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

By popular demand, we're doing an all-Epstein show today. My besties are all on vacation for ski week, so I'm taking this on solo. We have 3 different guests on who all have very different interpretations and opinions of the Epstein story.

Saagar Enjeti from Breaking Points believes that Epstein shows there is an “Epstein class” that operates above the law and accountability. He views the story as an indictment of our ruling elites. Michael Tracey is skeptical about many of the most salacious claims about Epstein and questions whether they meet any kind of evidentiary standard. He has criticized the media feeding frenzy over what he has called “Epstein mythology.”

And finally, Kevin Bass is a citizen journalist who's been tracking the release of the files and posting his findings on X, specifically regarding Reid Hoffman, perhaps the figure in tech most closely associated with Jeffrey Epstein. Some of it gets heated, but hopefully you'll come away with new perspectives and great information. I felt like it was important to showcase a range of viewpoints on this issue. I'm trying to keep an open mind, and I'll describe my own point of view at the end of the show.

And with that, here we go. Saagar, let me start with you. What is the import of the arrest of Prince Andrew in the UK this morning? Is this a case of “show us the man and we'll tell you the crime”? It obviously seems kind of coincidental that he's not being arrested for misconduct in the Epstein affair. He's being arrested for mishandling, I guess, trade secrets or public documents. So obviously, the timing of this is not coincidental.

No, it's certainly not coincidental, but I do believe that the facts matter in this case. Unfortunately for Prince Andrew and Lord Mandelson, the former ambassador to the United States from the UK as well, it is pretty clear-cut that they violated their official duties.

We should remember that the crux of this case involving Andrew is not just about some of the accusations that were made, although that is the genesis, let's say, of the investigation and the interest. This is about Prince Andrew serving as a UK trade adviser and forwarding nonpublic information to Jeffrey Epstein that has been released and is currently in the files. Some of it involves scheduling. However, Gordon Brown this morning said that he had actually shared some new information with Scotland Yard and the police.

So it's not exactly just what's in the files, but it could potentially be other material that Gordon Brown and the Chancellor were able to investigate as to what Prince Andrew was sharing, as part of a broader probe into Lord Mandelson and the tip-off that he gave to Jeffrey Epstein about an upcoming bailout.

I do think that this reveals quite a lot about Jeffrey Epstein. The genesis of his rise to power, his wealth, and his influence involved, let's say, even some of the co-hosts on this very podcast. It involved a deep financial knowledge of money-laundering networks and an effort to be at the very forefront of moving money across the globe, which I believe is his real power and influence. That's what enabled much of the behavior that much of the public is now horrified by.

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

I'm talking about Jason. I actually thought that the Jason email was very interesting. You'll see that in 2011, Jeffrey Epstein was contacting Jason about Bitcoin. I saw and watched your discussion. I'm not implicating him in any crime. I'm saying that if you watch and look at that email very closely, you are watching Jeffrey Epstein, a master money launderer and financial mastermind himself, be at the forefront of Bitcoin technology and wondering about it in 2011.

As Jason even pointed out in the last episode that you guys did about this, that was when Bitcoin was around $1 and some sort of open-source project. To me, that shows how at the forefront he was of new technology and new ways to move money surreptitiously across the globe, which is what I believe was his real strength and basically his raison d'être for being so useful to all of these different foreign governments and intelligence assets, including ours, Russia, Israel, and various different intelligence networks across the globe.

Yeah. Let me just, for viewers of this episode who didn't see that episode, summarize what exactly happened there, because I want to make sure that Jason's reputation is not unfairly impugned. I don't think you're doing that, but just to be absolutely clear about it, what happened was that Jason hosted an episode of This Week in Startups, roughly, I think, in 2011, with a couple of the Bitcoin Core founders. Then Epstein reached out to him for an introduction to those people.

One of my takeaways from that was, like you said, Saagar, that Epstein was extraordinarily early to Bitcoin. He clearly had a nose for putting himself in the middle of things. I think 2011 is when I discovered Bitcoin, so that was relatively early.

I thought it was almost comical, the way that Jason was trying to warn Epstein: “Oh, you don't want to meet these guys. These are some crazies. They're crypto-libertarians. They want to take down the government. There's no profit. There's no investment opportunity here.” In a way, it was kind of comical that Jason was trying to warn Epstein about the Bitcoin guys rather than vice versa.

But I don't really think people knew at that point in time what Epstein was involved in. Do you disagree with that? Do you think people should have known by 2011?

Well, David, I will say there is a Wayback Machine, and we can go back and look at what the Google results were. We also have somebody who pleaded guilty. Look, this is for every individual to make up their own mind. You could Google “solicitation of prostitution involving a minor.” That was literally a matter of public record.

I can only speak for myself. That's not really somebody I would involve myself with, even at a professional level. And had you known?

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

But it wasn't widely publicized at the time. The Palm Beach Post had numerous news articles.

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

Well, you're talking about the 2018, broader story, but the original solicitation-of-prostitution-involving-a-minor charge—I believe 2007 is when the nonprosecution agreement came to bear. That was all public record in terms of registration as a sex offender.

Again, you can use the Wayback Machine and go back and look. This doesn't necessarily implicate anybody in a crime, and anybody can make up their own mind as to how they would have involved themselves with that person. But it was out there. It wasn't unknown, and I don't think it's really responsible to imply otherwise.

Quick factual clarification on that: Although it wasn't an enormous story at the time, you can find coverage in The New York Times in July 2008, after Epstein pleaded guilty to the 2 state-level prostitution charges. We didn't have the full scope of the information, obviously, about what he was accused of or the nature of the nonprosecution agreement, but a Google search would have yielded that at the time.

Yeah, that's right.

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

2018, I would say.

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

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

But, Michael, I don't think that you would clown on people in the journalism landscape.

Michael, I don't think that you would deny that, ultimately, this was sparked by Julie K. Brown's Miami Herald story, and that a federal judge who reviewed the nonprosecution agreement did say that this was a violation of the Crime Victims' Rights Act because—

That was overturned on appeal.

Right. Well, I understand. However, this has also gone forth to the Supreme Court involving Ghislaine Maxwell. As I understand it, it is currently being litigated.

The Supreme Court rejected it.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

Maxwell's appeal.

I'm talking about the Maxwell appeal, but specifically the nonprosecution agreement and the overturning of it is what led to the current indictment—the 2019 indictment—of Jeffrey Epstein.

That's wrong, Saagar.

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

Yeah, I mean, this is a misconception. The nonprosecution agreement was never overturned. Ghislaine Maxwell's argument in her appeals included citing the nonprosecution agreement as something that she claimed she ought to have been covered by, and therefore insulated from federal prosecution, which was initiated against her in 2020.

Let me just finish.

Sure. Ghislaine Maxwell's argument in her appeals included citing the nonprosecution agreement as something that she claimed she ought to have been covered by, and therefore insulated from federal prosecution, which was initiated against her in 2020.

It was never voided. Bradley Edwards, the victims’ lawyer, attempted to convince federal judges to somehow nullify it, but he failed. The reason why Jeffrey Epstein was federally reprosecuted in 2019 is because prosecutors in the Southern District of New York—Maurene Comey et al.—concocted this cockamamie rationale for how they could circumvent the nonprosecution agreement by claiming they found a new victim in New York, claiming that there was some interstate nexus through which they could tie some of the old Florida allegations. But it was never nullified at all.

I apologize for not being very specific in my language. It was ruled in 2019 that it had violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act. That’s what led to the reindictment.

There was no connection.

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

You’ve got your chronology wrong. The Miami Herald story was based on Julie K. Brown. That was based on Julie K. Brown colluding with the victims’ lawyers, not the court ruling on the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.

All right, guys. Let me just get control of this again because I think we’re going down a rabbit hole, and there are lots of aspects of this story that we could discuss.

We should probably judge each person who interacted with Epstein or visited his island, and so forth, individually, in terms of what they actually did and what they actually knew. Saagar, I just think you’re being a little bit unfair to Jason because all he did was exchange emails with Epstein.

I don’t think it was in the 2011 time period. That’s all.

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

Yes. I think that exchange was noteworthy for the reason you just said, which is that Epstein somehow was putting himself in the middle of all sorts of things. He’s almost like a Zelig-like figure who pops up in many different newsworthy stories over the last few decades, which is what I think makes this interesting.

Jason Calacanis

I think maybe a question for each of you is: Who do you think this guy ultimately was? You hear all sorts of theories. Let’s say maybe the Epstein maximalist position would be that he was an intelligence asset or intelligence agent who was running a vast compromat operation on his island and thereby was corrupting and blackmailing the world’s elite. I think, Michael, you have a different point of view on that, so let me not characterize it. I’ll let you guys do it. But Saagar, let me start with you. Who do you think this guy was? Ultimately, at a 30,000-foot level, what do you think is going on here? What is this Epstein story really about? And then, Michael, I want to go to you on the same question.

