Part Two: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World

Robert explores how Jeffrey Epstein used his friendship with Brock Pierce and his influence with Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick to push for micro transactions in video games to "indoctrinate" children. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Ah, welcome, Pod, to Behind the Bastard Cast, Episodes: Epstein, Jeffrey. I'm Robert Evans. Hi. How are you doing? Andrew T.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  I like that you said the last sentence in syntactical order.

• 0:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's upsetting, isn't it?

• 0:23Speaker 01

  Everens Robert, am I?

• 0:25Robert Evans?

  What am I up to? What's my plan? You know, what's my ultimate goal? What am I working towards here by doing this? I don't know, Andrew T. I just don't know. How are you?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Okay. I just ate the top half of a tomato, and I actually feel pretty energized.

• 0:40Robert Evans?

  Best half of a tomato, to be honest. Like, the bottom half of a tomato? That's for chumps. Idiots, really.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Ooh. Yeah. Stem side. You gotta nibble around the stem.

• 0:50Robert Evans?

  Gotta nibble the stem, baby. I'm always saying that. That's, that's why, that's my motto, baby. Nibble the stem, you know?

• 0:55Speaker 01

  No stem!

• 0:56Robert Evans?

  You put it on t-shirts. That's right.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  stem out!

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:00Robert Evans?

  Andrew, where can people find you on the internet? Before we get into our episodes for today, where we continue the tale of Jeffrey Epstein birthing the modern world, man birthing the modern world?

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Thanks, I guess. I don't know, Andrew T on social media. But I do, Yo Is This Racist?, the podcast, and we have our premium shows at suboptimalpods.com, which are fun. We've been doing one called Star Trek, which is really fun, a little, slightly insider look at Star Trek.

• 1:24Robert Evans?

  I love it.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  My co-host, Toni Newsom, knows everything about Star Trek. She writes on Starfleet Academy. She was the voice of Beckett Mariner. Other stuff, I think.

• 1:34Robert Evans?

  Keeper of the flame. Well, I also want to send people somewhere. The Artist Mentorship Program in Portland helps primarily youth experiencing homelessness, get essential supplies and job training, and have music and art programs at the heart of their work. If you want to support the good things that they do and have done for more than 30 years, go to amppdx.org. That's amppdx.org. Okay. That's all the-

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Robert, I appreciate the chance to plug before all the heinous shit gets said.

• 2:05Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  You like the separation?

• 2:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It's important to plug before the heinous shit gets said, because people are going to feel markedly less good about the world, once we continue talking about Jeffrey Epstein creating all of the bullshit that you deal with on a daily basis as a person in society. Sorry about that.

• 2:29Speaker 03

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• 3:03Robert Evans?

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• 3:34Speaker 04

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• 4:09Robert Evans?

  So, part two. One of the frustrating things about delving into the Epstein files is that you are repeatedly confronted by the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was a person. And like any person, he had nicknames for people and words that he used in an idiosyncratic fashion that only his friends and his social circle fully understood. Everyone's like this, but it's weird to be confronted by these very human aspects of the life of a monster. More pointedly, it's frustrating because it means there's a lot that we'll never fully understand. Right. For example, Epstein started sending girls, and again, since the term girls was used in the email, and this is Jeffrey Epstein, we must assume they were underage kids to Brock, or at least there's a good chance they were to Brock.

• 4:54Robert Evans?

  One of these girls Epstein described as my little Suzie or Sue in emails he sent during the spring of 2012. Ew. I don't think we have a great idea of who this was yet. I haven't figured, at least my clumsy searching around did not figure out who Sue was. And given that she's probably a victim, I don't know that it's, we need to look too hard into this, but she grew very close to Brock Pierce, or at least that's the way Epstein and Brock's emails portray it. And Epstein asked regularly after Brock's relationship with Sue, with the kind of interest that makes me think that because he connected them, maybe Epstein saw Sue as his in to Brock, who he considered a valuable contact, right?

• 5:38Robert Evans?

  Maybe it was a situation where Epstein, quote unquote, discovered this girl, however old she actually is, sends her to Brock, they become close, and Epstein is curious about this relationship because it's his leverage, basically, right? Pierce, though, seems to have valued Epstein as well. On May 1 of 2012, he messaged Jeffrey saying, I know a girl in New York you may like. How should I introduce you? And then Jeffrey's like, basically like, you know, you can send me her Facebook or whatever, and so he sends her, he gives her a name and asks like, hey, can you check her out on Facebook? And Jeffrey just replies, cute.

• 6:20Robert Evans?

  So great, you know, like this gives you kind of an insight into how things worked, right? This is Brock has, it seems, graduated from being the kind of person that Jeffrey just supplies with girls to being the kind of person who is connecting Jeffrey to girls, right? Which is an evolution of their relationship. Again, I don't know how old this person is, but he does use the word girl. So it's not legal, he's questionable to wonder, right?

• 6:49Speaker 01

  It's also like this thing where it's so like, because you start to also kind of get the sense that.

• 6:56Robert Evans?

  I mean, on some level, they knew what they were doing was wrong, but it doesn't feel like they're not. They knew it was illegal. Yeah. I don't think they knew it was wrong in a morals. They certainly don't believe it, but they know that if people find out, they could get in trouble. Yeah. With about a lot of what they're doing. Yeah. Right? Yeah. It's that they don't seem to consider what they're doing to be wrong. No, no. They think they treat sex trafficking of underage girls, the way I think normal people treat like doing drugs. Right? Yeah. Where like you, it's illegal. You want to be a little careful about it because you could get in trouble if you get caught, but you're not judging your friend because they do acid once a year or take mushrooms occasionally. Right? Right. Um, that's, that's very much how they treat it. Right?

• 7:41Robert Evans?

  Right. So a month after this email chain where Brock sends Epstein this girl's Facebook page, uh, Pierce told Epstein that he was taking a trip to Moscow, Kiev and Odessa because that was an itinerary you could have back in 2012. Yeah. Epstein asked him to take photos and find me a present and Pierce replied, will do, and then a smiley face. Ew. And those photos are photos of girls and the present is girls, right? Several days later, Pierce replied with more than a dozen images of what I, we have to, I believe were naked young women, or at least scantily clad young women. Um, it's a little clear to me because of how, you know, the email is preserved, but

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  he sends these photos with the sentence, "The Ukraine is now my favorite country." Smiley face. Right. Just Ukraine, but I don't know. I feel like when you're the sex trafficking is, I shouldn't be a pedant about language here. Um, no, fuck them all. And again, we don't know that this is sex trafficking. I don't know what age these, these people are, you know? Uh, it's just gross. Ew. Yeah. Brock is both being provided by Epstein and also providing to at this point, right? Ew. Yeah. Which gives you an idea of how a lot of his relationships function. This is, we're talking about him and Pierce, but he had a number of famous dudes who he had similar relationships with, where it presumably starts with him feeding them women, but they also, you know? Yeah. Push people his way, right? That's how a lot of this certainly functioned.

• 9:09Robert Evans?

  It's sort of just like this, like low rent frat house shit where you're like. Right, right. Exactly. Mm-hmm. It's, and they talk about it that way, right? Yeah. They don't talk about it like we're doing a secret criminal enterprise. They talk about it like dudes talking about a hot chick at college, except for the chick is 30 years younger than them, right?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:26Robert Evans?

