for that.

• 26:40David Sacks?

  Guys, so Saagar told us upfront that he only had half an hour. So, you know, we don't have that much time. Listen, Saagar, let me ask you a couple of other questions and then once Saagar leaves, Michael, we can get you to say what you want to say. I want to go to the Les Wexner deposition the other day. What did we learn from that specifically about how Epstein got his start? I do think that there are these questions about, again, who this guy was, how did he accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars so early in his career? How did he seem to obtain all these different connections specifically to the intelligence world? Did any of that get resolved? And what's your take on that?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  No, David, it wasn't resolved. Unfortunately, the entire transcript is not public. What we do know from the House Oversight Committee, at least what's been released now so far, is Leslie Wexner said he was never questioned ever once by the FBI or the Department of Justice involving this case. I will say, if you look at the track record of Leslie Wexner, it's incredibly bizarre. He claims that Epstein was a con man who stole his money for decades. In 1991, we had the power of attorney that was signed over to him. He claims that Epstein was a financial genius and a wizard. We have the transferring of the townhome, which eventually there was some payment that was reconciled on the back end. But an incredible amount of control that Jeffrey Epstein had over Leslie Wexner's finances, over the Wexner Foundation, which he used to funnel money to Ayud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel,

• 28:09Speaker 01

  to support many Zionist causes under the Wexner Foundation, including the Wexner Fellowship currently at Harvard University. I do think it's important for us to explore some more of that. There's some very odd dealings with the beginnings of their relationship. Previous Epstein associates have testified that in 1992, which is shortly after power of attorney and all of that, was acquired, or the relationship, sorry, between Epstein and Wexner began, is that much of Epstein's lifestyle Wechsler does not even dispute that Epstein had vast control over his finances and even claims that he was stolen from by Jeffrey Epstein, that their relationship is supposed to have ended sometime, I think in 2007, but he has not yet answered questions about this relationship in an open

• 28:52Speaker 01

  public forum beyond some statements, and he currently did issue an opening statement for the record. I personally would like to see the release of that transcript, I mean, all for transparency here in this particular case. He's an 88-year-old man, and I do think it's genuinely bizarre, oh, and not to even mention the modeling industry, which, you know, which Wechsler himself was involved in, and there's several emails, including Wechsler's own crude drawing in the Epstein birthday book involving boobs, that he said that's all Epstein ever wanted. So their relationship is bizarre, goes back decades. Wechsler maintains, as I said, that he was conned and that he was stolen from. I don't really believe much of that story. Michael, you and I have now read thousands of Epstein

• 29:35Speaker 01

  emails. There's no sophisticated financial instruments going on, even back to the very beginnings of Jeffrey Epstein's claims here about managing money. Almost none of it passes the smelter. David, you're a very high net worth individual. You can go to Goldman Sachs or many other financial houses and get teams of people to manage money for sophisticated financial instruments and others not available to the rest of us. It'd be very odd for you to turn over your finances to Jeffrey Epstein.

• 30:04David Sacks?

  Yeah, so he began his career, I guess, at Bear Stearns. I guess it was a brief stint where he worked, I guess he, one of the curious things about him is he dropped out of college around the age 20. I guess he was studying math. He then was a teacher at the Dalton School for like a year.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 30:20David Sacks?

  And then he worked at Bear Stearns for four years.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  He met Ace Greenberg through the Dalton School. Greenberg's, I think it was, it was either one of his children was there, and then he went to Bear Stearns. He's fired from Bear Stearns after a couple of years, and that's when his descent into what I call like the darkness, his expertise in money laundering, I believe that that's when it was honed, as reflects in the record and the testimony of the people who dealt with him there at the time, including the false passport, Iran contra, arms smuggling, and all of that that I've laid out.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  So, can I ask you a quick question? Because I know you have to go soon. I'm honestly curious if you would agree with this statement from Thomas Massey. This is from February 16. He says, quote, "We're exposing the extent of Epstein's global pedophile ring and how it touches our government and aristocracy." So do you think it's a factually valid statement that what we know to have taken place and maybe even is still ongoing is a, quote, "global pedophile ring"?

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, when, what you're asking about a global pedophile ring is...

• 31:20Speaker 02

  This is Massey.

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Well, sorry?

• 31:22Speaker 02

  This is Thomas Massey saying it, not me.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, Thomas Massey, a global pedophile ring is a ring of global elites who seemed aware and perhaps participated in the abuse of underage children. Now, Michael, I will grant you this, and what I respect you the most...

• 31:37Speaker 02

  So you do agree with the statement?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Well, no, I will grant you this. What I think you do well is to parse the actual individual claim of many of the victims and others that are out there, and I actually think you have a great role in this ecosystem for debunking, especially some of the lowest IQ content, which is out there, like you did with the torture video. So I do want to appreciate you for doing that.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  That was low-hanging fruit. I mean, I don't, I don't really appreciate this idea that I only focus on low-IQ social media blather.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  Okay, Michael.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  I've delved very deeply into the legal minutia of all this saga.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yes, I know you have.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  And Jeffrey Epstein is just casually called a pedophile virtually everywhere in the media, among every politician, nonstop.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Right, and Michael, much of your criticism...

• 32:17Speaker 02

  And if you go and actually look at what he was convicted of in Florida...

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Right, but your criticism, Michael, is that actually he was in a biliphile because he would like to pre, a post-pubescent, 14-year-old girls.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Don't you find it bizarre, don't you find it bizarre that for all the enormous media resources that have been poured into this story over the past however many years by newspapers, magazines, podcasts, Netflix specials, you name it, I guess I'm the only one who ever thought to actually go into the Florida court docket and pull up the transcript of the plea hearing in June of 2008 when he entered his two guilty pleas, his guilty plea in Florida for two state-level prostitution charges? And he's called a convicted pedophile. Ad nauseam, it turns out the sole minor victim who was cited in that plea hearing as the sole minor to whom he procured for prostitution was literally 17 years old.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  Yes, Michael, I understand that because they picked the oldest person in the indictment to plead guilty to, and there's a 14, 15 year old, which is named in the 2007 draft indictment, which was released. Michael, you're focusing, I am focusing on a federal document, there's a federal document which specifically alleges a 14 and 15 year old who are abused, including asking a 15 year old, if there is, this 2007 draft, you have read it, I know that you have.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  A draft indictment, you're gonna take his dispositive?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not gonna, okay, unfortunately, it was never, it was never contested because of the plea agreement, which eventually came forward. I mean, I think you're using the same tactic Alan Dershowitz did in his defense. Unfortunately, I have to.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  I have nothing to do with Dershowitz, or I don't share his tactical maneuvers.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  I unfortunately have to take my child to a doctor's appointment, David, as I flagged to all of you, and in the beginning of this entire thing, and I do want to say.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  I take you to be operating in good faith as well, Sager, for the most part, unlike a lot of people who have glommed onto this story, and you're willing to, you know, engage on the substance, so that, again, is appreciated by me, and you know, whenever you'd like to engage further, I'm always available.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  All right, Michael, thank you, David, for the invitation.

• 34:08David Sacks?

  Yes, thank you for coming, Sager, appreciate it. All right, so, Michael, let me kind of reset here.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 34:14David Sacks?

  I'm not sure you've had a chance to kind of lay out your case for what you called Epstein mythology.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:22David Sacks?

  So I want to give you a chance to kind of just lay out your thesis here, that what's happening is actually a type of moral panic, or feeding frenzy, a type of hysteria, you've compared it to the Salem witch trials.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:35David Sacks?

  There was also the case in the 1980s of the whole daycare child abuse.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  Satanic panic, that's what it's called.

• 34:42David Sacks?

  Where I think hundreds of people went to jail or were prosecuted for that, it turned out.

• 34:45Speaker 02

  I don't know if it was hundreds, but more than enough to make it a extreme miscarriage of justice.

• 34:52David Sacks?

