Welcome back everyone. I am Cass PNC and I'm joined as
usual by my partner in crime, Mr. Bennett Tomlin.
How are you today? Oh, I'm a little nervous.
How are you, Cass? I'm not nervous.
I'm I'm ready for this. We're we're going to be talking
about a person who we've both written about and discussed
before, maybe not on the podcast very much, but we've definitely
written about them and had issues after writing that about
them. So I understand why Bennett is a
little nervous, but everything we're going to be discussing
today is public record like there's nothing.
And we're also not going to make any scandalous claims.
Everything that you that we're discussing right now you can
find for yourself in the Epstein files, unless the DOJ took these
files down, which they may have. We're talking about Brock Pierce
and his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein.
I want Bennett to describe Brock's early career.
Let's start at childhood actor, but I also just want to lead
with, if you want to follow along with us right now, you can
go to protos.com, type in, type in Brock Pierce.
It'll be the first article that comes up in your search.
And go ahead and click that and you can kind of follow along
with what we're going to be discussing today.
But yeah, go ahead, Bennett, and introduce folks to who Brock
Pierce is, in case they're unfamiliar.
Brock Pierce is a former child actor who starred in Like The
Mighty Ducks and The Mighty Ducks sequel.
As a teenager, he retired from acting and immediately became
part of this entity called Digital Entertainment Network,
which he was doing in collaboration with Mark Collins
Rector. We'll come up in a minute.
Unfortunately, Dan was supposed to be providing videos over the
Internet, like short television style shows, but over the
Internet it kind of didn't work because it was too early.
The infrastructure wasn't really there.
There wasn't enough demand for video delivered over the
Internet. And I want to add, there's clips
of these shows available on the Internet that they put out, and
they're terrible. I mean, these are really bad.
They're worse than generic sitcoms and stuff, and a lot of
them revolve around like gay teen gay and lesbian teenagers.
But you know, sorry, I did. I just wanted to let people
know. If you want to find clips of
these shows that Den put out, you can find them.
Yes, and DEN was going to be a multi $1,000,000 IPO towards the
end of the 1990s, but then that IPO ended up needing to get shit
canned because Mark Collins Rector was accused of sexual
assault and other forms of predation.
Following this, Pierce left DEN and decided to instead start
Internet gaming entertainment, which was gold mining for Wow.
Basically they hired a bunch of people in other countries and
stuff to grind for gold and Wow, and then they tried to sell that
gold to other people. I think there was also some
stuff for a while where they were selling like fully leveled
characters and things like that. Yes, yes.
And in case anyone is unfamiliar, like I, some of our
listeners I think are, are older than me, which is not exactly
young. World of Warcraft is what
Bennett is talking about right now.
He also did it for Ever EverQuest.
So like a bunch of a bunch of different, they're called
MMORPGSA bunch of people get together and play a kind of
fantastical game online where they try to complete missions.
That is supposed to be the fun part.
But what Brock Pierce did was take that and be like, OK, well,
we're going to loot farm. We're going to we're going to
level up these characters, get expensive loot, good loot, and
then we're going to sell that loot or those characters to
other players. And it became a very profitable
business. So profitable that a Goldman
Sachs got involved and you can you can take it away again,
Bennett. Specifically, Steve Bannon got
involved. This is somewhat after he left
Goldman Sachs, but he was able to bring in some other Goldman
Sachs guys for their money and they come in, take over IGE for
like $60 million or something like that.
And so that's where Pierce and Bannon begin working together
publicly. And it was kind of like a big
infusion of cash, which Pierce would end up committing to some
of his later ventures. Pierce does a couple of other
things kind of around the gaming space.
He ends up involved with, like, a venture capital fund called
Clearstone Ventures, where another Tether Co founder also
is a general partner. That's William Quigley.
And after a couple of years bouncing around that space, he
ends up getting involved with Bart and Bradford Stevens as
they were initially setting up their cryptocurrency venture
fund, which would eventually become Blockchain Capital.
Yeah, this was just a fun, to be clear, like this was part of the
the Stevens brothers. They had their own investment
firm and they just started this separate little cryptocurrency
fund that went on to become what we now call blockchain capital.
Yes. And so Pierce was majorly
involved in the early years of Blockchain Capital until he was
forced out when people again paid attention to Brock Pierce's
history. During his time at Blockchain
Capital, he also got involved in a bunch of other cryptocurrency
projects. He was part of Master Coin,
which became Omni, which is where Tether originally
launched. He was founded Co founded
Tether. To be clear, this is a Co
founder of Tether. He Co founded a real coin which
became Tether when it was bought out by the Bit Fenix Principles.
