It is Saturday, January 24th, 2026, and I have
to be honest with you, looking at the absolute
mountain of documents we have on the desk today,
I feel a very specific kind of exhaustion. It's
a heavy stack. And it's not just the physical
weight of the paper. No. It's the weight of the
subject itself. Exactly. It's the fatigue. If
you were listening to this right now, you probably
feel it too. It feels like we have been, I don't
know, about to find out the truth regarding Jeffrey
Epstein for what? For what, seven years? Ten
years? And yet here we are, six years after his
death, and late 2025 just decided to dump an
entirely new puzzle on our laps. It really was
a chaotic end to the year. I mean, if you had
told me five years ago that in 2026 we'd still
be parsing through new evidence, I would have
said you were crazy. Oh, absolutely. But look
at just the last six months. You had the release
of the first 50 years birthday book in September.
Right. Which just completely reignited the whole
social network debate. And the FBI finally and
I mean finally releasing the jail footage in
July. The so -called glitch footage. Yeah. Which
we are definitely going to spend some time on
later because the implications of that are just
staggering. Staggering. And then, of course,
the. political football of the client list that
just keeps getting punted back and forth. And
back and forth. It feels like we are drowning
in data, but starving for actual context. That's
the perfect way to frame it. We have millions
of data points, but no single narrative that
makes sense of them all. For most people, Epstein
is just a collection of headlines. Yeah, he's
a meme. He's the island. He's the plane. He's
the suicide or not controversy. It was all noise.
Our mission today is to cut through that noise.
We aren't doing another true crime rehash. I
don't want to talk about the lurid details just
for the shock value. I want to understand the
mechanism. The mechanism is key because when
you look at the source material, I mean, really
look at it. Epstein doesn't come across like
a criminal mastermind in the traditional sense.
He looks like a ghost in the machine. He's a
study in how the systems we trust. Finance, academia,
intelligence, the Justice Department. They all
have back doors. And he found every single one
of them. So let's test that theory. We need to
go back way before the island, before the jet,
before the billions. I'm looking at this timeline
we built out. And the first real anomaly is right
here. 1974. The Dalton School. The Upper East
Side. Very elite. The kind of place where the
tuition costs more than most people's salaries.
Extremely elite. And here is Jeffrey Epstein,
age 21. He is teaching calculus and physics to
the children of the Manhattan aristocracy. Right.
But looking at his resume here, he's a dropout.
He went to Cooper Union, dropped out, went to
NYU, dropped out. Right. He has no degree. He
has no credentials. In fact, he didn't even have
a teaching license. So let's just pause and really
look at this. How does a college dropout with
no degree get hired to teach physics at one of
the most prestigious prep schools in America?
You can't just walk in off the street and say,
trust me, I know math. Well, this is where the
mechanism starts to show itself right away. The
headmaster of Dalton at the time was a man named
Donald Barr. Barr. Wait, as in Bill Barr. The
former attorney general. His father. Now, we
have to be really precise with the source material
here because this is where Internet conspiracies
usually just go completely off the rails. OK.
Donald Barr actually left Dalton just a few months
before Epstein started teaching. So there isn't
a signature on a contract that says. donald barr
hired jeffrey epstein got it so he didn't directly
hire him likely not directly but barr had established
a very very specific culture there he was an
iconoclast he wrote science fiction space operas
actually no way yeah he believed in talent over
credentials he liked hiring unconventional people
who he thought were geniuses regardless of a
piece of paper and the administration that followed
him kept that ethos for a while So Evsky fits
the profile of a bar hire, even if Barr himself
didn't sign the contract. He just walked in,
charmed the right people, and projected this
aura of unconventional genius. Exactly. And even
then, at 21, the behavior pattern was already
visible. We have accounts from students, verified
accounts, that he was blurring lines immediately.
Like what? Showing up at student parties on the
weekends, flirting with the girls. In 2026, that
gets you fired and arrested within a week. In
1974. In 1974, in that specific circle, it was
just eccentric. He was the cool, young teacher.
