Speaker 1: I want you to just picture something for a second.
It's late, You're sitting at your desk, the only light
is from your laptop screen, and you're scrolling through an
email EBox. Okay, it looks well, it looks exactly like
your inbox, same layout, same font, you know, bold subject
lines for things you haven't read.
Speaker 2: It feels familiar, that digital space we all kind of
live in.
Speaker 1: Now, exactly totally. You see a subject line about a
meeting change, another one, an order confirmation from Amazon, some
junk mail. It's so so mundane, it's boring. But then
then you realize whose inbox this is, right, You realize
you are scrolling through the personal emails of a man
whose name is now basically a synonym for evil, for
the absolute worst kind of predatory behavior. You're inside Jeffrey
Epstein's inbox.
Speaker 2: And that familiarity, that, yeah, that absolute banality, that's what
makes it so chilling. Yeah, it isn't some you know,
gothic dungeon. It's a Gmail.
Speaker 1: Account that shivery. You just got that that really creepy
feeling of the normal mixed with the monstrous. That is
where we are going to be living for the next
hour or so because that inbox it's open now and
the story it tells is not the one we've been
hearing for the past decade.
Speaker 2: No, it's a story about the architecture of power, and
more importantly, how that architecture is specifically designed to make
you look in the wrong direction.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Thrilling Threads. I'm your host, and today is well, honestly,
it's going to be a heavy one. I've been sitting
with this source material for a few days and it's
a lot, but we have to go there. It is
February eighth, twenty twenty six, and we are pulling on
two threads, two threads that the mainstream media has for
the most part either ignored or just snipped short.
Speaker 2: And calling them lose threads might be that might be
an understatement. These are more like structural cables. You pull
on them, the whole building starts to creak.
Speaker 1: That's a good way to put it. We have a
huge stack of documents to get through today. We're basing
this whole conversation on a really frankly and explosive investigation
by Al Jazeera English's show The Listening Post.
Speaker 2: Fantastic show it is.
Speaker 1: And it features some incredible deep dive reporting from drop
site News. We're talking specifically about the work of journalists
Murtaza Hussein and Monoxi Robbie.
Speaker 2: They've done the really hard work here. I mean they
went through the haystacks to find the needles.
Speaker 1: They really did. So here's the mission for today. We
have two major stories. On the surface, they seem separate,
but as we'll see, they are deeply, deeply connected. Thread one, Okay,
the release of three million and I'm going to say
that again, three million new Epstein files. And these are
not the flight logs we've all seen before. These files
implicate the absolute highest levels of global intelligence of tech
and they draw a very clear line to Israel and
Silicon Valley.
Speaker 2: And then there's thread number two. It's going to take
us to the reality on the ground in Gaza, because
here we are, it's twenty twenty six, and we have
to have a really difficult talk about language, about how
a word like ceasefire has been twisted to mean something
very very different from peace.
Speaker 1: We are all going to get to a tool called
jmail a little later on. It might be the single
most dangerous or maybe the most revealing thing on the Internet.
Right now. But let's let's start with the dump three
million files. I mean, just the size of that. How
does any one person even start to process that amount
of data?
Speaker 2: Well, they don't. And that's the strategy, isn't It's a
classic info war tactic. If you really want to hide
something important today, you don't lock it away in a
safe no. No, you drown it in a sea of
irrelevant data. You bury it in a mountain of boredom.
The Department of Justice just drops three million files all
at once. They know newsrooms are stretched thin, they know
our attention spans are you shot. It's the ultimate needle
in a haystack scenario.
Speaker 1: But Murtaza Hussein and Monoxi Robbie, they brought a really
big magnet, it did, and.
Speaker 2: It turns out the needle in this particular haystack is radioactive.
Speaker 1: Let's get into the social dynamics here.
Speaker 2: First.
Speaker 1: The club, as the sources call it, because when we
usually talk about Epstein, it's always the salacious stuff, right
the island, the plane, the horrible abuse. But these files
they paid a different picture. It's more administrative.