  And they met her fucking, because Gillian Maxwell spider outside of a high school or something. I don't know. Yeah. Ew. It's gross. Also, in 2012, Epstein continued to gather influence in the world of video games. He started emailing regularly with Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. Actually, it may have been earlier in this. We don't know exactly how long he and Bobby were in regular contact. The emails show at least as far back as November of 2012, which is in that month Kotick visited New York. But they had been friends previously, right? We know the two planned to meet in person during that November 2012 trip, and we know that Epstein even tempted Kotick to come a day earlier by saying, hey, if you show up early, you can hang out with Woody Allen.

• 10:10Robert Evans?

  Ew. Oh, boy. Ew, ew, ew. Well, I'm on board. Who doesn't want to hang with Woody Allen?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  I mean, look, at least these guys' morality is consistent.

• 10:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Nightmare. The first time I saw Woody in one of these, I had a moment of freak out. I was like, oh, God, is it Woody Harrelson? That would really bum me out. And it's like, oh, no, Woody Allen exists. It's gotta be Woody Allen, right?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:33Robert Evans?

  And it is. It is Woody Allen. It's what's interesting to me is that Epstein brings up Woody Allen other times, right? Like when he's talking with Elon Musk and he's trying to convince Elon Musk to hang out one Christmas. He also brings out, like, Woody Allen's gonna be there. It could be you and me and Woody Allen partying together. So he seems to think this is like a big get for a lot. Like, this is maybe if I sweeten the pot with Woody Allen, this rich, famous guy will want to hang out with me.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  I mean, to be fair, Manhattan is basically what these guys are trying to aspire to, like, at all times.

• 11:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Manhattan or fucking, I mean, I don't, we don't need to talk about Woody Allen movies. So, that said...

• 11:16Robert Evans?

  Kotick and again, we can, we know they were emailing regularly in 2012. Kotick is connected to Epstein for quite a while longer than that. Um, we have a 2004, April of 2004 email between him and Gillian Maxwell, where he's talking about Gillian's sexy body. So they, the two of them seem to have had an affair of some sort. Um, which at least Gillian's an adult. So I don't know.

• 11:38Speaker 02

  Still ew.

• 11:38Robert Evans?

  Weird. You get the maybe had sex with an adult while hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein award, which is not much of an award. Uh, Bobby Kotick, not much of an award.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  Still ew.

• 11:51Robert Evans?

  The most significant aspect of Kotick and Epstein's friendship was that Jeffrey used as an influence over Bobby to push for more microtransactions in video games. He's really trying to convince Bobby this is the future of gaming. Right? Bobby's already convinced of this, but Epstein's further piling on, right? And is trying to encourage some specific ways that this should develop. I don't mean to say that like Epstein introduced the idea to Bobby Kotick. He's the kind of soulless school who would always have loved this thing and was pushing for it previously. But Epstein is trying to shift him in specific directions as, as relates to this stuff. On May 2 of 2013, Kotick asked Epstein for advice ahead of a meeting with New York City Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein. Specifically, he asked if Epstein knew of any edutainment games that were doing it right.

• 12:36Robert Evans?

  And what I assume was happening here is that as CEO of Activision Blizzard, he's meeting with the Department of New York City Education Chancellor to see if like, can we make a deal about like providing educational games to the school system in New York? Right? Like, that's probably the reason for this. And again, because I can't say directly, here is how Epstein influenced how Kotick felt about microtransactions. Here's what he introduced to the industry. I don't have a clear thing for that, but what I can say is Bobby Kotick valued Epstein's opinions enough that he asks him for advice ahead of a meeting like this. And he listens when Epstein tells him what he thinks should be happening with this stuff, which suggests Epstein is influencing the development of microtransactions in gaming to some level, right?

• 13:18Speaker 02

  And like.

• 13:19Robert Evans?

  Not the crea- not the main, but he's one of the dominos there, right?

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. And with Kotick, this is like, if we're in 2013, he got divorced in 2012. This is before he starts publicly dating, uh, Sheryl Sandberg.

• 13:32Robert Evans?

  Um, yes, it is.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  But this, this is just like an interesting timeline for this.

• 13:37Robert Evans?

  From Gillian Maxwell to Sharon Sandberg. What a, what a fascinating romantic.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  It's just.

• 13:42Robert Evans?

  Life this man's had.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, disturbing, weird little guy.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  It's, was it, was it, did you repost on Blue Sky something about like, or maybe you're gonna get to this about like, one of the, one of the reasons is to like indoctrinate kids into like.

• 13:57Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes. We're talking about all that right now. So Kotick emails him being like, do you have any suggestions for this meeting? With this guy from, you know, the Department of Education, New York. And Epstein says, you should play Medal of Honor or Call of Duty. And then quote, you will learn war history, right? Basically saying, video games are already great at teaching kids about war, which they're not. I don't think people learn a lot of accurate war history from Call of Duty or Medal of Honor. Some stuff, sure.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Well, they certainly learned that the two equal sides are the Allies and the Germans.

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  And the Axis, yeah.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Morally fine to be on either side.

• 14:31Robert Evans?

  To play either, right? Now, what's interesting to me about this is that Epstein's initial response, like just play either these video games and you can learn war history. Games are great at teaching kids stuff. That's kind of like the throwaway response you expect from Epstein. But what follows is really unique because after that initial line, he writes out like a five paragraph essay, laying out his thoughts on this subject. And this is not a normal response for Jeffrey. The biggest difference from his normal correspondence is that nearly every word in this essay is spelled properly and the grammar is mostly correct. It's very weird. Like you, you, you see dozens, hundreds of emails of him where he's just like spelling like a dipshit.

• 15:13Robert Evans?

  And then you see this like almost a page of writing that's like well formatted and like, I don't know if someone else wrote it for him.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Right. He like copy pasted from a white paper.

• 15:22Robert Evans?

  Yes, he clearly had a document, but it sounds like idiosyncratic, like it's in his voice if he had someone else type it up. I don't know. It's weird. And in this essay, Epstein argues that video games are quote, "already great at teaching," and then expresses something almost identical to how pro-AI people argue chatbots are going to revolutionize education. Fundamentally, the thing that works is a one-to-one student-teacher ratio. Even if you have a shitty teacher or tutor, you will learn a lot because that person gets to know you and challenges you at your level. That doesn't scale, but computers do. So we have to use computers to replace teachers, or at least augment them.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  No.

• 15:59Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Jeffrey. Thanks for seeding that into society.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  No, but, no.

• 16:04Robert Evans?

  It's interesting to see, like, this is, you know, a decade, years later, going to be, a decade or so later, going to be what, like, all of the AI bros are saying about education. And it's interesting to see Jeffrey land up the same spot in, like, 2012.

• 16:17Speaker 01

  Well, but also, because that's largely just the right-wing thing. It's like,

• 16:21Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  who cares?

• 16:22Robert Evans?

  Just gotta get rid of teachers.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. Get rid of teachers. Give your people the dumbest, most uninformativething. It's fine.

• 16:29Robert Evans?

  Right. And he's not talking about this, but you have to think, again, Epstein's angry. He's been judged by, you know, what he believes is a prudish society for something that he shouldn't be punished for. He's angry. And he probably sees, to a degree, the education system and the things it's taught women as being responsible for his woes. So I suspect there's more than a little, "Well, we can, if we do this, then we have control of the computers that are teaching kids, and thus the things that they learn," right?

• 16:58Speaker 01

  But, um, do you think it's that nef- because that's a thing that I sometimes have trouble with, is like, well, yeah, but it's, or I guess what I mean is like, that nefarious, but not, because they're so dumb and not detail-oriented otherwise, that I'd like, have trouble squaring, like, this grand vision and actually pulling it off. And I guess maybe it's that, yeah.