Wow. And he didn't get fired for the inappropriate
behavior, oddly enough. He was eventually dismissed
for poor performance. So he just wasn't a good
teacher. Apparently not. But by then, it didn't
matter. He had already extracted what he needed
from Dalton. He didn't need the salary. He needed
the Rolodex. He needed a specific parent. And
this is the pivot point in his entire life. He
was tutoring the daughter of Alan Greenberg.
Ace Greenberg. Yeah. The CEO of Bear Stearns.
A Wall Street legend. A titan. Epstein charms
the daughter, helps her with her calculus, and
eventually meets the father. He impresses Greenberg
with his, quote, mind for numbers. And suddenly,
the fired physics teacher is a junior assistant
at an investment bank. Talk about failing upward.
He gets fired from a school and lands on a trading
floor. But wait, because this is where people
usually gloss over the details. They just say
he went to Wall Street and got rich. Right. But
look at the speed. He joins Bear Stearns in 1976.
By 1980, just four years later, he is a limited
partner. Is that normal? I mean, that sounds
fast. It's virtually impossible, especially for
a guy with no MBA, no degree, and no prior experience.
It usually takes a decade of grinding to get
there, if you ever do. So what was he doing?
It suggests he wasn't just doing grunt work.
He wasn't a quant genius analyzing charts in
a back room. He was a salesman. What was he selling?
Tax avoidance. He figured out early on that the
one thing which people care about more than making
money is not losing money to the government.
He made himself a fixer for wealthy clients.
He identified loopholes. Okay, but if he was
so good at it, why did he get fired in 1981?
I'm looking at the reason here and it says Reg
D violation. We need to translate that because
it sounds like boring compliance stuff, but I
have a feeling it's important. Oh, it's very
important. Regulation D is an SEC rule. Basically,
it allows companies to sell private investments
without registering them as public securities.
But you have to follow very strict rules. OK.
You can usually only sell to accredited investors,
people who can afford to lose the money. And
you have to follow strict disclosure protocols.
And Epstein. Epstein just ignored the rules.
He gave his own money to a friend to invest in
a deal, effectively trying to skirt the regulations
to get in on a hot opportunity. He thought he
was smarter than the compliance department. He
thought rules were suggestions. Exactly. And
when Bear Stearns caught him, they cut him loose.
They didn't want the liability. So now he's out
on his own. And this enters his most mysterious
phase. The bounty hunter years. I honestly thought
this was an internet myth until I saw the documents
on the Obregon case. This feels like a movie
script that got rejected for being too unbelievable.
It sounds like fiction. From 1982 to around 1986,
he sets up this thing called the Intercontinental
Assets Group. He calls himself a financial troubleshooter.
A troubleshooter. He's traveling to Europe, carrying
a gun or claiming to, anyway, helping people
recover stolen money. He helped the Spanish actress
Ana Obregón. Right. Her father's money. Yes.
Her father had lost millions in a real estate
scam. Epstein trapped the money down. He played
the part of the heavy. He recovered the funds.
It's giving. International man of mystery, but
very, very low budget. It's shady. But it bridges
the gap between banker and criminal because this
work led him directly to Stephen Hoffenberg.
Towers Financial. The biggest Ponzi scheme in
history until Bernie Madoff came along. And this
is really where Jeffrey Epstein gets his Ph .D.
in fraud. Okay, and this is what I struggle with.
Stephen Hoffenberg went to prison for this. He
stole $450 million. Epstein was his right -hand
man, right? They're inseparable. In 1987, Epstein
is making $25 ,000 a month. In 1987 dollars?
That's like, what, $70 ,000 a month today? More?
Plus bonuses. They are flying on private jets.
They're trying to execute a hostile takeover
of Pan Am. They are living like kings. But here's
the mechanism again. Towers Financial was a fraud.
