I Know How Epstein Groomed America’s Corrupt Elite | The Daily Beast Podcast

What went through my head, as you were describing that encounter with a rich and powerful person, is how strangely similar it is in certain ways to Virginia Giuffre's account of being groomed by Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein. And what's so wild about that is that these are two kind of objects of his behavior, Epstein's behavior, who are at opposite ends of the power spectrum.

I think one of the things that that exchange is so fascinating because it illustrates something important, which is obviously there is a giant elite network that we're talking about here. And both of those men would have been in those elite networks. However, there are some people, I would say, probably like Mort Zuckerman, who have a job, you know, they sort of are doing an actual thing in the world, right? And they're in those networks as a byproduct of some activity they're engaged in, in the world. They own a business, they own multiple businesses, whatever. They're an academic. They used to be in the government. And there's a, I think, a smaller group of people, who Epstein is a perfect example, for whom the cultivation and maintenance of network ties is the job. So he's like the sort of middleman, and he's creating connections between people, and that's his value. And some of those people might also technically have a job. But if you go to a TED conference or if you go to, frankly, any conference, you'll meet some people there who just seem like people who, incidentally, happen to be there. And then you'll meet these people. And by the way, in the 2010s, when this culture was sort of at its peak, people in their bios of this ilk would call themselves connectors, like it would often be right on the bio. Do you remember this trend? People would be like, convener, convener, connector, creator, right?

And I think the New Yorker, which was very sort of, it went on to everybody was talking about everybody. The new rule one of like, don't model your life on something you read in a Malcolm Gladwell airport book. But Epstein is a perfect example of someone who is maintaining those things not as a byproduct of some other activity, but as the center of his life and what he shows. And of course, he is a convicted pedophile who did it. So that has its own flavor. But there's others who do it who are not convicted pedophiles, who are basically brokers between these different worlds. And so, you know, most people know a lot of people within their own world, right? Most academics. Successful. Yes. Right. I mean, all of us, in a way. You know, most, you know, an Italian-American guy in New Jersey knows probably the average Italian-American knows a bunch of other Italian-American guys in his neighborhood. New Jersey. Right, right. An academic, most academics, you know, having spent so long studying for that degree, so long. And it's a very kind of cloistered environment. Most of their friends are probably academics. I think most business people, after a while, you don't have time. You're working 80-hour weeks. Like, you know, a lot of business people, people like Jeffrey Epstein, but others who are kind of these network maintainers, their skill is actually maintaining ties to various types of people. Right. And so if suddenly you are a business person who needs to, it's not like you're not powerful enough to access that private school. It's just that you may not have cultivated a couple of those bridges of networks to slightly different worlds. Someone at that law firm, someone at that university that you might need for that specific thing. And so what Epstein did is serve as this kind of bridging function, which turns out to be very, very valuable in part. And again, it's not obvious to people because what you said is exactly, I think, most people's intuition, like, he's more or less powerful. Why do you need someone who's already powerful, right? But the thing is, if you don't, if you don't know people personally in a lot of these worlds, you have to go through the formal channels, right? And so someone like Jeffrey Epstein, who is kind of on a text basis with whatever, who do you need to get to? You need to get to Woody Allen. You need to get to Steve Bannon. You need to get someone to Goldman Sachs. You need to get to someone at the Treasury Department. You need to get to someone in Dubai. Right? Someone like that who can kind of offer you this like gruesome buffet of business cards, right? Right, right. Becomes valuable to people who are more siloed in particular worlds.

Well, to be very, very rich, to be a billionaire is to have lots of those points of friction that everybody watching this will have in their life and have them removed. You don't have to stand in that line, right? The food is waiting for you on the table when you get to the restaurant. You don't have to wait in line. You don't have to drive to Newark, you know, to wait in line at Newark. You're flying out of Teterboro, and the jet will leave whenever you want. I think what happens to those people is when they encounter some areas of life where there continues to be friction, it really causes an allergy. So when you are dealing with a Trinity, you know, school where it actually doesn't function like private jet-driven, I don't know, but it doesn't seem to function like private jet travel. It probably does have a real admissions process. It probably does turn away, given where it is, it probably does turn away lots of fancy people every year. I think it's shocking for some of these people because, unlike everybody watching this, they haven't encountered a no all day. They haven't encountered a no all week. They haven't encountered a kind of break. So I think what part of what Epstein did was offer the promise of extending that kind of seamlessness that you're expecting, that life has taught you to expect, into domains where maybe even for you, like a Mort Zuckerman, it'll be a little hard to access. And he did that by kind of keeping himself right at the center of a lot of these kind of worlds.