  So that's the comparison you've made. So I guess I want to let you lay out that case in a clear way, because I'm not sure that you've had a chance to quite do that yet.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  I mean, I definitely laid out my case on this score and many other. Venues and on many other occasions, but I guess not on this particular podcast yet. So I'm happy to sketch it out. In terms of the Satanic Panic parallel, that's not one that I would have necessarily been most inclined to bring up until recently, just because there's now this new layer of the mythology that's added, been added with the production of these Epstein quote files, where people are reading snippets of emails to signify some kind of coded messaging around cannibalism or around grotesque child sacrifice. That really wasn't a hallmark of the Epstein story so much before this enormous tranche of emails were released.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  And it relates to the Satanic Panic frenzy insofar as claims around such things as like truly grotesque child sacrifice, mutilation of infants, you know, bathing toddlers in blood, like all the most nightmarish scenarios you could possibly dream up were alleged in the 1980s and taken deadly seriously by the authorities, resulting in, as you alluded to, a good number of people actually being thrown in prison for many years. And it was, it was found to be just a gigantic hoax. But maybe a more apt parallel that also would have been apt even before this latest

• 36:27Speaker 02

  record production is that the Satanic Panic frenzy of the 1980s was ultimately concluded to have originated really with one woman who was just straightforwardly mentally ill, delusional, needed to essentially be institutionalized, and yet she would make claims about sex, child sex abuse that the authorities countenanced or gave credence to. And there's a similar thing going on with the Epstein mythology. Now, when I mention the Epstein mythology, I'm not talking about the 2007, 2008 Florida non-prosecution agreement or that whole scenario that Sager brought up in piecemeal before. That's a different element of this whole story.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  The mythology developed later, mostly around 2014 with the introduction of these new claims by Virginia Roberts Gouffray and her lawyers, Bradley Edwards, Paul Cassell, later David Boies, in which she alleged that she had been child sex trafficked around the world.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  And that she knew that Epstein enforced this child sex trafficking operation via blackmail. And also she made specific allegations against three particular individuals, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, John Luke Brunel, and then also she accused a generic category of other high profile persons who she didn't specify as also victimizing her, like prime ministers and politicians and presidents and so forth. So that's the, basically the origin of what I would call the mythology, which is just sort of of a different order or magnitude than the initial Palm Beach prosecution, which was effectively a local crime.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  But in terms of the mythology, the parallel to the Satanic panic, Virginia Roberts Gouffre was a profoundly disturbed, mentally unwell person who was validated and legitimized and now continues to be celebrated as some kind of martyr for truth, even though if anybody had used a lick of discernment about as to her claims, it would have been found that she could not be treated so credulously. Maybe she needed some help, but this idea that she would be the basis for this global scandal that's rocking all these countries is just outrageous. And there are two others who are fundamentally, two other mentally ill women, and I don't say that even to be pejorative or derogatory at all. It's just objectively true.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  If you take a look, Maria Farmer is one of these other definitely mentally ill persons who, for example, introduced or was integral in introducing this idea that Epstein had cameras set up in all his bedrooms and bathrooms and was surreptitiously recording prominent people so he could use it for blackmail. And then another one, Sarah Ransom, was one of the people who spurred the mythology in large part around the island. So she came to claim after going through several mental health crises that she had been systematically raped at the island, even though when she actually had to eventually give that position, she really described nothing of the sort. She was also an adult when she went to the island voluntarily and she described what

• 39:38Speaker 02

  it was effectively a consensual, you know, minor sexual encounter with Epstein, but she dramatized it. Radically in the wake and people don't know, I mean, David, did you, did you know this? Or does anybody know that they're in the public know that despite everybody and their mother, including like Ro Khanna, Thomas Massey at all, declaring that the Epstein property in the US Virgin Islands, the private island, that it's rape island or pedophile island, that there's never been a credible allegation of rape ever discovered that that took place on that island? Like, is that well-known or am I crazy?

• 40:13David Sacks?

  No, it's not well-known. The only reason I knew is because I've heard you on a couple of podcasts. So I thought it was important to get you on as a counterpoint. So just with respect to these three women, they did go to the island. Is that true?

• 40:27Speaker 02

  Sarah Ransom did.

• 40:28David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Maria Farmer, no. Maria Farmer is the one who purported that she was actually the original Epstein accuser and she was this great hero whistleblower because she tried to sound the alarm way before all these other females were abused. She claims that in 1996, after she had been a 25-year-old employee of Epstein's, who basically sat at his front desk in his New York townhouse, that she was invited and accepted to go to the Ohio compound of Lexley Wexner to be an artist in residence of sorts because she was a painter. And then she claimed that over the course of her interactions with Epstein and Maxwell,

• 41:14Speaker 02

  she ended up filing a first attempted police report and then went to the FBI. And she never really specified what it is that she claimed that she reported to the FBI with any clarity. But she told this tale about how Epstein had supposedly stolen these photographs that she had produced of her younger sisters who were below the age of 18 so that she could use those photographs to paint paintings of her younger sisters in the nude. Now, I don't know. I mean, I guess that's a confession to production of child pornography, but. Technically speaking, but you know, but that's what she claimed. And then she also added that she had been sexually assaulted or abused or raped by both Epstein and Maxwell. And somehow, over the course of that assault, at age 26, she had like a divine revelation,

• 41:56Speaker 02

  literally, and realized that they were both pedophiles. This is how she recounted it years after the fact. And if you look at the police, that FBI intake report or the complaint that was memorialized that has come out in terms of the, what was contemporaneously documented, she mentioned nothing about a sexual assault. She mentions nothing about any kind of sex crime at all. She simply claims that these photos of hers were stolen and there's never been any evidence that those photos were actually stolen. So that's one person and she's come, and these three women, Ransom, Farmer, Roberts Gouffre, were all integral in different dimensions of the mythology. They were incredibly important, named plaintiffs

• 42:36Speaker 02

  in critical litigation. Criminal investigations were launched on the basis of their claims in various respects. And they're all just profoundly mentally ill, erratic, and wholly unreliable to the degree that if we're going to have an international pedophilic mass hysteria narrative that's at all predicated on their claims, then we've entered into a fantasy land because it will never in the future hold up to any kind of rational reevaluation or scrutiny at all.

• 43:07David Sacks?

  Okay, so Roberts Gouffre, or VRG, as I think you've called her in your Substack, when did she come forward with her story? Because she was the basis of that Netflix movie or documentary called Filthy Rich about Epstein. You're saying that that happened after the whole 2008 Palm Beach?

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll explain. By the way, Filthy Rich, which, over this past summer, when the Epstein Fuhrer kind of got reignited, it like skyrocketed, like the one of the, you know, the top of the charts on Netflix once again. So that little piece of commercial propaganda has been very determinative in terms of how people have had their perception shaped of this issue. And it is like literal propaganda, I would argue, in the sense that it was concocted as a PR vehicle for the quote unquote victims and especially their lawyers to create like a public clamor for some kind of remedial action to be taken against Epstein's co-conspirators

• 44:15Speaker 02

  or more more more relevantly, his estate. It was it was a maneuver. It was a PR maneuver by a legal team who worked alongside the producers of that documentary, as has has happened so much of the mass market entertainment products that have been produced around the Epstein affair. It's only taken from that one perspective of the purported victims. And that perspective is shaped very carefully by their lawyers to create this sanitized survivor narrative that is now the predominant one. But in terms of her origins, yes, she she initially filed some civil litigation around, I want to say, oh, nine, 2010, maybe

• 44:59Speaker 02

  oh, eight, as a Jane Doe, maybe 2011, somewhere in that range, as first as a Jane Doe, meaning she wasn't named in the litigation. And this related to a period of around 2001, 2002, when she was in the Epstein orbit to some extent. And there's, there's evidence that she was in the Epstein orbit to some extent. She's not hallucinating everything. I've argued that I would, she's not so much a liar, I wouldn't say. Like, I've never directly accused her of lying about anything as such. I've called, I've said that she's kind of confabulated in alternate reality. And that's a little bit different because it doesn't necessarily connote willful deceit. And it's almost even more disturbing if you think about it. But

• 45:42David Sacks?

  What's your basis for that? The big one, I guess, is that in your view, that she recanted her story about Dershowitz or?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, she recanted her story, not just about Dershowitz. That's maybe the most well-known instance of her recanting one of her marquee claims. And it really only came about because Dershowitz was unusually motivated to actually pursue some sort of resolution through a very protracted litigation process against very high-powered lawyers. I mean, one of the fallacies here is that these survivors, quote unquote, such as Virginia, are taken to be these beleaguered victims, et cetera, who had no power at all in this dynamic. And yet, I mean, they were represented by some of the most powerful and skillful lawyers in the country, such as David Boies, who's like one of the best-known lawyers of all time and was hugely well-resourced. And also, you know, Virginia Gray became incredibly wealthy, maybe not as wealthy

• 46:35Speaker 02

  as you, David, but, you know, 20, estimates range from like 15, 20, 25 billion dollars. It's hard to know because a lot of the settlement details are secret. So it wasn't just this hapless victim who had nothing, no leg to stand on in order to make her claims. But yeah, Dershowitz, she ended up recanting her allegations. And bear in mind, it wasn't just that she, you know, happened to level some accusation at some point, maybe in like casual banter. It's that she made allegations of herself having been victimized by Dershowitz sexually on at least six or seven occasions. And she described each individual instance of that victimization in vivid, graphic, almost

