How Epstein Warped the Entire Internet

And like that is very frightening because it means like if Epstein didn't exist, another Epstein would. It's hard to think of a news event or cultural phenomenon over the past 25 years that Jeffrey Epstein was not somehow involved with, but since the release of the latest trove of files, we've learned even more specifically about his role in the early internet. From 4chan to World of Warcraft to Facebook and online movements like Gamergate and Me Too, Epstein seems to have played a role in all of it. So, how much of our modern internet was shaped by Jeffrey Epstein?

To discuss all of this, I have Ryan Brick here, author of the Garbage Day Newsletter and host of the podcast Panic World. He's been digging into the files and today we're going to talk about how Jeffrey Epstein warped our tech landscape from MySpace to crypto. Hi Ryan, welcome.

>> Thanks for having me.

>> Okay, you are a reporter that I feel like, you know, since we both graduated college, you have always been hyper online and spent a lot of time really digging into like the dark corners of the internet, especially back in the early days. So, can you sort of walk me through Jeffrey Epstein's like initial impact online? Like what was he up to in the early days of the web in the 2000s?

>> Yeah, I mean it's been very interesting to sort of see him come online, so to speak, like through the Epstein files. We know that he was very active on MySpace in the 2000s, and you can kind of fill in the blanks on what someone like Epstein will be doing on MySpace. But there are court documents that basically show that evidence for his 2008 arrest, a lot of that came from MySpace. When he's released from jail in the late 2000s, he is extremely focused on making sure that people don't know that he's a sex offender. So, he's paying people for SEO services to like to clean up his Google search results. There's emails from people who say that they're quote unquote hacking Wikipedia. There's like a multi-yearlong like editor war over whether or not Epstein should be included in the defender widget on like notable offender widget on Wikipedia. The way I view it and once again I should say with everything like we're only really seeing like 1% of the 1% of what you know this guy was up to from that though I feel very confident saying that like he was very interested in manipulating what was online to hide his tracks like that that is sort of his entry point into the world of tech and the internet and all the rest. He's also like very interested in like Bitcoin. He's using online multiplayer like video games. I've seen people say like maybe it was to communicate, but he's also interested in sort of in-game currency. I I sort of view that as like, okay, he's trying to talk to people without being tracked, and he's also interested in exchanging money without being tracked. The major thing is like in the 2000s, he's very interested in figuring out how technology can help facilitate his crimes and also how he can use the internet to hide them.

It's so crazy because reading back, especially the Wikipedia stuff, and I think he was spending like I don't know, it was a thousand dollars a day or >> a couple thousand a month. Yeah. To clean up his SEO. >> It's wild cuz I feel like for a lot of people back then, that wasn't even something we really thought about. I mean, I don't just mean that as a reporter. I mean, like I don't think there was a ton of awareness about this like entire sort of shadow industry that was manipulating Google results or like creating sort of fake SEO type websites. like that feels so much more modern. And to see that it was starting even back then was kind of surprising.

>> It seems very common sense on his side where it's like if you Google me, you'll see articles about how I'm a offender. Like that's sort of where this comes from. And so it is interesting that like that's one of the earlier use cases for these services, for these SEO scrubbing services. You mentioned he gets out of prison. He starts to kind of check out the internet a little bit more, get more involved in some of these spaces and it seems like he's specifically interested in some gaming spaces. He played World of Warcraft. What was he up to there?

>> We don't know, but we do know that he was he was talking to Brock Pierce, a former child actor who was in the Mighty Ducks who went on to start a company basically around gold farming in World of Warcraft. So yeah, Brock Pierce was the head of this company called Internet Gaming Entertainment. And this company was basically trying to figure out how do you exchange real money for gold and Warcraft because they were very interested in in-game currency. And at the same time, Epstein is emailing with Bobby Cotic, the CEO of Activision, and they're having conversations about loot boxes and in-game currency. And why this becomes important later is after Brock Pierce leaves Internet Gaming Entertainment, it's taken over by Steve Bannon, which is where he gets his start sort of as an online entity. And so, yeah, as I said, like this is a clear precursor to the philosophy behind things like Bitcoin and cryptocurrency. It is a bunch of men trying to figure out how to use the internet to exchange money without being caught by regulators or various governments.

