Within the trove of the notorious Jeffrey Epstein’s emails recently acquired by Bloomberg, the late pedophile and ruling class socialite proposed to fund an interesting program –– Harvard’s Personal Genome Project (PGP). Epstein’s reason for doing so? To find out if “beauty resides in DNA.”

This anecdote, along with a few others in Bloomberg’s first exposé into the cache of emails, shed light on a lesser known aspect of the mysterious Jeffrey Epstein: his fascination with transhumanism, or neo-eugenics. While eugenics has traditionally referred to the study of how to best arrange human reproduction to increase the rate of “desirable” traits within a population, transhumanism seeks a somewhat different approach to making more of us “desirables.”

Transhumanism relies on technology to “enhance” our genetic outcomes and phenotypic inevitabilities. For example, author David Galton, a member of the Eugenics Society, has celebrated technological advancements that have enabled parents to artificially select which genes their child receives in order to create “designer babies.” Academics such as Nicholas Agar have defended this practice, calling it “liberal eugenics.”

Despite whatever ambitious terminology is employed to rebrand the age-old scientific-ization of racism and elitist supremacy, the philosophical underpinnings of eugenics remain the same. Whether one seeks to eradicate undesirable traits within a population through top-down arrangement or transhumanistic alterations, each strategy breaks down individuals into measurable parts — rejecting the sanctity of human life. Both confuse seemingly “optimal” traits with inherently valuable ones, and cling to the material world in such a way that reduces the complexity of the universe into an algorithmic, “scientific” system. The spontaneity found in a forest becomes replaced by the structural organization of a corporation or a state. Most simply, the material world becomes the answer to everything –– to evolution, death and life itself.

But Epstein’s eugenics fantasies are not the mad thoughts of a singularly strange individual isolated from the rest of society. Quite to the contrary, they represent a way of thinking endemic to the Big Tech oligarchs that have come to dominate the American political sphere in the 21st century. Indeed, as the new Bloomberg cache reveals, Epstein’s eugenicist ambitions tie him to some of the most prestigious figures and institutions in academia, Big Tech, and science. Furthermore, they express the convergence of these sectors, and the deluded, self-serving ideologies to which they are tied.

The Source of Beauty

Harvard’s PGP is effectively a spiritual successor to its more ambitious forefather — the Human Genome Project (HGP). HGP was a National Institutes of Health- (NIH) funded effort to map the entire human genome, whereas Harvard’s PGP seeks to utilize data from individual genomes to help develop personalized medicine. The Human Genome Project, however, like Harvard’s successor project, is intimately tied to the eugenics movement. Its first director, James D. Watson, was a racist eugenicist who believed Black people were plagued by genetically inferior intellect, and who also headed the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. At its founding, the Cold Spring Harbor lab housed the Eugenics Records Office which sought to store “a comprehensive registry documenting the ‘pedigree’ of every American…” It was funded by notable robber baron lineages such as the Rockefellers and Carnegies. Fittingly, Epstein actually hosted Watson at his house where they discussed how “the cellular mechanisms of plants might be relevant to human cancer.”

George Church, the silver-haired, bearded director of the Harvard PGP who proposed “re-engineering humans” to Epstein, spent his time in graduate school working under his doctoral advisor, Walter Gilbert. Earlier in his career, Gilbert jointly ran a lab with Watson before the eugenicist moved on to head the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. The New York Times has described Church as “a molecular engineer who has worked to identify genes that could be altered to create superior humans.” He’s also more explicitly been referred to as a eugenicist — courtesy of his effort to create a genome-based dating app. In the later years of his career, Church co-founded two different companies aimed at expanding the use and sharing of genetic data.

