Hey everyone, it's Michael Shermer. It's time for another episode of the Michael Shermer Show. This is a special edition of the Shermer Says segments of this show. This one I'm calling me and Jeffrey Epstein. Oh no, say it ain't so. It ain't so, but I am in the Jeffrey Epstein files. Yes, as everybody knows by now, there's like three million documents on a government website where you can search by name. Anyway, so a friend of mine sent me some screenshots of letter emails that I mentioned in. Oh, my God, I had no idea. All right, so here's the setup. In 2017, it was the 25th anniversary of Skeptic Magazine. Here it is. Just to give a little plug for Skeptic, we've been going since 1992. So in 2017 was our 25th anniversary. So I thought, well, we should do something special, get a little extra boost for the magazine, a little more media exposure and so on because we're kind of a niche magazine. And anyway, so I hired this PR firm in New York City to put on a big 25th anniversary event in New York. And so they set that up at the YouTube Google headquarters there in the Chelsea building in Manhattan. And they said, OK, we need – it can't just be you on stage. You know, you're not that well known. we need some celebrities. I thought, well, I know, you know, like Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker and Dan Dennett. And, you know, I know some of these. No, no, no. Real celebrities. Okay. Well, who do I know? I don't know that many real celebrities. Wait a minute. I know Deepak Chopra. He and I have debated over the years, but we're, you know, kind of friendly. So I contacted Deepak and he said, yeah, sure. I'll do it. It was fun. Deepak was entertaining and there was a pretty big audience. Maybe there's a couple hundred people there and it was filmed and broadcast anyways. It was big fun. And that was it until yesterday when I found out who was in the audience. Apparently Epstein and a couple of guests, apparently probably young women or somebody was there. So here's one of the you can just type my name and you'll see these or we'll put them on the screen here for you. This is the assistant to Jeffrey Epstein writing someone named Julie Taymor. Hello, Julie. Jeffrey will be attending Deepak Chopra's event on Wednesday, September 27th from 5 to 7 p.m. at the YouTube Space New York gives the address. Deepak and Michael Shermer will be on stage for Skeptic Magazine's 25th anniversary in New York. The program will be live streamed on TYT Network, the Young Turks Network. Jeffrey is asking if you might like to attend with him as his guest. And then another one from, well, it's all blocked out of who it's to and from, but it's obviously about the same thing. Hi, blank. Jeffrey will be attending a Deepak Chopra event tonight, 5 to 7. Karnya, K-A-R-Y-N-A. And I will be going with him. He wanted to see if he would like to attend as well. Need to know as soon as possible, 5 to 7. invite to Deepak Chopra, Michael Shermer's stage, Skeptic Magazine's 25th anniversary. And then the other one, somebody named Yo Fontanella. Jeffrey has told the girls he wants to leave the house at 4 p.m. today for the Deepak event. Please have the Suburban out and ready to go at 3.15. Okay, that's signed by Jeffrey, obviously, directly from him to whoever this person is. Anyway, we'll put these on the screen so you can see them. So that's it. That's my claim to fame there on that. As it were, I didn't know until yesterday that he was even there. No, I never met him, although I almost got an invite. Well I did get an invite to the island Okay so here the even crazier story This goes all the way back to the 1980s And in the 1980s as many of you know I was a professional bike racer doing Race Across America and other long distance events. And then I got involved in an organization called the International Human Powered Vehicle Association, which these are these like super streamlined, fared bicycles that go like three, four times the speed of a regular bicycle for aerodynamic purposes. And there's a whole group of interesting engineers, technologists, and scientists who study these things just from a purely engineering point of view. And I was racing them because it was fun to be inside these things and go super fast. Anyway, one of the people there associated with this organization was Paul McCready. Paul McCready was the Caltech PhD engineer who founded Aero Environment, one of the companies that really pioneered drones, especially miniature drones, tiny drones that look like you know birds and insects and i saw him at one of these international human powered vehicle association events and he said hey you got to come to this cool thing on sunday afternoons at caltech it's called the skeptics like what's that oh it's a lecture series with cool scientists and and people like that um and so i'm going this sunday why don't you come so i'd be okay so i went and this was a group called the southern california