How Epstein Won So Many Friends & Influenced So Many ̶p̶e̶d̶o̶s̶ People

0:00 Even after the latest files were released earlier this month,

0:02 we still only have a tiny fraction of the complete

0:05 picture surrounding the life and crimes of alleged financeier Jeffrey Ebstein.

0:09 But even with these little breadcrumbs,

0:11 you have probably noticed that there are some deeply troubling connections

0:15 being put together about a deeply troubling number of high-profile people,

0:19 which does raise the obvious question.

0:21 How did Epstein win so many friends and influence so many people?

0:25 He wasn't born into great wealth or influence,

0:27 but from the information we have been allowed to see,

0:30 his business success was largely handed to him by figures

0:34 and organizations that regular people wouldn't even be considered by.

0:37 Like some kind of unholy Forest Gump,

0:39 he was seemingly always around some of the biggest names and events of the last

0:43 40 years with at least one finger in all of the wrong pies.

0:47 If he was simply just intertwined with other elite financeers,

0:50 then maybe this could all be written off

0:52 as deep connections within his supposed professional industry.

0:55 But we now know that his close personal

0:59 contacts included basically everybody from politicians to spiritual leaders,

1:04 banking officials, European nobility,

1:06 all the way down to Hollywood executives or the world's richest man

1:09 or the other world's richest man or the other world's richest man.

1:14 These connections also extended across borders,

1:16 political lines, professional backgrounds, and even public adversaries.

1:19 If we wanted to be really pragmatic,

1:21 it's probably worth actually learning from the way

1:24 that these people help out and cover

1:25 for one another as something we could apply to our careers and social lives,

1:29 just well, you know, hopefully without the diddling.

1:32 If it wasn't for all of that stuff, the depth and breadth of Epstein's

1:37 professional network would be incredibly impressive,

1:39 especially in an age where regular people have

1:42 fewer friends and human connections than ever before.

1:44 I mean, I don't know about you guys, after the age of 30,

1:48 I personally have like three and a half friends in total,

1:51 and even keeping up with them takes some time management.

1:54 All of this is especially eye opening when you additionally consider

1:57 that he didn't exactly have a flawless reputation to begin with.

2:01 These were supposedly some of the busiest,

2:03 most time poor individuals on the planet.

2:06 And yet, they all seem to have endless availability

2:09 for social gatherings where occasionally Epstein may have been present.

2:13 So, the story goes.

2:14 But perhaps the bigger question is,

2:17 was such an extensive contact network of the world's most

2:20 powerful people something exclusive to him because of his criminal operation?

2:23 Or are interconnected networks like this just

2:26 the standard operating procedure beyond a certain tax bracket?

2:29 The answer may seem pretty obvious.

2:31 It's a great big club and you ain't in it.

2:34 But what kind of club was this exactly?

2:37 And has it actually stopped operating?

2:39 Oh, and I guess once we have gone through all

2:42 of that, I should probably address the elephant in the room.

2:46 Yes, I was named in the Epstein files, but more on that later.

2:50 Elon Musk, he said that he refused to go to the island.

2:53 And then in these new files, it came out.

2:55 I think it was an email that said, "What day or night will be the wildest

2:59 party on your island?" The latest Jeffrey Epstein filed,

3:02 one of them being Bill Gates.

3:03 The documents alleged new details of his ties to the I never went to the island.

3:07 I never met any women from the fact that Donald

3:10 Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times.

3:14 Nothing came out about me other than it was a conspiracy against.

3:19 Another shows this unidentified woman sitting on his lap.

3:22 Clinton has denied any wrongdoing through a spokesman.

3:25 Okay, so it may not surprise you

3:28 that statistically the most surefire way to end up

3:31 with an extensive contact network of rich and powerful

3:34 people is to be born rich and powerful.

3:36 Now, for what it's worth, Epstein did not have these advantages handed to him.

3:41 He did grow up in a private gated community in New York,

3:44 but this was back in the 1950s when homes were actually

3:47 affordable for average people and the area was broadly considered middle class.

3:51 His mother was a teacher's aid, and his father worked as a groundskeeper

3:54 for the city's parks and recreation department.