One of these companies, Nebula Genomics, provides whole genome sequencing for users who provide the company with genetic data and medical records, promising customers enhanced privacy through blockchain technology. Yet despite this allegedly refined protection, Nebula offers a nice carrot for anyone willing to sacrifice privacy for the company’s “‘sponsored sequencing’ model, which offers customers a free clinical-grade genome if they let Nebula share their de-identified DNA and other data with pharmaceutical partners.” This function of the company recalls an idea of Epstein’s, in which he developed plans to create a search engine of human DNA in order to pinpoint “genetic links to diseases like cancer.”

Despite whether Nebula actually ensures the privacy of its users, however, its platform still enables the funneling of personal genetic and medical data to Pharma companies. Importantly, this practice is a central component of the development of biotechnology, which is the driving technological force behind transhumanism. Indeed, biotechnology is often dependent on the funneling of a steady stream of “real-world data” (as opposed to data collected within a clinical trial setting) to Pharma companies. This is due in part to the incentive of biotech developers to move as much of the drug development process outside of clinical trials as possible — something the companies aim to do in order to circumvent the consistent obstacles that biotech drug developers face in getting their products to market within the current regulatory paradigm. “Real-world data” is also valuable because there is an increasing amount of biotechnology that relies on AI and machine learning, which feeds on data to train and improve its models.

Furthermore, Church’s connection to the national security state through figures such as Peter Thiel and organizations like the CIA through their investments in his most recent venture, the “de-extinction” company Colossal Biosciences, which is attempting to resurrect the woolly mammoth, raises even more concerns regarding the proclaimed privacy protections of his projects. The CIA’s investment was “less about the mammoths and more about the capability,” which importantly appears to exclude privacy entirely. According to The Intercept, Colossal’s biotech “will help allow U.S. government agencies to read, write, and edit genetic material, and, importantly, to steer global biological phenomena that impact ‘nation-to-nation competition’ while enabling the United States ‘to help set the ethical, as well as the technological, standards’ for its use.” In other words, the technology and data provided by companies like Colossal will help the agency in what it effectively views as a biotech arms race. In conflicts with such significant stakes, it is easy for protections such as privacy to quickly become insignificant.

With Harvard’s PGP, however, Epstein was not seeking a cure to cancer or victory in a futuristic arms race — but rather, the discovery of whether “beauty resides in DNA.” Epstein’s interest in this model that relies on the constant mining, sharing and analysis of patient/user data — effectively making it a model built on mass surveillance of health data that can be weaponized by law enforcement and the national security state — highlights how these datasets can be retooled and exploited to serve the interests of anyone powerful enough to control them, even to explore strangely eugenicist ideas like DNA determining “beauty.” Indeed, another similarly esoteric question Epstein explored with Church and other scientists further accentuates this point.

A few months before Epstein was inquiring to George Church on the genetic source of beauty, he was exploring a different idea with the PGP director, an academic who is now the president of an AI education startup and a scientist who won the Nobel Prize last year. They were discussing something that they believed would “bring together experts in law, psychology, biology and economics.” This enticing subject that would apparently pull a myriad of prestigious individuals among the academic elite together was “to describe the ‘pleasure signatures in the brain’ that they said could correspond to hunger, sexuality and fear,” or what one participant in the discussion called “the pleasure genome initiative.”

In an email to Epstein’s assistant, the participant added “let me know if this subject is too strange for our patron,” to which Epstein replied “the patron has no boundaries.” Epstein’s comment, however, was only a microcosm of a more pervasive, consequential reality of our mass surveillance paradigm. These datasets, made up of millions of genetic data points from large swaths of individuals, similarly have “no boundaries” in their potential applications by the ruling class.

Defeating Death

Within days of Epstein reaching out in January 2006 to Stephen Kosslyn ––the then-chair of Harvard’s psychology department –– Kosslyn was “proposing a dinner with bigwigs across economics, genomics and limb regeneration to discuss a lab ‘centered on genetics and the brain’ that would explore ‘far-out ideas such as life extension.’” (emphasis added). To someone unfamiliar with the strange obsessions of the ruling elite, “life extension” may allude more to the ramblings of a mad scientist in a science fiction novel than any real phenomenon. Were it not for Big Tech billionaires and other ruling class elites, that might be true.

