File 66 - Why Epstein Played Xbox and World of Warcraft

EFTA documents reveal Epstein maintained gaming accounts banned under sex offender restrictions and discussed 'co-opting the video game industry' with Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. The trail connects to Steve Bannon's gold farming operation, Brock Pierce's crypto pivot, a $3 million Coinbase investment, and a meeting with 4chan's founder the day before /pol/ launched.

Sources for this episode are available at: https://epsteinfiles.fm/?episode=ep66

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The Epstein Files is an AI-generated podcast analyzing the 3.5 million pages released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA). All claims are grounded in primary source documents.

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Transcript

0:36

Three million pages of evidence. Thousands of unsealed flight logs. Millions of data points, names, themes and timelines connected. You are listening to the Epstein Files, the world's first AI native investigation into the case that traditional journalism simply could not handle. Welcome back to the Epstein Files. I'm looking at an email from Jeffrey Epstein's G vacationmail.com account dated 2010. It's a battle.net account activation. A world of Warcraft free trial. A convicted sex offender registered since 2008, creating an online gaming account. Two years later, his Xbox Live account would be permanently banned under a New York Attorney General initiative to remove sex offenders from gaming platforms. But the gaming accounts aren't the story. The story is what he wanted to do with the virtual economy behind them. Exactly. And I think that's the critical distinction we need to make. Right at the top. The idea of Epstein playing World of Warcraft, it sounds almost trivial, you know, like a bizarre footnote. Right. A weird piece of trivia. But when you actually apply a forensic lens, when you look at the timeline and overlay his activity with his financial records, his emails, his known associates, the picture changes. It's not a hobby. It is absolutely not a hobby. We're looking at a laboratory, a sandbox for ideas that would eventually scale up in terrifying ways. And that's really the mission for this deep dive. We're going to strip away that tabloid layer of Epstein the gamer and audit the architecture, the sources we have in front of us. The EFTA email dumps the newer FBI files. They show a man who saw these virtual worlds as well, unregulated frontiers. Unregulated is the key word. He saw them as places for economic extraction, for. I mean, one email uses the word indoctrination, which we'll get into. Yes, explicitly and eventually for political mobilization. It's a whole progression. So before we get too deep, we should probably define what we mean by the virtual economy, because in the context of these files, it's a lot more than just, you know, buying a digital sword in a game. Right. It's really a three stage evolution that we see in the documents. So stage one is the most literal in game currencies. We're talking about World of Warcraft gold. Actual tangible, well, virtual. But people paid real money for it. Okay, so that's the foundation. That's the foundation. Then you have stage two, which is the transition of that concept into the real world or a new version of the real world. Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin tether. Taking the principles of an unregulated digital asset and applying them to global finance. And stage three. Stage three is maybe the most abstract, but also the most impactful. It's the gamification of social influence. It's taking the mechanics of engagement, of community building, of, let's be frank, of mob behavior that you see in massive online games and applying those to platforms like 4chan to engineer actual real world political outcomes. And the cast of characters the documents place at the center of this. Yeah, it connects the dots between Silicon Valley, the gaming industry, and I mean, the highest levels of global political strategy. It's an unbelievable roster. You have Bobby Kotick, the longtime CEO of Activision, a titan of the industry. You have Steve Bannon. But this is years before the White House. This is when he was running a, for all intents and purposes, a digital sweatshop selling virtual gold. And the man connecting them, Brock Pierce, the former child actor who becomes this, this crypto evangelist, this common thread that runs through almost everything. It's a convergence of entertainment, finance and radicalization. And it all starts with that one innocuous looking email you mentioned, that GVACationMail.com account. All right, so let's start there. Section one, the user. We have the forensic trail and it begins with that handle. It's a pretty nondescript name, GVCation, but it's a confirmed Epstein account and it links directly to that World of Warcraft trial account from 2010. Two years later, October 2012, we see the creation of an Xbox Live account under a similar handle. And you have to put this in context, right? This is post conviction Epstein. He's been a registered sex offender for years at this point. Yes, he's on the registry. He's supposedly a financial and social pariah, although the files obviously show that was far from the case. He's operating in these massive public online spaces until he's not. December 19, 2013, he gets the notification, the banhammer, a permanent suspension from Xbox Live. And the automated email he receives cites the. The standard boilerplate harassment