The four-pack. I learned about this when researching my book Winners Take All, which is about a lot of these billionaires and the way they use kind of giving back as a mechanism to consolidate their wealth and power. And the four-pack refers to, I think it's particularly for New York-centered, super-rich people, the four-pack is the number of houses that is considered kind of a bare minimum in that social world. So it's a Manhattan house or apartment. It's a Florida place. Now let's just pause there for a second. That alone is part of the reason for the Florida place is to usually be able to keep your Manhattan days under 183 days. And so the Florida place is typically for that purpose. I mean, maybe people also like the warmth, but they can afford to go to nicer, warm places than that. It's an easy way to get your time there for tax, which then saves you a few percentage of a New York City income tax. Then, Hamptons house and house in Aspen are kind of a skiing place. So that was considered the four-pack. Just basic hygiene in that billionaire's world. But it just gives you a flavor of, you know, how people are thinking in that world. And also, you can avoid the friction of cold weather and the snow pileups and things. You just don't have to deal with it. Right? You can either go there for the whole of the winter, or you can go down for the weekends, if you've got your own transport. There's a really important word in this world also, that's the word optionality. So optionality in its origin is a finance term. And so, you know, you think about buying options on Wall Street. You're not buying the stock, you're buying the right to buy it if a certain thing happens. So I buy an option to buy it a year from now if it crosses 50, or I buy an option to sell it if it goes below 22. And buying options gives you optionality. It gives you, you know, and it's the whole idea of optionality is like you have all the upside but not the downside. You don't have to do the thing, but you can do the thing if you want to do the thing. So optionality has leapt from business school classes and finance classes. It sort of became over the last, I think, 10 or 15 years, the life aspiration for a lot of these folks. And what optionality means is having lots of choices and the choice to make additional choices and choices to preserve more choices, doors that open more doors, and never be on the hook for anything, never being tied to anything. There's a lot of manifestations that we can talk about. Some of that is really rich people who seemed to be very interested in Jeffrey Epstein providing him young women or girls. That's one form of optionality. A wife is not optionality, right? Going to an island where you could have, again, a gruesome buffet in this case of people, that's optionality. But also the housing is optionality, right? The kind of when people talk about optionality in dating, a lot of finance, you know, but it's now broadened beyond finance, people to use that concept. So much so, and I quoted this in one of the Epstein Class pieces, I think that one of the Harvard professors who wrote about it is a finance professor who wrote about the concept of optionality, gave a commencement speech or something in which he warned, it was called like the risks of optionality. He was afraid that this finance term had like metastasized into the culture too far, and people were applying it to their life in ways that were actually really destructive. Right. And so what it was stopping them from committing to things. Right. And so, you know, you'll remember a few years ago now, I guess it's a decade ago on Brexit, the year of Brexit, I think Theresa May, who was then the British prime minister, was it kind of early? Was she the prime minister? Right. Going into it, I think. Well, she was a prime minister that had to pick up after Brexit and try and organize it. So she shared this line, which was very controversial. Shit, I better check on that. There was a lot of prime ministers on that. Yeah. I mean, Theresa. Yeah, because Boris got dumped and Theresa May had to pick up the pieces and try and get it organized. So she had this line, I don't know if you remember this. It was very controversial at the time. People considered it kind of very nationalistic. I remember thinking, having a little bit of a jolt and then realizing she's exactly right. She said, if you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. You don't understand what citizenship is. And I think people, there's lots of ways to interpret that. Is she talking about immigrants? Is she like, what did I think? What she, my generous interpretation of what she was saying is in the age of kind of liquid money that moves everywhere and people moving among their four packs and people, as you see in this Epstein network, London today, Dubai tomorrow, doing a deal with Paris and Korea to invest in a Mexican hedge fund that'll buy out some, you know, old person's home in California and strip mine it, that again, most people watching this are actually from somewhere, whether you're born there or not, I don't care. I think you're somewhere now. Yeah. Some loyalty to it. You're there like most of the time. You have a connection to the community and you're part of a thing that's like the normal human way to live. And one of the things that is distinctive about the elite, because there's always been an elite, right, that's distinctive about the modern super elite that we see in the Epstein files, is that it is an elite uniquely untethered to place. If you think about, think about in Britain. Right. Go back. I mean, I think this is still true in Britain. But you go back, you know, 50 or 100 years, 20 years in Britain, the more clout, stature, power you had, the more you were like associated with a place. Right? You were the earl of this house. That house really mattered. And your granddaddy lived in that house, and you're right. And the paintings on the wall were like often that house and you. There's a certain kind of dog that you went hunting with. It was always that dog and the certain kind of thing you hunted. Right? That's has been more typical historically of what we associate with rich and powerful people, that they own land. You can't, you know, land is not very fungible. Yeah. It's like the Hearsts owning San Simeon. Right. And I think this in the era of globalization and digitization, what happened is we ended up with this kind of Epstein class. You could say that really doesn't work like that. They are nowhere people. They are always on a plane. They're most comfortable in planes because it's touch point free, as they call it. They, you know, they avail of global opportunities, but they're not part of communities. And if you again live in a normal town in this country and you look, I was driving all through Connecticut yesterday by chance and just all from one side to another. And except for the really prosperous towns like Greenwich, Connecticut is a rich place by comparison. But you see that this country's been stripped, like every town is like a shell. It's cute. The cute old things, like no one's there, there's no opportunity there. Right. And it's just like you can just feel this kind of like blood life. A strange drive anywhere in this country except for the places that are exceptions. Right? It just feels like juice was removed from the whole thing. And it was. It was. And so you don't have in those little towns I was driving through, you don't have like the slightly rich guy who owned the car dealership, which would have made him five times richer than the average person in town who then donated to the baseball league. Like, that guy doesn't live in that town anymore. Like a private equity firm owns a chain of those dealerships. And there's no guy, like, there's no one. The only people living there are the people who can't afford to leave. Right. Senator Chris Murphy, get out the kids. Leave, the kids get out. Senator Chris Murphy, who's senator from Connecticut, he has a new book coming out in, I think, a couple of months called The New Common Good that actually talks about this in a very deep way. What actually happened to many places that he represents and beyond. But, you know, there has been this kind of just removal of life force in so much of our society and the people we're talking about in this scene, the class, they're just buying, selling, trading, moving around, and they have no loyalty to any of the places they come from. All of their emails, when I was reading through the Epstein emails, they all start, where are you today? Where are you today? I'm landing in this place. Where are you? I'm going to be in Dubai next week. Where are you? Where are you? And at first I just thought it is kind of an interesting, you know, quirk. And then I realize it is because the assumption is not being in place. The assumption is you're on the move, you're constantly on the move.