Epstein, for example, financed the Edge Foundation — described as a “ casual salon of like-minded scientists and futurists that came to be known as the Reality Club” that formed in the 1980s — which extended the reach of his tentacles to influential academics and figures within genetic science, specifically ones exploring the darker questions of their field.

Among these scientists was Craig Venter, a grizzly-bearded geneticist with piercing grey eyes and “balls of steel” who remains a significant figure in the annals of the Human Genome Project. Notably, Venter and Church — the aforementioned Harvard PGP director — once led an “Edge master class” together, lecturing to a who’s who of Big Tech oligarchs and media figures, including Google founder Larry Page and Elon Musk, both at the luxurious Andaz Hotel off of Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood, right next door to the world famous Comedy Store, and at the uncomfortably white SpaceX building in Hawthorne.

Their lecture focused on a utopian future, one in which man is merged with machines via computer readings of genetic sequences “where the code can be replicated exactly, manipulated freely, and translated back into living organisms by writing the other way” — or more simply, gene editing. Church delivered the clarifying cherry on top of this technocratic proposal: “We can program these cells as if they were an extension of the computer,” he said.

Over a decade before this “master class,” Venter famously led the challenge against the publicly funded Human Genome Project with a privately funded competitor. Utilizing “whole-genome shotgun” sequencing and private capital, Venter sought to accelerate what he saw as the slow pace of the HGP and sequence the human genome faster than the NIH’s project. His effort proved fruitful; he and his corporate team ended up sharing credit for the sequencing of the human genome with the NIH.

One of Venter’s colleagues at Edge is Eric Weinstein, the managing director of Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, Thiel Capital. *New York Magazine *described the members of Edge as part of the group that Weinstein has called “the intellectual dark web,” whom the magazine claims have sparked “an effort to reopen areas of intellectual inquiry — about innate differences between the races, say, or the genders — now considered problematic, at a minimum.”

Indeed, Venter’s notable association with the HGP, linking him to eugenicists like Watson, appears to align with this description of Edge scientists “reopening” controversial areas of intellectual inquiry. However, his most recent and ambitious venture since his role in sequencing the human genome — his founding of a company named Human Longevity — ties him to science focused less on rebranding forbidden subjects of the past, and instead intent on opening a Pandora’s box of futuristic practices that seek to alter humanity’s relationship with death. Specifically, Human Longevity is dedicated to “trying to take the DNA information [Venter] helped unlock and figure out how to leverage it to cheat death for years, or even decades.”

A notorious profiteer, Venter set up a program at Human Longevity to charge patients $25,000 for ultra-detailed physicals, replete with blood tests, two MRI scans, an ultrasound and CT scan of the heart, a stool sample as well as a Blade Runner-esque “cognitive test in which letters flash on a computer screen at a dizzying pace.”

Baseline test from Bladerunner 2049 | Source

Yet, beyond generating revenue for the company, these enhanced physicals also serve as significant data miners. As Bio IT World detailed, Human Longevity seeks to “build the world’s most comprehensive database on human genotypes and phenotypes, and then subject it to machine learning so that it can help develop new ways to fight diseases associated with aging” — in other words, capturing and then applying giant collections of intimate biodata. This data is thought to be the missing link needed to “finally deliver on the genome’s promise” — which, in Venter’s eyes, includes robust life extension. The kind which Epstein appears to have been interested in, and which Church still is.

Another figure that is currently carrying the mantle for the late Jeffrey Epstein in the fight against death is founder of PayPal and Palantir, Peter Thiel. One of the more mild steps Thiel is taking towards this end is his plan to freeze his corpse — something Epstein allegedly considered as well. On a podcast appearance, Thiel told the anointed Editor-in-Chief of CBS News Bari Weiss, “I don’t necessarily expect it to work…but I think it’s the sort of thing we’re supposed to try to do.” To Thiel, freezing his corpse is more of an “ideological statement,” than anything — an impassioned yet likely inconsequential feat of activism in the “fight” against death itself.