He was part of Sunlot Holdings and Gox Rising, two different
initiatives that hope to either revive or purchase Mount Gox at
different points. He got involved with Noble
Markets around this point, which was like trying to be this
NASDAQ listed cryptocurrency exchange and ended up becoming a
Puerto Rican international financial entity that marketed
itself as a bank. We'll probably get back to that.
Yeah, yeah. Let's pause.
Let's pause here, actually, because I want, I want everyone
to. So you have a kind of a framing
of who Brock Pierce is. He's been quite successful with
a lot of these things. No one knows his exact net
worth, as is usually the case with extremely wealthy elite
individuals, but he likely is a billionaire.
I will say he at least has hundreds and hundreds and
hundreds of millions of dollars. He.
He claimed to be a billionaire back in like 2018 and when he
was like pressed on it, he said, oh, if I'm not a billionaire
yet, I'll just make a token and then I'll be a billionaire or
something to that general effect.
Yeah, yeah. I don't need money.
I can make tokens. That's kind of an A basic
understanding of who Brock Pierce is, but I want us to talk
about. Well, I do.
I glossed over. I was talking about his
professional career there. During some of those things,
there were some other personal struggles which were going on.
So Mark Collins, rector we mentioned is part of DEN, who's
a close friend or at least was at the time a close friend of
Brock Pierce, was eventually indicted for some of his sexual
crimes and fled the United States to go to Spain.
Brock Pierce went to Spain with him.
Pierce has claimed he was unaware of the indictment and
was unaware his good friend was a fugitive from the law when
they did this. But nonetheless, Pierce was
living with this fugitive from the United States justice system
together in Spain. Eventually Spanish authorities
raided the house to arrest Mark Collins Rector.
They found gigabytes and gigabytes of child pornography
and a bunch of other stuff like that.
This broke in some of like I think The Hollywood Reporter
broke it in the United States and tied Brock peers to it,
causing him some problems in terms of his reputation and
stuff that have continued to dodge him with people claiming
he's friendly with pedophiles. We'll get to that.
And so, yeah, he has for years been plagued with various
controversies surrounding how many of his close friends appear
to be pedophiles or other forms of sexual criminals.
Yeah. And he's denied all of this and
more or less has. I wouldn't say he's claimed to
be a victim, but he's kind of pushed forward the idea that
like he was a young kid when all of this stuff started if
anything, like you can't blame a 17/18/19 year old kid for making
bad decisions. It's a fine line to walk.
I'm not going to really get into it right now.
I think there's good reason to say that the behavior that was
happening then has kind of continued throughout the rest of
his career. A lot of people talk about the
way that he behaves behind closed doors and stuff and
rumor. The rumor mill is not
necessarily good to him and that is why, for instance he had to
leave blockchain capital like you mentioned.
And why he ended up having to leave like the Bitcoin
Foundation, that's right. And some other things like that
is because these controversies which were known about, which
had been reported were once again like brought to
prominence, including when John Oliver at one point like made a
joke referencing a popular documentary called An Open
Secret, which like referenced some of the earlier period of
Brock Pierce's life when he his friends were implicated in these
sexual crimes. Yeah.
And you know, there's issues with that with that film.
I won't say the the the film is perfect, but it also raises some
pretty disturbing questions. So, you know, buyer beware when
it comes to watching that and taking in what they say in it at
100% truth. But it is very interesting, I
guess I'll say. And I'll, yeah, I'll also add
that, like, the nature of the cycle of abuse is that victims
often become perpetrators or people who perpetuate the thing.
And so there is a decent chance that many of the people,
including or many of the people around Epstein who may have been
perpetuating or perpetrating sexual crimes were at some
point, perhaps themselves a victim of some of that behavior.
I spoke to a victim yesterday, not of Epstein, but a victim of
abuse. And I said to them, one of the
things I said to them was it's very fascinating to me how so
many of the victims were tasked with finding more victims and
that they would go on to do it. And we both came to this
conclusion that I, you know, I'm no psychologist and I'm not
trying to say I am or make any kind of claim that I am, but you
have, you know, all of control, rest rested, rested from you and
you lose all control. It feels like when something
like that takes place and it feels like a, a way to get that
power and that control back is to be like, OK, fine, I'm going
to, I'm going to go get more people now.
I'm the one who has the power. So it's not to say it's
forgivable or acceptable behavior, but at least there's a
way to understand it, you know? Yes.
And so that we've talked now about some of the broader
context around this Tether Co founder Cass, could you start
with Brock Pierce and Jeffrey Epstein becoming people who
communicate on a semi regular basis?
How did that happen? What did it look like?
