Murtaza Hussain: And that's why I think actually, you know, the real Epstein story is not to downplay the sexual crimes he committed. I think we all know that now though. But the real story is this actually, that he was basically a freelance, you could say operative on behalf of the Israeli government, perhaps other governments.

Steve Hsu: Right. So I, I wanna drill down into the, the, the, the sort of new aspect of this that you guys covered in depth. I do wanna say, from my perspective, the real story, the one that I think the firewall is still protecting the dam is still, you know, hasn't broken yet on this, is whether Epstein was blackmailing, you know, figures like Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, top US political figures and possibly on behalf of foreign interests.
And I think that's, that's the, the most radioactive story here and the, the main reason why, you know, there's still such resistance to this coming out. If it was just some rich men preying on young women. I think that could have come out right. The speaker of the house would not have said like, our whole political system could collapse if this came out or there are huge national security implications if this came out.

Welcome to Manifold. My guest today is Murtaza Hussain, a journalist with Drop Site News. Murtaza, welcome to the show.

Murtaza Hussain: Thanks for having me, Steve.

Steve Hsu: It's great to have you on. I was on your show, I think it was over the summer maybe. Your beat is kind of national security, if I'm not mistaken. And, and on that podcast we talked about US China competition.

Murtaza Hussain: Yeah, it was excellent. That day was summer time, time flies. It was around the time of the, well, it was like actually late fall, maybe it was around the time of the Chinese military parade. And it was interesting. It, it was a good podcast, so I'm glad to have talk to you again.

Steve Hsu: Great. Yeah, sorry. Got the, the dates wrong. The time just flies. I can't keep track of anything anymore. I totally by coincidence just happened to notice that you guys at Drop Site broke some stories. Jeffrey Epstein and wanted to just touch base with you on that broad topic.
But before we get into it, I would like maybe you to tell my audience a little bit about Drop Site News, because I'm a big supporter of alternative media.
I think the corporate or establishment media really doesn't cover all kinds of things that are really important to should be important to American and international listeners. So tell us how Drop Site was founded and, and what your sort of mission statement is.

Murtaza Hussain: Sure. And first of all, let me just say thank you for having me on, because part of the, the warped media environment and the so social control that they use to operate it is like selectively ignoring certain stories and not acknowledging them in the public record, regardless if they're true or not, just to, to maintain a sense of political control.
So he's kind of, conversations and alternative media are, are super important to, to break out of that paradigm. But, but Drop Site News, it was founded about a year ago. It's an independent news organization, very small. There's only maybe about seven or eight of us maybe seven or six, seven, something like that.
Very, very small number of us working here. It's funded on Substack. We have some donors too, individuals for the vast majority if it's funded by people paying a small substack monthly fee. It's a publication focused on broadly speaking, conflict and war and espionage and so forth. And, you know, we travel for the job.
I was in Syria earlier this year. We have colleagues who were in, Palestine or you know, all over the world pretty much. And we filed dispatches from war Zones, Ukraine anywhere you can think of in the course of it. So, you know, we're, it's, it's a spinoff of a publication, which I was also an original employee of called The Intercept, which is what was founded to do the Edward Snowden leaks.
And then literally evolved into more like a. Con conventional liberal left publication. Then we left me and my colleagues and found a Drop Site, which is much more narrowly focused on, you know, war and conflict and, and geopolitics per se. So yeah, that's a short story of drop site and we have about a hundred half a million subscribers now.
So it's growing pretty rapidly and, pretty healthily. And then, yeah, we've been covering the most recently, the Jeffrey Epstein saga.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. You know, I, I think that, um, a small group but of talented, really committed people, you can still move the needle in today's environment. Through the very startups that I'm involved in, I regularly communicate with establishment reporters at ft or Wall Street Journal or whatever that cover, say, genomics or AI or something.
But honestly, like, I think establishment media is so both lazy and also distorted for kind of strategic reasons. And so I think guys like you, even though you're a small team, you could just have a huge impact. You could, you could go out there and, and really cover things in depth that need to be covered that way.

Murtaza Hussain: That's actually the great thing about the current technological environment where a lot of the overhead institutional overhead that required to do reporting has sort of been you know, eliminated, like making video and broadcasting and does, anyone can do that. Everyone's doing it publishing to a broad platform.
Anyone can do it. So there's a lot of bad that goes along with it, but, you know, there's a lot of good such that you don't need a gigantic building full of people to do what Only the New York Times, or only Ft or so forth could do some time ago. And now that's actually highlighting even more plainly the shortcomings of those institutions and what, how much they don't do with their resources oftentimes.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. You know, I mean, look at me. I'm just, I'm some professor who, you know, mainly does physics and AI stuff. But here I am, I get a, I get to have a podcast channel just by, you know, using the, in this case we're on the Riverside platform. By the way, I, I, I do know the founder of Subtack, so I don't know how aware he is of you guys, but you know, I think he would support what you guys are doing.
So you know, maybe that's something we can talk about offline.
let's jump into our man, Jeffrey Epstein. And you know, who, who has, has gone in and out of the news. Like, I think 10 years ago I could mention the name Jeffrey Epstein, to really even very politically aware people, who are, you know, maybe even following the minutia of what's going on in New York or in Washington DC and they wouldn't even know who Jeffrey Epstein was that 10 plus years ago. You guys broke a bunch of stories and just to set it up, if I'm not mistaken, there are really two caches of emails that contributed a lot to these stories. One is the recent release, There's a whole saga about this trump opposing it and then eventually it happening.
But then there's another set of emails, which I think came from, was it an Iranian intelligence hack of, I don't know, was it Ehud Barak's email? Maybe you can set that, the background up for us, and then tell us what, what's the most interesting stuff you learn from this information?