3:56 This legacy alone wasn't going to let him rub shoulders with the people

4:00 who would eventually fill the pages of his little black books.

4:03 By most accounts and reports, he was an intelligent child who skipped

4:06 grades and made money by tutoring other students,

4:09 which eventually enabled him to attend NYU for mathematical physiology,

4:13 an impressive and prestigious degree even back then.

4:15 But he never graduated.

4:17 Now, history is filled with highly influential college dropouts.

4:20 In fact, a few of them will come up later in this very video.

4:24 But in Epstein's case,

4:25 he didn't produce anything of significance that would make

4:27 him stand out from any other high achieving dropout.

4:30 So, he didn't have any noteworthy family connections,

4:32 and he didn't found some company off the bat

4:34 that would propel him into the upper echelons of society.

4:37 Which means the only option left was for him

4:40 to claw his way up the uh old-fashioned way.

4:42 One of the first big question marks over Epste's early start

4:45 was how he landed his first job at the Dalton School,

4:49 a prestigious private high school without any real credentials.

4:52 Now, we have already made a whole video on how he made his money.

4:56 And this video will instead be about how he made his connections,

4:59 so we won't be recounting his entire career again.

5:02 But this first step was really quite important for both parts of his story.

5:06 It's really the first time he came

5:08 into indirect contact with anybody of historic importance.

5:10 the headmaster of the school shortly

5:13 before he started was infamously Donald Bar,

5:15 a man who just a few years earlier during World War

5:18 II had served as an officer for the Office of Strategic Services,

5:22 the predecessor to the CIA.

5:23 A not so fun fact is that Bar

5:26 also published a sci-fi novel called Space Relations,

5:29 which is about a planet ruled over by oligarchs who engage

5:32 in basically all of the crimes that Epstein would later be convicted of.

5:36 This kind of foreshadowing would be panned for hecky writing

5:38 if it weren't the actual world we are living in.

5:41 Donald Bar was also the father of Bill Barr who would later go

5:45 on to serve as the attorney general

5:47 under both the Bush and first Trump administration.

5:49 A lot of people start drawing lines from here on for pretty obvious reasons.

5:53 But to be fair, this connection is not particularly strong.

5:56 Donald Bar was the headmaster of Dalton,

5:58 but he had left the school three months before Epstein started working there,

6:02 and there is no concrete evidence that he

6:04 had any input on hiring a single math teacher.

6:06 What we do know, though, is that during his brief stint as an educator,

6:10 Epstein went to great lengths to ingratiate himself

6:12 with the parents of the high society students he was teaching.

6:15 One of those students, Lynn Copel,

6:17 later said in an interview that Ebstein convinced

6:20 another parent to advocate for him to her father,

6:23 Alan Greenberg, who was at the time the CEO of Bear Sterns.

6:26 I have personally never been to a parent

6:28 teacher interview that turned into a job interview.

6:30 But somehow it worked, which is how he eventually went to land a job

6:34 at the prestigious financial firm after being fired from Dalton.

6:37 The point here is that even back in his early 20s with not a lot going for him,

6:41 he was kind of shameless in using whatever connection he

6:43 had and squeezing the most he could out of them.

6:46 Working at Bear Sterns did lend him some credibility in high-profile clients.

6:50 And at the same time,

6:51 it rewarded him for reaching out and trying to make friends wherever he could.

6:55 Back in the 70s, entertaining banking clients and showing them a good

6:59 time and whatever it entailed was just part of the job.

7:02 Now, in a vacuum, this would all make sense.

7:05 an ambitious financeier wanting to develop professional friendships

7:07 with wealthy clients that could send business his way.

7:10 If you ignore his crimes, it's basically professional networking 101.

7:14 But well, none of this happened in isolation.

7:17 And this certainly doesn't explain how

7:20 he ended up involved with geopolitical scandals,

7:22 foreign spiritual leaders, neuvo academics,

7:24 or the birth of modern surveillance systems.

7:26 So, it's time to learn how many works to find out

7:30 how Jeffrey Ebstein won so many friends and influenced so many pedophiles.

7:34 A lot of what we talk about on this channel

7:36 is really just learning how the world works,

7:37 spotting the patterns underneath the headlines, incentives, feedback loops,

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8:46 The extent of Epstein's connections to powerful people

8:49 in unusual places and under unusual circumstances makes it really,

8:52 really easy for any kind of reporting

8:54 to veer quickly into outright conspiracy theory.