skeptics which was one of many kind of spontaneous local organizations that were branching off from what at the time was called PSYCOP, the Center for the, oh no, don't tell me I'm going to forget this, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation on Claims of the Paranormal. Anyway, so this guy named Al Seckle was running this local Southern California Skeptics along with, I don't know what you call her, volunteer or partner or whatever. I don't know if she was paid, but Pat Lindsay. Many of you know Pat was the co-founder with me of Skeptic Society and Skeptic Magazine. So then I went to a few of these. I met Seckle, and he had some parties and stuff at his house that I went to where there was Paul McCready who invited me. And there were other people like Murray Gellman and Francis Crick and Richard Feynman and Steve Allen, the founder of The Tonight Show, so on. And it was like, wow, okay, this guy's really connected. And then he would talk and tell me about how he was a graduate of Cornell University studying under Carl Sagan. Wow. What's he doing at Caltech? Oh, he's a Ph.D. student under in physics studying under Feynman and Murray Gelman. Wow. OK. So I was impressed with all that. And then then all of a sudden it just stopped. It ended. It's like, OK, what happened? And then I met Pat through a series of just chance events. I was writing an article on creationism in which I mentioned this amicus curiae brief that made it to the United States Supreme Court in the Louisiana creationism case. And my first reference was to a guy named Al Seckle who had organized this group of scientists, people like Murray Gell-Mahon and Stephen Jay Gould and others who were petitioning the Supreme Court to overturn this, well, to uphold the overturning of a law in Louisiana that required equal time for the teaching of creationism and evolution. Anyway, so Pat contacted me and said, you know, you cite this guy, Al Seckle. I go, yeah, yeah. He's the guy that organized this amicus curia brief with all these famous scientists, right? Well, not exactly. Turns out Al Seckle's a fraud. I'm like, what? Okay, so she comes over to my house, and four hours later, I get the whole story that he never went to Cornell. He didn't graduate and study under Carl Sagan. He hung out there. He met Sagan but he was never a student there Furthermore he was not even enrolled at Caltech He was not a physics student He was an imposter And then she started telling me more and more stories about how Al had bilked people out of at the time it was like 5 10 you know not huge amounts by today comparison but a significant amount in the 1980s On bogus things like investments in antiquarian books, you know, like I could get a first edition of Darwin's Origin Species or a first edition of Copernicus's. Day of Revolutionist Bus and so on. And, you know, we got 10 people each putting in $10,000. We're going to buy this book. And these deals would apparently always fall through. And the people didn't get their money back. Anyway, so then this led to Pat and I saying, hey, well, why don't we just get the lecture series up and going again? This will be fun. I can do it. I can host it and so on. And Pat can help me organize it and do all the artwork. And we said, while we're doing that, why don't we produce a magazine? And it's like, yeah, OK. And I knew the magazine business a bit because the way I got into cycling was through my first job out of college was as an editor at Bicycle Dealer Showcase, which is a trade magazine for the cycling industry. There I met professional bike racers, became one myself, got into the whole thing. But, you know, I spent two years there, so I knew something about the magazine business. I said, yeah, I can. Let's do a magazine and let's found a society. And not just a local Southern California, our own thing, a national, international organization. And here we are still now. What is that? Almost 30, 33 years later, 34 years later this year. OK, so still going strong. So we did all that. And then once that got started to get big, Sekel showed up like he wants to get involved. He wants to come to the lecture series and events and dinners that I was now putting on. And of course, Pat said, oh, no, no, no, we're going to nix that. So we nix that. And but he would periodically show up at events where I was speaking like at TED, like my first TED was at the Monterey before they were even posting them online for people to watch. You had to pay whatever it was, $5,000 at the time to go. And that's the only people that saw it. And after that year, I don't know, maybe a couple months, Sekel was there. And after a few months, Sekel goes, hey, if you like TED, I got another conference for you to go to. I know this billionaire, and he's going to fly everybody down to this private island of his, and we're going to have like our own TED-like conference. And he just rattled off the names, you know, this famous scientist