Murtaza Hussain: So there are actually three, so far, three separate sources of information we've been using for these stories. So one is the are the house oversight committee disclosures of Jeffrey Epstein's documents from his estate his calendars, especially, and some private communications that he'd undertaken in the last years of his life.
Those in the public record, they were released as part of this ongoing litigation and the ongoing. Political inquiry into his activities. So that's, that's one aspect. The other aspect is there is a cache of emails that Bloomberg News previously had exclusively, which Drop Site also has now, which were emails from his Yahoo Mail account.
He had, he had many different email accounts, but he had a particular account on Yahoo, which, you know, there, there, there's about 18,000 messages in there. The, it's, I don't really know if this, like what's, you know, what he used it for specifically, but the message, like the, the broad diversity, I'll, I'll get into that. So he kind of segmented his conversations, but, you know, we've been going through for the past week, and it's basically a lot of messages from 2006, 2019, but it wasn't the full scope of the activity in that time. It was some number of things he was doing, uh, using this address. And then finally the, the inbox you referred to, which is the, uh, a hacked email inbox, not of Epstein, but of Israeli former Israeli Prime Minister and former Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak.
And in those emails, there are significant mayor years of conversations between Barak. Epstein, and this was in the period that Barack was just leaving, his defense minister role 2013 and slightly before that as well too. He was in touch with Epstein. And so a lot of our stories have drawn upon that Barack inbox in conjunction with the house oversight releases, and especially the calendars because they allow you to cross reference and understand what's going on in those emails.
It's extremely revealing for reasonable talk about, The origins of that in Barack inbox, it's not totally clear. We have some speculation of what it is. It was claimed by a group, a pro-Palestinian hacking group called Al, and they had claimed sometime, you know, a few months ago, sorry, I think it was actually a few years ago, because the, the inbox is all cut off in 2016.
So I think that hack actually happened a long time ago, but it was dumped on a website called Distributed Denial of Secrets, which is like a predecessor, sorry, preor. It's a successor organization, the WikiLeaks, and they have all these hacks in different places. These have been sitting up there for a while.
They've been sitting on there. On distribute denial secrets, people can go look at them. There's not just Barak, there was emails from a former Israeli ambassador of the un, Ron Prosor and a few other Israeli generals, a personal account for hack to put on A-D-D-O-S. So, but you know, only, it was only Barak who had this very, very long, correspond with Epstein years long.
And it was known that Barak knew Epstein that had been reported and, you know, in the context of their personal relationship and allegations of sexual exploitation, things like this. But what these emails show is something much more interesting, I think, and we'll talk about it. But basically his, the long arc of his ties with Epstein and what they were doing together for many, many years.

Steve Hsu: Just to clarify a couple questions about the, specifically the email situation. So, are there people who claim the Barak hacked emails are not real or has it more or less been established beyond reasonable doubt that those are real?

Murtaza Hussain: So at this point, I don't think anyone's claiming they're not real because we went through, there's actually several things happened first. They're actually first reported on by Reason Magazine. Someone did a story on them earlier this year about Epstein's ties. To the, like, spyware world generally.
It was kind of a very high level story. But that was reported and that reporter went through independent process of verification. And then we went through independent process of verification, talking to people in the emails verifying non-private information, sorry, non-public information that was privately in there.
And, and then a, now another thing has happened in the past two weeks or so, that the House Oversight Committee has released its cache of Epstein's Communications. And they happened to overlap with the communications with Barak. So those emails, they're all in both things. So that was the kind of the third you know, nail in the verification. So I think at this point it's pretty solid.

Steve Hsu: Awesome now. I read extensively in the most recent Gmail release. I don't think I've looked at the Yahoo stuff. Is there a qualitative difference in terms of who he was communicating with through those different email accounts?

Murtaza Hussain: So the Yahoo Mail that has not been made public to, for everyone to see yet. Bloomberg has a copy, but they never share with anybody and they never publish online. But now we have them, uh, through D-D-D-O-S received them and they give us access to them, and we have a, a cache of them. So, you know, we prob we're gonna try to make them public so people can go through them themselves.
The issue is that, uh, you know, obviously one issue in these emails is that this is a period of his life when Epstein was very involved in sex trafficking and he seemed like he was involved in this throughout his life. But he was using this email at least for a certain period, extensively to engage in that behavior.
So to just dump it online, I think maybe this is part of the reason Bloomberg hasn't done it. You know, you could imperil people's privacy. You could you know, further victimize people, inadvertently by doing so. So for us to do that, we'd have to vet them very thoroughly, which we're gonna try to do and then see if it's safe that we can release it publicly if thereafter. But then, you know, I think people will get a lot out of it. 'cause there are other things going on there too. But you know, that's the, the barrier and impediments to sharing them publicly, at least to date.
Steve Hsu: So I, I think as we, before we start taping, I mentioned to you that, uh, I'm sort of a, it's a little bit of a joke, but I fancy myself an Epstein scholar because even 20 years ago I knew people who knew Epstein and Epstein had a certain reputation in finance because he exhibited wealth as if he were a one to 10 billionaire.
But no one ever knew how he made his money. Nobody traded with him. All the trading, big trading desks, desks on Wall Street at the big banks and hedge funds never traded with him. So there was always a mystery, like, how did this guy make his money? So, so there was a lot of fascination with him and also through the physics community.
He w he had a genuine interest actually. In frontier science and physics. And so there were a lot of people I knew who had gone to his island or knew him and, and they were in the email, the Gmail cash that became public. But I'm curious in the parts of the emails that overlap chronologically, is he using sort of only the Gmail to communicate with one set of people and there's a completely disjoint set of people that are in the Yahoo messages? Or has he just got two email accounts that he's using all the time? Can you just say something about that?