I think what I'll say, some would sit out kind of in general and then some specific emails. So a couple of things in general. So one is this notion of this kind of silly, seemingly silly ritual, where are you? Where are you going to be tomorrow? Are you going to be in Athens? I know someone in Athens, you know, seem like a silly ritual. I started to realize, I think these are the kind of pheromones of an exchange of pheromones of this class of people who do not belong, do not consider themselves part of places, don't consider themselves loyal to places. And so their loyalties are horizontally to other people in this kind of network, not downward to the people. Right. They live among. I mean, even if you have the four-pack, my guess is if you go to their block in Manhattan or you go to their place in Aspen, or you go out to the Hamptons where they live, or you go down to Florida and you went a couple doors side to side and asked, how are they as neighbors? How are they as community members? What's their role here? My guess is you draw blanks. You draw blank stares. I don't think people would experience them. You generally the same people are just moving around the same places because that's been my observation that this a kind of move out to the Hamptons and some of this Florida and basically you're seeing this, but I don't think they're forming community even with right people that they're doing that with right. It's each to each. So the community itself is more tenuous. And I think they don't, I mean, I think community is a word that is irrelevant to a lot of these people. I think they have networks. Right. A community is like, I don't know, people you'd sacrifice for, people you do things that don't make sense. I mean, when I think of people I consider in my community, like I'm willing to lose money on them, I'm willing to cook food for them in a way that would be much cheaper and more efficient to order takeout, but I'm going to cook for them anyway. You know, I'm willing to like have their kids sleep over when they have to go out of town on a like that's community, right? I don't think people, I don't think these people live in that way in general. They have services, not community. Right? They have services. Right. Community is what people do, I guess, when, you know, when they don't have services. And again, you know, it's interesting thinking about Epstein. And we'll get to this specific emails, but think, but I've seen he was a world-class exploiter of specific insecurities and kind of lacunae in people he was talking to. And actually, I think one of the things he identified is a lot of these people are very lonely, right? Right. Again, you at home may not think that because you think they have everything, but they actually don't have everything. They have a lot of some very specific things, right? And they actually don't have, these are often not great marriages, as attested by the number of them that often get, well, and then it becomes very expensive to get divorced. Right? Yeah. You know, these are often, one of my winners, they all came out. I was written to by so many children of people like this talking about how little admiration they have for their own super wealthy parents and asking me for advice. And I didn't know what advice to give them. How do they, you know, they don't inherit this money, but they basically hate their dad. How do they deal with that?