• 17:20Robert Evans?

  It's less of a grand, because, you know, Epstein isn't the guy making this stuff. He's just kind of talking to people who will be owning the companies that own it about what he, how he wants to see it used.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 17:32Robert Evans?

  Right? And I don't think Epstein's not engaged in a cohesive plot with a bunch of other rich guys who destroy education. I think he just- Sees this as beneficial and a better way to do society, right? And I think part of why he sees it is that like he doesn't like or respect a lot of the people in this, yeah, who are doing this job, right?

• 17:53Speaker 01

  And I, you know what, and I guess like the vision versus the execution is what, like, that's what ICE is. ICE is the vision and the execution of that vision, which is jolly.

• 18:02Robert Evans?

  And he's, he's just kind of got, and he's talking with his other rich friend, because he's an, he's, and he's an idea guy, right? That's Epstein's whole, whole brand. Um, so he goes on in this essay to say that the real issue is that today's, with educational games, is that today's video games just don't try to teach stuff we care about. And it's unclear who we is. I think he's referring to we as in like, people like you and me, Bobby, like smart, rich guys care about. Quote, "The best scheme I've come up with so far is to use the X Prize or something like it to co-opt the existing video game industry. You want to skip convincing educators and parents about this stuff and just go straight for the kids."

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Ew. I mean, I guess, to be, to be fair.

• 18:46Robert Evans?

  That's what he's saying, yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Not, not that this is a good use, but the, probably one of the least sinister uses of go straight for the kids Jeffrey Epstein has ever.

• 18:54Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, this is, this is, yeah, right?

• 18:57Speaker 01

  Like grading on a curve, this is the better way he said it.

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  Because as soon as he says, you want to skip convincing parents and teachers, just go straight for the kids by making a game that gets them addicted. Then Epstein provides his own suggestion for like what an educational game might look like. And he, he, he suggests a game that would teach a player how to read and pronounce Japanese kanji. Quote, "Imagine you are looking at a door in a video game. It has some squiggly symbols printed on it. Little munchkins walk up to that door and say konnichiwa. The door opens and they are greeted by a hot princess with big tits and a thong. The door closes in your face. You are going to fucking learn to read and pronounce kanji."

• 19:37Speaker 01

  That's, but that's why I'm like, they're so dumb. I just can't believe we're ruled by these fucks.

• 19:45Robert Evans?

  There's the, there's the, the line between, I'm not saying Jeffrey Epstein controlled all of this as the puppet master, but he had a lot of ideas that he helped to seed in powerful people who then took those ideas further. And also the way he thinks about all this shows you how the ruling class thought about and thinks about all this stuff and was talking about it. And he influenced that, right?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  I mean, to me, it's just like all these unfuckable dweebs finally like forced their way into some sex through violence and coercion. And now they want to impress the man. Yeah.

• 20:15Robert Evans?

  Well, and the fucking, the, the whole, you, you see just like the, the fact that women don't really matter to him is made very evident. Just in the fact that he's like, yeah, hot princess, big tits and a thong. That'll teach him how to read Kanji. And little girls kind of being enticed. I, I have issues believing this would work on boys, but like, are they gonna want the big titted hot princess Jeffrey in this game for schools? That you want to put in schools? Ew. Epstein then concludes, edutainment is for pussies because once kids catch on, you are trying to teach them something they shut down. We have to keep the boobs and guns and profit. You see how much money video games are making these days?

• 20:59Robert Evans?

  Fuck educational reform. We need educational subversion. And what he's saying here is that like, this stuff, you don't want to make educate, you want to make games that get kids addicted. And you teach them and push messages through the games that they're playing while also profiting off of them. And the way to do that is make games that they are addicted to playing, that are compulsively like attractive to them, right? Your goal is to subvert the educational system. You're, you're almost saying, we want these games to teach kids a separate set of things than they're learning in school and society. Right? You want to think about like how gaming culture has been used by guys like Bannon who were attached to Epstein. You can see some really direct through lines here, right?

• 21:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:43Robert Evans?

  Now, after Epstein goes on this very weird rant, Bobby Kotick doesn't respond, are you fucking crazy? Instead he responds, X Prize is a good idea, but key is real world rewards. Learn to read, earn cellphone minutes, iPhone credits, virtual items in games.

• 22:00Robert Evans?

  That's a funny email in its own right. Futureist Pablo Holman, who's looped into, Epstein loops Pablo into this conversation. And Pablo responds with just a dig at Bobby Kotick, saying, "I'm all for indoctrinating kids into an economy. You gotta love how his example for real world rewards is virtual items and games."

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:19Robert Evans?

  Which is, I mean Pablo, you're tied to Jeffrey Epstein forever now, so that's shameful, but that is a pretty good dig.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, truly.

• 22:28Robert Evans?

  Bobby Kotick is a dumbass.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Everyone in these emails, like every time you don't respond only with, "What the fuck are you guys talking about?"

• 22:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, what the fuck is wrong with you dipshit? Yeah. And Holman is obviously correct that Kotick is a visionless slug of a man who ruined at least one great company. These emails were sent just a few weeks after the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, the first Call of Duty game to feature microtransactions. Per an article in The Gamer by James Lucas, "Call of Duty Ghosts, which launched later that year, went even further with paid special characters, voiceover packs, skins, camo, and even weapons. It's not hard to draw a line between these conversations with Epstein and industry figures and the sudden boom in microtransactions that occurred around the same time period. But what's most concerning is the apparent interest to normalize aggressive monetization strategies towards younger audiences, as suggested in remarks made by Epstein's associates

• 23:18Robert Evans?

  in the DOJ documents." And Epstein, again, he doesn't invent the idea of microtransactions in children's games. Bobby's thinking about this before Epstein starts talking about it, but Epstein is influencing his thoughts on it, and Epstein is talking a lot about how we need to normalize using games to deliver propaganda to kids by addicting them, right? That like the fact that the game is addictive and has the guns and the tits and, you know, makes money is part of like what keeps the kid paying attention and what allows you to influence them with the content and the game. And this is a big part of the modern microtransaction industry, right? Like what we ultimately landed on is fuck teaching kids anything, just get them hooked.

• 23:59Robert Evans?

  Like get them, get them playing games where they're going to be sending money regularly and gambling for stuff like loot boxes, right?

• 24:06Speaker 01

  And it's, it's also like that most of these are built on whales. Like it isn't broadly the kids. It's like the unfortunate, I don't know, what is it like four or 5% somewhere in there?

• 24:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Who are like paying for everything else and more.

• 24:23Robert Evans?

  No, but it is, I mean, the fact that these are present in the games, even though most of the money isn't coming from randomly, it still affects them, right?

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:30Robert Evans?

  Researchers from the Australian Consumer Policy Research Centre, the CPRC, and Manas University in 2016 identified 20 dark patterns of monetization in modern games, the worst of which were gambling-like features such as paid loot boxes, like the ones Bobby Kotick helped push at Activision Blizzard. Per an investigation by ABC Australia, quote, "The design features were not in all games, but 95% of adult players surveyed had come across them and 83% had suffered negative consequences." So this is a harmful industry and it's one that, you know, Jeffrey is a cheerleader for. Again, he's not the founder of it, but he's one of the, he's one of the dominos here. Today, the global online microtransaction market is more than, worth more than $75 billion a year.

• 25:15Robert Evans?