Yeah, So in 2010, this is 2 years after Jeffrey Epstein had
already been arrested for and then eventually accepted a
guilty plea for procuring minors for prostitution.
That happened in 2008. And by 2010, he's still
struggling with the ramifications of that.
He's still getting civil lawsuits.
He's still facing a lot of media attention about what he what
he's accused. Of.
There's new victims coming forward, new new lawsuits, new
problems. So he desperately wants to try
to fix this and he doesn't know how.
So he reaches out to someone named Al Sekle, Alfred Sekle.
Most people probably are not super familiar with this guy.
He is. He was well known in I guess
like in the Epstein circles. He.
Dated for many years. He dated Gilane Maxwell's
sister. Gilane Maxwell, if you're
unfamiliar, is basically known as the Madam for Jeffrey
Epstein. So Al Sekle was dating Gilane
Maxwell's sister, Isabel, and he was in regular contact with
Jeffrey Epstein. And Epstein reached out to him
and said, hey, I need you to scrub the Internet of my sexual
assault issues and my legal issues.
I need you to get rid of this stuff.
And he, Al Sekle says he'll do it for $25,000.
So Jeffrey Epstein pays him $25,000.
Then Al Sekle asks for 10,000 more dollars because it turns
out he didn't give the money to who he was supposed to.
Then he asked for 10,000 more than he says he wants to put on
a conference. And the conference is going to
cost somewhere like $100,000, possibly, maybe more.
It's going to be a very expensive conference.
It's going to be hosted on Jeffrey Epstein's private
island. And Al Sekle says this is great
for you. Like we're going to wipe
everything clean and we're going to make you out to be a a
philanthropist, a science philanthropist, somebody who who
cares about giving. And this is this conference is
going to be the start of a new beginning for your reputation.
So despite having problems now and concerns about the honesty
of Al Sekle and the ability for him to follow through with his
promises, Epstein goes ahead with this conference.
And the conference is called the Mind Shift Conference.
One of the invitees is Brock Pierce.
Originally, Brock had been planned to because he has a
winery. I guess Brock Pierce had been
planned to do a wine tasting. But Epstein said no, I don't
want a wine tasting. Forget it.
So instead of doing a wine tasting, Brock Pierce does a
presentation on cryptocurrencies.
And despite the fact, it turns out Epstein hates this
conference, he sends an e-mail pretending to be someone else,
pretending to be this random woman named Susan.
And he tells Al Sekle it's the mind shit conference.
He says it's it was the worst thing that the Epstein
Foundation has ever funded and he's complaining as this
fictitious woman, even though it the e-mail has all the spelling
errors that Epstein includes, it has all the grammatical errors
that Epstein, it's obviously Jeffrey Epstein.
Alseckel actually responds and says, I'm not an idiot.
I know that this is you Jeff. To which to which Jeffrey
Epstein does not respond, but one of the important little
tidbits in this angry rambling e-mail that he sends to Al Sekhl
is Reichhardt was interesting, as was Brock.
So he mentions 2 names as people he enjoyed and thought they had
a interesting presentation during this conference that he
hated. And very quickly after that,
which takes place in January of 2011, Brock Pierce and Jeffrey
Epstein start to become pretty close.
And so this conference is like the main connection we knew of
between Jeffrey Epstein and Brock Pierce before this recent
release of the Files. That was the thing people would
always point to to be like, no, Brock Pierce didn't just have
these problems when he was younger.
He's still actively choosing to associate with pedophiles.
And so from that e-mail, like you said, they became good
friends and they start to financially collaborate, it
seems like Pierce asks Epstein for his advice on a bunch of the
legal and financial situations he repeatedly finds himself in.
Yeah, they're not necessarily doing business together yet, but
Brock Pierce is asking for advice.
It seems like Jeffrey Epstein's also occasionally reaching out
to ask questions about cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and
and stuff like that. So, so a relationship begins
where they're at least asking each other questions about
finance and cryptocurrencies, and that's when things begin to
get really weird and gross. I want to say none of what we're
suggesting here is proof of any crime.
And I suspect, though, Brock Pierce has not responded, at
least as of recording. Brock Pierce has not responded
to protos. He has not put out any messages.
There's no PR about this. He's just stayed silent.
So no one has heard anything from him.
It's worth saying none of what we're sharing here is
necessarily criminal. It just looks weird and gross
and disgusting. OK, so that that's the preface.
Sorry, Bennett, What? What do they start talking about
after they've done a little bit of discussion of business,
finance and cryptocurrency? As we said, Brock reaches out to
see what Jeffrey Epstein thinks about a fund Clear Stone Group
is putting together. That's the gaming venture
capital fund that we mentioned that Brock was involved with.
