25: The Construct: Jeffrey Epstein: Difference between revisions

<p><em>00:29:26</em><br>All right, here’s what went into my meeting of Jeffrey Epstein. My recollection is that Jeffrey Epstein had a staff of young adult women who I would guess were in their late twenties, perhaps early thirties. They seemed very professional. They seemed very attractive and they seemed to take his schedule and all of the sort of incidental executive function duties off of his hands. Principally I dealt with them, according to my recollection, and not with Jeffrey directly. I believe I became aware that Jeffrey wanted to see me, and since I was at that time involved in a small hedge fund, I went to see him on 71st Street across from the Frick Museum. </p>

<p><em>00:30:12</em><br>When I got to the door, it was an extraordinary experience. He in fact was living in what was, for Manhattan, which is famous for relatively small dwellings, even for the very rich, in a very large townhouse. I went through the door. I was greeted, treated professionally, and I was led to a waiting room. </p>

<p><em>00:30:30</em><br>In that waiting room, which I believe was off to the left as you entered, I sat in the chair for a while and I noticed that there was a large mechanical piece of art, and I believe that it had some electronics to it. After a while of sitting in my chair, my recollection is that I went up to this art object and I started trying to inspect it. As I was looking at the art object, which I thought was quite innocent, I suddenly thought that I saw something like a lipstick camera, that is, a very small camera whose lens was staring straight at me. My first thought was, “Holy cow. I’ve discovered that there’s a hidden camera that has been trained on me while I’ve been in this room.” </p>

<p><em>00:31:12</em><br>I thought myself to be rather clever for having found it. But my second thought was exactly the reverse of this: I bet this isn’t that difficult to find; the object that it was buried in attracts attention. And it must be that people who look at this object invariably find the camera. And then I started asking myself, “am I supposed to find the camera? Is this a test? Is this person trying to make sure I’m comfortable with being under surveillance?” The whole thing was now quite queer and I went back and I sat down, as I recall it. </p>

<p><em>00:32:17</em><br>If I recall correctly, there was another gentleman, perhaps another hedge fund person, or a science person, who sat to my left and I stared at this tablecloth and I thought, “Oh, you’re going to serve me food on a tablecloth made out of the flag of my country, or perhaps you’re going to give me a beverage that might spill on the American flag? Is this a test of some kind of my loyalty to my country, or whether I have some sort of morality that isn’t burdened by some petty reverence to an inanimate object.” </p>

<p><em>00:32:49</em><br>I couldn’t tell what was going on, but I started getting extremely agitated, and, in fact, angry, and I think my feelings involved in expletive, which is, "F the person who decided that this was a good idea to put an American table, a flag as a tablecloth to test new people coming to the house." </p>

<p><em>00:33:07</em><br>My recollection is that Jeffrey entered from the right with the young woman. In my mind. I remember her as being perhaps 22-23; she was extremely attractive. As I recall, Jeffrey sat down and began bouncing this woman on his knee, so he motioned for her to sit down and she appeared to be quite happy in this role as Jeffrey asked questions and discussed science, theories I had about markets, how they related to gauge theory, theoretical physics. I don’t remember the man saying much to me who was also in the room at the time. And so, all I have a recollection of is the four of us: Jeffrey, the woman on his leg, and the other gentleman and myself. </p>

<p><em>00:34:10</em><br>My recollection is also that, in order to test our willpower and concentration, that Jeffrey would bounce this woman occasionally, that she would giggle in order to test our resolve as to whether we could stay focused in the conversation. </p>

<p><em>00:34:10</em><br>I found him to be quite intelligent. He clearly was no slouch, but I also found that every single interaction with him resulted in my being back footed conversationally. He was constantly trying to throw me off guard, and at some level I was also irritated and angry, and I was trying to keep my cool during this entire interaction. And I thought to myself, “I don’t know anybody who behaves this way.” I knew several rich people at that point in my life, and I’ve known many more very wealthy people, perhaps billionaires of 10 and 11 figure fortunes. </p>

<p><em>00:35:08</em><br>And in so doing, I came to start to believe that I was not really talking to somebody who was a hedge fund manager or a financier, but that I was instead talking to a very intelligent and extremely charismatic man. My recollection was that he was magnetically handsome, perhaps a little off in certain ways. Certainly he’s been compared to Ralph Lauren, which was my thought, but he was prematurely gray, if I recall the image, and he had a kind of charisma that could probably be quantified in an era of facial recognition. There was something very, very unusual and compelling about him, despite the fact that he was more than a little bit lubricious. The meeting ended abruptly at some point, and I walked out. </p>

<p><em>00:35:54</em><br>I remember feeling that there are very few times in your life when you feel the hair on the back of your neck rise up. I don’t know whether that’s literally what happened, but it was certainly the sense that I had met something unholy. And I remember calling my wife and I remember talking to her, and I’ve used the word "construct" ever since. </p>

<p><em>00:36:12</em><br>Now, in order to do Responsible Conspiracy Theorizing, there are a couple of techniques that I would like to share that I use. </p>

<p><em>00:36:20</em><br>One is that I would like to distinguish two separate elements that may in fact be the same thing. Let’s imagine that the character that I met is in fact the forward-facing construct, and that there was an underlying human being playing that character. Now, if he was genuine, then as we say in mathematics, without loss of generality, we can adapt ourselves to the circumstance that the actor and the character were one and the same. So if the actor and the character are one and the same and that he was in no way a construct of anyone, then no harm, no foul, the theory will accommodate that. But it allows us to have a different possibility that the character and the actor are two different people. </p>