and that famous island. Yeah, that sounds great. Okay, count me in. Anyway, it never worked out for whatever reason that year, and I never found out why and didn't even know who it was, who was this billionaire. Anyway, so then years later, I find out it's Epstein and there was some famous scientists there and they didn't know what was going on or they did or whatever. Anyway, that's another story I'll stay out of. But but that's not the craziest part of the story. OK, so, you know, Al's con game went on and on, including in his personal life. So I met his first wife, Laura, and they had a daughter who was just a little bit older than my daughter. So I kind of knew her. And then he divorced her and married Denise Lewis, who's a fairly famous actress. Anyway, then they divorced or maybe not. It seems to be in dispute. And he married the third wife who was somebody, some rich woman who lived in Malibu. And he lived in this estate, like up on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Malibu. and then I kept hearing more and more stories excuse me about people he conned but now the cons were getting bigger you know not not five or ten thousand but like fifty thousand hundred thousand and he was getting sued and sued and sued and and so he then disappeared He moved to France to get away from his creditors presumably and lawyers and he pending lawsuits And there he married, or maybe not technically married, because I guess he wasn't officially divorced, his fourth wife, a woman named Isabel. And so that was around 2010, 2011 that he did that. and he would still call me periodically, long distance call from Al Sekel, oh God, now what does this guy want? And then around 2015, he completely disappeared and then they found his body at the bottom of a cliff. Or did they? Well, it was parts of a body. It had been, I guess, mutilated and eaten by animals. But ultimately, the French authorities said, yeah, it's this guy, Al Seckle. And he's dead. And, you know, and they ruled it a suicide. Pat always thought, you know, he faked his death. I mean, he faked his degrees. He faked his books. You know, he faked his income. He faked his wives. You know, why not? He faked his cancer. That was the original reason that the skeptics folded that he gave. He said he didn't say his creditors are coming after him and people found out I faked my degrees. He said he got leukemia. You know, and Pat always pressed her. Can we can we see some of the medical records? Well, no, they're private. He thinks all that. Maybe he's still alive. Hey, Al, if you're listening to this, don't call me. OK, just post on X that you're still. I know. OK, that's not going to happen. But the name, the last name of his fourth wife, Isabel, is Maxwell. She is the sister of Ghislaine Maxwell, the co-conspirator in Jeffrey Epstein's sex ring and now is in prison. How crazy is that? It's pretty crazy. Right. So I have no personal involvement in any of this doesn't matter. I just thought it was an amusing story of how these things are connected. And more largely, as you go through the Epstein files and see all the big names in there, how much the kind of thing that Seckle did. is what Epstein did on a much larger scale. That is to say, I know this famous person. Would you like to meet this famous person? Well, I'm having this party, or I'm having a dinner, or we're going to this conference, or whatever. I mean, this is what, again, Seckle used to do. You know, he would call Randy, the amazing Randy, and say, hey, I'm putting on this event, this party, dinner party, and Feynman's coming. And Randy would, oh, well, I want to meet the great Richard Feynman. And then he'd call Richard Feynman and go, hey, I got the amazing Randy coming. He's going to perform magic for it. Oh, yeah, I want to see that. I want to meet the amazing Randy. And he would just do that over and over and over, round and round, until you have a room full of famous people. You know, Jonathan Miller, the playwright, Steve Allen, the host of The Tonight Show, Johnny Carson got it, and Francis Crick and his wife. These are all at Al's house in Pasadena. It's astonishing. So imagine, and Al never really actually had any money, except for what he stole or conned people out of. But, you know, Epstein apparently really had a lot of money. So imagine you had Al Seckles' skills as a con man and hundreds of millions of dollars to dole out to people. It becomes a little more understandable why people had a hard time distancing themselves. Now, in hindsight, of course, they should have never done this, but you kind of see how it unfolds that way. Anyway, that's my Epstein story, and I'm sticking to it. It's crazy. And there'll probably be more drops, but nothing related to me. I already typed in my own name. I saw there's six emails or something. I just showed them to you. So there's nothing more there to be found. But in any case, all right, signing off. Thanks for listening.