  As Epstein said, "We have to keep the boobs and guns and profit," right? An article in the BBC by Catherine Latham makes the end result of all this very clear. "Gaming companies use behavioral psychology to manipulate users into spending," says Professor Sarah Mills, "and the link between gaming and gambling is becoming increasingly blurred," she explains. Ms. Mills is a professor of human geography at La Brea University. Her research found gambling techniques make gamers play for longer and spend more money and drive repeat buying. And we could go on from here to discuss the outrageous proliferation of gambling apps for young people and how companies like Activision Blizzard paved the way for shit like Kalshi, right? Yeah. And Epstein is a piece of that story, right? But that's also getting us all away from the Epstein of it, because this is stuff

• 25:59Robert Evans?

  that's largely occurred since the end of his life, right? Right. I think we've done enough to establish how harmful this trend is and that Jeffrey was a prominent voice urging developers to go down this road and urging developers at a high level, talking to the C suites, right? Yeah. I should also note that Epstein and Kotick's friendship went deeper than just work-related conversations. These aren't just guys who are talk and shop. Per Kotaku article by Ethan Gatch. Emails between the two were allegedly exchanged multiple times in 2013 as well. A February 24th, 2013 email stated that Epstein was in LA, planning a visit to SpaceX that week and was trying to link up with Kotick while in town. "Thanks, but rather see you," Epstein wrote in one email, "taking girls after to Bel Air."

• 26:43Robert Evans?

  Kotick at one point allegedly wrote back, "Come with your friends to my house, Beverly Hills, 10 minutes from Bel Air." Great. Also, this is an insane thing to put in an email, dude. It's crazy. Oh. "Gotta hang out with Elon Musk at SpaceX before taking my girls to the CEO of Activision Blizzard's house." And again, notably, Elon's not invited. Right, Elon's, oh, I mean, you don't want him at the good parties. You know, you don't want, you don't want him and Bobby Kotick in a room at the same time. That's just too much cool.

• 27:17Robert Evans?

  You know who else is cool?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Me?

• 27:21Robert Evans?

  Some would say, sure, of course, Sophie, yes.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  Andrew T.

• 27:25Robert Evans?

  Sure, Andrew T. I'm okay. You know, and also the sponsors of this podcast. Yay.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Evans, comma, Robert.

• 27:34Speaker 03

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• 28:03Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto, Dolutegravir, Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 29:02Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. If you've thought about trying therapy with our long-term sponsor, BetterHelp, insurance options may now be available nationwide with an average copay for eligible members of just $23 per session. Your mental health doesn't know it's World Mental Health Day. Stress does not politely wait until October 10th. Burnout does not RSVP. And your brain definitely doesn't check the calendar before deciding to spiral at 11:47 PM. Mental health is just a part of regular health. Therapy isn't only useful for big life choices, it could be a place to talk through smaller things, that work situation, taking up too much... Of your mental real estate or a relationship dynamic you can't quite name,

• 29:46Robert Evans?

  or simply the sense that something feels off. If you've been waiting to start therapy, BetterHelp works with more than 125 health plan networks and eligible members have an average copay of just $23 per session with insurance. Don't have insurance who live outside the US? You can still get 10% off your first month. Visit betterhelp.com/behind to explore your payment options. That's betterhelp.com/behind.

• 30:13Robert Evans?

  And we're back. You know, we're talking Jepstein, Jeffrey Epstein. So Epstein's friendship with Brock Pierce continued along a similar tenor to his friendship with Bobby Kotick. In May of that year, Pierce told Epstein that he had plans to purchase what was at the time the largest Bitcoin exchange on earth, Mt. Gox. Now, this is a side story from a larger, much funnier story because Mt. Gox was for years the place to go if you were new to crypto and looking to get into it, right? If you wanted to get started with Bitcoin or whatever, Mt. Gox is probably where you were starting. And Mt. Gox got its name from its original purpose, which was it was a place to sell and trade Magic the Gathering cards.

• 30:58Robert Evans?

  Mt. Gox stands for Magic the Gathering Online Exchange, right? They started going by Mt. Gox when the slightly more sensible libertarian crypto enthusiasts pointed out that like, hey, regular people don't want to store their life savings at a business run by people who sell magic cards for a living, right? Like, it's not really like a bank. It doesn't give bank vibes.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  It could have been called the Chaos Orb, so I guess it could be worse.

• 31:24Robert Evans?

  It could have been called the Chaos Orb. Yeah, I mean, we're further along on our decline now. Pour an article on the website produs.com by Cas Pianci, quote, Epstein, who was unfamiliar with the exchange, asked if it had been seized by the US government. It hadn't. The purchase had never occurred. And in April of 2014, it was revealed that Mt. Gox had lost the majority of its users' money. All of the money in Mt. Gox gets stolen, right? The whole bank gets stolen. Because again, the Magic the Gathering online exchange is a bad place to keep your savings. Yeah. Yeah.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  It's fine, though. Not regulated. No FDIC.

• 31:58Robert Evans?

  Not at all regulated, baby. We don't need an FDIC.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  We don't need that. That's big government.

• 32:04Robert Evans?

  We'll, we'll talk about why that's funny. But what's really, what's funny immediately here is that even after the whole bank gets stolen, Pierce doesn't give up acquiring Mt. Gox. He cries after it collapses to buy it, and he starts this initiative called Gox Rising, which like, why are you tied to the Magic the Gathering bank that got, that, that lost every, like, why are you invested in continuing that journey, Brock? Oh, God. Is it just the name Mt. Gox is so appealing to you? I don't get it. I mean, look, brand recognition, you know, that's half the battle. The brand recognition is that place that lost everyone's money. But yeah. But not anymore. Yeah. We couldn't possibly lose it twice.

• 32:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it happened twice. That's crazy. So you should, the fact that Pierce still thinks this is a good idea should tell you something about Pierce. And the fact that Epstein continues to treat this kid as a genius should let you know that Jeffrey Epstein was not nearly as intelligent as he gets credited with being sometimes. Yeah. The same month Brock started trying to buy Mt. Gox, Epstein reaches out to his friend Bill Gross, who is the co-founder of a major investment management company, PIMCO, about an exciting new crypto project that Brock was working on. And this is the project that he gets involved with really after Mt. Gox. And it's called Tether. Have you ever heard of the cryptocurrency Tether? Yes. I think I have some. I don't remember why.

• 33:29Robert Evans?

  It's, it's prominent. People know about it. And the, the idea behind Tether, you brought up the FDIC earlier, that like, oh, the whole bank got stolen. Maybe that's a good idea that the regular financial system had. Tether is Brock, I mean Brock is one of the guys behind Tether. Tether is kind of the attempt to add sort of an FDIC type deal to crypto. It doesn't work the way the FDIC does, but the idea is it's a way to make cryptocurrency less dangerous and volatile, right? Tether is what's called, supposed to be a stablecoin. That's the idea, right?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  I should say, I think the only reason I have any cryptocurrency is to play quasi-legal international digital poker.

• 34:07Robert Evans?

  Of course, and true.

• 34:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:11Robert Evans?

  So, the idea behind Tether is that it's what's called a stablecoin. Normal crypto is way too volatile to be a good store of value, right? Like, you don't want to store your savings in something that can be worth zero tomorrow, right?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:24Robert Evans?

  Tether was ostensibly pegged to the US dollar. And so basically, the idea is that like, it's backed up by real money, right? So we can't, it can't become worth nothing. And as a result, Tether is today the most successful and the largest stablecoin. But the fact that what it's supposed to be and what it actually is are two different things.