I mean, if you told me right now that at my 95th birthday, several of my children would voluntarily stay away, I'd jump off this roof. Right? I mean, I think your kids are going to be there. I hope you like it at 95. What? What? And it is such a revealing clue to what these people value. But, you know, at the end of the day, like, if you can't even love your family enough to hold them, how do we trust you with, in his case, the minds of, like, one-third of Americans who watch Fox News? And just, like, think about this very objectively. If this man's love and virtue and character were not enough to hold his children and family, that is the same level of care at best that is being brought to bear on Fox News and these other things. Right? Well, well.

So let's first, let's assume that many folks listening to this have no idea who Cathy Rambam is, so it's actually a nice way to do it. Nice sex, but I like you. I like you actually reading the quote first. Okay, so now you've heard the quote. I imagine people have reactions to that quote. So now let's tell you who she is, right? Because she's not a random person on the street who, okay, fine, they have a toxic view, or you have some uncle who would spout something like that at a family get-together. Fine. Who cares? She is someone, the kind of person who has shaped your life. She was Barack Obama's White House counsel. You may have heard the job. White House counsel. Let's just be really clear. It is the lawyer, not for the president, for the presidency. It is the lawyer who represents the American presidency. Okay? When decisions are made about all kinds of things, can we torture people or not torture people? Right. Is it legal to go to war? Drone strike or no drone strike? You know, today you can imagine people probably having discussions about using AI in wars. You know, can we bomb Iran without checking with anybody? These are the, that's the person, one of the key people advising those decisions, and not just any president either. Barack Obama, as you know, someone with as much good character who I think has never been caught in his life, even in the off moment, even in a leaked tape. I don't think there's a world in which you would catch Barack Obama with that attitude to people or anyone connected, closely connected to him. And after, you know, after being White House counsel, she considered offers from Obama to become attorney general when she was. I don't know who you go to for career advice. You've had an illustrious career. I'm sure you've the people you asked about. She, Cathy Rambam, went to Jeffrey Epstein, convicted pedophile, for advice. Obama is going to, you know, maybe nominate me for attorney general. Do you think I should take it? I generally don't go to convicted pedophiles for, you know, any, I don't, I'm not, I don't think I do, but I always avoid them in particular when writing jobs about the attorney general or any legal, legal kind of facing jobs. Then she becomes a fancy law partner. He's asking her at some point about some immigration question. She responds about her $2 million signing bonus from some law firm, just like going from like immigration to, well, and wait a minute, doesn't he also say, no, don't go and be attorney general. I can help you. But doesn't he want her to go and work at Rothschild's on his behalf? I don't, I didn't, I don't actually see that. I think so. Well, he's to figure out, you know, she's like, well, my apartment in New York is too expensive to take such a low-paying job. And then he, in the way that is again, really interesting and him very, him specific. He's like, how much is the rent? Let me see if I can offload it for you. That's what also makes him different. Like most super rich people are not at that level of the weeds of like, how much is your rent? Let me see if I can offload it. So he's a sort of unusual guy in that way, which we can get to as an old world. Well, well, an interesting that he's homing in on her insecurity about her home. And that's going to help with. Yes, exactly. He understands that everybody has needs. That needs are kind of these holes that you can fill in. If you are the one who fills that hole, you can write keys to the kingdom. Right. She then became the chief counsel for Goldman Sachs. She has since stepped down after a lot of pressure. But because of this, so she's now the chief lawyer for this giant financial institution, a financial institution, you know, before she joined it, that, you know, famously was caught up in the financial crisis and had, you know, legal issues because it had, you know, told its clients one thing while betting the other way. And, you