threats and. Or abuse, which, given who we're talking about, is an easy assumption to make. You hear Epstein was banned for harassment online, you just nod. You don't even question it. And maybe there was some of that. We don't have the specific chat logs, but what the FTA documents reveal is that the administrative trigger for the ban was something else entirely. It wasn't about what he did that day. It wasn't behavioral in that sense. Not in the immediate sense, no. It was a compliance action. The documents lay it out pretty clearly. In 2012, the New York Attorney General's office launched a partnership with the big gaming companies. Microsoft, Sony, Blizzard, ea, all of them. And the goal was to proactively purge their platforms of registered sex offenders. They were using state registries and cross referencing them with user databases. So Epstein had been on the New York registry since 2008. The system just finally caught up to his gamertag. It just took them a while to connect the dots. So Microsoft didn't nuke the account because he was being abusive in a game lobby on December 18th. They nuked it because of who he was in the real world. Okay, so why is this important? Why do we need to spend time on the fact that he got banned from playing Halo or whatever? Because it establishes active participation. This is a crucial point. He wasn't just some detached investor looking at Activision stock price on a Bloomberg terminal. He was in the trenches. He was in the trenches. He was a user. He understood the ecosystem from the inside. He knew the mechanics of the game lobby, the dynamics of the chat room, the workings of the virtual marketplace. So when we get to these later, much more disturbing emails about indoctrination and manipulating economies, he's not speaking theoretically. He's speaking from experience. He's a participant observer. He's seen the power of the medium firsthand. He understands its stickiness, its ability to capture attention and how to exploit it. Yeah, which brings us directly to the corporate ambition. This is where the files get. I mean, incredibly dense and incredibly dark. We have to talk about Bobby Kotick. Bobby Kotick, for decades, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, one of the most powerful figures in entertainment, period. And his name appears nearly 300 times in the Epstein files. We've audited 300 times. Let's just sit with that number for a second. That is not a casual acquaintance. That's not someone you bump into at a conference once. No, absolutely not. And the tone of the communications is, well, it's socially intimate, it's comfortable. There's an email from November 2012 where Epstein is writing to a model agent and he just casually drops in. Bobby Kotick came over last night. He's great. Just a normal Tuesday night. A month later, December 2012, Kotick himself emails Epstein after a trip to the Caribbean. He says he wished we could have stopped by the island. And these aren't old communications. This is well after Epstein's conviction and registration. Years after then you get to February 2013. This is an email from Epstein inviting Kotick to a private tour of SpaceX. With Elon Musk. And the specific phrasing is chilling, isn't it? It is. He writes, the girls and I are going to see elon Musk at SpaceX. The girls and I. It's just stated so matter of factly. It implies Kotick was not just aware of that milieu, but comfortable being invited into it. And we know from other documents that Kotick was exchanging flirtatious emails with Ghislaine Maxwell as far back as 2004. So there's a long history here. But for the purpose of this deep dive, the real smoking gun isn't the socializing. It's an email chain from May of 2013. This is the one, the indoctrination email. I think it's important we read parts of this verbatim because the language they use is just. It's so stark, it's so unambiguous. It is. The conversation starts, believe it or not, from a meeting Epstein had with Joel Klein, the former New York City education chancellor. Yes, they were talking about edutainment using games for education. Epstein then loops in a man named Pablo Holman, who describes himself as a futurist, an inventor, a hacker. And Holman sends back what can only be described as a manifesto, a manifesto for what he calls co opting the existing video game industry. And he writes, and I'm quoting directly, we have to keep the boobs and guns and profit. Fuck educational reform. We need educational subversion. Subversion, not education subversion. The intent is laid bare right there. It gets worse. He goes on to propose using raw sex appeal to force kids to learn. His literal example is, and again I'm quoting, a hot princess with big tits and a thong who won't open a door in a game unless the player learns to read kanji characters. It's an incredibly crude and misogynistic pitch. It's almost cartoonishly evil. But what's truly revealing is how Bobby Koenig, the CEO of one of the largest game companies on Earth, responds. Right. He doesn't reply saying this is insane or this is deeply inappropriate. He doesn't say we make art or this isn't what our company does. His feedback is purely operational. He writes, xprize concept is good, but key is real world incentives. And then he provides specific examples. Phone minutes and iPhone credits, not badges, not high scores. Real world tangible economic rewards for in game actions. And that's when Holman forwards the entire exchange to Epstein and he adds his own assessment of Kotick's feedback. He writes, I am all for indoctrinating