Speaker 2: It's the business of evil, it really is.
Speaker 1: And you see the names. We all know, Donald Trump,
Bill Clinton, Peter teel, Elon Musk, Bill Gates. But it's
the timing of the emails that just it just completely
throw me.
Speaker 2: The timeline is everything. It is the single most critical
piece of evidence in this whole affair, because the common story,
the narrative that everyone from Bill Gates to you know,
Prince Andrew has tried to sell us is the we
didn't know defense, right, or.
Speaker 1: The oh, as soon as we found out, we cut
him off completely exactly.
Speaker 2: I met him once at a party, he seemed to
bid odd, never saw him again. That's the boiler plate excuse.
But these emails, they don't just poke holes in that defense,
they vaporize it. The source material points out just how
jarringly friendly, how normal, the emails are after two thousand
and eight.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's pause right there, two thousand and eight, just
to anchor everyone in what that year means in the story.
Speaker 2: Right. So, in two thousand and eight, Jeffrey pleads guilty
in Florida, he is convicted for soliciting a child for prostitution.
He becomes a registered sex offender, a felon. His mugshot
is everywhere. This is not a rumor at this point,
it is a hard legal fact.
Speaker 1: It's on the public record. He's a known quantity. And
yet you're saying, if you look at these emails from
twenty nine, twenty ten, twenty eleven, the tone doesn't change,
It does.
Speaker 2: Not shift an inch. If anything, it gets more sympathetic
towards him. You have emails from some of the most powerful,
most respected people in the world offering him personal comfort.
Speaker 1: Wait comfort, yes.
Speaker 2: Consoling the predator because he had a bad run in
with the press. It's surreal.
Speaker 1: That is stomach churning.
Speaker 2: There's one example from the source material that I think
just it could perfectly encapsulates this. Yeah, this moral black hole.
And I know you saw this one.
Speaker 1: You have to be talking about, Noam Chomsky. I am,
I have to be honest with you. When I read
that section in the drop site news report, I thought
it had to be a typo. I just I refuse
to believe it. Noam Chomsky, author of Manufacturing Consent, the
guy who taught a whole generation of us myself included
how to critique power structures, how to speak for the oppressed.
Speaker 2: That's the one.
Speaker 1: And he's in the Epstein inbox.
Speaker 2: Oh, he's deep in the Inbox. The files show Chomsky
writing to Epstein and expressing sympathy, sympathy for what he
talks about, the horrible way that the press and the
public were treating Epstein. He's sympathizing with the convicted child
sex offender about his pr problems.
Speaker 1: I don't even know how to process that. It's like
finding out that Captain America was secretly working for Hydra
all along. It just breaks your brain.
Speaker 2: It creates a massive cognitive dissonance. And I think that's
why this part of the story is so important. It
shows you that being brilliant or having a public persona
as a moral leader, it doesn't grant you any immunity
from being drawn into this this club.
Speaker 1: And he's not the only one.
Speaker 2: Not by a long shot. You also have Deepak Chopra,
the guru of wellness and spirituality. He's emailing Epstein to
offer him comfort, to send him healing thoughts.
Speaker 1: So you've got the the world's leading intellectual and the
world's leading spiritual guide both What coddling this monster? Why?
What did Epstein have that could make these people just
suspend their basic human decency utility?
Speaker 2: That is the single most important word in the Al
Jazeera investigation. Epstein wasn't just some rich guy throwing wild parties.
He was a connective node.
Speaker 1: A connective node. What does that mean?
Speaker 2: Think of him like a human router for the global elite.
He directed traffic, He moved money, he moved influence critically,
he moved leverage. He was an elite fixer who operated
completely above the normal rule of law. If you were
a scientist who needed one hundred million dollars for a lab,
you went to Epstein. If you were a politician who
needed a quiet introduction to a tech billionaire, you went
to Epstein.