Murtaza Hussain: You know, I, I don't fully, I think we don't know the exact scope of it, but he had many email addresses the same. And he had seen me, I've only seen a few of them, but Ike, you know, we've discovered like, you know, more inboxes and so forth that he used. What he specifically segmented them for. I'm not a hundred percent clear, some of them, but ambiguous.
One of them is called JEE vacation. One is called JE Project. I think one was called like JE iTunes or something, and Little Saints, you know, little JE or something like that you know, the littlest, something like the, these, he had multiple different emails, which he would sometimes forward his own emails to a different box as well, too.
Use Gage in some sort of skullduggery with these emails. And I have seen there are differences. And you know, what he used them for. But the JEE vacation email, we don't really have that through the lens of his communications there with Barak. So one could surmise that based on what we see of what we've seen so far, at least, and it's provisional kind of conclusion, it seemed like the J EEE vacation email may have been more used for his global espionage and back channel diplomacy activities.
That's the impression one gets from seeing his correspond to Barak. Whereas the J eee project emails may have dealt more with his dealings with academia and his sex trafficking and his communications with his lawyer and so forth. But again, I can't know that for sure until, and unless we get the full cash of the JEE vacation emails. But that is what seems from the outside.
Steve Hsu: Got it. Okay.
Maybe we should move on to Ehud Barak. So, you know, I, I remember years ago seeing photos of Barak coming and going from Epstein's mansion, and sometimes he would wear a, I forgot what these things are called Kafi. He had something to disguise his face, but the, but the paparazzi caught him coming in and out of there regularly.
And, and even with a girl, I think at one point so I think it was known that he and Epstein were close and that he stayed at the residence, just off of Central Park. Also that they, they were involved in business. Maybe tell us what, what are the new things that you learned recently about this?
Murtaza Hussain: So this is a profoundly interesting topic, like everything you said we've reported, but also what you said about the photos and the stories we saw. 'cause I saw those stories years ago too. Before I get into our stories, there's a very important domestic Israeli political context in the story, which is only gonna become more salient, I think, and to becoming salient in the last 24 hours even so as well.
But basically, Barak was somebody who was like kind of on the left of Israel, the center left of the Israeli political establishment. And he had deep, you know, alienation and rivalry with the people currently in power in Israel, uh, in Netanyahu and the Likud party and so forth. He was more on the labor block.
So, you know these stories about Barak. This does not mean they're not true. It's just that it happens. Like there's these very aggressive stories about him alleging his involvement in you know, sex trafficking with Epstein and you know, sexual assault and so forth. There was the story you mentioned the daily male story, which, you know, actually he was not, and this is the psychological thing they did. He was not actually with the women in those photos, but they just put some women who were leaving the house maybe roughly the same time, maybe not in the same headline with him to make it seem that he'd just come out of an orgy or something at Epstein's house. But you know, it was kind of like interesting because actually, you know, he, maybe it was doing that, but that was not exactly clear from that.
And then very recently, I think like a month ago Virginia Giuffre her book came out, which was one of the victims of Epstein. And in the book she alleges a prime minister, an unnamed prime minister raped her and very graphically and so forth, but she doesn't actually name him. But you know, it could be him.
It seems like it's very strong, circumstantial evidence. It could be him. But she never says that explicitly. But the New York Post, also a very right-wing newspaper, which is very pro-ISIS, Israel only. They like put Barak's photo in the, in the story about this and like, you know, basically drew the conclusion that she never drew fearlessly without fear of defamation or whatever.
It could be there. So, you know, these publications, the Mail and the Post and so forth, they're kind of more aligned with these Israeli, right? So they love this story because they love the idea of tearing it down, Ehud Barak, regardless, even if it's true, they just would embrace it in a way they would not, because they seem as a political rival.
So this is kind of the subtext, and the subtext is becoming more and more salient now as the Israeli media starts taking note of the story. But, you know, our stories are actually not really about, Ehud Barak's putative involvement in sex trafficking. They're about something totally different, which the media has not covered at all, which I think is the real Epstein story, which is Epstein and Barack, including during the time that Barack was defense minister in Israel and likely, we only have the emails from 2012, 2016, most for the most part of their communications, and he was defense minister until 2013. We, that relationship that start at the 2012, it was clearly, you know, midstream, we caught it. They had a very close relationship and. Epstein was effectively working for Barak, working with Barak, I would say actually to further the goals of the Israeli security establishment Israeli intelligence linked tech and surveillance firms, and helping Barak Corrupt conduct back channel diplomacy on behalf of the Israeli government.
So he was somebody who I don't believe people have asked me, and they've said even before we write writing about this, he was, was he a Mossad agent? I don't think he was a Mossad agent. He was something very different. He was somebody who through his relationships with Israeli elites and elite and other countries in Russia and the US and Europe and elsewhere, Africa and Middle East he was somebody who would act as an independent actor supporting Israeli strategic goals, and Barak, into the correspondence would rely on Epstein to help him accomplish these goals, but also help him make money. He would help him once he left defense ministry become a very wealthy, private contractor selling Israeli surveillance and security tools to foreign countries over many years. And that's really what our story's about. And that's why I think actually, you know, the real Epstein story is not to downplay the sexual crimes he committed. I think we all know that now though. But the real story is this actually, that he was basically a freelance, you could say operative on behalf of the Israeli government, perhaps other governments.

Steve Hsu: Right. So I, I wanna drill down into the, the, the, the sort of new aspect of this that you guys covered in depth. I do wanna say, from my perspective, the real story, the one that I think the firewall is still protecting the dam is still, you know, hasn't broken yet on this, is whether Epstein was blackmailing, you know, figures like Bill Gates or Bill Clinton, top US political figures and possibly on behalf of foreign interests.
And I think that's, that's the, the most radioactive story here and the, the main reason why, you know, there's still such resistance to this coming out. If it was just some rich men preying on young women. I think that could have come out right. The speaker of the house would not have said like, our whole political system could collapse if this came out or there are huge national security implications if this came out. I don't think Randy, John sorry. Johnson would've said that if it weren't something more akin to what I just mentioned. But we, we can get to that later. 'cause I know that wasn't the focus of your recent investigations. I think I can shed a little bit of light in on what you guys recently covered for two reasons.
So my first startup which was founded back in 2000, so 25 years ago, um, was in encryption and information security. And we had, as one of our investors, the CIA Venture fund. So we were in that world, and I know many Israelis who are in that world for a very specific reason. In Israel, if you're a high school student. You're one of the smartest kids in Israel. You test extremely high. You can, rather than serve in the ordinary military, you can get into two different programs. One called Alpi and one called Unit 8,200. Tal Piot is a little more focused on sort of basic research. It's physics, math, computer science majors.
8,200 is a little more focused on signals intelligence. So specifically like communications and spying and cient. Both of those programs allow you to go to university and get a very special set of degrees and training in practical defense related stuff, as well as highly theoretical, advanced stuff.
And these are the smartest kids in Israel that get into this program. The alumni from that program are very disproportionately the CEOs of tech companies coming out of Israel, and you meet them all the time in Silicon Valley, especially if you work in information security, you meet them all the time in more broadly, in other technology areas as well.
So, so that, that's a thing. And it's very common, as, you know, for someone who's had a whole life in politics. If they weren't super corrupt, they might come out of politics with really not a lot of money, like a lot less money than people. They would consider their peers, you know, globally, people they regularly deal with at meetings and conferences and things, they have way less money than those people because they've been in public service.
And often the moment they get out, they're in a hurry to rectify the situation. Like they're in a hurry to make those dollars shekels. And you can, I sort of interpret Ehud who's communications with Epstein in that vein that, look, I'm out of politics now. I wanna make some money and I'm gonna get into tech related, defense related tech and spy related tech.
And there's even an exchange where Jeffrey's like, yeah, I can help you with this. And, and he's saying, well, look, the way I interpret that sentence is a little ambiguous, but the way I interpret Aou sentence is that, Hey, I know you're good with the ladies, but what do you know about tech and, you know, introducing me to the, you know, biggest pockets of money in the wor, you know, that kind of thing. But they did get involved, and I think it's quite clear they worked together on a number of pretty big deals. And, and, and the world of money is, you know, they're just pockets of money. And if you know people, oh, those Singaporean sovereign Wealth Fund, the UAE Sovereign Wealth Fund, the Saudi Sovereign Wealth, you know, big pools of capital, you need connections.
You need introductions. Once you have those introductions, you can start working on deals. I think I have a very good sense of what that is about, that, that relation, that part of the relationship between Barak and Epstein.