They were selling bonds to investors, promising
these huge returns, and then paying off the old
investors with a new investor's money. A classic
Ponzi. Classic. And Hoffenberg later claimed
explicitly that Epstein was the architect of
the whole scheme. He said Epstein was the one
who figured out how to manipulate the balance
sheets. So why didn't Epstein go to jail in the
90s? Hoffenberg did. Timing. It all comes down
to timing. Epstein left the company in 1989.
The house of cards didn't collapse until 1993.
So by the time the feds came knocking. He was
already gone. He had distanced himself. He was
never charged. He walked away with the money,
the connections, and none at the prison time.
It's the Teflon effect starting to form. He learns
that if you leave the room right before the bomb
goes off, you don't get blamed for the explosion.
Precisely. And that money, which was essentially
stolen, money laundered him into his next phase,
the phase where he captures a whale. Leslie Wexner,
the billionaire behind Victoria's Secret and
The Limited. This relationship is the cornerstone
of Epstein's wealth. Without Wexner, there is
no Jeffrey Epstein as we know him. I want to
drill down on the financial relationship here
because the word advisor. Feels way too soft.
You have notes here about power of attorney.
Yes. In 1991, Epstein gains full power of attorney
over Wexner's personal and financial life. Okay,
for the non -lawyers listening, that doesn't
just mean he gives advice. That means he can
sign checks, he can buy property, he can hire
and fire people. He is essentially acting as
Leslie Wexner. It is total encapsulation. Wexner
severed ties with his other longtime advisors.
He moved his assets into trusts that Epstein
controlled. And over the years, Epstein received
something like $200 million in fees from Wexner.
$200 million? For what? Beating the S &P 500?
No. In fact, the source material we have suggests
Epstein's actual trading returns were mediocre
at best. He wasn't Warren Buffett. He wasn't
a wizard of the stock market. So what was Wexner
paying for? For lifestyle management and problem
solving. Epstein bought the Manhattan mansion,
the largest private residence in the city, from
Wexner. He got the private jet from Wexner. It
sounds less like an employee and more like, well,
I don't know what it sounds like. But the level
of dependency is staggering. And he secured that
dependency by saving Wexner money in other ways.
We have to talk about the Virgin Islands setup.
The tax haven. This was the big pitch. Epstein
moves his operation to the U .S. Virgin Islands.
He sets up the Financial Trust Company. By doing
this, thanks to local economic incentives designed
to bring businesses to the islands. Right. They
want the investment. They want the investment.
So he drops his effective tax rate from nearly
40 percent down to roughly 4 percent. So he saves
his clients Wexner, another billionaire, Leon
Black. Tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions
of dollars in taxes. And that buys you a lot
of forgiveness. You can be eccentric. You can
be creepy. You can be a college dropout. As long
as you are saving the billionaire more money
than you cost him. Money is the ultimate detergent.
It scrubs everything clean until it doesn't.
Which brings us to part two, the network. Yeah,
because he didn't just want to be rich. He wanted
to be respected. Or at least he wanted people
to think he was smart. He had a deep, gnawing
insecurity about his lack of education. I think
that dropout status haunted him. He didn't just
buy cars and planes. He bought scientists. He
collected them like trophies. I'm looking at
the list here. Stephen Hawking, Marvin Minsky
from MIT, Nobel Prize winners. He was throwing
money at Harvard. at the MIT Media Lab. He hosted
the MindShift conference on his private island.
But if you look at what he was interested in,
it gets dark very, very quickly. He wasn't funding
climate change research or basic biology. Eugenics.
Eugenics and transhumanism. He was obsessed with
DNA. He told scientists he wanted to seed the
human race with his own DNA. The baby ranch concept.
That sounds like something out of a sci -fi movie.
Yes. He reportedly had a plan to use his Zorro
ranch in New Mexico to impregnate women on a
massive scale. He wanted his head and his penis
frozen after death. This is a God complex in
its purest form. He genuinely believed his genetics
were superior. And the scientists, they just
nodded along. They took the money. They took
the checks. We have emails where they joke about
his weird theories, but the money cleared. It's
the exact same pattern as the bankers. Moral
questions tend to fade when the funding is generous.
