Here is a two hour interview of Jeffrey Epstein by Steve Bannon.

https://twitter.com/AdameMedia/status/2017792281902710973/video/1

Commenters immediately claimed it must be a deep AI fake. It’s not. He waves his hands around a lot and I’ve counted his fingers. 

Also, AI doesn’t do humour – at least not black high comedy of this quality.

AI also shows its limitations in this reply from Grok to a commenter who, unable to face listening to two hours of insane drivel asked: “What is Epstein’s most astonishing statement?” To which Grok, with a bit of prompting, replied:

The most astonishing statement is Epstein’s claim that he learned of the 2008 financial crisis while in solitary confinement and advised Bear Stearns’ CEO and Treasury officials via collect calls from jail. Epstein claims: While in solitary confinement in jail in 2008, a guard mentioned Wall Street crashing. He then made a collect call to Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne to discuss Lehman Brothers’ collapse and whether to bail out Bear Stearns. The next day, he called a Treasury Department official for similar discussions. […] This is significant as it suggests he had extraordinary influence and access to top leaders, despite being incarcerated for sex crimes, implying deep, enduring connections in finance and government.

That’s only the most astonishing statement in the interview if you’ve been trained on the same millions of words that you and I have been exposed to, which deal almost exclusively with the moral failings of the Great and the Good. In fact, the whole two hours is a proof of Schrödinger’s observation (for Schrödinger makes a guest appearance in the discussion, along with Pythagoras, Leibniz and Feynman) that a discourse may be screamingly boring and deeply fascinating at the same time.

Epstein is the guy in the hotel bar you strike up a conversation with because he’s reading Scientific American and you think he might be interesting. Two hours later, your brain is in such agony that you can’t even think of an excuse to leave.  

Much of the credit for the interview’s fascination lies with Steve Bannon. He only really asks three questions, which he comes back to time after time, without ever receiving an answer to any of them. And the questions are very odd. 

First, he wants to know about Epstein’s feelings in solitary confinement.

Didn’t he ever ask himself how he came to be there? What did he feel? 

Answer: No. He didn’t feel anything.  

Steve: You can’t possibly expect me to believe this. 

Epstein: I know. I don’t believe it.

Steve asks each of his three questions about half a dozen times. On about the third time of being told that Epstein had no feelings about talking to the head of Bear Stearns from a prison cell, Steve remarks: “There’s something deeply fucked up with you.” Perceptive guy, Steve.

Second question: Why did he, Epstein, the greatest mind in the financial world (he asks Epstein if he can think of a greater one. He can’t) not see the financial crash of 2008 coming?

Answer: Nobody could see it. The market is a complex system. Complexity is complexity. It’s like the body. That’s a complex system too. Doctors understand parts, but not all. 

Steve asks the question again and again, and each time Epstein comes back to the complexity of the body.

Steve: And you were saying, the smartest guy in the room didn’t see it coming.

Epstein: No of course not

Steve: The bankruptcy of Bear Stearns, you just thought that was a Bear Stearns problem? You didn’t see it as systemic?

Epstein: I know you keep harping on it but it’s not..

Steve: Because you’re a mathematician that understands systems. It seems everybody understands they had a systemic problem, you would at least be the first on the early search radar. If you’re not going to see it, then I’m really afraid..

Epstein: Imagine the guy who has a stroke, or has a heart attack, when you ask him: did you feel funny the day before, he’s gonna tell you, yeah, I didn’t feel right. Something was.. I didn’t feel right, my stomach was.. I felt a little dizzy, I felt a little weak,” but if you asked him the day before: Are you going to have a heart attack tomorrow? He’d just say: “No I just feel a little weak and I’m a little dizzy and my stomach hurts.” So these systems, and that’s the issue of complexity. What complexity says in fact is that everything seems to go along and seems.. and one of the great examples of complex systems is sand dunes. In fact the sand keeps building up, people see some, and all of a sudden, one more sand drop and the thing sta… all the sand starts running down hills. That’s the way I see the financial market.