I do think that there is a very low-IQ, unfortunate explosion of accusations that are out there. I want to be very responsible in the way that I describe it. I think that Jeffrey Epstein was somebody who arose under very suspicious conditions in the 1980s, potentially involving Iran-Contra knowledge, specifically with arms traffickers like Adnan Khashoggi and Douglas Leese, and Steven Hoffenberg as well.

These black-market money-laundering and tax-evasion strategies were honed over a period, which eventually inspired various people like Leslie Wexner and many other multibillionaires. At the very same time, he also had his sexual proclivities, which I think at this point were well known, and those became useful. His money-laundering-specific duties, knowledge, and usefulness, let’s say, to the CIA and to various other intelligence assets became a very useful part of the nexus in the post–Cold War environment.

At the time, it was also socially known among a lot of Epstein’s associates that he had this bizarre practice of often seeking out massages, which in some cases, they are saying, involved underage girls. To say that he was running a vast compromat operation, I think, ascribes too much intention to what’s really happening here.

The reason why I’m being intentional in my language is that what he clearly was doing was recruiting and running this vast massage scheme, also involving Ghislaine Maxwell, all across the world, involving Russian and Eastern European women. This behavior was tolerated, and in some cases seen, by a vast number of the global elite.

The 2007 circumstances of the nonprosecution agreement—and Michael and I could go back and forth on this for a long time as to the circumstances in which that arose—are important. However, I don’t think, Michael, you would even deny that his access to wealth, power, and money did eventually allow him to get off with the 2007 nonprosecution agreement and the eventual sweetheart deal that he gets with his hiring.

I wouldn’t agree with that, actually.

I don’t think the average Joe can just hire Ken Starr, private investigators, and lawyers.

Jason Calacanis

Oh, sure. His vast wealth enables him to secure very high-powered legal representation.

That’s what I’m claiming. This whole concept of a sweetheart deal is a total canard.

Jason Calacanis

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

I will answer that. However, I do want to stipulate up front that I think this reflex to have to offer some kind of totalistic assessment of who Jeffrey Epstein was at his very essence has fed into so much of the constant churn of algorithmic slop that has generated this hysterical frenzy around this issue and has led to people being totally deluded about what we’re even talking about.

I have some surmises about Jeffrey Epstein. He definitely was a money manager who, as you mentioned, was like this Zelig character who did have an extraordinary cross-section of connections with people from across fields. I was looking through some of these records in the new Epstein Files production, and I was looking for something else, but there’s an archive of these old message pads that he had at his Palm Beach house.

I’m scrolling through, and it turns out Halle Berry left him a couple of messages. I had no idea that Halle Berry was ever in contact with Jeffrey Epstein. You can always find somebody new and novel who apparently had some dealing or another with him.

But why are we talking about Jeffrey Epstein right now, in February of 2026?

Because he is believed to have been the most prolific child sex trafficker in American, or perhaps world, history, which is why this issue might now take down the British government. It’s embroiling Norway. A minister in Slovakia had to resign over it. There’s a new criminal investigation that was just launched in France, et cetera.

That’s what people conceive Jeffrey Epstein to have been. That whole notion is based on an onslaught of mythological nonsense that’s pumped out daily by these YouTube shows—I won’t mention names—podcasts, and social media personalities who are driven by these perverse algorithmic incentives to be totally divorced from the facts and to foreground this rampant speculation.

That speculation ties in the Mossad and unnamed other intelligence agencies with this presumed implication—or this presumed reality—that, of course, we know for sure Jeffrey Epstein was running this pedophile crime ring. And so they presuppose a conclusion that’s just been floating out there in the ether, thanks to all this horrendous media coverage.

I think this is the worst story of my adult lifetime in terms of the media coverage, and it implicates the alternative media, the mainstream media, and everybody in between. It’s actually shocking. I will predict here and now that if we revisit this issue in 2 or 3 years, people will come to realize, if I have anything to do with it, that they were bamboozled on a mass scale.

There’s genuine fraud that has been rampant in terms of the journalistic malfeasance. We’re not supposed to ever consider the massive financial incentives, where the Epstein industry is now something like—I’ve estimated—a billion dollars in terms of the payouts that have been given to purported victims who are allowed to just reimagine things that happened to them 20 years before as an adult, not as a child, but as an adult at the time of their claimed victimization. Then they can call themselves a sex-trafficking victim and secure a couple million dollars tax-free from JPMorgan, and the media will hail them as these brave survivors without doing a single thing to check the veracity of any of their claims.

You know why people are so upset about these redactions in the Epstein files? I’m upset too. I criticized Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna for the language of their bill, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which they crafted in concert with Bradley Edwards, this extortionist, quote-unquote, victims’ lawyer who’s made a killing on this issue over the past 10 years, in conjunction with David Boies, another shyster.

At Bradley Edwards’s urging, Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie put in this giant carve-out to so-called transparency and disclosure in their bill, such that the DOJ was authorized to redact, withhold, or conceal any information that could be the most tangentially tied to anything that’s, quote, victim-identifying. They’ve been arguing frantically in federal court for the past few months that they’re opposed to the disclosure of Epstein files because it’s going to terrorize all these beleaguered women.

Do you think that maybe, if we did get full transparency, it might disrupt this sanitized, quote-unquote survivor narrative that everybody pushes so credulously? I'll just give you one example. I don't want to go on for too long; there are so many threads I could pull here that you have to rein me in.

But one narrative that could be disrupted if we actually did get genuine disclosure—which we're not getting—and, in fact, Edwards et al. demanded that the entire archive be taken down because this disclosure was too horrendously threatening to them—is that we would maybe get more insight into some of the government propaganda that's been allowed to propagate unchecked. Saagar, I wonder if you've corrected this on Breaking Points. You can let me know.

Well, who knows? Why is the government deceiving the public about it? If people want to be mad at me, tell them to blame Pam Bondi for putting out that phony, propagandistic figure and having it repeated ad nauseam without the slightest bit of critical discernment.

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

Oh, well, I mean, you're asking me to correct the record of something I've never even uttered. I've never said that word. It's literally not something that I've ever claimed.

I do think, Michael, that what you like to do is go after—and really, I think fundamentally, I'm not even sure if you would reject this—you reject the idea of victimization, that past victimization can't even happen. And I also don't necessarily want to get into the idea of victimization. I don't even know what that means.

Well, you reject the idea that women could be victimized by Jeffrey Epstein, manipulated, even if in some cases money were exchanging hands. I will say, by the way, that just paying or flying in adult women from Eastern Europe for the express purpose of having sex is a crime. It's not underage.

However, we do have the 2007 draft indictment, where a number of underage victims were mentioned. Epstein specifically asked a 15-year-old if she knew anybody younger whom he could recruit. So I do think your core contention that, at the end of the day, he was a “pedophile” is definitely illegitimate.

I also don't necessarily want to get dragged into the victim stuff, which I think you are fundamentally focused on, because I do think that when you're saying, “Why are people talking about this?” it confirms a general suspicion about the way people act with impunity at the highest levels of American or global society—in terms of their moral character and their financial dealings.

You like to brush across this intelligence question. I would love for you to grapple with some of the facts, not necessarily just related to today: the Israeli government installing surveillance equipment in an Epstein-owned apartment used by the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak; Ehud Barak and Epstein joking questioningly about Mossad; Epstein FOIAing the CIA in 1999 for any mention of himself; the dealings that he himself had with the arms-dealing industry in the 1980s; and the fact that he had a false Austrian passport at the age of 29. Austria was the capital of spies long before he became filthy rich.

So, Michael, I think what you're obfuscating is a general interest in the story. Often what you try to do is find the lowest-IQ, most maximalist people talking about cannibals or anything like that, and then paint that as—

I barely mentioned the cannibalism stuff. I mean, of course, you're trying to—

Yeah, you paint the rest of us who believe in some bigger part of this story as—

I mean, if you believe that we can just accept at face value that a 21-year-old model who accepted an invitation to visit Jeffrey Epstein's island when she was in the British Virgin Islands under false pretenses by Jean-Luc Brunel—let me finish—had nothing to do with it, this is nonsense.

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

All right. Go ahead.

Lisa Phillips, who was one of the women, quote-unquote survivors, who spoke at these press conferences in front of the U.S. Capitol, infamously declared that she and her fellow survivors were going to create their own list of Epstein clients and then hand it over to Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie so they could read it out on the floor of the House of Representatives under the protections of the Speech or Debate Clause and cause a giant media firestorm.

As I don't have to remind you, her whole tale of victimization is that, at age 21, as a professional model, she was on a photo shoot in the British Virgin Islands. Another girl, or young woman, she was with invited her to take a ferry to Jeffrey Epstein's island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. She accepted. She never claimed victimization for 20 or 20-plus years.

She was on a podcast in 2020 saying, “Gee whiz, I never heard anything about all this crazy Epstein stuff, but I knew him, and I don't know what happened there.” Then, all of a sudden, JPMorgan opens its floodgates for settlements of $290 million. I know we're not supposed to acknowledge human nature or what that can incentivize on this particular subject, but explain that to me.