kids into an economy. Indoctrinating kids into an economy. I mean, that phrase, it sends a chill down my spine every time I read it. This isn't about teaching kids financial literacy. No, it's about conditioning them. It's about creating a Skinner box where the child performs a task and receives a reward, wiring their brain to participate in a specific economic system that you, the corporation, control. And the timing here is absolutely critical. We have to look at the date on this email. May 2013. Yes. What else was happening in Activision in the spring of 2013? Just weeks earlier, in April 2013, Activision introduced its first ever microtransactions into its biggest franchise, Call of Duty, with the game Black Ops 2. The very first time players could spend real money for purely cosmetic digital items. It was the dawn of a business model that would go on to generate digital billions upon billions of dollars and completely reshaped the industry. So at the exact historical moment that Activision is rolling out this new model of extracting real money for virtual goods, their CEO is privately emailing with Jeffrey Epstein and a futurist about using real world incentives for educational subversion with the explicit goal of indoctrinating kids into an economy. It completely reframes the public facing corporate strategy, doesn't it? Publicly, microtransactions were about player choice and expression. Privately, the mindset was about indoctrination. It reveals that to them, these games were not just art or entertainment. They were powerful mechanisms. They were enclosed systems where user behavior could be tracked, modified, shaped, and ultimately monetized. Holman's talk about boobs and guns is just the crude wrapping paper on a very sophisticated philosophy of behavioral and economic control. And Jeffrey Epstein wasn't just a recipient of this email. He was the catalyst for the conversation. He was in the center of the brainstorm. It puts his Xbox Live ban in such a strange context. He's being kicked off the platform as a sex offender, a compliance risk, while simultaneously being consulted by the platform's biggest content provider on how to use these very systems to subvert education and indoctrinate children. It's this paradox of access. He's banned from the public lobby, but invited into the private boardroom. It's just stunning. Okay, so if Kodak and Activision represent the, let's call it, the corporate extraction arm of this virtual economy, our next figure represents the political extraction. We have to talk about Steve Bannon. This is a connection that I think still surprises a lot of people. They know Bannon, the political strategist The Breitbart chairman, the architect of the 2016 Trump campaign. They forget his previous life. They forget he was a gold farmer. In a sense, yes. He was the CEO of a company that was the king of gold farming. Let's back up and explain what that actually means, because it's a very specific weird corner of Internet history. Before Breitbart, Bannon was the CEO of a company called ige, Internet Gaming Entertainment. And what IGE did for anyone who wasn't playing World of Warcraft back in the mid-2000s was essentially a form of global labor arbitrage. That's a very clinical way to put it. A less clinical term would be a digital sweatshop. IGE was founded in 2001 by Brock Pierce. And remember that name because he is central to all of this. He's the bridge. He's the bridge. And the business model was what they called gold farming. IQIYI would employ huge numbers of low wage workers, mostly in China, and pay them pennies on the dollar. We're talking as little as 25 cents an hour. To do what? To play World of Warcraft. But not to play for fun. To work. To sit in Internet cafes for 12 hour shifts, performing the most monotonous in game tasks over and over again, killing the same monsters, collecting the same virtual resources, all to accumulate quantities of the game's currency, gold. Which IGE would then sell. Exactly. They'd sell that virtual gold to wealthy Western gamers, players in the US or Europe, who had more money than time for real US dollars. It was a massive multi million dollar gray market. So Steve Bana walks into this picture when he comes in around mid-2005. He's brought in to bring a level of corporate legitimacy to this frankly shady operation. And he does. In February 2006, he secures a $60 million investment from Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs invested in a World of Warcraft gold farming company.$60 million by June 2007. Bannon has replaced the founder, Brock Pierce as CEO. Now, the business itself eventually imploded. Blizzard, the games maker, started cracking down, banning their accounts, and there were lawsuits from players. But, and this is the absolute key to understanding Bannon's entire political career, he didn't leave that experience empty handed. He left with a profound insight. The intense young men. Yes. In interviews years later, after he had become a political figure, Bannon described this epiphany he had while looking at the IGE user data. He said he discovered millions of intense young men who are living and operating in these virtual spaces. He Specifically identified them as rootless white males. He did. And he realized that this massive demographic, which the entire mainstream media and political establishment was either ignoring or openly mocking as basement dwellers, was actually an enormous untapped resource. He saw an army in waiting. An army in waiting. They weren't just slackers. They were organized. They