OK, we have to talk about the political names.
And I want to be careful here because, as we
saw in 2025, this topic is basically a weapon
now. It feels like every time a document drops,
one side shouts, ha, gotcha, and the other side
shouts, fake news. It's radioactive. But we have
to be neutral reporters here. The reality is
Epstein was an equal opportunity infiltrator.
Let's look at the two big ones. Trump and Clinton.
We've all seen the photos. We've heard the quotes.
But what does the new evidence actually say?
Let's take Trump first. They were neighbors in
Palm Beach. Socially, they were very close in
the 90s and early 2000s. You have that famous
2002 quote where Trump calls him a terrific guy
and notes he likes women on the younger side.
Which, knowing what we know now, just makes your
skin crawl. It does. But then there is a rift.
Around 2004, they have a falling out over real
estate. The Maison de la Mitié mansion in Palm
Beach. Trump outbid him. Trump. Trump outbid
him. Epstein was furious. Yeah. And they seemingly
stopped hanging out after that. But the 2025
releases really muddied the water on this rift.
They did. That first 50 years birthday book that
was released last September contained a letter
attributed to Trump that seemed very warm, written
well after the supposed fight. Right. Trump's
team immediately claimed he didn't sign it. That
was a forgery. And now there are legal challenges
about its authenticity. And then we have the
tapes released in 2024 where Epstein is just
bragging. He's on tape claiming to be Trump's
closest friend. But we have to remember, Epstein
was a pathological liar. He lied about his degree,
lied about his money. Was he lying about his
access to the president to impress a 19 -year
-old girl he was talking to? It's entirely possible.
It's very possible. OK, what about Clinton? The
flight logs are infamous. The hard evidence is
27 flights on Epstein's plane. 27. And visits
to the White House by Epstein in the early 90s.
The connection through Ghislaine Maxwell was
incredibly strong. But Clinton's defense has
always been very specific. I never went to the
island. And surprisingly, the Secret Service
records that were released back in 2017 actually
back that up. They show him on the plane, but
they don't show agents deploying to Little St.
James. So technically, he might be telling the
truth about the island. while lying by omission
about the depth of the entire relationship. It
seems like Epstein didn't care about the party
platform. He just cared about the power. He collected
power. Party affiliation was irrelevant. You
have Bill Gates, who met with him after the 2008
conviction. That's the one that just baffles
me. It's 2011. Epstein is a registered sex offender,
and Bill Gates is taking meetings with him. Gates
called it a huge mistake later on, but it just
shows how Epstein managed to launder his reputation.
He convinced powerful people he was some kind
of victim of the system rather than a predator.
It wasn't just Gates either. What about Noam
Chomsky? That was another 2025 revelation. Financial
transfers of about $270 ,000 and meetings well
after the conviction. And Hewitt Barak, the former
Israeli prime minister. A frequent visitor and
a business partner in a company called Carbine.
The network was wide and it was deep. Which brings
us to the deep dive part of this episode, the
intelligence angle. For years, this was dismissed
as just a crazy conspiracy theory. Yes, he was
a spy, he was Mossad, he was CIA, all of that.
Right. But the deeper we dig into some of these
business deals, and especially the Acosta comments,
it stops looking like a theory and starts looking
like a business model. It really does. Let's
break down that Acosta comment because that is
the smoking gun for a lot of people. OK, so remember
Alexander Acosta? He was the U .S. attorney in
Florida who signed that sweetheart plea deal
in 2008. The deal we'll get to in a second. Right.
When Acosta was being vetted for labor secretary
years later, he was asked why on earth he gave
Epstein such a light sentence. His answer was
chilling. He said he was told Epstein belonged
to intelligence and was above his pay grade.