Speaker 1: So when you're in that club, you don't look at
the criminal record.
Speaker 2: You look at the balance sheet, You look at the
contact list. He was useful and that made him untouchable, and.
Speaker 1: Maybe because he was compromised, he was safe to be around.
Speaker 2: That's a huge part of it. Everyone knew he was dirty,
and that meant everyone felt comfortable being dirty around him.
It's a mutually assured destruction pact that's disguised as a
social circle.
Speaker 1: Which brings us to the geopolitical side of this, the
thread that for years now the media seems to be
trying to pretend doesn't exist.
Speaker 2: Yes, And before we pull on that thread, we have
to talk about the giant red herring They've been dragging
in front of.
Speaker 1: Us, the Russia connection.
Speaker 2: The Russia obsession for years. If you turned on cable news,
what was a question about Epstein? It was always is
he a Russian asset? Does Putin have the tapes? Is
this how Russia controls Trump?
Speaker 1: I remember it. It was wal to wall coverage for months.
Speaker 2: Well, Mirtaza Hussein at drop site News, he did something
very simple. He just used the search function in the archive.
He searched for Putin.
Speaker 1: A secret memo, a wire transfer.
Speaker 2: He found desperation. He found email after email from Epstein
trying to get a meeting with Putin and being ignored,
completely shut down. Epstein wasn't working for Putin, he was
chasing him like an autograph seeker. The files show zero,
and I mean zero, evidence of any Russian intelligence connection.
Speaker 1: So the biggest story of the last five years was
a total dud. But the story that nobody is talking about.
Speaker 2: That's where the fire is. The Israel story is concrete,
it is documented. It's not speculation. It's a zalber it's administrative,
its calendar invites and meeting transcripts and contracts, and it
all seems to center on one very very powerful man,
a Hood Barack.
Speaker 1: Okay, So for listeners who might not follow Israeli politics
that closely, just remind us who is a Hood Barak
in this whole ecosystem.
Speaker 2: He's a Titan. I mean, he is the Israeli establishment personified,
former Prime Minister, former Defense Minister, former Chief of the
General Staff at the IDF. He's the most decorated soldier
in the history of Israel. He is not some fringe character.
Speaker 1: And he was just hanging out with Epstein.
Speaker 2: Hanging out is way too casual. Epstein was acting as
an advisor, a fixer. He is managing Barack's introductions to
the American and finance elite.
Speaker 1: Okay, I want to drill down on one specific interaction
that the source material pulls out, because this is where
the thread starts to glow, the Pollunteer connection.
Speaker 2: This is the critical juncture.
Speaker 1: This is where it all comes to the Palngeer. We
know them, the big data analytics firm founded by Peter Teel.
They do massive contracts for the CIA, the NSA ICE.
They are for all intents and purposes the private backbone
of the American surveillance state.
Speaker 2: They're the company that promises to see the future by
analyzing the present. They know everything about everyone.
Speaker 1: So the source site's a transcript of a phone call.
It's from twenty thirteen. Now, remember this is five full
years after Epstein's conviction as a sex offender. Who's on
the call.
Speaker 2: It's Jeffrey Epstein and Ehud Barack. And the subject isn't parties,
it's not vacations. It's business strategy, high level corporate strategy.
Speaker 1: And what exactly are they discussing.
Speaker 2: Epstein is explicitly on this call talking about Peter Teel
putting Ehud Barock on the board of Palenteer. He is
person brokering a marriage between the former head of the
Israeli military intelligence apparatus and the most powerful private surveillance
company in America.
Speaker 1: And did it happen? Did he get on the board?
Speaker 2: It wasn't just talk. We don't know about the board
seats specifically. But two years later, in twenty fifteen, Pallanteer
opens its first major office in Tel Aviv.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack the implications of that, because on the surface,
that sounds like a boring business headline, right company opens office,
But what does that actually mean.