 The third question is about the Santa Fé project. This, apparently, was  a fifteen year project involving the best scientists and mathematicians who’d been dropped by the Livermore laboratory because quantum physics wasn’t going anywhere, and were hired by Epstein to discover the meaning of life the universe and everything. (I need to go back and check I’ve got that right.) 

Here Epstein seems to remember that the only proper job he’s ever had was as a maths teacher, and he launches into a history lesson from Pythagoras through Newton and Leibniz up to the day that Feynman said to him: “Anyone, Jeffrey, who says to you that they understand quantum physics, and quantum mechanics, and quantum behaviour, you know they’re lying.”  

Epstein: Shrödinger wrote a very famous book Called “What is life?” He was trying to figure out a way can you describe the way, the difference, formulaically, between things that are alive and things that are dead. No. The things that are alive – in my world – are miracles. Not magic. Magic has a bad connotation.

Steve: You don’t believe in the spirit or the soul? That’s what animates people. Is it your spirit or your soul?

[…]

Epstein: Yes, in fact I refer, the soul, there’s obviously some.. the question isn’t.. even going back ..

Steve: People would normally think that you are soulless

Epstein: Thank you

Steve: No, but to have you talk about it – you actually believe in it and have done some thinking about it – is pretty shocking in its own right isn’t it?

Epstein: Well I get.. mathemati.. Leibniz and.. Leibniz thought that .. 

Steve: Newton was at Cambridge, and he was head of the math department, right? Leibniz, who was Leibniz – a German professor?

Epstein: Yes, but what Leibniz said is: the soul is so strange, because God took chemicals, which is simply materials, like tables, and he somehow made this material able to have a thought. How strange is that? Not only does it have a soul, but this, somehow it was put together that this material substance can, is able to think. So when you say to me that it’s obvious to everyone that the’s such a thing as a soul.. now if you’re part of the Charlatanville you try to explain it to people. The soul I describe is the dark matter of the brain. Why is it dark matter? In the high energy physics nowadays you hear of dark matter, dark energy. Again, terminology, complicated terminology. Why is it dark matter? Because we can’t see it. Well, what do you mean you can’t see it? Somehow we see something moving towards this area of darkness. [lots of hand movements here] Something.. I can see this thing, this appears to me to be empty, it’s black, but I see it being drawn this way. So I say: well, I know if this were matter, that would follow that equation. If it was solid, it would explain the way this particle moves. But I can’t see anything here, so I’ll just call it dark matter, and we’ll say: I don’t know what it is, but it behaves as is there was something there. The soul is obvious to everyone that there’s something different to things that are alive and things that are not alive, but we have no idea what it is. It’s currently unexplainable. I believe we need an entirely different system of analysis to try and figure out..sorry..

Steve tries again.

Steve: You with Murray Gell-Mann founded or had the idea of, the Santa Fé institute. Ten or Fifteen years later, that effort to study the complexity of systems mathematically..

Epstein: Yes, was a total failure

Steve: Total failure? 

Epstein: Total failure.

Steve: Why is that?

Epstein: It, it’s the failure of science because in fact, to some extent, science doesn’t describe romance. I don’t know why I’m attracted to somebody. I don’t know, people are attracted to somebody and everyone has this feeling they’ve seen someone walk in the room, says oh, that person gives me a creepy feeling. Science has tried to describe, science doesn’t describe what “creepy feelings” means. They just know it’s a creepy feeling. They think: women – as I said the last time – have an intuitive sense. What is intuitive? They have intuition, they have feelings, and they are able to deal in the realm of things that men – especially men like myself – find unexplainable. They have great – women have intuition, men see things a bit differently. Men want to measure everything. Women are not really that interested in measuring. 

[long silence] 

I think I’d better stop there.

About 1 hour 14 minutes in, the question of climate change or global warming comes up, but it just leads to another discussion of Newton and billiard balls. 

Another thing we’ve learnt from the Epstein files is that he suffered from hypogonadism. 

Himmler, you may remember, was very similar.