She now claims that we're supposed to take her to be a survivor. She was one of the women who also stood up and protested Pam Bondi last week. So, Sacks, if you do take at face value that that person can be rightly designated as a victim and fuel and foment this giant worldwide pedophilia crisis that we're supposedly in the midst of, then I don't know. I consider you to have a pretty high IQ, and that's not just some random person on social media talking about cannibals. So you tell me if you agree that that's a legitimate case of victimization and should be the classic example of selecting somebody.

I'm not here to defend every so-called Epstein victim. Because, by the way, I think what you do very expertly is find people like Lisa Phillips and then try to portray all of them as that sort. Would you deny that vast wire transfers were sent to Eastern Europe to fly in women for the express purpose of sex? Because that is trafficking women. Is that not a crime, Michael? Have you Googled the Mann Act?

For somebody who has actually looked into prostitution, this is what I'm talking about. By the way, you have not yet grappled with the 2007 draft indictment.

I have a very limited amount of time. Hold on, guys. Saagar told us up front that he only had half an hour.

We don't have that much time. Listen, let me ask you a couple of other questions, and then once he leaves, Michael, we can get you to say what you want to say.

I want to go to the Leslie Wexner deposition the other day. What did we learn specifically about how Epstein got his start? I do think that there are questions about who this guy was, how he accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars so early in his career, and how he seemed to obtain all these different connections, specifically to the intelligence world. Did any of that get resolved? What's your take on that?

No, David, it wasn't resolved. Unfortunately, the entire transcript is not public. What we do know from the House Oversight Committee, at least from what has been released so far, is that Leslie Wexner said he was never questioned even once by the FBI or the Department of Justice involving this case.

I will say that, if you look at the track record of Leslie Wexner, it's incredibly bizarre. He claims that Epstein was a con man who stole his money for decades. In 1991, we had the power of attorney that was signed over to Epstein. Wexner claims that Epstein was a financial genius and a wizard.

We have the transfer of the townhouse, for which there was eventually some payment reconciled on the back end, but an incredible amount of control that Jeffrey Epstein had over Leslie Wexner's finances and over the Wexner Foundation. He used it to funnel money to Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, and to support many Zionist causes under the Wexner Foundation, including the Wexner Fellowship currently at Harvard University.

I do think it’s important for us to explore some more of that. There are some very odd dealings with the beginnings of their relationship. Previous Epstein associates have testified that in 1992, shortly after the power of attorney was acquired—or, sorry, shortly after the relationship between Epstein and Wexner began—much of Epstein’s lifestyle exploded.

Wexner does not even dispute that Epstein had vast control over his finances and even claims that he was stolen from by Jeffrey Epstein. Their relationship is supposed to have ended sometime, I think, in 2007, but he has not yet answered questions about this relationship in an open public forum beyond some statements. He did issue an opening statement for the record. I personally would like to see the release of that transcript. I’m all for transparency here in this particular case.

He’s an 88-year-old man, and I do think it’s genuinely bizarre. And not to even mention the modeling industry, which Wexner himself was involved with. There are several emails, including Wexner’s own crude drawing in the Epstein birthday book involving boobs, where he said, “That’s all Epstein ever wanted.” Their relationship is bizarre and goes back decades.

Wexner maintains, as I said, that he was conned and that he was stolen from. I don’t really believe much of that story. Michael, you and I have now read thousands of Epstein emails. There are no sophisticated financial instruments going on. Even back to the very beginnings of Jeffrey Epstein’s claims about managing money, almost none of it passes the smell test.

David, you’re a very high-net-worth individual. You can go to Goldman Sachs or many other financial houses and get teams of people to manage money and sophisticated financial instruments that are not available to the rest of us. It would be very odd for you to turn over your finances to Jeffrey Epstein.

Yeah. He began his career, I guess, at Bear Stearns. It was a brief stint. One of the curious things about him is that he dropped out of college around age 20.

I guess he was studying math. He was then a teacher at the Dalton School for about a year, correct?

And then he worked at Bear Stearns for 4 years.

Sagar Enjeti

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

Sagar, can I ask you a quick question? I know you have to go soon. I’m honestly curious if you would agree with the statement from Thomas Massie. This is from—

Sagar Enjeti

Okay. February 16, he says, quote, “We’re exposing the extent of Epstein’s global pedophile ring and how it touches our government and aristocracy.” So, do you think it’s a factually valid statement that what we know to have taken place, and maybe even is still ongoing, is a global pedophile ring?

Well, I mean, when you’re asking about a global pedophile ring—it was—well, sorry.

Sagar Enjeti

This is Thomas Massie saying—Thomas Massie: “A global pedophile ring is a ring of global elites who seemed aware and perhaps participated in the abuse of underage children.” Now, Michael, I will grant you this—and what I respect—well, no, I will grant you this. What I think you do well is parse the actual individual claims of many of the victims and others that are out there.

I actually think you have a great role in this ecosystem for debunking especially some of the lowest-IQ content that is out there, like you did with the torture video. So, I do want to appreciate you for doing that.

That was low-hanging fruit. I don’t really appreciate this idea that I only focus on low-IQ social-media bullshit of all this saga.

Sagar Enjeti

Yes, I know you have. Jeffrey Epstein is just casually called a pedophile virtually everywhere in the media and among every politician. Nobody thought to ask whether he preyed on prepubescent children. Don’t you find it bizarre that, for all the enormous media resources that have been poured into this story over the past however many years—newspapers, magazines, podcast specials, you name it—I guess I’m the only one who ever thought to actually go into the Florida court document and pull up the transcript of the plea hearing in June of 2008, when he entered his 2 guilty pleas to 2 state-level prostitution charges, and he’s called a convicted pedophile ad nauseam?

It turns out the sole minor victim cited in that plea hearing, the sole minor whom he procured for prostitution, was literally 17 years old.

Yes, Michael. I understand that because they picked the oldest person in the indictment to plead guilty to, and there’s a 14- or 15-year-old who is named in the 2007 draft indictment, which was released. Michael, you’re focusing—I am focusing on a federal document. There’s a federal document that specifically alleges the abuse of a 14- and 15-year-old. This is the 2007 draft indictment. You have read it, and you’re going to take it as dispositive.

Well, I’m not going to—okay. Unfortunately, it was never contested because of the plea agreement that eventually came forward. I think you’re using the same tactic Alan Dershowitz did in his defense. Unfortunately, I have nothing to do with Dershowitz, and I don’t share his tactical maneuver.

Sagar Enjeti

I unfortunately have to take my child to a doctor’s appointment, as I flagged at the beginning of this entire thing.

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

Sagar Enjeti

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

Yes. Thank you for coming, Sagar. Appreciate it. All right. So, Michael, let me reset here. I’m not sure you’ve had a chance to lay out your case for what you called Epstein mythology.

Yeah.

So that’s the comparison you’ve made. I guess I want to give you a chance to lay out that case in a clear way, because I’m not sure you’ve had a chance to quite do that yet. What’s happening is actually a type of moral panic or feeding frenzy, a type of hysteria. You’ve compared it to the Salem witch trials. There was also the case in the 1980s of the whole day-care child-abuse Satanic Panic, where I think hundreds of people went to jail or were prosecuted for that.

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

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

I’ve definitely laid out my case on this score in many other venues and on many other occasions, but I guess not on this particular podcast yet. I’m happy to sketch it out.

In terms of the Satanic Panic parallel, that’s not one that I would have necessarily been most inclined to bring up until recently, just because there’s now this new layer of the mythology that’s been added with the production of these Epstein “files,” where people are reading snippets of emails to signify some kind of coded messaging around cannibalism or around grotesque child sacrifice. That really wasn’t a hallmark of the Epstein story so much before this enormous chunk of emails was released.

It relates to the Satanic Panic frenzy insofar as claims around such things as truly grotesque child sacrifice, mutilation of infants, bathing toddlers in blood—all the most nightmarish scenarios you could possibly dream up—were alleged in the 1980s and taken deadly seriously by the authorities, resulting in a good number of people actually being thrown in prison for many years. It was found to be just a gigantic hoax.

Maybe a more apt parallel, which also would have been apt even before this latest record production, is that the Satanic Panic frenzy of the 1980s was ultimately concluded to have originated with one woman who was just straightforwardly mentally ill, delusional, and needed to essentially be institutionalized. Yet she would make claims about child sex abuse that the authorities countenanced or gave credence to. There’s a similar thing going on with the Epstein mythology.

When I mention the Epstein mythology, I’m not talking about the 2007–2008 Florida non-prosecution agreement or that whole scenario that Sagar brought up piecemeal before. That’s a different element of this whole story. The mythology developed later, mostly around 2014, with the introduction of these new claims by Virginia Roberts Giuffre and her lawyers, Bradley Edwards, Paul Cassell, and later David Boies, in which she alleged that she had been child-sex-trafficked around the world and that she knew Epstein enforced this child-sex-trafficking operation via blackmail.