More recently, a Thielverse alumnus also interested in anti-aging, Jim O’Neill — who, after working in the Bush administration, headed the Thiel foundation where he helped found the Thiel Fellowship — was appointed to be second in command at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Before entering his prestigious new post in government, O’Neill helped kickstart the career of venture capitalist Laura Deming by awarding her $100,000 through the Thiel Fellowship. With that cash, Deming started a venture capital firm called The Longevity Fund, focused on investments in life extension and reversing the effects of aging.

Deming later went on to co-found another anti-aging VC firm, “age1” with Alexander Coville, a Stanford alumnus who studied the “biology of aging.” Coville is an advocate of “reduced regulatory burdens” regarding biotechnology — a position he shares with O’Neill, who believes that the FDA should test drugs for efficacy after they’ve been approved and brought to market.

In 2019, O’Neill became the CEO of the SENS Research Foundation, where he had already served as a board member for nearly a decade. SENS, a non-profit that invests in anti-aging startups, was co-founded by the radical English gerontologist with an alleged taste for minors, Aubrey de Grey. Grey, whose face is covered in a wizard-like beard accompanied by a long, flower-powered ponytail, has been described as a “prophet of immortality.” He believes that with the correct development and application of technology, humans can live for “millennia,” and the lucky ones, even longer. Notably, SENS’ first major funder was the man who kickstarted O’Neill’s private sector career, Peter Thiel.

Yet, Grey was not the only immortality voyager with an affinity for minors with whom Thiel was acquainted; he also knew Jeffrey Epstein. In 2015 and 2016, Epstein injected $40 million into two funds of the Thiel-founded venture capital firm Valar Ventures. This preceded Thiel’s 2018 investment into the pre-crime Israeli- intelligence- / Unit 8200-linked company Carbyne911, which invasively collects data from users who phone 9-1-1 call centers in order to help predict crimes before they occur. Epstein invested in Carbyne three years prior through former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s limited partnership company, Sum. Given this timing, it is likely that the pair’s investments in Carbyne as well as Epstein’s hefty investment into Valar Ventures were points of discussion in the series of meetings that Epstein and Thiel had scheduled in 2014.

Beyond his investments in anti-aging biotechnology companies, Thiel has stated “People have a choice to accept death, deny it or fight it…I think our society is dominated by people who are into denial or acceptance, and I prefer to fight it.”

Thiel is hardly the only Epstein-connected billionaire waging war against death. Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google who became a client of JP Morgan through Epstein in 2004 and later hired Epstein to advise him on a trust for his children, is the founder of a “super-secret biotech outfit [called] Calico [that] is ‘solving death.’” According to *The Standard, *Brin “has no plans to die.” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who dined with a fresh-out-of-prison Epstein, has reportedly made significant investments in the anti-aging startup Altos Labs that has raised billions of dollars. Altos is developing “reprogramming technology” which in Frankenstein-like fashion could rejuvenate “cells in the lab that some scientists think could be extended to revitalize entire animal bodies, ultimately prolonging human life.” Mega-Zionist Larry Ellison, whose CIA-contracting company Oracle has partnered with Palantir, has invested over $300 million into anti-aging research. Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur who sold his company Braintree (the then-owner of Venmo) to the Thiel-founded PayPal and wrote a book called “Don’t Die,” infuses himself via blood transfusions with the plasma of his teenage son and does “penis shockwave therapy” as part of his probe to uncover eternal life. Mark Zuckerberg, a mentee of Thiel’s who has been intimately linked to the Palantir founder virtually his entire career, awards $3 million per year to anti-aging scientists through the scientific award he co-founded called the Breakthrough Prize. The Breakthrough Prize is also funded by Sergey Brin and his former wife, founder of genetic data-collecting company 23andMe, Anne Wojcicki.