Speaker 2: It means integration, means a fusion of capabilities. You have
to understand what Palenteer really does. It takes huge, messy
data sets from all over the world and finds patterns
from intelligence agencies. And then you have to understand the
Israeli tech world. It is overwhelmingly driven by veterans of
elite IDF intelligence units, specifically Unit eighty two hundred and
Unit eighty one.
Speaker 1: Unit eighty two hundred remind us think of.
Speaker 2: It as Israel's version of the NSA, but with a
revolving door that leads directly into the startup sector. Almost
every major Israeli cybersecurity is a veteran of Unit eighty
two hundred. It is the absolute elite of the elite
in cyber intelligence.
Speaker 1: So what you're saying is Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender,
is the middleman facilitating a merger between America's top private
surveillance company in Israel's top military intelligence pipeline.
Speaker 2: Precisely, and this is where this idea of private sector
intelligence comes in. The source argues very convincingly that Epstein
wasn't a spy in the way we think of spies. Yeah,
you know, James Bond in a trench cot right, that's.
Speaker 1: The movie version, no secret DoD drops.
Speaker 2: The reality is far more subtle and frankly, far more dangerous.
He was practicing private sector intelligence. He was using his
personal and financial connections to forge state level alliances that
directly benefited the strategic interests of Israel. Voluntarily, he was
personally enhancing the technological and surveillance capabilities of a foreign
power by leveraging his influence in Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: But why, what was his motivation? Was he just a
passionate Zionist the source?
Speaker 2: It was purely about leverage, about power. Epstein saw himself
as a kind of transnational figure above the laws of
any one country. If he could be the guy who
connects the Israeli military to Peter Teal, he makes himself
indispensable to both sides. He becomes too powerful to prosecute,
too connected to fail, too big to jail exactly, And
yet he did end up back in jail eventually.
Speaker 1: Eventually.
Speaker 2: Look at how long it took, Look the sweetheart deals
he got. Look at who was still visiting him, who's
still emailing him years after he should have been a
total pariah. That private sector intelligence shield. It worked for
a very, very long time.
Speaker 1: It's just terrifying the idea that our global geopolitical reality,
who has access to our data, who is tracking our movements,
was being brokered in the living room of a predator.
Speaker 2: He gives a whole new meaning to the phrase dirty data,
doesn't it?
Speaker 1: It really does. But here's the question that is just
driving me crazy. We have the emails, we have the
phone transcripts, we have the day, it's the names. Why
is this not the lead story on every single news
network tonight? Why are we here on thrilling threads having
to piece this together from an Al Jazeera report.
Speaker 2: The source has a name for this. They call it
the ecosystem of Silence, and the critique they make is well,
it's scathing. It suggests that the media elites in the
US aren't just missing the story, they are actively avoiding
it because they are socially embedded with the very people
they're supposed to be covering.
Speaker 1: The part of the club.
Speaker 2: They go to the same dinner parties in the Hamptons,
their kids go to the same elite private schools to
report on this honestly would be to blow up their
own social lives.
Speaker 1: There is one story in the source material about David
Brooks from the New York Times that I think just
perfectly illustrates this whole ecosystem.
Speaker 2: Oh, the David Brooks incident. This one is, I mean,
it's so perfect in his hypocrisy you couldn't write it
in a novel.
Speaker 1: Lay it out for us.
Speaker 2: Okay, So, a while back, David Brooks, the very serious,
thoughtful columnist for the New York Times. He writes a
column and in this column he argues that the media
should just stop covering Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1: Why.
Speaker 2: He says, it's distasteful. It's sensationalists, We're giving a criminal
too much oxygen. The basic argument was, let's move on,
there's nothing to see here.
Speaker 1: Let's all be grown ups and talk about more important things.
Speaker 2: Right. It sounded very high minded, a plea for journalistic standards.
But then a little while after this column is published,
a photo emerges, and.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing it wasn't a photo of David Brooks volunteering
at a food bank.