• 34:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:45Robert Evans?

  Because the idea is that Tether is pegged to the dollar, but that's not even, even on its face real, because Tether is meant to actually be 50% backed by cash or cash equivalents, right? Now, obviously, banks don't have as much cash on hand as they have people with money invested in their bank, or money in the bank, right? And that's why we have the FDIC, right? If your bank goes bust, the FDIC will reimburse, at least for, I think it's up to a quarter of a million dollars in account or something like that, but they'll reimburse your losses, right?

• 35:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:17Robert Evans?

  The government is saying, if the bank fucks up, you're not screwed as a regular person, because this is an FDIC-backed bank. Tether doesn't really work that way, but they're kind of trying to make people think that it works that way, right? That like, no, no, no, like, this is bank, banks don't have 50% of their assets backed by cash or equivalents, right? So Tether is actually more realistic than a bank, right? And the reality is, there have been like pseudo-bank runs on Tether, and at times, people behind Tether have just refused to redeem the cash value of their cryptocurrency, because that's what, they could do that to stop a bank run, right? Which is also something they get to do, because they're not a bank, right? It's, you're just throwing money to some fucking freaks who are gonna do what they want with it.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Some racists are holding your money.

• 36:03Robert Evans?

  Tether would prove, though, to be a very wise financial bet for Brock. The company is profitable at this moment, right? And it's made a lot of money over the course of its lifetime. I'm sure he did very well on this. Now Brock is not the creator of the idea behind Tether. That would be a guy named J R Willett, but he co-founds the company and initially calls it RealCoin when it launches in July of 2014. In 2019, Tether surpassed Bitcoin in trading volume and it is currently tied to about half of all Bitcoin's sales, even though the Wall Street Journal has reported on Tether increasingly showing up in cases of money laundering and the financing of terrorist groups. In 2021, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced that Tether was not, in fact, fully backed by real currency, which sparked a sell-off.

• 36:44Robert Evans?

  The CFTC ordered Tether to pay $41 million for violations of the Commodity Exchange Act. Now, I've left into the future, past the lifespan of Jeffrey. Just to make it clear, this was a shady business from the beginning, right? This is never a good business. Like all this shit. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yeah, like all of this shit. So Epstein leans in to this fact, right? In his email to Gross, because he's trying to talk a finance guy into getting on the crypto board here. Gross is the guy who works at Pemco, who he's trying to get to invest in the idea that becomes Tether. And Epstein acknowledges in this email that there are issues with cryptocurrency.

• 37:26Robert Evans?

  "The good is that Bitcoin uses an algorithm to limit supply, unlike the variable of gold or other commodities. However, two main issues. One, the government doesn't like it. Money laundering, money transmitting, aiding and abetting, all types of crimes. Two, all transactions are arguably taxable and therefore extra tricky. The Bitcoin guys came to see me early in the process and made it clear they were all willing to go to jail for their ideas. I'm not. There is a way to do it, but it turns the Bitcoin model on its head. Talk to you soon." This is argument for Tether, right? And, but what's interesting to me in that is him saying, "The Bitcoin guys came to see me early in the process and made it clear they were all willing to go to jail for their ideas." We know he's in touch with Gavin. We don't know who else necessarily. I mean, we, we'll talk later.

• 38:08Robert Evans?

  There's other guys that Bitcoin is attached to, but this is some more evidence, at least that- He wants other people to think he's really, maybe he's lying about this, right? But also, we know he was talking to Gavin. We know he's in touch with a number of these guys, and we know that they're talking ideologically about what this means to each other. So I don't really think this is a lie. This seems consistent with other things we have evidence of, right? And it's further evidence that Jeffrey is an influential person in this period of development for Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole, right? Now, obviously, we don't, that doesn't mean that he was like making big final decisions on Bitcoin, but it means that he's, he's got some influence with the people doing it, right?

• 38:52Robert Evans?

  And that there's not, no reason for that, as we'll talk about. In 2014, Epstein helps Brock Pierce ink a deal with Noble Bank to create a Puerto Rico-based company that would act as the real money bank for Tether, right? Like, this is the actual bank that's going to provide the cash that supposedly backs up this stablecoin. This further establishes Epstein as a foundational figure in the history of crypto, because Tether, as I noted, is a very significant cryptocurrency. And Epstein, not only is he advising Pierce in the beginning stages of Tether becoming a thing, but he helps make a deal with the bank that acts as like the backing for Tether. He's important in this, right?

• 39:34Robert Evans?

  And this is, particularly the stage of crypto development he's a part of is not the initial stage where you have these guys, like he talks about, who are willing to go to jail for these weird libertarian ideas they have, right? We don't have to, you don't have to like or respect what they see to be like, oh, a lot of these people were true believers, right? Yeah, they really wanted to weaken the power of the state and the Federal Reserve by decoupling currency from the government, right? And that's, they were willing to go to prison for it. There are guys like that in the early history of crypto. Epstein comes in and has his influence in the stage of crypto in which it starts slowly trying to replicate the features of the real financial system in order to achieve widespread adoption, right? Tether is a piece of this. It's an acknowledgement that like, this is way too volatile.

• 40:19Robert Evans?

  Too many people are losing money. We need something that we can at least market as a safe cryptocurrency that's backed up by cash, right? So that's what, Epstein's involvement in crypto is during the period in which it's starting to take on, it's at least starting to dress up in the drag of a real financial system, right? The trappings of actual money, as opposed to a... Exactly, exactly. Digital lottery ticket. Right, right. It's as opposed to the thing my friends used to buy drugs in 2009 with e-gold, right? Right. And again, part of the point, the idea behind Tether is we want to make rich people feel comfortable to put their money into crypto, right? So other crypto millionaires can cash out using the real money they put in. So Brock Pierce, like, that's, that's why you want the real money, right?

• 41:04Robert Evans?

  That's why Tether's valuable. The pyramid scheme, the pyramid needs to be shored up at the base. This is safe, put your money in, then we cash out our holdings to get real money. Yeah. In 2014, Epstein put $3 million of his own money into an investment in a new Bitcoin trading exchange, Coinbase, founded by the Stevens Brothers, Bradford and Bart. Caspian C. writes, "Perhaps most embarrassing about the Epstein Coinbase investment is that they knew who had put the money in there to purchase shares. As Pierce rushed to get the deal closed, he shared one awkward hurried email with Epstein. I need permission to let the founder know who you are." Right?

• 41:45Robert Evans?

  So Epstein is putting this money in to fund Coinbase, which is like Pierce is helping to broker, you know, this, this deal to, to provide like the basic funding to get Coinbase off the ground. And Pierce is, as he's communicating with the people he's working with at Coinbase, realizes Epstein is a convicted sex criminal. And if I get these people to invest in a company that he's a major investor in, and I don't let them know, that could be fraud, right? You can't convince them to partner with you in a major venture and not let them know that one of the people funding the company is a convicted pedophile. It's kind of important, right? And Epstein gives his permission. So Brock lets the Coinbase people know that Jeffrey Epstein, who by this point, it's

• 42:29Robert Evans?

  been years since his conviction for child sex trafficking, is one of the funders. And the Coinbase people are like, yeah, it's fine with us. Right?

• 42:39Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff. And Coinbase is the new Mt. Gox. That's the big exchange people get into now when they're starting in crypto, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool stuff. They're, they're, do they still have Super Bowl ads? I guess we'll find out. I don't, I don't think they're doing Super Bowl ads anymore, but they're still around. Something, yeah. Yeah, that Matt Damon money ran out, though. But you know who does have the money to hire Matt Damon?