Yeah, it's wild again that like this is all sort of like this precursor to the modern internet. I guess I mean we're talking about like 2010 to 2013. I guess >> it's in this period where they're both like fixated on in-game currency, in-game communication, how to like make money off of like in-game purchases, and they're also very fixated on Occupy Wall Street. And and I think that there's a there's probably a connection there. this idea of like if Wall Street is under attack, like we need to figure out ways to exchange money where people can't see what we're doing. Like that that's me kind of filling in the blanks there, but that that's sort of how I view it.

>> Yeah. No, it makes sense. And I guess this is again like pre sort of crypto boom, pre Bitcoin world and everything. Tell me what they were up to with Occupy Wall Street. Were they sort of directly involved in any of those movements or were they just sort of tracking this stuff?

>> This is where I'm going to say I'm connecting some dots that like, you know, I'm not totally clear on, but we do know that Jeffrey Epstein and his brother Mark were emailing pretty frantically about Occupy Wall Street. There's a line in one of these emails where I think it's Mark says, "This is what you predicted 30 years ago." And we can get into a larger conversation about how like Epstein is stupid. Like he's a really stupid guy. There's a video in in the files of him like learning how to rightclick and save a file. Like he's not a tech literate person. He's not a literate person. He can't really type or write. Like anyways, he's clearly offering a service to other rich people of like advising them. That that's how I think you should think about these things. There's no link between him and Occupy Wall Street like directly, but there is a fixation about hackers in the late 2000s, early 2010s. There's a bunch of these rich guys that are becoming very interested in like what hacking can accomplish and the kind of guy that a hacker might be and how do you find them? And there's always been questions about why Occupy Wall Street fizzled and why it sort of spread off into sort of nastier parts of the internet, you know, why anonymous has been so like morally gray and the role of radicalized hackers like was it weave? Yeah. So, there's always been sort of this question of like why did that hacker c like you know it's like the the meme of like why don't they just hack the student loan database and give us all our student loans back? Like why are we always sort of dealing with these guys in this sort of nefarious way? And you know, maybe there's a connection there, but we don't have anything hard to to sort of say that.

>> What else is happening outside of Epstein's realm on the internet? What is going on on the web at this time? And what were kind of like the vibes like, I guess, politically online in this era?

>> Sure. I mean, this is this is a huge era. It's arguably one of the most important eras in sort of the evolution of information technology. By the end of the 2000s, you get this like very angry postrecession internet culture that eventually turns into Occupy Wall Street. It inspire the, you know, the early Facebook generation inspires the Arab Spring across the Middle East. And a lot of American tech companies are pointing at these populist, vaguely leftist, vaguely liberal, vaguely progressive social movements from like at the time young millennials, now older millennials and saying this is great. Like technology is a tool for democracy. We now know that like almost all these have fizzled. The the Arab Spring absolutely turned into sort of an authoritarian nightmare. But like this was the the narrative. Twitter is a tool for democracy. Facebook is a tool for democracy. And it is I think very important for the marketing of these platforms and the platform's relationship with the media. At the time the media was sort of saying like a tweet could change the world and like you know it can not in a good way. That's when all of this is starting. the the very beginnings of what would become Black Lives Matter is starting around this time. Trayvon Martin is killed in 2012. The early rumblings of of the progressive leftist liberal online movements are starting at this time. And this will be important actually for Epstein and our conversation about Epstein when we get to Me Too, which we can talk about in a second.

>> Before we get to Me Too, I want to go back in history a little bit further to 4chan. So 4chan was obviously founded a really long time ago. It's such an internet 1.0 company. But I feel like as all this tech optimist is like kind of taking over, as you mentioned, it's like Obama years. Everyone's like Tumblr, we love the internet. Oh my gosh, how could these things ever be bad? There is this kind of like alternative internet, I guess, that's like sort of bubbling up that's still very fringe. What was going on in those communities? And how did Jeffrey Epstein kind of interact with them?