Speaker 2: Not quite. It was a photo of David Brooks in
a meeting with Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1: You have got to be kidding me. He is literally
telling the rest of the world to look away while
he himself is sitting at the table with the guy.
Speaker 2: And that's not even the worst part. The crucial detail
is he never disclosed it. When he wrote that column
telling everyone to ignore Epstein. He didn't add a little
note at the bottom saying, full disclosure, I've met with
a subject to this column. He hit it. He is
the ultimate conspect of interest.
Speaker 1: It's if you're gaslighting. He's telling his readers, you're the
ones who are obsessed. Well, he's the one who's complicit.
Speaker 2: And that's why the Israel angle is radioactive in the
mainstream press. If you really pull that thread, you don't
just find Ehud Barak. You find the powerful people who
invested with Barack. You find the journalists who interviewed those people.
You find the publishers who gave them book deals. The
web is just too dense, it's too close to.
Speaker 1: Home, an ecosystem of silence, and that silence is a weapon,
which that actually brings us directly to the second part
of our show today, because we're seeing the exact same
mechanism the same kind of information control being used right
now today in twenty twenty six, to hide a war.
Speaker 2: In plain sight, it is the exact same playbook, different continent,
much higher body count, but the playbook is identical.
Speaker 1: Let's pivot to Gaza. It's February twenty twenty six. If
you just read the headlines in the US or Europe,
what's the story you see?
Speaker 2: You see peace process, ceasefire, holding talks on reconstruction.
Speaker 1: You see a picture of progress, of stability, A deal
was signed. What back in October twenty twenty five, President
Trump took a victory lap. The official narrative is the
war is over.
Speaker 2: But the reality on the ground, according to the reporting
from drop site news in Al Jazeera, is what they're
calling a ceasefire mirage.
Speaker 1: A mirage. That is the perfect word for it, because
from far away it looks like water, it looks like peace,
But when you get up close, if you are actually
living in Gaza, it is nothing but sand, in heat
and death.
Speaker 2: Let's just look at the number. Since this so called
ceasefire was signed in October, Israel has killed more than
five hundred Palestinians.
Speaker 1: Five hundred people.
Speaker 2: Now in the brutal calculus of this conflict. After tens
and tens of thousands died in twenty twenty four and
twenty twenty five, a number like five hundred might sound
low to the international community, and that's the trap. The
source argues, this isn't the ceasefire. It's not a cessation
of violence. It's limited restraint. It's and this is a
direct quote, genocide with a pause button.
Speaker 1: Genocide with a pause button. That isn't That's a horrific phrase.
Speaker 2: But it's accurate because the violence never actually paused. It
just slowed down to a rate that the world is
willing to ignore. The argument is that as long as
the death toll stays in the single or double digits
each day, as long as there isn't one single massive
bombing that kills two hundred people at once, the world
just looks away. It fades into the background noise of
the twenty four hour news cycle.
Speaker 1: It becomes a palatable level of violence.
Speaker 2: A manageable atrocity, exactly. And we have to talk about
the numbers themselves, the total casualty figures, because this is
a huge part of the information war. The official count,
the one you hear quoted, which even the Israeli government
has now kind of quietly acknowledged is accurate, is around
seventy one thousand dead.
Speaker 1: Seventy one thousand, I mean, that's the size of a
city just gone.
Speaker 2: But that's just the confirmed count. That's bodies that have
been physically recovered, brought to a hospital or morgue, identified
and registered. The source we're looking at discusses detailed studies
from The Lancet and the Economist, and we have to
stress these are not fringe activist groups. These are conservative,
peer reviewed, mainstream institutions, and their analysis suggests the real
number is significantly over one hundred thousand, maybe as high
as one hundred and eighty thousand dead.
Speaker 1: How how is that possible? How do you lose one
hundred thousand people from the official count?