Then they will eventually engage in some business transactions
together. But before those business
transactions, there's a series of strange and uncomfortable
emails where they seem to be discussing women in some unusual
and uncomfortable manners. Like there is one e-mail where
Jeffrey Epstein is talking about these people who are in LA
encouraging Brock to go meet up with these people.
He tells Brock don't bring your girlfriend to this.
And Brock responds will do. Broke up with my girlfriend last
night so that won't be a problem.
And then later after this meeting Brock says I had a great
time with the girls. Hope they had fun too.
Thanks. Best regards.
Now, like a little weird considering who's involved.
Yeah criminal. No, definitely not right that
like it's innocuous enough. There's just some back and
forths about some women. Every every man has talked about
women in term if like every I guess I'll say every straight
man has at least had a conversation with their friend
about like, hey, I think this girl would be great for you or
something. And it's like OK, yeah, I'll
meet up with her. This could literally be
something like that, right? Except there's 2 girls named.
The whole thing is weird. I'm going to be honest.
It's very strange actually. Most people don't do this.
Well, especially most people don't do this like once they're
adults. Like when you're a 7th grader
and you're insecure, you'll be talking to your buddies and be
like, oh, what do you think about so and so or whatever.
But like, the older you get, the more you, like, understand that
these people are humans and you should engage with them, like,
as a human being and not as, like, object for your play.
So yeah, there's those emails you talked about.
There's another e-mail where Jeffrey Epstein talks about his
new Russian in LA that he wants Brock to meet up with.
And man, that's a sentence that has a lot of possible
implications, very few of which we can definitively say.
Yeah, very, very strange. My new Russian is in Lai.
OK, I don't know what that means.
How many Russians do you have, Epstein?
Anyway, there's. 1. At least one, Yeah.
There's another one after that where Brock Pierce is telling
Epstein that he knows a girl in New York.
So this is, and I just want to clarify because this is Epstein
says, hey, I have a Russian in LA, can you meet up with her?
And Brock says, Oh yeah, I think so.
And then he doesn't, he isn't able to meet up with this, this
Russian girl. And he's, and he says like, oh,
sorry, I, I, I couldn't meet up with this Russian girl.
But also, I have a girl for you in New York.
Brock gives Jeffrey Epstein the name of this woman and
encourages Jeffrey Epstein to check her Facebook, to which
Jeffrey Epstein responds cute, which is uncomfortable and
unpleasant in light of the broad context we all know about these
individuals. And again, nothing criminal
here, just very strange stuff. Not necessarily.
Criminal together, at least. Now.
But now is when it starts to get really, really weird in my
opinion. And this is when I start to
wonder. I think at worst, what we've
seen so far is who who knows what the worst possible, who
knows what the worst possible thing is that we've seen so far.
But I will say that the emails don't present anything that you
could be like that. You could definitively be like,
oh, I know what's going on there.
The next ones I would say are a little bit more telling.
Becomes harder to come up with innocuous explanations for some
of these emails. That's correct.
In August of 2012, Brock Pierce says, currently in Moscow.
Next stop Kiev and then Odessa, to which Epstein responds.
Take photos and find me a present.
Brock Pierce replies to that with will do :).
That's gross. But more gross and more telling
is that three days after that, Brock Pierce sends Jeffrey
Epstein 30 plus images of a girl named Anastasia.
And he says at the bottom of this e-mail, the Ukraine is now
my favorite country :). I also want to make sure
everyone understand it's not the Ukraine, it's Ukraine that is a
Russian way of discussing Ukraine is to call it the
Ukraine. So he talks like a Russian.
He behaves like a weird creep and he's taking pictures of
women and sending them along to Jeffrey Epstein for reasons
undefined, I guess. Yes.
And again, just to preempt any of the lawyers who might be
watching this, there are some plausibly not illegal reasons
that I guess Brock Pierce would be sharing these pictures.
Even if that those reasons might be immoral, perhaps they're not
illegal, but so yeah, we see this part of their relationship
where they discuss women and things like that.
Well, I want to add one last thing to this part that wasn't
actually included in our article.
This is something and we'll hopefully we'll in our show
notes. You can we'll link to the
coffee. Zilla or Voidzilla I guess is
the channel Voidzilla video where he discusses some of the
stuff he's found. Something that Epstein seems to
do regularly is have people go around globetrotting for him
taking pictures and finding women and then he gets visas
issued for them. Brock Pierce and Jeffrey Epstein
specifically talk about an, an E5B visa or an EB5, sorry, EB5
visa. And that is for someone, if they
spend $1,000,000 starting a business, they're allowed to get
a temporary residence here in America.