>> Yeah. So, I should say like you should always view Epstein as a predator and as a groomer. So, it's not so much that he's like an evil mastermind. It's that he's identifying social spaces that he can infiltrate. It's what pedophiles do, right? So, Something Awful launches in 1999 and it quickly becomes like a very popular watering hole for like misanthropes and weirdos and it starts to create a lot of the early internet culture that we would eventually call memes, right? So, Photoshop Friday was like their big Photoshop battles they would do every week and that kind of like created a lot of the early internet culture that we now think of. There's a effectively like a bunch of mod drama. I'm simplifying here so please do not email me saying that I got the history wrong here. I'm just trying to simplify. There's some mod drama around 2003 around posting like anime porn basically and a really sort of like intense message board on something awful called anime death tentacle wh house was the was the section and there was all these fights about whether it should be banned or not. And what ended up happening was a a teenager on on something awful at the time used an early translation software called Babelfish or Babelfish to machine translate a Japanese message board called Tuchchan or Nchan or Futaba Channel. And once again, please just no one email me at this. I'm simplifying. I'm trying to do as best I can. And then they create 4chan. That teenager was named Christopher P. And Christopher Pool basically ran 4chan for for you know close to a decade over a decade. And there were all kinds of moderation issues on 4chan because it's an anonymous message board where message board threads time out due to inactivity. So what that means in practice is like you're supposed to post on there as often as possible because the minute you stop posting whatever that thread was that everyone's talking about disappears forever. There's a lot of different sections on 4chan. This will be important for what we're talking about. And over the years, pool known as his username moot more commonly. Moot is like experimenting with news threads, nudes, news boards. And the 2008 campaign of Ron Paul kind of like takes over the site in this really aggressive way and it and basically turns like this the whole thing into like Ron Paul spam. And so he's like Moot is like trying to figure out how to quarantine all the the Ron Paul spam. And one of the great mysteries, you know, as as I've written about 4chan is why Moot decided to bring back a news and politics board for a third time because every time he would he would create one, it would just become like a giant hub for neo-Nazis. And what we have since discovered from the Epstein files is that the day before he he did that, before he brought before he created what's called poll, politically incorrect, he met with Jeffrey Epste. Now, this is where I have to say that Moot has since released a statement saying that Jeffrey Epstein had no connection to his desire to launch pole, but it's still really weird. It's a really weird thing to have happened. I've asked other sort of like internet like long haulers like, do you believe Moot? Is he telling the truth? And I don't know. I've heard different explanations for what happened, but it is very strange.

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>> I think you made such a good point earlier of saying like it's not necessarily that Epstein is a mastermind. He seems just very adept at like being at the right place at the right time almost where like maybe he told Moot to start some who knows like but ultimately he was sort of just around these communities during this like very pivotal time.

>> Yeah. Yeah. And what's really interesting is in the emails, the the conversation about Moot refers to him as a hacker, which I think is like something that has kind of been lost to time that a lot of these young internet guys that were creating websites and creating communities were thought of as these like renegade hackers. My read on it is like Epstein thought like, ooh, like 4chan could be a place where like I find hackers, I find people who would commit cybercrime for me. And the only evidence we know that he was aware of 4chan after this initial meeting was that in 2017 he emailed his girlfriend a link to 4chan thread containing Five Nights at Freddy's. So like he is clearly like aware of the site, but I've been trying to push back as best I can against people who are like Gamergate was created by Jeffrey Epstein. It's like maybe, but like the evidence just isn't there.

>> Well, let's talk about Gamergate.

>> How many years have you and I have been talking about Gamergate now?

>> Dude, it's too much. It's too much. I think people are thinking about things a little too much sometimes in the sense that like I think everybody thinks everything is like a scope and it's not. It's mostly kind of just like idiot people or like strange coincidences or whatever. And I do think that Gamergate was an important moment for the modern internet. I think it showed this sort of like blueprint for weaponization of the internet, but also it's just like kind of a bunch of people being terrible in a way that they continue to be terrible. Can you explain what happened and why it was such an influential sort of event on the early web?