She also made specific allegations against 3 particular individuals: Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, and Jean-Luc Brunel. She accused a generic category of other high-profile persons whom she didn’t specify as also victimizing her, such as prime ministers, politicians, and presidents. That’s basically the origin of what I would call the mythology, which is just a different order of magnitude than the initial Palm Beach prosecution, which was effectively a local crime.

But in terms of the mythology, the parallel to the Satanic Panic is that Virginia Roberts Giuffre was a profoundly disturbed, mentally unwell person who was validated and legitimized and now continues to be celebrated as some kind of martyr for truth. Even though, if anybody had used a lick of discernment about her claims, they would have found that she could not be treated so credulously. Maybe she needed some help, but this idea that she would be the basis for this global scandal that's rocking all these countries is just outrageous.

There are 2 other mentally ill women. I don't say that to be pejorative or derogatory at all; it's just objectively true. Maria Farmer is one of these other definitely mentally ill persons who, for example, was integral in introducing this idea that Epstein had cameras set up in all his bedrooms and bathrooms and was surreptitiously recording prominent people so he could use it for blackmail. Another one, Sarah Ransome, was one of the people who spurred the mythology in large part around the island.

She came to claim, after going through several mental health crises, that she had been systematically raped on the island, even though when she actually had to eventually give a deposition, she described nothing of the sort. She was also an adult when she went to the island voluntarily, and she described what was effectively a consensual minor sexual encounter with Epstein, but she dramatized it radically in the wake of that.

People don't know—I mean, David, did you know this, or does anybody in the public know that, despite everybody and their mother, including Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, declaring that the Epstein property in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the private island, is “Rape Island” or “Pedophile Island,” there's never been a credible allegation of rape ever discovered that took place on that island? Is that well known, or am I crazy?

No, it's not well known. The only reason I knew is because I've heard you on a couple of podcasts, so I thought it was important to get you on as a counterpoint. With respect to these 3 women, they did go to the island. Is that true?

Sarah Ransome did.

Okay.

Maria Farmer did not. Maria Farmer is the one who purported that she was actually the original Epstein accuser and that she was this great hero whistleblower because she tried to sound the alarm way before all these other females were abused.

She claims that in 1996, when she was a 25-year-old employee of Epstein's who basically sat at his front desk in his New York townhouse, she was invited and accepted an opportunity to go to the Ohio compound of Les Wexner to be an artist-in-residence of sorts because she was a painter. She then claimed that, over the course of her interactions with Epstein and Maxwell, she ended up first attempting to file a police report and then went to the FBI. She never really specified with any clarity what she claimed to have reported to the FBI.

She told this tale about how Epstein had supposedly stolen photographs that she had produced of her younger sisters, who were below the age of 18, so that she could use those photographs to paint pictures of her younger sisters in the nude. I don't know. I guess, technically speaking, that's a confession to the production of child pornography, but that's what she claimed.

She also added that she had been sexually assaulted, abused, or raped by both Epstein and Maxwell. Somehow, over the course of that assault, at age 26, she had a divine revelation, literally, and realized that they were both pedophiles. This is how she recounted it years after the fact.

If you look at the police and FBI intake report, or the complaint that was memorialized and has come out, in terms of what was contemporaneously documented, she mentions nothing about a sexual assault. She mentions nothing about any kind of sex crime at all. She simply claims that these photos of hers were stolen, and there's never been any evidence that those photos were actually stolen.

So that's one person. These 3 women—Ransome, Farmer, and Roberts Giuffre—were all integral in different dimensions of the mythology. They were incredibly important named plaintiffs in critical litigation, and criminal investigations were launched based on their claims in various respects. They're all just profoundly mentally ill, erratic, and wholly unreliable, to the degree that if we're going to have an international pedophilic mass-hysteria narrative that's at all predicated on their claims, then we've entered into a fantasy land, because it will never in the future hold up to any kind of rational reevaluation or scrutiny at all.

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

Yeah, I'll explain. By the way, Filthy Rich, over this past summer, when the Epstein fervor got reignited, skyrocketed to one of the top spots on Netflix once again. That little piece of commercial propaganda has been very determinative in terms of how people have had their perceptions shaped of this issue.

It is literal propaganda, I would argue, in the sense that it was concocted as a PR vehicle for the victims, quote-unquote, and especially their lawyers, to create a public clamor for some kind of remedial action to be taken against Epstein's co-conspirators or, more relevantly, his estate. It was a maneuver, a PR maneuver, by a legal team who worked alongside the producers of that documentary, as have so many of the mass-market entertainment products that have been produced around the Epstein affair.

It's only taken from that one perspective of the purported victims, and that perspective is shaped very carefully by their lawyers to create this sanitized survivor narrative that is now the predominant one. In terms of her origins, yes, she initially filed some civil litigation around—I want to say 2009 or 2010, maybe 2008, maybe 2011, somewhere in that range—as a Jane Doe, meaning she wasn't named in the litigation. This related to a period around 2001 or 2002, when she was in the Epstein orbit to some extent.

There's evidence that she was in the Epstein orbit to some extent. She's not hallucinating everything. I've argued that she's not so much a liar. I wouldn't say that I've ever directly accused her of lying about anything as such. I've said that she's confabulated an alternate reality, and that's a little bit different because it doesn't necessarily connote willful deceit. It's almost even more disturbing if you think about it.

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

Yeah. She recanted her story not just about Dershowitz. That's maybe the most well-known instance of her recanting one of her marquee claims, and it really only came about because Dershowitz was unusually motivated to pursue some sort of resolution through a very protracted litigation process against very high-powered lawyers.

One of the fallacies here is that these survivors, quote-unquote, such as Virginia, are taken to be these beleaguered victims who had no power at all in this dynamic. And yet they were represented by some of the most powerful and skillful lawyers in the country, such as David Boies, who's one of the best-known lawyers of all time and was hugely well resourced. Virginia Giuffre also became incredibly wealthy—maybe not as wealthy as you, David, but estimates range from $15 million to $20 million to $25 million. It's hard to know because a lot of the settlement details are secret.

It wasn't just that she happened to level some accusation at some point, maybe in casual banter. She made allegations that she had been sexually victimized by Dershowitz on at least 6 or 7 occasions, and she described each individual instance of that victimization in vivid, graphic, almost grotesque detail, describing Dershowitz's body parts, sexual proclivities, and so forth. She did this in a sworn affidavit and under deposition, so she could theoretically even have been subject to perjury charges, should a prosecutor ever have been inclined to bring them—which, of course, they wouldn't have been in this environment.

But it goes much further. She had to recant claims against Harvard professor Stephen Kosslyn, whom she claimed she had intercourse with. She recanted even claims against Jean-Luc Brunel, another actor, or player, in this whole story that leads people to make their postulations about there being this supposedly international sex-trafficking ring because he was a modeling mogul.

Brunel ended up getting arrested by French authorities under pressure from the U.S. in 2019, after Epstein himself was federally indicted and arrested. Given the vagaries of the French legal system, which I still don't fully comprehend in relation to the United States, he was in custody, or incarcerated, for quite a long time prior to any formal charges being brought.

Eventually, Virginia was called from Australia to go to Paris to provide evidence against Jean-Luc Brunel in 2021, in a format unlike anything that takes place in the U.S. Both the defense and the prosecution have an ability to question, or have a colloquy with, the accuser.

And she ends up having to retract her claims against him as well. Her lawyers had to admit that this memoir—or memoir manuscript—that she produced in 2011 and 2012 was something she was scheming about with a ghostwriter who was potentially going to work with her, Sharon Churcher, a journalist at the Daily Mail. They were scheming about how they could get the biggest possible book deal, or even a movie deal or some kind of entertainment package deal. She had already been paid $160,000-plus by the Daily Mail, plus serialization revenue, for having done an interview with them and given over the Prince Andrew photo. They wanted to marshal or leverage that momentum, publicity-wise, from the Daily Mail's articles in 2011 into a book.

And so Sharon Churcher, in this email exchange—you can go read it—came and said, “Yeah, you know what? Just throw anybody's name in you can think of who might have had the most fleeting association with Jeffrey Epstein, and that'll get us the biggest possible book deal. That'll entice the most publishers and agents. And as to Dershowitz, yeah, I mean, he's pretty well-known, and we all think he's a pedo, so throw him in there, too.” I mean, that's what they're saying.

Wait, this is your interpretation of what happened?

Michael Wolff

Almost literally what they say. I'm almost quoting verbatim; I'm not exactly quoting.

Who said that? Who said that?

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

Wait, how do we know that?

Because we have the transcripts of the emails. They came out in the course of discovery in litigation.

Oh, wow. Okay.

She was a trash journalist.

Yeah. Who was working on co-authoring the book with her, or what was the arrangement?

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

And then what ended up happening?

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

Was it published?

Not initially. Finally, a version did eventually come out last October, after Virginia Roberts Giuffre's purported death in April of last year. I only say “purported” because the circumstances of it are still bizarre. Look, I'm willing to grant that she is in fact dead at this point, but that's another sort of tangent.

