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Part Three: How Jeffrey Epstein Helped Build the Modern World

February 24, 2026·1 hr 6 min·5 clips

Epstein used Norway's former prime minister to pitch Vladimir Putin on making Bitcoin Russia's Sputnik.

The cold open starts tired and hostile. The host calls the series a Jeffrey Epstein podcast extravaganza, then drags the modern world into the room as the thing on trial. Andrew T joins as the guest who says he is part of it under protest. The first joke is simple and bleak: everyone is stuck participating in modern life under protest, mostly because beds exist and obligations keep winning. That is the tone. Comfort is scarce, society seems badly designed, and Epstein is one of the bad people tied to how this world got built. The main bit is Bitcoin. A question about whether state and federal governments might turn against crypto leads to Epstein's answer about Bitcoin's confused identity. He names the mess pretty directly. Currency, property, architecture, payment system, transparent ledger, anonymous promise: the host sits with how Bitcoin was sold as too many things at once, and too many of those things do not fit together. Then the answer gets uglier. Epstein compares Bitcoin's category confusion to gender classification, which the host reads as revealing, not just weird. The argument turns dry and cutting. Bitcoin cannot be every liberating, anonymous, transparent, anti-government thing its boosters claimed it was, and the host bluntly calls that contradiction a con. The gender pivot hangs around. In 2014, the host says, Epstein is thinking about gender's loosening boxes while also thinking about crypto's unstable category claims. Later in Epstein's life, the host says, he becomes a big opponent of trans rights and helps seed that world. So the fragment feels nasty but useful. Epstein is watching cultural and financial categories shift, and the host reads that through fraud, classification, and backlash. The closing beat stays exhausted. Andrew T calls the whole thing bizarre, pain becomes the joke, and part four lands less like a victory lap than another grim obligation.

As heard by us

The host reads a 2014 Epstein email about Bitcoin and follows it somewhere most coverage hasn't.

Part Three of Behind the Bastards' Epstein series centers on a single document: a 2014 email in which Epstein mapped Bitcoin's internal contradictions onto the emerging conversation about gender identity.

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Why you'd press play

If the Epstein files feel abstract, this episode has the one email that makes them concrete.

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