>> So, it all started around this guy's blog post full of unfounded allegations that his ex-girlfriend was trading sexual favors for positive reviews of her indie video game. And it ballooned out into sort of an anti-woke crusade, initially against video games and then against the entire entertainment industry and the world. And the reason it it it it's had the legacy it's had and had the legs it had initially is thanks to conservative publishers like Breitbart. And this is where this is where like things actually do get a little interesting for me. Steve Bannon at this point has left, Internet Gaming Entertainment or whatever it's called. And he's now the editor-in chief of Breitbart. And he hires Milo Yiannopoulos to be their tech correspondent, their tech columnist. And Milo's big trick was taking chatter from 4chan and writing it up in news articles which could then be shared on Facebook at like peak Facebook article time. So you know you're you're seeing in 2014 now a bunch of 4chan nonsense. I mean although honestly like we are all doing it like we were all being like this thing's oh 4chan hacked the time magazine poll. Isn't that amazing? You know like like everyone was kind of writing these stories but they were doing it in a way to to advance a culture war narrative. And so you end up like creating this environment where random 4chan conspiracies are are are beginning to infiltrate like Fox News coverage, right? If you think of this as Fox News is the top of the pyramid. And so that is interesting to me like the fact that Steve Bannon and Epstein eventually become extremely close friends and that and that Bannon and and Milo are so instrumental in the spreading of Gamergate and that Epstein was sort of looking at 4chan before Gamergate. Like there's an interesting thing there, but I have to like always stop right there because I don't want to give any of these parties too much credit. And I sort of think that Gamergate probably would have happened even without Steve Bannon being involved, but like they definitely helped boost all of this stuff.

>> I mean, it's not like Jeffrey Epstein created Gamergate, of course. And I think like I saw some takes kind of when this was happening of like, you know, he's got his hands and everything. I think it's interesting how aware he was of again these sort of like I don't want to say backroom dealings but sort of like the underbelly of the internet.

>> Absolutely. So by this point he has successfully infiltrated Silicon Valley to some degree. The main nodes of contact there are at first Elon Musk and Joy Edo from the MIT Media Lab. And there's a photo that like he emailed himself that he took at a dinner where it's like Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Teal, Elon Musk, like he met all these guys and he was particularly interested in Peter Teal and Palanteer. There's a really good recording of Epstein talking to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehoud Barak which I think sort of like gives the whole game away in a way where it's Epstein basically talking to Barak saying you got to check out this company Palanteer like like it's a hot new stock tip and like that's why I've written several times that like I think the easiest way to think about what Epstein was doing was as an elaborate elder abuse scheme like he was sort of identifying extremely rich old men and then convincing them like how to invest their money in different directions while skimming off the top. This is what, you know, Les Wexner has said for years is that like he was actually being robbed blind by Epstein. All of this is important because by the time Me Too arrives, Epstein has like successfully infiltrated different parts of Silicon Valley. He's like helping set up former Prince Andrew visit Andre and Horowitz's offices. He's talking to Peter Teal regularly and inviting him to his Zoro ranch in New Mexico. Like all of these guys know each other. And so the New York Times publishes their investigation into Harvey Weinstein in 2017. And then Epstein immediately gets connected with Steve Bannon, which is really interesting. And what's even more interesting is that in the thread that connects the two, it's a third party basically saying like, "Oh, remember Internet Gaming Entertainment? Like this guy was involved." What we then have is like probably one of the most interesting relationships documented in the Epstein files and it happens across text messages and emails. And I think the most charitable read on the communications between Steve Bannon and Epstein between 2017 and Epstein's death is that the two of them were just bullshitting each other on a level that has just never been seen before. These two are just like the most insane con artists of our era and they are both fantasizing about a political takeover of the world. And as much as I think that like the two of them are basically like puffing them themselves up to each other and trying to like you know big dog each other, what they outline is extremely important. It's probably like the most important document we have of, you know, the radicalization of the world in the in the back half of the 2010s. They are trying to create a cryptocurrency funded far-right movement to shut down Me Too. That is that is actually the the entire thing. And the reason they're doing that is so Epstein is extremely freaked out by Me Too. He he if you want to find this in the files, you have to search mostly you have to search Times Up. He's using the Hollywood sort of spin-off name for it. Although he like had like you know one of his network in Times Up like he was talking to them the whole time. He was very freaked out about it. And so what him and Bannon concoct is if they can get far-right politicians elected, those far-right politicians who are in bed with, you know, Russian interests or or sort of authoritarian, you know, nation states, they can shut down any regulation of cryptocurrency that might pop up across Europe and the US. And if there's no regulation on cryptocurrency, they can fund basically like endless amounts of lawsuits and pressure to anyone who tries to report sexual abuse. That's really what they're trying to build. And they're talking about like you can name any far-right politician and they're basically connected to all of them. You know, in the 2018 Brazilian election, former Brazilian president Jar Balssonaro says he's not talking to Bannon. Turns out he was talking to Bannon and also possibly talking to Epstein. Matteo Salvini with La Liga in Italy, Marine Le Pen with Front National in France, the AFD party in Germany, Nigel Farage, and the Brexit movement in the UK. They're all talking to Bannon. And Bannon is talking to Epstein. And they're all trying to accomplish this one thing, which is unregulated financial transfers, far-right politics, and crushing the Me Too movement.