know, helped contribute to that mortgage meltdown that, you know, again, lots of people watching this will have lost homes, right, in that crisis. There are people watching this today whose wealth was greater in the summer of 2008 than it still is. There's a significant number of Americans who never recovered from what those financial institutions helped trigger. She was not at that bank at that time, but that's, those are the, that's the world. Right. And so what I hope I've convinced you is that when you read those sentiments, and there's others in the emails, but that's a really good one, you're not, this is not just your drunk opinions at Thanksgiving. This is a window into how someone thinks about you and your family when they are White House counsel making decisions about whether, for example, we need congressional authorization to, like, send your son to war. No. Right. The same. Think about someone who is so dehumanizing the people at the rest stop, seeing them as just a sea of fat bodies. It's the same moral compass that is making a decision about, you know, advice on whether we can afford casualties in a war and what to recommend to a president. Right. The same kind of contempt for a person surely can't be so easily ring-fenced, if that's what you feel to most people in this country, towards most people in this country, by the way, in the most like elite corridor of this country, even though it's a highway rest stop. Then surely that way of seeing people, regular people whose existence you seem to be offended by in the email, surely it goes into your other decisions when you're Goldman Sachs and you're thinking about, you know, how do we deal with the housing market? How do we do this? How do we deal with that? How do we diversify the bank? Should we? Surely the same basic attitude that is so clearly that anybody reading that email or hearing that email will recognize that attitude. We've all known people who look at other people that way. But what my point to you is that attitude is not just a toxic attitude. It shapes your life and it shapes policy. It shapes policy which impacts all of us, which shapes society. And I would venture to guess that many people listening to this know that even without hearing the quote or knowing who she is, because you've experienced the effect. What the Epstein files is showing you is some of the causes that you may not have seen, but you've lived the effects. You've lived a health care system, you've lived your own insurance policies that feel like shit, that make you feel like you're paying money and no one's holding you, right? You go to work every day at places it feels like I give everything for this company. But does this company have my back? Right. You see cuts at your kid's school now? They can't do music this year. Now they can't do gym anymore. You've experienced all that, so you know the effects. What the Epstein files are so helpful is assigning causes to effect. This is how these people think. Oh, this is who they're loyal to. Oh, this is what they're actually thinking about. Even though they claim that they need their wealth needs to be left untouched so that they can dream up ideas that will benefit all of us. Know what they're actually talking about in their emails. As you see in the famous correspondence between Epstein and Leon Black, billionaire private equity guy, is how to set up LLCs for the purchase of paintings to avoid unnecessary taxes. Right? So you've lived the effects. This glimpse into the causes is incredibly helpful.

What went through my head as you were describing that encounter with a rich and powerful person is how strangely similar it is in certain ways to Virginia Giuffre's account of being groomed by Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein. And what's so wild about that is that these are two kind of objects of his behavior, Epstein's behavior, who are at opposite ends of the power spectrum. Virginia Giuffre was a runaway. She had already suffered a whole bunch of abuse and exploitation. She was working at Mar-a-Lago in the spa. No power and clout, which is why he was able to bring her. Andrew, I mean, 14, 15 years old. Rape, abuse, trafficker. The person you're describing from a conventional power analysis is the opposite, right? Rich, powerful, lots of clout, no physical danger. Right. Epstein didn't have anything on him. And yet the basic moves of pulling people in, figuring out their vulnerability... I think one of the things that's hard to wrap your head around with him is he was grooming very powerful people and grooming very powerless people at the same time and then putting them together.

