American entrepreneur and venture capitalist Bryan Johnson has recalled his conversation with Jeffrey Epstein, saying that a short video call convinced him that the convicted sex offender was “a very dark person.” This comes after the Department of Justice on Friday released the largest batch of Jeffrey Epstein files to date, which included three million more pages of documents, and thousands of videos and images.
“8 years ago I met Epstein via zoom. A mutual contact put us in touch as I was building my brain interface company Kernel and he had supposedly done some neuroscience stuff at MIT,” Johnson wrote on X.
“After a ten minute video call I immediately called the person who put us in contact and told him that Epstein seemed like a very dark person. I felt sick to my stomach. I also told him I that never wanted to speak to him again. I remember this so clearly because I knew nothing about him but weirdly, intuitively, something was deeply wrong. Being in his proximity felt dangerous,” he added.
Johnson added that he never interacted with Epstein again after their call.
“Despite having nothing to go off of, I never interacted with him again and came to find out years later that he’d had a fuc*** up past,” he concluded.
Johnson shared more details about the call in a follow-up post. Explaining why the two of them connected, he wrote, “He was doing work at MIT, neuroscience-adjacent stuff, and he knew getting brain data access was a core limitation (which is the exact problem I was working on at Kernel). There was an obvious incentive for him to pursue a connection with me and at the end of the call he wanted to stay in touch. Instead, the moment the call ended, it was an immediate no. A hard, instinctive ‘fu** no’. I was genuinely relieved when the call ended.”
“Typically I wouldn’t say something like this publicly because I usually only stick to measurable science…but he is legitimately the most intuitively ‘evil’ person I had (or have) ever met. It was the strongest negative feeling I’ve ever had about another person. It was visceral,” he continued.
Johnson continued, “We were on the phone for maybe ten minutes, and he spoke for 8 maybe 9 of them. He just talked at me. Rammed his thoughts, his plans, his accomplishments, who he knew, what he wanted. Everything felt off. I remember the call dragging on. Most of what he talked about was flexing connections, scientists, money donated…MIT, Harvard.”
Johnson also defended his decision to connect with Epstein in the first place.
“That’s the thing, it wasn’t part of my algo to check if someone being intro’d to me was a registered sex offender…,” he said. “He also wasn’t presented as some obvious outcast. He was wrapped in credibility, positioned by others as relevant and important. Epstein wasn’t some fringe guy who showed up randomly. He was embedded in institutional credibility. It turns out even after he was a convicted sex offender, MIT and Harvard were still engaging with him. He was always surrounded by people who made him seem legitimate.”
“That interaction was the first and last time I interacted with him. I feel you all. It’s terrifying,” Johnson added.
The latest Epstein files
The newly released documents shed light on Epstein’s relationships with several prominent figures, including Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The files also appeared to contain at least 4,500 documents that mentioned President Trump, The New York Times reported.
Trump, meanwhile, told reporters that the latest release of the Epstein files absolves him of any wrongdoing. “I was told by some very important people that not only does it absolve me, it’s the opposite of what people were hoping, you know, the radical left,” he said in his first public comments since the latest release of the files.