• 47:17Speaker 02

  grotesque detail, describing Dershowitz's body parts, sexual proclivities, et cetera. And she did this in sworn affidavits and under deposition. So could theoretically even be subject to perjury charges should a prosecutor ever have been inclined to bring them, which of course they wouldn't have been in this environment. But it goes much further. She had to recant claims against a Harvard professor, Stephen Coslin, who she claimed she had intercourse with. She recanted even claims against John Luke Brunel, who's another sort of actor or a player in this whole story that- Leads people to make their postulations about there being this supposedly international sex trafficking ring because he was like a modeling mogul, but he ends up getting arrested

• 48:00Speaker 02

  by French authorities under pressure from the US in 2019 after Epstein himself was federally indicted and arrested. And given the vagaries of the French legal system, which I don't fully comprehend still in relation to the United States, he was in custody or incarcerated for quite a long time prior to any formal charges being brought. Eventually, she's called to provide evidence against, Virginia is called from Australia to go to Paris to provide evidence against John Luke Brunel in 2021 in this format that is nothing that takes place in the US, but it's like where the both the defense and the prosecution have an ability to question or have colloquies with the accuser. And she ends up having to retract her claims against him as well. And, you know, they, her lawyers had to admit that this memoir that she produced or memoir

• 48:45Speaker 02

  manuscript that she produced in 2011 and 2012 that she was sort of scheming with this ghost writer who was potentially going to work with her, Sharon Churcher, a journalist at the Daily Mail. She was scheming about how they could get the biggest possible book deal or even like a movie deal or some kind of entertainment package deal. And she already had been paid 160,000 plus by the Daily Mail plus serialization revenue for having done an interview with them and given over the Prince Andrew photo. And then they wanted to marshal or leverage that momentum publicity wise from the Daily Mail's articles in 2011 into a book. And so Sharon Churcher, in this email exchange, you can go read it, it came out in litigation, says, hey, yeah, you know what, just like throw out, throw anybody's name and you can

• 49:27Speaker 02

  think of who might have had the most fleeting association with Jeffrey Epstein. And that'll get us the biggest possible book deal. That'll entice the most publishers and agents. And as to Dershowitz, yeah, I mean, he's pretty well known and we all think he's a pedo, so throw him in there too. I mean, that's what they're saying.

• 49:45David Sacks?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This is your interpretation of what happened with the book?

• 49:51Speaker 02

  No, it's almost literally what they say. I'm almost quoting verbatim. I'm not exactly quoting verbatim.

• 49:54David Sacks?

  Who said that? Who said that?

• 49:56Speaker 02

  This is what Churcher says to Virginia Roberts Gouffray, and she's all on board with it.

• 50:01David Sacks?

  Wait, how do we know that?

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Because we have the transcripts of the emails.

• 50:06David Sacks?

  Oh, wow. Okay.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  They came out of the course of discovery in litigation.

• 50:10David Sacks?

  And this person was.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  She was a Capable Trash journalist, yeah, who was working behind the scenes with Virginia.

• 50:17David Sacks?

  The book with her or what was?

• 50:18Speaker 02

  They were in talks for her to potentially be the co-author of the book. Uh, so they were, they were sort of strategizing as to how they could get a book deal or get a literary agent to sign on with Virginia and get her a lucrative book deal.

• 50:34David Sacks?

  And then what, what ended up happening?

• 50:38Speaker 02

  A draft manuscript was produced. I don't know exactly how involved Churchill was.

• 50:42David Sacks?

  Was there a book published or?

• 50:45Speaker 02

  Not initially. Finally, a version did eventually come out last October. After Virginia Roberts could phrase purported death in April of last year, and I only say purported because the circumstances of it are still bizarre. Look, I mean, I'm, I'm willing to grant that she is infected at this point, but I mean, that's another sort of tangent, but no, it didn't come out for a long time. A draft was produced and then the draft manuscript had to be, had to be, um, um, revealed or handed over, over the course of litigation with Dershowitz. And her lawyers by the, by 2017 to 2019 had to admit on her behalf, so David Boies at all, that this fiction, that, that this memoir manuscript,

• 51:28Speaker 02

  which had been presented as nonfiction, which was shopped around to potential book publishers as nonfiction, which had been the basis for a lot of media coverage around these allegations as, as though it were a nonfictional representation of her purported experiences. They finally have to admit that it was a fictionalized account of her purported experiences. So like for example.

• 51:50David Sacks?

  This is V R G's own lawyers admitted, like David Boies.

• 51:54Speaker 02

  Right. Yep.

• 51:55David Sacks?

  So they basically said that this manuscript, which had been the basis for her story and.

• 52:00Speaker 02

  A lot of the mythology, like Bill Clinton was on the island, she claimed. No evidence that Bill Clinton was ever on the island. He did fly around in Epstein's private jet in 2002 and 2003, but no evidence he ever went to the island. She claimed that she saw him on the island and which is false as far as we go, as far as we know, or as far as all the available evidence is ever suggested.

• 52:18David Sacks?

  That probably is one of the most repeated claims in respect to Epstein, which is that Bill Clinton was on the island. And you're saying that's just completely untrue. And that came from V R G's manuscript, which ultimately they had to admit was a work of fiction, not nonfiction, at least her own lawyers did.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  Correct, correct. But to but what's so mind boggling is that just relatively recently, after this whole blow up around Epstein got ignited last July, the book publishers obviously realized that it was a highly profitable opportunity for them to produce some version of her manuscript in the form of a new memoir. And that she had been working on a new version of it with another ghostwriter for some time, Amy Wallace, but they obviously wanted to peg the publication of it to this renewed Epstein uproar. So this her quote, the memoir finally gets published in some capacity in October of last year.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  It becomes an international bestseller, not just in the United States, but in Britain, Australia, et cetera. And I'm still stunned. I mean, maybe I can I don't I can no longer really be stunned anymore. But it's still stunning to think back on how credulously the reception to that memoir was, even though, I mean, it was basically just Amy Wallace, this ghostwriter, repackaging and massaging. Well, I always catch myself when I use the verb massage now. I shouldn't use that. Repackaging the initial memoir manuscript and basically updating it for 2025. And nowhere, nowhere do they, nowhere do they just do they disclose that it's based on a fictionalized manuscript? So it's just a fraud that was perpetrated.

• 54:01David Sacks?

  They ultimately did publish a version of the manuscript.

• 54:03Speaker 02

  Yes, last year.

• 54:04David Sacks?

  And did that book include the accusations against Dershowitz and Bill Clinton? Or had that been removed by that point?

• 54:11Speaker 02

  To clarify, those allegations of sexual improprieties against Dershowitz were not in the 2011 manuscript. Those were concocted later as a basis for Virginia Roberts Guffray to join this ongoing litigation that her lawyer Bradley Edwards had initiated around something called the Crime Victims Rights Act and how the non-prosecution agreement from 2007, 2008 had supposedly violated the Crime Victims Rights Act. It's a complicated issue, but that was debuted. Those claims against Dershowitz were debuted in December of 2014. But there are a bunch of other claims already in the manuscript from 2011, and there's a reference to Dershowitz, but it's just not an accusation of sexual misconduct.

• 54:54David Sacks?

  Okay, the three women that you mentioned, Guffray, Ransom, Farmer, did they have the same lawyers or different lawyers? Were the lawyers working together?

• 55:03Speaker 02

  Pretty much the same lawyers. I mean, it's basically the same cabal of lawyers. It's David's firm, and then Bradley Edwards' firm. Bradley Edwards was the initial lawyer that oversaw primarily the Florida, the purported victims from the Palm Beach phase from like 2002 to 2005. He started representing them around 2008, and then Boys came a little bit later around the more kind of grandiose litigation, but they were working, they've worked in conjunction with one another and still are. They're still suing in a class action lawsuit that they initiated last October, Bank of America, to extract a couple hundred more million dollars, just like they did from

• 55:43Speaker 02

  JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank and the Epstein estate and plenty of individualized lawsuits that they've alluded to, but never clarified the parameters of, like they brag, Bradley Edwards does, that they got like 20 or 25 settlements that are still secret, he says, from specific individuals whom he acknowledges may not have committed any wrongdoing at all, but just simply don't want to suffer the PR backlash that we're seeing now on steroids. So it's a hugely lucrative industry, and I don't know, you tell me, David, is this like dimension of this whole story ever mentioned anywhere in any of the popular media coverage, whether it's on podcasts or on CNN or anywhere?

• 56:21David Sacks?

  No. Okay, and even the Deutsche Bank settlement, I don't think I'd have heard of that. What was that?

• 56:27Speaker 02

  So, when Epstein dies, August 10th, 2019, right?