• 43:07Speaker 02

  Not me.

• 43:07Robert Evans?

  The sponsors of this show, maybe us. If you, if you buy enough of the products that advertise on our show, Sophie and I might get the money to bring Matt Damon onto the show. And I know that's what all of our listeners have been clamoring for. All you Dame heads out there. Oh.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  I'm really.

• 43:23Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  I really just want to take this as an excuse to talk about Ben Affleck's back tattoo again.

• 43:29Robert Evans?

  Ah, I'll always talk about Ben Affleck's back tattoo.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  I know, it's great.

• 43:34Robert Evans?

  Let's all think about that while these ads run.

• 43:38Speaker 06

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• 44:09Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutigrevir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 44:32Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 45:08Robert Evans?

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

• 45:15Speaker 04

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• 45:49Robert Evans?

  We're back and boy, I sure love Ben Affleck's back tattoo of Phoenix. Ben Aff back.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  There it is. Well done.

• 45:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  That was relaxing for me, to be honest.

• 46:01Robert Evans?

  In June of 2004, this part's not going to be relaxing, Sophie, because in June of 2014, Jeffrey Epstein asked Brock Pierce if he knew the Winklevoss Twins.

• 46:14Robert Evans?

  Of course, those weird looking fuckers show up in this.

• 46:17Speaker 02

  I know.

• 46:18Robert Evans?

  Now, the Winklevi, if you're not familiar, were the guys who allegedly Mark Zuckerberg maybe stole the Facebook idea from. And then they get hardcore into crypto after suing Mark Zuckerberg, I think several times. So they get really into crypto and like every celebrity who gets really into crypto, they're totally not a scam crypto product, eventually get sued by the S E C, right? Now thankfully, the Winklevi were intelligent enough to donate heavily to Donald Trump's reelection campaign and per TechCrunch, quote, "also backed his family's business ventures", which means his family's crypto grifts. So on January 24th, 2026, just a few days before I started work on these episodes,

• 47:01Robert Evans?

  the S E C dropped their lawsuit against Gemini, the crypto exchange founded by the Winklevoss Twins, right? Cool. So I love that. Yeah. So Pierce replies that he does know the Winklevoss Twins, because of course he does, and Epstein says, "Okay, I'm going to send Svetlana to them to get a download of the company that they're planning to launch, right? To get a look at the business they're starting." Great, great question, Sophie. As Pianci notes, this was likely Svetlana Positova, who is a Russian citizen who was the daughter of a former Colonel in the Red Army. Her family lives in an apartment building initially constructed for NKVD staffers. And per the News England Herald, she quote, "attended a Moscow university once described as an incubator

• 47:44Robert Evans?

  for the KGB." She joined a modeling agency as a young woman, one run by John Luke Brunel, who has been alleged to have recruited girls and women for Epstein. Right? Brunel is one of the people who is funneling young models towards Jeffrey Epstein. Svetlana claims that she was just a model interested in charitable endeavors, and Epstein had a lot of connections in that world, and so they became friends. Since Svetlana is alleged to have spent a lot of time with Prince Andrew, which he denies, and Epstein clearly connected her to other influential people, a lot of people suspect that she was a Russian agent working as a part of that government's influence operation to utilize Epstein as a clandestine source. And this may have been true. There are a number of

• 48:23Robert Evans?

  connections to Epstein and Russian intelligence. And this episode isn't primarily about that stuff, but this may be one more example of a, we really don't know. Like, I don't know what Svetlana was. Yeah.

• 48:36Speaker 02

  But maybe.

• 48:37Robert Evans?

  Maybe.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  But also, it is like, kind of increasingly clear that like, no matter what like a foreign government might want to do to us, it's pretty clear that our most powerful citizens were willing to do it anyway. So it's sort of just like, like, you think alleged Wendy Deng's behavior, she wakes up and she's like, "They already did everything I was ordered to make them do."

• 49:01Robert Evans?

  Well, and that, the part of the thing is that like, the most effective shit that the Russian government did using its influence operations worked because of how fucked up the US is, right?

• 49:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:13Robert Evans?

  They were, they were like, in pushing and kind of like fanning the flames of like vaccine denial and COVID denial and all this stuff, they were just standing on the shoulders of American giants who started that process here, right?

• 49:26Speaker 01

  I know. You could easily see all of everyone at the, whatever the, it was, whatever the KGB is now, is just like, it's, this is easy mode. This is destabilization on cheat codes, because they simply do it for you every time.

• 49:41Robert Evans?

  And you just find the levers like Epstein, who have the connections, you can push people in and, you know.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, good stuff. Now, another fun thing that's happening at the time is that Brock's friends are being sued over the massive number of sexual assaults that are alleged to have occurred during the parties that they threw, right? So during this period of time, this is like 2014 or so, Brock emails Epstein asking if he knows a lawyer named Jeff Herman. Quote, "He is suing four of my friends. Any dirt you have could prove helpful." Epstein described Herman as a very bad guy. In writing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Even leave a voice note at least. In an email. And Epstein responds, "Yeah, Herman's a really bad guy. He represented several of the women who were accusing me of sex crimes."

• 50:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he sounds like a bad guy. Cool stuff. Yeah, sounds like a, sounds like a bad guy, Jeff. So Brock and Jeffrey's friendship grows closer and closer over this period of time, and Epstein continues to expand his involvement into crypto separate from Brock as well. He donates extensively to the MIT Media Lab, which was run by a guy named Joy Ito. Joychi Joy Ito was born in Kyoto, Japan, on June 19th, 1966. His family immigrated to Canada when he was three and then to the United States, where they ultimately settled in a suburb of Detroit. His father was a research scientist and his mother was a secretary for an early tech company that made photovoltaic products, Ovonix. He became Timothy Leary's godson, which should tell you most of what you need to know about

• 51:15Robert Evans?

  the social and political dynamics with which Joy Ito was raised. What the fuck? The company founder. Huh? Yeah, yeah, wild shit, right? The party his child went to. The company founder, Stanford Ofchinsky, kind of adopted Ito as a protege when he was a little kid. He just sees this kid's really into, you know, technology, into code, into like, you know, engineering and stuff. And to the extent that like, he starts just kind of like, talking with him and helping him out and coaching him, he eventually hires him to do actual work with actual scientists when Ito was 13 years old. Ofchinsky later claimed he was not a child in the conventional sense, and the fact that that's kind of the story for both Brock Pierce and Joy Ito is kind of interesting to me,

• 51:59Robert Evans?

  that like, these are both guys who are gonna be really tied to Epstein in some very shady ways, involving underage people allegedly, and they're also both guys who don't have childhoods themselves. Interesting, interesting dynamic, right? Yeah, yeah. The family maintained, Ito's family, maintained strong connections to their Japanese heritage and moved back to Japan when he was 14. He returns to the US after he graduates to get his computer science degree from Tufts University, which is where he meets future eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar. Ito drops out of two different colleges ultimately because he's frustrated with the stupidity of the higher education system. Ito also becomes an influential part of the musical counterculture in Japan. He runs nightclubs in Japan, he helps to bring industrial music to the country, and he's

• 52:44Robert Evans?

  also an angel investor in Kickstarter and Twitter, as well as a shitload of other less well-known ventures like Photopedia. He wins a 2011-

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I like how you're describing the only cool person you've talked about so far, unfortunately.