were passionate or intense, as he put it. They were technologically fluent. And crucially, they were angry. They felt alienated and left behind. And Bannon realized that if you could find a way to harness that intensity, that gamer rage, and point it away from a virtual dragon and towards a real world political target, we could have a revolution. You could change the world. And that is exactly what he did. He took that core insight from the gaming world of IGE and applied it directly as the foundational strategy for Breitbart News. He deliberately cultivated that audience. Gamergate in 2014 was almost the test run for it, wasn't it? It was the proof of concept. It showed that this online mob could be activated to swarm and harass opponents, to dominate the information space, and to create a political narrative that the mainstream media was forced to cover. That was the playbook for 2016. Okay, so how did the Epstein files connect to this history? Bannon and Epstein weren't running in the same circles back in 2005. No, not at all. But the documents show that Epstein was, at the very least, studying Bannon's past. We have an email from November 2016. This is right after Trump wins the election, and Bannon is about to become a household name. Okay. Epstein's accountant, a man named Richard Kahn, forwards Epstein. A deep dive article from Wired magazine. And the article is all about Bannon's history, which with IGE and the gold farming business. So Epstein is doing his homework on the new power players. He's studying the Architect. He's studying the Architect. Then, A year later, December 2017, the files document a formal introduction between the two men. And from there, the relationship just explodes. Oh. So through 2018 and into 2019, we see hundreds of text messages exchanged between them. Their meeting, their talking strategy. Bannon even filmed, by his own admission, 15 hours of documentary footage with Epstein. 15 hours which has never seen the light of day. It remains one of the great missing artifacts of this entire case. What did they talk about for 15 hours? We know from texts that they were discussing European populist movements. They mentioned Salvini in Italy, Le Pen in France. They were looking at a global chessboard. You can see the synergy, can't you? Yeah, Bannon understood The mechanics of mobilizing this virtual mobile. Epstein understood the mechanics of offshore finance and influence peddling. One knew how to build the army, the other knew how to fund it. It's a terrifying partnership. So we have Kotick, who sees gamers as economic units to be conditioned. We have Bannon, who sees them as political units to be radicalized. And tying those two worlds together, the world of gaming and the world of high finance, is our third key player, the bridge. Brock Pierce. Brock Pierce is the rosetta stone for this whole affair. You simply cannot understand the evolution of the virtual economy without him. Think about his trajectory. He starts IGE, he founds IGE in 2001. The company where Steve Bannon has his political epiphany. So he's there at the very beginning. But after IGE collapses under legal pressure, Pearce doesn't just fade away, he pivots. He takes the core idea of a digital decentralized asset and moves into the next frontier. Cryptocurrency. He goes all in on crypto. He co founds tether, which becomes the indispensable, if highly controversial, stablecoin that basically underpins the entire crypto trading market. He co founds a venture capital firm called Blockchain Capital. He becomes a crypto billionaire. And the files show unequivocally that he is the one who brought Jeffrey Epstein into that world. Unequivocally. The numbers in the documents are just staggering. Pierce's name appears 1,801 times. The word Bitcoin appears 1,522 times. This wasn't a passing interest for Epstein. It was an obsession. And it was a profitable one. Very. The records show that Pierce introduced Epstein to Crypto sometime between 2011 and 2014. And in 2014, Epstein makes a major move. Using a shell corporation registered in the US Virgin Islands, he invests $3 million into Coinbase. Coinbase? Yeah. Now one of the largest and best known crypto exchanges in the world. And remember the timing again, 2014. For an investor of Epstein's profile, that is very early. This wasn't him jumping on a bandwagon. In 2017, he was on the ground floor funding the infrastructure. What was the return on that investment? The files show that in 2018 he sold about half of his position. That $3 million initial investment yielded a payout of roughly$15 million, a massive ROI. But again, the real story here, the gun isn't the profit he made. It's an email from February 2018. Yes, this is the document. This is the one that Connects all three of our main characters. It's the coin guy's email. Tell us about it. Epstein sends an email directly to Steve Bannon. The message is short and to the point. He writes, quote, do you have coin guys, Brock's people, Or should we find Brock's people? Brock's people. Let that sink in. He is asking Steve Bannon, the man who took over Brock Pierce's video game company, for an introduction to Brock Pierce's network of cryptocurrency experts. He's explicitly linking the two networks, the old IGE crew and the new crypto crew. He sees them as one and the same. It demonstrates so clearly that in Epstein's mind, crypto wasn't some separate new phenomenon. It was the logical successor to the World of Warcraft gold market. It was the maturation of the virtual economy. It's the same fundamental idea, isn't