Speaker 2: You bury them, or rather you just you don't unbury them.
The reporting here is crucial. For the last two years,
Israel has maintained a ban on so called dual use
items entering gaza. Right.
Speaker 1: We've heard about that for things like medical supplies and
building materials.
Speaker 2: But it also applies to heavy machinery, to bulldozers, to cranes,
to excavators, all the equipment you would need to lift
a ten ton slab of collapse concrete off of a
flattened apartment building.
Speaker 1: So the rubble from twenty twenty four is it's still there.
Speaker 2: The rubble is still there, which means the bodies are
still under it, uncounted, unidentified. The source calls this a
deliberate tactic of undercounting. If you ban the equipment needed
to clear the rubble, you are effectively banning the ability
to count the dead. You keep the official number artificially low,
you keep it palatable for your international allies.
Speaker 1: That is, that's a level of bureaucratic cruelty that's hard
to even comprehend. You're manipulating the spreadsheet of death by
controlling the supply chain of bulldozers.
Speaker 2: It is, and it feeds directly into what the source
calls the two truths phenomenon. We saw it with the
Epstein files. One story for the insiders, another for the public.
We are seeing the exact same thing here.
Speaker 1: Okay, break that down for us. What are the two
truths of the Gaza ceasefire?
Speaker 2: So truth number one is for the international audience. If
you're watching CNN in New York or the BBC in
London today in February twenty twenty six. You're hearing about
the ceasefire holding, maybe some minor skirmishes, but overall the
Trump peace plan is being tested. The language is all
very soft, very diplomatic, fragile progress.
Speaker 1: Okay, that's what we hear.
Speaker 2: But then there's truth number two. This is for the
domestic Israeli audience. The source material sites Israeli media outlets,
specifically Channel fourteen and the newspaper Marieve, and if you
read the reporting in Hebrew, you get a completely different reality.
They are not talking about peace. They are openly reporting
that the IDF is preparing for large scale attacks in
the coming weeks. They discuss the imminent collapse of the
Trump peace plan not as a possibility, but as an inevitability.
Speaker 1: So let me get this straight. The Israeli public is
being told, don't worry, the war isn't really over, We're
just reloading, and the American public is being told, don't worry,
the war is over. You can stop paying attention. Now.
Speaker 2: That is precisely it. It is a split screen reality.
The theory from the source is that the Israeli government
tells the truth to its own people, because it needs
to reassure its far right political base that they haven't
gone soft. But they lie to the international press to
avoid sanctions, to avoid diplomatic pressure from Washington to keep
the military aid flowing.
Speaker 1: In the international media, they just buy it. They don't
see the other screen.
Speaker 2: They enable it. There's a fascinating dynamic. The source points out.
When an idea of spokesperson gives a briefing to the
New York Times, they use the soft diplomatic language, But
when that same spokesperson goes on Channel four thirteen an
hour later, they're much more blunt about the violence. But
the Western media outlets almost never report what's being said
on Israeli television in Hebrew. They just print the English
language press release they were handed.
Speaker 1: It's wilful ignorance. It's journalistic malpractice.
Speaker 2: It's also, i think, just media fatigue. The source sites
data from fairness and accuracy in reporting or fair and
it shows that media coverage of Gazo peaked in late
twenty twenty four early twenty twenty five the second the
word ceasefire was announced. Coverage just fell off a.
Speaker 1: Cliff, out of sight, out of mind, but out.
Speaker 2: Of sight isn't an accident, it's an active policy. We
are now, what more than two years into this, our
international journalists still banned from entering Gaza independently.
Speaker 1: They are still the Israeli Supreme Court is just slow
walking the legal challenges. They just granted the government another
two month extension to prepare its arguments for why the
ban is necessary.
Speaker 2: Two months after two years, what arguments could they possibly
still be preparing. The argument is the delay itself. Every
single day that a CNN camera crew is not filming
inside con units is a victory for the narrative managers.