• 52:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's not gonna stay cool for long. He wins a 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute for his achievements advocating for digital freedom. He writes a monthly column for Wired, and he is a visiting professor at Harvard. He does a lot of shit. And then, on April 25th of 2015, he sends an email to Jeffrey Epstein, asking for money. Ito was in a tight spot. So, the Bitcoin Foundation, which is the organization that is paying the salaries of three of the five developers for Bitcoin, had just been declared bankrupt by one of its board members, right? So, suddenly, three of the five people who are actually developing and, like, furthering

• 53:37Robert Evans?

  Bitcoin's evolution are no longer getting paid. And here's how Ito, in his email, describes their importance. He's sending this to Epstein. "The five core developers are like Linus Torvalds of Linux. They decide what changes are made to the core code." Ito further informs Epstein that, quote, "Many organizations scrambled to step into the vacuum created by the Foundation and take control of the developers." He puts "take control" in quotation marks. I don't know who he's quoting, but I do know the fact that he puts emphasis on this as extremely important because he's framing this as whoever is paying these developers has control over these developers who themselves control the future of Bitcoin.

• 54:18Robert Evans?

  Ito continues, "We moved quickly, talking to all of the various stakeholders, and the three developers decided to join the Media Lab. This is a big win for us." And he's sending this to Jeffrey. He's talking about this big win because Jeffrey made this big win possible, because the money that the Media Lab uses to pay these developers comes from the Epstein Foundation.

• 54:40Robert Evans?

  Ito asks Jeffrey for this money. Jeffrey sends him the money. And this email I've just quoted from is Ito celebrating after they they basically hire these developers, they buy these developers, right?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:52Robert Evans?

  Ito sends a news article.

• 54:54Speaker 01

  They buy all the printing, the money printing. They buy like.

• 54:57Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, or at least, yeah, the guys who have the keys to Fort Knox, maybe.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they're, or they buy like the actual money printing machine and now they can be turned to do whatever.

• 55:09Robert Evans?

  And after kind of writing everything that I've I've quoted from here, Ito emails Epstein saying FYI, used gift funds, that's the money Epstein sent him to underwrite this, which allowed us to move quickly and win this round. Thanks. And Epstein's response to this email is just Gavin is clever.

• 55:29Robert Evans?

  This is Gavin Anderson, right? Again, very hard to say how much contact he had with Epstein, but Epstein is here responding to an email with Ito, who would have been in contact with Gavin, basically saying Gavin came up with the idea to do this. That's kind of what he's insinuating, right?

• 55:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 55:49Robert Evans?

  And again, it suggests that he and Gavin are talking, that he and Gavin are strategizing about the future of Bitcoin, as he is definitely strategizing about the future of Bitcoin with Joy Ito and providing the money to pay for three of these five developers. That is significant in the history of the development of Bitcoin, right?

• 56:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Now, Patrick Riley, a minor aspiring right wing influencer who paid for a verified account on Twitter and mostly seems to shill a cryptocurrency called XRP, is going to find, I don't know if he's the, I don't think he's the first guy, but he finds these documents in the Epstein files and he's going to post about them. And that post is going to cause some really interesting stuff to happen. Before we get into the post he made about this revelation, I want to give you a relevant example of the previous kind of posts that Patrick L. Riley was making on Twitter, right? So you should just have an understanding of what kind of man this is. Sophie will have this up on video form. This is from August 10th of 2025. The unvaccinated are to people as XRP holders are to crypto.

• 56:53Robert Evans?

  Both are of the highest quality and endured a trial that siphoned out the best of humanity. In fact, I bet the XRP community has the highest ratio of non-vaxxed in any crypto.

• 57:03Speaker 07

  What a cool guy.

• 57:05Robert Evans?

  That's the kind of thinker Patrick Riley is. So after the most recent Epstein disclosure, Patrick makes a post and he attaches the email chain that I had been quoting from earlier to this post. And then he writes, "At the time this letter was written, there were around 12,000 commits to Bitcoin's code. Today, there are 47,583 commits to Bitcoin's code. This means that 74.79% of the Bitcoin core development code was committed after Jeffrey Epstein took over the de facto senior management role as benefactor. He may not have been Satoshi, but he was absolutely running the executive direction of Bitcoin on behalf of Mossad. What are the odds that there are backdoors built into Bitcoin's code at this point? "Probably about 100%." He spells it "probably."

• 57:51Speaker 05

  Probably.

• 57:53Robert Evans?

  Brain geniuses. So this sets off a wave of upset that verged on nausea for many crypto true believers. For the online right, the Epstein case is just about the most important thing on earth. But Bitcoin is also hallowed. It's a sacred tool for freeing money from the clutches of the state. This post from CryptoBitLord is a relevant example of many such responses to the

• 58:15Speaker 05

  Not CryptoBitLord.

• 58:17Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. "75% of Bitcoin's code comes directly from Jeffrey Epstein's investments. We've basically funded an elite pedophile ring since 2015. I feel sick." And like, yeah, you guys gotta have like.

• 58:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:33Robert Evans?

  Like Riley's wrong about a bunch of, for one thing, there's, there's not evidence that the fucking Mossad, that Epstein was running Bitcoin on behalf of Mossad. He wasn't really running Bitcoin, but he was in a position to influence it. I don't think, there's not evidence that there's backdoors in Bitcoin's code because you wouldn't need to. It's easy to track Bitcoin. Like, what, what would the backdoor even be, right?

• 58:55Speaker 01

  Also, you don't, you, like, you were funding a global pedophile ring by participating in Bitcoin before Jeffrey Epstein was involved. That's the only thing it's good for.

• 59:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's its primary purpose.

• 59:11Robert Evans?

  So after these posts go viral, Bitcoin friendly press organs have to leap to defend their favorite coin, right? So they've got to, after fucking Patrick posts this and people start freaking out over like, oh my God, we're funding the pedophile cabal. Jeffrey Epstein directed 75% of Bitcoin, which also isn't really accurate, right?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:28Robert Evans?

  Um, it's just that 75% of it was written after this, these developers are acquired by Joy Ito's lab, which is, and that acquisition is funded anyway, whatever. Um, here's how the Bitcoin Academy website tried to smooth all this over. The funded salaries for Bitcoin core developers like Vladimir Wanderland during a cash strapped period 2015 to 2017. But here's the kicker, Epstein's money flowed through MIT's systems directly to developers. As one ex-user bluntly put it, funding a university lab does not equal running Bitcoin. And this is technically true, but when you pay the salary of three out of five people whose votes can determine the future of Bitcoin, it's not unreasonable to say you might kind of run Bitcoin, right?

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:12Robert Evans?

  Like, it's not unreasonable to say you have influence in it. I'm not even saying he ran it, but he's in a position to influence it, right?

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  And the technically true of it is like, what a, what a, like, grasp at that straw, dude. Like, that's, okay, I guess, technically.

• 1:00:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he wasn't literally guiding every step Bitcoin took, but he was in a position to guide the steps he wanted to and to make, you know?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Robert Evans?

  Um, and again, the only counter argument here really is you're arguing that like, well, Jeffrey Epstein probably just spent half a million dollars to get no benefit. He probably just sent that money out because he didn't want any power or influence in Bitcoin, right? Like, yeah, that seems likely for Jeffrey Epstein.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  But, but also like, like, the way power works is like, simply by not allowing your competitor to exert influence, you have exerted influence. Like, he could have literally done nothing.