So why are Brock Pearson Epstein getting visas for people?
Again, unclear, undefined. We don't know.
I don't know who knows? We just, you know, it seems very
strange. It, it's, it's not elite.
Nothing, nothing illegal. You know, as you said, don't
want lawyers breathing down our neck, but I just wanted to add
that little tidbit to this set of affairs that transpired.
We'll come back to some of their financial dealings, but I
actually want to jump ahead a little bit to Susie or Little
Sue Cass. Can you just talk briefly about
the relationship between Pierce, Epstein and Sue?
It's a very, very strange set of circumstances.
So that first, the first time due to terrible redaction by the
Department of Justice, which they've gone ahead and already
taken back thousands of files. We know that so far they're
probably going to have to take back way more.
They did a really terrible job of redacting.
And so we know the names of some of the people mentioned in like
the previous emails that we discussed.
The. The first time that women were
sent to see Brock Pierce, one of them was this woman named Sue.
Sue comes up a lot in Epstein's emails.
I don't know if she's an assistant.
I don't know if she's an assistant slash something else.
It sure feels that way. But Brock Pierce continues to
see Susie often, regularly. The relationship continues for
years and years and years. And as that relationship
continues, Dean starts to get pretty involved in the in their
relationship, which is again, very odd to me that Epstein
cares. Like he he asks, are you being
faithful to Susie? Are you being faithful to Sue?
He tells Joy Ito, for instance, Oh, Brock Pierce's little Sue's
boyfriend. He'll e-mail Brock and say like,
Hey, it's Sue's birthday. And he's like, Oh my God, thank
you for telling me. I got AI got a message.
No, no, no, don't you know you figured it out on your own?
Very, very, very weird stuff. But as this relationship
continues, by 2018, so now Brock Pierce is known Epstein for
seven years. By 2018, Brock Pierce is married
to a woman named Crystal Rose. And yet he sends Jeffrey Epstein
an e-mail in January of 2018 saying I'm ready to marry Sue,
though I'll have two wives going to attempt to thread that needle
over the next few days with Crystal.
I don't know if he tried to attempt that to he attempted to
thread that needle actually with Crystal Rose, or this was
something he was just saying to Epstein because he wanted
Epstein to think, yeah, I'm still interested in Sue or
Susie. I have no idea what happened
with this, but that's polygamy, and polygamy is illegal in
America. Maybe he meant it in some
spiritual way. I don't know.
And I don't know how Sue felt about it, and I don't know how
Crystal Rose felt about it. But I know that he's laying it
out in plain English that his plan is to marry for the second
time this woman who was introduced to him by Jeffrey
Epstein. I don't think anyone knows what
happened with that. I'm actually not even 100%
positive that Brock is like married to Crystal in a way that
the legal system recognizes. I know it's a smart contract
marriage or something. I don't.
Yeah, I don't know what that means.
That's not really the point. I think this more just points to
the degree of intimacy between Brock Pierce and Jeffrey Epstein
where they are like discussing these intimate personal
relationships. Brock seems to have some amount
of romantic connection to this person who's clearly in Jeffrey
Epstein's orbit. And like, it is weird to see
them so casually discuss so much of this kind of thing when we
all know, and Brock should have known, that one of the people
involved in this conversation is a pedophile.
That's right, That's right. And I want to add, you and I are
both married, and it seems so cavalier to discuss somebody who
you've promised you're going to be with for the rest of your
lives as though it's like a game or something.
Like it's like, clearly the idea of marriage doesn't actually
matter to Brock Pierce. There's just some weird reason
that he feels like he's ready to marry Sue.
Like, why do you need to have two wives?
Why can't you just be happy dating?
Like, if you want to be polyamorous, fine.
I like, that's fine. I don't care.
But like the way that he's so cavalier, the condescending
attitude, the way that he's treating women and talking about
women, it's disturbing. It's disgusting and it's
bizarre. Like, I can't imagine, even if I
got into a massive fight with my wife, I would not talk about her
this way. It's really, really strange.
It suggests that a very basic level Epstein and his friends
may not have been upstanding men.
Yeah, surprise, surprise. Returning to the business
relationship between these two, we talked briefly about how
Pierce asked for Jeffrey Epstein's advice on this Clear
Stone Gaming fund. There was also Brock Pierce
before it's collapse. Brock Pierce let Jeffrey Epstein
know he was thinking about purchasing Mt Gox, then the
largest Bitcoin exchange. And this is a thing that Pierce
would keep trying to do. He did it with Sunlot Holdings,
which he did in collaboration with John Betts.