• 56:34Speaker 02

  A feeding frenzy breaks out in terms of litigation that is brought against his estate. Because at that point, Epstein is obviously no longer available to contest any claims that are made against him, and libel laws cease to apply. People are aware, obviously, that he was very wealthy. He wasn't like a multi-multi-billionaire, as a lot of people suspected at the time, but according to his disclosure of assets when he was arrested, his net worth was like 650 million. So, still a pretty big estate. And so, because of this flood of lawsuits against the estate, the executors of the estate, Darren Indike and Richard

• 57:16Speaker 02

  Kahn, decide to agree to coordinate with the victims' lawyers, Bradley Edwards, David Boies, et al., to set up a, basically, a mediation program that they call the Epstein Victims Compensation Fund, which is a holistic settlement process that victims, or alleged victims, could submit claims to, and then there would be a mediator brought in to evaluate the claims and decide what amount of money to give out. So, there wouldn't have to just be like a flood of individual lawsuits. They could kind of consolidate it. And so, they set up a settlement model, basically, for the Epstein estate, which was expressly non-adversarial, meaning there would be no adversarial scrutinization of the claims

• 58:00Speaker 02

  that were made to justify somebody's entitlement to millions of dollars. Claimants were entitled to as much as $5 million from just this one settlement fund. And it was tax-free, by the way.

• 58:14David Sacks?

  Wait, this is with Deutsche Bank?

• 58:16Speaker 02

  No, no, this is the Epstein estate. I'm getting to Deutsche Bank because it ties into the Epstein estate. From the Epstein estate, this Epstein estate was first in the chronology of settlements. And so, they set up a settlement model, right? It's a non-adversarial, confidential, tax-free, because they claim that it applies under, that it could be categorized under the IARS code as like compensation for an injury, so therefore you don't have to pay income taxes on it. And so, that gets set up, right? And then-

• 58:40David Sacks?

  And who adjudicates that?

• 58:43Speaker 02

  The court in the US Virgin Islands, because the state was domiciled in the US Virgin Islands, appointed on the recommendation of both parties, a, an independent mediator or administrator, Simona Lelchuk, her name is, who specialized, she claimed, anyway, in this sort of thing, and like, she had an extra sensitivity towards sexual assault victims, she claimed. I mean, it's kind of a phony, we don't want to get sucked into that necessarily tangent, but, yeah, so there's an independent administrator, and that was modeled, they said, on previous consolidated settlement mechanisms, such as like the Jerry

• 59:22Speaker 02

  Sandusky, I don't know if you recall the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State, where claims were made that this football coach had abused a bunch of boys, and so a consolidated settlement program was set up to pay out settlements to claimants.

• 59:36David Sacks?

  Okay, got it. So that's the Epstein estate, so let's get to the Deutsche Bank aspect.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  So then they, they, they take that model that had been set up for the Epstein estate, and then they start going after bank, major multinational banking institutions that David Boies and Bradley Edwards decide to, very creatively and cleverly, I have to say, allege were complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's, like, world-spanning child sex trafficking operation, and therefore reliable.

• 1:00:01David Sacks?

  Wait, what is the nexus between Deutsche Bank or Bank of America and Epstein? Were those the banks that he used?

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Epstein banked at those institutions. So first JP Morgan from like the late 90s to 2013 roughly, and then Deutsche Bank from 2013 to 2019.

• 1:00:17David Sacks?

  And the argument is that they should have somehow stopped his activities?

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that they were.

• 1:00:22David Sacks?

  Or failed to do a KYC or something like that?

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, they, they, they, they first started making a much more accusatory argument about their direct complicity in facilitating a sex trafficking operation, but what the judge ultimately agreed to was to that they were effectively, or they were reasonably guilty or reasonably to be found liable for essentially negligence, because Epstein would withdraw cash.

• 1:00:49Speaker 02

  And that's supposed to trigger certain monitoring provisions that it was claimed JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank did not satisfactorily do. I mean, it was kind of like a stretch of an argument, frankly.

• 1:00:59David Sacks?

  I get it.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  But because of the popular climate around, oh, anybody who was involved in this in any way has to pay for all this pedophilic sex trafficking, there wasn't a whole lot really that the lawyers for those banking institutions could do to take the heat off.

• 1:01:12David Sacks?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  So they settled, right?

• 1:01:14David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 1:01:15Speaker 02

  So there are two more settlement funds.

• 1:01:16David Sacks?

  How big are those settlement funds? Those two?

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  So JP Morgan was, ended up totaling around 290 million. And the lawyers end up convincing the judge who presided over this agreement in New York, the federal judge, Rakoff, to grant them 30% in legal fees or attorney's fees that they claimed. And Deutsche Bank was around 90 million or 80 million, maybe.

• 1:01:42David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  So just add those up now. So the Epstein estate was around, if I'm remembering, 121 million, and that's gone up actually since even more litigation's been filed, separated apart from the class action settlement. JP Morgan, 290, Deutsche Bank around 80 or 90. So we're already at like a half a billion dollar industry. And there's plenty of other lawsuits and settlements that have been spawned from this thing. And so I just have never understood, or I do understand it, so I should correct myself. I've always found it perversely amazing that this whole aspect of this story is never mentioned because it's led to such things as this gross inflation of the total number of victims, where you have adult women who are eligible.

• 1:02:25David Sacks?

  You're saying that there's financial incentives. You're saying there's financial incentives here. And just the lawyers are, these are contingency fee plaintiffs' lawyers? They get like 30% or what's their, I mean, these guys are not paid by the hour, right? They're, they get?

• 1:02:37Speaker 02

  Well, no. Well, could that, I don't think it's, no, not, it's not a contingency fee.

• 1:02:42David Sacks?

  Okay.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Set up for this. They, they got the judge to approve.

• 1:02:47Speaker 02

  A 30% earmark of the resulting settlement funds to be given over for attorney's fees. So it wasn't a contingent based on the client, it was that the judge approved 30% of the overall settlement.

• 1:03:01David Sacks?

  Got it. So the lawyers who sort of organized these settlement pools.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:03:07David Sacks?

  Negotiated essentially their cut upfront.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  With the judge, right.

• 1:03:11David Sacks?

  With the judge, and you're saying that was about 30% of all these.

• 1:03:14Speaker 02

  It was exactly 30%.

• 1:03:15David Sacks?

  Okay, okay, got it.

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  But if you have a set of criteria that are so lax, I mean, JP Morgan even had even more lax criteria than the Epstein estate, which basically allowed anybody who ever like came within two football fields of Jeffrey Epstein to file a claim against him and get a few million dollars tax-free. But the JP Morgan settlement was even more lax. So there are people who are eventually basically rejected. The few who are rejected from the Epstein estate fund end up getting a settlement from, some of them anyway, the JP Morgan or Deutsche Bank fund. So that's, so this woman Lisa Phillips, who was like an adult model,

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  never made any claim about anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein that was wrongful for like 20 years, said on a podcast publicly that she had no idea what these girls were talking about when they make these allegations against Jeffrey Epstein. As of 2020, she said this, by 2023, she's getting, you know, she never, I asked her, she didn't disclose to me her full amount, but you know, probably around 2 million at least. And then they get free healthcare from yet another settlement between the US Virgin Islands, the government of the US Virgin Islands and JP Morgan, that they set aside for just free healthcare for, until 2028 for any alleged Epstein victim.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  And it's just like, don't people recognize how that could be incentivized, this inflation of the number of total victims we're told must exist and that thus gives rise to this mass hysteria and moral panic about like thousands of victims? I mean, at this Bondi, Pam Bondi hearing that was so contentious last week in the House Judiciary Committee, you had people screaming thousands of victims need, you know, demand justice. And it's just like a concoction that is not grounded in any.

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  Approximation of like empirical fact. So I always say if people want to be mad at Pam Bondi and Cash Patel for something, be mad at them for signing off on that ridiculous memo from last July where they include that figure of over a thousand victims that has given fuel to the most maximalist conceptions of Epstein mythology in terms of the victims that were left in their wake. I mean, Sager always wants to, and I shouldn't maybe say too much, I'm not, and I'm not trying to impugn him at all, but I do get a lot of people on the internet doing a variation with Sager did, saying, hey, let's just talk about the intel ties. Forget all this, you know, gossip stuff around.

• 1:05:31David Sacks?

  Well, they are interesting. I mean, the intel ties are interesting, right?

• 1:05:34Speaker 02

  Sure. I'm, you know, the whole story is interesting. It's interesting that Epstein apparently met Michael Jackson in his Palm Beach house and photos of it came out. It's interesting that he consorted with everyone from Donald Trump to Bill Clinton. I agree. It's interesting.