It didn't come out for a long time. A draft was produced, and then the draft manuscript had to be revealed or handed over in the course of litigation with Dershowitz. By 2017 to 2019, her lawyers—David Boies et al.—had to admit on her behalf that this memoir manuscript, which had been presented as nonfiction, had been shopped around to potential book publishers as nonfiction, and had been the basis for a lot of media coverage around these allegations as though it were a nonfictional representation of her purported experiences, was actually a fictionalized account of those experiences.

For example, this is VRG's own lawyers, like David Boies?

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

A lot of the mythology—like that Bill Clinton was on the island. She claimed it, but there's no evidence Bill Clinton was ever on the island. He did fly around in Epstein's private jet in 2002 and 2003, but there's no evidence he ever went to the island. She saw him on the island, which is false as far as we know, as far as all the available evidence has ever suggested. That probably is one of the most repeated claims with respect to Epstein: that Bill Clinton was on the island. You're saying that's just completely untrue, and that it came from VRG's manuscript, which they ultimately had to admit was a work of fiction, not nonfiction—at least her own work.

Correct. But what's so mind-boggling is that, just relatively recently, after this whole blowup around Epstein got ignited last July, the book publishers obviously realized that it was a highly profitable opportunity for them to produce some version of her manuscript in the form of a new memoir.

She had been working on a new version of it with another ghostwriter for some time, Amy Wallace, but they obviously wanted to peg the publication of it to this renewed Epstein uproar. So the memoir finally gets published in some capacity in October of last year. It becomes an international bestseller, not just in the United States, but in Britain, Australia, and elsewhere.

I'm still stunned. Maybe I can no longer really be stunned anymore, but it's still stunning to think back on how credulous the reception to that memoir was. It was basically just Amy Wallace, this ghostwriter, repackaging and massaging—oh, I always catch myself when I use the verb “massage” now. I shouldn't use that—repackaging the initial memoir manuscript and basically updating it for 2025. Nowhere do they disclose that it's based on a fictionalized manuscript. So it's just a fraud.

So they ultimately did publish a version of the manuscript?

Nick Bryant

Yes, last year.

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

To clarify, those allegations of sexual improprieties against Dershowitz were not in the 2011 manuscript. Those were concocted later as a basis for Virginia Roberts Giuffre to join this ongoing litigation that her lawyer, Bradley Edwards, had initiated around something called the Crime Victims' Rights Act and how the nonprosecution agreement from 2007–2008 had supposedly violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act. It's a complicated issue.

Those claims against Dershowitz debuted in December 2014. There are a bunch of other claims already in the 2011 manuscript, and there's a reference to Dershowitz, but it's just not an accusation of sexual misconduct.

Okay. The three women that you mentioned—Giuffre, Ransome, and Farmer—did they have the same lawyers or different lawyers? Were the lawyers working together?

Pretty much the same lawyers. It's basically the same cabal of lawyers. It's David Boies and then Bradley Edwards's firm. Bradley Edwards was the initial lawyer who primarily represented the purported victims from the Florida, Palm Beach phase, from 2002 to 2005. He started representing them around 2008.

Boies came a little bit later, around the more grandiose litigation, but they've worked in conjunction with one another and still are. They're still suing Bank of America in a class-action lawsuit that they initiated last October to extract a couple hundred more million dollars, just like they did from JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank, and the Epstein estate. There are plenty of individualized lawsuits that they've alluded to but never clarified the parameters of.

Bradley Edwards brags that they got 20 or 25 settlements that are still secret, he says, from specific individuals whom he acknowledges may not have committed any wrongdoing at all, but simply don't want to suffer the PR backlash that we're seeing now on steroids. So it's a hugely lucrative industry.

And I don't know—you tell me, David—is this dimension of the whole story ever mentioned anywhere in any of the popular media coverage, whether it's on podcasts or on CNN or anywhere?

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

When Epstein died on August 10, 2019, a litigation frenzy broke out in terms of the lawsuits brought against his estate, because at that point Epstein was obviously no longer available to contest any claims that were made against him and libel laws ceased to apply.

People were obviously aware that he was very wealthy. He wasn't a multibillionaire, as a lot of people suspected at the time, but according to his disclosure of assets when he was arrested, his net worth was around $650 million. So it was still a pretty big estate.

Because of this flood of lawsuits against the estate, the executors of the estate, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, decided to coordinate with the victims' lawyers, Bradley Edwards, David Boies, et al., to set up basically a mediation program that they called the Epstein Victims' Compensation Program. It was a holistic settlement process that victims or alleged victims could submit claims to, and then a mediator would be brought in to evaluate the claims and decide what amount of money to give out.

There wouldn't have to just be a flood of individual lawsuits. They could consolidate them. They set up a settlement model for the Epstein estate that was expressly nonadversarial, meaning there would be no adversarial scrutiny of the claims that were made to justify somebody's entitlement to millions of dollars. Claimants were entitled to as much as $5 billion from just this one settlement fund, and it was tax-free, by the way.

Wait, this is with Deutsche Bank?

No, no, this is the Epstein estate. I'm getting to Deutsche Bank because it ties into the Epstein estate. The Epstein estate was first in the chronology of settlements.

And so they set up a settlement model, right? It's nonadversarial, confidential, and tax-free because they claim that it could be categorized under the IRS code as compensation for an injury. Therefore, you don't have to pay income taxes on it.

And so that gets set up, right? The court in the U.S. Virgin Islands, because the estate was domiciled there, appointed—on the recommendation of both parties—an independent mediator or administrator, Jordana Feldman. She claimed to specialize in this sort of thing and to have an extra sensitivity toward sexual assault victims. I mean, it's kind of phony, but we don't want to get sucked into that tangent necessarily.

The independent administrator was modeled, they said, on previous consolidated settlement mechanisms, such as the Jerry Sandusky scandal at Penn State. I don't know if you recall the Jerry Sandusky scandal, where claims were made that this football coach had abused a bunch of boys, and a consolidated settlement program was set up to pay out settlements to claimants.

Okay, got it. So that's the Epstein estate. So let's get to the banks.

They took the model that had been set up for the Epstein estate and started going after major multinational banking institutions. David Boies and Bradley Edwards decided to very creatively and cleverly, I have to say, allege that these banks were complicit in Jeffrey Epstein's world-spanning child sex-trafficking operation and therefore liable.

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

Epstein banked at those institutions. First, JPMorgan, from roughly the late 1990s to 2013, and then Deutsche Bank, from 2013 to 2019.

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

Nick Bryant

Yeah.

Or failed to do KYC or something like that?

Yeah. They first started making a much more accusatory argument about the banks' direct complicity in facilitating a sex-trafficking operation. But what the judge ultimately agreed to was that they were reasonably liable for negligence, essentially, because Epstein would withdraw cash, and that was supposed to trigger certain monitoring provisions, which JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, it was claimed, did not satisfactorily carry out.

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

So they settle, right?

They settled. There are 2 funds.

How big are those settlement funds, the 2 of them?

JPMorgan ended up totaling around $290 million, and the lawyers ended up convincing the judge who presided over this agreement in New York, the federal judge Rakoff, to grant them 30% in legal fees, or attorneys' fees, as they claimed. Deutsche Bank was around $90 million or $80 million, maybe.

Okay.

So, just add those up now. The Epstein estate was around, if I'm remembering, $121 million, and that's gone up since even more litigation has been filed, separate and apart from the class-action settlement. JPMorgan was $290 million, and Deutsche Bank was around $80 million or $90 million. So we're already at a half-billion-dollar industry, and there are plenty of other lawsuits and settlements that have been spawned from this thing.

I've never understood—or I do understand it, so I should correct myself—I've always found it perversely amazing that this whole aspect of the story is never mentioned, because it's led to such things as this gross inflation of the total number of victims, where you have adult victims.

Jason Calacanis

You're saying there are financial incentives here, and the lawyers are contingency-fee plaintiffs' lawyers. They get, like, 30%, or what's their arrangement? These guys are not paid by the hour, right? They get—

No, I don't think it's a contingency fee. It's not set up that way. They got the judge to approve a 30% earmark of the resulting settlement funds to be given over for attorneys' fees. So it wasn't contingent on the client; it was that the judge approved 30% of the overall settlement.

Got it. So the lawyers who organized these settlement pools negotiated essentially their cut up front with the judge, and you're saying that was about 30% of all these—

Exactly 30%.

Jason Calacanis

Okay, okay. Got it.

But if you have a set of criteria that are so lax, JPMorgan had even more lax criteria than the Epstein estate fund, which basically allowed anybody who had ever come within 2 football fields of Jeffrey Epstein to file a claim against them and get a few million dollars tax-free.

There were people who were basically rejected from the Epstein estate fund who ended up getting a settlement from the JPMorgan or Deutsche Bank fund, some of them anyway. This woman, Lisa Phillips, who was an adult model, had never made any claim about anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein that was wrongful for 20 years. She said publicly on a podcast that she had no idea what these girls were talking about when they made allegations against Jeffrey Epstein. In 2020, she said this; by 2023, she was getting a settlement.