Murtaza Hussain: You're absolutely right because Barak, when he left public office, as people in the US do and in Europe do, and in Israel do evidently they wanna make a lot of money, they wanna make up for the lost time of being a public servant and leveraging the connections ostensibly that they got in public life to start making money.
But, you know, it's fascinating because, you know, one thing that's interesting in the, in the emails is that there's clearly a power dynamic in the emails between Epstein and Barak. And one would think that Barak doesn't need introductions, and he's a very powerful person, one of the most powerful, influential people in the Israeli political and security establishment at that time of his generation.
But you know, in the email, it's not like he Epstein's looking up to him or trying to get his help or trying to get his attention. It's quite inverted actually. Barak is really eager for Epstein's help to make money. He needed help to make money. He needs help to make these introductions that you're talking about right now to private banks to foreign governments specific individuals are well placed there to make deals and so forth. And the, what they were doing, the mechanism that they were trying to use to help him make money was by and large the promotion of these Israeli tech and security firms and surveillance technology firms, uh, to foreign governments.
So their relationship sort of accomplished a dual purpose. It did help make Barak Barak lots of money as a, like a consultant or like a finder of appropriate clients for these companies or for countries in some cases. but also in doing so, it would help spread this technology around the world.
It would help embed the Israeli firms which are linked, or their origins are in, you know, either unit 8,200 or unit 81 in the tech infrastructure of other countries that would then later go on to sign formal security deals with Israel. And with, so far we've done five, or sorry, six stories in this archive.
We have many more stories to come, but the stories they're very emblematic in many ways. There was one deal that the Israeli government signed with Cote D'lvoire in 2014, that deal was very much engineered in the, the years leading up to it. And final culmination between Epstein and Barak, both including during a time when Barak was still defense minister, they were both meeting Cote D'lvoire officials sometimes at Epstein's house in New York.
They were working to promote these surveillance technology to Cote D'lvoire and they adopted it and it's still in place there, and they have a very good relationship stemming apart from these relationships that were built. Then another similar thing happened in Mongolia, again with the Epstein's introduction.
They create uses NGO called the International Peace Institute to help set up a relationship between Barak and a few other people in the Mongolian government, again, as a channel to create this. Sell this surveillance technology in 2017 if I signed an official deal. And the others, we have more stories like this in other countries, and especially in Africa and other places that they're doing this.
Another thing they're doing is that, there a lot of diplomacy is done through these track two or track three sort of discussions between powerful people. Epstein was like a fixer in the sense too. He was a, a story we did was he was helping Barak create a back channel between the Israeli government when Barak was out of office.
But it was a powerful private citizen to create a back channel, to express an offer to the Russian government to, for resolution, to the Syrian Civil War in 2013, to try to compel the removal of the Syrian president Bashar Alad at that time in replacement with a pro-Russian dictator who they would jointly select ostensibly.
So he was doing that and then he was also setting up meetings with the Steve Bannon and Modi in 2019 and, you know, doing all types of things. So his power influence was far beyond what one would deem a private citizen per se. And he was somebody who was more powerful than government officials or as powerful in many cases, powerful government officials while ostensibly being, you know, just a financier, quote unquote.
So, you know, these are all very fascinating sort of activities he was engaged in, which are in no way part of the mainstream public accounting of the story, which is that he was like a creepy guy and he committed sex crime. It was a me too story, basically. It's still there. New York Times discussing it this way.
And it is not to downplay the, you know, nature of the acts he committed, the crimes he committed, but this is really missing the forest for the trees here. And to your point very briefly about blackmail a story, one of the stories we did was that in Epstein's house in Manhattan. A senior Israeli military intelligence officer lived in that house for weeks at a time, according to not just the emails.
He, the schedules, his personal schedule was released by the House Oversight Committee Yoni Corin, who was Barak's chief of staff, including during the time that Barack was still defense minister. This gentleman was living in Epstein's house and his apartment in New York during also the place he was alleged to engage in sex trafficking.
So, you know, one can imagine what he was doing there, and it's not really been accounted for in any way and encourage people to read the story, and read all the details and the emails and so forth. But it would be quite easy for someone to engage. It's, it would create an environment that's conducive to the activity.
And, and finally, on this point, you know, we don't have, like, you know, it's a very extreme conclusion. We don't have like, I guess, a smoking gun per se right now, but I think that it's sort of already implied anyways, because if you are somebody who is very powerful. And you know what other powerful people are doing, the criminal or moral activities they're engaged in and you were, and even facilitating it for them, you kind of have leverage over them anyways.
You have leverage over them for that reason. And if you have ties to foreign foreign intelligence agencies, we are extremely well documented. They're staying in your house and so forth. You can use that information as a tool of even without explicit coercion exercising influence. So was he coercing people as well too? I think there's some reason to believe that, but even without that, I think that the story that he was, the blackmail aspect of it is sort of built in, it's baked into the cake.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I think, I don't disagree with anything you said. I, I think it's important to distinguish between what I might call early stage and late stage Epstein. Okay. So the, I think the, the stories you've written and the, the recent emails that came out are kind of late stage Epstein, where the guy already has an island. He has the highest, the largest single family residence in New York City, right? Which was given to him reportedly for $1 by Les Wexner, who's one of the big mega group pro-Israel billionaires from Ohio, in this case, from Ohio. So in late stage Epstein, he knows everybody. He's going to these events like Davos.
He, he is a fun time. He's inviting you, Larry Summers and his wife to his island, Alan Dershowitz, you know, Bill Gates, et cetera, et cetera. He knows everyone. He can throw wild parties, great parties with fringe benefits. He's a man of mystery because you know, he's purportedly a financier who might actually be able to help Leon Black or somebody like that save a hundred million dollars in taxes through some fancy, you know, legal maneuvers in Cayman Islands or something like this.
So there's no reason why. If I were a big hedge fund manager or I were minister of defense of some European country, if I met Epstein in a party, why I, I would get to know this guy. He's a very interesting guy. Smart guy has beautiful ladies hanging around with him. Super rich obviously has his own plane, so that's late stage Epstein.
And, and sure he might've had more to offer Ehud Barak coming out of politics than vice versa in terms of making money. Right? So I think that's all, I think you're totally spot on with that stuff. But how did Epstein get there? Right? You have a guy who was teaching, who didn't complete college, was teaching math and physics at Dalton, worked at a couple banks, maybe got fired, not sure what actually happened.
Somehow he went from that to living a one to 10 billionaire lifestyle. And in that early phase, what happened? And, you know, that early phase does overlap somewhat with, you know early photographs taken with Bill Clinton and, and so already some big figures, right? So, so there, there, there's a whole timeline here we're really talking about.
You know, I think when he was hanging out with Trump the most was at the nineties probably, right? So we're talking about a 30, 35 year arc for this guy. To the extent that he might've been running a kind of honeypot operation to accumulate, blackmail leverage, whether for himself or for foreign powers, that was more early Epstein, I think, I think. But later on I think he was just living it up and just doing whatever he wanted and was already probably regarded as a resource. So, you know, if I were the Russian secret police and I wanted some information, I might just send a guy to talk to Epstein, right? 'cause he knows everybody and he might be able to help. So, so I just wanna distinguish between the, the, it's a 35 ish year arc for this.