• 1:05:46David Sacks?

  Right. Let me bring up one sort of criticism of you and then I want to give Kevin a chance to get in here. So, look, I think it's very important that we hold this process to evidentiary standards. Like you're saying, I think that people's motivations need to be examined, especially like the lawyers who are bringing these cases who are, you know, reaping hundreds of millions of dollars. So I think you are, and I think even Sager admitted this, I think are playing an extremely important role in this process by bringing some rigor and accountability to a lot of these claims. And I think that's really important. At the same time, you're not really offering an explanation of so many aspects that are so interesting about Epstein.

• 1:06:31David Sacks?

  And I'm not saying it's necessarily your duty to do that, but I'm wondering, you know, do you have a theory of how did he accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars? How did he get so connected? Some people like Mike Benz have said that it all goes back to Burr Sterns, where he says that one of his accounts was BCCI, which was this notorious international bank that was involved, eventually was shut down because it was involved in international money laundering and crimes, things like that. So I think this is Mike Benz's theory. In any event, do you have a theory that would provide a satisfactory explanation for so many of the threads that we see? Or do you just feel like it's not really your job to

• 1:07:14David Sacks?

  do that? And your job is really more just to poke holes in, you know, what are some of the more outlandish claims of politicians or lawyers?

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Well, I'm happy to address any little data point that people want to throw out at me. I mean, I do that all day, every day, pretty much. So it's not like I'm trying to avoid anything or be at all evasive, right? So people ask me all the time, okay, how did he make his money? What about Leslie Wexner, et cetera, et cetera? So it's not like I'm unaccustomed to addressing any of this stuff. It's just that I feel like there's a bit of a fallacy or a logical flaw in attempting to say that it's incumbent on me to proffer some kind of ultimate totalizing theory. I have a theory I could sketch out that maybe explains some of what people would like to know in such, you know, that people are so titulated by. But I think, again, one of the things, one of the reasons why the coverage of the story

• 1:08:09Speaker 02

  has been so horribly bad is that speculation has replaced fact. And we have this whole mythology or folklore that's developed and that people just kind of ambiently absorb and then they end up just believing things that are totally false. So for example, people just believe, and I'm sure that you've seen this, that Epstein must have referred to his private plane as the Lolita Express. Therefore, anybody who was ever on the plane must have known that this was like a child sex trafficking plane, because why else would it be named the Lolita Express after the famous book about a 12-year-old girl or whatever who was a sexual object? It's just like false. I mean, that was, there's never been any evidence for that. It was a nickname that was invented like by, it was a cheeky nickname invented by this British tabloid.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  And so that's just one example of all this flotsam that gets...

• 1:08:56David Sacks?

  Okay, but to go back, do you have a theory of how specifically Epstein got started? Because somehow, I guess it was in the 80s, he went from someone who was just a trader at Bear Stearns to very quickly amassing a fortune that, I don't know, seems like hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, like you said, he died with about 650 million. I don't know how big the fortune was in the 1980s. We know that Wexner sold him the townhouse. I guess one of the details that came out the other day, as Wexner said, it was at, what he was told was fair market value, and Epstein obtains his plane from Wexner. So, I mean, is that the explanation? That somehow he got his start because Wexner was extraordinarily generous towards him?

• 1:09:40David Sacks?

  Like, I'm just curious, like...

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  Not quite.

• 1:09:45Speaker 02

  So, I mean, there was a huge New York Times article that was one of the few helpful contributions to the popular knowledge around Jeffrey Epstein recently in December, where they go through, I mean, they basically set out to answer the question that everybody always asks with like a wink and a nod, as though they think that the asking of the question is supposed to prove that the answer would be fundamentally sinister, meaning how did Jeffrey Epstein make his money? Because the idea is that he must have made his money by dint of his orchestration of this pedophilic sex trafficking ring that he enforced by blackmail at the direction of the Mossad or something like that. And the New York Times goes into fairly forensic detail about how he ended up accumulating money over the course of

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  the 1980s. So people could go read that if they'd like. I mean, I do think that it's fair to say, and saying this does not mean that you have to have to condone everything that Jeffrey Epstein ever did over the course of his entire life, but I do think that he was definitely very high intelligence. I do think that he was highly proficient in mathematics as a young man, which is why he, part of why he became a math teacher at the Dalton School, a pretty prestigious private school in Manhattan, then ends up getting recruited to Bear Stearns, and ends up innovating some novel financial maneuvers that you're probably much more fluent in than me in terms of describing, because I'm not a finance guy, but it was around a time where there was a demand for Wall Street to innovate new tactics for very high net worth

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  individuals to structure their wealth, to lessen their tax burden, to do all kinds of other things. And Epstein did so, and then he leaves Bear Stearns, so he rose to the ranks of Bear Stearns pretty quickly. So around age 24, 25, he was like a partner, or he had some relatively high ranking position relative to the rest of the workforce at Bear Stearns at a young age. He starts up his own boutique. Financial advisory firm that's tailored specifically to very high net worth individuals, such as ultimately Leslie Wexner, who is one of the wealthiest people in the United States. Yes, they do have, he was, Wexner was definitely Epstein's most important client. They, there was the power of attorney that was handed over, which is seen unto itself

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  on the internet to be either inherently sinister or to show us that, of course, Epstein must have been in some kind of like pedophilic collusion with Wexner. But, I mean, it's explicable if you actually want to know what it was about. At a certain point, people just want to have to have the ability to keep asking that question with like a gleam in their eye as though the, they're supposed to, it's supposed to imply that there is this, like that the pedo sex trafficking is the ultimate answer to everything. But, you know, Ghislaine Maxwell, when she gave her proffer interview last summer to the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanch, in the very first time, amazingly enough, that she was asked by any US government official to simply describe her experiences with Jeffrey Epstein, imagine that. Despite having been integral, we've been told all these years, in the running of the most

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  prolific child sex trafficking operation, I guess, in world history. Only in July 2025 did any government official ever just ask her to describe what her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was all about. And she said that she observed Epstein doing a lot of work that would seem very complicated and intense to her in terms of his financial business. So, for example, Maxwell says Epstein ended up basically restructuring all of the finances for Wexner's business holdings. And, you know, he owned The Limited, he owned Victoria's Secret, other kinds of women's clothing outfits and retailers, he had real estate developments. And Epstein was basically the money guy for all of it. And for a man who, in their early 90s, was already worth like a couple of billion, Wexner,

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  that is, if Epstein is getting like a yearly cut of the revenues, that could add up over time, right? Then they had a handful of other very high net worth clients, like Elizabeth Johnson, who was an heiress to the Johnson and Johnson fortune, Leon Black, the hedge fund manager. So you don't need that many extremely high net worth clients, right? If you're their go-to money manager, to eventually build up a pretty nice sized fortune, I would imagine. So I'm not saying we have a full accounting of like every penny that he ever accumulated over the course of his life, but we have quite a bit of information. And it just occurs to me that some, the people who are, who most loudly ask, how did he get his money, almost don't even want to know or read into.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  The information that is currently available.

• 1:14:04David Sacks?

  All right. Well, I mean, it is kind of unusual that a money manager in that position would obtain that much money so quickly. I'll just say like from my experience with the money management business, they're not generally able to charge that much. But let me put a pin in that because I want to let Kevin Bass get in here. I've been following your feed quite a bit. You are basically a startup entrepreneur who had got interested in the Epstein files. I think you used AI to analyze them. And in particular, you've been looking at Reid Hoffman's story about Epstein. And you've put together an analysis, I think you've called it the Reid Hoffman files. I've been following your tweets and it's quite interesting. Let's start with how you got into this,

• 1:14:49David Sacks?

  what got you interested and how you've been doing your research.

• 1:14:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. So originally I just saw that there was kind of a conflict on social media about Reid Hoffman. I didn't know much about the Epstein files or about that particular conflict, but I was curious. I had built some really sophisticated AI tools, you know, mostly using like vectorized SQL databases and some of the MCP stuff with the new agents. And for some other purposes. And so I wanted to port those over to see if I could resolve some of these questions. Elon had some very strong opinions about Hoffman's involvement with Epstein and he's usually at least,

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  if he's not always directly in the bull's eye, he's usually at least a few inches away. So I wanted to go check those out. And then, you know, they came out and I guess late January, January 30th, the big ones that the big drop that recently happened. And so I just, I started going through the Reid Hoffman part in particular. And I essentially started to try to organize, or I have organized most of my analyses around some core claims that Hoffman made about his involvement with Epstein. And I've just been asking the question. Are these claims true? Are they supported by the record or are they contradicted by the record? And overwhelmingly, like absolutely overwhelmingly, they appear to be contradicted relentlessly

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  by the the drop that came out in January 30th. If you want, I can go through some of the big ones and then I can also talk about.