A U .S. attorney was told to back off because
a child predator was an intelligence asset. That
is the direct implication of his statement. And
then you have to look at the House. the setup
in the New York mansion, the media room. The
wiring. I read about the wiring. Sources who
worked on the house described a system of pinhole
cameras in the bathrooms, in the bedrooms. The
feeds all ran to a central server room. That's
not just for perversion. That is a compromise
factory. Exactly. If you invite Bill Gates or
Prince Andrew or a senator or a president to
your house and you catch them in a compromising
position, you own them. The 2025 email releases
showed Epstein acting as a back channel between
Israel and Saudi Arabia. He wasn't just a party
host. He was a geopolitical messenger. It explains
the untouchable status he seemed to have for
decades. He had insurance policies on powerful
people. Until he became too toxic to keep. So
let's talk about the actual crimes in that deal.
Part three. Because before all the intelligence
theories and the power brokers, they were actual
victims, real teenage girls. And we have to be
clear about the system he built. It wasn't random.
It was an industrial operation. Recruiters like
Ghislaine Maxwell would find vulnerable girls,
often from broken homes, often needing money,
and bring them into this world of massages. It
was a pyramid scheme of abuse. And in 2005, the
Palm Beach police actually did their job. They
did. A police chief named Michael Ryder. They
raided the house. They found the cameras. They
found the photos. They were ready to charge him
with multiple felonies that would have put him
away for life. They had him dead to rights. And
then the feds stepped in. The non -prosecution
agreement. The NPA. This document is It's a legal
unicorn. I've been studying legal cases for a
long time, and I have never seen anything like
it. It granted federal immunity not just to Epstein,
but to any potential co -conspirators. Wait,
any potential co -conspirators? Named or unnamed.
Imagine robbing a bank, making a deal, and the
prosecutor says, OK, you and anyone who helped
you drive the car or hold the gun, even people
we don't know about yet, are all safe forever.
It's a blanket amnesty for the entire criminal
enterprise. And they kept this deal. secret from
the victims which a federal judge later ruled
was illegal it violated the crime victims rights
act but the damage was done the result was he
served 13 months and i struggle to even use the
word served It was a complete joke. He slept
in a private wing of the county jail. But for
12 hours a day, six days a week, he was on work
release. So he just went to the office. He went
to his office in West Palm Beach. He had his
driver. He met with lawyers and young women.
And didn't he hire the jail deputies? I remember
reading that. Yes. He paid the off duty deputies
to act as his private security guards and receptionist
while he was at the office. The police were on
his payroll. It was a hallucination of justice.
But the hallucination finally ended in 2019.
The Miami Herald investigation reignited the
case. The public outrage was just too loud to
ignore. He gets arrested again. And this time
it was different. It was federal. They raided
the Manhattan townhouse. They found $70 ,000
in cash, diamonds, and crucially, a fake Austrian
passport. And what was on the passport? It had
his picture, a different name, and it listed
a Saudi residence. Which screams flight risk.
Which is exactly why he was denied bail. He was
looking at federal sex trafficking conspiracy
charges. The walls were finally, finally closing
in. He was facing 45 years to life. And then?
August 10th, 2019, the death. The official narrative,
suicide by hanging. Okay, and this is where we
need to be really careful and separate the internet
frenzy from the forensic reality because the
anomalies are real. We aren't making them up.
They are very real. First, just the protocol
failures. He had been taken off suicide watch
shortly before his death. Which makes absolutely
no sense for a high -profile inmate who had just
tried to hurt himself weeks earlier. His cellmate
was transferred out at the last minute, leaving
him alone. The two guards assigned to his unit
admitted to falsifying logs. They fell asleep
and didn't check on him for at least three hours.
And the cameras, the camera that were pointing
at his cell. Two cameras outside the cell malfunction.
It just reads like a bad spy novel. Oh, sorry,
the cameras broke and the guards fell asleep
at the exact same time. It strains credulity.
But let's look at the forensics, the hyoid bone.