He did it with Gox Rising, which it was never clear where the
money for Gox Rising was coming from, but that was another
attempt of Brock Pierce to revive Mount Cox.
There's other weird conversations like Epstein
speaking to Bill Gross of Idealab where he talked about a
cryptocurrency that Brock Pierce had pitched him.
It's a little bit hard to tell from the description, but it
might be an early version of Tether.
It seems to more be like an algorithmic stable coin, but
there's perhaps that was the germination of Tether.
The story of Tether is kind of weird when you go back to like
the pre real coin days and a lot of the master coin people who
were involved in it said that like it was over a year from
like its initial conception, which would put it around the
time this e-mail was sent to the time they were actually ready to
launch. It is real coin in the summer of
2014. So that e-mail was sent in may
of 2013 around when the real coin slash tether founders said
they started thinking about this project.
There's also Brock Pierce asked Jeffrey Epstein to look over a
NASDAQ agreement related to what was then Noble Markets, which
was then a cryptocurrency exchange.
It became, like we mentioned at the beginning of this episode,
an international financial entity called Noble Bank, which
for a brief period was Tethers primary tether to the banking
system. Yeah.
As to be. Clear Noble Bank was not a bank,
even though it called itself bank, which I think in the
states is illegal. You can't do that.
But maybe they have different rules and regulations about IFES
in Puerto Rico. It's also been softened up a bit
in the States. That's why you see like like
things like Chime, like Walmart's banking thing.
Chime advertise itself is like banking done different, even
though it's a fintech and it's not a bank.
Like there have been some changes in the advertising
rules, letting fintechs advertise their services as
banking even though they're not banks.
I think that's a bad choice, but they don't let me make
regulations. A lot of coiners are quite happy
about that. Anyways, I think one of the most
fascinating business transactions between these two
is the Coinbase Investment. Could you talk to us a little
bit about the Coinbase Investment cast?
Oh man, the Coinbase investment is so fascinating and and gross
to me. Basically we talked about this,
Bennett mentioned this at the at the top, but basically these two
brothers Bradford and Bart Stevens have a cryptocurrency
partners to LP that they begin in collaboration with Brock
Pierce and Brock Pierce decides to bring Jeffrey Epstein into
this fund. It's unclear every investment
made in this fund. I'm unsure and unclear if
Epstein put other capital into this fund or if there were other
investments made, but the one investment we know for sure that
Epstein contributed to was that he dumped $3,000,000 into this
fund so that they can make a coin base investment.
I think a lot of people, myself included, until relatively
recently figured that if there's going to be a Bermuda based like
corporation or you know, that there's ways to hide identity so
that not every business necessarily knows who's
investing money into their business.
But it turns out that's not necessarily true because as
Coinbase is closing this round, it suddenly Brock Pierce is
like, hey, if we want to do this, we got to do it right now.
Jeffrey, do you want to do this? And he's, Jeffrey says yes, of
course, yeah, I want to put $3,000,000 into Coinbase.
And Pierce then states, OK, well, the only issue is if you
really want to do this, I have to tell the founders who you
are. He invested, he got he made the
investment. We know there's proof that he
got a cash out from this, which we can get into, I don't know
later if we want to or now, but he absolutely made this
investment which suggests not no, proves for a fact that Fred,
I don't know how to say his last name, Ursum, Fred Ursum and
Brian Armstrong knew that Jeffrey Epstein was dumping
$3,000,000 into Coinbase. Let's be real, Coinbase was not
hard up at this point. They didn't they?
They didn't need the $3,000,000 from Jeffrey Epstein.
They took it and the reason they took it is because they thought
that no one would know that Jeffrey Epstein invested in
Coinbase. Thankfully, we have certifiable
proof that not only did Jeffrey Epstein invest in Coinbase, they
knew that he invested. They knew that a pedophile who
had been arrested in 2008 for procuring a minor for
prostitution was going to invest in their company and they were a
OK with that. To me, that is that's that.
It's not just bad as in you. I don't like that.
It's bad risk management. Seriously.
This was one of the most surprising things that you came
across when you were making this article because I, like you,
always assumed that most of the people who were receiving
Jeffrey Epstein investments had some pastiche of plausible
deniability. But here we have Coinbase 1
surprisingly doing due diligence and two doing the due diligence
and then being like Jeffrey Epstein, yes, he passes our due
diligence bar. Like the truly stunning thing
about it for me was that what name would they have rejected?
Who could Brock Pierce have gone back to those founders with said
the name And they would have been like, Oh no, we can't take
that money because Jeffrey Epstein apparently doesn't reach
that standard. And incredibly disturbing.