I asked her, and she didn't disclose her full amount to me, but it was probably around $2 million at least. Then they get free health care from yet another settlement between the U.S. Virgin Islands government and JPMorgan, which set aside free health care until 2028 for any alleged Epstein victim.

Don't people recognize how that can incentivize this inflation of the total number of victims we're told must exist? That, in turn, gives rise to this mass hysteria and moral panic about thousands of victims. At that Pam Bondi hearing, which was so contentious last week before the House Judiciary Committee, you had people screaming, "Thousands of victims demand justice." It's a concoction that is not grounded in any approximation of empirical fact.

So I always say, if people want to be mad at Pam Bondi and Kash Patel for something, be mad at them for signing off on that ridiculous memo from last July, where they included that figure of over 1,000 victims. That has given fuel to the most maximalist conceptions of Epstein mythology in terms of the victims that were left in their wake.

I get a lot of people on the internet doing a variation of what Sacks did, saying, "Hey, let's just talk about the intelligence ties. Forget all this gossip stuff around it."

Well, the intel ties are interesting, right?

Sure. I'm not saying the whole story isn't interesting. It's interesting that Epstein apparently met Michael Jackson at his Palm Beach house and that photos of it came out. It's interesting that he could be connected with everyone from Donald Trump to Bill Clinton. I agree—it's interesting.

Let me bring up one criticism of you, and then I want to give Kevin a chance to get in here. I think it's very important that we hold this process to evidentiary standards, like you're saying. I think people's motivations need to be examined, especially the lawyers who are bringing these cases and reaping hundreds of millions of dollars.

I think you are—and I think even Sacks admitted this—playing an extremely important role in this process by bringing some rigor and accountability to a lot of these claims. I think that's really important. At the same time, you're not really offering an explanation for so many aspects that are so interesting about Epstein. I'm not saying it's necessarily your duty to do that, but I'm wondering: Do you have a theory of how he accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars and how he got so connected?

Some people, like Mike Benz, have said that it all goes back to Bear Stearns, where he says one of his accounts was BCCI, which was a notorious international bank that was involved in international money laundering and crimes and things like that. I think this is Mike Benz's theory. In any event, do you have a theory that would provide a satisfactory explanation for so many of the threads that we see? Or do you feel it's not really your job to do that, and that your job is more to poke holes in some of the more outlandish claims of politicians or lawyers?

I'm happy to address any little data point that people want to throw at me. I do that all day, every day, pretty much, so it's not like I'm trying to avoid anything or be evasive. People ask me all the time, "Okay, how did he make his money? What about Leslie Wexner?" So it's not like I'm unaccustomed to addressing any of this stuff.

I just feel like there's a bit of a fallacy, or a logical flaw, in attempting to say that it's incumbent on me to proffer some kind of ultimate, totalizing theory. I have a theory I could sketch out that maybe explains some of what people would like to know, in such a way that people are so titillated by it.

But I think, again, one of the reasons why the coverage of the story has been so horribly bad is that speculation has replaced fact. We just have this whole mythology or folklore that's developed, and people ambiently absorb it. Then they end up believing things that are totally false.

So, for example, people just believe—and I’m sure you’ve seen this—that Epstein must have referred to his private plane as the Lolita Express. Therefore, anybody who was ever on the plane must have known that this was a child sex-trafficking plane, because why else would it be named the Lolita Express, after the famous book about a 12-year-old girl or whatever who was a sexual object? That’s just false. There was never any evidence for that. It was a nickname invented—a cheeky nickname invented—by a British tabloid. That’s just one example of all this flotsam.

Okay. But to go back, do you have a theory of how specifically Epstein got started? Because somehow, I guess, it was in the ’80s that he went from someone who was just a trader at Bear Stearns to very quickly amassing a fortune that, I don’t know, seems like hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, like you said, he died with about $650 million. I don’t know how big the fortune was in the 1980s.

We know that Wexner sold him the townhouse. I guess one of the details that came out the other day is that Wexner said it was at what he was told was fair market value, and Epstein obtained his plane from Wexner. So, I mean, is that the explanation—that somehow he got his start because Wexner was extraordinarily generous toward him? I’m just curious.

Not quite. I mean, there was a huge New York Times article that was one of the few helpful contributions to the popular knowledge around Jeffrey Epstein recently, in December, where they basically set out to answer the question that everybody always asks with a wink and a nod, as though they think that asking the question is supposed to prove that the answer would be fundamentally sinister: How did Jeffrey Epstein make his money? The idea is that he must have made his money by dint of his orchestration of this pedophilic sex-trafficking ring that he enforced by blackmail at the direction of the Mossad or something like that.

The New York Times goes into fairly forensic detail about how he ended up accumulating money over the course of the 1980s. People could go read that if they’d like. I do think that it’s fair to say—and saying this does not mean that you have to condone everything that Jeffrey Epstein ever did over the course of his entire life—but I do think that he was definitely highly intelligent. I do think that he was highly proficient in mathematics as a young man, which is part of why he became a math teacher at the Dalton School, a pretty prestigious private school in Manhattan.

Then he ends up getting recruited to Bear Stearns and ends up innovating some novel financial maneuvers that you’re probably much more fluent in than me in terms of describing, because I’m not a finance guy. But it was around a time when there was a demand for Wall Street to innovate new tactics for very high-net-worth individuals to structure their wealth, lessen their tax burden, and do all kinds of other things. Epstein did so, and then he leaves Bear Stearns.

He rose through the ranks of Bear Stearns pretty quickly. So, around age 24 or 25, he was a partner, or he had some relatively high-ranking position relative to the rest of the workforce at Bear Stearns at a young age. He starts up his own boutique financial advisory firm that’s tailored specifically to very high-net-worth individuals, such as Leslie Wexner, who was ultimately one of the wealthiest people in the United States.

Wexner was definitely Epstein’s most important client. There was a power of attorney that was handed over, which is seen in and of itself on the internet to be either inherently sinister or to show us that, of course, Epstein must have been in some kind of pedophilic collusion with Wexner. But it’s explicable if you actually want to know what it was about. At a certain point, people just want to keep asking that question with a gleam in their eye, as though it’s supposed to imply that the pedophilic sex trafficking is the ultimate answer to everything.

When Ghislaine Maxwell gave her proper interview last summer to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, that was, amazingly enough, the very first time that she was asked by any U.S. government official simply to describe her experiences with Jeffrey Epstein. Imagine that. Despite having been integral—we’ve been told all these years—to the running of the most prolific child sex-trafficking operation, I guess, in world history, only in July 2025 did any government official ever just ask her to describe what her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was all about.

She said that she observed Epstein doing a lot of work that would seem very complicated and intense to her in terms of his financial business. For example, Maxwell says Epstein was basically restructuring all of the finances for Wexner’s business holdings. He owned The Limited, he owned Victoria’s Secret, other kinds of women’s clothing outfits and retailers, and he had real estate developments. Epstein was basically the money guy for all of it.

And for a man who in the early ’90s was already worth a couple of billion—Wexner, that is—if Epstein is getting a yearly cut of the revenues, that could add up over time, right? They had a handful of other very high-net-worth clients, like Elizabeth Johnson, who was an heiress to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, and Leon Black, a hedge fund manager. You don’t need that many extremely high-net-worth clients, right? If you’re their go-to money manager, you can eventually build up a pretty nice-sized fortune, I would imagine.

I’m not saying we have a full accounting of every penny that he ever accumulated over the course of his life, but we have quite a bit of information. It just occurs to me that some of the people who are most loudly asking, “How did he get his money?” almost don’t even want to know or read into the information that is currently available.

All right. Well, I mean, it is kind of unusual that a money manager in that position would obtain that much money so quickly. I’ll just say, from my experience with the money management business, they’re not generally able to charge that much. But let me put a pin in that, because I want to let Kevin Bass get in here.

I’ve been following your feed quite a bit. You are basically a startup entrepreneur who got interested in the Epstein files. I think you used AI to analyze them, and in particular, you’ve been looking at Reid Hoffman’s story about Epstein and have put together an analysis. I think you’ve called it the Reid Hoffman Files. I’ve been following your tweets, and it’s quite interesting. Let’s start with how you got into this, what got you interested, and how you’ve been doing your research.

Yeah. Originally, I just saw that there was a conflict on social media about Reid Hoffman. I didn’t know much about the Epstein files or that particular conflict, but I was curious. I built some really sophisticated AI tools, mostly using vectorized SQL databases and some of the MCP stuff with the new agents, for some other purposes. I wanted to port those over to see if I could resolve some of these questions.

Elon had some very strong opinions about Hoffman’s involvement with Epstein, and he’s usually—if he’s not always directly on the bull’s-eye—he’s usually at least a few inches away. So I wanted to go check those out. The big ones came out, I guess, in late January, January 30—the big drop that recently happened.

