Does anyone know what this June 2019 text from Epstein is about? I have added some links to RationalWiki and Wikipedia but not corrected spelling and corrected OCR errors. Was it at one of the institutions he sponsored like MIT Media Lab? Or more like his conference in the Virgin Islands? It seems to mix mainstream figures and people in the Libertarian/LessWrong network.
Another correspondent in 2016 suggested inviting Scott Alexander Siskind to speak at a different event Epstein was involved in. The correspondent has a Substack which cites Siskind in 2025.
Obviously just because Epstein had heard of a public figure does not mean that they knew him.
Epstein’s words begin below:
- List for summer talks. David Pizarro. Professor of Psychology and Philosopher at Cornell Univcrsit
- Eric Weinstein, Mathematician
- Matthew Putman, Scientist
- Paul Saffo, Technology Forecaster, and Professor of Engineering
- Lori Santos, Professor ofPsychology and Cognitive Science
- Janna Levin, Theoretical Cosmologist
- Ev Williams, Internet Entrepreneur
- Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Author
- Heiner Gocbbels, Composer, and Director
- Martine Rothblatt, Lawyer and Entrepreneur
- Peter Thiel, Venture Capitalist, and Entrepreneur
- Richard Thaler, Behavioral Economics
- Barbara Tversky, Professor of Psychology
- Michael Vassar, Futurist, Activist
- Bret Weinstein, Biologist, and Evolutionary Theorist
- Susan Hockfield, MIT President, Professor of Neuroscience
- David Deutsch, Physicist
- Eliezer Yudkowsky, Al Researcher
- N. Jeremy Kasdin, Astrophysicist
- Carl Zimmer, Science Writer
- Douglas Rushkoff, Media Theorist
- Eric Topol, Cardiologist
- Dustin Yellin, Artist
- Sherry Turkic, Professor of Social Studies
- Taylor Mac, Actor
- Stephen Johnson, Author
- Martin Hagglund, Swedish Philosopher and Scholar of Modernist Literature
- Thomas Metzinger, Philosopher, and Professor of Theoretical Philosophy
- Bjarke Ingels, Danish Architect, Founder of BIG, currently working on Floating Cities/Sustainable Habitats project
- Kai-Fu Lee, Venture Capitalist, Technology Executive, and Al Expert, developed the world’s first speaker-independent continuous speech recognition system
- Poppy Crum, Neuroscientist, and Technologist, Chief Scientist at Dolby Laboratories, Adjunct Professor at Stanford University (Computer Research in Music)
- Neil Burgess, Researcher, and Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, investigating the role of the hippocampus in spatial navigation
- Paul Sloom, Psychologist, and Researcher exploring how children and adults understand the physical and secin’ world, with a special focus on language, religion and morality
- Brian Cox, Physicist, and Professor of Particle Physics, Presenter of Science Programs
- Eythor Bender. CEO of Berkeley Bionics, Innovator and Business Leader in human augmentation (bionics and robotics)
- Gwynne Shotwell President. and COO at SpaceX, Engineer. listed in 2018 as the 59th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes
- Jaap de Roodc. Associate Professor of Evolution (of parasites) and Ecology, focusing on how parasites attack monarch butterflies and in return how butterflies have the ability to self-medicate
- Jim Holt, American Philosopher, and Contributor to the New York Times writing on string theory, time, the universe, and philosophy
- Vijay Komar, Indian Roboticist and UPS Foundation Professor in School of Engineering & Applied Science:. became Dean of Penn Engineering, studies flying and cooperative robots
- Hugh Herr, Biophysicist, Engineer, and Rock Climber, builds prosthetic knees, legs, and ankles that fuse biomechanics with microprocessors at MIT
- Gabriel Zucman, French Economist at UC Berkeley. best known for his research on tax havens, inequalities, and global wealth
- Fci-Fei Li, Professor of Computer Science, Director of Stanford’s Human-Ccntered Al, works as Chief Scientist of Al/ML of Google Cloud
- Dennis Hong, Korean American Mechanical Engineer, Professor and Founding Director of RoMeLa (Robotics & Mechanisms Laboratory) of the Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Department at UCLA
- Misha (Mikhail) Leonidovich Gromov, American
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https://bsky.app/profile/colincarlson.bsky.social/post/3mdojcogafc2e making an std that makes women more horny.
jesus fucking christ the depravity never ends. and there’s still three million more files of this bullshit
Risk and limitations: the study is inherently risky. While it is highly likely that STIs that alter female sexual behavior exist in the wider mammalian order, whether or not they current infect humans remains unclear. Challenges exist in successfully culturing newly identified STIs and adapting microbes to standardized lab models for testing. Finally, any new STIs will be relatively easy to test for efficacy in animals but costly and otherwise challenging to test in humans, and it is possible that success in animal models will not translate into human efficacy. Risks can be mitigated by simultaneously conducting animal and human studies, increasing the probability of identifying at least a single mammalian agent that modifies female sexual behavior.
Fucking terrifying.
This is not the worst academics and pundits in Epstein’s network, this virologist named Nathan Wolfe is new to me. If an American academic had their career ended by fraud or misconduct there is a good chance that he or she was trying to make nice with Epstein afterwards.