8:56 We still simply do not know the details of something

8:59 like the inner workings of the Iran Contra affair,

9:02 the nature of the man's meetings with various heads of state,

9:05 and even for that matter, how he even made most of his money.

9:08 The line between extrapolating on incomplete information and constructing

9:11 outright conspiracy theories is very hard to navigate.

9:15 And this is made a lot harder by the fact that well,

9:19 we still have woefully incomplete information.

9:20 Theories surrounding Epstein,

9:21 like the idea that he was a comprom gathering intelligence asset,

9:25 do kind of fit into place with the information we have,

9:28 but we just don't have that much information.

9:30 Now, it's important to remember this for two reasons.

9:32 The first is that it relates a lot to how he collected all of his contacts.

9:37 A lot of it seemingly wasn't that unusual.

9:40 In his early career, the extensive networking he did was largely

9:43 indistinguishable from what any career-driven financeier might do.

9:46 For what it's worth, by most accounts,

9:48 from people who aren't trying to actively distance themselves from the man,

9:52 he had strong interpersonal skills and was

9:54 very good at making people feel important.

9:56 As his network of contacts grew, he was clever to somewhat diversify

10:00 his portfolio of friends instead of staying strictly

10:03 within the ecosystem of financial service providers

10:05 and the people who were after their services.

10:08 Heworked extensively outside of that bubble as well.

10:11 Now, this later served him well in his criminal operations,

10:14 but it also just made him the guy who knows a guy.

10:18 In total, so far, we know of 107,000 interactions between

10:22 19,000 people named in the files with Ebstein at the center.

10:25 This is thanks to the team who

10:27 has put together the Epstein network visualization,

10:28 which I will leave a link to in the description.

10:31 He could connect academics who had a lot of prestige but no

10:34 money to people with a lot of money who wanted to buy prestige.

10:38 He could talk to his overseas friends about entering a new market.

10:41 A lot of it was just being able to name drop

10:44 to impress other people who he would also pull into his orbit.

10:47 According to Michael Wolf, a journalist and media consultant who worked

10:50 closely with Epste in the early 2000s,

10:52 the man frequently attended TED conferences

10:54 to connect with speakers with interesting

10:56 ideas that he could later host at events for his wealthy friends.

10:59 So, you know, if you thought TED Talks

11:02 couldn't get any more insufferable, here we are.

11:04 He really did treat networking like a full-time job.

11:07 And being the guy that could connect anybody with anybody

11:10 unfortunately eventually extended to connecting

11:12 perverted people with their victims.

11:14 This network of contacts also compounded on itself over time as he himself grew

11:18 more notoriety in those circles and attained

11:21 more wealth to fund a comparable lifestyle.

11:23 The billionaire social calendar is a wellocumented

11:25 series of events around the world throughout

11:27 the year that a few hundred high-profile

11:29 individuals almost nomatically work their way through.

11:32 People overwhelmingly interact with other people from their own social class.

11:36 And the problem is that these people are so wealthy that there are

11:39 only a few hundred people worldwide that they can properly really relate to.

11:43 So they travel between these events because

11:45 they know similar people will be there.

11:47 Wendover did a great video on the logistics

11:49 of all of this because of course he did.

11:52 It's really interesting and I will leave a link to it below.

11:54 But the point as it relates to Epstein's network is that there

11:57 are only a few thousand people worldwide operating at this level.

12:00 The reason it seems like he knew everybody was

12:03 because there really wasn't that many people to know.

12:06 After his 2008 conviction,

12:08 this did take a bit of a beating and people understandably did

12:11 not want to be associated with someone in the news for his crimes.

12:14 But according to reports,

12:15 he was able to build this network back up by leveraging

12:18 other people that could vouch for him being a changed man.

12:21 Outside of the heinous crimes, which are clearly front and center,

12:24 something else that is angering people as they sort through these files is how

12:27 clear it is that this is a small group that looks after each other.