I started going through the Reid Hoffman part in particular, and I essentially started to try to organize—or I have organized—most of my analyses around some core claims that Hoffman made about his involvement with Epstein. I’ve just been asking the question: Are these claims true? Are they supported by the record, or are they contradicted by the record?

Overwhelmingly—absolutely overwhelmingly—they appear to be contradicted relentlessly by the drop that came out on January 30. If you want, I can go through some of the big ones.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Yeah, maybe a place to start is with Reid Hoffman’s statement in 2019 to Axios. This is when the Epstein scandal, I guess, first became national news, and people who were closely associated with him felt the need to characterize their relationship with him—to distance themselves, to explain how they knew him or how closely they knew him. Reid’s statement at that time was the following. Let me just read this out. This is Reid Hoffman speaking:

“My few interactions with Jeffrey Epstein came at the request of Joi Ito for the purposes of fundraising for the MIT Media Lab. Prior to these interactions, I was told by Joi that Epstein had cleared the MIT vetting process, which was the basis for my participation. My last interaction with Epstein was in 2015. Still, by agreeing to participate in any fundraising activity where Epstein was present, I helped to repair his reputation and perpetuate injustice. For this, I am deeply regretful.”

Oh, give me a break.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Is that statement accurate?

Not at all. In fact, it’s not just from 2019. He even reiterated this on February 4 this year on X repeatedly. He said, “I only know Jeffrey Epstein because of a fundraising relationship with MIT, which I very much regret. These meetings were all coordinated by Joi Ito, then director of the MIT Media Lab.”

He also says, “We met with Joi Ito, the director of MIT Media Lab, who asked me to help MIT fundraise with Epstein. I regret blah blah blah.” None of that’s at all true.

There are very few mentions of even fundraising with MIT. I would even go so far as to say, I don't know. I've said it this way on some of my posts, but the extent of the relationship between Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein almost looks like they were best friends. My best friends, I don't interact with anywhere near as much as Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein did between 2013 and 2019.

There was constant contact. There were something on the order of about 400 initiations by Hoffman to Epstein. It wasn't just mediated by Joi Ito at all. Their assistants were in constant contact with each other, and they had extensive financial relationships. There were something like 42 different meetings that are documented, and around 20 are absolutely confirmed.

They met in person for breakfast. They would spend time at each other's houses overnight. Epstein met his wife. Hoffman claims that he was only there for 1 night, but even the 1 time that we have absolutely documented that he's referring to, he was there for 2 nights. There were almost certainly 2 other island visits as well, in addition.

It's an extraordinarily extensive personal and business relationship, and it's not just about Joi Ito. Now, Joi was a really important part of it. Joi was, as far as I can tell—and you guys know a lot more about this than I do, but I've been going through the files the last couple of days—Epstein's gateway into academia: Cambridge, Harvard, and science. That's sort of his main gateway there.

Reid Hoffman was his gateway into Silicon Valley and into tech—the main guy. So there is a very close relationship between Joi Ito and Hoffman, but there is also very much an independent relationship between Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein, very much independent of Joi Ito.

Okay. So Reid claimed that he only had a few interactions with Epstein. That's false. You're saying he had hundreds—

Hundreds.

—including dozens of in-person meetings and—

Yes.

—stays at the island—

At least once, you said, for 2 nights, not 1, and there were probably a second or third visit.

There was the stay at the townhouse. Reid claimed that all of his interactions were sort of mediated by Joi Ito and were about the MIT Media Lab. By the way, it's not clear why someone would feel compelled to spend so much time fundraising for MIT, which wasn't even their alma mater. So this whole explanation didn't really make a lot of sense from the beginning.

But it's pretty clear that the topics of conversation were not about MIT or the MIT Media Lab. In fact, I thought one detail that was really interesting was that one of their first interactions was about a book called Deception. I haven't read the book. I don't know what the thesis is, but it appears to justify the use of deception in certain circumstances.

Anyway, I just think that was ironic, I guess, if nothing else. But look, I—

Can I make a quick comment?

Go ahead. Yes, yeah, Michael, go ahead. Do you want to be Reid's defense attorney in this context?

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

Yeah.

So here's what I would say. I have to reject the whole premise of this discussion that is so ubiquitous now, which is that anybody who so much as exchanged a short little email with Jeffrey Epstein—and I know Reid Hoffman apparently had a closer relationship with Jeffrey Epstein than just 1 email here or there—but the principle that anybody who had some interaction, to some degree or another, with Jeffrey Epstein now has something that they have to issue these mealy-mouthed, melodramatic statements of profound apology for is just so tedious and ridiculous.

What are they guilty of? If the implication is that they're, by association, guilty of enabling pedophilic sex trafficking, that is a flagrant misconception. Why is it never clarified that Jeffrey Epstein was never even accused of committing any illicit sexual acts against any person under the age of 18 after the year 2005? I don't know what years Reid Hoffman and Jeffrey Epstein interacted, but this idea that he was looking the other way while all these preteens were being raped is just nonsense.

But the media never clarifies it. So now we have everybody from Noam Chomsky to Steve Bannon being told that their reputation is in tatters and that they are themselves, by association, some sort of sex-criminal enablers. It's just a total fantasy. I find this moral panic—

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

I mean, Epstein pleaded guilty to 2 prostitution charges in 2008. Are you saying Reid Hoffman and Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon should have all said, “Because the guy pleaded guilty to 2 prostitution charges, that means nobody can ever consort with him ever again for the rest of his life”? I think that's a ridiculous standard.

There are 2 different issues here. One is whether or not there's this global pedophile ring. We can even go further, and there's this satanic ritual and all this other stuff, which I'm inclined to think that you're very close to the truth in what you're saying.

On the other hand, there are Reid Hoffman's public statements dramatically minimizing the relationship.

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

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

Yeah. All right, let me tell you my point of view on this. First of all, I think you're correct that there's a lot of guilt by association happening, and there is a little bit of a feeding frenzy. Like you said, just because someone emailed Epstein doesn't mean that they were involved with him in some nefarious way.

I thought it was unfair when Saagar mentioned that Jason had emails with Epstein back in 2011 to make an introduction. I think that's—

I hadn't even seen that. I mean, it's not important enough even to draw my attention. Who cares? There's plenty of interesting material in the files, but random emails—

No, no. And I agree, and that's why I tried to defend Jason there, because I know that there was just nothing to that.

Now, in the case of Reid, I think that there are a couple of things that are interesting about this. Number 1 is, when the new Epstein files dropped, Reid came out on X and very aggressively started pointing the finger at other people, wildly accusing both Elon Musk and Donald Trump of somehow being involved in Epstein's purported crimes.

This is just a classic case of someone throwing stones while living in a glass house. You look at his own statements from 2019 all the way up to weeks ago, and they don't hold water at all. He lies about the extent of his relationship with Epstein, how many times they met, what the subject matter was, what the context was, and how many times he potentially visited the island. It's just 1 lie after another while, again, wildly accusing other people.

You do have to ask: What is going on here?

Yeah. That just goes to show how weaponizable this whole thing is and how the Epstein story, or any kind of tangential connection to Epstein, can be leveraged to serve some kind of preexisting agenda. If Reid Hoffman and Elon Musk don't like each other, then they could accuse each other of having a closer connection to Epstein than they did. It's just a slugfest.

And yet I'm still struggling to understand what the underlying accusation of wrongdoing is supposed to be, above and beyond how perhaps Reid Hoffman, Musk, or whomever might have misrepresented the relationship.

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

My theory on this—I think it's kind of obvious what he's doing—is that by pointing the finger at Trump or Elon, actually both, he's driving everyone into their partisan tribes, right? So, as to, I think, seek protection from the Democrat tribe to which he's contributed hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think it's worked. I mean, you look at the mainstream media coverage of this, the New York Times coverage of it, which we talked about in a previous episode of the show.

They wrote an article about Epstein’s ties to Silicon Valley. Other people who had far less extensive relationships with Epstein got paragraphs in that story. Reid Hoffman was mentioned in only 1 sentence along with 3 other people. So he does seem to be getting a pass from the media, if you want to characterize this as a feeding frenzy, moral panic, hysteria, or what have you—whatever it is, he seems to be getting a pass from the media.

My point about this has not been to accuse Reid of crimes, because I don’t think we have any basis for that whatsoever. Let me just state that clearly.

Is there a fallacy to all this, then?

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

Or another parallel is Hillary Clinton just came out this week and gave an interview on the BBC where she said, “We, the Clintons—Bill and I—we had no real connections with Epstein. But Donald Trump, we can just assume as unassailably true that he’s in the process of orchestrating a cover-up because he has something to hide.”

On the other hand, Trump will toggle back and forth between Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, and Reid Hoffman: They’re the ones who are truly implicated by their association with Epstein. I had nothing really to do with the guy. Then the next day he’ll say, “Oh, I’m a little upset that Bill Clinton’s been dragged into this mess.”

It just gets framed and organized around a partisan battering ram, and it becomes incredibly tedious because there doesn’t even have to be any concrete allegation of any wrongdoing whatsoever. There’s no credible allegation of any pedophilic wrongdoing by either Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk—anybody. What are we talking about here?