It's wild because I feel like I mean ultimately so much of that is what is defined the Trump era and the Trump presidency especially even the second Trump presidency like with all of like the crypto stuff. And I think it's so revealing that it was all tied back to like wanting to exploit women. It wasn't even like a super nefarious like I don't know big brain like political agenda.

>> This is super important because you can watch Epstein in semi-real time learn how to be an ideologue. He was not a creature of politics or I mean he had like weird like eugenics misadventures and side plots, but I almost sort of view them as a way to talk to the more hardcore ideologues in Silicon Valley. The way I sort of see him is like we know that sexual predators insert themselves into institutions with a lot of gray space and a lot and a lack of oversight. You know, we saw this with the Catholic Church. It's this vast institution and there's not a lot of oversight and they can kind of carry out their their, you know, their their agendas. I sort of think that Epstein was that to post cold war espionage. Like imagine how dangerous it would be if a like got in the mix between MI6, the CIA, MSAD and FSB, right? Like that's a really scary idea. And then he becomes extremely useful to these intelligence agencies. And then he starts to, you know, invade Silicon Valley. And when he gets to Silicon Valley, you know, it's Peter Teal talking about like a global surveillance state that can control the whole world and no laws and whatever. And it's like Epstein learns to speak that language to get these people on board.

>> How effective like was this? I mean obviously we know it ultimately was effective enough to like I mean Trump is back in office so this broader movement was successful but even just zooming back a little bit to what he was doing in the as the early 2010s like how much of our internet was shaped by Epstein. I feel like we're all sort of looking back at like his involvement in Yeah. You mentioned like Victoria's Secret, Lex Wner, like he had his hands in so many parts of culture.

>> Epstein owned the Limited 2.

>> It's crazy. That is like the defining brand from my childhood. Like it's wild.

>> He transferred ownership of the Limited 2 to his holding company. Here's a crazy one I can't really figure out what to do with is that he was so prolific apparently on MySpace that there are CD ROMs of his activity, you know, trying to find victims on MySpace and then all of the data on MySpace is erased in a transfer and there we can't see anything that happened on MySpace pre 2016. Like there are so many questions and I try not to go down the rabbit hole and become like a tonal like maniac thinking about this stuff. But to answer your question of like how much of the internet did Epstein shape, I think the best way to think about it is that the internet of today would probably look fairly similar if Epstein never existed. But he was able to evolve his trafficking operation and his and his sexual predator sort of you know network with the help of the internet and the and at least like was in close contact with the men who built it and like that is very frightening because it means like if Epstein didn't exist another Epstein would have. If you are a far-right gamergator, like I'm sorry, like you're helping a like if you voted for Trump, you are you are at least at the very least helping a you're helping many and and that is, you know, just something that, you know, if there is a hell, you'll be alerted to when you get there. But like that's that's where we're at, you know. It's it's that these guys had an agenda and that the internet, you know, and its evolution helped facilitate that for many many years.