I think that kind of points to how willing so many of these
people, so many of these entities were to ignore such
atrocities as long as they remained like connected to these
centers of power and influence. And that for so many of these
men, it's a lot of men in here, it's like they'll overlook
anything if it means they have just this much more marginal
access to, like, power or influence.
And that seems to have been like a huge portion of Jeffrey
Epstein's like game he was playing here is he did his very
best to cultivate as many of those relationships as possible
and then dangled these relationships kind of like in
front of these other people for access.
Like one of the other emails you found was one where Rock Pierce
was asking Jeffrey Epstein for an introduction to Larry
Summers, another well known Epstein associate who all over
these files is like asking Jeffrey Epstein for romantic
advice as he debates whether or not he has like a 70 year old
man or whatever should pursue one of his grad students who's
in his seminar. God, I hate Larry Summers.
That's not the point of this episode.
But like. So much of Epstein's role was in
acting as like this way to facilitate those kind of high
power, high influence, high status relationships between
these people, and that because these people so desperately
wanted to maintain that access, they could overlook any amount
of child rape. It couldn't possibly put it
better. And I think that is that is a
perfect segue actually into exactly the next topic, which is
that it turns out Brock Pierce introduced and this is going to
have ramifications for the rest of the world and everyone who
lives in it. Brock Pierce introduces Jeffrey
Epstein to Steve Bannon and just I like I think most people are
familiar with Steve Bannon. He's an evil man.
He's a chaos agent. I don't know what else to call
him other than someone who. Similar to like, Peter Thiel
wants to see the world burn because he thinks it will be
profitable for him. And I don't even know if he
would deny any of what I just said.
I think he would be fine with that description.
These ramifications to me are quite powerful because Steve
Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein become very good friends very,
very quickly. Epstein calls him a pretty smart
puppet master. And at the time of Jeffrey
Epstein's death, Steve Bannon was in the process of creating a
documentary that it seems, though again, we're speculating
a little bit here, it seems, was kind of meant to slot Jeffrey
Epstein into the same kind of right wing eccentric who may
have done some sex crimes space that like Peter Thiel often
fills nowadays. I mean, everyone's seen it.
There's a picture of Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein
taking a selfie together and in front of a mirror.
Like these guys became really good friends.
And, and I think it's, it's fair to say that Steve Bannon
probably influenced Jeffrey Epstein, but I think Jeffrey
Epstein also influence Steve Bannon and a lot of the
despicable, disgusting missions he's accomplished, whether it be
through the Trump administration or otherwise.
I, I assume some of those ideas came from Jeffrey Epstein.
So I, I mean, I think, I think this is probably the most
damaging for, for the rest of us, this is the, one of the more
damaging relationships that occurs just based on the level
of influence that Steve Bannon has at the time and who he
knows, right? So I, I, I, I look at this and
it, it freaks me out. I don't know how to say it
otherwise. It freaks me out that they were
besties. Part of my difficulty in
discussing some parts of these files is it is very easy.
To sound like a conspiracy theorist, to sound like you're
describing a right wing conspiracy that cannot actually
exist, right that Bannon was so involved with like getting the
Brexit movement started. And then Peter Thiel and Jeffrey
Epstein are emailing each other to celebrate when Brexit passes.
And Bannon is doing this documentary for Epstein and
Epstein is convincing moot to reopen poll, which leads to like
Nick Fuentes and the gropers and a whole bunch of the like, all
right damage that they ended up doing.
And like, it is literally a right wing conspiracy.
And I think in some sense they've probably been more
successful than they imagined they would be when they were
taking many of these individual actions.
But like, it is disturbing to see them so openly plot the
downfall of civilization effectively.
Like when Epstein is messaging Peter Thiel about Brexit.
Jeffrey Epstein says it's just the beginning.
And Peter Thiel is like the beginning of what?
And so Jeffrey Epstein is like the return to tribalism, amazing
new alliances. You and I both agreed 0 interest
rates were too high, which I don't know what he means by
that. He wanted negative interest
rates. Like, yeah, maybe he did right.
Maybe they really he had fully committed to Bitcoin at that
point. I I don't understand the
economics of what he's suggesting there to say 0
interest rates are too high like a.
Lot of people have pushed put forward the idea of negative
interest rates, you know. Sure.
And they're used sometimes. They're used sometimes, like the
European Commission uses them and the Bank of Japan has used
them at times. They are an important part of
modern central bank theory. However, generally you don't go
0 is too high. And there's, especially in the
United States, a lot of economists tend to think that
the long period of extended, very historically low interest
rates may have led to some malinvestment.