In short, Epstein was only one man among a group of elites seeking to transcend the limits of human life through transhumanist biotechnology. This obsessive fear of death, and anxious attachment to all that is material, casts a looming shadow over these supposedly larger-than-life billionaires who wield exorbitant power over American politics.While conventional wisdom would lead most to believe these billionaires all acquired their fortunes through unique intelligence and logic defying diligence, their quest to immortality suggests something else; that they fear, more than anything, reality — which they cannot control.

Baby Incubating

Indeed, an irrational desire for control is a driving force of eugenics. Eugenicists are not only focused on controlling their own lives or even their immediate communities, but the evolutionary future of the entire human race. Naturally, someone with such an ideology is likely to see *their own *genes as the ones to lead the human race to new and improved heights. One such way to ensure the spread of your genetic makeup across the population is primitive and simple; having as many children with as many different partners as possible.

Among the scientists that Epstein corresponded with in the *Bloomberg *cache was Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist at Harvard who is the co-director of “the Good Project.” In response to an email from Epstein, Gardner said he’d get back to him on two requests, one of them being “advice about offspring.”

Gardner told Bloomberg that the “‘offsprings’ question may have been ‘about the possibility of having children.’” Given past reporting on Epstein’s interest in cultivating “offspring,” this was likely the case.

According to the Times:

“On multiple occasions starting in the early 2000s, Mr. Epstein told scientists and businessmen about his ambitions to use his New Mexico ranch as a base where women would be inseminated with his sperm and would give birth to his babies…”

Yet, like all the other components of Epstein’s interest in eugenics, his baby ranch scheme did not arise from his own strange predilections. He allegedly based the idea “on accounts of the Repository for Germinal Choice, which was to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates who wanted to strengthen the human gene pool.” Unsurprisingly, it seems that in Epstein’s alleged pursuit to “[perfect] the human genome,” he believed his own genes could pave the way to perfection.

Similarly, another billionaire linked to Epstein seems to have an obsessive interest in seeding his sperm and DNA into the general population: Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder, Elon Musk. Musk, who may have hired Epstein for consulting services as Musk sought to take Tesla private, and whose brother Kimbal Musk allegedly got set up with one of his girlfriends through Epstein, has “offered his own sperm to friends and acquaintances,” including RFK Jr.’s former running mate and Sergey Brin’s ex-wife, Nicole Shanahan, according to the Times.

While Epstein’s baby ranch was focused on producing many children at once, Musk reportedly sought to build a massive compound in Austin, Texas, to house his 11 children and three wives. As detailed by the Times, his efforts to produce many children through different partners at once through methods such as I.V.F. appeared more sporadic, impulsive and less organized than Epstein’s baby incubator fantasy.

Unlike Epstein, who allegedly has criticized “efforts to reduce starvation and provide health care to the poor” out of fear of overpopulation, a common train of thought among eugenicists, Musk is more concerned with declining birth rates as opposed to overpopulation. Yet, Musk still appears to maintain that the reproduction of a particular kind of person is important, as the Tesla founder is apparently “worried that educated people [aren’t] having enough children.”

“I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid,” he said. “You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.’”

Though ostensibly for different reasons, Musk and another associate of Epstein, billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, have both funded research studying human population trends. Musk donated $10 million to the University of Texas for this research. Gates, whose philanthropic foundation has taken a clear stance against overpopulation, created the Bill & Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health, and has donated to organizations to study population growth and develop “sound public policy by promoting the use of accurate population data and its analysis in the decision-making process.” Epstein himself invested in a field adjacent to population studies through his $6.5 million donation to the Harvard scientist Martin Nowak, who studies “Evolutionary Dynamics in Structured Populations.”