• 1:16:29David Sacks?

  Yeah, maybe maybe a place to start is with Reid Hoffman's statement in 2019 to Axios. This is when, I guess, the Epstein scandal first, I think, became national news and people who are closely associated with him felt the need to characterize their relationship with him, to distance themselves, to explain how they knew him or how closely they knew him. And Reid's statement at that time was the following. Let me just read this out. This is Reid Hoffman speaking. My few interactions with Jeffrey Epstein came at the request of Joey Ito for the purposes of fundraising for the MIT Media Lab.

• 1:17:12David Sacks?

  Prior to these interactions, I was told by Joey that Epstein had cleared the MIT vetting process, which was the basis for my participation. My last interaction with Epstein was in 2015. Still, by agreeing to participate in any fundraising activity where Epstein was present, I helped to repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice for this, I am deeply regretful.

• 1:17:35Speaker 02

  Oh, give me a break.

• 1:17:36David Sacks?

  Is that statement accurate?

• 1:17:39Speaker 03

  Not at all. And in fact, it's not just from 2019. He even reiterated this on February 4th this year on X repeatedly. He said, I only know Jeffrey Epstein because of fundraising relationship with MIT, which I very much regret. These meetings were coordinated by Joey Ito, then director of MIT Media Lab. And he also says, yes, with Joey Ito, the director of MIT Media Lab, who asked me to help MIT fundraise with Epstein, I regret, blah, blah, blah. Like, none of that's at all true. There's very few mentions of even fundraising with MIT. I would even go so far as to say, I don't know.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  I've said it this way on some of my posts, but it's like the extent of the relationship between Epstein and Reid Hoffman, it almost looks like best friends. Like my best friends, I don't interact with as anywhere near as much as Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein did over, you know, between 2013 and 2019. There are constant contact. There's something around on the order of about 400 initiations by Hoffman to Epstein. It wasn't just mediated by Joe Ito at all. And, you know, their assistants were in constant contact with

• 1:19:01Speaker 03

  each other. They had extensive financial relationships. There's something like 42 different meetings that are documented. Around 20 are absolutely confirmed. They met in person for breakfast. They would spend each other, spend time with each other's houses overnight. Epstein met his wife. It is claimed that by Hoffman that he only was there for one night. Even the one time that we have absolutely documented that documented that he's referring to, he was there for two nights. And almost certainly, there was two other island visits as well. In addition, it's an extraordinarily extensive personal and

• 1:19:43Speaker 03

  business relationship. And it's not just about Joe Ito. Now, Joe Ito was a really important part of it. Joe Ito was sort of, as far as I can tell, again, you guys know a lot more about this than I do, but as far as I could tell, really going through the files over the last couple of days, Joe Ito was sort of Epstein's gateway into sort of academia, Cambridge, Harvard, science. That's, that's sort of his main gateway there. Reid Hoffman was his gateway into Silicon Valley, into tech, the main guy. And so there is a very close relationship as well between Joe Ito and Hoffman. But there is also very much an independent relationship between Hoffman and Jeff Epstein, very much independent of Joe Ito.

• 1:20:30David Sacks?

  Okay, so Reed claimed that he only had a few interactions with Epstein. That's false. You're saying he had hundreds? Hundreds. Including dozens of in-person meetings and Yes. Stay at the island at least once. You said for two nights, not one, and there were probably a second or third visit. Yes. There was the stay at the townhouse. Reed claimed that all of his interactions were sort of mediated by Joey Ito and were about the MIT Media Lab. By the way, it's not clear why someone would feel compelled to spend so much time fundraising for MIT, which wasn't even their alma mater. So this whole explanation didn't really make a lot of sense from the

• 1:21:11David Sacks?

  beginning, but it's pretty clear that the topics of conversation were not about MIT or MIT Media Lab. In fact, I thought one detail that was really kind of interesting was their first interaction, one of the first, was about they bonded over a book called Deception, which I haven't read the book. I don't know what the thesis is, but it appears to justify the use of deception in certain circumstances. Anyway, I just think that was ironic, I guess, if nothing else. But look, I, you know-

• 1:21:46Speaker 02

  Can I make a quick comment?

• 1:21:46David Sacks?

  Yes, go ahead. Yeah, Michael, go ahead. Do you want to be Reed's defense attorney in this context?

• 1:21:51Speaker 02

  Not exactly, although I end up, I guess, putting myself into a position where it can come across that way. I'm really trying to be the defense attorney for, like, sanity.

• 1:22:00David Sacks?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 02

  So here's what I would say. I have to just reject the whole premise of this discussion that is so ubiquitous now, which is that anybody who so much as exchanged a chortling email with Jeffrey Epstein, and I know Reid Hoffman apparently had a closer relationship with Epstein than just one email here or there, but the principle that anybody who had some interaction of some degree, to some degree or another, Jeffrey Epstein now has something that they have to issue these mealy-mouthed, melodramatic statements of profound apology for is just so tedious and ridiculous. What are they guilty of? If the implication is

• 1:22:40Speaker 02

  that they're by association guilty of enabling pedophilic sex trafficking, that is a flagrant misconception. Do people know, how come it's never clarified that Jeffrey Epstein was never even accused?

• 1:22:54Speaker 02

  Of committing any illicit sexual acts against any person under the age of 18 after the year 2005. So I don't know what years Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein interacted, but this idea that he was like looking the other way while all these preteens were being raped is just nonsense, but the media never clarifies it. So now we have everybody from Noam Chomsky to Steve Bannon, being told that their reputation is in tatters and they are themselves like by association, some sort of like sex criminal enablers. And it's just, it's just a total fantasy.

• 1:23:27Speaker 03

  So Michael.

• 1:23:28Speaker 02

  Moral panic.

• 1:23:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. Michael, I think this, I think you're making some really interesting points. I think they're important. I think.

• 1:23:35Speaker 02

  I mean, Epstein pleaded guilty to two prostitution charges in 2008. You're saying Reid Hoffman and Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon should have all said, oh, because the guy pleaded guilty to two prostitution charges with they were, which they were, that means nobody can ever consort with him ever again for the rest of his life. I think that's a ridiculous standard.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  There's two, there's two different issues here. One is whether or not there's this global pedophile ring and you know, we can even go further and there's this satanic rituals and all this other stuff, which I'm inclined to think that you're, you're very close to the truth in what you're saying. On the other hand, there are Reid Hoffman's public statements, like dramatically minimizing the relationship. Now.

• 1:24:21Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:24:22Speaker 03

  I think that can easily, obviously be explained. There's an obvious explanation where we don't have to necessarily impugn to Reid Hoffman, you know, being a pedophile or any of these other things that people are wanting to suggest because he lied. And the alternative explanation is just that this is such a hot potato. There is hysteria. So people lie about their relationship with Epstein, even though they're not guilty of something that's terrible behind the scenes.

• 1:24:49Speaker 02

  Any association at all is radio with Epstein is radioactive. I mean, but so if somebody lies, then I mean, they can be condemned for the lie because lying itself is condemnable. Like Howard Lutnick made up a ridiculous lie that was totally pointless and actually counterproductive for his purposes. And the lie itself can be condemnable, but not necessarily because Howard Lutnick is covering up any kind of pedophilic sex criminality, just because of the moral hysteria that's been allowed to be unleashed around this stuff. Or like any connection in any way to Epstein is like grounds for censure.

• 1:25:20David Sacks?

  Yeah, and all right, let me tell you my point of view on this. So first of all, I think you're correct that there's a lot of guilt by association happening and there is a little bit of a feeding frenzy. And like you said, just because someone emailed Epstein doesn't mean that they were involved with him in some nefarious way. And I thought it was unfair when Saagar mentioned that Jason had, you know, emails with Epstein back in 2011 to make an introduction. I think that's

• 1:25:47Speaker 02

  I hadn't even seen that. I mean,

• 1:25:49David Sacks?

  Yeah, I think that's

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  It's not important enough even to draw my attention. Like, who cares?

• 1:25:52David Sacks?

  It's a

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  There's plenty of interesting material in the files, but like random emails.

• 1:25:55David Sacks?

  No, no, and I agree. And that's why I tried to defend Jason there is because I know that there was just nothing to that. Now, in the case of Reed, I think that there's a couple of things that are interesting about this. Number one is when this new Epstein files drop happened, Reed came out on X and very aggressively started pointing the finger at other people wildly accusing both Elon Musk and Donald Trump of somehow being involved in Epstein's purported crimes. And this is just a classic case of someone throwing stones while living in a glass house. I mean, you look at his own statements from 2019 all

• 1:26:39David Sacks?

  the way up to weeks ago, and they don't hold water at all. He lies about the extent of his relation with Epstein, how many times they met, what the subject matter was, what the context was, how many times he visited the island potentially. I mean, just one lie after another, while again wildly accusing other people. And you do have to just ask, what is going on here?