Broadly, like, like you're saying, it's just so unpleasant
to see like a pedophile at a center of a right wing
conspiracy to destroy so many of the institutions that are
important to our world, and they seem to be succeeding.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's something I will say that as I
spent days and days and days going through the Epstein files
and, and I really do think if you have the stomach for it, I,
I urge people to look people up and try to at least like do
some. I'm not saying become a citizen
journalist. I don't want to push more people
to do that because a lot of people are terrible at doing
journalism and it makes it harder for anyone who's good at
it. But I do think it's worth
looking at some of this stuff with your own eyes because it's
real. These are not conspiracy
theories. Like, we have the information.
It's right there. It's from years ago.
This is not being changed and altered.
Outside of being redacted poorly, there is no conspiracy.
Jeffrey Epstein was human trafficking.
He was using the elites and rich people that he knew to help him
do human trafficking. The idea that there's old men
with money going around the world finding women and shipping
them off to an island, it sounds insane.
It sounds insane. It sounds like something someone
in a mental institution would say.
It sounds like the pizzagate nonsense, right?
Like the stuff Q Anon believed about cosmic pizza and stuff,
but like it's real happened. Yeah, it's real.
I and that's like, that is why I just want people.
I my, I can't tell you how many times I would be looking through
these files and my jaw would just drop and I would go no
fucking way. No way they're saying this shit
in an e-mail. No way you're taking notes on a
fucking criminal conspiracy. What are you doing?
We've had this discussion so many times.
The the it's I'm, you know, I'm glad they did it.
Because they're they're. All getting caught now, but
you'd think these powerful wealthy men would know better.
But this is they're doing something really stupid.
And I don't know what that says. I don't know what that says
about the world that we live in. I don't know what that says
about what the powerful and elites are actually like.
I don't you know, and obviously this isn't everyone.
This is like, you don't, you're not going to find every name in
here, but you're going to find a lot of them and a lot of them
were real chummy with him, including Brock Pierce.
So the final thing I want to say, and if you want to like do
you want to you, we can get into some of this other stuff.
But the real, the final thing I, I, I, I want to personally say
is that the most damning part about this, whether you want to
say nothing illegal is shown in the emails, nothing, nothing
criminal happened necessarily. Jeffrey Epstein was a known
convicted pedophile in 2008. Everyone knew it was big news by
2010. Everyone and their mom knew
exactly who Jeffrey Epstein was and what he was accused of and
what he was convicted of. And yet Brock Pierce and a lot
of people like him chose to instead of distancing themselves
from him, instead of being like, oh that's a creep, I don't want
anything to do with him. They became his best friend.
Brock Pierce knew Jeffrey Epstein basically until the day
he got arrested again. They were sending emails back
and forth through 20198 years as best friends.
That says a lot about Brock Pierce, says a lot about him and
his character and what he cares about.
It's not good. None of this is good.
I don't care if it's illegal at this point, I I just don't care.
This is atomic reputational damage.
It should be. If it's not, if this guy is not
castigated and shunned for for what he's done, I don't know.
I don't know what we're doing. I agree.
I think the most damning thing about the files, like we've kind
of already said in this episode, is the fact that they expose the
broad willingness of so many people to continue to interface
with this pedophile, with this sexual predator.
And that's clearly Brock Pierce, right?
He becomes quite literally friends with him.
But I think it's also, like we have said, Coinbase, it's Brian
Armstrong and Fred Ersham. It is so many of these
individuals who do the due diligence who ask who is this
guy who looked this guy up and say, oh, OK, it was only one
time he got convicted of being a pedophile and decide it's
$3,000,000. I'm not going to say no to
$3,000,000. And in the process, by being
willing to accept this predator into their ranks, they further
enriched this pedophile. They provided him with more
connections, more opportunity, and more plausible deniability
because other people who were now being introduced to Epstein
saw him as already being friends and being connected with these
people. So new people were like, well, I
guess I don't have the full story.
All these other people surely must have the full story if they
think this is OK. And because of that, Epstein
became richer, Epstein became more powerful, and Epstein
continued to be able to perpetrate sex crimes against
children for years. And that is in large part thanks
to people like Brock Pierce, thanks to people like Brian
Armstrong, thanks to people like Fred Ersham.
Even if they never saw Epstein commit a single crime, knowing
he was the criminal and being able to see his game in that
way, they helped enrich and empower him.
A. 100, possibly over $100 million that Epstein earned from
that Coinbase investment base helped Jeffrey Epstein possibly
make over $100 million. That says everything, right?
And lastly, I know that cast coin is repeatedly mentioned in
the Epstein files, but.