Speaker 1: So the only people who can report from inside are
Palestinian journalists.
Speaker 2: And this is the most insidious part of the whole strategy.
The source argues, there's a systematic process to dehumanize and
discredit those local journalists. First, the international media outlets often
discount their reporting as inherently biased, and then if their
footage is too compelling to ignore, the IDF will often
just smear the journalist, claiming they're Hamas affiliated, to retroactively
invalidate their work.
Speaker 1: So you create a perfect information vacuum. You ban the
outsiders who are seen as impartial, and you slander the
insiders who are the only.
Speaker 2: Witnesses, and in that vacuum of truth, you can do
whatever you want with total impunity. The sources theory on
the endgame here is what's pretty chilling. They believe Israel's
goal is to maintain this media blackout until the reconstruction
phase begins. Why the optics, purely optics. They want the
very first high definition professional images the world sees from
Gaza in years to be of cranes building new high rises,
paved roads, a new Gaza rising from the ashes. They
do not want the world to see what one witness
in the report described as entire cities vaporized into dust.
Speaker 1: There is a detail in that report, a sensory detail
that it's just stuck with me for days.
Speaker 2: I think, I know you're going to say the smell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the witness described this thick, inescapable stench of gunpowder
and decomposing bodies that just hangs over the entire Gaza strip.
You can't capture that in a press release, no, And.
Speaker 2: That's the reality they're trying to pave over. Literally, if
cameras were allowed in today, right now, they would be
filming an active crime scene Israel is just playing for time.
They're waiting until they can clean up the evidence before
they let the jury in.
Speaker 1: It's all. It's incredibly heavy, and it can feel so
hopeless when you see the scale of this control, control
of the borders, control of the media, narrative, control of
a dead man's inbox.
Speaker 2: It does it feels overwhelming. But this is why we
do this show. This is why it's called thrilling threat.
Because there are always cracks in the wall. There are
always people pulling at the threads.
Speaker 1: And sometimes those people build tools to help the rest
of us pull them too.
Speaker 2: Which brings us finally to Jmail.
Speaker 1: I promise we would talk about this. I have to
admit I went to the site myself this morning just
to see it.
Speaker 2: And what did you see? What was your first impression?
Speaker 1: It looks like a Google product. I mean, it's that clean,
simple blue and white interface. The name is jmail. It
was created by two people, Luke Eigel and Riley Woltz.
Speaker 2: It's a brilliant piece of design. Yeah, it's user interface
design as a form of political protest.
Speaker 1: It really is, because usually when you get access to
a big document leak, it's a total mess, right, it's
thousands of blurry pdapps and a chaotic folder structure, feels
like homework. But jmail. Jmail makes the entire Epstein archive
look and feel and function exactly like your personal email.
Speaker 2: And that's the genius of it. It completely democratizes the investigation.
You don't need to be a DOJ lawyer with some
fancy forensic software anymore. All you need to know is
how to use a search bar.
Speaker 1: I did it. I typed in gates just one word
and instantly it populates subject lines, pop up meeting, dinner,
follow up on proposal. It doesn't feel like you're examining
evidence in a federal case. It feels like you're snooping
on a coworker's computer.
Speaker 2: And that feeling, that slightly voyeuristic, slightly dirty feeling, that's
incredibly powerful. It breaks down the wall between you and
the subject. It puts you in the room with the monster.
Speaker 1: Creators actually put a warning on the homepage. They say,
using it will leave you with an unsettling, creepy feeling,
and they are one hundred percent right.
Speaker 2: It's that banality of evil all over again. You'll see
an email from Epstein about, you know, getting his toaster fixed,
and then the very next email is who I'm setting
up a billion dollar deal with a head of state?
All in the same font. It flattens the hierarchy of
evil into this mundane searchable list.
Speaker 1: Why did they build it? What was a catalyst?