>> Yeah. And I mean, Epstein obviously dies and we're only learning about this theoretically. His his public life ended, we should say he's in his real playing Fortnite or whatever people think. But I'm wondering kind of like I mean you mentioned this like these men that that run the internet that like Elon Musks of the world the Peter Tales of the world that sort of built the modern infrastructure of the internet that wield enormous power over it like what are their circles like and like what do we know about you know how these things are operating today because I think like a peek into Jeffrey Epstein reveals kind of how much he was able to kind of exploit and potentially maybe in small ways manipulate the system but are there more Jeffrey Epstein maybe not but these other kind of like side men that are quietly like whether they're profiting off it or just playing a big role in kind of like shaping the public modern internet in ways that we can't see.

>> Yeah. I I think the emails that we have are fairly revealing about how this works, which is it's a bunch of powerful men and all they do all day is eat lunch and eat dinner with each other and they like share business tips. They're like, "Hey, did you hear about this hot new app? You hear about this hot new business?" And then they're emailing, you know, semicoherent like like barely literate like messages to each other being like, "You got to meet this guy, you got to meet that guy." And they're making their assistants and their PR people like connect them with each other. And we have this view of rich people living these like insanely extravagant lives. But, you know, we saw this with the Diddy freakoff parties. It's like what what these people actually really want and seem to value is anonymity and the ability to sort of be away from the public and be away from any kind of scrutiny. And so when you're trying to think, you know, like I had someone the other day be like, "Do you really think that the entire world is run by?" And I'm like, "No, I don't think that." What I do think is that there is a culture of the ultra ultra ultra ultra wealthy wanting to get away from everyone else and be afforded sort of like an ability to relax and and sort of be, you know, not on guard. And if you can facilitate, you know, an island or ranch that these people can go to and have a meal and then have a party, you can then kind of create a menu of more and more unsavory activities. And in fact, we saw this. There's a menu that he provided at at Little St. James of all the drugs you could buy and what they would do and and how long they lasted. That's what he was doing. He was providing that service on top of his sort of financial advisory role. So, you could you could you could easily see like, oh, come invest with me, sign me on as your financial adviser. Oh, I'm having an end of the year party. You can come to the end of the year party. By the way, do you have any tastes that might not be exactly mainstream? how can I, you know, how he was a client guy. Like it's a he was a sales guy.

>> It's so wild to think of him kind of like operating and catering to these guys that are such dunes. Like the email, like you said, they're reading these emails, they're like borderline incoherent and the amount of power and influence that these men have. When you read sort of how illiterate they are, it's is I don't know. It's disturbing.

>> Yeah, I've definitely stopped proofreading my emails. Like I mean like look like if Bill Gates can can type with you know his eyes closed like why am I bothering? I mean, like that's the thing, like these guys are not like they're not particularly smart or deep thinkers, at least with each other. And Epstein is is is a dumb guy. Like he's really dumb, but he is like charismatic and he knows people and he's got this entire sort of side service, this sort of like like underground service he can offer you. And him and Ghislaine Maxwell like can can make anything happen, whatever anything means to you. Like that's very powerful, especially if you're recording it and then using it as sort of soft blackmail, which we can also see some evidence of in the files.

>> You said before that like if you're this Gamergate guy, right, or you fell for some of this stuff, like you were ultimately helping. And I'm curious kind of what the reaction has been from those more far-right communities in like on 4chan or elsewhere. How do these guys not feel like Chuds realizing that like there are people like Steve Bannon or whoever just essentially like orchestrating their entire sort of dumb outrage cycles and then these people fall for it? Like I don't know. Has there been any self-reflection or any sort of questioning of things from those communities?