Hahah, knowing my old professor is in the Epstein files in any capacity is hilarious.
- Bret Weinstein, Biologist, and Evolutionary Theorist
The Joscha Bach Substack article is a strange mix of self-pity, JAQing off, and eugenics. He compares Namibian babies he saw in a documentary to great apes in terms of their childhood development, cites studies showing lower cognitive ability among African American children, and then gets all emotional over the fact that people might think he’s a bit of a racist.
AI attracts so many racists – especially the kind who can’t tell that they’re racist. I guess it’s inevitable for any field of study that includes the word 'intelligence" in its name.
Joscha Bach introduced Michael Vassar to Epstein in 2018 with:
My friend Michele Reilly asked me to reintroduce her to you; you met her and Michael Vassar a few years ago on the island
Vassar is best known for the MetaMed startup which bet that LessWrong posters were better at diagnosis than MDs. He also founded one of the LessWrong splinter movements that Scott Alexander warns people against.
There is a MIT computer scientist and popularizer called Michele Reilly although he could have meant someone else. My career has not been very successful but at least I never asked a friend to introduce me to a pederast or accepted an invitation to a sex criminal’s private island.
From seeing Rushkoff listed, one guess is something edge.org related. Or TED talks.
You might be able to cross reference it with what Rushkoff has posted and/or message him directly, he’s pretty online, has a podcast going back that far. He wrote a book about his experiences with billionaires - https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/xebglt/im_douglas_rushkoff_author_of_survival_of_the/ - I think the “unnamed desert resort” belonging to JEE would be a reasonable guess.
I’d probably try to google pairs of people + 2019 conference and see if you get lucky, but 40 choose 2 is a bit large.
“Susan Backfield” should be “Susan Hockfield” (president of MIT from 2004 through 2012). The PDF reads correctly but apparently the OCR is screwed up, or something, and trying to copy the text gives a misspelling. Likewise, “Hcrr” should be “Herr” and “Iocman” should be “Zucman”.
So far, this mostly looks like a list of random public figures in science/tech/entrepreneur circles.
The Weinstein brothers, Michael Vassar, Peter Thiel, and Yudkowsky were the names that leapt out at me. I don’t know that Vassar has any mainstream intellectual or academic achievements.
I don’t know of any either… To amend my earlier comment: it looks like a ghastly New Scientist/Forbes cocktail-party axis, with a dose of TESCREAL.
That was my take as well. It’s basically anyone in academia/tech who had a PR machine working for them at the time, and a couple of weird extras.
How Gromov only landed the underwhelming summary of “American” is interesting, I assume the list copy paste was cut short and the next word was “mathematician”.
If these people did all end up in the same location it’s probably safe to assume it was a private and unpublicized event. Some of them seem to have been in and around silicon valley at the time, so maybe one of the tech fake charity “foundation” events.
Some names are missing like Sabine Hossenfelder, the GMU economists, Brad Delong, and Hoover Institute staff. And I would not underestimate the number of people in this network who just went to the right university, met the right people, got the right job, and started to climb the ladder of fame.
I’m sure many of them are somewhat accidental ladder climbers, but looking at some of the names in the list:
- Herr: At MIT, just had yet another Ted talk in 2018 about his exoskeleton work
- Shotwell: 2018 Business Insider named her the “Most powerful female engineer”, Musk lackey
- Li: ex-Google, 2019 became Stanford co-director of their AI hole and “won” a bunch of prizes from various places
- Zucman: Published book on tax havens 2019, loads of media work to sell the book, award from Le Monde, billed as “No. 1 enemy of billionaires” (paraphrased)
- de Roode: previous Ted talks, 2018 time magazine list for top 50 in healthcare (a sharp fall from his listing in 2014 of the 100 most influential people?)
- Mac: bunch of lectures in 2019 after his 2017 pulitzer, 2018 tv circuit including Colbert, a bunch more awards, 2019 Broadway play that had seven Tony nominations, etc.
- Topol: 2019 book on AI and med, bunch of media for that to sell the book
These were just the ones I looked at out of curiosity for what they were up to around 2018-2019. There’s clearly the TESCREAL theme across the list, but it strikes me that there’s also a lot of very active PR/promotion effort across the board. Award nominations don’t exactly spontaneously generate from impartial awe-struck onlookers, and media book reviews aren’t chosen based on literary merit.
The inclusion of Mac especially is what made me think this might just be a slightly wider list of candidates a grotesque parasite would want to ingratiate themselves with by inviting them give private lectures - he doesn’t strike me as a great fit otherwise.
Back in 2019, Sabine Hossenfelder was a blogger with one book to her name. She hadn’t taken off as a YouTuber and fully embraced the grift. I’m not surprised she barely appears.
Gromov is a mathematician. There was a Why is Gromov in the Epstein files? reddit thread on r/math a while back.
Learning that Rebecca Watson emailed Epstein for comment on a quote she was going to discuss, and Lawrence Krauss emailed Epstein because people like Rebecca Watson were outing him as a sex pest, reminds me of what a small world that was.
I don’t plan to link every figure, but will do so if they are sleazy or the name is unfamiliar. Many of them seem like distinguished academics or popularizers.
“There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.”
I think Watson e-mailed Krauss, who forwarded the message to Epstein.