• 1:01:08Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  And as long as someone else that he didn't like wasn't doing some, something with it, that's doing a thing.

• 1:01:14Robert Evans?

  That's doing a thing. Yeah.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:16Robert Evans?

  Uh, now this half-assed defense of Bitcoin continues. Emails show Ito thanked Epstein for allowing us to move quickly and hiring Bitcoin talent. But let's be real, MIT's DCI was one of many funders. Today, groups like Brink and the Human Rights Foundation transparently support Bitcoin development. Epstein's role? A shady donor, not a senior manager of Bitcoin. And again, this is true. And to no one's surprise, Patrick Riley's tweet was nonsense again. But Epstein is clearly influencing the development of Bitcoin in the mid aughts. I don't see any other way of describing this, or at least he has influence on the men who decided how Bitcoin would develop. Now Bitcoin Academy notes that per the structure

• 1:01:58Robert Evans?

  of the deal, developers were unaware of the funding source. And maybe that's true. Quick audience poll. How many listeners think Jeffrey Epstein would give up a half million dollars if he didn't think it would impact what the developers he was paying for would do?

• 1:02:14Speaker 01

  Quick poll.

• 1:02:14Robert Evans?

  Right? Like, do you think that they never learned where the money came from or who they had to keep happy?

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  Or they wouldn't. But that's the thing. It's like, like, I think these people are like, oh, there wasn't like a direct like meeting.

• 1:02:28Robert Evans?

  He just did it for nothing. He just did it for nothing. Yeah.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  And it's like, no, he did it because he wanted a benefit. To make, yeah, there's just ways to communicate what you want.

• 1:02:38Robert Evans?

  I know there's a degree which this is less satisfying because I can't say here's what he did specifically to influence the development of crypto. I just know that he put himself and spent a lot of money to be in a position where he could influence the development of crypto, which means he was doing fucking something, right? And even Bitcoin Academy couldn't entirely polish this turd. The files show Epstein to cozy up to crypto figures. In 2014, he reportedly invested in Blockstream via Joy Edo's fund, though back clarifies Epstein had no direct or indirect ties to the company. Emails reveal Epstein pitching digital currency ideas to a Saudi advisor in 2016, but zero evidence exists of him touching Bitcoin's code. His real skill? Name dropping Satoshi's associates

• 1:03:20Robert Evans?

  at parties. And this is true. His real skill is name dropping famous people. But that skill has value because people know Jeffrey can connect you to influential and wealthed people and to funding, which is what allows him to influence people, including the people who guided the development of Bitcoin. Again, it's just, there's not a counter argument. Jeffrey Epstein had the opportunity to significantly influence the development of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency as a whole, right?

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  It's so funny. These two episodes have been weirdly like, he would be an odious person genuinely without the sex trafficking.

• 1:04:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Like, if he was not a pedophile, he would still be a monster.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:06Robert Evans?

  And that is kind of the surprising thing to me, because previously I'd been like, well, obviously he was a bad guy, because he was a sex trafficker, but if he hadn't done any of the sex trafficking, I would have assumed he was just another asshole finance bro. And like, no, no, he was unfortunately more influential than that.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Robert Evans?

  Alas.

• 1:04:24Robert Evans?

  Anyway, that's, uh, that's gonna do it for part two it.

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:04:29Speaker 01

  I mean, as far as these go, this has, this has been weirdly less stomach churning than I thought, when you said we were gonna be going through the Epstein files, I will say in a weird way.

• 1:04:40Robert Evans?

  Because you, I mean, you're not, I'm trying to focus it on what I think is an interesting journey, which is how Epstein influences the development of microtransactions and video games, of cryptocurrency, and of like, the burgeoning far right, which is more of what we're gonna talk about in the last two episodes. I think that's really compelling. Obviously, the, and, and we've done like, four episodes on Epstein, where we focus just on the sex crimes. We are, we do, we've talked about a lot of alleged sex crimes in this, like, he and Brock talking about girls, and talking about girls with fucking Tadic, right? But yeah, it's just not as much, you know?

• 1:05:12Speaker 01

  It's just, it's just odd to me that there's so much other stuff, I guess. I just, I don't know. I, I, it hadn't occurred to me, really.

• 1:05:19Robert Evans?

  I mean, I don't, it didn't to a lot of people. You knew he was influential, but I wouldn't have guessed a lot of this stuff was going on, right? Like, not, it's not even surprising, it's just, I wouldn't have, it, it's just weird for him to have had an influence here. Like, it makes sense, like, oh, yeah, I get, given the guy he was, why he got into far right stuff, why he was sharing all this racist shit that we'll talk about in the next episodes, why he wanted to get into Bitcoin, all this stuff. It makes sense when you say it, but I just would, I didn't guess it ahead of time, you know?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:49Robert Evans?

  I think, like, I'm not surprised, but I'm like, oh, fuck, huh?

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Robert Evans?

  I didn't call that one.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's just, it's an interesting angle.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's the Where's Waldo of evil villains.

• 1:05:59Robert Evans?

  He's, he's the Where's, the Where's Waldo of evil pedophiles.

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  Kilroy?

• 1:06:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's a Kilroy type, well, no one knows. Kilroy was here was like, an early meme, but we don't really know, like, why, like, what it was about.

• 1:06:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 1:06:15Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:16Speaker 02

  Well.

• 1:06:17Robert Evans?

  Well.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  We'll have more next week for folks.

• 1:06:21Robert Evans?

  Wow. Sophie, I do have to say, you've been caught by the subreddit.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  Why?

• 1:06:28Robert Evans?

  Breaking, Sophie is not a real person. Sophie is an advanced artificial intelligence built to serve the needs of the pod. We have this confirmed. It's in the White Papers. Proof, Sophie Ray Lichterman is an anagram for both AI policeman Thresher and America's Hitler phone.

• 1:06:43Speaker 02

  Is this actually in the subreddit?

• 1:06:45Robert Evans?

  That's strong evidence, Sophie. I don't know. I haven't double-checked. This could just be a lie. Probably is a lie. I don't know. I've done no work.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  That is my favorite part about conspiracy theorists in general is the amount of time they think people doing evil stuff spend anagramming.

• 1:07:01Robert Evans?

  The amount of importance anagrams have to the global pedophile elite is really funny.

• 1:07:07Speaker 01

  Like, now that we see the actual correspondence of the global pedophile elite, they can't spell the first time.

• 1:07:12Robert Evans?

  They can't fucking spell these words.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  How are they gonna do an anagram?

• 1:07:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Jeffrey Epstein could barely use a keyboard.

• 1:07:19Speaker 02

  This is actually on the subreddit. I thought you were just... There's 43 comments. Come on, guys.

• 1:07:26Robert Evans?

  I know, so I'm sorry. I thought it was funny.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  God.

• 1:07:31Robert Evans?

  Good stuff. Andrew, did you plug your pluggables yet?

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  Sure did. Starter track. I don't know. Thanks for having me. I cannot in good conscience say it's fun to be here, but it is certainly illuminating.

• 1:07:43Robert Evans?

  But you are here.

• 1:07:44Speaker 02

  I have a pluggable. Touch grass. Touch grass.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  You know what? I should actually say, Solidarity and Snacks is the mutual aid crew that I run with out here in Los Angeles. They're great folks. Solidarity and Snacks, you can find them.

• 1:08:01Robert Evans?

  Okay. All right, everybody. This has been Behind the Bastards, a podcast that you just listened to. Shame on you.

• 1:08:11Speaker 08

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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