This is the detail everyone latched onto and
for good reason. Explain that for us. What is
the hyoid bone and why is it so important? It's
a small U -shaped bone in the neck that supports
the tongue. Dr. Michael Baden, the famous pathologist
hired by the Epstein family to observe the autopsy,
noted the hyoid was broken. Not just broken,
but fractured in three places. Now, in hangings,
especially typical suicides, this happens in
about 6 % of cases. 6%, so it's very rare. It's
very rare. However, in strangulation homicide,
it's extremely common. It's almost a signature
of someone being manually strangled. So it's
possible it was suicide. But statistically, the
evidence points much more strongly towards murder.
It raises a massive red flag. Dr. Baden was very
clear that the injuries were more consistent
with homicide or a very violent struggle. But
here is where it gets really interesting, especially
for us here in 2026. Last year, in July 2025,
the FBI finally released the surveillance footage
from that night. And this was supposed to put
all the conspiracy theories to bed. Instead,
it poured gasoline on them. Because of the glitch.
The video has a jump. A literal time jump. The
clock on the footage goes from 11 .58 .58 to
12 .000000. So wait, nearly three minutes are
just gone. Gone. Erased. Right at the critical
moment. And it gets worse. The metadata, the
digital fingerprint of the file shows the video
was modified despite the FBI claiming it was
raw, unedited footage. CBS News even cited an
official saying an unedited version exists somewhere.
So let's just lay this out. We have a high value
prisoner connected to intelligence agencies who
dies in a cell where the cameras break, the guards
sleep. And the footage that is released six years
later has a suspicious cut right at the critical
moment and has been digitally altered. It means
that whether it was suicide or murder, the official
story is incomplete at best and a cover -up at
worst. It fuels the conspiracy not because people
are crazy, but because there is documented incompetence
or tampering by federal agencies. It feels like
gaslighting on a national scale. It is. It forces
you to ask, who benefits from the silence? Who
benefits from the trial never happening? Which
brings us to the aftermath. We are now in 2026.
What is the legacy of all this? Fatigue. I think
that's the main word, list fatigue. Oh, absolutely.
We've been promised the client list for years.
It's always just around the corner. And every
time something is released, it's redacted or
it's just known associates or it's widely misinterpreted.
Trump's DOJ, under Pam Bondi, claimed in 2025
there was no list. Which, I'm sorry, nobody believes.
And then you have the political weaponization.
You have claims from people like James O 'Keefe
and Mark Epstein, Jeffrey's brother, that Democrats
are scrubbing Republican names and Republicans
are scrubbing Democratic names from the documents.
It's just become a culture war artifact. You
have the Epstein didn't kill himself meme, which
is basically a permanent fixture of the Internet
now. You had that bizarre statue on the National
Mall last year, the best friends forever statue
of Trump and Epstein. Which the police removed
almost immediately. But it shows how deeply this
has embedded itself in the national psyche. It's
a symbol of total elite corruption. And sadly,
in all of this, the victims so often get lost.
They do. The estate paid out over $125 million
between the victim's fund and the U .S. Virgin
Islands settlement. But because the criminal
case was dismissed when he died, there was no
trial. There was no public reckoning. The money
is a quiet settlement, not justice. So as we
wrap up this deep dive, how do we synthesize
all of this? What's the takeaway? I think we
have to look at Epstein not as an anomaly, but
as a symptom. He was a symptom of a system where
wealth and connections can literally bend reality.
He bent the financial system with offshore accounts.
He bent the legal system with the MPA. He bent
the social system by buying his way into Harvard
and the White House. And the deep dive takeaway
here is that the story isn't just about what
happened in that jail cell on August 10th. It's
about how he stayed out of a cell for 30 years.
Exactly. The mechanism of his rise is every bit
as important as the mystery of his fall. I want
to leave you with one final provocative thought.
We know about the edited tapes. We know about
the fake passport. We know about the broken bone.
But the biggest question, the one that underpins
everything, remains. If the blackmail tapes really
existed, the ones implied by Maxwell, the ones
hinted at in the black book, where are they now?
And more importantly, who is currently sleeping
soundly at night because they haven't been released?
That is the question. Thank you for listening
to The Deep Dive. See you next time.