Murtaza Hussain: And actually this is something I'm really interested in your take Steve as well too. As someone who was like followed Epstein and taken interest in for many years because this early part of his life, I've also been looking into it and there is a degree, like intrigue is like putting it lightly, but there's like a, he was, he was like, he was involved in some way perhaps in Iran Contra, and he had ties with AAN Khashoggi and so forth during that time.
And there is like, you know, there's different working thesis. I think a thesis may be that he was like a very proficient money launderer. And money laundering is a tool that is useful for intelligence agencies. So we're one to yeah. So if we want to be engaged in that, that could open a lot of doors.
And there's also this organization there's actually, I think Pakistani bank was called BCCI which was also involved in a very institutional way in the sort of crime and also money laundering and all these divorce financial crimes, but also sex trafficking. It was involved in sex trafficking of women to golf Arabs and other people.
So, you know, there seems like a symmetry there between Epstein's rise and the his tactics and the, the things these people are doing, and then Khashoggi and others that may make sense. And also is a relationship with Les Wexner because, you know, Les Wexner, you know, he became his billionaire and then he gave the family foundation or something like that was given over to Epstein.
So basically the fortune was given over to this guy. Who gives over their family the billion dollar fortune, power of attorney to some, anyone other than maybe your son or something. You've given it to him. It's, it is all very strange. And you know, I, I'm really curious your take, but there's something in here is like the mafia or something as
well too. There's like a mafia esque, the whole Paris state way that they operated and all this stuff in the murky origins is interesting, but I'm very curious your analysis of it.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So I love to okay. First of all, I, I'd like to maybe send you down a rabbit hole for your future research with a guy called Ari Ben Menashe, who's very well known figure in, I mean, he literally was held in federal prison, the same facility where Epstein was later killed, or suicide. Ben Menashe spent a year in that federal prison under charges from the federal government, US Federal Government related to Iran Contra, and he was an Israeli intelligence operative.
I, I'll go into that in a second. And he, he's, he's made public statements about what Epstein at the time was doing.
I think that most people don't understand. Like, imagine that I'm just a hustler, I'm a grifter and I'm just trying to make my money in Manhattan, and I get to know a bunch of rich people and maybe I, I have access to girls and I get some of them in trouble with the girls and I blackmail them or something.
Right? It's a very risky position for me to be in, to play that game because these are very rich people. They can hire private investigators to deal with me. They can hire ex-cop to come and rough me up. They can do whatever they want to me at what, what's my protection to be able to operate in that game.
Okay. Very tough game to play. But let's suppose I have an Intel connection. So in the, in the way of Russians would talk about is you have a roof. In the post-Soviet era when things were really rough in Russia, people would, all businessmen had to have a roof that, that would be some mafia or intelligence or state, organization that's protecting me.
Otherwise I get extorted by other people. So if, if you're working with an intel service, like let's say you are providing this compromise to an intel service, the rough stuff they can handle. Because if, if, if, let's say I'm blackmailing some hedge fund billionaire and I'm just like, look, you slept with this girl at my house would hate for your wife Janet, who I love to find out about this.
How would you like to invest in this new fund that I'm setting up in Cayman Islands right? And if the guy's like, Hey, I know what you're up to. Don't you think you could fucking blackmail me and I'm gonna send some guys over to talk to you tomorrow? Former NYPD guys, right? If I'm by myself, that's gonna be a big threat to me. What can Epstein do against these guys? But if I actually work for an Intel service, they can help me with that rough stuff, right? They, they're used to that. They have people former, I mean, what do Intel services do in, in foreign countries? They have former Special forces people who do wet work, who, you know, I, I, I just can just be protected much more than just a, a person standing by myself.
So my theory, again, I don't have any specific corroboration for this, is that if, but if you want to play this game, you're best off pairing up, whether it's with the mafia or it's with State Security, or somebody who's willing to use violence or at least protect you with the threat of violence. If some hedge fund guy says to me, I'm sending over some guys to rough you off.
I'm like, Hey, you know, I work with Mossad. If, if, or I work with CIA, if you wanna rough me up, I think you're gonna get the worst end of this. I don't think your family wants to deal with that either. Right? So I think that's the missing piece that a lot of people don't realize. Like it could just be the mafia.
It could be, look, I'm, I have mafia connections. Don't mess with me, either pay me off, or I'm gonna tell your wife I'm gonna release these photos to your wife right? But if you think you can threaten me with violence, hey, you can talk to my mafia friends about this right? So I think that's a missing piece of this whole thing that people don't realize.
Like most legitimate businesses are never gonna flirt with violence. They're just not gonna go there. But if you're an Intel service or a mafia like entity that does go there, different story. Different story that no normal person like you or me ever wants to deal with, right? Because if they threaten your family, what are you gonna do here?
I'm just gonna cave right? So anyway, I think that's, that's a part of it.
Now, this Ari Ben Menashe story. So, so Ari Ben Menashe was charged. He was one of the people that was actually charged in Iran Contra, and he was held in federal prison. He was acquitted actually, if you go and look it up, he was actually acquitted because he claimed he was working for a US allied government, Israel, the Israeli Intelligence services, and that that was why he was acquitted.
And this is all in the federal record. That guy who knew Robert Maxwell Ghislaine Maxwell's father who, who was known to also, you know, collaborate in some way with Mossad Arab and Menashe just said openly, has said repeatedly that in that phase of his life, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were involved in honeypot compromat operations for Israeli intelligence.
He just flat out says it. So anyway, I, again, I don't know, just epistemically, I don't know what's true or false here. It's all, you know, it's very tough to figure out what's true or false when there's spies and things involved. But, that's, that's a particular direction, which it's not difficult to pick up that thread if you're investigating.
And then, you know, it's never gonna be mentioned by establishment media because it's very, very embarrassing. It's very embarrassing to think like Bill Clinton, somebody might've had kompramat on Bill Clinton while he was president of the United States or something like this, right. So, yeah.
Murtaza Hussain: Yeah. You know, with that, that very alarming quote you said about Mike Johnson, that this could imp the entire political system or destroy the entire political system. Imagine what that could be in reference to. It'd have to be something like that, that