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03David Sacks?

  And

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  I mean, that just goes to show how weaponizable this whole thing is and how the Epstein story or any kind of tangential connection to Epstein can be leveraged to serve some kind of pre-existing agenda. So if like Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk don't like each other, then they could accuse each other of like having a more, a closer connection to Epstein than they did. And it's just like a slugfest. And yet I'm still struggling to understand like what the underlying accusation of wrongdoing is supposed to be above and beyond just how perhaps Reid Hoffman and/or Musk or whomever might have misrepresented the relationship.

• 1:27:42Speaker 02

  Well, the question, the question is also partly like, why did he need to so aggressively attack others? Why did he need to so aggressively lie about the relationship? Is it just that he's covering himself because of a moral hysteria? Or is there, I don't know?

• 1:27:58David Sacks?

  Well, I mean, my, my theory on this, I think it's kind of obvious what he's doing is that by pointing the finger at Trump or Elon, actually both, he's driving everyone into their partisan tribes.

• 1:28:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:12David Sacks?

  So as to, I think, seek protection of the Democrat tribe, to which he's contributed hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think it's worked. I mean, you look at the mainstream media coverage of this, the New York Times coverage of it, which we talked about in a previous episode of the show, they wrote an article about Epstein's ties to Silicon Valley. Other people who had far less extensive of a relationship with Epstein got paragraphs in that story. Reid Hoffman was only mentioned in one sentence along with three other people. So he does seem to be getting a pass from, you know, Michael, if, you know, you want to characterize this as a feeding frenzy or moral panic or hysteria, what have you, whatever it is, he seems to be getting a pass from the media. And my point about this

• 1:28:56David Sacks?

  has not been to accuse Reid of crimes because I don't think we have any basis for that whatsoever. Let me just state that clearly.

• 1:29:04Speaker 02

  Wasn't there a fallacy of all this then?

• 1:29:06David Sacks?

  No, well, let me get to that. But my point has just been that the media needs to cover this in a fair and even-handed way as opposed to, like you said, weaponizing it to go after the people they don't like because there's political advantage in that.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Or another parallel is Hillary Clinton just came out this week and gave an interview on the BBC where she said, we, the Clintons, Bill and I, we had no real connections with Epstein, but Donald Trump, we can just assume as unassailably true that he's in the process of orchestrating a cover up because he has something to hide. And then on the other hand, Trump will toggle back and forth between Bill Clinton and Larry Summers and Reid Hoffman. They're the ones who are truly implicated by their association with Epstein. I had nothing really to do with the guy. And then the next day he'll say, oh, I'm a little upset or rueful that Bill Clinton's been dragged into this mess. And it just gets, you know, framed around, organized around just like a partisan battering ram. And it just becomes incredibly

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  tedious because there doesn't even have to be any more any concrete allegation of any wrongdoing whatsoever. There's no credible allegation of any pedophilic wrongdoing by either Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, any of us. Like, what are we talking about here ultimately? We're like in this other domain of like, who can establish the most damning guilt by association, even though nobody can spell out what the guilt is supposed to be tied to?

• 1:30:29David Sacks?

  Well, and but here's the question is, why did Reid so brazenly lie about his relationship with Epstein? It could just be

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  Why did Howard Letnick lie?

• 1:30:39David Sacks?

  Well, it could just be that he wants to protect his reputation in business by minimizing the association. But obviously, when you lie that extensively and that brazenly about it, it is going to make people think that you have something to cover up. And, you know, I think that

• 1:30:56Speaker 02

  People think a lot of dumb things. I mean, is there like any evidence at all that would that would tie Reid Hoffman to some kind of child sex crime? Not that I know of.

• 1:31:03David Sacks?

  No, I'm not accusing him of that.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  So if people think that's what's being covered up, then they should be disabused of that fallacious notion, rather than countenancing the notion and allowing the mass hysteria to continue proliferating unhindered?

• 1:31:17David Sacks?

  Can I ask you something, Michael? What evidence is there for?

• 1:31:22David Sacks?

  So on the island or in general, what evidence is there that people were being trafficked? Maybe not minors? Did that actually, were people actually going to the island for that purpose? Was that that extensive or not?

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  It's impossible to know what people even mean by trafficking anymore. Trafficking is incredibly nebulous concept. It's very much open to the whims and discretion of prosecutors who seek to fit some fact pattern to a desire to prosecute somebody for some sort of Sexual related offense if it involves simply facilitating the movements of somebody from point A to point B. So if adult women consensually flew on an airplane to go visit a luxury island in the Caribbean and over the course of that visit, maybe they engage in some consensual sex act. And then 20 years later, they can retroactively classify it as trafficking and that will entitle them to like millions of dollars in tax-free

• 1:32:23Speaker 02

  settlement money. Are we going to take at face value that that constitutes trafficking? Because I don't. So I'm always a little bit mystified as to what we're supposed to understand as trafficking now.

• 1:32:32Speaker 03

  So your overall perspective on this is basically that a lot of the discourse about this is constructed and we don't really understand the underlying facts. Is that your?

• 1:32:41Speaker 02

  I mean, I understand the underlying facts to the greatest degree that I can ascertain them. And I think that they are just chronically and almost unbelievably mischaracterized everywhere you look.

• 1:32:52David Sacks?

  Let me get you to react to this tweet that someone just mentioned you on.

• 1:32:56Speaker 02

  Uh oh, here we go. A brilliant feedback.

• 1:33:01David Sacks?

  Well, this is, okay, this is a guy, I don't know this guy, present witness. But this is what he's saying is the evidence. Okay. So I just, you know, I want to get your reaction to.

• 1:33:11Speaker 02

  Evidence of what?

• 1:33:11David Sacks?

  Well, let me read this for people who are just listening and can't see the screen. And then I'll get your reaction to it. So he says, here's the evidence. $160 million from Leon Black, $50 million townhouse and power of attorney over Wexner's estate, cameras in his residence wired by Israeli government, compromising photos of Prince Andrew Clinton, etc. Confirmed sex trafficking of underage girls from Maxwell Brunel and others. Teaching job with William Barr, parentheses, CIA. Khashoggi was a client of Epstein, parentheses, money laundering for intelligence, question mark. Advisor to Ehud Barak and the Rothschilds. Rummler, who is the chief legal officer at Goldman Sachs and former White House counsel under Obama, was a key advisor and backup executor of his will. There are millions of

• 1:33:54David Sacks?

  files still redacted, none have been released by CIA, State Department. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone telling you that there's nothing to see here is attempting to whitewash the most important revealing intelligence-related story of our lifetimes. And then he calls you out here. Michael Tracy doesn't understand the difference between evidence and proof and is certainly exploiting sexually abused women for engagement.

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  I mean, first of all, I don't know what that guy is even arguing all that stuff is supposed to be evidence of. Like, what is the ultimate contention that he's claiming those myriad scattered data points are supposed to justify? I mean, that's what's so strange about this story. Nobody can really ever articulate. Like, Sager struggled to articulate what I suspect actually is his ultimate belief, which is that there was some kind of pedo trafficking operation. Like, I think said that he agreed with the Thomas Massey quote that I read out to him, but on its face, that's sort of like a bizarre statement to make. So they latch on to this other peripheral stuff around intelligence and whatnot. And that guy said,

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  "How dare anyone ever say there's nothing to see here?" And he ascribed that to me. I've never said, "There's nothing to see here." People tell me all the time that I allegedly have said, "There's nothing to see here," but I don't say that at all. I'm pretty much as obsessed, if not more obsessed, with this story than anyone at this point, to a degree that's probably not very healthy mentally.

• 1:35:18David Sacks?

  But you're obsessed with it in the sense that you think this is a modern-day Salem witch trial.

• 1:35:30Speaker 02

  Right. Which is fascinating.

• 1:35:31David Sacks?

  Yeah. So you're fascinated from like a sociological standpoint, which is, have humans evolved beyond, you know, where they were hundreds of years ago, engaging in witch hunts and things like that? Or do you think it's interesting in other ways?