Gates, who worked with Epstein to invest in the MIT Media Lab after Epstein’s 2008 conviction, and for some unexplained reason acted as a liaison between Epstein and the university, also has other troubling investments and opinions regarding fertility and population growth. These include his endeavor to create an implantable birth control device that could “be turned on and off with a remote control,” his idea to ration healthcare based on an individual’s perceived value to society, as well as his effort to promote long-acting reversible contraceptives in Africa with a company whose initial mission was “improving the biological stock of the human race.” Though Epstein and Musk may have disagreed on the purpose of population studies, it would seem that Gates and the late pedophile were aligned on the cause.

From left to right: Jes Staley, Lawrence Summers, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates and Boris Nikolic | Source

The Epstein Brain

In the early months of 2008, as the Democratic primaries were unfolding and the soon-to-be President Obama was still just an Illinois state senator, Jeffrey Epstein was communicating with “star researchers across universities” to back efforts to “better understand the brain.” *Bloomberg *noted that one of these researchers, Elkhonon Goldberg, “a renowned neuropsychologist then at New York University,” thanked Epstein with a seemingly concerning level of adoration:

“‘We are quite confident that with your support our Brain can become an exceptional scientific endeavor and we will proud to name it ‘The Epstein Brain,’ Goldberg wrote, adding a smiley face.”

One of the researchers who was “set to be [included]” on this project was NYU’s Yann LeCun, who since 2013 has been working on AI at Meta, where he is now the Chief AI Scientist. While LeCun told Bloomberg that he had never heard of Epstein before this interaction, that Epstein never funded his work and that he had no further correspondence with Epstein after “this one meeting,” LeCun’s connection to the “Epstein Brain” again demonstrates the convergence of Big Tech and transhumanism — specifically when placed into the context of other Big Tech-connected “brain” projects.

Most notably, in 2016, Facebook (now Meta) — which has been embroiled in government mass surveillance privacy scandals — hired Regina Dugan, the first female director of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and a former Google executive, to head its research development team, Building 8. During its short lifespan, Building 8 sought to provide Facebook with “DARPA-style breakthrough development” for its products. Notably, Dugan arrived at her prestigious leadership role at DARPA by way of her hiring by President Barack Obama back in 2009. Years later under Dugan’s leadership, Building 8 worked on brain-computer interface technology, developing tech that would “allow people to send text messages by thinking — tapping them out at 100 words per minute.” Using “optical technology,” the innovative products were poised to allow Facebook to “read thoughts.”

Hyping the project, Dugan posed a question: “What if you could type directly from your brain?…It sounds impossible, but it’s closer than you realize.” Unfortunately for Facebook and hopeful technology optimists, however, the project floundered.

Yet, it would not be the last time that Dugan worked on brain tech. From Facebook, she moved on to become the CEO of the Wellcome Leap — an initiative that was spun out of the Wellcome Trust, a Big-Pharma connected philanthropic organization focused on funding biomedical research that has troubling ties to the British Eugenics Society. Like Building 8, Wellcome Leap has adopted the DARPA model of innovation, demonstrated by Dugan’s leadership role.

One of the projects Dugan launched at Wellcome Leap is called “The First 1000 Days (1kD),” which is focused on “Promoting Healthy Brain Networks.” Utilizing wearable technologies, the program aims to constantly monitor children in their first three years of life, collating data points to enable the digital extraction of “meaningful signals” from infant brains that are then fed into AI algorithms to “assess brain development” in the “real world.” In turn, these algorithms generate a myriad of “scalable methods” including “therapeutic interventions” to improve a child’s “executive functioning.”

A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction

The world’s richest medical research foundation, the Wellcome Trust, has teamed up with a pair of former DARPA directors who built Silicon Valley’s skunkworks to usher in an age of nightmarish surveillance, including for babies as young as three months old. Their agenda can only advance if we allow it.