Steve Hsu: I mean, this guy, Mike Johnson is serious guy. He is like the third, in some sense, the third most powerful guy in the United States, right? And he just says this to the press, like, what, what's he, what could he possibly mean by that? You can't say like, oh, you know, this P Diddy thing, if it gets out, it's a threat to national security.
It's like, what? You know, P. Diddy was doing the stuff with underage girls and rappers and whatever. What does that have to do with national security? What does that have to do with the collapse of our political system for, for the third most powerful political figure in, in the United States just a few days ago?
Right. To literally say that about the Epstein files to the, the real media, the establishment media. But no one follows up on it, right? No. Like only you follow up on it right? It's just insane. Right.

Murtaza Hussain: It's, you know, this crazy part of it is that these emails are sitting there, like, all this information is publicly available. One could deduce it. We're doing it with very limited resources and budget. Just a few people putting it together. The New York Times and the you whole building of people in Midtown, Manhattan Washington Post, all financial times, they are just not interested in. They're actively, and I would say egregiously ignoring it, in fact. And a very funny thing happened the other day and it played out a game today as well too. It continued some, the person who actually broke the matrix about this a little bit was Benjamin Netanyahu. Because 24 hours ago, I actually on you know, some Friday night roughly Benjamin Netanyahu shared an article by the publication Jacobin, the left wing publication in the United States, which referenced the drop site news reporting about this bar ized to Epstein what they were doing.
And in doing that, you know, he kind of like gave the first official sort of acknowledgement that this exists and this is real. And I think he shared the article. Because, you know, he's doesn't like Barak and it's like some sort of like tying someone to Jeffrey Epstein in any capacity just doesn't look very good.
So he shared it for his own domestic political reasons, but in doing so, he gave a broader recognition to everybody in the world that this is something which, you know, unofficial public figure in acknowledging now. So now there's been all this fighting about it between Natali Bennett and Barack, sorry.
And, and, and, and Netanyahu over the subject. And at recently the Halifax, the security conference on Saturday. Saturday a journalist actually asked Barak about the subject. He asked him about, you know, there's this story and Net shared this, and they say all the stuff about you and Epstein and so forth.
And, you know, Barak said was, you know, he didn't refer to drops, he refer to ate. It's very antisemitic publication and it's all lies and things like this. But it's like, you know, bringing this volcano, which everyone's trying to ignore, it's just sort of like erupting. Regardless. So I think they, their strategy the people who are trying to engineer this into a limited hangout, the US political system, by not acknowledging it, suppressing whatever's in the files and the one refusing to acknowledge anything that comes out outside of that, like our reporting and the New York Times will not acknowledge it because then it doesn't exist.
And then trying to keep it at bay that that way. But it's a little harder to control the narrative in this era. It's possible, but it's harder because you have to control many more points of access. So you can control, you can have a sufficient agreement in New York Times, but you can't control every subset page who, every person who may dig something up.
And that's the dam that's sort of breaking right now, I think. And you know, to your point, I don't know how deep it goes. It can go much deeper. And I think that what you said about Ariba Menashe and the history of Epstein and so forth I do think there's something there. And if that does come out, it will be very, it would be unbelievably humiliating for the current political elite.
It would impugn the credibility. It would call everything into question, basically, if that would've come to life. So I would imagine they would go to extraordinary lens to stop that. And there are going extraordinary lens, but it's not really sufficient. Actually, right now, it's still, it's still happening that, that the revelations are coming and, you know, we're reporting on it, but others are gonna report on it too.
It's, it's a fact now. It's gone too far. So, you know, we have to see how they continue to try to respond to it.

Steve Hsu: I, I would just encourage you to keep pushing on the story because I, I feel like it's a, you know, having been. Sort of like amateur investigator into this particular story for many years decades actually. I, I feel it's close to where it could break now. Maybe, maybe it's not gonna break because maybe I think, I think Trump ginned up a justice department investigation of Clinton Epstein connections.
And so then, like, I think the Justice Department can probably like block the release of a lot of documents by claiming that, oh, there's an active invest, you know, active investigation. How sick are we of that, that term. But, it's still possible. I think some, you know, things could be blocked, but I don't know.
I think we're very close to you know, something interesting happening.