>> Oh yeah, there was self-reflection and then they immediately pivoted to being like it's true there is a Zionist conspiracy to control the world and that like Jews tricked me. Like I saw this like a bunch of threads that were like Jews tricked me into helping a like that's what it is. And like this is the problem with a lot of this stuff is like we love to imagine some kind of come to Jesus moment where like these guys realize that they've wasted their lives and like that they just sort of wake up. What actually usually happens is that when you have a moment like this, it actually further radicalizes them into believing like even more nihilistic things. So it's like once the rug has been pulled on you from this, I mean there's nothing left to care about. Like once the radicalization process starts, it's very hard to reverse it. It's much easier to just like go deeper down the rabbit hole and become like even more violent and angry and xenophobic.

>> I know. I feel like I was hoping that maybe this would like not black pill people, but I have seen some people sort of just lose faith in the system. I mean, I think these files have been damaging to Trump's support, I guess, in the sense that people believe him to be complicit, but it doesn't seem like they're moving away from radicalization. It feels like they're actually just going further down the rabbit hole, as you said, and going in even more extreme ways. I feel like I don't know, the Jeffrey Epstein thing I feel like I see on TikTok all the time is like, "Oh my god, all those QAnon people were right. actually all those conspiracies we grew up like saying hey those crazy people like think that or don't believe you know, don't believe in 9/11 etc etc like actually they were probably right."

>> Look, there are plenty of questions about what Epstein was up to on 9/11 and there's a lot of files missing from that time period and there's some very weird stuff there. I don't want to get too crazy again, but like yeah, the man was the Forrest Gump of the 21st century. I have been wondering this as well sort of like where does this go and I I interviewed for my show Panic called Representative Ro Khanna about this recently and sort of trying to figure out like what he thinks, you know, cuz he was one of the politicians pushing so hard to get these files released, him and Tom Massie. And I don't think he was really ready to say this, but like I might be ready to say this that like yes, I think if we are legally allowed to vote again, this has already cost Trump the election. I think I'm eternally too hopeful, but like I think that this is like really damaged Trump in a way that like is kind of existential. And if Trump loses, we're looking at like a thousand-year Democrat reign at this point. Like hopefully they would have to re Well, I shouldn't say I shouldn't say >> if there's one thing I know, Ryan, they're going to it up.

>> There's been serious reputational damage done to this. I think there's also a lot of interesting things happening in Europe. Like the French government just got, you know, just started moving on this. The British government is moving on this. This is not going away. And I think the the further other countries go down this process of saying like we're not going to stand for this, it's going to make Americans wonder like why are we? And I think the most like if you're looking for like a where does this all go? How does this affect American politics? I think it's very possible we end up with like a second Occupy style kind of like chaotic populist movement over this stuff and one that can go in a million directions because as you said there are a lot of people now like random TikTokers that are like Qanon was right and so I don't know what politics that would have but I think like it's very possible that we're we're heading towards a mass sort of anti-elite populist movement that like will look like whatever you know whatever I'm not really sure but Yeah, I this is not going away in the way I think the Trump administration hoped it would.

>> Yeah, I know. I wonder if that populist movement will go anywhere. Like it seems like the architecture of the internet is so hostile. And speaking of Ro Khanna, big booster of mass surveillance laws and stuff and like it seems like even something like Occupy today would be so surveilled and crushed before it even got traction. And when we see I mean look at what ICE is doing out in the streets. It's like

>> I I would disagree with you there cuz like I mean I saw you know I was in Minneapolis and I saw how they're doing it how anti-ICE people are are running things and like I actually think there's evidence all around us that offline social movements are gaining traction and the technology is speeding up to allow them to operate whether it's through Signal or whatever else. And I think we are like closer to a tipping point with this stuff than we think. I just I don't think it's going to be an inherently liberal populist uprising, but I think that that we are closer to something happening than we think we are.