The program “promotes” these “healthy” brain networks, therefore, towards ends that are more obviously eugenicist in nature than Facebook’s failed brain-typing pipe dream. 1kD assumes there is a scientific model of the brain that leads to enhanced cognitive abilities — a model which the mental organs of young children should be warped to replicate through “interventions” and mass surveillance. Indeed, if this wasn’t clear enough, 1kD also aims to create an *in-silico *model of the human brain, generated with the massive amounts of data mined by wearables. The program envisions this model as possessing “predictive” capabilities — able to map the likely development of the brain based on different variables. Yet, inherent to this strategy, which aims to map, predict and then steer the development of the infant brain towards greater cognitive capacities, is the idea of an ideal model — an allegedly scientific, data-dictated, superior version of the human brain.

While the “Epstein Brain” project remains obscured in vagueness, it appears that within the Tech milieu, which Epstein was so significantly linked to, exists a belief in the scientifically superior human. In the paradigm of innovation and mass surveillance established by Big Tech overlords, this ideal man is created through the extraction of human traits by data-mining devices — devices that can break their subjects down, and reorganize them according to *in-silico *standards developed by scientists and their oligarchic benefactors.

Epstein, meanwhile, had more direct plans for the actual “Epstein Brain” — as in, his literal brain. He reportedly sought to preserve it through cryogenics, frozen upon death to be reanimated at a later point, along with his penis. Epstein likely wanted to do this for selfish reasons; with his brain and genitalia well-preserved, he could return to the material world which death releases humans from, and then reattach his most prized possessions to a new body years after his demise. But perhaps he sought to do this for noble reasons too — to gift humanity with ideal “models,” ones to be studied, replicated and used as a reference to mold lesser brains and penises into. Whatever his intentions, they likely died with him in 2019. The concepts and ideologies that shaped them, however, live on.

Cold Harbor – Breaking You Down and Selling the Parts

While many Americans are likely unaware of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and its housing of the Eugenics Records Office, one of the most acclaimed television shows of 2025 was the second season of Ben Stiller’s Severance. In the show, the protagonists uncover a secretive program that the corporation which dominates the series’ world, Lumin, is carrying out called Cold Harbor. The evil scientists conducting the operation induce in an unwitting subject, who is kept in isolation from all of society, multiple personalities, all of which have no recognition or remembrance of each other.

Screenshot from Severance – AppleTV | Source

While Lumin’s Cold Harbor is most akin to the CIA’s secretive Cold- War-era mass torture/mind control program MKULTRA, it also parallels the underlying philosophy of eugenics; the belief that human beings are not whole, but rather, comprised of measurable and manipulatable parts, parts that with enough care and precision can be extracted, studied, changed and exploited to produce superior outcomes. Going back to early 20th century eugenics, before biotechnology was being produced by Big Pharma en masse, this belief was embedded in the field, with eugenicists believing that with the correct arrangement of society, society’s leaders could make “desirable” traits proliferate, and wipe “undesirable” ones from existence.

With transhumanism, however, made possible through mass surveillance-reliant biotechnology, the idea of the measurable, divided human becomes even more clear. Inherent to transhumanism is a near-religious deference to data — for in the minds of transhumanists, it is data that extrapolates the divided parts of humanity into a form that is applicable and manipulatable.

Indeed, it is for this reason that Big Tech has made itself the vehicle by which transhumanist infrastructure is being built. Many of these Big Tech oligarchs ultimately believe in the technological singularity, a dystopian future in which technological growth outpaces human intelligence by such a vast degree that it threatens humanity itself. For these technocrats, the solution to this alleged inevitability is a merging of the human race with artificial intelligence — in other words, the creation of a master race, lifted to perfection via technology built on the decades-long extraction of innumerable datapoints of unpaid serfs. Importantly, as Whitney Webb noted in her analysis of Henry Kissinger and Eric Schmidt’s book, The Age of AI, this master race will not be comprised of all humans, but rather, a selective few at the top of a new two-tiered system:

In the coming society shaped by the AI “revolution,” [Kissinger and Schmidt] openly note that there will be two tiers of society. One tier will find AI’s impacts “empowering”; this tier will be largely composed of “the people who build [AI], train it, task it, regulate it” as well as “policy makers and business leaders who have technical advisers at their disposal.” The other tier may occasionally experience the coming AI-driven society as “gratifying” but will also find its impacts “disconcerting or disempowering.”