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  I think it's interesting in other ways, definitely in that way as well. But there are other ways in which it's interesting. I think it's almost interesting as an anthropological survey of sorts among, you know, elite movers and shakers, you could say, where Epstein did have this extraordinary ability to network and to convene people who probably otherwise would never have been convened. So I've been saying that I think Jeffrey Epstein is the only man on Earth who could have brought together for a friendly social pow-wow, Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon. Like, I'm almost jealous of that. I mean, I'm sure that would have been a very fascinating discussion to listen in on, right? And there are other

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  examples. And so I think it's interesting from that perspective. I mean, I think everything that, every little piece of information that can be uncovered about Jeffrey Epstein's life is now almost intrinsically interesting, just given the salience of the story, right? So I guess I'm... Interested just from that perspective because like obviously he's now a historic or world historic even figure. And so yeah, I'm always, I'm always down to find out something new about what Jeffrey was up to. So sure, I think it's interesting politically, just in terms of how this can be leveraged into some sort of political battering ram against enemies. And, you know, this is like the number one oppositional Trump narrative of

• 1:37:11Speaker 02

  the second term. It's almost Russiagate redux in the outsized prominence that, that Democrats are giving it in terms of what they bring up day after day in hopes of it undercutting Trump or bedeviling him. So

• 1:37:28David Sacks?

  Yeah, it does seem to be like the, the new, new Russiagate in that way where every possible tangential fact is somehow connected.

• 1:37:37Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:37:37David Sacks?

  And the whole thing kind of metastasizes and is used in a partisan weaponized way.

• 1:37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. And but, but it's different in that there's an international component. Like this is the number one scandal right now that's ravaging Norway, Slovakia, I was mentioning, obviously Great Britain today, and other places, you know, United Arab Emirates, name your country. So there's an, like, it's been internationalized, which is just fascinating as well. They, didn't, didn't they burn like an effigy of Jeffrey Epstein in Iran or something? I mean, it just never ends. So of course, there's like infinite fascinating material, at least to me. I just don't accept that in order to be fascinated by this, we must buy, we must, you know, have this weird epistemology where we can just collect all these discrepant little pieces of information, blast them out on the internet, and then

• 1:38:28Speaker 02

  just think that we've done the argumentative and logical work necessarily, necessary to somehow establish how that proves our ultimate notions about what the story is supposed to signify, which again, is pedophilic sex trafficking enforced by blackmail that ensnared prominent individuals at the direction of some intelligence agency. That's the crux of the Epstein mythology. And it's been systematically unraveled, included, partially by this, the disclosure of more Epstein files, but even prior to January 30th or December 19th, the two productions, there was never any credible evidence for any of it. So yeah, I am fascinated in terms of how people come to believe such mythological

• 1:39:08Speaker 02

  Things and the journalistic malfeasance, again, that has been characterizing the story as well is of particular interest to me because they it's been a central factor in how the mythology has been allowed to just kind of proliferate without any countervailing point of view being put to it.

• 1:39:30David Sacks?

  All right. I think that's a pretty good place for us to wrap up. Kevin, do you have any final thoughts?

• 1:39:36Speaker 03

  Um, I'll just continue releasing some of this stuff. I, uh, I tend to agree with Michael, but, um, you know, I also think that sticking to the facts is also very important too, and telling the truth is, is important in both directions as well. So.

• 1:39:51Speaker 02

  Can I just make one concluding thought? I actually do think it's, you know, I'm, I'm happy for this opportunity to speak on your podcast. I assume I'm reaching an audience that probably would not otherwise hear of me to a large extent. And because I do think it's actually very disturbing that so many people around the world are being told that it's somehow been proven or vindicated that there is a massive child rape ring, or that there were mass child rapes that were allowed to be perpetrated by the highest levels of government and then were covered up because, as I mentioned on Piers Morgan this week, it's very easy to imagine how people with a predisposition toward mental illness who hear this stuff and believe it might be driven to do something like

• 1:40:32Speaker 02

  homicidally crazy. So I'm not predicting anything in particular. I just think it's, it's probably the most explosive thing to tell the mass public in terms of what it might incite particular people with a particular mental instability to do. So I mean, that's just one of the potentially detrimental effects of all this that I think it should be rationally countered to the maximum extent. Possible, and I think we're going to be beset with this issue for the foreseeable future. So at a certain point, I don't know, maybe there should be a little bit more momentum behind providing some degree of irrational corrective. I mean, or does it, is it just

• 1:41:17Speaker 02

  me? I mean, am I the only guy who's gonna be doing this forevermore? I mean, there's some more who have like come to take on a little bit more of a skeptical perspective. But I think we should, we have, we should be cognizant of the real world ramifications, rather than just speaking about it in the abstract, or who suffers more, Reid Hoffman versus Elon Musk, all this other stuff. I think it really is a crazy making thing that's been inculcated in the public.

• 1:41:41David Sacks?

  Yeah. Well, look, I think both of you have performed very valuable services for the public in regards to this whole episode. I think, Michael, you are asking really important questions about evidentiary standards. And what is the basis for some of the more, let's call them Epstein maximalist claims out there, again, about this global pedophile ring and so forth. And I think you're right, that when you're talking about crimes, you have to be evidence driven. And there is a little bit of a feeding frenzy here. And it is appropriate to ask what the motivations are of everyone involved in this story. And you're one of the only people who are doing it. Although it does seem like you are making a difference, there does seem to be a vibe shift a little bit around what you're doing.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, most people who have like, who have their brains wired in a normal way, which would not include me, would probably have like a negative emotional reaction to being inundated day in and day out with accusations of personally being a pedophile or harboring like depraved sexual fantasies of molestation of children or whatever. But like, you know, obviously, that is not the case for me. But I can withstand it because I'm used to the torrent of vitriol. But most people, I think, probably would be dissuaded from taking a certain angle on a certain subject, if that's what they had to endure.

• 1:42:54David Sacks?

  Well, the mob does not like being accused of being a mob. And their defense mechanism seems to be to accuse anyone who points out some of these problems in the, the logic of basically somehow being involved in, in the crimes that they're alleging.

• 1:43:12David Sacks?

  So, in any event, I do think that you are performing a valuable service. You know, when Hollywood dramatizes this, it's, you know, it's like Henry Fonda in the Oxbow Incident, or maybe it's Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird. You've got a mob, and you have this one lone figure who's standing athwart the mob, trying to talk sense into them. And, you know, in real life, it's not Gregory Peck, it's like a guy in a one-bedroom apartment in New Jersey.

• 1:43:39Speaker 02

  Yes. For all the money I'm told I'm surreptitiously receiving from Leslie Wexner and the Mossad, I mean, I wish I could get some better digs, but...

• 1:43:48David Sacks?

  Yeah. And Kevin, I do think that what you're doing is really important, because I think that the citizen journalism here that's sleuthing through the Epstein files is turning up really interesting things. And I do not think it's appropriate for Reed to be, again, wildly pointing the finger at other people while the evidence shows that he's been bold-faced lying about every aspect of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And to be honest, if he had just kept his mouth shut and not accused other people, I'm not even sure this would be a topic on the show. I would just wait to let the chips fall where they may, and see what ultimately comes out about this. But he kind of put himself in play by saying all of these things, and I do think it's appropriate to examine the

• 1:44:32David Sacks?

  record and assess his credibility on that basis. And you've done that job, and I hope you and other people will keep going through the files and actually seeing what is actually there, so we can get to the truth of this story.

• 1:44:47Speaker 02

  I agree, and thank you.

• 1:44:49David Sacks?

  Well, let's wrap it there. I just want to make one final point, which is, you know, even when, years ago, this was sort of a cause celebre on the right, where you had right-wing podcasts pointing the finger at Bill Clinton or other left-wing figures, I never weighed in on this. I wasn't sure what to think. I still... I'm not completely sure what to think about it. I don't want to get over my skis in terms of overly associating myself with any one point of view because I think when people do that, they do kind of dig in. And I'm keeping an open mind with respect to what comes out next. It would not surprise me at all if Michael Tracy turned out to be correct, but also it

• 1:45:29David Sacks?

  wouldn't completely surprise me if some version of Sagar's version of the story proved to be correct, assuming more evidence comes out. So I'm keeping an open mind. I do think it's really important for us to evaluate the claims critically, which is why I think it's important to hear from people like Michael Tracy. And I look forward to seeing what comes next and we'll address it then.

• 1:45:52Speaker 02

  I try to be rigorously evidence-based as well, myself. So I don't discount the idea that something could theoretically come out that would undermine some of the assumptions or conclusions that I've derived from my research and reporting on this. So I think that's a healthy epistemological habit, always be open to the possibility of something that's in contravention of your prior assumptions being presented to you.

• 1:46:18David Sacks?

  Absolutely. Fully agree. Okay, we'll leave it there. Thanks, guys.

• 1:46:55Speaker 04

  They should all just get a room and just have one big U-Jorgie because they're all just, it's like this sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

• 1:47:03Speaker 05

  What, you're the bee? What, you're the bee? What? We need to get merch.