Speaker 2: Accountability? Drop Site News partnered with them, and the reason
they gave is that they believe the Department of Justice
under Trump was deliberately slowing down the release of the
remaining files.
Speaker 1: So the fear was that the most incriminating stuff was
being held back or released so slowly that we'd all
lose interest and move on exactly.
Speaker 2: So jmail is an active defiance against that. It's a
way to weaponize public curiosity. If you dump three million
files in a ZIP folder on some obscure government website,
almost no one will look. But if you put those
same three million files behind a simple Gmail like search bar,
everyone will look. You're effectively crowdsourcing the biggest criminal investigation
of our time.
Speaker 1: It's a tool for the curious, for sure, but it's
also a weapon against that ecosystem of silence you were
talking about.
Speaker 2: It is. It's a digital thread pillar.
Speaker 1: Okay, so let's try to tie these two massive, heavy
threads together. We've gone from the penthouses of Manhattan and
the secure boardrooms of Palaneer all the way to the
rubble filled streets of Gaza. We've talked about tech billionaires
and starving children. What is the connective to shoe? What
holds these two seemingly separate stories together.
Speaker 2: I think, if you step all the way back, both
of these stories are about one single powerful concept, impunity.
Impunity absolutely think about the Epstein case. What you're seeing
is a textbook example of how power, money, and connective
utility can shield a predator for decades. He was useful
to the state, He was useful to powerful people in
the intelligence counity, he was useful to the tech sector.
And because he was useful, the law simply did not
apply to him in the same way it applies to
you or me.
Speaker 1: He was a protected asset. He was.
Speaker 2: And then you look at Gaza and you see impunity
on a state level. You see how the total control
of a narrative and the total physical control of a
border allows a government to operate without consequences. It allows
them to redefine the word cease fire until it means
the opposite of what it says. It allows seventy one
thousand deaths to be treated as a rounding error.
Speaker 1: It all comes down to controlling the flow of information.
Speaker 2: Yes, the truth in our world isn't usually hidden in
a lock safe with a laser grid. It's hidden in
a pile of paperwork that's too big and too boring
for anyone to read. Or it's hidden behind a concrete
wall that no journalist is allowed.
Speaker 1: To cross until now, until a tool like jmail or
a deep dive investigation like the one from Al Jazeera
just kicks the door open a crack.
Speaker 2: That's the hope, isn't it. Impunity can only survive in
the dark.
Speaker 1: That, for me is the thrilling takeaway today. The threads
are always there. You just have to be willing to
pull on them, even if they're covered in grime, even
if they lead to people you once admired, like a
Noam Chomsky, even if they lead to some really uncomfortable
truths about who your own government considers its allies.
Speaker 2: You have to be willing to look at those uncomfortable
connections to ask the hard questions, why is a private
American surveillance company being discussed on a phone call between
a convicted sex offender and a former Israeli prime minister?
Why does a ceasefire include five hundred dead bodies in
just four months?
Speaker 1: So I have a question for you, for everyone and listening.
We've talked a lot today about how media narratives can
shape our reality. So I ask you, do you trust
the label cease fire when the casualty count just keeps
ticking up? What does that word even mean to you anymore?
Speaker 2: And on that other darker thread.
Speaker 1: Regarding Epstein, if you had access to jmail right now,
and you do, it's out there on the web, who
is the very first person you would search for? And
more importantly, are you prepared for what you might find? Because,
as we've learned today, the names on that list, they
might just break your brain a little.
Speaker 2: That's a dangerous search bar, but maybe a necessary one.
Speaker 1: We want to hear what you think. Please leave a comment,
tell us what your theory is about the Israel angle blackout.
Why do you think the American media was so eager
to chase the Russia story for years but is so
terrified of this one.
Speaker 2: I'll definitely be reading those comments. It's a conversation we
have to have because it's pretty clear that mainstream news
isn't going to have it for us.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, keep pulling the threads. You never know what's going
to unravel. We'll see you next time on Thrilling Threads