I want to point out two things you said there that I think are really important, interesting, and show up in the emails again and again. Two words: interesting and fun. Okay. So interesting, in Epstein language, in the kind of patois of Epstein land, interesting means brain, and fun means... But let's just make clear those are the two promises, right? And the two things that he is offering to these guys often — sometimes to some guys I would say he was offering one, to some he was only offering the other, and to many he offered both. Right. So let's just break this down for a second. So the interesting thing — this offer is, I think probably the bigger part of the funnel for a lot of people is the interesting conversation. And the second one is about the fact that a lot of business guys — and again, folks at home who are not in these worlds may not realize, you may watch Industry on TV or you may watch Succession — it's really important to stress that that is not what most business people's lives are like, right? They're not getting up and either smoking crack or snorting coke off their coffee table.

So when Jeffrey Epstein — and sorry, that's partly related to the fun thing — but also have very siloed mental inputs. At some point you're working really hard to work really hard. Right. This is one of the only countries where people work harder the more money they make, work longer hours the more money they make, which is not historically how it worked. Makes no sense. Right. But people do it. So yeah, it's a great... So you're working 80 hours, right? You're making a lot of money. Whatever. I can tell you, these guys' lives are not interesting, right? Their intellectual inputs are not interesting. They say like every private equity guy has the same four or five ideas at a dinner. And, you know, isn't Zoran dangerous? Because it'll just drive people — like it's not even an interesting — there's so many critiques you could make of Zoran. Right. I never hear a new one. Right. Zoran could probably generate more interesting critiques of Zoran than these guys. Like they just don't have a lot of interesting new stuff coming in. They don't. A lot of people tell them the truth. Often it's guys in marriages. I will observe that. I don't think the marriage is itself a source of intellectual exchange and grappling. I think these are guys who are not interested in what their wives think a lot of the time, and their wives are like often managing like a very large number of kids and lots of chaos and are not necessarily in a place where they're like off of that back.

And I'm not saying this to malign them, how boring they are, but it's important to underline this. Because if your picture is like finance people in the show Industry, then you don't understand why interesting — you know, the chance to meet interesting people is exciting. If you understand the reality of these people's lives — Ehud Barak, which is kind of like... these people really live these very small lives. Right, right. And so like the promise of interesting people. Right? I remember going to the TED conference and, you know, the TED talk is fine. I gave a couple of TED talks, like it helped me reach more people with my ideas when I was younger. Great. But I remember like I personally would get more out of it every time I like get the Sunday New York Times and somehow my kids are occupied. If I get like three hours with it, I have learned way more things. My brain, I can just feel it, than I would in like four days of a TED conference. It's just like it's very light, right? But I remember these guys at the time would be like, wow, if Bill Gates — when I'd get my sense Bill Gates was sitting in the front row, they really go like they really like are so starved, even Bill Gates, for ideas. There's still there's... I mean, I think a lot of people are shocked that Bill Gates was hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein because you like, Bill Gates at one point, you know, the second richest man in the world, you know, slightly down the list now because he had to get divorced, which is a real issue. How much is it going to cost to get divorced? But why did Bill Gates have to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein? I think it's this — it's these kind of routinized lives. Very, very boring, as I would argue. And so the interesting thing is like the promise of this kind of intellectual crackle. That sometimes when I meet these guys and they find out what I do or they get to know me, they're actually so envious of like my exposure to all kinds of new thoughts all the time, that I get to go talk to people, that I get to do it.

And like, if I'm empathetic about it, like most people don't really get the chance that you and I do to like keep learning forever. I'm calling people like, right. And so there's this — there's guys making $20 million a year in New York, which is like they stopped learning a while ago and they don't like it, but they're there in their thing. And so the promise of interesting is, I'm going to return you to the feeling you got in grad school. I'm going to return you to the feeling when there was like an interesting speaker passing through. I'm going to return you to the feeling when you used to read books that were not like, you know, business-class 30,000-feet books. And then the fun promise — and that word, why don't you have fun? Right. That's just sex. That's what he's saying there. And that is obviously for a smaller group of people who he had more trust in. And, you know, it was presumably groomed to a point of not feeling there was a risk there. But that's what fun means, you know, and, you know, fun, cute girls. There's different words he used. But again, I think you have to understand how boring most people in business are, right? It's to understand the promise of interesting. Yeah.