Murtaza Hussain: I agree. I agree. We're we're very close.
Hey, I, I never do this on my podcast, but I'm just gonna, I'm gonna show you, um, a picture, which is one of my favorite pictures from the era. I, you know, I'm older than you, so I, I really fully remember iran Contra and I was an adult when Iran Contra happened. And Bill Clinton, I voted twice for Bill Clinton.
He was my man. Can you guys see, can you see this

Steve Hsu: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's photo amazing,
now? I don't know how many people have seen this photo, but isn't this one of the most amazing photos all time?
incredible photo. What year was this photo taken?
I don't know. But judging from that monitor, I'm guessing it's a nineties photo.
Crazy, huh?
an amazing photo, unbelievable expression and everything
Maybe I should learn how to do like the, introduce more visual content into my podcast. Maybe I'll get more views, but. So, yeah.
So to me, what could happen next? There are different possible branches we could end up on. One branch is that they managed to suppress it because now there's a DOJ investigation. And so even though this built this, this thing passed in Congress, there's still gonna be able to withhold a bunch of stuff. And maybe that'll happen. On the other hand, maybe stuff will get out and I think it could be, I think the real, again, I'm speculating here. I'm not saying I have this with high conviction, I know this with high conviction, but it seems like the US Israel relationship is what's sort of hanging in the balance here. And if it is revealed that there, you know, Israeli intelligence was using kompramat against us politicians or something like that, that would just be pretty devastating, right?
If that came out. And so I think that to me is a, a possible version of what happened in the early Epstein days and why this stuff is so tightly blocked. That's my hypothesis.

Murtaza Hussain: I agree. And you know, it's funny because I think that they would take extraordinary lengths to prevent the release of that information because so many people are invested in that relationship and just how damning that would be. I think that they would, do whatever they could to stop that. Well, you know, a funny thing is that I think that whoever's doing the releases. They made some errors because not just like mis in inconsistent redactions, but you know, the thing with yoni corrin like that is actually, you gave like a huge data point there. Yoni, Korin, the, the military intelligence officer that was in the house oversight release, that was in his, his calendars. So the government released information and they redacted the other stuff, but they release information showing that a serving chief of staff to the Israeli defense minister was living in Epstein's apartments and, you know, military intelligence officer living in his apartment on numerous occasions, including while he was the Barak, was the defense minister.
That is an astonishing detail to release. So I have to think that it was released maybe by accident or, you know, I don't know. Maybe they just, they were, I don't know what's redacted, like what's not redacted is so bad, but yeah.

Steve Hsu: Even if you put a crack team of aligned F-B-I-C-I-A people to go through all this and make sure nothing gets out that you guys are gonna seize on, mistakes are gonna be made. I mean, think of how much information is in all that stuff right? And so it's quite plausible that it's just a mistake.
And they didn't, they didn't really think about what the consequences would be. And you know, plenty of people will just say, oh, you guys are, you guys are antisemitic. Like, you know, like, you know, even noticing that the chief of staff of the. Minister of Defense of Israel was living at Epstein's Place for weeks at a time like that.

Murtaza Hussain: That alone can't be discussed. It's antisemitic, so who cares if it gets out right? That, that that's the emerging the emerging narrative about it. And uh, you know, I think it's very, it's kind of a politicized use of a serious accusation, but that is what people are trying to say without engaging the substance of it actually. So, criticisms of it will say that this is just conspiracy, Andi and so forth, but without actually talking about what was reported.
Because the details cannot be engaged with, because the details, if you engaged with the details, it's all over because, you know, it's just make it up. It's literally in the house. Oversight documents. So.
sorry, sorry to interrupt you. I just to make a joke, actually, let me state for the record, I am not antisemitic. My hero is Richard Feynman, a Jewish American physicist. And you know, you actually look a little Semitic to me, actually. Just kidding. All, most of my intellectual influences when I was growing up were Jewish. Like, that's like, it's such a spurious accusation. And you know, the drop side, our editors are Jewish. Like we have like, it's like a very, it's like a na, it's a very, it's like calling someone, it's been politicized to the point where it's like, in a communist regime you would call someone a fascist.
Like it's like that type of regime language is being used.

Steve Hsu: empty

Murtaza Hussain: it's being drained during a meaning. Yeah, it's being drained a meaning, which is very unfortunate. But you know, like, I think it's kind of like being less effective now. And you know, I, one thing I always say is that when you look at these stories and activities, one of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his, this group of people who were operating this way, it was actually ordinary Israeli people also because their country
was being used as like an operating base by this mafia to, you know, do things for their own benefit, which is not be maybe benefited a certain class of people in Israel, but certainly if you're a working class or middle class person, you had no knowledge of this. You didn't want your country to be used in this way.
You weren't benefiting from it. So, and now you're be gonna be blamed if something is like this is you, you'd be blamed collectively despite having nothing to do with it. So, you know, I will say the Israelis are also victims of this too. So it's not something that's stigmatizing a certain group or certain nationality even.
It's something which you know, it's a very class-based sort of thing and, you know, many people are victims of it, trans nationally. So, you know, I, I don't think that that line of you know, dismissing it will work because it's too well documented. You'd have to just. Nuke, the articles from the internet, they can't do that anymore anyways.
It's too late for that now too. It just, it was very voluminously detailed. And there's more, there's like a lot more to come. So, you know, I think that they'll try to ignore it and then that, that may be the next best thing. But, you know, with friends like Netanyahu, you know, maybe you will continue giving us some sort of play in that thing.
And I think that the dam is gonna burst soon and that other publications will write about it soon.

Steve Hsu: What's wild for me again, like pointing out that I'm an older guy, I grew up in the eighties. What's wild for me is that the groups that are legitimately interested in what's in this story and getting to the truth are so strongly both left and right. So on one side you have like Nick Fuentes and the late Charlie Kirk who are like.
Marjorie Taylor Greene, who were like, far right. People who want all this information to get out. But then you have Jacobin Jacobin, which is far left. Right. And it's, and so it's like, to me it's basically like old, it's old boomers who don't want to think about this. And, and like young people who actually want the, or old boomers who are just too influenced by establishment media.
And then, and then young people who actually just get their news from lots of sources, like you said. And so they, they're, they're gonna learn about this one way or the other.

Murtaza Hussain: That's a very good way. It's a generational thing in part, at least like, not exclusively, but definitely that's a part of it. Because the one thing those people share in common is that they were left and right they were at odds with, or excluded by, or dissatisfied with the previous ruling compact and establishments, and they saw hypocrisies and things they don't think are not true or they don't get, and this is just such the most glaring and, you know, ostentatious example of potential corruption and malfeasance, and I think it's punctuated because of the, you know, unrest over the Gaza war as well too, which is happening at the same time as this because the questions about the US Israeli relationship are becoming more pointed than ever, especially from the younger generation on both the left and the right.
So, you know, all these things are intersecting one another to make this like a focal point. And you know, actually the person who said something very interesting about this was Steve Bannon. And you know, Steve Bannon is like, his communications with Epstein are in they were basis of one of our stories actually with the India related story.
But he actually said at a public event that Epstein is the key to unlocking like everything, or unlocking the whole story. And that was very interesting for him to say, because, you know. I think there's a grain of truth in that, or a strong degree of truth because he is emblematic of the corruption of a certain era and a certain consensus in American politics, which, you know, some people are very interested in holding together and a lot of people are kind of seeing through at this point. And you know, Mike Johnson's right. If you do see true, at that point, it could be very injurious to the political system as a whole.

