Name: Huberman Explains the Epstein Problem That'll Last a Century
Uploaded: 2026-03-29T21:32:35.000Z
Duration: 10 min 2 s
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Yeah, I mean, I think the Epstein files, to me, are an interesting—I think people are going to be talking about this 100 years from now.

To-infinitive

Because I think it's—well, I'll say a couple things.

First of all, I never met him, never interacted with him, never corresponded with him, you know, and, um, and

But, you know, he had—he had deep, uh, pause in the scientific community.

I'm very happy to know that, you know, no one at Stanford was taking money from him.

Actually, I remember in 2017 when that case kind of first broke, and

I'm in touch with our development, our fundraising office all the time, and

I said, "Please tell me that he's not funding labs." You know, they said, "Nope." He approached us, we gave him the cold shoulder.

You know, they're—you know, they vet very carefully, which is what MIT didn't do.

I mean, my—I consider him a colleague only because he's in the field of neuroscience, right?

But Richard Axel won the Nobel Prize for discovering the molecular basis of olfaction.

He shared it with Linda Buck in 2004, and

he had to step down as the director of the Columbia Neurosciences Institute today.

Okay, well, I'll try not to, but, but, you know.

I mean, he was a—club random was taken.

to learn that he was, you know, buddy-buddy with Epstein for so many years, and—Right.

And, you know, I think that, um, it's—so here's one thing that's clear to me at the—I'm not a psychologist, but

I'm a human being with some degree of experience, and

what I know is that if you're in touch with your gut sense, if you're around a guy like Epstein, you should want to get out of there.

So the fact that people with—with—now, I—I understand how some people were manipulated by him because they were too young or whatever to—to be able to navigate that, but

why anyone, especially these supposed high-IQ folks, would actively seek him out and try to, you know, embed themselves in his world?

But before I do, who were you going to tell me about?

Yeah, no, that wasn't what I was going to tell you about.

Okay, so I've looked at this thing very carefully now because I—you and I are in the business of media.

So here's—here's the question that I think has not been explored thoroughly enough.

Why is it that in 2008, Epstein was convicted, then comes back to New York—I mean, he's still traveling all over the place—and people continue to engage with this guy?

Like, people seek him out, people are taking funding from him.

And yes, I got it, he wore the Harvard sweatshirt, which doesn't mean shit at all, by the way.

I—I can't believe I have to explain this to everybody.

There are people in this world, a lot of them who are very, uh, achievement-oriented, shall we say, and

successful in their field, which is either science or finance, who have zero clue how to get a female human into bed.

Oh, so you think these guys were just too dweeby to get laid?

He's a guy who, like any pimp, who can just get—I don't know what it is, I don't possess it, I don't want to possess it, it's horrible if you do it—but he could get all these women and they—you look at the emails.

I mean, some of them were certifiably dweeby.

Well, they're saying things like, "Richard Branson, hope I get to see you again, but, you know, only if you're going to bring your harem." So it's what he brought with him.

I accept your hypothesis, but—but the—but may I do a yes and?

Yeah, and—and I've talked about this before publicly, actually, a couple years ago, before any of this popped.

I was on Rogan and I—and we were talking about, you know, why scientists cozied up to—to Epstein, and—and he—he provided, either directly or by, you know, being the rabbi in certain introductions, um, enormous amounts of funding to certain places.

Like, you know, I mean, you—they're in the files, right?

I mean, I'm not trying to dodge a lawsuit here.

I mean, the Columbia Neuroscience Institute was not funded by Epstein, but

there's a lot of record of sort of joint meetings around that, and, you know, people in the leadership from Columbia meeting with—with Epstein and the people who eventually gave the money.

So here's the part that, um, I don't know, maybe I'm, uh, just too West Coast to understand.

Well, it's just, you know, this is a very New York story when you really think about it.

He had the biggest real estate footprint.

He had all—you know, an island and all the shit.

Like, honestly, like, I grew up in the—in the South Bay.

I'm impressed by people that have discovered things and done things and, you know, creatives and things like that.

I—I understand Manhattan, where your—your real estate is, how big the real estate is.

But for people to—in otherwise intelligent people to blow past their understanding of his crimes, because that's what they were, against minors, wait, hold on, this means something.

I know—let's—let's just take the—the example of the person who's not there for the women, who's there for the money, because a lot of people made a lot of money for their pet projects, their research projects, their technology projects.

I mean, the list of people that's in there, it doesn't look to me like they were all with him so they could, you know, get access to women.

They wanted money, and I think what he—what he offered people was a sense of omnipotence.

He has an island that's separate—it was like a level above the level that he offered other people that turned out to be the level below everything else.

And we're somehow shocked now that this happened, but

I—I do think from 2010—this is what I was emphasizing before—from 2010 or so until he—he was eventually arrested again and was standing trial before—he was killed.