it? An unregulated, decentralized digital asset that's hard to tax and hard to trace. It's exactly the same logic. It's the pursuit of an economic system that exists entirely outside the control of governments, outside the purview of traditional banking regulations, the very regulations that were constantly flagging Epstein's accounts for suspicious activity. It was the ultimate offshore bank, a bank that existed everywhere and nowhere, all at once. And Bannon and Pearce were his guides. One had shown him the labor force, the intense young men. The other showed him the new currency for that new world. So we've covered the corporate ambition, the political mobilization, the financial architecture, but there's one more piece to this puzzle. Let's call it the cultural weaponization. We have to talk about 4chan and Epstein's connection to it, which is, again, something that seems so far outside his usual sphere of influence. It is, on the surface, a very strange connection. We're talking about the darkest, most chaotic corner of the Internet, arguably the single most influential cultural engine of the 2010s. And the documents show Epstein was there at a pivotal moment. The meeting with Moot. The meeting with Christopher Poole, who is far better known by his online handle, Moot. He was the founder and, at the time, the sole administrator of 4chan. And the files show they met when. October 24, 2011. The meeting appears to have been brokered by Boris Nikolic, a venture capitalist who was a close science advisor to Epstein. Nikolic emails Epstein after the meeting, and Epstein gives his assessment of the 4chan founder. He writes, I liked him a lot. I drove him home. He is very bright. So a positive meeting. Epstein is impressed. Now, look Very closely at that date. October 24, 2011. What happens the next day? This is the kind of detail that makes the hair on a forensic auditor's neck stand up. The very next day, October 25, 2011. Christopher Poole launches a new board on 4chan. It's called POL for politically incorrect Poll. The board that would, for all intents and purposes, serve as the incubator for the alt right. The board that would give birth to Gamergate, that would launch a thousand racist memes, that would become the central nervous system for QAnon, and would serve as the unofficial content factory for the entire online component of the 2016 election. It became what Epstein and Nikolak discussed in other emails. A hive mind capable of mass disruptions. So is it possible this is just a wild coincidence? Epstein happens to meet the founder of 4chan, and less than 24 hours later, the founder launches what becomes arguably the most potent political weapon on the Internet. I mean, on its own, you could dismiss it. Coincidences happen. But in our line of work, you don't look at events in isolation. You look for patterns. You look at context. And the context is that Epstein was already deeply interested in mass disruptions. He was interested in how Bannon's intense young men could be mobilized. He was interested in Kotick's ideas about subversion. Exactly. And here he is meeting with the architect of the anonymous web at the precise moment of its political weaponization. We can't prove he told Moot to launch poll. We don't have that email. But to call the timing merely anomalous feels insufficient. It's a data point that demands to be connected to the others. And this wasn't just a one off interest for her. He kept tabs on a platform. He did. We have a documented instance from 2017. Years later, Epstein forwards a 4chan link to a girlfriend. And the content of the link is just bizarre. It was about a video game called Five Nights at Freddy's. A horror game that's extremely popular with young kids. Exactly. It's such a strange, specific data point, but it proves he was still navigating these spaces himself. He wasn't just getting a briefing from an assistant. He was clicking the link on the boards. He understood the culture, the vernacular. Okay, let's try and pull all of these threads together. This has been a lot of information. Wow. W Gold, Activision, Bannon, Crypto. 4chan. Let's draw the through line. How do we connect these dots into one coherent narrative? I think the best way to look at it is as a timeline of escalation a progression of an idea. The virtual economy starts as a simple test bed and it evolves. So step one is IGE. Right? From roughly 2001 to 2007, Brock Pierce and Steve Bannon run the gold farm. The primary lesson from that phase is proof of concept. You can successfully extract real worlded value from a virtual world. By exploiting labor, you prove that virtual goods have tangible worth. Okay, step two. Step two is what I call the indoctrination phase. Roughly 2011 to 2013, Epstein connects with Bobby Kotick and the mainstream gaming industry. The lesson here is that games aren't just economies, they're behavioral modification engines. The indoctrination email proves they saw games as a delivery mechanism to bypass traditional authority figures, parents, teachers, and shape the economic behavior of children directly. The weaponization 2011-2016. This happens in parallel. Epstein meets Moot Poll is launched. Bannon takes his intense young men theory from IGE and applies it at Breitbart. The gamer demographic is successfully activated and weaponized into a potent political force. And that leads to step four, the financialization. Exactly 2014 to 2018. Brock Pierce, the pioneer from step one builds the bridge to crypto. Epstein follows him, investing heavily in Coinbase. The virtual gold