Steve Hsu: Totally agree. Let me throw out another piece of history, which is very relevant to this whole thing. Which you might be interested in, like another rabbit hole you can go down. So, but you know, as a longtime Epstein scholar, I'm, I'm steeped in this kind of stuff. So a lot of people think kompromat, the idea that people are blackmailed is just fanciful.
It doesn't really happen or that spying doesn't happen. that it's not really used in the way that people claim Epstein maybe was using it even though they were willing, half the country was willing to believe that the Russians had compromised on Donald Trump for years and years. Some of the people still believe it, right?
But, but when you bring it up in the Epstein context, they, they say it's just conspiracy theory. It's too fanciful to be true. But let me give you a real historical example, which is very famous. There's a huge Wikipedia entry on it. It's even been made into movies. It's called Salon Kitty Salon. S-A-L-O-N, Kitty Kitty's, the name of a woman.
Salon Kitty was a huge brothel operating in Berlin. And it was secretly operated by the State Security Services of the Nazi party. So there was a huge brothel on in Berlin. The Nazis used it not just to spy on foreign diplomats, rich people who passed through Berlin. They used it to spy on their own people.
So if a general came back from the eastern front and he was sleeping with some woman in the brothel, they would record every conversation. They had miles of tape. This is in 1930s and forties. They had miles of tape, audio tape of all the conversations that happened in this big building. If a general came back from the eastern front and they wanted to know if this guy was loyal to Hitler or you know, thinking some thoughts that he wasn't supposed to be thinking, they were interested in that.
They were monitoring their own people. They were monitoring foreign diplomats, foreign dignitaries, businessmen, et cetera. It's established fact that this thing ran for, for years and years and years. It's a matter of history. So the idea that no one's doing this anymore is just stupid. It's so much easier to do it now.
Then that was very advanced technology for the 1940s to record every conversation happening in every room of this building. Now I can do a trivial, I can put a little tiny, completely undetectable web camera and in a room, and you'll never know that you're being recorded. Right. So, and Epstein could have done the same.
In fact, I think the reporting, I'm curious what you think. I, I don't know how strong the reporting is, but it's been reported many times that all the rooms in his New York residents were actually wired up. So, and there was a huge, that there was a huge central control room in what used to be a bathroom on the ground floor.
I, I've read that in many accounts. I don't, just don't know how true it is. But, um, you know, so if, if that's true, then his residence was a giant Salon Kitty of Manhattan right next to Central Park.

Murtaza Hussain: I have seen that same information as well too. And you know, if you deduce the two things, intelligence agents living the extended time in your house, you know, the control room, the cameras, you know, it's a tremendous you know, I don't know the word. It's a tremendous Venn diagram of things which cross over that make it very plausible that devil exactly was doing.
Steve Hsu: I, I, I seem to recall seeing news, a news story that because of one of the civil suits, there were various victims groups that sued, I think the estate of, of Epstein or whatever in some of the civil suits, I think introduced as evidence was an inventory taken by the FBI when they raided Epstein's residence in New York.
And I've seen reporting on that. I don't remember if I've actually seen some item, like an item list, but that supposedly lists many, many binders. Information with discs. I mean, old technology, like, you know, discs maybe photographs or audio or whatever, but in, in a binder format with different, you know, pockets.
And I mean, there, there was some actual explicit reporting and that that only came out. The FBI now claims it can't locate any of that stuff. But that was reported, and I think it, it came to light because of a civil suit that somehow the court got access to this inventory of FBI inventory when they raided the house.
If I had a team of journalists, I would ask them to go look into that.

Murtaza Hussain: Hmm. That's actually very interesting. I, I'll make note of that actually.

Steve Hsu: I mean, they should, if FBI raids a residence of a prominent figure like Jeffrey Epstein and, and like, apparently they drilled the safe. I've heard that said many times that they drilled a, a very big, effectively kind of walk-in safe, huge safe. They drilled it. And surely there's an official document inventorying all this stuff they took out of the house.
Like surely that's part of like FBI or police procedure. Right? So surely those documents exist, right? So they just won't, Mike Johnson want them out.

Murtaza Hussain: Right, right. Or someone who saw the document?

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So anyway, we've, we've been on a long time and I I've, I've enjoyed this and I, I hope, I hope you guys will continue what you're doing. I think it's fantastic that at least somebody serious is, is still pushing on this door.

Murtaza Hussain: Well, Steve, I, I really appreciate you having me because part of the whole problem with this story is the, you know. It's like a, you find the matrix or something because it's like a institutional sort of consistency in a position towards it, which is that it's not happening or it's happening. This is a me too story that, you know, that's basically the story that happened and nothing else to see here.
But, you know because of the fact we have the ability to broadcast and the speak and report independently without the need for intermediaries any longer and to channels like this and drop site and whatever it's kind of makes it harder for them to, you know, have these sort of maintain a narrative, which we all know is false or at least as woefully incomplete.
So yeah, thank, thanks for having me in discussing it because it does help push back against that.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, it's been a pleasure. And let me just say one final thing, which is I don't think either you or I are downplaying the Me Too, that's suffering of the women here that were exploited. Obviously that's super important, but again, back to my point about P Diddy. The powers protecting the information about what Epstein did it, it's so vast.
P Diddy was also a me too sex exploitation kind of situation. I think there were also underage people involved in that as well. But, but the point is the disparity between how, what the forces that play to keep the Epstein information from coming to the public versus what happened with PD is it's such a disparity.
And I just can't imagine the Speaker of the house saying what he said Le I think it was less than a week ago, about the P. Diddy information right? He only said it about the Epstein information that would shake the foundations of our political system and jeopardize national security. What could he possibly have meant?
What could he po the third most powerful political figure in the United States? What could he have meant with those comments? Right. People should ask that

Murtaza Hussain: right. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. So, all right. Well, thanks a lot. Uh, let's keep in touch on this. I hope you guys break some more stories and I can have you on again.
We'll have many more stories in the weeks and months to come. We have a whole, a lot to go through in there. Yeah, so see you soon.

Awesome.