This [lower] tier will comprise “those who lack technical knowledge, or participate in AI-managed processes primarily as consumers,” which is to say the vast majority of people.

In the pair’s second book, Genesis: Artificial Intelligence, Hope, and the Human Spirit, they make another prediction that gives insight into how this two-tiered society will come into existence: through transhumanism. Specifically, they foresee a future where all men must merge with machines and become Homo technicus. Unlike previous evolutions of the Homo genus, natural selection would not push humanity into the Homo technicus future. Instead, the controllers of modern technology would produce a conscious, imposed evolution of Homo sapiens, carried out in the name of resisting AI’s allegedly inevitable domination of humanity.

Epstein almost certainly bought into this reality, and it is likely part of the reason why he inquired about a “‘Manhattan Project’ for AI” to a computer scientist, according to Bloomberg. Indeed, the primary goal of Epstein’s start-up, Southern Trust, according to court filings from the US Virgin Islands, was “to become a successful competitor in the field of artificial intelligence concentrated in biomedical informatics and financial informatics algorithms and technology.” To do this, notably, it “[focused] on data acquisitions and locating and establishing wide-ranging, all-inclusive biomedical and financial information databases on servers located in the US Virgin Islands.”

Now, Epstein’s data aggregation efforts are being posthumously carried out primarily by OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who are both pursuing the “Stargate” project — the construction of an expansive amount of data-centers that will process and integrate the constellation of data points spread across the web into AI models that will generate profit and control for their owners, and, as Webb noted, occasional “gratification” for everyone else.

President Trump, Larry Ellison, Sam Altman, & Masayoshi Son | Source

Ultimately, this is a crucial part of the context behind Epstein’s connection to the elites of academia and kings of Silicon Valley. It is why when asked by journalist Russ Douthat if he’d prefer that the human race endure, Peter Thiel *umm’d and uhhh’d *his way into the now notoriously viral moment where he took a full twenty seconds to respond, “Yes, I would.”

Peter Thiel talking to Russ Douthat for The New York Times | Source

Less discussed were Thiel’s words following his half-hearted assurance to Douthat. “I would also like us to radically solve these problems.” The ideal iteration of transhumanism, he went on, “was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. And there’s a critique of, let’s say…the transvestite [as] someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses, and a transsexual is someone where you change…your penis into a vagina…but we want more transformation than that…we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs” (emphasis added).

The total transformation Thiel envisions is spiritual:

“Transhumanism is just changing your body. But you also need to transform your soul, and you need to transform your whole self.”

Incredibly, Thiel may be right — just not in the way that he thinks. If transhumanism is only one step in “transforming” the human spirit, this transformation will not result in something greater than the material perception of reality that humans are, for the most part, restricted to. Instead, a full embrace of transhumanism is poised to tether the soul to the divisions that racist eugenicists, AI algorithms, and elitist oligarchs break it into. It will drag the “soul,” or whatever one might consider the spiritual, sacred, or ethereal, entirely down to the material world.

As the building of the technocratic infrastructure to create such a system accelerates by the day, the fate of society — or perhaps even humanity — rests on one of two fates; whether the structures of transhumanism truly can bind the soul to the material world, or whether inside us all there exists a spark of something greater, something inextinguishable, something that Big Tech’s all-seeing surveillance tools cannot measure, predict, or control.

We can likely assume which side of the argument Jeffrey Epstein would fall on.