<p><em>00:37:07</em><br>Another technique that I like to use is I like to think about a decision tree. And in a decision tree, I don’t want to have to say which branch of the decision tree is true, and which branch is false. Very often when you share a conspiracy theory, what you find is that people want to know exactly what you believe. "Well, what do you think happened? What do you think was really going on?" Well, the answer is, "I don’t know." But what if you can come up with a theory that is true no matter which branch of the decision tree you’re on, that you have confidence in? This is where I’ve been headed. </p>

<p><em>00:37:40</em><br>Lastly, I want to use a technique which is extremely important to me, that I’ve talked about before at the best of Naval Ravikant on Twitter. So, you can find a Twitter thread that will go under something like the title, “The invisible world is first discovered in the visible world’s failure to close.” </p>

<p><em>00:38:00</em><br>Now, what do I mean by that? What I mean is, is that sometimes you discover that something is not right only because the explanation for everything that can be seen doesn’t add up. My favorite example of this is beta decay in something like cobalt 60. If you measure the momenta of all of the visible particles, you’ll notice that it doesn’t add up to a conserved momentum equation. And this is what allowed Wolfgang Pauli to hypothesize that there must be something carrying away some momentum that is electrically neutral and cannot be seen. And he named it the neutrino, "the little neutral one". </p>

<p><em>00:38:40</em><br>Well, something didn’t make sense about Jeffrey Epstein. How could somebody have that much money claim to be a hedge fund manager, be so clearly focused on his persona, and not look or sound like anybody I’d ever met in trading at that point? I believe that this person, in some sense represented a failure of the visible world’s failure to close, and so I decided that it was with some probability, not 100% certainly, that this person was in fact a construct. </p>

<p><em>00:39:12</em><br>Now, around—I forget when it was, 2005?—some point through 2007, Jeffrey Epstein becomes entangled with Florida law enforcement for requesting, or arranging, massages from underage women; that was almost certainly a massage was a euphemism for some form of child prostitution. This was an extremely disturbing episode in which he was vigorously defended by a high profile team, which is his right in an adversarial system, but it was with a particular vigor that I found absolutely disturbing and unsettling. And that the sentence given to Jeffrey Epstein seemed to be so reduced compared to what he was being accused of, that I felt like I had to just check all of my intuitions. Why was such a light sentence being imposed? </p>

<p><em>00:40:09</em><br>Further, people I knew went and visited him in prison and talked about him being a friend, talked about him being a massage enthusiast. It made no sense to me that this person who was being accused of some form of pedophilia was being treated very differently than I would have imagined by people that I very much respected at the time. </p>

<p><em>00:40:32</em><br>I didn’t understand what was going on, but I started to formulate a second theory, and I haven’t heard it discussed much in the media, so I’ll share it with you now. The idea is that if you buy the idea that Jeffrey Epstein was in fact a construct of the intelligence community, my belief is that he was constructed to be a sapiosexual Hugh Hefner. In some sense. He was the Dan Bilzerian of his day. That is, somebody who is not interested in little girls, but is instead interested in young women, women over the age of consent, who by law have every right to associate with whoever they wish to and can engage in consensual relations. Now, you may frown upon it. You may look down upon it. You may say that it’s an abusive power, for a man in his 40s, 50s, what have you to be cavorting with some person above the age of consent. However, I don’t take the same exact view of it that I take the view of somebody going below the age of consent. So in the era of #MeToo, we have a different situation in which people are very uncomfortable even talking about the legal situation in which women in their early twenties, who may be trying to wield sexual power are contending with men who may be trying to wield political or economic power, and that’s an issue that I don’t have a particular interest in settling. But whatever it is, it’s very different than somebody sending people to a high school to find 15 year-old girls or 14 year-old girls for erotic massages or prostitution or what have you. </p>

<p><em>00:42:07</em><br>So my belief was, in effect, that the intelligence community that may have constructed Jeffrey Epstein, was constructing him to be a sapiosexual Hugh Hefner, but that they had stupidly and mistakenly hired somebody who was actually closer to Humbert Humbert as an actor. That is the underlying actor playing the role of Jeffrey Epstein, hedge fund genius, was in fact, someone with a pedophilia problem that was probably not known to the intelligence community when it constructed the project, which I believe would have had to have dated from the '80s or '90s, when Jeffrey Epstein first started amassing his network of high profile contacts under this mysterious reputation as a one-of-a-kind financial genius. </p>

 

<p><em>00:43:20</em><br>So this went to some of the way towards explaining that. But I’ve had another issue that I’ve tried to talk to people about, which I also think figures into this story. Why was Jeffrey Epstein so focused on science? And in particular, why was he focused on heterodox science? Keep in mind, I’m just, I’m reading, I’m reading nothing. This is a completely ad lib, so just allow me to catch my breath. </p>

<p><em>00:44:32</em><br>Okay. When you have something that fits those twin criterion, then even free market economists will agree that it constitutes a public good, a failure of the market to keep value and price in lockstep. In essence, we pay for scientific research out of taxpayer dollars because the market cannot price it correctly. So you have something which I believe to be of fantastic value, including military value and potentially industrial value as it is translated from pure science into technology. </p>

<p><em>00:46:14</em><br>So when the music stopped, the system started to decay. You had an extremely valuable system. I’ve said before that theoretical physics largely constructed our modern economy. It invented the world wide web. It invented the semiconductor. It gave us nuclear power, nuclear weapons, our communications technology in the electromagnetic spectrum. </p>