Ultimately, we’re in this other domain of who can establish the most damning guilt by association, even though nobody can spell out what the guilt is supposed to be tied to.

Well, here’s the question: Why did Reid so brazenly lie about his relationship with Epstein? It could just be—

Why do you have to lie?

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

People think a lot of dumb things. Is there any evidence at all that would tie Reid Hoffman to some kind of child sex crime?

I’m not accusing him of that. So if people think that’s what’s being covered up, then they should be disabused of that fallacious notion rather than countenancing the notion and allowing the mass hysteria to continue proliferating unhindered.

Can I ask you something, Michael? What evidence is there—on the island or in general—that people were being trafficked? Maybe not minors. Did people actually go to the island for that purpose? Was that extensive or not?

It’s impossible to know what people even mean by trafficking anymore. Trafficking is an incredibly nebulous concept. It’s very much open to the whims and discretion of prosecutors who seek to fit some fact pattern to a desire to prosecute somebody for some sort of sexual-related offense.

If it involves simply facilitating the movement of somebody from point A to point B, so if adult women consensually flew on an airplane to visit a luxury island in the Caribbean and, over the course of that visit, maybe engaged in some consensual sex act, then 20 years later they can retroactively classify it as trafficking, and that will entitle them to millions of dollars in tax-free settlement money—are we going to take at face value that that constitutes trafficking? Because I don’t.

So I’m always a little bit mystified as to what we’re supposed to understand as trafficking.

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

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

Let me get you to react to this tweet that someone just mentioned you in. Oh, here we go. [laughter] Brilliant feedback.

Well, this is a guy. I don’t know this guy, Present Witness, but this is what he’s saying is the evidence. I want to get your reaction to it. Let me read this for people who are just listening and can’t see the screen, and then I’ll get your reaction to it.

He says:

“Here’s the evidence: $160 million from Leon Black; $50 million townhouse and power of attorney over Wexner’s estate; cameras in his residence wired by the Israeli government; compromising photos of Prince Andrew, Clinton, et cetera; confirmed sex trafficking of underage girls from Maxwell, Brunel, and others; teaching job with William Barr; Princeton’s CIA; Khashoggi was a client of Epstein; prince’s money laundering for intelligence; adviser to Ehud Barak and the Rothschilds; Ruemmler, who was chief legal officer of Goldman Sachs and former White House counsel under Obama, was a key adviser and backup executor as well. There are millions of files still redacted. None have been released by the CIA or State Department. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Anyone telling you that there’s nothing to see here is attempting to whitewash the most important, revealing intelligence-related story of our lifetimes.”

And then he calls you out here: “Michael Tracy doesn’t understand the difference between evidence and proof and is cynically exploiting sexually abused women for engagement.”

Michael Tracy

Okay. [laughter] First of all, I don’t know what that guy is even arguing all that stuff is supposed to be evidence of. What is the ultimate contention that he’s claiming those myriad, scattered data points are supposed to justify?

That’s why what’s so strange about this story is that nobody can really ever articulate it. Saagar struggled to articulate what I suspect actually is his ultimate belief, which is that there was some kind of pedophile trafficking operation. I think he said that he agreed with the Thomas Massie quote that I read out to him, but on its face, that’s sort of a bizarre statement to make. So they latch on to this other peripheral stuff around intelligence and whatnot.

That guy said, “How dare anyone ever say there’s nothing to see here?” He ascribed that to me. I’ve never said there’s nothing to see here. People tell me all the time that I allegedly have said there’s nothing to see here, but I don’t say that at all.

I’m pretty much as obsessed, if not more obsessed, with this story than anyone at this point, to a degree that’s probably not very healthy mentally.

Obsessed with it—but hold on, Michael. Let me just ask you about that. You’re obsessed with it in the sense that you think this is a modern-day Salem witch trial, right? Which is fascinating.

So you’re fascinated from a sociological standpoint: Have humans evolved beyond where they were hundreds of years ago, engaging in witch hunts and things like that? Or do you think it’s interesting in other ways?

Michael Tracy

I think it’s interesting in other ways, definitely in that way as well, but there are other ways in which it’s interesting. I think it’s almost interesting as an anthropological survey of sorts among elites, movers, and shakers, you could say, where Epstein did have this extraordinary ability to network and convene people who probably otherwise would never have been convened.

I’ve been saying that I think Jeffrey Epstein is the only man on Earth who could have brought together for a friendly social powwow Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon. I’m almost jealous of that. I’m sure that would have been a very fascinating discussion to listen in on, right? And there are other examples.

So I think it’s interesting from that perspective. I think every little piece of information that can be uncovered about Jeffrey Epstein’s life is now almost intrinsically interesting, given the salience of the story. I guess I’m interested just from that perspective because obviously he’s now a historic—or even world-historic—figure.

I’m always down to find out something new about what Jeffrey was up to. So, sure, I think it’s interesting politically, just in terms of how this can be leveraged into some sort of political battering ram against enemies. And this is the number 1 oppositional Trump narrative of the second term. It’s almost Russiagate redux in the outsized prominence that Democrats are giving it in terms of what they bring up day after day in hopes of undercutting or hurting Trump.

Yeah, it doesn’t have to be the new Russiagate in that way, where every possible tangential fact is somehow connected, and the whole thing kind of metastasizes and is used in a partisan, weaponized way.

Michael Tracy

Yeah, but it’s different in that there’s an international component. This is the number 1 scandal right now that’s ravaging Norway, Slovakia—I was mentioning, obviously, Great Britain today—other places, the United Arab Emirates, name your country. So it’s been internationalized, which is just fascinating as well.

Jason Calacanis

Didn't they burn an effigy of Jeffrey Epstein in Iran or something? It just never ends. So, of course, there's infinite fascinating material, at least to me. I just don't accept that, in order to be fascinated by this, we must have this weird epistemology where we can collect all these discrepant little pieces of information, blast them out on the internet, and then think that we've done the argumentative and logical work necessary to somehow establish how that proves our ultimate notions about what the story is supposed to signify—which, again, is pedophilic sex trafficking enforced by blackmail that ensnared prominent individuals at the direction of some intelligence agency.

That's the crux of the Epstein mythology, and it's been systematically unraveled, including partially by the disclosure of more Epstein files. But even prior to January 30th or December 19th, the 2 productions, there was never any credible evidence for any of it. I am fascinated by how people come to believe such mythological things, and the journalistic malfeasance that has been characterizing the story is of particular interest to me as well, because it's been a central factor in how the mythology has been allowed to proliferate without any countervailing point of view being put to it.

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

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

Michael Tracy

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

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

Or is it just me? Am I the only guy who's going to be doing this forevermore? There are some others who have come to take on a little bit more of a skeptical perspective.

Well, I think we should be cognizant of the real-world ramifications rather than just speaking about it in the abstract, or who suffers more, Reid Hoffman versus Elon Musk, or all this other stuff. I think it really is a crazy thing that's been inculcated in the public.

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

Michael Tracy

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

Jason Calacanis

Well, the mob does not like being accused of being a mob. Their defense mechanism seems to be to accuse anyone who points out some of the problems in the logic of basically somehow being involved in the crimes that they're alleging. So, in any event, I do think that you are performing a valuable service.

When Hollywood dramatizes this, it's like Henry Fonda and The Ox-Bow Incident, or maybe it's Gregory Peck and To Kill a Mockingbird. You've got a mob, and you have this one lone figure who's standing up to thwart the mob, trying to talk sense into them. In real life, it's not Gregory Peck; it's a guy in a 1-bedroom apartment in New Jersey.

Michael Tracy

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

And Kevin, I do think that what you're doing is really important because I think this citizen journalism here that's sifting through the Epstein files is turning up really interesting things. I do not think it's appropriate for Reid to be wildly pointing the finger at other people again while the evidence shows that he's been bald-faced lying about every aspect of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

To be honest, if he had just kept his mouth shut and not accused other people, I'm not even sure this would be a topic on the show. I would just wait to let the chips fall where they may and see what ultimately comes out about this. But he kind of put himself in play by saying all of these things, and I do think it's appropriate to examine the record and assess his credibility on that basis.

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

I agree, and thank you.

Well, let's wrap it there. I just want to make one final point, which is, even when years ago this was sort of a cause célèbre on the right, where you had right-wing podcasts pointing the finger at Bill Clinton or other left-wing figures, I never weighed in on this. I wasn't sure what to think. I still am not completely sure what to think about it.

I don't want to get over my skis in terms of overly associating myself with any one point of view, because I think when people do that, they do dig in, and I'm keeping an open mind with respect to what comes out next. It would not surprise me at all if Michael Tracey turned out to be correct, but it also wouldn't completely surprise me if some version of Saagar's version of the story proved to be correct, assuming more evidence comes out.

So I'm keeping an open mind. I do think it's really important for us to evaluate the claims critically, which is why I think it's important to hear from people like Michael Tracey. I look forward to seeing what comes next, and we'll address it then.

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

Jason Calacanis

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