12:31 When figures like Steve Bannon and Noom

12:33 Chosky are just one degree of separation apart,

12:35 it is a pretty clear demonstration that for extremely elite people,

12:39 they can disagree about fundamental political differences the same

12:42 way regular people might disagree about different sports teams.

12:45 No matter which side wins, it won't really affect them,

12:47 and everybody is just there to have a good time.

12:50 Now to you personally this may have

12:52 already been pretty clear but the public attention

12:54 these crimes are bringing is also shining a light

12:57 on this aspect of these relationships as well.

12:59 Now the final aspect that we can discern from the information

13:02 that we actually have available is that Epstein was terminally online.

13:05 Even from the small slice of the files that we have available,

13:09 this man received tens of thousands of messages and responded

13:12 to most of them in a relatively timely manner.

13:14 From the thousands of emails the team and I have personally poured through,

13:18 the somewhat unsatisfying and also kind of sad reality

13:21 amongst all of this was that Epstein was just really

13:24 popular amongst these people because he was a perceived peer

13:26 that would actually talk to them like a normal person.

13:29 Without going full armchair psychologist,

13:31 a majority of the communications that the public have actually

13:35 been given access to concern mundane things like business ideas,

13:38 lame jokes, and introductions.

13:39 For Ebstein himself,

13:40 he was able to leverage some of these social connections with the help

13:44 of an undisclosed amount of blackmail into business

13:47 opportunities that would in turn fund his lifestyle,

13:49 which would in turn enable him to interact

13:51 with a wider network of wealthy and influential people.

13:53 As we covered in our previous video,

13:55 a majority of Epstein's wealth came from exorbitant fees

13:58 paid to him by a small number of people who,

14:00 for some reason, wanted him to manage

14:03 their money over the more traditional financial options.

14:05 Now, the obvious side effect of all of this is that there will probably be

14:08 a good number of people in this extended

14:10 network that were not involved in his criminal conspiracy.

14:13 And that is what a lot of people are going to great lengths to point out.

14:18 But that itself does raise a much bigger question,

14:20 which is best demonstrated by looking at this email here.

14:24 Yes, there I am named in the Epstein files.

14:27 Looks pretty bad, right?

14:28 Well, yeah.

14:29 Without some extra context to fill in the blanks, it absolutely does.

14:33 But by unredacting what we can, I am sorry to disappoint you,

14:38 but this is just an email chain between Epstein and an unidentified

14:42 sender talking about working as a producer in the movie industry.

14:45 One of the most important components

14:46 of that business is apparently learning how money works.

14:49 So, well, I guess I might need to rethink this channel's tagline.

14:54 Oh, and one other thing that I have to point out,

14:57 which is not really important in the grand scheme of things,

15:00 but within this same email, he also said that the first step before learning

15:03 how money works was learning to read and write.

15:06 Now, after the team and I have collectively

15:08 spent hundreds of hours combing through this guy's emails,

15:10 this really stood out because half of his messages literally

15:14 look as if he face rolled his keyboard and pressed send.

15:17 both himself and the highly influential people he was communicating

15:20 with sent emails that could only be described as borderline illiterate.

15:24 Anyways, yes, this particular email is clearly just a silly example.

15:28 But the point is, without the additional context,

15:31 it would be really easy to spin a story that looked really bad here,

15:35 which raises the obvious question.

15:37 Why aren't people who are actually mentioned

15:39 tangentially in these files begging for more information

15:41 to be put out to clear their name and clarify the extent of their involvement?

15:46 The simple answer is, of course, that some of these people are guilty of heinous

15:50 crimes and would prefer for their waters to stay muddy.

15:52 But for everybody else,

15:53 it really could be as simple as not wanting to rat out their friends,

15:56 contacts, and clients.

15:57 As demonstrated by these very documents,

15:59 this is a small club that can provide prestige,

16:02 lucrative opportunities, and well, anything else that they might want.

16:06 To a lot of these people,

16:08 staying on the inside is simply more important than justice.

16:11 Now, obviously, if and when more information is released,

16:14 this story could change significantly.

16:15 But if you want a clear demonstration of just how valuable these contacts were,

16:19 go and watch this video next to find out how the man himself actually got

16:22 so rich in the first place with very little in the way of real credentials.

16:26 And don't forget to like and subscribe to keep on learning how money works!