>> Yeah, I think there's definitely like even if there isn't that like flash point like IRL necessarily, it's certainly a vibe shift and I think that that alone will have consequences. If you had to describe Jeffrey Epstein's ideology, what would it even be?

>> At this point, I've probably read like thousands and thousands of these emails. And I'm going to say like I think this is him trying to intellectualize the fact he's a pedophile because at a certain point you just have to like you got to come up with some kind of like marketing pitch for the more high-minded individuals you want to like bring into your network. But what I would say is he was very convinced that climate change was creating a need for a eugenics movement. Towards the end of his life, he was very interested in basically capturing young women and breeding them as cattle. And there's some evidence that he was doing that depending on how like you want to read some of what's in the files. And he has emails about how he wanted to basically create like a race of super babies with his own DNA. And he was very anti IVF. He he he said that the the natural way is much more fun in one of his emails. And so he taken all together I think at the core he was a pedophile who was running a trafficking operation but I think that probably over the course of his life evolved into this sort of high-minded idea that he was going to create an ark for climate change and and and jumpstart his own eugenics movement to basically create a new race of humans. And that sounds ridiculous but like it's very lined up with stuff that Peter Teal has said. It's very lined up with like all kinds of Silicon Valley founders and what they talk about. I don't think they got it from him. I think actually maybe it's possible he learned how to intellectualize what he was doing from them. But yes, like this this whole sort of like libertarian dark enlightenment network state. The thing that none of these people are saying is something that Jeffrey Epstein was quite comfortable saying, which is that they're all freaked out about climate change. And like all of the radicalization we're seeing at the top 1% of the country, at the top 1% of the world, all of this is them trying to like create a way to outlast climate change without having to do anything. And I think Epstein in his own way was workshopping that idea as well.

>> It's bizarre that they care so much about climate change when I mean I know that they believe it rightly will lead to kind of mass disruption in the world etc. and maybe that will affect their wealth but they also have bunkers in New Zealand or Hawaii or whatever and they seem so insulated from its worst effects.

>> Yeah. I mean they're like they know that it's impossible to stop it from their framework, right? Because the only way to stop it would be regulation and they don't want regulation. So they can't stop climate change. So they're creating these islands and these bunkers and these like you know seasteading operations and Martian you know and lunar you know orbiters or whatever because like through their philosophy of like you know rampant capitalism there is no off switch for anything. So their thought is like we'll just outrun it we'll outlast it. We'll treat it like shorting the market. We'll put all of our chips you know in our bunkers and our islands and stuff and and then wait it out. And I think Epstein learned over the course of the 2000s and 2010s how to intellectualize his pedophilia that way. And he was sort of very interested in yeah in genetic manipulation. I mean he had really kooky ideas. He was trying to breed a kosher pig.

>> What?

>> So that he could he could make kosher pork. He was on some like real supervillain, you know, like real wacky. And yeah, we we don't really know still about the like intricacies of his operation. Like that's the really frustrating thing is like we can see his like the emails we have are from his vacation address. Like we don't really we don't really know like totally what he was doing and how it was working and and until we do like we're sort of just left to speculate. But yeah, I'm I'm comfortable saying that like he was creating honeypot situations for very powerful men and he was finding different ways to intellectualize what he was doing to them. And all of this was extremely threatened by Me Too, which then causes him to speed up his sort of political revolution with Steve Bannon. And there is obviously all kinds of evidence that he was, if not a double agent, a triple or quadruple agent for multiple intelligence agencies. So, yeah.

>> It's wild. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for joining me and chatting today.

>> Yeah, I hope that wasn't too depressing and gross.

>> All right, that's it for this week's episode of Power User. If you like my work, please, please support me on Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my Substack newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.co. On my Patreon, I do bonus episodes. You can listen ad-free. I do a monthly Q&A live stream and more. You can also get my bi-weekly newsletter of everything that I'm sort of reading and following online with a paid subscription to my Substack or my Patreon. Thanks so much and I'll be back next week with a brand new episode of Power User. See you then.