from World of Warcraft evolves into virtual currency for the real world. Bitcoin tether. The goal is now full scale unregulated global wealth extraction. Which brings us to the final step, the synthesis of it all. That's the coin guys. Email in February 2018. It's the moment all the previous steps converge. Epstein, Bannon and Pierce's network. The gold farmer, the political operative and the crypto billionaire. They're no longer just playing games or running message boards. They're actively trying to build a parallel infrastructure. A parallel media system with Breitbart and 4chan. A parallel financial system with crypto and a parallel influence machine to power both. It's the culmination of a decade of experimentation. And the terrifying part, as you look around today, is how much of it worked. It really did. The world we live in now, this strange intersection of meme stocks, crypto speculation, online radicalization, gamified politics. This is the world they were brainstorming. We are living inside the virtual economy they helped architect it completely shifts the common perception of Epstein, doesn't it? He wasn't just a predator hiding on a private island. That was his personal depravity. His professional project was something much bigger. He was a venture capitalist of chaos. That's a good way to put it. He Wasn't the one coding the website or designing the game? No, but he was funding the architects. That is the critical role he played. He didn't mine the Bitcoin, but he funded the exchange. He didn't start the message board, but he met with the founder the day before it went political. He was the hub. He made the introductions. He connected the man who ran the gold farm to the world of high finance and political strategy. And all the while, he was also the user getting banned from Xbox Live for being a registered offender or while simultaneously plotting with the industry's biggest CEO. The irony is just immense. The automated compliance system of Microsoft rejected him. But the human architects of that very system were having him over for dinner and asking for his input. So, as we wrap up, what's the ultimate takeaway for the listener? Why should someone who doesn't play video games or own crypto care about a decade old email from Bobby Kotick? Because you are living in the world built on these principles, whether you know it or not. If your retirement fund has exposure to tech stocks that profit from microtransactions, if your children play games that are designed to be psychologically addictive, if you consume political news that was laundered through a toxic message board, you are participating in the ecosystem that Epstein and his associates helped to pioneer. They saw the user, they saw all of us as a resource to be mined. Your attention, your data, your money, your outrage. It's all just raw material for the machine. That, quote, indoctrinating kids into an economy, it says it all. It's not about teaching them to be responsible citizens. It's about conditioning them to be predictable consumers in a closed loop. A loop designed to keep you engaged. Kotick wanted real world incentives, like phone credits to keep you on the device. Bannon wanted political outrage to keep you tethered to the movement. And Peirce wanted crypto adoption to keep you tethered to the alternative financial system. And Epstein, it seems, wanted all of it. He wanted control. And more than anything, he wanted a world where the rules that applied to everyone else simply didn't apply to him. The virtual economy was the perfect blueprint for that world. In the real world, he was a registered sex offender who had to check in with the authorities. But in the virtual world, he was a visionary investor, a coin guy, a patron of disruptive ideas. It was the ultimate escape hatch from accountability. Until the real world finally broke down the door. Until it finally caught up. We're almost out of time, but there's one final thought I want to leave our listeners with a loose end from the files that frankly haunts me. The 15 hours of documentary footage. Exactly. We know Steve Bannon filmed 15 hours of interviews with Epstein in 2019, just before his final arrest. That footage has never been released. We have no idea what's on it. But we do know from that 2018 email what was on their minds. They were looking for coin guys. They were looking for Brock's people. So if the indoctrination email was their thinking in 2013 and the coin guys email was their goal in 2018, what new level were they discussing in those 15 hours on camera in 2019? Did they find their coin guys? Did they build the next phase of the machine? The files show they were looking. And when you look at the opacity of the modern crypto market, the untraceable money, the anonymous founders, you have to wonder if the architecture they planned on that tape is the architecture we're all living with today. It is the black box at the heart of this whole investigation. We have the emails, we have the flight logs, we have the financial records, but we don't have the final tape. Something to think about the next time you log in. This has been the Epstein files. We'll be back. You have just heard an analysis of the official record. Every claim, name and date mentioned in this episode is backed by primary source documents. You can view the original files for yourself at epsteinfiles fm. If you value this data first approach to journalism, please leave a five star review wherever you're listening right now. It helps keep this investigation visible. We'll see you in the next file.