BONUS: How Epstein broke the internet — and our lives

Before we get into the real darkness, what was your favorite dumb thing that happened of these three? Kamala 6-7 HQ, Ted Cruz saying stop attacking pedophiles, or Elon saying money doesn't buy happiness? I think I gotta go with the Kamala 6-7. We're so, so screwed. We're so screwed. and the whole thing is just so outrageously dumb and inappropriate and like I said I just hope everyone involved is having a nice time in their little slack room planning out their posts and I hope that that's that's fun for them you know me in the real world I'm spending my time reading thousands of emails about a secret pedophile cabal that's running the world that's that's that's what I'm doing uh while Kamala is doing six seven I looked at it and then 10 minutes later I was like, why do I, I can't compose an email. Why do I only want to get back in bed? And it took me like another five minutes to connect that. like it made me deeply depressed and spiral just feeling endlessly cooked just how like really like an actual visceral reaction of being like of i'm like why does everything feel empty now so the kamala thing that made me just like i was like fine i had no emotional reaction to it this on the other hand give me screen sharing permissions talk us through this so this is stephanie Feldman, the national policy director for Biden's 2020 campaign. And she wrote a thread, uh, basically off the back of the headquarters, Kamala announcement, you know, ask, uh, talking about like, how do you measure, you know, how content persuades and mobilizes people. And then this is an example she writes, um, of something the 2020 team for Biden wanted to do. She writes, here's my favorite example of something the Biden 2020 digital team wanted to tweet out from the Biden campaign account. I vetoed it because it's such an outrageously unserious reaction to a serious moment and not Biden brand. Lots of digital people were upset with me and it's the ASCII cartoon text bunny with a sign meme and it says justice for George Floyd in the sign. I think it's the most outrageous thing I've ever seen in my life. Yeah honestly They feed into each other of just like of just like you are just so Well okay We are talking about the Epstein files And so... Again. Again. But to sort of connect the dots between this and that and to get us there. What I will say is I don't know how long I can go experiencing reality. The way I'm experiencing it, the way I think many Americans are experiencing it between ICE occupying American cities and voter ballots being pulled out of different states and seemingly some kind of CIA related coup d'etat happening. It seems like with Tulsi Gabbard or something right now that we don't know much about yet. Right. I forgot about that. The Epstein files, of course, outlining in pretty explicit detail that this was all actually part of a plan cooked up by the world's most prolific pedophile. I don't know how long I can handle knowing all of that while also looking at like anyone in charge of what you would call the liberal establishment, the democratic mainstream establishment, just with their thumbs up their asses, having fun online and goofing off. I don't know how long I can actually – I don't know how long I can last that. The cognitive dissonance is too much for me. I'm Grant Irving. This is Panic Road, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. Joining me today, an increasingly tired Ryan Broderick. Hey, buddy. Yeah, I'm in a much darker place than the last time I jumped on the mic because the Department of Justice released thousands of new emails related to Jeffrey Epstein and the investigation of his crimes across the last 30 years. And I've read many of them, not all of them. I sort of stuck to my patch, plugging in terms for right wing political networks and different sort of technological fascinations that he may have had, trying to kind of piece together what influence he may have had over, well, selfishly, my career, but also global democracy. and uh the answer is that he had quite a bit of influence there and um i the forest gump of evil yes he he is he is effectively the main character of well okay there a lot we don know i just gonna put that right at the top here there a lot we still don know i think it safe to assume that what we have seen is probably the least bad of what in there and the communications that he having are with people who are the least important if you can kind of think about it that way but what we have seen already makes me think that he is effectively the final boss of millennials uh every horrible thing that has happened in our lives, including him triggering the great financial crisis because he took all his money out of Bear Stearns to support himself when he got arrested the first time. Every single thing, I'm still looking for a connection between him and 9-11 because if we got that, we could basically say that our entire lives have been shaped by Jeffrey Epstein. Hi, Grant here from the future. Right when we finished recording, Ryan messaged me to say that there's an email from 2003 offering Ghislaine Maxwell a spot on the 9-11 Shadow Commission. That's cool. Back to this uplifting conversation. And yeah, I feel very crazy. I feel extremely crazy that this man's email inbox, one of his vacation email inbox, not even his main email, his vacation email inbox seems to implicate him in every bad thing that has ever happened to people of our generation as it was happening to us, including microtransactions and video games. So two questions for you. And then before we just, we like break all that down. What have you seen has been most people's big reaction from this new deluge of information? And also I had the thought yesterday, if somebody asked me what I was working on or thinking on that I would have no fucking idea of how to start talking about it without sounding like I had like ingested thousands of hours of Alex Jones like I would probably start with like okay so do you know about 4chan like can you what have most people been taking away from this deluge that you've seen and also if you had to do like a 60 second explainer okay like how would you solidify this for like the most normal person the answer to your first question is like actually very frustrating because i think the most common thing i've seen is like a very very very oversimplified and like way more far reaching sort of summary of what's in there because a lot of people who are like not reading these or reading sort of any responsible reporting about them and so i've seen people be like bitcoin Bitcoin was invented by Jeffrey Epstein. We have no proof that Bitcoin was invented by Jeffrey Epstein. We can talk about his involvement with the Bitcoin project but that and Epstein did not like make 4chan He did not make Gamergate He was a financier who was looking for investment opportunities And every time you sort of see one of these projects come up in his inbox, that is how he's approaching it. He's picking things that already exist and he's deciding where to put his money and his influence. Okay, 60 seconds. Yeah, I can do it. The grand project of the last decade of Jeffrey Epstein life, following his first arrest for soliciting child prostitution in the 2000s, was manipulating what we see on the internet to hide his crimes and exploring and investing in technologies that allowed him to transfer huge sums of money without being noticed by responsible parties. And those two things dovetailed into a conspiracy with Steve Bannon to overthrow liberal democracy in as many countries as possible in quick succession to allow him to basically fund his sex trafficking ring with cryptocurrency, according to the emails that we've seen so far. And now when somebody says to you, that sounds fucking crazy, what's your response if that was like, not me, because you can be mean to me, but like a 50-year-old mom who is like, earnest. because it does sound crazy. If you think that Jeffrey Epstein didn't fuck with your life in some way, you are wrong. He fucked with all of our lives for years. And so it is our duty, I think, as human beings to understand what he did and why he did it. Even if it means that I have not had a normal dream in like a week. Okay. The rest of the conversation is going to be on our Patreon, patreon.com slash panic world. Normally, I like to give you the big concept before we pay Walt, but this is such a rat's nest. I didn't really know where else to cut this off. That felt fair. Unfortunately, this is so tricky and important. I think we're going to talk about it again on the main feed. In the meantime, four or five bucks, this conversation is on our Patreon, patreon.com slash panic world. And you can read about it in Garbage Day at garbageday.email. The issue is titled, Here's How Epstein Broke the Internet. And then you just go to your browser and put in garbageday.email. Look for that one. You know how to use the internet. I believe in you. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you soon.